You say you see no reason why we should pray to the Saints since God can hear us and help us just as well, and will do so gladly, as any Saint in Heaven. Well, then, what need, I ask, do you have to ask any physician to help your fever, or to ask and pay any surgeon to heal your sore leg? For God can both hear you and help you as well as the best of doctors. He loves you more than they do, and He can help you sooner. Besides—–His poultices are cheaper and He will give you more for your words alone than they will for your money!
But it’s his pleasure, you say, that I should be helped by means of those who are his instruments. In fact, he himself works through them, since he’s the one who’s given the doctors’ remedies their healing nature. In the say way, I say, it has pleased God that we should ask assistance from his holy saints and pray to them for help. Nor does that make them equal to God himself, whether it’s the case that they help us by his will and power, or that he helps us because of their intercession. If St. Paul exhorts us to pray for one another, and we gladly think it right to ask every poor man to pray for us, should we think it evil to ask the holy saints in heaven to do the same? Though God, as reason teaches us, is above all and has no equal, he doesn’t forbid us to ask others besides himself for help.