Prayer can solve more problems, alleviate more suffering, prevent more transgression, and bring about greater peace and contentment in the human soul than can be obtained in any other way.
You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.
How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun--but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.
There are souls which, crab-like, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness.
Only when creation stops can we find the Absolute. The Absolute is in the soul, not in creation. So by stopping creation, we come to know the Absolute.