This page needs to be proofread.

greater efforts, He compares the steep, thorny path to heaven with the primrose path to perdition, but He refuses to say which way the majority goes. When He says few find the small door and narrow path, He refers to Himself and His contemporaries— to Himself, the way to the truth and the life whom so few of them recognized and acknowledged as such. When He adds that many travel by the wide road to perdition, He simply expresses the infinite yearning of the Sacred Heart for man, to which one lost is many lost; to which many saved are few saved — which wishes all to come to a knowledge of the truth and be saved. So far, therefore, neither side of the dispute has anything like a definite argument to adduce either from Christ or the Church. In the parable of the virgins five are foolish and five wise. In the twentieth and twenty-second chapters of St. Matthew, however, we read : " Many are called, but few are chosen," words that, to some, prove that few indeed are saved, but words that, to my mind, prove that many more are saved than are lost. If you remember, they are the closing words of two famous parables — the parable of the householder who hired laborers for his vineyard, and the parable of the king who, to procure guests for his son's wedding-feast, turned from the discourteous rich to the riffraff of the highways and byways. Now, in the former parable there is no mention whatever of those that are lost, for we read that all the laborers, after their day's work, received, every man, a penny. The lost would, naturally, be those who,