from heaven were to teach other than Thou hadst taught, he should be anathema?
Brethren, the causes of defections from the faith and from the practices of religion are set forth in today's gospel. A certain man made a great supper and invited many. But they began all at once to make excuses, the first, because he had bought a farm and must go see it, another, because he had purchased five yoke of oxen and must go try them, and a third because he had married a wife; and each said: " I pray thee hold me excused." Pride and avarice and conceit and sensuality: these are the forces which keep men away from Church and the sacraments. How many individuals and families there are who, though when in humbler circumstances they were good Catholics, are now grown rich and have achieved a position in society and are ashamed of, and have abandoned, the faith of their fathers! History records that most of the great heresiarchs were men of inordinate ambition and vanity, who, because they could not attain the honors they considered their due within the Church, left her and sought them among her enemies. Ah! these proud, vain souls acquire a grand villa, it may be, and they must needs go out to see it, but the price they pay is excessive, for in exchange they give their priceless faith and their hope of one of the many mansions in their Father's house. Or perhaps to pride they add avarice, and are so absorbed in the game of profit and loss that they have no time to listen to, much less to accept, the Lord's invitation. " Pray excuse me,"
