An Easy Way to Become a Saint - September 1

Continued from yesterday...

Chapter 8. The Principal Duties of the Day

II. Our Daily Prayers

Our first and most important prayer is the Morning Offering. Immediately on arising, we should fall on our knees and make this offering, slowly and deliberately, as already explained before.

Morning and Evening Prayers are most important factors in human life. Far from being a matter of minor importance, they are the most urgent of our daily obligations. If well said, they obtain for us all needful graces and protect us from the many evils that may be awaiting us in the course of the day.

If badly said or omitted, we expose ourselves to grievous calamities. Many fall victims to disease or are killed by accidents or meet with premature deaths because they had not prayed.

There is certainly one peril that we have to face every day of our lives, which comes, as St. Peter and St. Paul warn us, from the fearful malice of the devil, who is ever using his keen angelic intelligence to work our ruin. We are as defenseless as children in his hands. Woe to us if we have not God's help in this daily conflict with our implacable enemy! That infallible help is obtained by Prayer.

Many Catholics seem to have little fear of the devil. They take no precautions against his attacks. He is the greatest evil and the most terrible danger that menaces us during all our life and most especially at the hour of death. For this last moment he reserves his most awful attack.

He hates us with a malignant hate, for we are destined to occupy the glorious throne in Heaven which he has lost. This thought lashes him into fury. He has made a careful study of us and knows our every weakness; he notes our evil inclinations and when we are off our guard, as a result of having omitted our prayers, he redoubles his temptations.

Many fall in this unequal combat, and if death surprises them in this state, they are plunged into Hell for all eternity.

Such is the oft-recurring story of thousands of lost souls. This fact alone should be enough to make us careful in saying our daily prayers well....

[Continued tomorrow]
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From An Easy Way to Become a Saint
by E. D. M. (1949)
The Catholic Printing Press
Lisbon, Portugal
With Ecclesiastical Approbation
13th June 1949