Take, for instance, the horrible vice of profane swearing, to which many of you, to your own shame you must confess, are so much addicted, and about which you are inexcusably careless. There is no doubt at all that there is many a Protestant who would not so much as think of enquiring about the faith of a person who was in the habit of blaspheming. And yet he may be really anxious to know the truth, and his soul is as dear to God as yours; and if you are the cause, by this abominable habit of yours, of his turning away in despair from the church, most assuredly you will have to give an account for it when your soul shall come to be judged. Many persons all around us are outside of the church to-day because of the prevalence of this sin of profanity among Catholics, because all the Catholics whom they know seem rather to be children of the devil than of the good God.
There are many other things, particularly drunkenness and falsehood, by which Catholics spread around them the leaven of bad example, and drive people away from the faith instead of drawing them to it; but I have not time to speak of all. It is for you, my brethren, to look to it that, when you come to die, you shall feel that you have indeed done something to diffuse through the world the leaven of faith and virtue, not of unbelief and vice and that our Lord will not require at your hands the blood of your brother, for whom he died as well as for you.
Septuagesima Sunday
Epistle.
1 Corinthians ix. 24; x. 5.
Brethren:
Know you not that they who run in the race, all run indeed, but one receiveth the prize? So run that you may obtain.
And every one that striveth for the mastery refraineth himself from all things; and they indeed that they may receive a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible one. I therefore so run, not as at an uncertainty: I so fight, not as one beating the air: but I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become reprobate. For I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea. And all in Moses were baptized, in the cloud and in the sea; and they did all eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink (and they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ). But with the most of them God was not well pleased.
Gospel.
St. Matthew xx. 1-16.