calvin on prayer

I am preparing for class tomorrow, and I came across this encouraging/convicting section from Calvin’s 1541 Institutes on prayer (p. 458).

“We are taught by faith to know that all the good we need and which we lack in ourselves is in God and in His Son our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom the Father has established all the fullness of His blessings and abundance so that we may draw everything from there as from a very full fountain.  Now it remains for us to seek in Him and, by prayers, ask from Him what we have learned is there. 

For otherwise to know God as the Master, Author, and Giver of all good who invites us to ask them from Him, and for us not to address Him, not to ask anything from Him, would not benefit us at all.  It would be as if someone disdained and left buried and hidden under the earth a treasure about which he had been told.”