231. Good Game Wasted

Good Game Wasted

Pro_12:27 : ’93The slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting.’94

David and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Micha, and Solomon of the text showed that some time they had been out on a hunting expedition. Spears, lances, sword and nets were employed in this service. A deep pitfall would be digged. In the center of it there was some raised ground with a pole on which a lamb would be fastened, and the wild beast not seeing the pitfall but only seeing the lamb would plunge for its prey and dash down, itself captured. Birds were caught in gins or pierced with arrows. The hunter in olden times had two missions, one to clear the land of ferocious beasts and the other to obtain meat for themselves and their families. The occupation and habit of hunters are a favorable Bible simile. David said he was hunted by his enemy like a partridge upon the mountain.

My text is a hunting scene. A sportsman, arrayed in a garb appropriate to the wild chase, lets slip the blood-thirsty hounds from their kennels, and mounting his fleet horse with a halloo and the yell of the greyhound pack, they are off and away, through brake and dell, over marsh and moor, across chasms where a misstep would hurl horse and rider to death, plunging into mire up to the haunches or into swift streams up to the bit, till the game is tracked by dripping foam and blood, and the antlers crack on the rocks, and the hunter has just time to be in at the death. Yet, after all haste and peril of the chase, my text represents this sportsman as being too indolent to dress the game and prepare it for food. He lets it lie in the dooryard of his home and becomes a portion for vermin and beaks of prey. Thus by one master-stroke, Solomon gives a picture of laziness, when he says: ’93The slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting.’94 The most of hunters have the game they shot or entrapped cooked the same evening or the next day; but not so with this laggard of the text. Too lazy to rip off the hide. Too lazy to kindle the fire and put the gridiron on the coals.

The first picture I ever bought was an engraving of Thorwaldsen’92s ’93Autumn.’94 The clusters of grapes are ripe on the vine of the homestead, and the returned hounds, panting from the chase, are lying on the doorsill, and the hunter is unshouldering the game, while the housewife is about to take a portion of it and prepare it for the evening meal. Unlike the person of the text, she was enough industrious to roast that which had been taken in hunting. But the world has had many a specimen since Solomon’92s time of those whose lassitude and improvidence and uselessness were depicted in my text.

The most of those who have made a dead failure of life can look back and see a time when a great opportunity opened but they did not know it. They were not as wise as George Stephenson, ’93the father of railways,’94 who, when at sixteen years of age he received an appointment to work at a pumping engine for twelve shillings a week, cried out: ’93Now I am a made man for life.’94 God gives to most men at least one good opportunity. A great Grecian general was met by a group of beggars, and he said to them: ’93If you want beasts to plough your lands, I will lend you some. If you want land I will give you some. If you want seed to sow your land, I will see that you get it. But I will encourage none in idleness.’94 So, God gives to most people an opportunity of extrication from depressed circumstances. As if to create in us a hatred for indolence, God has made those animals which are sluggish to appear loathsome in our eyes, while those which are fleet and active, he has clothed with attractiveness. The tortoise, the sloth, the snail, the crocodile repel us, while the deer and the gazelle are as pleasing as they are fleet, and from the swift wings of innumerable birds God has spared no purple or gold or jet or crimson or snow whitness. Beside all this the Bible is constantly denouncing the vice of laziness Solomon seems to order the idler out of his sight as being beyond all human instruction when he says: Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.’94 And Paul seems to drive him up from his dining-table before he gets through with the first course of food with the edict: ’93If any will not work, neither shall he eat.’94

Now, what are the causes of laziness and what are its evil results? I knew a man who was never up to time. It seemed impossible for him to meet an engagement. When he was to be married, he missed the train. His watch seemed to take on the habits of its owner and was always too slow. He had a constitutional lethargy, for which he did not seem responsible. So indolence often arises from natural temperament. I do not know that there is a constitutional tendency to this vice in every man. However active you may generally be, have you not, on some warm spring day, felt a touch of this feeling on you, although you may have shaken it off as you would a reptile? But some are so powerfully predisposed to this by their bodily constitution that all the work of their life has been accomplished with this lethargy hanging on their back or treading on their heels. You sometimes behold it in childhood. The child moping and lounging within doors, while his brothers and sisters are at play, or if he join them, he is behind in every race and beaten in every game. His nerves, his muscles, his bones are smitten with this palsy. He vegetates rather than lives, creeps rather than walks, yawns rather than breathes. The animal in his nature is stronger than the intellectual. He is generally a great eater and active only when he cannot digest that which he has eaten. It requires as much effort for him to walk as for others to run. Languor and drowsiness are his natural inheritance. He is built for a slow-sailing vessel, a heavy hulk and an insufficient cut-water. Place an active man in such a bodily structure and the latter would be shaken to pieces in one day. Every law of physiology demands that he be supine. Such a one is not responsible for this powerful tendency of his nature. His great duty is resistance. When I see a man fighting an unfortunate temperament, all my sympathies are aroused, and I think Victor Hugo’92s account of a scene on a warship, where, in the midst of a storm at sea, a great cannon got loose, and it was crashing this way and that and would have destroyed the ship; when the chief gunner, at the almost certain destruction of his own life, rushed at it with a handspike to thrust between the spokes of the wheel of the rolling cannon, and by a fortunate leverage arrested the gun till it could be lashed fast. But that struggle did not seem so disheartening as that man enters upon who attempts to fight his natural temperament, whether it be too fast or too slow, too nervous or too lymphatic. God help him, for only God can.

Furthermore, indolence is often a result of easy circumstances. Rough experience in earlier life seems to be necessary in order to make a man active and enterprising. Mountaineers are nearly always swarthy, and those who have toiled among mountains of trouble get the most nerve and muscle and brain. Those who have become the deliverers of nations once had nowhere to lay their heads. Locusts and wild honey have been the fare of many a John the Baptist, while those who have been fondled of fortune and petted and praised have often grown up lethargic. They have none of that heroism which comes from fighting one’92s own battles. The warm summer sun of prosperity has weakened and relaxed them. Born among the luxuries of life, exertion has been unnecessary, and therefore, they spend their time in taking it easy. They may enter into business, but they are unfitted for its application, for its hardships, for its repulses, and after having lost the most of that which they have invested, go back to thorough inaction. This costly yacht may do well enough on the smooth, glassy bay, but cannot live an hour amid a chopped sea.

Another cause of indolence is severe discouragement. There are those around us who started life with the most sanguine expectation. Their enterprise excited the remark of all compeers. But some sudden and overwhelming misfortune met them, and henceforth they have been inactive. Trouble, instead of making them more determined, has overthrown them. They have lost all self-reliance. They imagine that all men and all occurrences are against them. They hang their heads where once they walked upright. They never look you in the eyes. They become misanthropic and pronounce all men liars and scoundrels. They go melancholic and threadbare to their graves. You cannot rouse them to action by the most glittering offer. In most cases these persons have been honorable and upright all their lives, for rogues never get discouraged, as there is always some other plot they have not laid and some other trap they have not sprung. There are few sadder sights than a man of talent and tact and undoubted capacity giving up life as a failure, like a line of magnificent steamers rotting against wharves, from which they ought to have been carrying the exportations of a nation. Every great financial panic produces a large crop of such men. In the great establishments where they were partners in business, they are now weighers or draymen or clerks on small salary.

Reverie is also a cause of indolence. There are multitudes of men who expect to achieve great success in life, who are entirely unwilling to put forth any physical, moral or intellectual effort. They have a great many fascinating theories of life. They are all the while expecting something to turn up. They pass their life in dreaming. They have read in light literature how men suddenly and unexpectedly came to large estates, or found a pot of buried gold at the foot of the rainbow or Good Luck, or had some great offer made them. They have passed their lives in reverie. Notwithstanding he is pinched with poverty and that any other man would be downcast at the forlorn prospect, he is always cheerful and sanguine and jovial, for he does not know but that he may be within a day or two of astounding success. You cannot help feeling entertained with his cheerfulness of temper. All the world wishes him well, for he never did anybody any harm. At last he dies in just the same condition in which he lived, sorrowful only because he must leave the world just at the time when his long-thought-of plans were about to be successful. Let no young man begin life with reverie. There is nothing accomplished without hard work. Do not in idleness expect something to turn up. It will turn down. Indolence and wickedness always make bad luck. These people of reverie are always about to begin. They say: ’93Wait a little.’94 So with a child that had a cage containing a beautiful canary and the door of the cage was open and a cat was in the room. ’93Better shut the door of the cage,’94 said the mother. ’93Wait a minute,’94 said the boy. While he was waiting the feline creature, with one spring, took the canary. The way that many lose the opportunity of a lifetime is by the same principle. They say: ’93Wait a minute.’94 My advice is not to wait at all.

Again, bad habits are a fruitful source of indolence. Sinful indulgences shut a man’92s shop and dull his tools and steal his profits. Dissoluteness is generally the end of industry. There are those who have the abnormal faculty of devoting occasionally a day or a week to loose indulgences, and at the expiration of that time, go back with bleared eyes and tremulous hands and bloated cheeks to the faithful and successful performance of their duties. Indeed, their employers and neighbors expect this amusement or occasional season of frolic and wassail. Some of the best workmen the most skilful artisans have this mode of conducting themselves, but, as the time rolls on, the season of dissipation becomes more protracted and the interval of steadiness and sobriety more limited, until the employers become disgusted and the man is given up to a continual and ruinous idleness. When that point has arrived he rushes to destruction with astonishing velocity. When a man with wrong proclivities of appetite has nothing to do, no former self-respect or moral restraint or the beseechings of kindred can save him. The only safety for a man who feels himself under the fascination of any form of temptation is an employment which affords neither recreation nor holiday. Nothing can be more unfortunate for a man of evil inclination than an occupation which keeps him exceedingly busy during a part of the year and then leaves him for weeks and months entirely unemployed. There are many men who cannot endure protracted leisure. They are like fractious steeds that must constantly be kept to the load, for a week’92s quiet makes them intractable and uncontrollable. Bad habits produce idleness and idleness produces bad habits. The probability is that you will either have to give up your loose indulgences or else give up your occupation. Sin will take all enthusiasm out of your work, and make you sick of life’92s drudgery, and though now and then between your seasons of dissipation, you may rouse up to a spasmodic activity and start again in the chase of some high and noble end, even though you catch the game, you will sink back into slothfulness before you have roasted that which you took in hunting. Bad habits unfit a man for everything but politics.

Now, what are the results of indolence? A marked consequence of this vice is physical disease. The healthiness of the whole natural world depends upon activity. The winds, tossed and driven in endless circuits, scattering the mists from the mountains and scooping out death damps from the caves and blasting the miasma of swamps and hurling back the fetid atmosphere of great cities, are healthy, just because of their swiftness and uncontrollableness of sweep. But, after a while, the wind falls and the hot sun pours through it, and when the leaves are still and the grain fields bend not once all day long, then pestilence smites its victims and digs trenches for the dead. The fountain, born far up in the wildwood of the mountain, comes down brighter for every obstacle against which it is riven and singing a new song on every shelf of rock over which it bounds till it rolls over the water-wheels in the valley, not ashamed to grind corn, and runs through the long grass of the meadow, where the willows reach down to dip their branches and the unyoked oxen come at eventide to cool. Healthy water! Bright water! Happy water! While some stream, too lazy any more to run, gathers itself into a wayside pool, where the swine wallow and filthy insects hop over the surface and reptiles crawl among the ooze, and frogs utter their hideous croak, and by day and night arises from the foul mire and green scum, fever and plague and death. There is an endless activity under foot and overhead. Not one four-o’92clock in the flower-bed, not one fly on the window-pane, not one squirrel gathering food from the cones of the white pine, not one rabbit feeding in clover tops, not one drop falling in a shower, not one minnow glancing in the sea, not one quail whistling from the grass, not one hawk cawing in the sky, but is busy now and is busy always, fulfilling its mission as certainly as any monarch on earth or any angel in heaven. You hear the shout of the plough-boys busy in the field and the rattle of the whiffletrees on the harrow, but you do not know that there is more industry in the earth upturned and in the dumb vegetation under foot than in all that you see. If you put your ear to a lump of riven sod you may hear nothing in the roots and spicul’e6 of grass, but there are at work spades and cleavers and pile drivers and battering rams and internecine wars. I do not wonder that the lively fancy of the ancient saw in the inanimate creation around Floras and Pomonas and Graces and Fauns and Fairies and Satyrs and Nymphs. Everything is busy. Nothing is inanimate, except the man who cannot see the life and hear the music. At the creation the morning stars sang together, but they were only the choir which was to lead all the stars and all the mountains and all the seas in God’92s worship. All natural objects seem at one and the same time uniting in work and joy and worship. In God’92s creation there is no pause in either the worship or the work or the joy. Amid all natural objects at one and the same time it is Halloween and Whit Sunday and Ash Wednesday and All Saints’92 Day. All the healthy beauty of that which we see and hear in the natural world is dependent upon activity and unrest. Men will be healthy’97intellectually, morally and physically’97only upon the condition of an active industry. I know men die every day of overwork. They drop down in coal pits and among the spindles of Northern factories and on the cotton plantations of the South. In every city and town and village you find men groaning under burdens as, in the East the camels stagger under their loads between Aleppo and Damascus. Life is crushed out every day at counters and work benches and anvils.

But, there are other multitudes who die from mere inertia. Indulgences every day are contracting diseases beyond the catholicon of allopathy and homeopathy and hydropathy and eclecticism. Rather than work they rush upon lancets and scalpels. Nature has provided for those who violate her laws by inactivity, what rheum for the eyes and what gout for the feet and what curvature for the spine and what strictures for the chest and what tubercles for the lungs and what rheumatisms for the muscles and what neuralgias for the nerves. Nature in time arraigns every such culprit at her bar and presents against him an indictment of one hundred counts, and convicts him on each one of them. The laws of nature will not stop their action because men may be ignorant of them. Disease, when it comes to do its work, does not ask whether you understand hygiene or materia medica. If there were not so many lies written on tombstones and in obituaries, you would see what multitudes of the world’92s inhabitants are slain in their attempts to escape the necessity of toil. Men cross oceans and continents, and climb the Alps, and sit under the sky of Italy or the shadow of Egyptian pyramid, and go down into ancient ruins, and bathe at Baden-Baden, and come home with the same shortness of breath and the same poor digestion and the same twitching of the nerves; when at home with their own spade they might have dug health out of the ground, or with their own ax hewn health out of a log, or with their own scythe garnered health from the grain field. There are many who estimate the respectability of an occupation by the little exertion it demands, and would not have their children enter any employment where their hands may be soiled, forgetting that a laborer’92s overalls are just as honorable as a priest’92s robes and an anvil is just as respectable as a pulpit. Health flies from the bed of down and says: ’93I cannot sleep here;’94 and from the table spread with ptarmigan and epicurean viands saying: ’93I cannot eat here;’94 and from the vehicle of soft cushions and easy springs, saying: ’93I cannot ride here;’94 and from houses luxuriously warmed and upholstered, saying: ’93I cannot live here;’94 and some day you meet Health, who declined all these luxuriant places, walking in the plow’92s furrow or sweltering beside the hissing forge or spinning among the looms or driving a dray or tinning a roof or carrying hods of brick up the ladder of a wall.

Furthermore, notice that indolence endangers the soul. Satan makes his chief conquests over men who either have nothing to do, or, if they have, refuse to do it. There is a legend that St. Thomas, years after Christ’92s resurrection, began again to doubt, and he went to the apostles and told them about his doubts. Each apostle looked at him with surprise and then said he must be excused for he had no time to listen any longer. Then St. Thomas went to the devout women of his time, and expressed his doubts. They said they were sorry but they had no time to listen. Then St. Thomas concluded that it was because they were so busy that the apostles and the devout women had no doubts. Idleness not only leads a man into associations which harm his morals, but often thrusts upon him the worst kind of skepticism. It is not among occupied merchants, industrious mechanics and professional men always busy that you hear the religion of Jesus maligned, but in public lounging places, given up to profanity and dissoluteness. They have no sympathy with the book that says: ’93Let him that stole, steal no more; but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.’94 I never knew a man given up to thorough idleness that was converted. Simon and Andrew were converted while fishing, and Lydia while selling purple, and the shepherds of Bethlehem watching their flocks heard the voice of angels, and Gideon was threshing on the threshing-floor, but no one was ever converted with his hands in his pockets. Let me tell the idler that there is no hope for him either in this world or in the world which is to come.

If the Son of God, who owned the whole universe, worked in the carpenter shop of Joseph, surely we who own so little, yet want so much, ought to be busy. The redeemed in heaven are never idle. What exciting songs they sing. The angels’97on what messages of love they fly through all the universe, fulfilling God’92s high behests and taking worlds in one circuit, rushing with infinite fierceness against sin, cruelty and oppression, and making the gates of hell quake at the overthrow of the principalities of darkness and in the same twinkle of an eye, speeding back to their thrones with the news of sinners repentant. The River of Life is ever flowing, and the palms ever waving, and the hallelujahs ever rising and the harps ever sounding and the temple always open and the golden streets always a-rush with chariots of salvation. The last place which you ought ever to want to go to is heaven, unless you want to be busy.

Alas, that in this world there should be so many loungers and so few workers. We go into the vineyard of the Church, and we hear the arbor groan under the weight of the vines and the clusters hanging down, large and thick and ripe, cluster against cluster, fairer than the bunches of Eshcol and Engedi, and at a touch they will turn into wine more ruddy than that of Libanus and Helbon. But, where are the men to gather the vintage and tread the wine-press? There comes to your ear a sound of a thousand wheat fields ready for the sickle. The grain is ready. It would fill the barns. It would crowd the garners. After a while it will lodge, or the mildew and the rust will smite it. Where are the reapers to bind the sheaves? The enemies of God are marshaled. You see the glitter of their bucklers. You hear the pawing of their chargers, and all along the line of battle is heard the shout of their great Captain, and at the armies of the living God they hurl their defiance. Where are the chosen few who will throw themselves into the jaws of this conflict? King James gave to Sir John Scott, for his courage, a coat-of-arms with a number of spears for the crest and the motto, ’93Ready, aye, ready!’94 and, yet, when God calls us to the work and the cause demands our espousal, and interests dreadful as the Judgment and solemn as eternity tremble in the balance, how few of us are willing to throw ourselves into the breach, crying ’93Ready! aye, ready!’94 Oh, I should like to see God arise for the defense of his own cause and the disenthralment of a world in bondage. How the fetters would snap and how the darkness would fly and how heaven would sing.

You have never seen an army like that which God shall gather from the four winds of heaven to fight his battles. They shall cover every hill-top and stretch through every valley and man the vessels of every sea. There shall neither be uproar nor wrath nor smoke nor bloodshed. Harvests shall not lie waste in the track nor cities be consumed. Instead of the groan of the captives, shall come the songs of the redeemed. Yet the conquest shall be none the less complete, for if, in that hour when it should be vigilant, the Church of God should neglect to seize the prize and the cause should seem to fail, from the graveyards and cemeteries of all Christendom the good and faithful of the past would spring to their feet in time to save the cause. And though the sun might not again stand still over Gibeon or the moon in the valley of Ajalon, the day would be long enough to gain a decisive victory for God and truth.

But, my text is descriptive also of those who hunt for opportunities, and, when they get them, do not use them. The rabbit they overcome by an early morning tramp lies for weeks uncooked in the dooryard. The deer they brought down after long and exhausting pursuit in the Adirondacks, lies on their doorsill undressed, and the savory venison becomes a malodorous carcass. They roast not that which they took in hunting. Opportunities laboriously captured, yet useless, and that which came in invitingly, like a string of plover and quail and wild duck hung over a hunter’92s shoulder, turns to something worse than nothing. So with Agrippa when almost persuaded to be a Christian. So with the lovely young man who went away from Christ very sorrowful. So with tens of thousands who have whole handfuls, whole skyfuls of winged opportunities which profit them nothing at all, because they roast not that which they took in hunting. Oh, make out of this captured moment a banquet for eternity. The greatest prize in the universe to be won is the love and pardon of Christ. Win that and you can say:

Now I have found a Friend

Whose love shall never end,

Jesus is mine!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage