Page:Sermons for all the Sundays in the year.djvu/305

 me, and I will deliver thee." (Ps. xlix. 15.) Call upon me, and I will save you from every danger. ” He shall cry to me, I will hear him." (Ps. xc. 15.) "Cry to me, and I will hear thee." (Jer. xxxiii. 3.) "You shall ask whatever you will, and it shall be done unto you." (John xv. 7.) Ask whatsoever you wish and it shall be given to you. There are a thousand similar passages in the Old and New Testaments. By his nature God is, as St. Leo says, goodness itself. "Deus cujus natura bonitas." Hence he desires, with a great desire, to make us partakers of his own good. St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi used to say, that when a soul prays to God for any grace, he feels in a certain manner under an obligation to her, and thanks her; because by prayer the soul opens to him a way of satisfying his desire to dispense his graces to us. Hence, in the holy Scriptures, the Lord appears to recommend and inculcate to us nothing more forcibly than to ask and pray. To show this, the words which we read in the seventh chapter of St. Matthew are sufficient. ” Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you" (vii. 7). St. Augustine teaches, that by these promises God has bound himself to grant all that we ask in prayer. ” By his promises he has made himself a debtor." (De Verb. Dom. Serm. ii.) And, in the fifth sermon, the saint says, that if the Lord did not wish to bestow his graces upon us, he would not exhort us so strenuously to ask them. "He would not exhort us to ask, unless he wished to give." Hence we see that the Psalms of David and the Books of Solomon and of the Prophets are full of prayers. 2. Theodoret has written, that prayer is so efficacious before God, that, ” though it be one, it can do all things." “Oratio cum sit una, omnia potest." St. Bernard teaches, that when we pray, the Lord, if he does not give the grace we ask, will grant a more useful gift. ” He will give either what we ask, or what he knows to be more profitable to us." (Serm. v. in Fer. 4 cm.) And whom has God, when asked for aid, ever despised by not listening to his petition? ” Who hath called upon him, and he despised him ?" (Eccl. ii. 12.) The Scripture says, that among the nations there is none that has gods