Yes, my brethren, God wishes our love; it was to obtain it that he became one of us and died for us on the cross; and it is to win it now that he asks us to remember and to adore his Sacred Heart. "Let us therefore," says St. John, "love God, because God first hath loved us." This is the spirit of this devotion: that we should not try to save our souls merely for the fear of hell, but that, seeing how much God has loved us, we should love him in return. And also that, seeing how much he has loved our brethren, the same fire of divine charity may be kindled in our hearts, and thus each one of us may do our share to carry on and to complete the work for which he shed his Precious Blood: the bringing of the world to the knowledge and love of him. ------------------- Sermon LXXXVII. Ingratitude. _A certain man made a great supper, and invited many. ... And they began all at once to make excuse._ --Gospel of the Day. You know, my dear brethren, the parable given by our Divine Lord in the Gospel of to-day. The principal point of it is in the words which you have just heard. The guests who were invited to the supper, instead of feeling honored by the invitation and accepting it gladly, began to make one excuse or another; one had his farm, one his oxen, and another had just married a wife. None of these reasons would have prevented them from coming to the supper had they really wished to; they were mere flimsy pretexts put forward to hide their indifference to their host and to all that he had to offer them. {292} You know this parable, and I think you also know well its meaning. As our Saviour uttered it the coldness and ingratitude of those whom he had come to save rose up before him, giving him a foretaste of the agony which was afterward to overwhelm and crush him in the garden of Gethsemani. His heart, burning with love for men, longed and thirsted for love in return; it was all he asked; could he but have had that all the pains of his sorrowful life and terrible death would have been as nothing. But no; he foresaw that, after all, those to whom he stretched out his arms on the cross in loving invitation would, for the most part, turn a deaf ear to his appeal; would give him at the best but a reluctant and half-hearted service; would keep as much as possible for themselves, and give as little as possible to him.