Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Shepard

Shepard’s image lands like a sermon dressed up as natural history: industrious bees, except these bees are wrong. They “swarm” through “towns, and woods, and fields,” a panoramic sweep that makes the target feel everywhere, unavoidable, ambient. Puritan New England liked to picture itself as a covenant community, a carefully ordered hive where labor served God and neighbor. Shepard weaponizes that familiar metaphor by flipping its moral valence: the problem isn’t idleness, it’s productivity with the wrong destination.

The sting is in “only.” Work that looks virtuous on the surface - steady, organized, even communal - can still be spiritually rotten if it’s “only to get honey to their own hive.” He’s naming a kind of sanctified selfishness: people who participate in the outward machinery of society (commerce, settlement, improvement of the land) while privately treating the world as a supply chain for personal security. By calling them “young and old, of all sorts,” Shepard refuses the comforting fiction that greed is a fringe vice belonging to a villain class. It’s democratic; it reproduces across ages and ranks.

Context sharpens the warning. In a colony built on religious purpose yet forced to survive through trade and property, the line polices the boundary between “calling” and accumulation. Shepard isn’t condemning making honey; he’s condemning the inward curve of the soul that turns every field and town into a mirror reflecting the self. The rhetoric works because it indicts a whole moral posture while leaving listeners uncomfortably unsure whether they’re observing the swarm - or part of it.