Hannah More
1745-1833 18th century
Prayer understood as desire rather than speech, and a piety proved in the use of one's days.
Who was Hannah More?
A Bristol schoolmaster's daughter and a successful playwright in the London salons, she broke with the theatre and spent her pen and her money opening Sunday schools for the children of the Mendip miners. Unmarried all her life, she wrote against the slave trade, for the education of girls, and treatises of practical piety read by hundreds of thousands.
In their own words
Prayer is the application of want to him who only can relieve it; the voice of sin to him who alone can pardon it. […] It is not eloquence, but earnestness; not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but compunction of soul.
Prayer is the guide to self knowledge by prompting us to look after our sins in order to pray against them; a motive to vigilance, by teaching us to guard against those sins which, through self examination, we have been enabled to detect.
Prayer is an act both of the understanding and of the heart. The understanding must apply itself to the knowledge of the divine perfections, or the heart will not be led to the adoration of them.