5 Sermon Illustrations on Idleness

The author of "The Castle of Indolence" paid homage in that admirable poem to the master-passion of his own easy nature. Thomson was so excessively lazy, that he is recorded to have been seen standing at a peach-tree, with both his hands in his pockets, eating the fruit as it grew. At another time, being discovered in bed at a very late hour in the day, when he was asked why he did not rise, his answer was, "Trotch, mon, I see one motive for rising."

— Percy

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Killing time? I would as soon think of cutting an angel’s throat that I met on God’s highway, coming straight from His throne. Pleasure-mongering! Somebody to entertain them! As if life were a cheese and men were maggots boring in it! Are there not thousands of foreigners asking to be taught? Are not the Spaniards knocking at our door, asking us to organize for them a school of morals, a Bible school, a school of religion, a school of patriotism, on Sunday afternoon? Are there not social settlements that ask for hundreds of workers and teachers? How would it look if a regiment of soldiers at a critical moment at Gettysburg had sat down on the grass and looked for a cool tree and paid some man to come in with a jew’s-harp and play to them, while the struggle for liberty went on? (Text.)

— N. D. HILLIS

Commenting on the well-known dislike of the late Russell Sage for vacations, _Forest and Stream_ says: “An office dig who digs voluntarily is as uneasy and as unhappy on a holiday as were those Pennsylvania mine mules which, on the occasion of the coal strike, were for the first time in many years lifted to the surface and turned out into the green fields in the sunlight. The poor creatures were in actual pain until they got back again into the darkness and the close atmosphere in the mine. The trouble with them was, that their whole nature as surface-dwellers had been supplanted by the attributes common to moles and the blind fishes of Mammoth Cave, and they could not stand in the open air and the light. So with a human being under the obsession of inordinate money-getting. The loss of time is only one component of the restlessness which attacks him after he gets away from the rut. His nature has become so molded and restricted to the ruling passion that he has lost capacity for finding employment in other things, least of all in vacation surroundings and vacation ways.”