If by losing the spirit of prayer, you mean losing the heavenly sensations of deep devotion, I am afraid that does not matter a scrap.

Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.

Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.

The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, & intellect & feeling are only important in so far as they contribute to that.

If we ask of the saints how they achieved spiritual effectiveness, they are only able to reply that, insofar as they did it themselves, they did it by love and prayer.

God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.

The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.