ncerned with mental prayer or orison; the simplest of those
degrees of contemplation which may pass gradually into mystical
experience, and are at least in some form a necessity of any real and
actualized spiritual life. Such prayer is well defined by the mystics,
as "a devout intent directed to God."[91] What happens in it? All
writers on the science of prayer observe, that the first necessity is
Recollection; which, in a rough and ready way, we may render as
concentration, or perhaps in the special language of psychology as
"contention." The mind is called in from external interests and
distractions, one by one the avenues of sense are closed, till the hunt
of the world is hardly perceived by it. I need not labour this
description, for it is a state of which we must all have experience: but
those who wish to see it described with the precision of genius, need
only turn to St. Teresa's "Way of Perfection." Having achieved this, we
pass gradually into the condition of deep withdrawal variously called
Simplicity or Quiet; a state in which the attention is quietly and
without effort directed to God, and the whole self as it were held in
His presence. This presence is given, dimly or clearly, in intuition.
The actual prayer used will probably consist--again to use technical
language--of "affective acts and aspirations"; short phrases repeated
and held, perhaps expressing penitence, humility, adoration or love, and
for the praying self charged with profound significance.

"If we would intentively pray for getting of good," says "The Cloud of
Unknowing," "let us cry either with word or with thought or with desire,
nought else nor on more words but this word God.... Study thou not for
no words, for so shouldst thou never come to thy purpose nor to this
work, for it is never got by study, but all only by grace."[92]

Now the question naturally arises, how does this recollected state, this
alogical brooding on a spiritual theme, exceed in religions value the
orderly saying of one's prayers? And the answer psychology suggests is,
that more of us, not less, is engaged in such a spiritual act: that not
only the conscious attention, but the foreconscious region too is then
thrown open to the highest sources of life. We are at last learning to
recognize the existence of delicate mental processes which entirely
escape the crude methods of speech. Reverie as a genuine thought process
is beginning to be studied with the attention it de