is the whole subject. The end of it is to make that abominable idleness, the source of so many sins and vices, hateful to all.
Give us Thy light and grace hereto, O Lord, through the merits of Mary and of our holy guardian angels! Those who have their daily work to do, that they may not listen to me without profit for themselves, may apply what they hear either to the state of sin or to the neglect of the good intention in their daily actions; for, to work in the state of sin or without the good intention of turning what we do to some profit for our souls is the same before God as to be idle.
Nature rejects useless things. There is no creature in the whole world, no matter how vile it may be, that is not of some use or other. “No natural thing,” says Aristotle, “is altogether useless.”[1] The various weeds that grow in our gardens and fields and on the public highways, and that are trodden under foot by the passers-by; the insects, flies, wasps, and vermin that torment us, have been created for a special object, and they are useful and helpful to men, although we cannot always see how that is. Nothing can be utterly useless; and if it were possible for any creature to have no object for its existence that creature, according to philosophers, would at once be rejected and cast out by nature as superfluous. “Nature abhors the superfluous,”[2] is another axiom of philosophers.
God does not tolerate useless things. Severianus asks a remarkable question: Why did not God create the sun, moon, and stars on the first day, since on that same day He made light? “Be light made. And light was made.”[3] But He waited till the fourth day before creating the heavenly bodies: “Let there be lights made in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years: to shine in the firma ment of heaven and to give light upon the earth.”[4] What was the reason of that? To teach us a very important lesson, says Severianus; for in the first three days the sun, moon, and stars would not have had anything to do, since there was nothing to which they could be useful. God made those heavenly bodies that by their continual movements, light, heat, and influence, they might help to increase and preserve earthly things. Now it was
