Men Ought Always to Pray

In this precept—to pray always —there is nothing of exaggeration, nothing commanded which may not be fulfilled, when we understand of prayer—the continual desire of the soul after God! having, indeed, its times of intensity, seasons of an intenser concentration of spiritual life, but not being confined to those times; since the whole life of the faithful should be in Origen's beautiful words, "one great connected prayer;" or, as Basil expresses if, "prayer should be the salt, which is to salt everything besides." "That soul," says Donne, "that is accustomed to direct herself to God on every occasion; that, as a flower at sunrising conceives a sense of God in every beam of his, and spreads and dilates itself toward him, in thankfulness, in every small blessing that he sheds upon her; that soul who, whatsoever string be stricken in her, bass or treble, her high or low estate, is ever turned toward God;—that soul prays sometimes when she does not know."—Trench