513

Why God has established prayer.

1. To communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality.
2. To teach us from whom our virtue comes.
3. To make us deserve other virtues by work.

(But to keep His own pre-eminence, He grants prayer to whom He pleases.)

Objection: But we believe that we hold prayer of ourselves.

This is absurd; for since, though having faith, we cannot have virtues,
how should we have faith? Is there a greater distance between infidelity
and faith than between faith and virtue?

_Merit._ This word is ambiguous.

_Meruit habere Redemptorem.

Meruit tam sacra membra tangere.

Digno tam sacra membra tangere.

Non sum dignus.[192]

Qui manducat indignus[193]

Dignus est accipere.[194]

Dignare me._

God is only bound according to His promises. He has promised to grant
justice to prayers; He has never promised prayer only to the children of
promise.

Saint Augustine has distinctly said that strength would be taken away
from the righteous. But it is by chance that he said it; for it might
have happened that the occasion of saying it did not present itself. But
his principles make us see that when the occasion for it presented
itself, it was impossible that he should not say it, or that he should
say anything to the contrary. It is then rather that he was forced to
say it, when the occasion presented itself, than that he said it, when
the occasion presented itself, the one being of necessity, the other of
chance. But the two are all that we can ask.

514

The elect will be ignorant of their virtues, and the outcast of the
greatness of their sins: "Lord, when saw we Thee an hungered, thirsty?"
etc.[195][196]

515

Romans iii, 27. Boasting is excluded. By what law? Of works? nay, but by
faith. Then faith is not within our power like the deeds of the law, and
it is given to us in another way.

516

Comfort yourselves. It is not from yourselves that you should expect
grace; but, on the contrary, it is in expecting nothing from yourselves,
that you must hope for it.

517

Every condition, and even the martyrs, have to fear, according to
Scripture.

The greatest pain of purgatory is the uncertainty of the judgment. _Deus
absconditus._

518

John viii. _Multi crediderunt in eum. Dicebat ergo Jesus: "Si
manseritis_ ... VERE _mei discipuli eritis, et_ VERITAS LIBERABIT VOS."
_Responderunt: "Semen Abrahae sumus, et nemini servimus unquam."_

There is a great