Proverbs 20:4

Because of the cold, the sluggard would not plough, etc. He who now neglects to labor in the service of God due to sloth will beg in the coming day of the kingdom, and it will not be given to him, because whatever a man …

The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold,....

28 Mercy and truth preserve the king: and his throne is upholden by mercy. The virtues of a good king. Those are mercy and truth, especially mercy, for that is mentioned twice here.

The sluggard will not plough - For other parts of this character, see the preceding chapter, Proverbs 19 (note). It is seldom that there is a season of very cold weather in Palestine; very cold days sometimes occur, with wind, rain, and sleet. They begin their ploughing in the latter end of September, and sow their early wheat by the middle of October. And this is often the case in England itself. The meaning of the proverb is: the slothful man, under the pretense of unfavorable weather, neglects cultivating his land till the proper time is elapsed.

LAZINESS is the crying sin of Eastern nations. I believe that the peculiar genius of the Anglo-Saxon character prevents our being, as a nation, guilty of that sin. Perhaps we have many other vices more rife in our midst than that, but, in the East, almost every man is a lazy man. If you tell a Turk in Constantinople that his street is filthy—and it certainly is, for there the offal lies and is never swept away—he says, sitting with his legs crossed, and smoking his pipe, "The Lord wills it." If you tell him there is a fire at the bottom of the street, he does not agitate himself, but he says, "God wills it." If you were to tell him that he was sitting on a heap of gunpowder and that he had better take heed lest a spark should blow him up, probably he would never move, or take his pipe out of his mouth, except to say, "God wills it." Some of the most extraordinary instances of idleness are told us of those people by travelers in the East to this day. The further you go East, the less activity there is—the further you go West in the world, the more restless does the human mind become and, consequently, I suppose, the more active. Yet, while the fact of the superabundance of idleness in the East is a great explanation of the reason why Solomon speaks so much against it in the Proverbs—and seeing that this Book was meant to be read, not only in the East, but everywhere else—I fear that there must also be some laziness in the West and, as this Book was meant to be read in England, I should imagine there must be a few sluggards in England! And this happens to be not a matter of imagination with me at all, for I know there are many such. You can brush against them at the corners of our streets.