5 Sermon Illustrations on Faithfulness in Duty

At the battle of Antietam, as one of the regiments was for the second time going into the conflict, a soldier staggered. It was of no wound; but, in the group of dying and dead through which they were passing, he saw his father, of another regiment, lying dead. There, too, was a wounded man who knew them both, who pointed to his father's corpse, and then upward, saying only, "It is all right with him." Onward went the son by his father's corpse, to do his duty in the line, which, with bayonets fixed, advanced upon the enemy. When the battle was over, he came back, and, with other help, buried his father.

A captain of the name of Douglass, who commanded "The Royal Oak," when the Dutch sailed up the Medway, had received orders to defend his ship to the last extremity, but not to retire; and therefore, when his ship was set on fire, he chose rather to perish in her than quit his station, exclaiming, "A Douglass was never known to quit his post without orders!"

The following declaration of Sir Matthew Hale is an illustration of this truth:

"Though my hands and my mind have been as full of secular business, both before and after I was judge, as, it may be, any man's in England, yet I never wanted time in six days to ripen and fit myself for the business and employments I had to do, though I borrowed not one minute from the Lord's day to prepare for it, by study or otherwise. But, on the other hand, if I had, at any time, borrowed from this day any time for my secular employment, I found it did further me less than if I had let it alone; and therefore, when some years' experience, upon a most attentive and vigilant observation, had given me this instruction, I grew peremptorily resolved never in this kind to make a breach upon the Lord's day, which I have now strictly observed for more than thirty years."