Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/349

Rh the Son of God Himself shows us that if our prayers are to be acceptable to the divine Majesty they must be united with His name and merits. ''Amen, amen, I say to you if you ask the Father anything in My name, He will give it you. Hitherto you have not asked anything in My name. Ask and you shall receive, that your joy may be full.'' And He enforces this by reference to the tender love of parents for their own children. If you, then, being evil, He says, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father from heaven give the good Spirit to them that ask Him.

And how abundant are not the choice gifts contained in that good Spirit. The greatest of them all is that hidden power of which Christ spoke when He said: No man can come to Me except the Father, who hath sent Me, draw him.

It is impossible that men grounded in this teaching should not feel drawn and even impelled to the habit of faithful prayer. With what steady perseverance will they not practise it; with what fervor pursue it, having before them the very example of Christ Himself, who, having nothing to fear for Himself and needing nothing, for He was God, yet passed the whole night in prayer, and with a strong cry and tears offered up prayers and supplications, and doing this "He wished to stand pleading before His Father as if remembering at that time that He was our teacher," as Venerable Bede, that ornament of your nation, wisely considers. But nothing proves so clearly and forcibly both the precept and the example of our divine Lord in regard to prayer as His last discourse to the apostles during those sad moments that preceded His passion, when, raising His eyes to heaven, He again and again entreated His Holy Father, praying and beseeching Him for the most intimate union of His disciples and followers in the truth, as the most convinc-