Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/353

Rh must pray to God, and pray yet more earnestly in this sad condition of things, since He alone can effect a remedy. May He show the measures proper to be taken; may He sustain the courage and strength of those who labor at this arduous task; may He deign to send laborers into His harvest.

Whilst We so earnestly press upon Our children the duty of prayer, We desire at the same time to warn them that they should not suffer themselves to be wanting in anything that pertains to the grace and the fruit of prayer, and that they should have ever before their minds the precept of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians: Be without offence to the Jews and to the Gentiles, and to the Church of God. For besides those interior dispositions of soul necessary for rightly offering prayer to God, it is also needful that they should be accompanied by actions and by words befitting the Christian profession—first of all, and chiefly, the exemplary observance of uprightness and justice, of pitifulness for the poor, of penance, of peace and concord in your own houses, of respect for the law—these are what will give force and efficacy to your prayers. Mercy favors the petition of those who in all justice study and carry out the precepts of Christ, according to His promise: If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall ask whatever you will, and it shall be done unto you. And therefore do We exhort you that, uniting your prayer with Ours, your great desire may now be that God will grant you to welcome your fellow-citizens and brethren in the bond of perfect charity. Moreover, it is profitable to implore the help of the saints of God, the efficacy of whose prayers, specially in such a cause as this, is shown in that pregnant remark of St. Augustine as to St. Stephen: "If holy Stephen had not prayed, the Church to-day would have had no Paul."

We therefore humbly call on St. Gregory, whom the