Exhortation to the believer’s frequent use of ejaculatory prayer

           Use Second. To the saints.  Be ye excited to the frequent exercise of this duty of ejaculatory prayer.  I know you are not altogether strangers to it—if you answer your name and be such as you go for; but it is a more intimate and familiar acquaintance with this kind of prayer that I would gladly lead you into.  Such an art it is that, were we but skilful traders in it, we should find a blessed advance in our spiritual estate and soon have more money in our purse—grace and comfort, I mean, in our hearts—than now most Christians can show.  We might, by a spiritual alchemy, turn all we touch into gold, extract heaven out of earth, and make wings of every creature and provi­dence that meet us to help us in our flight to God. Our whole life would be—what I have read of a holy man—but one communion‑day with Christ. Then neither friends nor foes, joys nor woes, callings nor recreations—or whatever else we have in this world to do with—should be able to interrupt our acquaintance with him.  Whereas now, alas! everything inter­poseth, as an opaque body, to hide God and heaven from our eye.  We who now walk—like travellers in some bottom or low swamp—with our thoughts of heaven so overtopped by the world, that we hardly get a sight of that glorious city to which we are going from morning to night—and thereby lose much of the pleasure of our journey—should then have it in a manner always before us, as a joyful prospect in our eye, to solace us in the difficulties of our pilgrimage, and make us gather up our feet more nimbly in the ways of holiness when we shall see whither they lead us.  We count them pleasantly situated who live in a climate where the sun is seldom off their horizon. Truly, none have such a constant light of inward joy and peace shining upon their souls as those who are familiarly conversant with this duty.  They are in sole positi—placed in the sun, as is said of the Rhodians; they stand at the best advantage of any other to have, if not a continual, yet a frequent, intercourse with God, from whom both the influences of comfort and grace also do all come.  And if those trees must needs have the fairest and sweetest which stand most in the sun, then, surely, they are most likely to excel others both in comfort and grace who are most with God. Every little that the bee brings to the hive—as she flies in and out, though she stays not long on any flower—adds to the stock.  Though the soul makes no long stay with God in this kind of prayer, yet the frequent reiterations thereof conduce much to the in­crease of its grace.  Light gain, with quick returns, makes a heavy purse.  Little showers, often following one upon another, plump the corn and fill the bushels.  So do these short spurts—sallies of the soul to heaven—enrich and increase grace in the heart ex­ceedingly.  Now, if thou shouldst ask how thou may­est make this kind of ejaculatory prayer more familiar unto thee, take these few words of counsel:—