refused to adore their gods. Everywhere you go, under the sun, you will
find the creature offering to the Creator a homage of worship.

He, therefore, who makes so little of God as to forget to adore and
thank Him becomes inferior to the very pagans who, sunk in the darkness
of corruption and superstition as they were, did not, however, forget
their first and natural duty to the Maker. Neglect of this obligation
in a man betrays an absence, a loss of religious instinct, and an
irreligious man is a pure animal, if he is a refined one. His
refinement and superiority come from his intelligence, and these
qualities, far from attenuating his guilt, only serve to aggravate it.

The brute eats and drinks; when he is full and tired he throws himself
down to rest. When refreshed, he gets up, shakes himself and goes off
again in quest of food and amusement. In what does a man without prayer
differ from such a being?

But prayer, strictly speaking, means a demand, a petition, an asking.
We ask for our needs and our principal needs are pardon and succor.
This is prayer as it is generally understood. It is necessary to
salvation. Without it no man can be saved. Our assurance of heaven
should be in exact proportion to our asking. "Ask and you shall
receive." Ask nothing, and you obtain nothing; and that which you do
not obtain is just what you must have to save your soul.

Here is the explanation of it in a nutshell. The doctrine of the Church
is that when God created man, He raised him from a natural to a
supernatural state, and assigned to him a supernatural end.
Supernatural means what is above the natural, beyond our natural powers
of obtaining. Our destiny therefore cannot be fulfilled without the
help of a superior power. We are utterly incapable by ourselves of
realizing the end to which we are called. The condition absolutely
required is the grace of God and through that alone can we expect to
come to our appointed end.

Here is a stone. That that stone should have feeling is not natural,
but supernatural. God, to give sensation to that stone, must break
through the natural order of things, because to feel is beyond the
native powers of a stone. It is not natural for an animal to reason, it
is impossible. God must work a miracle to make it understand. Well, the
stone is just as capable of feeling, and the animal of reasoning, as is
man capable of saving his soul by himself.

To persevere in the state of grace and the