"Now unto Him that is able to do above all things,-- Yea, far exceedingly beyond what we ask or think,-- According to the power that worketh in us: To Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus, Unto all generations of the age of the ages.--Amen!"
Praise soars higher than prayer. When St Paul has reached in supplication the summit of his desires, he sees the plenitude of God's gifts still by a whole heaven outreaching him. But it is only from these mountain-tops hardly won in the exercise of prayer, in their still air and tranquil light, that the boundless realms of promise are visible. God's giving surpasses immeasurably our thought and asking; but there must be the asking and the thinking for it to surpass. He puts always more into our hand and better things than we expected--when the expectant hand is reached out to Him.
Man's desires will never overtake God's bounty. Hearing the prayer just offered, unbelief will say: "You have asked too much. It is preposterous to expect that raw Gentile converts, scarcely raised above their heathen debasement, should enter into these exalted notions of yours about Christ and the Church and should be filled with the fulness of God! Prayer must be rational and within the bounds of possibility, offered 'with the understanding' as well as 'with the spirit,' or it becomes mere extravagance."--The apostle gives a twofold answer to this kind of scepticism. He appeals to the Divine omnipotence. "With men," you say, "this is impossible." Humanly speaking, St Paul's Gentile disciples were incapable of any high spiritual culture; they were unpromising material, with "not many wise or many noble" amongst them, some of them before their conversion stained with infamous vices. Who is to make saints and godlike men out of such human refuse as this! But "with God," as Jesus said, "all things are possible." _Faex urbis, lux orbis_: "the scum of the city is made the light of the world!" The force at work upon the minds of these degraded pagans--slaves, thieves, prostitutes, as some of them had been--is the love of Christ; it is the power of the Holy Ghost, the might of the strength which raises the dead to life eternal.
Let us therefore praise Him "who is able to do beyond all things"--beyond the best that His best servants have wished and striven for. Had men ever asked or thought of such a gift to the world as Jesus Christ? Had the prophets foreseen one tenth part of His greatness? In their boldest dreams did the disciples anticipate the wonders of the day of Pentecost and of the later miracles of grace accomplished by their preaching? How far exceedingly had these things already surpassed the utmost that the Church asked or thought.