Part 8

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.