streets, paying useless visits, gambling, eating, drinking, and doing nothing? And yet they maintain that they are doing no harm in all this, and are indignant with those who dare to describe them as sinners in the city! But when they appear before the judgment-seat of God they shall learn, when too late, what they were in life; namely, useless for themselves and their own souls, which they neglected; useless for their neighbor and their children, to whom they gave bad example; useless, finally, for their God and for His service, which they did not render Him.
Thus the idler deserves to die prematurely. Cut it down therefore; why cumbereth it the ground? It is no wonder then if the angry God should send forth the command to have those useless men taken away. And this is the threat that the Lord utters against all sinners: “The fear of the Lord shall prolong days: and the years of the wicked shall be shortened,”[1] as the Wise Man says in the Proverbs. Thus it often happens that one who has sinned much dies sooner than if he had lived piously. This we find to have been the case with Her, the son Juda: “And Her, the first-born of Juda, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and was slain by Him.”[2] Mark these words: God slew him because he was wicked. Baronius writes in his Annals that a person of gigantic stature and terrible coun tenance once appeared to the wicked emperor Anastasius, and said to him: “Behold, on account of your perversity in matters of faith I strike out of your life fourteen years that you would have lived had you not been given so much to consort with heretics and sinners.”[3] .Death hastens with unwearied steps to meet all men; towards some he advances gradually; but sinners and the wicked he overtakes, so to speak, on horseback. “Now the sting of death is sin,”[4] says St. Paul; that is, sin is the sharp and pointed spur that compels death to hasten his movements, and makes him, as it were, a swift runner. If this is true for all sinners, it is certainly so for idlers; for idleness is said to tempt the devil, and it fosters all kinds of vice and wickedness. Cut it down therefore, says the Lord; why cumbereth it the ground? Come, O death! and cut down that barren tree. The idle man is not worthy of a long life. Away with him! Alas! and in what am I guilty? I have done no harm. You have done
