A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.

Mabie argues that leisure is not automatically beneficial; it becomes “safe” and genuinely advantageous only after a person has been disciplined by sustained work. Work, in this view, trains attention, habits, and purpose, so that when external schedules and obligations fall away, one can use freedom creatively rather than drift into aimlessness. The contrast between “times and tasks” and “freedom” suggests that unstructured time tests character more than labor does: without inner direction, idleness can corrode ambition and moral steadiness. The ideal is a mature autonomy in which leisure yields richer intellectual, spiritual, or civic fruit than mere toil—turning freedom into a higher form of productivity.