Part 9

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.]

This method of looking in proverbs for an higher meaning than any which lies on their surface, or which they seem to bear on their fronts; or rather of searching out their highest intention, and claiming that as their truest, even though it should not be that perceived in them by most, or that which lay nearest to them at their first generation, is one that will lead us in many interesting paths. And it is not merely those of heathen antiquity which shall thus be persuaded often, and that without any forcing, to render up a Christian meaning; but (as was indeed to be expected) still more often those of a later time, even those which the world had seemed to claim for its own, shall be found to move in a spiritual sphere as their truest. Let me offer in evidence of this these four or five, which come to us from Italy: _He who has love in his heart, has spurs in his sides_;—_Love rules without law_;—_Love rules his kingdom without a sword_;—_Love knows nothing of labour_;—_Love is the master of all arts_.[192] Take these, even with the necessary drawbacks of my English translation; but still more, in their original beauty; and how exquisitely do they set forth, in whatever light you regard them, the free creative impulses of love, its delight to labour and to serve; how worthily do they glorify the kingdom of love as the only kingdom of a free and joyful obedience. While yet at the same time, if we would appreciate them at _all_ their worth, is it possible to stop short of an application of them to that kingdom of love, which, because it is in the highest sense such, is also a kingdom of heaven? And then, what precious witness do these utterances contain, the more precious as current among a people nursed in the theology of Rome, against the shameless assertion that selfishness is the only motive sufficient to produce good (?) works: for in such an assertion the Romish impugners of a free justification constantly deal; evermore charging this that we hold, of our justification by faith only, (which, when translated into the language of ethics, is at least as important in the province of morality as it is in that of theology,) with being an immoral doctrine, and not so fruitful in deeds of love as one which should connect these deeds with a selfish thought of promoting our own safety thereby.

[Sidenote: Christian proverbs.]

There are proverbs which reach the height of evangelical morality. “Little gospels”[193] the Spaniard has somewhat too boldly entitled his; and certainly there are many which at once we feel could nowhere have arisen or obtained circulation but under the influence of Christian faith, being in spirit, and often in form no less than in spirit, the outbirths of it. Thus is it with that exquisitely beautiful proverb of our own: _The way to heaven is by Weeping-Cross_;[194] nor otherwise with the Spanish: _God never wounds with both hands_;[195] not with _both_, for He ever reserves one with which to bind up and to heal. And another Spanish, evidently intended to give the sum and substance of all which in life is to be desired the most, _Peace and patience, and death with penitence_,[196] gives this sum certainly only as it presents itself to the Christian eye. And this of ours is Christian both in form and in spirit: _Every cross hath its inscription_;—the name, that is, inscribed upon it, of the person for whom it was shaped; it was intended for those shoulders upon which it is laid, and will adapt itself to them; that fearful word is never true which a spirit greatly vexed spake in the hour of its impatience: “I have little faith in the paternal love which I need; so ruthless, or so negligent seems the government of this earth.”[197]

So too is it with that ancient German proverb: _When God loathes aught, men presently loathe it too_.[198] He who first uttered this must have been one who had watched long the ways by which shame and honour travel in this world; and in this watching must have noted how it ever came to pass that even worldly honour tarried not long with them from whom the true honour which cometh from God had departed. For the worldly honour is but a shadow and reflex that waits upon the heavenly; it may indeed linger for a little, but it will be only for a little, after it is divorced from its substance. Where the honour from Him has been withdrawn, he causes in one way or another the honour from men ere long to be withdrawn too. When He loathes, presently man loathes also. The saltless salt is not merely cast out by Him, but is trodden under foot of _men_. (Matt. v. 13.) A Louis the Fifteenth’s death-bed is in its way as hideous to the natural as it is to the spiritual eye.[199]

[Sidenote: Sir Matthew Hale’s proverb.]

We are told of the good Sir Matthew Hale who was animated with a true zeal for holiness, an earnest desire to walk close to God, that he had continually in his mouth the modern Latin proverb, _We perish by permitted things_.[200] Assuredly it is one very well worthy to be of all remembered, searching as it does into the innermost secrets of men’s lives. It is no doubt true that nearly as much danger threatens the soul from things permitted as from things unpermitted; in some respects more danger; for these being disallowed altogether, do not make the insidious approaches of those, which, coming in under allowance, do yet so easily slip into dangerous excess.

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[Sidenote: Proverbs and Scripture.]