10 Sermon Illustrations on Evil And Sin

A youth employed as a milkman at Belper, in Derbyshire, Eng., has, without any apparent motive, attempted to murder an old housekeeper, under the influence of a long course of stories about Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard. This is far from the first time that similar results have followed from the same kind of reading. Courvoisier attributed his assassination of Lord William Russell to a state of morbid sympathy with crime, induced by the perusal of the then popular romance of "Jack Sheppard;" and the annals of the police since then furnish many other instances. Mr. Ainsworth (who, of course, thought of writing nothing more than amusing fictions) has been unfortunate in having popularized, and invested with a halo of romance, two such scoundrels as Sheppard and Turpin.

When the cruel fall into the hands of the cruel, we read their fate with horror, not with pity. Sylla commanded the bones of Marius to be broken, his eyes to be pulled out, his hands to be cut off, and his body to be torn in pieces with pincers; and Catiline was the executioner. "A piece of cruelty," says Seneca, "only fit for Marius to suffer, Catiline to execute, and Sylla to command." C. Colton.

I do not know why it is, that, by the constitution of the universe, evil has so much more power than good to produce its effect, and to propagate its nature. One drop of foul will pollute a whole cup of fair water; but one drop of fair water has no power to appreciably improve a cup of foul. Sharp pain present in a tooth or a toe will make the whole man miserable, though all the rest of his body be easy; but, if all the rest of the body be suffering, an easy tooth or toe will cause no perceptible alleviation. Dr. Boyd.

EVIL, Society of the Sophronins, a wise teacher, would not suffer even his grown-up sons and daughters to associate with those whose conduct was not pure and upright. "Dear father," said the gentle Eulalia to him one day, when he forbade her, in company with her brother, to visit the volatile Lucinda, — "dear father, you must think us very childish if you imagine that we should be exposed to danger by it." The father took in silence a dead coal from the hearth, and reached it to his daughter. "It will not burn you, my child: take it." Eulalia did so, and, behold! her beautiful white hand was soiled and blackened, and, as it chanced, her white dress also. "We cannot be too careful in handling coals," said Eulalia in vexation. "Yes, truly!" said the father. "You see, my child, the coals, even if they do not burn, blacken: so it is with the company of the vicious."

The ten plagues have visited our literature; water is turned into blood; frogs and lice creep and hop over our most familiar things, — the couch, the cradle, and the bread-trough; locusts, murrain, and fire are smiting every green thing. I am ashamed and outraged when I think that wretches could be found to open these foreign seals, and let out their plagues upon us; that any satanic pilgrim should voyage to France to dip from the Dead Sea of her abominations a baptism for our sons. It were a mercy to this, to import serpents from Africa, and pour them out on our prairies; and lions from Asia, and free them in our forests; lizards and scorpions, and black tarantulas from the Indies, and put them in our gardens. Beecher.