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.”  That is why righteousness is the ground of prevailing intercession, because righteousness means sympathetic understanding of the mind of God.

And in none is there such sympathetic understanding because in none is there such nearness to God, as in Blessed Mary.  To go to her in our prayers and to beg her to intercede for us is, of course, no more a trenching upon the unique mediatorship of our Lord than it is to ask my human friend to pray for me.  We tend, do we not? to select from among the circle of our acquaintance those whom for some reason we feel to have what we call a special power in prayer when we seek for some one to pray for us in our need.  Is it not wholly natural then that we should go to our Blessed Mother on whose sympathy we can unfailingly count and in whose spiritual understanding we can implicitly trust, when we want to interest those who are dear to our Lord in our special needs?  We have every claim upon their sympathy because they are fellow-members of the same Body; and we know, too, that He Who has made us one in His Body wills that we should receive His graces through our mutual ministrations.

     Mary, Maiden, mild and free,
     Chamber of the Trinity,
     A little while now list to me,
      As greeting I thee give;
     What though my heart unclean may be,
      My offering yet receive.