ems no ground for rejecting the tradition of invocation except
the rather odd ground that we do not know the mode by which our requests
reach them! As there are a good many other spiritual facts of which we
do not know the mode, I do not think that we need be deterred from the
practice of invocation on that ground: certainly the Church has never
been so deterred.

It is strange how little people attempt to think out their religion, and
especially their obligation to religious practice. I have so often heard
people say, when the practice of invocation of saints was urged: Why ask
the saints? Why not go directly to God? And these same people are
constantly asking the prayers of their fellow Christians here on earth!
Suppose when some pious soul comes to me and asks me if I will not pray
for a sick child, or a friend at sea, I were to reply: "Why come to me?
Why not go directly to God?" I should be rightly thought unfeeling and
unchristian. But that is precisely what the same person says when I
suggest that the saints or the Blessed Mother of God be invoked for some
cause that we have in hand! A person comes to me and asks my prayers,
and I go to a saint and ask his prayers on precisely the same basis and
for precisely the same reason, namely, that we are both members of the
Body of Christ and of one another. We have the right to expect the
interest and to count on the love of our fellow-members in Christ. We go
to the saints with the same directness and the same simplicity with
which we go to the living members of the Body, living, I mean in the
Church on earth. If it be not possible to do that, then death has made a
very disastrous break in the unity of the Body of Christ.

And if we can count so without hesitation upon the love and sympathy and
interest of the saints, surely we can count upon finding the same or
greater love and sympathy in the greatest of all the saints, our blessed
Mother, who is also the Mother of God. She in her spotless purity is the
highest of creatures. She by her special privilege has boundless power
of intercession; not power as I have explained before, because of any
sort of favouritism, but power because her spiritual perfection gives
her unique insight into the mind of God. Power in prayer really means
that, through spiritual insight we are enabled to ask according to His
will "And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask
anything according to his will, he heareth us." Tha