ation that He answers or not as He
sees fit, according as He sees our needs to be: and if He answers, He
answers in His own way and at His own time--when His hour is come. The
intercession of the saints, and of the highest saint of all, the holy
Mother, must thus be conceived as aspiration not as force. We hardly
need to remind ourselves that Blessed Mary though the highest of
creatures is still a creature and infinitely removed from the uncreated
God. When we think of her prayers or the prayers of the saints as having
"influence" or "power" with God, we must remember the limitations of
human language. It is quite possible through inaccurate use of language
to create the impression that we believe the prayers of the saints to be
prevailing with God because of some peculiar spiritual energy that
belongs to them, or, still worse, because we regard them as a sort of
court favourites who have special influence and can get things done that
ordinary people cannot. We need only to state the supposition to see
that we do not mean it. When we think what we mean by the influence of
the prayers of the saints, of their prevailingness with God, we know
that we mean that the superior value of the prayers of the saints is due
to the superior nature of their spiritual insight, to their better
understanding of the mind and purpose of God. Blessed Mary is our most
powerful intercessor because by her perfect sanctity she understands God
better than any one else. No educated Christian believes that she can
persuade God to change His mind or alter His judgment, or that she or
any saint would for a moment want to do so. Nor do we who cry for aid in
the end want any other aid than aid to see God's will and power to do
it: we have no wish or hope to impose our will on God. Prayer is
aspiration, the seeking for understanding, the submitting our desires to
the love of God; and the prayer of the saints helps us because they are
our brothers and sisters, of the same household, and join with us in the
offering of ourselves to God that we may know and do His holy will. And
we can see here in this incident at Cana the whole mode of prayer. There
is the just implied suggestion of the need, the hint of her own thought
about the matter, in the way in which S. Mary presents the case to
Jesus. There is the divine method which approves the end sought but
reserves the time and method of fulfilling it to the "hour" which the
divine wisdom approves. There is th