ing about
it because I have had to fight it all my life. But this man was not an
idler. This man was a worker. He failed, but he did not fail because
he refused to put his hand to any task or to bend his back under any
load.

Why then did this man fail? Not from ignorance, not from inability,
not from idleness. He was busy. That is his word about himself. And
nobody denies it. "As thy servant was busy here and there, he was
gone." What, I repeat, was the secret of his failure? Just this, that
though he was busy, he was not busy at his own task. He was simply
busy here and there. He was one of those unfortunate souls that has so
many things to do and so many engagements to keep and so many functions
to attend and so many burdens to carry that he cannot do his own duty.

Do you know of anybody like that? "Did you keep your prisoner?" I ask.
"No, I was too busy." "Busy at what, in Heaven's name! Do you know of
anything more important than obeying the orders of your king? Do you
know of anything more important than helping to save your nation? Do
you know of anything of more importance than saving your own life, your
own honor, your own soul."

You can see his trouble. He allowed the secondary to so absorb him
that he neglected the primary. Those things that he was working at
here and there, those unnamed tasks that he was performing, there is no
hint that they were vicious things. I am sure that they were
altogether harmless. They may have been altogether good and useful.
But the trouble with that good was that it robbed him of the privilege
of doing the best. The trouble with the Prodigal in the Far Country
was not simply the fact that he was in a hog pen. He might have been
in a palace and been quite as bad off. It was the fact that he was
missing the privilege of being in his Father's house.

The sin that I fear most for many of you is not the sin of vicious
wrong-doing. It is the sin of this man, the sin of choosing the second
best. I read recently of an insane man who spent all his time in an
endeavor to sew two pieces of cloth together. But the thread he used
had no knot in the end of it. So nothing was ever accomplished. Now,
there is no harm in such sewing. But the tragedy of it is that if we
spend all our time doing such trivial things we rob ourselves of the
privilege of doing something better. And that is just the trouble of
much of our life to-day. Many of us are engaged in a