**Another great encouragement for persevering in prayer!
You tell me nothing new: you are not the only one that is troubled with wandering thoughts during prayer. Our mind is extremely roving, but as the will is mistress of all our faculties, she must recall them and carry them to God as their last end. When the mind for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contradicted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome. They commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth.
I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before God. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer--many words and long discourses being often the occasion of wandering. Rather, hold yourself in prayer before God like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the Presence of the Lord. If it sometimes wander, and withdraw itself from Him, do not disquiet yourself for that; trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it. The will must bring it back into tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, God will have pity on you.
One way to re-collect the mind easily in the time of prayer, and to preserve it more in tranquility, is not to let it wander too far in other times. You should keep your thoughts strictly in the presence of God. And being accustomed to think of Him often, you will find it easy to keep your mind calm in the time of prayer, or at least to recall it from it's wanderings.
I have told you at large in my former letters of the advantages we may draw from this practice of the presence of God. Let is set about it seriously and pray for one another.
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