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Show COMMUNING WITH GOD. It was on the confines of Judea, beyond tho Jordan, Jor-dan, that our Blessed Lord declared marriage to be a Bacrament and a oontract binding "till doath dd us part." Here also, and at tho same time, he laid his hands upon and blessed lae little children brought to him, end pronounced a curse upon any one man or woman' who should defile a child; and here, too, after blessing the children, when He was about to depart for J erusalem, the rich young merchant mer-chant asked Hlmr "Master, what shall I do that I may have life everlasting?" And from that day until the present time every thotightful soul In Christendom has asked himself the same question, and a voice spoke to every soul that sought the Information In-formation ; "Ask and It shall be given to you, pray to God for help," What is prayer? The lift ing up of the heart, the soul, the intellect, to the Creator of all things and persons to glorify Him, to thank Him, and to ask Him for help in our weaknesses. That wonderful Apostle and Christian philosopher, philoso-pher, St. Paul, informs us, in his epistle to the Romans, why "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven" against impious and unjust men. He writes: "Because that when they had known God, they had not glorified him, nor gave thanks; but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened." That is to say further, that many men exhaust ingenuity in seeking wealth, pleasure and honors; they study the arts and sciences, sci-ences, dive into all kinds of human research, and forget what is the most important of all, the "one thing necessary," the state of the soul for eternity, after it bids good-bye to time. "Follow peace with all men," writes St. Paul to his Hebrew converts; "seek holiness without which no man shall see God:" Now, it is impossible for man or woman to have holiness without prayer. Let us lay stress on this, and once again learn that prayer is the raising up of the heart to God, to beg His help and to ask Him for assistance in our trials and temptations. It is an act of religion, and of the human soul, whereby we acknowledge the supreme power and dominion of God, our own weakness and our entire dependence on Him. Even the Protestant Protest-ant poet Montgomery recognized the intimate union between the soul of man and the duty of prayer, for he tells us: Prayer is the soul's siccere desire, Uttered or unexpressed; The motion of a hidden fire That trembles in the breast. Prayer is the burden of a sigh, The falling of a tear, The upward glancing of an eye When none but God is near. We are composed of body and soul; but tho very sense we have of our existence involves a conviction con-viction of our weakness, our inferiority and our helplessness. How our body was formed is as profound pro-found a secret to us, today, as it was to the mother of the seven brothers martyred 360 years before the Redemption, who said to her sons about to be slain because they refused to "transgress the laws of God": "I know not, my sons, how you were formed in my womb, for I neither gave you breath, nor soul nor life; neither did I frame the limbs of any of you." II Macab. vii:22. How the body is so intimately united to our soul, what the nature of that awful union may be, or how the sin of the soul affects the body, are problems prob-lems which by meditation deepen into awsome mysteries. mys-teries. Wonderful is the human body and its components, com-ponents, the most amazing of all God's visible creation, cre-ation, but it is of an order Infinitely below that of the soul of man. Nothing in the region of matter, mat-ter, nothing existing within the compass of the senses, can approach the soul of man in it3 marvelous mar-velous composition and greatness: "For though the giant ages heave the hill, And break the shore and evermore Make and break and work their will ; Though worlds on worlds in myriad myriads roll Round us each with different powers And different forms of life than ours, What know we greater than the soul?" Of the immortality of the soul no sane man doubts? But what means this immortality? It mean3, according to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, unending life in heaven or hell. Then, this being so, how am I to gain heaven? Let our Lord and his Apostles be heard. "Now Jesus went up into a mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him, and he taught them, saying : 'Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you.' " "We have nothing that we did not receive," writes St. Paul, "through the mercy of God by prayer; it ia God who worketh in us both to will and to accomplish." "And Jesus said to them that we ought always to pray and not faint" or grow tired. Luke xviii :1. We then, in all humility and earnestness, should implore God's help, for a "clean heart" without which no one "shall see God," and this clean heart ia manifestly the result of prayer offered to God by the human soul. If St. Paul "would have ns lift up pure hands to God in prayer" for help in our daily trials and temptations, it is that we may, in the end, inherit eternal life, 'Tray for my soul," pleaded with her friends, the Queen of the Scots when ascending the scaffold to her martyrdom: Tray for my soul; More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dream3 of." |