Page:The Doctrines of the New Church Briefly Explained.djvu/178

172 and resolution to do your part toward breaking their bands asunder.

And since thought and affection have extension, prayer for the sinning, the sick and the sorrowing, may sometimes (according to the depth or intensity of the desire, and the condition of the person prayed for) be effectual in removing the malign and infesting spheres, and thereby bringing the individual into new and more orderly relations with the Lord and heaven.

Thus it is that sincere prayer for whatever is just and pure and righteous—prayer that the Lord's kingdom of truth and love may be established and built up—is always answered. For such prayer tends, by an unfailing law, to bind the affections of the petitioner more closely to the things of his kingdom. It is among the divinely appointed means of drawing the soul into closer fellowship with the Lord, and renewing us after his own Divine likeness. And this is the end of all prayer,—as indeed it is of all doctrine, of all faith, of all instruction, of all obedience.

"Prayer in itself considered," says Swedenborg, "is discourse with God; and, moreover, a certain internal view of those things which are properly the objects of prayer; so that at such time there is a kind of opening of a man's internals toward God—but this with a difference dependent on the man's state and the nature of the things prayed for. If the prayer spring from