Chapter IV: Part 4

There are, again, proverbs which, from another point of view, might seem of an ignoble cast, and as calculated to lower the tone of morality among those who received them; proposing as they do secondary, and therefore unworthy, motives to actions, which ought to be performed out of the highest. I mean such as this: _Honesty is the best policy_; wherein honesty is commended, not because it is right, but because it is most prudent and politic, and has the promise of this present world. Now doubtless there are proverbs not a few which, like this, move in the region of what has been by Coleridge so well called “prudential morality;” and did we accept them as containing the whole circle of motives to honesty or other right conduct, nothing could be worse, or more fitted to lower the moral standard of our lives. He who resolves to be honest because, and only because, it is _the best policy_, will be little likely long to continue honest at all. But the proverb does not pretend to usurp the place of an ethical rule; it does not presume to cast down the higher law which should determine to honesty and uprightness, that it may put itself in its place; it only declares that honesty, let alone that it is the right thing, is also, even for this present world, the wisest. Nor dare we, let me further add, despise prudential morality, such as is embodied in sayings like this. The motives which it suggests are helps to a weak and tempted virtue, may prove great assistances to it in some passing moment of a violent temptation, however little they can be regarded as able to make men _for a continuance_ even outwardly upright and just.

And once more, proverbs are not to be accounted selfish, which announce selfishness; unless they do it, either avowedly recommending it as a rule and maxim of life, or, if not so, yet with an evident complacency and satisfaction in the announcement which they make, and in this more covert and perhaps still more mischievous way, taking part with the evil which they proclaim. There are a great many proverbs, which a lover of his race would be very thankful if there had been nothing in the world to justify or to provoke; for the convictions they embody, the experiences on which they rest must be regarded as very far from complimentary to human nature: but seeing they express that which is, however we might desire it were not, it would be idle to wish them away, to wish that this evil had not found its utterance. Nay, it is much better that it should so have done; for thus taking form and shape, and being brought directly under notice, it may be better watched against and avoided. Such proverbs, not selfish, but rather detecting selfishness and laying it bare, are the following; this Russian, on the only too slight degree in which we are touched with other men’s troubles: _The burden is light on the shoulders of another_; with which the French may be compared: _One has always enough strength to bear the misfortunes of one’s friends_.[146] Such is this Italian: _Every one draws the water to his own mill_;[147] or as it appears in its eastern shape, which brings up the desert-bivouack before one’s eyes: _Every one rakes the embers to his own cake_. Such this Latin, on the comparative wastefulness wherewith that which is another’s is too often used: _Men cut broad thongs from other men’s leather_;[148] with many more of the same character, which it would be only too easy to bring together.

[Sidenote: Selfish proverbs.]

With all this, I would not of course in the least deny that immoral proverbs, and only too many of them, exist. For if they are, as we have recognised them to be, the genuine transcript of what is stirring in the hearts of men, then, since there is cowardice, untruth, selfishness, unholiness, profaneness there, how should these be wanting here? The world is not so consummate an hypocrite as the entire absence of all immoral proverbs would imply. There will be merely selfish ones, as our own: _Every one for himself and God for us all_; or as this Dutch: _Self’s the man_;[149] or more shamelessly cynical still, as the French: _Better a grape for me, than two figs for thee_;[150] or again, such as proclaim a doubt and disbelief in the existence of any high moral integrity anywhere, as _Every man has his price_; or assume that poor men can scarcely be honest, as _It is hard for an empty sack to stand straight_; or take it for granted that every man would cheat every other if he could, as the French: _Count after your father_;[151] or, if they do not actually “speak good of the covetous,” yet assume it possible that a blessing can wait on that which a wicked covetousness has heaped together, as the Spanish: _Blessed is the son, whose father went to the devil_; or find cloaks and apologies for sin, as the German: _Once is never_;[152] or such as would imply that the evil of a sin lay not in its sinfulness, but in the outward disgrace annexed to it, as the Italian: _A sin concealed is half forgiven_.[153] Or again there will be proverbs dastardly and base, as the Spanish maxim of caution, which advises to _Draw the snake from its hole by another man’s hand_; to put, that is, another, and it may be for your own profit, to the peril from which you shrink yourself;—or more dastardly still, “scoundrel maxims,” an old English poet has called them; as for instance, that one which is acted on only too often: _One must howl with the wolves_;[154] in other words, when a general cry is raised against any, it is safest to join it, lest one be supposed to sympathise with its object; to howl _with_ the wolves, if one would not be hunted _by_ them. In the whole circle of proverbs I know no baser, nor more dastardly than this. And yet who will say that he has never traced in himself the cowardly temptation to obey it? Besides these there will be, of which I shall spare you any examples, proverbs wanton and impure, and not merely proverbs thus earthly and sensual, but devilish; such as some of those Italian on revenge which I quoted in my third lecture.

[Sidenote: Immoral proverbs rare.]

But for all this these immoral proverbs, rank weeds among the wholesome corn, are comparatively rare. In the minority with all people, they are immeasurably in the minority with most. The fact is not a little worthy of our note. Surely there lies in it a solemn testimony, that however men may and do in their conduct continually violate the rule of right, yet these violations are ever felt to be such, are inwardly confessed not to be the law of man’s life, but the transgressions of the law; and thus, stricken as with a secret shame, and paying an unconscious homage to the majesty of goodness, they do not presume to raise themselves into maxims, nor, for all the frequency with which they may be repeated, pretend to claim recognition as abiding standards of action.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Alms the salt of riches.]

As the sphere in which the proverb moves is no imaginary world, but that actual and often very homely world which is round us and about us; as it does not float in the clouds, but sets its feet firmly on this common earth of ours from which itself once grew, being occupied with present needs and every-day cares, it is only natural that the proverbs having reference to money should be numerous; and in the main it would be well if the practice of the world rose to the height of its convictions as expressed in these. Frugality is connected with so many virtues—at least, its contrary makes so many impossible—that the numerous proverbial maxims inculcating this, than which none perhaps are more frequent on the lips of men, must be regarded as belonging to the better order;[155] especially when taken with the check of others, which forbid this frugality from degenerating into a sordid and dishonourable parsimony; such, I mean, as our own: _The groat is ill saved which shames its master_. In how many the conviction speaks out that the hastily-gotten will hardly be the honestly-gotten, that “he who makes haste to be rich shall not be innocent,” as when the Spaniards say: _He who will be rich in a year, at the half-year they hang him_;[156] in how many others, the confidence that the ill-won will also be the ill-spent,[157] that he who shuts up unlawful gain in his storehouses, is shutting up a fire that will one day destroy them. Very solemn and weighty in this sense is the German proverb: _The unrighteous penny corrupts the righteous pound_;[158] and the Spanish, too, is striking: _That which is another’s always yearns for its lord_;[159] it yearns, that is, to be gone and get to its true owner. In how many the conviction is expressed that this mammon, which more than anything else men are tempted to think God does not concern Himself about, is yet given and taken away by Him according to the laws of his righteousness; given sometimes to his enemies and for their greater punishment, that under its fatal influence they may grow worse and worse, for _The more the carle riches, he wretches_; but oftener withdrawn, because no due acknowledgment of Him was made in its use; as when the German proverb declares: _Charity gives itself rich; covetousness hoards itself poor_;[160] and the Danish: _Give alms, that thy children may not ask them_; and the Rabbis, with a yet deeper significance: _Alms are the salt of riches_; the true antiseptic, which as such shall prevent them from themselves corrupting, and from corrupting those that have them; which shall hinder them from developing a germ of corruption, such as shall in the end involve in one destruction them and their owners.[161]

At the same time, as it is the very character of proverbs to look at matters all round, there are others to remind us that even this very giving itself shall be with forethought and discretion; with selection of right objects, and in right proportion to each. Teaching this, the Greeks said, _Sow with the hand, and not with the whole sack_;[162] for as it fares with the seed corn, which if it shall prosper, must be providently dispersed with the hand, not prodigally shaken from the sack’s mouth, so is it with benefits, which shall do good either to those who impart, or to those who receive them. Thus again, there is a Danish which says, _So give to-day, that thou shalt be able to give to-morrow_; and another: _So give to one, that thou shalt have to give to another_.[163] And as closing this series, as teaching us in a homely but striking manner, with an image Dantesque in its vigor, that a man shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth, take this Italian, _Our last robe_, that is our winding sheet, _is made without pockets_.[164]

[Sidenote: Manly proverbs.]

Let me further invite you to observe and to admire the prevailing tone of manliness which pervades the great body of the proverbs of all nations: let me urge you to take note how very few there are which would fain persuade you that “luck is all,” or that your fortunes are in any other hands, under God, than your own. This our own proverb, _Win purple and wear purple_, proclaims. There are some, but they are exceptions, to which the gambler, the idler, the so-called “waiter upon Providence,” can appeal. For the most part, however, they courageously accept the law of labour, _No pains, no gains_,—_No sweat, no sweet_,—_No mill, no meal_,[165] as the appointed law and condition of man’s life. _Where wilt thou go, ox, that thou wilt not have to plough?_[166] is the Catalan remonstrance addressed to one, who imagines by any outward change of circumstances to evade the inevitable task and toil of existence. And this is Turkish: _It is not with saying Honey, Honey, that sweetness will come into the mouth_; and to many languages another with its striking image, _Sloth, the key of poverty_,[167] belongs: while, on the other hand, there are in almost all tongues such proverbs as the following: _God helps them that help themselves_;[168] or as it appears with a slight variation in the Basque: _God is a good worker, but He loves to be helped_. And these proverbs, let me observe by the way, were not strange, in their import at least, to the founder of that religion which is usually supposed to inculcate a blind and indolent fatalism—however some who call themselves by his name may have forgotten the lesson which they convey. Certainly they were not strange to Mahomet himself; if the following excellently-spoken word has been rightly ascribed to him. One evening, we are told, after a weary march through the desert, he was camping with his followers, and overheard one of them saying, “I will loose my camel, and commit it to God;” on which Mahomet took him up: “Friend, _tie_ thy camel, and commit it to God;”[169] do, that is, whatever is thine to do, and then leave the issue in higher hands; but till thou hast done this, till thou hast thus helped thyself, thou hast no right to look to Heaven to help thee.

[Sidenote: Persian proverb.]

How excellently this unites genuine modesty and manly self-assertion: _Sit in your own place, and no man can make you rise_; and how good is this Spanish, on the real dignity which there often is in doing things for ourselves, rather than in standing by and suffering others to do them for us: _Who has a mouth, let him not say to another, Blow_.[170] And as a part of this which I have called the manliness of proverbs, let me especially note the noble utterances which so many contain, summoning to a brave encountering of adverse fortune, to perseverance under disappointment and defeat and a long-continued inclemency of fate; breathing as they do, a noble confidence that for the brave and bold the world will not always be adverse. _Where one door shuts another opens_;[171] this belongs to too many nations to allow of our ascribing it especially to any one. And this Latin: _The sun of all days has not yet gone down_,[172] however, in its primary application intended for those who are at the top of Fortune’s wheel, to warn them that they be not high-minded, for there is yet time for many a revolution in that wheel, is equally good for those at the bottom, and as it contains warning for those, so strength and encouragement for these; for, as the Italians say: _The world is his who has patience_.[173] And then, to pass over some of our own, so familiar that they need not be adduced, how manful a lesson is contained in this Persian proverb: _A stone that is fit for the wall, is not left in the way_. It is a saying made for them who appear for a while to be overlooked, neglected, passed by; who perceive in themselves capacities, which as yet no one else has recognised or cared to turn to account. Only _be fit for the wall_; square, polish, prepare thyself for it; do not limit thyself to the bare acquisition of such knowledge as is absolutely necessary for thy present position; but rather learn languages, acquire useful information, stretch thyself out on this side and on that, cherishing and making much of whatever aptitudes thou findest in thyself; and it is certain thy turn will come. Thou wilt not be _left in the way_; sooner or later the builders will be glad of thee; the wall will need thee to fill up a place in it, quite as much as thou needest a place to occupy in the wall. For the amount of real capacity in this world is so small, that places want persons to fill them quite as really as persons want to fill places; although it must be allowed, they are not always as much aware of their want.

And this proverb, Italian and Spanish, _If I have lost the ring, yet the fingers are still here_,[174] is another of these brave utterances of which I have been speaking. In it is asserted the comparative indifference of that loss which reaches but to things external to us, so long us we ourselves remain, and are true to ourselves. _The fingers_ are far more than _the ring_: if indeed those had gone, then _the man_ would have been maimed; but another ring may come for that which has disappeared, or even with none the fingers will be fingers still. And as at once a contrast and complement to this, take another, current among the free blacks of Hayti, and expressing well the little profit which there will be to a man in pieces of mere good luck, which are no true outgrowths of anything which is in him; the manner in which, having no root in himself out of which they grew, they will, as they came to him by hazard, go from him by the same: _The knife which thou hast found in the highway, thou wilt lose in the highway_.[175]

[Sidenote: Abuse of proverbs.]

But these numerous proverbs, urging self-reliance, bidding us first to aid ourselves, if we would have Heaven to aid us, must not be dismissed without a word or two at parting. Prizing them, as we well may, and the lessons which they contain, at the highest, yet it will be profitable for us at the same time always to remember that to such there lies very near such a mischievous perversion as this: “Aid thyself, and thou wilt need no other aid;” even as they have been sometimes, no doubt, understood in this sense. As, then, the pendant and counter-weight to them all, not as unsaying what they have said, but as fulfilling the other hemisphere in the complete orb of truth, let me remind you of such also as the following, often quoted or alluded to by Greek and Latin authors: _The net of the sleeping (fisherman) takes_;[176]—a proverb the more interesting, that we have in the words of the Psalmist, (Ps. cxxvii. 2,) when accurately translated, a beautiful and perfect parallel: “He giveth his beloved” (not “sleep,” as in our version, but) “in sleep;” God’s gifts gliding into his bosom, he knowing not how, and as little expecting as having laboured for them. Of how many of the best gifts of every man’s life will he not thankfully acknowledge this to have been true; or, if he refuse to allow it, and will acknowledge no _eudæmonia_, no ‘favourable providence’ in his prosperities, but will see them all as of work, how little he deserves, how little likely he is, to retain them to the end. Let us hold fast, then, this proverb as the most needful complement of those.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Proverbs for young men.]

I feel that I should be wanting to hearers such as those who are assembled here, that I should fail in that purpose which has been, more or less, present to me even in dealing with the lighter portions of my subject, if I did not earnestly remind you of the many of these sayings that there are, which, while they have their lesson for all, yet seem more directly addressed to those standing, as not a few of us here, at the threshold of the more serious and earnest portion of their lives. Lecturing to a _Young Men’s Society_, I shall not unfitly press these upon your notice. Take this Italian one, for instance: _When you grind your corn, give not the flour to the devil, and the bran to God_;—in the distribution, that is, of your lives, apportion not your best years, your strength and your vigour to the service of sin and of the world, and only the refuse and rejected to your Maker, the wine to others, and the lees only to Him. Not so; for there is another ancient proverb,[177] which we have made very well our own, and which in English runs thus: _It is too late to spare, when all is spent_. The words have obviously a primary application to the goods of this present life; it is ill saving here, when nothing or next to nothing is left to save. But they are applied well by a heathen moralist, (and the application lies very near,) to those who begin to husband precious time, and to live for life’s true ends, when life is nearly gone, is now at its dregs; for, as he well urges, it is not the least only which remains at the bottom, but the worst.[178] On the other hand, _The morning hour has gold in its mouth_;[179] and this, true in respect of each of our days, in which the earlier hours given to toil will yield larger and more genial returns than the later, is true in a yet higher sense, of that great life-day, whereof all the lesser days of our life make up the moments, is true in respect of moral no less than mental acquisition. The _evening_ hours have often only _silver_ in their mouths at the best. Nor is this Arabic proverb, as it appears to me, other than a very solemn one, being far deeper than at first sight it might seem: _Every day in thy life is a leaf in thy history_; a leaf which shall once be turned back to again, that it may be seen what was written there; and that whatever _was_ written may be read out in the hearing of all.

And among the proverbs having to do with a prudent ordering of our lives from the very first, this Spanish seems well worthy to be adduced: _That which the fool does in the end, the wise man does at the beginning_;[180] the wise with a good grace what the fool with an ill; the one to much profit what the other to little or to none. A word worth laying to heart; for, indeed, that purchase of the Sibylline books by the Roman king, what a significant symbol it is of that which at one time or another, or, it may be, at many times, is finding place in almost every man’s life;—the same thing to be done in the end, the same price to be paid at the last, with only the difference, that much of the advantage, as well as all the grace, of an earlier compliance has past away. The nine precious volumes have shrunk to six, and these dwindled to three, while yet the like price is demanded for the few as for the many; for the remnant now as would once have made all our own.

[Sidenote: Study of the Classics.]

I have already in a former lecture adduced a proverb which warns against a bad book as the worst of all robbers. In respect too of books which are not bad, nay, of which the main staple is good, but in which there is yet an admixture of evil, as is the case with so many that have come down to us from that old world not as yet partaker of Christ, there is a proverb, which may very profitably accompany us in our study of all these: _Where the bee sucks honey, the spider sucks poison_. Very profitably may this word be kept in mind by such as at any time are making themselves familiar with the classical literature of antiquity, the great writers of heathen Greece and Rome. How much of noble, how much of elevating do they contain: what love of country, what zeal for wisdom, may be quickened in us by the study of them; yea, even to us Christians what intellectual, what large moral gains will they yield. Let the student be as the bee looking for honey, and from the fields and gardens of classical literature he may store it abundantly in his hive. And yet from this same body of literature what poison is it possible to draw; what loss, through familiarity with evil, of all vigorous abhorrence of it, till even the foulest enormities shall come to be regarded with a speculative curiosity rather than with an earnest hatred,—yea, what lasting defilements of the imagination and the heart may be contracted hence, till nothing shall be pure, the very mind and conscience being defiled. Let there come one whose sympathies and affinities are with the poison and not with the honey, and in these fields it will not be impossible for him to find deadly flowers and weeds from which he may suck poison enough.

With a few remarks on two proverbs more I will bring this lecture to an end. Here is one with an insight at once subtle and profound into the heart of man: _Ill doers are ill deemers_; and instead of any commentary on this of my own let me quote some words which were not intended to be a commentary upon it at all, and which furnish notwithstanding a better than any which I could hope to give. They are words of a great English divine of the 17th century, who is accounting for the offence which the Pharisee took at the Lord’s acceptance of the affectionate homage and costly offering of the woman that was a sinner: “Which familiar and affectionate officiousness, and sumptuous cost, together with that sinister fame that woman was noted with, could not but give much scandal to the Pharisees there present. For that dispensation of the law under which they lived making nothing perfect, but only curbing the outward actions of men; it might very well be that they, being conscious to themselves of no better motions within than of either bitterness or lust, how fair soever they carried without, could not deem Christ’s acceptance of so familiar and affectionate a service from a woman of that fame to proceed from anything better than some loose and vain principle ... for by how much every one is himself obnoxious to temptation, by so much more suspicious he is that others transgress, when there is anything that may tempt out the corruptions of a man.”[181]

[Sidenote: Chinese proverb.]

And in this Chinese proverb which follows, _Better a diamond with a flaw, than a pebble without one_, there is, to my mind, the assertion of a great Christian truth, and of one which reaches deep down to the very foundations of Christian morality, the more valuable as coming to us from a people beyond the range and reach of the influences of direct Revelation. We may not be all aware of the many and malignant assaults which were made on the Christian faith, and on the morality of the Bible, through the character of David, by the blind and self-righteous Deists of a century or more ago. Taking the Scripture testimony about him, that he was the man after God’s heart, and putting beside this the record of those great sins which he committed, they sought to set these great, yet still isolated, offences in the most hateful light; and thus to bring at once him, and the Book which praised him, to a common shame. But all this while, the question of _the man_, what he was, and what the moral sum total of his life, to which alone the Scripture testimony bore witness, and to which alone it was pledged, this was a question with which they concerned themselves not at all; while yet it was a far more important question than what any of his single acts may have been; and it was this which, in the estimate of his character, was really at issue. To this question _we_ answer, _a diamond_, which, if a diamond _with a flaw_, as are all but the one “entire and perfect chrysolite,” would yet outvalue a mountain of _pebbles without one_, such as they were; even assuming the pebbles to _be_ without; and not merely to _seem_ so, because their flaw was an all-pervading one, and only not so quickly detected, inasmuch as the contrast was wanting of any clearer material which should at once reveal its presence.

Footnotes

[144] They have for their Latin equivalents such as these; Colo quod aptâsti, ipsi tibi nendum est.—Qui vinum bibit, fæcem bibat.—Ut sementem feceris, ita metes.

[145] In respect of other proverbs, such as the following, Tunica pallio propior;—Frons occipitio prior; I have greater doubt. The misuse lies nearer; the selfishness may very probably be in the proverb itself, and not in our application of it; though even these seem not incapable of a fair interpretation.

[146] On a toujours assez de force pour supporter le malheur de ses amis. I confess this sounds to me rather like an imitation of Rochefoucault than a genuine proverb.

[147] Ognun tira l’acqua al suo molino.

[148] Ex alieno tergore lata secantur lora.

[149] Zelf is de Man.

[150] J’aime mieux un raisin pour moi que deux figues pour toi.

[151] Comptez après votre père. Compare the Spanish: Entre dos amigos un notario y dos testigos.

[152] Einmal, keinmal. This proverb was turned to such bad uses, that a German divine thought it necessary to write a treatise against it. There exist indeed several old works in German with such titles as the following, _Ungodly Proverbs and their Refutation_. It is not for nothing that Jeremy Taylor in one place gives this warning: “Be curious to avoid all proverbs and propositions, or odd sayings, by which evil life is encouraged, and the hands of the spirit weakened.” In like manner Chrysostom (Hom. 73 in Matt.) denounces the Greek proverb: γλυκὺ ἤτω καὶ πνιξάτω.

[153] Peccato celato, mezzo perdonato.

[154] Badly turned into a rhyming pentameter:

Consonus esto lupis, cum quibus esse cupis.

[155] There are very few inculcating an opposite lesson: this however is one: _Spend, and God will send_; which Howell glosses well; “Yes, a bag and a wallet.”

[156] Quien en un año quiere ser rico, al medio le ahorcan.

[157] Male parta male dilabuntur.—Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen.

[158] Ungerechter Pfennig verzehrt gerechten Thaler.

[159] Lo ageno siempre pia por su dueño.

[160] Der Geiz sammlet sich arm, die Milde giebt sich reich. In the sense of the latter half of this proverb _we_ say, _Drawn wells are seldom dry_; though this word is capable of very far wider application.

[161] There is one remarkable Latin proverb on the moral cowardliness which it is the character of riches to generate, saying more briefly the same which Wordsworth said when he proclaimed—

“that riches are akin
To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death;”

it is this: Timidus Plutus: and has sometimes suggested to me the question whether he might not have had it in his mind when he composed his great sonnet in prospect of the invasion:

“These times touch monied worldlings with dismay;”

not that his genius needed any such solicitation from without; for the poem is only the natural outgrowth of that spirit and temper in which the whole series of noble and ennobling poems, the _Sonnets to Liberty_, is composed, and in perfect harmony with the rest; yet is it, notwithstanding, in a very wonderful way shut up in the two words of the ancient proverb.

[162] Τῇ χειρὶ δεῖ σπείρειν, ἀλλὰ μὴ ὅλῳ τῷ θυλάκῳ.

[163] Giv saa i Dag, at du og kandst give i morgen.—Giv een at du kand give en anden.

[164] L’ultimo vestito ce lo fanno senza tasche.

[165] This is the English form of that worthy old classical proverb: Φεύγων μύλον, ἄλφιτα φεύγει, or in Latin: Qui vitat molam, vitat farinam.

[166] Ahont anirás, bou, que no llaures? I prefer this form of it to the Spanish: Adonde yrá el buey, que no are?

[167] Pereza, llave de pobreza.

[168] Dii facientes adjuvant.

[169] According to the Spanish proverb: Quien bien ata, bien desata.

[170] Quien tiene boca, no diga á otro, Sopla.

[171] Donde una puerta se cierra, otra se abre.

[172] Nondum omnium dierum sol occidit.

[173] Il mondo è, di chi ha pazienza.

[174] Se ben ho perso l’anello, ho pur anche le dita;—Si se perdieron los anillos, aqui quedaron los dedillos.

[175] In their bastard French it runs thus: Gambette ous trouvé nen gan chimin, nen gan chimin ous va pèdè li. It may have been originally French, at any rate the French have a proverb very much to the same effect: Ce qui vient par la flute, s’en va par le tambour; and compare the modern Greek proverb: Ἀνεμομαζώματα, δαιμονοσκορπίσματα. (What the wind gathers, the devil scatters.)

[176] Εὕδοντι κύρτος αἱρεῖ.—Dormienti rete trahit. The reader with a _Plutarch’s Lives_ within his reach may turn to the very instructive little history told in connexion with this proverb, of Timotheus the Athenian commander; an history which only requires to be translated into Christian language to contain a deep moral for all. (_Sulla_, c. 6.)

[177] Sera in imo parsimonia.

[178] Seneca (_Ep._ i.): Non enim tantum _minimum_ in imo, sed _pessimum_ remanet.

[179] Morgenstund’ hat Gold im Mund.

[180] Lo que hace el loco á la postre, hace sabio al principio.

[181] Henry More, _On Godliness_, b. 8. How remarkable a confirmation of the fact asserted in that proverb and in this passage lies in the twofold uses of the Greek word κακοήθεια; having, for its first meaning, an evil disposition in a man’s self, it has for its second an interpreting on his part for the worst of all the actions of other men.

LECTURE VI.

THE THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS.

I sought, as best I could, in my last lecture to furnish you with some helps for estimating the ethical worth of proverbs. Their theology alone remains; the aspects, that is, under which they contemplate, not now any more man’s relations with his fellow-man, but those on which in the end all other must depend, his relations with God. Between the subject matter, indeed, of that lecture and of this I have found it nearly impossible to draw any very accurate line of distinction. Much which was there might nearly as fitly have been here; some which I have reserved for this might already have found its place there. It is this, however, which I propose more directly to consider, namely, what proverbs have to say concerning the moral government of the world, and, more important still, concerning its Governor? How does all this present itself to the popular mind and conscience, as attested by these? What, in short, is their theology? for such, good or bad, it is evident that abundantly they have.

Here, as everywhere else, their testimony is a mingled one. The darkness, the error, the confusion of man’s heart, out of which he oftentimes sees distortedly, and sometimes sees not at all, have all embodied themselves in his word. Yet still, as it is the very nature of the false, in its separate manifestations, to resolve into nothingness, though only to be succeeded by new births in a like kind, while the true abides and continues, it has thus come to pass that we have generally in those utterances on which the stamp of permanence has been set, the nobler voices, the truer faith of humanity, in respect of its own destinies and of Him by whom those destinies are ordered.

I would not hesitate to say that the great glory of proverbs in this their highest aspect, and that which makes many of them so full of blessing to those who cordially accept them, is the conviction of which they are full, that, despite all appearances to the contrary, this world is God’s world, and not the world of the devil, or of those wicked men who may be prospering for an hour; there is nothing in them so precious as their faith that in the long run it will approve itself to be such: which being so, that it must be well in the end with the doer of the right, the speaker of the truth; no blind “whirligig of time,” but the hand of the living God, in due time “bringing round its revenges.” It is impossible to estimate too highly their bold and clear proclamation of this conviction; for it is, after all, the belief of this or the denial of this, on which everything in the life of each one of us turns. On this depends whether we shall separate ourselves from the world’s falsehood and evil, and do vigorous battle against them; or acquiesce in, and be ourselves absorbed by, them.

[Sidenote: A lie has no legs.]

Listen to proverbs such as these; surely they are penetrated with the assurance that one who, Himself being The Truth, will make truth in small and in great to triumph at the last, is ruling over all: and first, hear a proverb of our own: _A lie has no legs_; it is one true alike in its humblest application and its highest; be the lie the miserable petty falsehood which disturbs a family or a neighbourhood for a day; or one of the larger frauds, the falsehoods not in word only but in act, to which a longer date and a far larger sphere are assigned, which for a time seem to fill the world, and to carry everything in triumph before them. Still the lie, in that it is a lie, always carries within itself the germs of its own dissolution. It is sure to destroy itself at last. Its priests may prop it up from without, may set it on its feet again, after it has once fallen before the presence of the truth, yet this all will be labour in vain; it will only be, like Dagon, again to fall, and more shamefully and more irretrievably than before.[182] On the other hand, the vivacity of the truth, as contrasted with this short-lived character of the lie, is well expressed in a Swiss proverb: _It takes a good many shovelfuls of earth to bury the truth_. For, bury it as deep as men may, it will have a resurrection notwithstanding. They may roll a great stone, and seal the sepulchre in which it is laid, and set a watch upon it, yet still, like its Lord, it comes forth again at its appointed hour. It cannot die, being of an immortal race; for, as the Spanish proverb nobly declares, _The truth is daughter of God_.[183]

Again, consider this proverb: _Tell the truth, and shame the devil_. It is one which will well repay a few thoughtful moments bestowed on it, and the more so, because, even while we instinctively feel its truth, the deep moral basis on which it rests may yet not reveal itself to us at once. Nay, the saying may seem to contradict the actual experience of things; for how often telling the truth—confessing, that is, some great fault, taking home to ourselves, it may be, some grievous sin—would appear anything rather than shaming the devil; shaming indeed ourselves, but rather bringing glory to him, whose glory, such as it is, is in the sin and shame of men. And yet the word is true, and deeply true, notwithstanding. The element of lies is that in which alone he who is “the father of them” lives and thrives. So long then as a wrong-doer presents to himself, or seeks to present to others, the actual facts of his conduct different from what they really are, conceals, palliates, denies them,—so long, in regard of that man, Satan’s kingdom stands. But so soon as the things concerning himself are seen and owned by a man as they indeed exist in God’s sight, as they are when weighed in the balances of the eternal righteousness; when once a man has brought himself to tell the truth to himself, and, where need requires, to others also, then having done, and in so far as he has done this, he has abandoned the devil’s standard, he belongs to the kingdom of the truth; and as belonging to it he may rebuke, and does rebuke and put to shame, all makers and lovers of a lie, even to the very prince of them all. “Give glory to God,” was what Joshua said to Achan, when he would lead him to confess his guilt. This is but the other and fairer side of the tapestry; this is but _shame the devil_, on its more blessed side.

[Sidenote: Vox populi, vox Dei.]

Once more;—the Latin proverb, _The voice of the people, the voice of God_,[184] is one which it is well worth our while to understand. If it were affirmed in this that every outcry of the multitude, supposing only it be loud enough and wide enough, ought to be accepted as the voice of God speaking through them, no proposition more foolish or more impious could well be imagined. But _the voice of the people_ is something very different from this. The proverb rests on the assumption that the foundations of man’s being are laid in the truth; from which it will follow, that no conviction which is really a conviction of the universal humanity, but reposes on a true ground; no faith, which is indeed the faith of mankind, but has a reality corresponding to it: for, as Jeremy Taylor has said: “It is not a vain noise, when many nations join their voices in the attestation or detestation of an action;” and Hooker: “The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God Himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of nature, her voice is but his instrument.” (_Eccles. Pol._, b. i. § 8.) The task and difficulty, of course, must ever be to discover what this faith and what these convictions are; and this can only be done by an induction from a sufficient number of facts, and in sufficiently different times, to enable us to feel confident that we have indeed seized that which is the constant quantity of truth in them all, and separated this from the inconstant one of falsehood and error, evermore offering itself in its room; that we have not taken some momentary cry, wrung out by interest, by passion, or by pain, for _the voice of God_; but claimed this august title only for that true voice of humanity, which, unless everything be false, we have a right to assume an echo of the voice of God.

Thus, to take an example, the natural horror everywhere felt in regard of marriages contracted between those very near in blood, has been always and with right appealed to as a potent argument against such unions. The induction is so large, that is, the nations who have agreed in entertaining this horror are so many, oftentimes nations disagreeing in almost everything besides; the times during which this instinctive revolt against such unions has been felt, extend through such long ages; that the few exceptions, even where they are of civilized nations, as of the Egyptians who married their sisters, or of the Persians, among whom marriages more dreadful still were permitted, cannot be allowed any weight; and of course still less the exception of any savage tribe, in which all that constitutes the human in humanity has now disappeared. These exceptions can only be regarded as violations of the divine order of man’s life; not as evidences that we have falsely imagined an order where there was none. Here is a true _voice of the people_; and on the grounds laid down above, we have a right to assume this to be a _voice of God_ as well. And so too, with respect to the existence of a First Cause, Creator and Upholder of all things, the universal consent and conviction of all people, the _consensus gentium_, must be considered of itself a mighty evidence in its favour; a testimony which God is pleased to render to Himself through his creatures. This man or that, this generation or the other, might be deceived, but all men and all generations could not; the _vox populi_ makes itself felt as a _vox Dei_. The existence here and there of an atheist no more disturbs our conclusion that it is of the essence of man’s nature to believe in a God, than do such monstrous births as from time to time find place, children with two heads or with no arms, shake our assurance that it is the normal condition of man to have one head and two arms.

This last is one of the proverbs which may be said to belong to the Apology for Natural Religion. There are others, of which it would not be far-fetched to affirm that they belong to the Apology for Revealed. Thus it was very usual with Voltaire and other infidels of his time to appeal to the present barrenness and desolation of Palestine, in proof that it could never have supported the vast population which the Scripture everywhere assumes or affirms. A proverb in the language of the arch-scoffer himself might, if he had given heed to it, have put him on the right track, had he wished to be put upon it, for understanding how this could have been: _As the man is worth, his land is worth_.[185] Man is lord of his outward condition to a far greater extent than is commonly assumed; even climate, which seems at first sight so completely out of his reach, it is his immensely to modify; and if nature stamps herself on him, he stamps himself yet more powerfully on nature. It is not a mere figure of speech, that of the Psalmist, “A fruitful land maketh He barren for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.” (Ps. cvii. 34.) God makes it barren, and ever less capable of nourishing its inhabitants; but He makes it so through the sloth, the indolence, the short-sightedness of those that should have dressed and kept it. In the condition of a land may be found the echo, the reflection, the transcript of the moral and spiritual condition of those that should cultivate it: where one is waste, the other will be waste also. Under the desolating curse of Mohammedan domination the fairest portions of the earth have gone back from a garden to a wilderness: but only let that people for whom Palestine is yet destined return to it again, and return a righteous nation, and in a little while all the descriptions of its earlier fertility will be more than borne out by its later, and it will easily sustain its millions again.

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[Sidenote: Proverb of Pythagoras.]

How many proverbs, which cannot be affirmed to have been originally made for the kingdom of heaven, do yet in their highest fulfilment manifestly belong to it, so that it seems as of right to claim that for its own, even as it claims, or rather reclaims, whatever else is good or true in the world, the seeds of truth wherever dispersed abroad, as belonging rightfully to itself. Thus there is that beautiful proverb, of which Pythagoras is reputed the author: _The things of friends are in common_.[186] Where does this find its exhaustive fulfilment, but in the communion of saints, their communion not with one another merely, though indeed this is a part of its fulfilment, but in their communion with Him, who is the friend of all good men? That such a conclusion lay legitimately in the words Socrates plainly saw; who argued from it, that since good men were the friends of the gods, therefore whatever things were the gods’, were also theirs; being, when he thus concluded, as near as one who had not the highest light of all, could be to that great word of the Apostle’s, “All things are yours.”

Nor can I otherwise than esteem the ancient proverb as a very fine one, and one which we may gladly claim for our own: _Many meet the gods, but few salute them_. How often do _the gods_, (for I will keep in the language which this proverb suggests and supplies,) _meet_ men in the shape of a sorrow which might be a purifying one, of a joy which might elevate their hearts to thankfulness and praise; in a sickness or a recovery, a disappointment or a success; and yet how few, as it must be sadly owned, _salute_ them; how few recognise their august presences in this joy or this sorrow, this blessing added, or this blessing taken away. As this proverb has reference to men’s failing to _see_ the Divine presences, so let me observe by the way, there is a very grand French one which expresses the same truth, under the image of a failing to _hear_ the divine voices, those voices being drowned by the deafening hubbub of the world: _The noise is so great, one cannot hear God thunder_.[187]

[Sidenote: One man, no man]

Here is another proverb which the Church has long since claimed, at least in its import, for her own: _One man, no man_.[188] I should find it very hard indeed to persuade myself that whoever uttered it first, attached to it no deeper meaning than Erasmus gives him credit for—namely, that nothing important can be effected by a single man, destitute of the help of his fellows.[189] The word is a far more profound one than this, and rests on that great truth upon which the deeper thinkers of antiquity laid so much stress—namely, that _in the idea_ the state precedes the individual, man not being merely accidentally _gregarious_, but essentially _social_. The solitary man, it would say, is a monstrous conception, so utterly maimed and crippled must he be; the condition of solitariness involving so entire a suppression of all which belongs to the development of that wherein the true idea of humanity resides, of all which differences man from the beasts of the field; and in this sense _One man_ is _no man_; and this, I am sure, the proverb from the first intended. Nor may we stop here. This word is capable of, and seems to demand, a still higher application to man, as a destined member of the kingdom of heaven. But he can only be in training for this, when he is, and regards himself, as not alone, but the member of a family. As _one man_ he is _no man_; and the strength and value of what is called Church teaching is greatly this, that it does recognise and realize this fact, that it contemplates and deals with the faithful man, not as isolated, but as one of an organic body, with duties which flow as moral necessities from his position therein; rather than by himself, and as one whose duties to others are indeed only the exercise of private graces for his own benefit. And all that are called Church doctrines, when they really understand themselves, have their root and their real strength in that great truth which this proverb declares, that _One man is no man_, that only in a fellowship and communion is or can any man be aught.

And then there is another proverb, which Plato so loved to quote against the sophists, the men who flattered and corrupted the nobler youth of Athens, promising to impart to them easy short cuts to the attainment of wisdom and knowledge and philosophy; and this, without demanding the exercise of any labour or patience or self-denial on their parts. But with the proverb, _Good things are hard_,[190] he continually rebuked their empty pretensions; with this he made at least suspicious their promises; and this proverb, true in the sense wherein Plato used it, and that sense was earnest and serious enough, yet surely reappears, glorified and transfigured, but recognisable still, in the Saviour’s words: “The kingdom of heaven is taken by violence, and the violent take it by force.”[191]

[Sidenote: Witnesses for the truth.]