He had little hope of informing me. But his heart was bursting with pity, and he could not leave the poor man without help either. And the strange thing was that as he moved on, the weight on his shoulders became lighter and lighter, and finally the sensation of it ceased completely.

The abbot looked around and was stunned. There was no one on my shoulders! The old man disappeared!!

And only from afar came a small voice: "It is impossible to fulfill your prayer, for the deeds of your brethren are different from yours... Compel them to follow in your footsteps: otherwise they will not enter the Kingdom of God.."

Thus, hardness of heart and indifference to one's neighbor are a decisive obstacle to union with Christ. Christianity, first of all, in its practical implementation, is service to one's neighbor.

The Lord came to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many (Mk. X, 45). And since He requires His disciples to follow Him, that is, to imitate the example of His life, it is clear that the duty of service rests with all Christians and should be the main goal of their activity. "Whosoever will come after Me," He says, "let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me" (Mk. VIII, 34). Whoever does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me (Matt. X, 38). In other words, whoever does not imitate the Lord in serving his neighbors to the point of being ready to lay down his life for them, as the Savior did, is not worthy of Him.

But egoism, or selfishness, repels a person from serving others, and this lack of service, callousness and indifference to one's neighbor is the usual external manifestation of egoism.

In consciousness, this vice manifests itself as an openly impudent or hypocritically disguised rule of life: "Only I would feel good, and I don't care about the rest.."

This is Herod's leaven, a kind of heart defect. In the realm of the mind, in the realm of thought, there is often another vice that makes a person unfit for the Kingdom of God, a vice that the Lord calls the "Sadducean leaven."

The exact origin of the word "Sadducees" has not been established. It comes either from the name of the high priest Zadok, or from the Hebrew word "uedakah", which means "just". This name seems to have signified, first of all, in the time of John Hyrco, a party consisting mainly of priests, and, contrary to the exaggerations of the Pharisees, content with justice as the text of the law demanded it. They were positive minds of their time. Being devoted to sensuality and imbued with materialism and doubts, they did not believe in the existence of another world. The thought of the afterlife seemed madness to them. They did not hold the prophets in high esteem and accepted the law in the narrow sense as a wise rule concerning material benefits and earthly things. They asserted that nothing in the law proved immortality, which is why they denied the resurrection of the dead. Being limited minds, they found absurd teachings that were alien to their wisdom, which was based on the letter of the law. They can be called skeptics, because they had a negative or great doubt about many questions and phenomena of the spiritual world and spiritual life. Only perceptible, tangible phenomena were indisputable for them. Everything that was inaccessible to their understanding or went beyond the limits of their sensory experience and their bookish learning, they simply denied. In this respect they resemble the realists or positivists of our time of the worst shade.

At the same time, consisting mainly of priests and men of great, though false, learning, the Sadducees were accustomed to feel themselves the leaders of the intellectual life of the people, who, it must be said, were treated with great contempt for their ignorance and lack of education.

This position of intellectual leaders they would never yield to anyone, and therefore they treated with extraordinary fanaticism and intolerance all opinions and teachings that did not come from their camp and did not agree with their views. They were generally mentally arrogant and liked to resort to malicious ridicule.

Thus, their basic mood and their main vice can be defined as mental pride. If in general the greatest defect and ineradicable vice among men is secret pride, then perhaps the most dangerous variety of it is the pride of the mind. Its essence consists in the fact that man, bowing down to self-adoration before his personality and especially before his mental faculties, begins to consider himself the only infallible authority in the solution of all questions and consequently rejects everything that he does not understand, because in his self-deification he does not admit the idea that there can be things beyond his understanding. In people of the Sadducean bent this inevitably leads to materialism, skepticism, and unbelief, for in the field of faith it is necessary to recognize the limitations of the human mind, to humbly bow before the mystery that surrounds man everywhere, and to accept many of the explanations of this mystery without one's own rationalistic verification, since in many matters of faith such a test is quite impossible. But it is this limitation of the arbitrarily seized rights of the mind that the Proud people do not want and cannot allow. In consciousness, it is formulated as follows: "I can understand everything. If I do not understand this and I am told that such an understanding is even impossible for me, then it is clear that this is nonsense, a fairy tale, a fable!" Thus, a negative attitude towards the spiritual world, inaccessible to the human mind, is inevitably born.

There can be no simplicity and integrity of faith in such people, for such faith requires of a person the ability to completely abandon his own considerations and, not trusting the power of his mind, to seek the truth only in God with full readiness to accept this truth without any doubt, in whatever form it may be given to human consciousness by God. Intellectual pride prevents this, and doubts arising from the contradiction of given truths and one's own considerations are inevitable here. And yet, as the Apostle James says, the doubter is like a wave of the sea, raised and tossed by the wind. Let not such a person think to receive anything from the Lord. A double-minded man is not firm in all his ways (Jas. I, 6-8).

This sad, constantly repeating history is centuries old and dates back to the fall of the first ancestors. Let us recall that the essence of this fall was precisely that, having renounced in a fit of false pride the childish trust in God and trying to acquire the Divine knowledge of good and evil by their own efforts, people turned out to be in fact only a laughing stock and a deceived victim of the tempting serpent. Whoever does not want to be a servant of God inevitably becomes a slave of the devil. This eternal law is as immutable in the intellectual realm as in all others.