We are all anxious that God should hear and grant our prayers. He is always ready to do so. The obstacles are always on our side, and one of the chief of these is a want of humility. If God resists the proud, He is not likely to hear their prayers; hence one of the first requisites of success in my prayers is that I should humble myself before God. Then, and not till then, will my prayer reach the ears of the Most High. "The prayer of him that humbleth himself pierces the clouds."

One of the most dangerous forms of pride is a contempt for others, and one that we may be very prone to without realizing its ruinous effects upon our prayers. When the self-complacent Pharisee thanked God that he was not like the poor publican, he probably was quite unconscious that his prayer was offensive to God. Pride blinded him. So it often blinds us; and we little think, when in prayer we secretly congratulate ourselves on being free from certain faults which we see in our neighbors, that all the while we are displeasing God by thus harshly judging others.

How are we to be humble in prayer? By dwelling on our own miseries, and the good points which we see in those around, or which we should see if it were not that our own pride makes us blind to their superiority to us, and the fact that the graces God has liberally bestowed on us make our ingratitude and our want of correspondence to them all the more culpable.

O God, who resistest the proud, and givest thy grace to the humble, grant me that true humility of which thy adorable Son has left us the example. Notwithstanding the powerful obstacles which my natural inclinations oppose to this virtue, I ardently desire to learn of Him to be meek and humble of heart. I am filled with confusion, O Lord, when I reflect on my inordinate love of esteem and applause, my extreme fear of contempt and humiliation, my independence of spirit, my attachment to my own ideas and opinion, my secret satisfaction in success, my latent mortification at seeing others preferred, my insatiable desire of praise and honor. O Lord, I should despair of the cure of maladies so numerous and grievous, did not I know that thou art an Almighty Physician, to whom nothing is impossible. Cast on me, O my God, a look of compassion, and have mercy on me. Grant that I may know thee, to love thee alone ; that I may know myself, to comprehend the depth of my miseries.

May I never forget the many motives that urge me to the practice of humility, the sins of my past life, my inclination to evil, my inconstancy in virtue, my tepidity in thy service, my ingratitude towards thee, my daily infidelities, and the innumerable defects which, notwithstanding my pride, I cannot disguise from myself. May I at length do myself justice, by sincerely believing myself to be the last of all creatures; may I henceforth shun praise as sedulously as I have hitherto sought it; may my only aim be to please thee, my only desire to be forgotten by the world; may the remembrance of the account I shall have to render of Thy graces, prove a perpetual stimulus to the practice of humility in the use of them. If by thy grace I am ever capable of doing any thing to promote Thy honor, I will refer the glory to thee alone; I will think of the voluntary humiliations of my Savior; I will take Him for my model, that by attaining resemblance with Him, I may deserve to be one day ranked among His elect in the kingdom of heaven. Amen.