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SERMON XIX.

THE VINEYARD OF THE SLOTHFUL.

PROV. xxiv. 30-34.

"I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; and, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; and thy want as an armed man."

We have here an account of a sight which the wise man saw; of the manner in which it af fected his mind; of his wise determination to get instruction out of it; and of the reflections which he made upon it. He saw his neighbour's estate gone to ruin; he inquired within himself, for the

practical purpose of obtaining a lesson of caution for his own guidance-how this had come to pass; and he perceived it to be the natural and necessary consequence of slothful habits. He records the matter, therefore, for our benefit; and the Holy Spirit, under whose guidance he wrote, would have us learn the self-same lesson which he thought it so important to lay to heart.

The words, no doubt, are easily capable of an application to our spiritual concerns : but I mean to take them at present in their most literal and obvious sense. The subject, therefore, which I shall have to treat of is, The wickedness and ruinous consequences of sloth, as manifested in the neglect of our ordinary calling. And I beg that you will not imagine that I am going to enter herein upon any needless discussion, or to speak upon a subject which is either below the notice of a Christian minister, or one in which immortal souls and the honour of the Gospel are not concerned. The Almighty, in the passage before us, did no doubt mean to instruct us respecting the right ordering of our earthly businesses, and to require it of us that we should take heed to manage them well and uprightly, and, to that intent, industriously. And I trust, therefore, that I shall have no difficulty in making it appear to you, both that industry in worldly affairs is a very important part of religious duty, and that sloth

in them is a gross sin against God:-as dangerous to our souls as almost any sin can be, and as necessary as any other to be repented of by ourselves, and atoned for by the blood of Christ. I shall proceed then, by God's assistance,

I. First, to illustrate from the text the nature, progress, and effects of slothfulness in our ordinary callings.

II. Secondly, to explain the wickedness of this slothfulness in a christian view; and,

III. Lastly, to exhort you to a contrary conduct on christian principles.

I. And first, the text very well illustrates the nature, progress, and effects of slothfulness in our ordinary callings.

"I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; and, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; and thy want as an armed man.”

Here was great disorder already come to pass, and inevitable ruin close at hand, and sloth the sole root and cause. Let us also consider the matter well, that we too may receive instruction.

Sloth is the prevailing indisposition and aversion of the mind to labour, through an unwise abhorrence of necessary trouble and exertion, and a self-indulgent and sinful love of ease.

i. In the text, this habit is characterised, in the first place, as being a gross want of understanding or common sense.

"I passed by the field of the slothful, and the vineyard of the man void of understanding." And surely so it is to right and sound understanding, in any practical or profitable sense, the sluggard has no pretensions. The plain declarations of holy Scripture, and the testimony of universal experience, are both alike thrown away upon him. him. He is none the wiser for the light under which he lives, and which comes to him, if he would but open his eyes, from so many quarters. And this is utterly inexcusable. Even heathen instructors have told us, that there is nothing valuable to be had in the world without patient industry and persevering labour. But when a man has the Bible in his hand besides, and God's authority to back those observations which any but a fool must make, what must he be, if he does not, or rather, if he will not, see the necessity of the case; and that, "if a man will not work," he not only has no right "to eat," but that in the ordinary course of things he must either starve or do worse. What must he be, again, if

admitting, as he does, that the Bible is God's most needful and precious gift, to direct his feet into the way of peace, he nevertheless has not read or pondered so much as the three first chapters of it for this he surely cannot have done to any effectual purpose, or he would have learned both that labour is his Maker's sovereign ordinance for man in every condition, which, therefore, it must be in vain for him to resist, and that he has ordained it for most salutary purposes. We may begin, therefore, as Solomon does, with setting down every sluggard for a fool; and though he, for his own part, may not be a little proud of himself as a man of wit and talent, and it may be true that he has many natural gifts,—this only concludes more forcibly against him, for it proves how much he throws away: so that, in truth, the man whose feebleness of intellect the sluggard perhaps arrogantly despises, if he does his best therewith, and labours diligently in obedience to God's will in any mean employment to which God has called him, more exceeds this insolent one in true wisdom and real dignity of character, than the scholar who can write twenty languages, or lecture on twenty sciences, exceeds in learning the clown who cannot tell his letters. The homely similitude, indeed, of a "jewel of gold in a swine's snout," by which Solomon designates the vanity of beauty without discre

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