Prayer,

Tempest of human passions, you who stifle the good sentiments of which all incarnate Spirits bear a vague intuition in the depths of their conscience, who shall calm your fury? It is prayer that must protect men against the flood of that ocean, whose bosom encloses the hideous monsters of pride, envy, hatred, hypocrisy, falsehood, impurity, materialism, and blasphemies. The dike you oppose to it by prayer is built with the hardest stone and cement, and, powerless to cross it, these monsters exhaust themselves in vain efforts against it and plunge, bloodied and afflicted, into the abyssal depths. O prayer of the heart, incessant invocation of the creature to the Creator, if they knew your strength, how many hearts dragged down by weakness would have had recourse to you in the moment of the fall! You are the precious antidote that heals the wounds, almost always mortal, that matter opens in the Spirit, making the poison of brutal sensations run through its veins. But how restricted is the number of those who pray well! Do you believe that, after having devoted a great part of your time to reciting formulas you have learned, or to reading them in your books, you will have merited enough of God? Disabuse yourselves; good prayer is the one that springs from the heart; it is not prolix; only, from time to time, it lets escape its cry to God in aspirations, in anguishes, and in entreaties for pardon, as if imploring Him to come to our aid and the good Spirits to bear it to the feet of the just Father, for this incense is to Him of agreeable odor. Then He sends them in numerous groups to fortify those who pray well against the Spirit of evil; thus they become strong as unshakable rocks. They see the waves of human passions break against them, and, as they delight in this struggle that must heap merits upon them, they build, like the halcyon, their nests in the midst of the tempests. Fénelon. n Allan Kardec.

Paris. — Typ. H. CARION, rue Bonaparte, 64.

[1] Translator's Note: There are three spellings in the Revue: Sabò, Sabô, and Sabo. We have kept the first, since it is, of all of them, the one most frequently cited in this work.

[2] [v.

Fénelon.]