to God?  We are perhaps ready enough to ask for blessings and mercies, but that is only a part of the full life of prayer which must include also thanksgiving, lifting of the heart and mind, and quiet listening or interior prayer.  There was an age in the world when this interior prayer was so much more joyful and natural a thing than the world of matter that it had to be taught “to labour is to pray.”  Today, when we accept the necessity of labour, and even worship activity for its own sake, do we not need to be reminded that to pray is to labour?  If you doubt this, try to make that concentrated form of prayer known as meditation, out of which springs a resolve and determination to do better; try to do this faithfully for fifteen minutes a day and it may prove the hardest work you have ever undertaken.  A great servant of God has said, “I believe no soul can be lost which faithfully practices meditation for fifteen minutes a day.”  Nor must we forget that in this work of prayer we are companioned by the Holy Spirit, the Peace-maker, Who maketh intercession for us “with groanings which can not be uttered” and “Who leads us ever gently but surely into that closer communion with God whose result is life more abundant.”  After prayer it is easier to realize that “to be spiritually minded is life and peace”; it is easier to obey the injunction “And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.  Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice, and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ’s sake, hath forgiven you.”  And for those that seek after peace it must be all wrath, all anger and all evil speaking which are put away:  This leaves no room for what the world calls “just wrath” “righteous anger,” or speaking evil of evil doers.  Let us call to mind the incident in the early life of St. John, afterwards the great disciple of love, when he wanted to call down wrath on the wicked inhabitants of a city and was rebuked by Our Lord who said, “Ye know not in what spirit ye speak.”  After love had supplanted wrath, and the good spirit had taken the place of the evil in St. John’s heart, he was sent to convert the people he would have destroyed.  Yes, it is the spirit that matters, the wrath that is wrong and that must be put away before we can love God or our neighbour as ourself, for the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.

When we understand that the object of life and of education is the creation of a spirit and not the doing of things, we are freed from the tyranny of results in this world as a final test and come to realize that judgment belongs only to God Who as a Spirit judges the effort.