I do not know the precise date, but I think it could not have been very late when she received a mighty answer to the prayer to behold God’s glory.  New views of Christian privilege and of the relation of Christ to believing souls came with prayerful searching of the Scriptures.  She entered, to use her own words, upon “a life of incessant peace and serenity—­notwithstanding it became, by degrees, one of perpetual self-denial and effort.”  The consciousness of God never left her.  The whole world seemed holy ground.  Prayer became a perpetual delight.  The pride and turbulence of nature grew quiet under these gentle influences, and anything from God’s hand seemed just right and quite good.

The secret of her peace and of her usefulness lay very largely in the prayerfulness of her life.  From her early years, prayer was her delight.  In describing the comforts of her chamber in the school at Richmond, she noted as its crowning charm the daily presence of the Eternal King, who condescended to make it His dwelling-place.  With the deeper experiences of which we have spoken came a fresh delight in prayer.  “It was very delightful,” she says, “to pray all the time; all day long; not only for myself, but for the whole world—­particularly for all those who loved Christ.”  Her views of prayer were Scriptural, and, therefore, discriminating.  She fully accepted Paul’s statement that “we know not what we should pray for as we ought” without the help of the Spirit; and, therefore, she always spoke of prayer as something to be learned.  If she believed that a Christian “learns to pray when first he lives,” she believed also that the prayer of the infant Christian life was like the feeble breath of infancy.  She understood by prayer something far more and higher than the mere preferring of petitions.  It was communion; God’s Spirit responding harmoniously to our own.  With Coleridge she held, that the act of praying with the total concentration of the faculties is the very highest energy of which the human heart is capable.  Hence she was accustomed to speak of learning the mysterious art of prayer by an apprenticeship at the throne of grace.  She somewhere wrote:  “I think many of the difficulties attending the subject of prayer would disappear if it could be regarded in early life as an art that must be acquired through daily, persistent habits with which nothing shall be allowed to interfere.”  She saw that prayer is not to be made dependent on the various emotive states in which one comes to God.  “The question,” she said, “is not one of mere delight.”  The Roman Catholic poet accurately expressed her thought on this point: 

  “Prayer was not meant for luxury,
  Nor selfish pastime sweet;
  It is the prostrate creature’s place
  At the Creator’s feet.”

She illustrated in her own quaint way the truth that moods have nothing to do with the duty of prayer.  When one of your little brothers asks you to lend him your knife, do you inquire first what is the state of his mind?  If you do, what reply can he make but this:  “The state of my mind is, I want your knife.”