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 the ideal Christian attitude which accepts the divine will perfectly, and says to the servants:  “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.”

“They have no wine”:  S. Mary’s word expresses the present weakness of humanity, Man is born in sin, that is, out of union with God.  That hoary statement of dogmatic theology seems to stir the wrath of the modern mind more than any other dogma of the Christian Faith, except it be the dogma of eternal punishment.  It is rather an amusing phenomenon that those who have no visible basis for pride are likely to be the most consumed with it.  The pride of Diogenes was visible through the holes in his carpet; the pride of liberalism is visible in its irritability whenever the subject of sin, especially original sin, is mentioned.  Yet the very complacency of liberalism about the perfection of man, is but another evidence (if we needed another) of his inherent sinfulness, his weakness in the face of moral ideals.  If we confess our sins we are on the way to forgiveness; but if we say that we have no sin the truth is not in us.

This boasting of capacity to be pure and strong without God, theologically the Pelagian heresy, is sufficiently answered by a cursory view of what humanity has done and does do.  Even where the Christian religion has been accepted the accomplishment is hardly ground for boasting.  The plain fact is (and you may account for it how you like, it remains in any case a fact) that human beings are terribly weak in the face of moral and spiritual ideals.  They are not sufficiently drawn by them to overcome the tendency of their nature toward a quite opposite set of ideals.  We do run easily and spontaneously after ideals which the calm and enlightened judgment of the race, whether Christian or non-Christian, has continuously disapproved.  We know that Buddha and Mahomet and Confucius would repudiate Paris and Berlin and New York and London with the same certainty if not with the same energy as Christ.  We live in a time when a decisive public opinion gets its way; and therefore we are quite safe in saying that the misery and sin which go unchecked in the very centres of modern civilisation exist and continue because there is no decided public opinion against them.