"Prayer is so great and necessary a part of religion that every degree of assistance in it will be always acceptable to pious minds. The inward and spiritual performance of this worship is taught us in many excellent discourses, but a regular scheme of prayer as a Christian exercise or a piece of holy skill, has been much neglected. The form, method and expression, together with other aspects of it, such as voice and gesture, have been so little treated that few Christians have any clear or distinct knowledge of them. Yet all these have all too powerful an influence upon the soul in its most spiritual exercises, and both nature and Scripture provide various directions about them. Now while institutes of logic and rhetoric abound that teach us to reason aright and to speak well among men, why should the rules of speaking to God be so little taught?"
