much harm, what cannot idleness effect in those for whom the whole year is one holiday? I ask all of you who are here present: When have you most frequently experienced temptations and impure thoughts and desires (I say nothing of your having consented to them, and I hope and trust such has not been the case with any of you); was it not almost always when you were idle and unoccupied, and could afford to stare at everything around you? When you lay in bed longer than usual in the morning? When you gave up work earlier than usual in the evening, and as is unfortunately too often the case in summer, sat at the door still late at night? Or otherwise when you had nothing to occupy you? If one quarter of an hour in the day can do that, what cannot idleness teach those who make a profession of it?
And parents should not wonder at the wickedness of their children, when the latter are brought up in idleness.
Mark this, fathers and mothers; for God has entrusted your children to you, binding you by a grievous obligation to look after their souls and to bring them to heaven. You often complain of the conduct of your sons and daughters; you say that your children already know and speak of things that they should not know anything of for the next twenty years; that from day to day they grow more independent, vain, unruly, indevout, and indeed if you could see into their consciences you would find far worse things that do not appear in their faces. Whence comes this? Eh! reflect a little on the training you give your children; examine how they spend the day from morning till night; see if they do not perhaps sit on that cushion on which the devil takes his rest. You may be quite certain, I repeat with St. Jerome, that idleness is the mother of all concupiscence and sin; you need not have the slightest doubt of this; idleness is the bellows that blows up the flames of impurity and wantonness and all other vices. How is it possible, if the son has nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep, and roam about the streets, if the devil finds him always making a holiday; how is it possible, I say, for that wicked spirit not to lead him into nil kinds of sin and evil? How is it possible, if the daughter has no occupation but adorning and tricking herself out; no other teaching or instruction but how she is to make courtesies and pay compliments, how she is to talk and dance; if she is allowed full liberty to attend all kinds of parties; if she finds the smoke of the kitchen too sharp for her eyes; if the spinning-wheel irritates her ears with its noise; if the needle hurts her hands; if the smoothing-iron is too hard