[Scriptum compendiosum Psalterii intentionem declarans]

says it much helps the purity of prayer if in every place or time we refrain from illicit acts, if we always chastise our hearing from idle words, and if we accustom ourselves to search the tongue and the heart in the praise of God and His testimonies. For whatever things we are accustomed to do, say, or hear most often, the same must necessarily return most often to the soul, as if to its accustomed and proper seat. Let the brother strive, therefore, that he may be able to avoid the tumult of thoughts before he begins the office, to excite his heart to devotion. We are so sluggish and tepid in the divine office because we are not excited by devotion beforehand, and thus we will be here; we entered coldly and dissolutely. When, however, the office begins, with wandering thoughts now rejected, let us hold our mind upward to God, intending those things which are chanted. Otherwise, if we offer access to thoughts at first, we will later be able to evade their tumult only with difficulty. For the ancient enemy, the sender of such thoughts, the slippery serpent, if his head is not resisted, will glide into the deepest parts of the heart while one is not feeling it. And as one heavily armed, he tries to guard his own atrium. And against this, it helps much if

a brother, as soon as he wakes from sleep, casts away thoughts. For with those things the devil occupies and offers the first fruits of his thoughts and actions to the Lord in prayer or some good meditation, or with bodily exercise, namely the bending of knees, the stretching of hands, the expansion of arms in the manner of a cross, the prostration of the whole body, and similarly as it is taught in the conferences of the fathers, conference nine. From which the effect of devotion is excited and the spirit becomes heated, and from this the brother will be more devout and more expeditious all day long. An example of a certain devout priest who was accustomed to inform young brothers and novices that as often as he awoke from sleep in bed, so often, with hands raised to heaven, he should praise his God by praying something. There is no doubt that a devout servant of God would do this in deed which he taught by mouth. It must be known that the same Johannes Cassianus says here in the book of conferences, in the ninth conference, that so that prayer can be emitted with that fervor and purity which it ought, these things are to be thoroughly observed. First, the solicitude of temporal things must be entirely cut away. Second, that we admit the care or memory of no business