36 Sermon Illustrations on Evil And Sin

A few weeks ago, a boy was charged with stealing an article of small value, and one such as boys would scarcely begin to take. The little fellow was bright and intelligent. There was a natural ingenuousness in him which was engaging. Yet he stood at the bar of the police-court a thief. The boy had been a diligent student in the annals of crime. Lives of pirates, thieves, footpads, and highwaymen, had kindled in his breast a fiery admiration of their deeds; and he was beginning to imitate the heroes whose adventures he had studied, when, fortunately, the law stepped in, just as he had passed across the threshold of crime.

The truest definition of evil is that which represents it as something contrary to nature. Evil is evil because it is unnatural. A vine which should bear olive-berries, an eye to which blue seems yellow, would be diseased. An unnatural mother, an unnatural son, an unnatural act, are the strongest terms of condemnation.

— F. W. Robertson

As there is a law of continuity, whereby, in ascending, we can only mount step by step; so they who descend must sink with an ever-increasing velocity. No propagation is more rapid than that of evil; no growth more certain. He who is in for a penny, if he does not resolutely fly, will find that he is in for a pound.

Dante, in his imaginary journey through perdition, describes his interview with Paoli and Francesca, an Italian lord and lady who were put to death for the crime of adultery. He questioned the lady concerning her sin. She said, "The book and writer both were Guilt's purveyors." The bad book became the instrument of evil, which cost the lives of the parties. Wise.

War is that miserable desolation that finds a land before it like Eden, and leaves it behind like Sodom and Gomorrah, a desolate and forsaken wilderness. Let it be sowed with the seed of man and beast as a field with wheat, war will eat it up. T. Adams.

In the days of bank burglaries--now much less frequent, owing to the protections that science has provided for money vaults--it was not often that a single robbery was reported; they “came in battalions.” This was not because the same gangs engaged in many different enterprises, but because a universal similar impulse permeated the minds of the criminal class devoted to these forms of guilt. A curious study might be made of the causes of epidemics of crime. In superstitious times all evils were attributed to the influence of adverse stars. This may have been an approach to scientific truth, or its advanced shadow. The causes of meteorological change must be the causes lying back of the pervading disposition at times witnessed to commit peculiar classes of crime. A suicidal atmosphere must have its origin in some of the secret springs of nature. Advanced speculation has recently attributed cyclones, earthquakes, and other terrestrial disturbances to great changes in the surface of the sun or in the superheated ether surrounding it. A theory quite as plausible as this might attribute epidemics of crime to similar influences, by which weak reasons are overthrown and murderous intents are kindled in excitable minds with destructive tendencies. There are causes for all things in life and nature, and no study of such causes is in vain.--Chicago _Journal_.

There is a cruel custom which prevails in some districts in South China in time of drought. A large collection of brass locks is made, and each is marked with a Chinese character. One iron lock is added to the pile, and duplicate slips are distributed among all the male population of the villages. The unfortunate man whose slip holds the same writing on it as the iron lock must have a slit made in the front of his throat and through this, the bar of the iron lock passed. He is considered to be in some way the cause of the drought and must wear this lock until rain comes. Blood-poisoning often carries the victim off before the drought is broken.

As fast as Christian mission work prevails in China, these cruelties disappear.

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The love of evil prowlers for the darkness is not confined to the insects named in the extract. It is also a characteristic of those who hunt men’s souls; the saloon-keeper thrives best by his night trade.

Tarantulas are night prowlers; they do all their hunting after dark, dig their holes, and, indeed, carry on all the various business of their life in the night-time. The occasional one found walking about in daytime has made a mistake, someway, and he blunders around quite like an owl in the sunshine. (Text.)--VERNON L. KELLOGG, “Insect Stories.”

One evil contains within itself the possibilities of all evil. Medical writers have now much to tell touching the convertibility of disease. They have come to the conclusion that the constitutional defect appearing in a family in one generation is not necessarily transmitted in that exact form to succeeding generations. What appears at one time as insanity will reveal itself at another as epilepsy or paralysis; convulsions will reassert themselves as hysteria or insanity; insanity is converted into a tendency to suicide; the suicidal tendency will become a mania for drinking; what is neuralgia in the father may be melancholia in the son; what is deformity in one generation may be apoplexy in the next. In an afflicted family the constitutional defect has curious ramifications, and undergoes strange metamorphoses.

It is much the same with evil. Men will indulge in one vice, while they express the utmost abhorrence of other vices of which they could never think themselves susceptible. But this is a mistake. All evils are one in root and essence; and surrendering ourselves to one form of iniquity, we surrender ourselves to all; changing circumstances and temptations will involve the lawbreaker in other sins, and in aggravated guilt.--W. L. WATKINSON, “The Transfigured Sackcloth.”

In the history of the great calamity of Asiatic cholera in this country in 1832, mention is made of the emigrant steamer that brought the disease to these shores. The steamer touched at Quebec and at Montreal, and landed passengers infected with the disease at both points. Over this intervening distance of two hundred miles, the disease traveled in thirty hours. Pursuing the succeeding events of this history, the writer says:

Over this long distance, thickly inhabited on both shores of the St. Lawrence, cholera made a single leap, without infecting a single village or a single house between the two cities, with the following exceptions. A man picked up a mattress thrown from the _Voyageur_, and he and his wife died of cholera; another man, fishing on the St. Lawrence, was requested to bury a body from the _Voyageur_, and he and his wife and nephew died. But more than 4,000 persons died of cholera in Montreal, and more than an equal number in Quebec. An emigrant ship conveying the disease had meanwhile touched at New York, and the mortality soon reached 3,500. These figures will at least indicate the virulence of the disease, when once originated, and the rapidity with which it spreads.

In this account we see that every place touched by the plague-ship or any object from it became a new center from which the disease spread. So moral evil contaminates. Its virulency spans the centuries and affects every son of man. (Text.)

See WOMEN, INJUSTICE TO.

INNATE, THE

As in the case of the little girl mentioned below, we have to guard, not alone against the acts of evil men, but against what is in the men themselves:

“Come on! come on!” said a gentleman to a little girl at whom a dog had been barking furiously. “Come on! he’s quiet now.”

“Ah, but,” said the little girl, “the barks are in him still.”

_The Survey_, in commenting on Dr. H. G. Beyer’s statement at a recent conference of the New York Academy of Medicine that the fly is “not merely a pest but an epidemic,” says:

One fly lays 120 eggs in the season, and as each of these eggs takes but ten days to reach maturity, it has been computed that twelve flies surviving the winter will produce 40,000 the following summer. When to this estimate of numbers is added the experimentally proved fact that one fly carries upon his legs alone anywhere between one and six million bacteria, there seems little exaggeration in Dr. Beyer’s characterization.

Observation has shown that the fly is omnivorous and ubiquitous, and that, certain unsanitary conditions being fulfilled, where-ever the fly is, there also are certain diseases. In regard to these diseases the most startling evidence is given for typhoid, but careful experiments have shown that no less than ten others, among them tuberculosis, carbuncle, cholera, tapeworm and summer diarrhea, have been spread by flies, and there is good reason to believe that smallpox, leprosy and diphtheria might be added to the list.

It is the omnivorousness of the fly, together with his choice of breeding-places, that makes him a menace to health. A fruitful source of disease bacteria is damp, decaying organic matter, and it is just such matter, usually stable refuse, that is used for a breeding-place by flies. Experiments with young flies fresh from the breeding-ground showed them to have live bacteria either on the outside of their bodies or in the digestive tracts. This same decayed organic matter is also the food of the fly, but with true democracy of taste he is glad to share man’s food also, and it is this willingness to take his dessert out of the sugar-bowl after a dinner of decayed fish that constitutes his chief danger to man.

It is a hopeful sign when the daily press begins to moralize on saloons after the manner of the Sioux Falls _Press_ in the following extract:

A saloon is a saloon, in whatever light you view it, and if it all were scuttled and launched upon some limitless and bottomless lake, not a tear would trickle down our cheeks. A better saloon? You might as well talk of a better rotten egg, a better highway robber, a better thief, a better yeggman, a better bum, a better gambler, a better case of measles, typhoid-fever, smallpox, erysipelas, a better Five Points, a better place for the committing of murder, robbery, or any other shameless crime.

In two hundred years thirty thousand witches are said to have been destroyed in England; and as recently as 1716, when the town was enjoying the wit and satire of the “Queen Anne men,” a woman and her child nine years of age were hanged at Huntingdon. Addison, with a mind that wavered between superstition and good sense, said he could not forbear believing “in such a commerce with evil spirits as that which we express by the name of witchcraft,” while, at the same time, he could “give no credit to any particular modern instance of it.” Scotland, which is regarded as an enlightened part of the empire, held with the utmost tenacity its faith in witchcraft. The Scotch, a vigorous people, put their hands to the work heartily. It was easy to find victims, since, as we have said already, they tortured until they confest. It is calculated that two thousand persons were burned in Scotland in the last forty years of the sixteenth century. A century later a witch epidemic broke out in the village of Mohra, in Sweden. A number of children were said to be bewitched, and familiar with the devil, who was described as wearing a gray coat, red and blue stockings, a red beard, and a high-crowned hat. The witches kept this exacting person supplied with children, and if they did not procure him a good many, “they had no peace or quiet for him.” The poor wretches were doomed to have no more peace or quiet in this world. Seventy were condemned to death, and twenty-three were burnt in a single fire at Mohra. It is noteworthy that a belief in this frightful superstition which destroyed more innocent persons than the so-called holy office was held by men of great intellectual power--by Erasmus, Bacon, and the judicious Hooker; by Sir Edward Coke, Sir Thomas Browne, Baxter, and Sir Matthew Hale. And the old belief is not yet extinct in country districts. Only recently a man at Totnes accused his father of bewitching, or, as a “white witch” called it, “overlooking” his daughter, so that she suffered for months from a disease in the arms; and the people who live in remote villages may often hear of similar cases.--London _Illustrated News_.

A twisted auto on a dead man’s chest-- Ye ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done their best-- Ye ho! and a bottle of rum! The roadhouse bar and the “lady friend”-- Ye ho! and a bottle of rum! And at eighty miles they took the bend-- Ye ho! and a bottle of rum! A swerve that mocked their drunken wills, A crash and a shriek through the darkness thrills; “Joy riding” is the pace that kills-- Ye ho! and a bottle of rum!

--New York _World_.

"I was well acquainted," says Mr. Green, the reformed gambler, "with the circumstance of a young man starting to go to the hot springs of Arkansas. He was a man who had acquired by honesty and industry about nine hundred dollars. He had been in bad health for some time, and concluded to visit the springs to recruit his health. On his arrival at the mouth of White River, he was detained for a boat, and while there he was induced to play cards. I am unable to say at this time, what was the game that he played, but he won some forty or fifty dollars and the game broke up. After the game was broken up, one of the gamblers pulled out a button and bantered the young man to win it at "faro" and he pulled out a quarter and bet it against the button, and the banker won. He tried again and again, until he lost some three or four dollars, to win the button, and then went to bed. The banker had now several persons betting small bets on the game, and he won some eight or ten dollars, and here was quite a noise and bustle going on. The young man, who had quit and gone to bed, got up, and felt a strong propensity to win all. He began betting on the game again, and in a short time lost the whole of his nine hundred dollars trying to win a button; for that was all he could have won, as the man had no money at first but what he had won from the young man. The young man was obliged to make his way home, without his health being benefited, and without his money.

Vernon L. Kellogg points out how the evil of the great grasshopper plague that visited some Western States about forty years ago, entailed disaster on the whole country:

Over thousands and thousands of square miles of the great granary of the land were spread the hordes of hoppers. Farmers and stockmen were being ruined. Then the storekeepers and bankers that sell things and lend money to the farmers. Then the lawyers and doctors that depend on the farmers’ troubles to earn a living. Then the millers and stock-brokers and capitalists of the great cities that make their fortunes out of handling and buying and selling the grains the farmers send in long trains to the centers of population. Everybody, the whole country, was aghast and appalled at the havoc of the hopper. (Text.)--“Insect Stories.”

Hunters dig pits in the earth, then cover them over, and place a bait near them to attract the prey, that they may venture upon the treacherous place and fall in. Thus the Devil makes this world his fatal vault, which he strews over with pleasures and delights; the way seems smooth, but it is slippery.