A vicious life can bring no one to heaven. The whole proof of my proposition consists in this one argument: a vicious life cannot lead to eternal life; an idle life is a vicious one, and therefore an idle life cannot lead any one to eternal life. The first part of this argument you must admit to be true, for the only thing that can bar us out of heaven and condemn us to hell is sin. “The soul that sinneth, the same shall die.”[1] So that all I need prove is that an idle life is a vicious one. If I succeed in doing that, the conclusion will follow of itself.
And idle life is a vicious one. Proved from the Fathers. And such is the case, my dear brethren; idleness opens the door to all sorts of sin and vice. If I were to quote only the twentieth part of what the holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church, enlightened by the spirit of God, have written on this topic, my sermon would not come to an end to-day. Idleness is an enemy to virtue, a betrayer of youth, a spendthrift of time, a dangerous sleep of those who are awake, a poison for the souls of men, an incentive to impurity, a pleasing guest of hell, a soft cushion of the devil, a luxurious bed of all evil; such are the epithets applied to it by those writers when they speak of it in moderate terms. “You may look on it as quite certain,” says St. Jerome, “that idleness is the mother of all concupiscence, uncleanness, and sin.” St. Chrysostom says in nearly the same words: “idleness is, as it were, the mistress of all vices.” “Idleness is a cesspool of temptations and bad thoughts,” such are the words of St. Bernard. In a word, St. Augustine gives no hope of salvation to the idle man who has no becoming occupation: “He who loves idleness shall never be a citizen of heaven.”
From Scripture. But why should we appeal to those witnesses when we have the infallible word of God itself on our side? “Send him to work, that he be not idle,” is the warning of the Holy Ghost by the Wise Man; no matter who the person may be, of what sex or condition, rich or poor, young or old, let that person work, and have something to do and be not idle. Why? “For idleness hath taught much evil.”[2] We read in the Gospel of St. Mark that when the infirm man who had a withered hand that he could not use came to Jesus in the synagogue to be healed, our dear Lord at once asked the Pharisees, " Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life or to de-
