LECTURE IV. THE POETRY, WIT, AND WISDOM OF PROVERBS.

It will be my endeavour in the three lectures which I have still to deliver to justify the attention which I have claimed on behalf of proverbs from you, not merely by appealing to the authority of others, who at different times have prized and made much of them, but by bringing out and setting before you, so far as I have the skill to do it, some of the merits and excellencies by which they are mainly distinguished. Their wit, their wisdom, their poetry, the delicacy, the fairness, the manliness which characterize so many of them, their morality, their theology, will all by turns come under our consideration. Yet shall I beware of presenting them to you as though they embodied these nobler qualities only. I shall not keep out of sight that there are proverbs, coarse, selfish, unjust, cowardly, profane; “maxims” wholly undeserving of the honour implied by that name. [89] Still as my pleasure, and I doubt not yours, is rather in the wheat than in the tares, I shall, while I do not conceal this, prefer to dwell in the main on the nobler features which they present.

[71]
Poetic imagery.

And first, in regard of the poetry of proverbs—whatever is from the people, or truly for the people, whatever either springs from their bosom, or has been cordially accepted by them, still more whatever unites both these conditions, will have poetry, imagination, in it. For little as the people’s craving after wholesome nutriment of the imaginative faculty, and after an entrance into a fairer and more harmonious world than that sordid and confused one with which often they are surrounded, is duly met and satisfied, still they yearn after all this with an honest hearty yearning, which must put to shame the palled indifference, the only affected enthusiasm of too many, whose opportunities of cultivating this glorious faculty have been so immeasurably greater than theirs. This being so, and proverbs being, as we have seen, the sayings that have found favour with the people, their peculiar inheritance, we may be quite sure that there will be poetry, imagination, passion, in them. So much we might affirm beforehand; our closer examination of them will confirm the confidence which we have been bold to entertain.

Thus we may expect to find that they will contain often bold imagery, striking comparisons; and such they do. Let serve as an example our own: Gray hairs are death’s blossoms; [90] or the Italian: Time is an inaudible file; [91] or the Greek: Man a [72]bubble; [92] which Jeremy Taylor has expanded into such glorious poetry in the opening of the Holy Dying; or that Turkish: Death is a black camel which kneels at every man’s gate; to take up, that is, the burden of a coffin there; or this Arabic one, on the never satisfied eye of desire: Nothing but a handful of dust will fill the eye of man; or another from the same quarter, worthy of Mecca’s prophet himself, and of the earnestness with which he realized Gehenna, whatever else he may have come short in: There are no fans in hell; or this other, also from the East: Hold all skirts of thy mantle extended, when heaven is raining gold; improve, that is, to the uttermost the happier crises of thy spiritual life; or this Indian, to the effect that good should be returned for evil: The sandal tree perfumes the axe that fells it; or this one, current in the Middle Ages: Whose life lightens, his words thunder; [93] or once more, this Chinese: Towers are measured by their shadows, and great men by their calumniators; however this last may have somewhat of an artificial air as tried by our standard of the proverb.

There may be poetry in a play upon words; and such we shall hardly fail to acknowledge in that beautiful Spanish proverb: La verdad es siempre verde, which I must leave in its original form; for were I to translate it, The truth is always green, [73]its charm and chief beauty would be looked for in vain. It finds its pendant and complement in another, which I must also despair of adequately rendering: Gloria vana florece, y no grana; which would express this truth, namely, that vain glory can shoot up into stalk and ear, but can never attain to the full grain in the ear. Nor can we, I think, refuse the title of poetry to this Eastern proverb, in which the wish that a woman may triumph over her enemies, clothes itself thus: May her enemies stumble over her hair;—may she flourish so, may her hair, the outward sign of this prosperity, grow so rich and long, may it so sweep the ground, that her detractors and persecutors may be entangled by it and fall.
Witty proverbs.

And then, how exquisitely witty many proverbs are. Thus, not to speak of one familiar to us all, which is perhaps the queen of all proverbs: The road to hell is paved with good intentions; [94] take this Scotch one: A man may love his house well, without riding on the ridge; it is enough for a wise man to know what is precious to himself, without making himself ridiculous by evermore proclaiming it to the world; or this of our own: When the devil is dead, he never wants a chief mourner; in other words, there is no abuse so enormous, no evil so flagrant, but that the interests[74] or passions of some will be so bound up in its continuance that they will lament its extinction; or this Italian: When rogues go in procession, the devil holds the cross; [95] when evil men have it thus far their own way, then worst is best, and in the inverted hierarchy which is then set up, the foremost in badness is foremost also in such honour as is going. Or consider how happily the selfishness and bye-ends which too often preside at men’s very prayers are noted in this Portuguese: Cobblers go to mass, and pray that cows may die; [96] that is, that so leather may be cheap. Or, take another, a German one, noting with slightest exaggeration a measure of charity which is only too common: He will swallow an egg, and give away the shells in alms; or this from the Talmud, of which I will leave the interpretation to yourselves: All kinds of wood burn silently, except thorns, which crackle and call out, We too are wood.

The wit of proverbs spares few or none. They are, as may be supposed, especially intolerant of fools. We say: Fools grow without watering; no need therefore of adulation or flattery, to quicken them to a ranker growth; for indeed The more you stroke the cat’s tail, the more he raises his back; [97] and the Russians: Fools are not planted or sowed; they grow of themselves; while[75] the Spaniards: If folly were a pain, there would be crying in every house; [98] having further an exquisitely witty one on learned folly as the most intolerable of all follies: A fool, unless he know Latin, is never a great fool. [99] And here is excellently unfolded to us the secret of the fool’s confidence: Who knows nothing, doubts nothing. [100]

The shafts of their pointed satire are directed with an admirable impartiality against men of every degree, so that none of us will be found to have wholly escaped. To pass over those, and they are exceedingly numerous, which are aimed at members of the monastic orders, [101] I must fain Bohemian proverb. hope that this Bohemian one, pointing at the clergy, is not true; for it certainly argues no very forgiving temper on our parts in cases where we have been, or fancy ourselves to have been, wronged. It is as follows: If you have offended a clerk, kill him; else you never will have peace with him. [102] And another proverb, worthy to take[76] its place among the best even of the Spanish, charges the clergy with being the authors of the chiefest spiritual mischiefs which have risen up in the Church: By the vicar’s skirts the devil climbs up into the belfry. [103] Nor do physicians appear in the middle ages to have been in very high reputation for piety; for a Latin medieval proverb boldly proclaims: Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists. [104] And as for lawyers, this of the same period, Legista, nequista, [105] expresses itself not with such brevity only, but with such downright plainness of speech, that I shall excuse myself from attempting to render it into English. Nor do other sorts and conditions of men escape. “The miller tolling with his golden thumb,” has been often the object of malicious insinuations; and of him the Germans have a proverb: What is bolder than a miller’s neckcloth, which takes a thief by the throat every morning? [106] Evenhanded justice might perhaps require that I should find caps for other heads; and it is not that such are wanting, nor yet out of fear lest any should be[77] offended, but only because I must needs hasten onward, that I leave this part of my subject without further development.
Proverbs about pride.

What a fine knowledge of the human heart will they often display. I know not whether this Persian saying on the subtleties of pride is a proverb in the very strictest sense of the word, but it is forcibly uttered: Thou shalt sooner detect an ant moving in the dark night on the black earth, than all the motions of pride in thine heart. And on the wide reach of this sin the Italians say: If pride were as art, how many graduates we should have; [107] and how excellent and searching is this word of theirs on the infinitely various shapes which this protean sin will assume: There are who despise pride with a greater pride, [108] one which might almost seem to have been founded on the story of Diogenes, who, treading under his feet a rich carpet of Plato’s, exclaimed, “Thus I trample on the ostentation of Plato;” ‘With an ostentation of thine own,’ was the other’s excellent retort;—even as on another occasion he observed, with admirable wit, that he saw the pride of the Cynic peeping through the rents of his mantle: for indeed pride can array itself quite as easily in rags as in purple; can affect squalors as earnestly as splendours; the lowest place and the last is of itself no security at all for humility; and out of a sense of this we very well have said: As proud go behind as before.

[78]

Sometimes in their subtle observation of life, they arrive at conclusions which we would very willingly question or reject, but to which it is impossible to refuse a certain amount of assent. Thus it is with the very striking German proverb: One foe is too many; and an hundred friends too few. [109] There speaks out in this a sense of how much more active a principle in this world will hate be sometimes than love. The hundred friends will wish you well; but the one foe will do you ill. Their benevolence will be ordinarily passive; his malevolence will be constantly active; it will be animosity, or spiritedness in evil. The proverb will have its use, if we are stirred up by it to prove its assertion false, to show that, in very many cases at least, there is no such blot as it would set on the scutcheon of true friendship. In the same rank of unwelcome proverbs I must range this Persian one: Of four things every man has more than he knows: of sins, of debts, of years, and of foes; and this Spanish: One father can support ten children; ten children cannot support one father; which, in so far as it rests upon a certain ground of truth, suggests a painful reflection in regard of the less strength which there must be in the filial than in the paternal affection, since to the one those acts of self-sacrificing love are easy, which to the other are hard, and often impossible. But yet, seeing that it is the order of God’s providence in the [79] world that fathers should in all cases support children, while it is the exception when children are called to support parents, one can only admire that wisdom which has made the instincts of natural affection to run rather in the descending than in the ascending line; a wisdom to which this proverb, though with a certain exaggeration of the facts, bears witness.
French proverb.

How exquisitely delicate is the touch of this French proverb: It is easy to go afoot, when one leads one’s horse by the bridle. [110] How fine and subtle an insight into the inner workings of the human heart is here; how many cheap humilities are here set at their true worth. It is easy to stoop from state, when that state may be resumed at will; easy for one to part with luxuries and indulgences, which he only parts with exactly so long as it may please himself. No reason indeed is to be found in this comparative easiness for the not ‘going afoot;’ on the contrary, it may be to him a most profitable exercise; but every reason for not esteeming the doing so too highly, nor setting it on a level with the trudging upon foot of him, who has no horse to fall back on at whatever moment he may please.

There is, and always must be, some rough work to be done in the world; work which, though rough, is not therefore in the least ignoble; and the schemes, so daintily conceived, of a luxurious [80] society, which repose on a tacit assumption that nobody shall have to do this work, are touched with a fine irony in this Arabic proverb: If I am master, and thou art master, who shall drive the asses? [111]

Again, how clever is the satire of the following Haytian proverb, which, however, I must introduce with a little preliminary explanation. It was one current among the slave population of St. Domingo, and with it they ridiculed the ambition and pretension of the mulatto race immediately above them. These, in imitation of the French planters, must have their duels too—duels, however, which had nothing earnest or serious about them, invariably ending in a reconciliation and a feast, the kids which furnished the latter being in fact the only sufferers, their blood that which alone was shed. All this the proverb uttered: Mulattoes fight, kids die. [112]

And proverbs, witty in themselves, often become wittier still in their application, like gems that acquire new brilliancy from their setting, or from some novel light in which they are held. No writer that I know of has an happier skill in thus adding Fuller’s use of proverbs. wit to the witty than Fuller, the Church historian. Let me confirm this assertion by one or two examples drawn from his writings. He is describing[81] the indignation, the outcries, the remonstrances, which the thousandfold extortions, the intolerable exactions of the Papal See gave birth to in England during the reigns of such subservient kings as our Third Henry; yet he will not have his readers to suppose that the Popes fared a whit the worse for all this outcry which was raised against them; not so, for The fox thrives best when he is most cursed; [113] the very loudness of the clamour was itself rather an evidence how well they were faring. Or again, he is telling of that Duke of Buckingham, well known to us through Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, who, having helped the tyrant to a throne, afterwards took mortal displeasure against him; this displeasure he sought to hide, till a season arrived for showing it with effect, in the deep of his heart, but in vain; for, as Fuller observes, It is hard to halt before a cripple; the arch-hypocrite Richard, he to whom dissembling was as a second nature, saw through and detected at once the shallow Buckingham’s clumsier deceit. And the Church History abounds with similar happy applications. Fuller, indeed, possesses so much of the wit out of which proverbs spring, that it is not seldom difficult to tell whether he is adducing a proverb, or uttering some proverb-like saying of his own. Thus, I cannot remember ever to have met any of the following, which yet[82] sound like proverbs—the first on solitude as preferable to ill fellowship: Better ride alone than have a thief’s company; [114] the second against certain who disparaged one whose excellencies they would have found it very difficult to imitate: They who complain that Grantham steeple stands awry, will not set a straighter by it, [115] and in this he warns against despising in any the tokens of honourable toil: Mock not a cobbler for his black thumbs. [116]

But the glory of proverbs, that, perhaps, which strikes us most often and most forcibly in regard of them, is their shrewd common sense, the sound wisdom for the management of our own lives, and of our intercourse with our fellows, which so many of them contain. In truth, there is no region of practical life which they do not occupy, for which they do not supply some wise hints and counsels and warnings. There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it. “Adages,” indeed, according to the more probable etymology of that word, they are, apt for action and use. [117]
Wisdom of silence.

Thus, how many of these popular sayings and what good ones there are on the wisdom of governing the tongue,—I speak not now of those urging the duty, though such are by no means wanting,—but[83] the wisdom, prudence, and profit of knowing how to keep silence as well as how to speak. The Persian, perhaps, is familiar to many: Speech is silvern, silence is golden; with which we may compare the Italian: Who speaks, sows; who keeps silence, reaps; [118] and on the safety that is in silence, I know none happier than another from the same quarter, and one most truly characteristic of Italian caution: Silence was never written down; [119] while, on the other hand, we are excellently warned of the irrevocableness of the word which has once gone from us in this Eastern proverb: Of thine unspoken word thou art master; thy spoken word is master of thee; even as the same is set out elsewhere by many striking comparisons; it is the arrow from the bow, the stone from the sling; and, once launched, can as little be recalled as these. [120] Our own, He who says what he likes, shall hear what he does not like, gives a further motive for self-government in speech; while this Spanish is in an higher strain: The evil which issues from thy mouth falls into thy bosom. [121] Nor is it enough to abstain ourselves from all such words; we must not make ourselves partakers in those of others; which it is only too easy to do; for, as the Chinese[84] have said very well: He who laughs at an impertinence, makes himself its accomplice.

And then, in proverbs not a few what profitable warnings have we against the fruits of evil companionship, as in that homely one of our own: He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas; [122] or, again, in the old Hebrew one: Two dry sticks will set on fire one green; or, in another from the East, which has to do with the same theme, and plainly shows whither such companionship will lead: He that takes the raven for a guide, shall light upon carrion.
Good sense in proverbs.

What warnings do many contain against unreasonable expectations, against a looking for perfection in a world of imperfection, and generally a demanding of more from life than life can yield. We note very well the folly of one addicted to this, saying: He expects better bread than can be made of wheat; and the Portuguese: He that will have an horse without fault, let him go afoot; and the French: Where the goat is tied, there she must browse. [123] Again, what a good word of caution in respect of the wisdom of considering oftentimes a step which, being once taken, is taken for ever, lies in the following Russian proverb: Measure thy cloth ten times; thou canst cut it but once. And in this Spanish the final issues of procrastination are well set forth: By the street of “By-and-bye” one arrives at the house of “Never.” [124] In how[85] pleasant a way discretion in avoiding all appearance of evil is urged in the following Chinese: In a field of melons tie not thy shoe; under a plum-tree adjust not thy cap. And this Danish warns us well against relying too much on other men’s silence, since there is no rarer gift than the capacity of keeping a secret: Tell nothing to thy friend which thine enemy may not know. Here is a word which we owe to Italy, and which, laid to heart, might keep men out of law-suits, or, being in them, from refusing to accept tolerable terms of accommodation: The robes of lawyers are lined with the obstinacy of suitors. [125] Other words of wisdom and warning, for so I must esteem them, are these; this, on the danger of being overset by prosperity: Everything may be borne, except good fortune; [126] with which may be compared our own: Bear wealth, poverty will bear itself; and another Italian which says: In prosperity no altars smoke. [127] This is on the disgrace which will sooner or later follow upon dressing ourselves out in intellectual finery that does not belong to us: Who arrays himself in other men’s garments, is stripped in the middle of the street; [128] he is detected and laid bare when and where detection is most shameful.

Of the same miscellaneous character, and derived[86] from quarters the most diverse, but all of them of an excellent sense or shrewdness, are the following. This is from Italy: Who sees not the bottom, let him not pass the water. [129] This is current among the free blacks of Hayti: Before fording the river, do not curse Mrs. Alligator; [130] provoke not wantonly those in whose power you presently may be. This is Spanish: Call me not “olive,” till you see me gathered; [131] being nearly parallel to our own: Praise a fair day at night; and this French: Take the first advice of a woman, and not the second; [132] a proverb of much wisdom; for in processes of reasoning, out of which the second counsels would spring, women may and will be, inferior to us; but in intuitions, in moral intuitions above all, they surpass us far; they have what Montaigne ascribes to them in a remarkable word, “l’esprit primesautier,” the leopard’s spring, which takes its prey, if it be to take it at all, at the first bound.

And I cannot but think that for as many as are seeking diligently to improve their time and opportunities of knowledge, with at the same time little [87] of either which they can call their own, a very useful hint and warning against an error which lies very near, is contained in the little Latin proverb: Compendia, dispendia. Nor indeed for them only, but for all, and in numberless respects it often proves true that a short cut may be a very long way home; yet the proverb can never be applied better than to those little catechisms of science, those skeleton outlines of history, those epitomes of all useful information, those thousand delusive short cuts to the attainment of that knowledge, which can indeed only be acquired by them that are content to travel on the king’s highway, on the old, and as I must still call it, the royal road of patience, perseverance, and toil. Surely these compendia, so meagre and so hungry, with little food for the intellect, with less for the affections, we may style with fullest right dispendia, wasteful as they generally prove of whatever time and labour and money is bestowed upon them; and every wise man will set his seal to this word, as wisely as it is grandly spoken: “All spacious minds, attended with the felicities of means and leisure, will fly abridgements as bane.”
Proverbs about books.

And being on the subject of books and the choice of books, let me put before you a proverb, and in this reading age a very serious one; it comes to us from Italy, and it says: There is no worse robber than a bad book. [133] Indeed, none worse, nor so bad; other robbers may spoil us of our money; but this robber of our “goods”—of our time at any rate,[88] even assuming the book to be only negatively bad; but of how much more, of our principles, our faith, our purity of heart, supposing its badness to be positive, and not negative only. And one more on books may fitly find place here: Dead men open living men’s eyes; at least I take it to be such; and to contain implicitly the praise of history, and an announcement of the instruction which it will yield us. [134]

Here are one or two prudent words on education. A child may have too much of its mother’s blessing; yes, for that blessing may be no blessing, but rather a curse, if it take the shape of foolish and fond indulgence; and in the same strain is this German: Better the child weep than the father. [135] And this, like many others, is found in so many tongues, that it cannot be ascribed to one rather than another: More springs in the garden than the gardener ever sowed. [136] It is a proverb for many, but most of all for parents and teachers, that they lap not themselves in a false dream of security, as though nothing was at work or growing in the minds of the young in their guardianship, but what they themselves had sown there, as though there was not another who might very well have sown his tares beside and among any good seed of their sowing. At the same time the proverb has also its happier side. There may be, there often are, better [89] things also in this garden than ever the earthly gardener set there, seeds of the more immediate sowing of God. In either of its aspects this proverb is one deserving to be laid to heart.

Proverbs will sometimes outrun and implicitly anticipate conclusions, which are only after long struggles and efforts arrived at as the formal and undoubted conviction of all thoughtful men. After how long a conflict has that been established as a maxim in political economy, which the brief Italian Gold’s worth is gold. proverb long ago announced: Gold’s worth is gold. [137] What millions upon millions of national wealth have been as much lost as if they had been thrown into the sea, from the inability of those who have had the destinies of nations in their hands to grasp this simple proposition, that everything which could purchase money, or which money would fain purchase, was as really wealth as the money itself. What forcing of national industries into unnatural channels has resulted from this, what mischievous restrictions in the buying and selling of one people with another. Nay, can the truth which this proverb affirms be said even now to be accepted without gainsaying—so long as the talk about the balance of trade being in favour of or against a nation, as the fear of draining a country of its gold, still survive?

Here is a proverb of many tongues: One sword keeps another in its scabbard;[90] [138]—surely a far wiser and far manlier word than the puling yet mischievous babble of our shallow Peace Societies, which, while they fancy that they embody, and they only embody, the true spirit of Christianity, proclaim themselves in fact ignorant of all which it teaches; for they dream of having peace the fruit, while at the same time the root of bitterness out of which have grown all the wars and fightings that have ever been in the world, namely the lusts which stir in men’s members, remain strong and vigorous as ever. But no; it is not they that are the peacemakers: in the face of an evil world, and of a world determined to continue in its evil, He who bears the sword, and though he fain would not, yet knows how, if need be, to wield it, he bears peace. [139]

One of the most remarkable features of a good proverb is the singular variety of applications which it will admit, which indeed it challenges and invites. Not lying on the surface of things, but going deep down to their heart, it will be found capable of being applied again and again, under circumstances the most different; like the gift of which Solomon spake, “whithersoever it turneth, it prospereth;” or like a diamond cut and polished upon many sides, which reflects and refracts the light upon every one. There can be no greater mistake than the attempt to tie it down and restrict it to a single application, when indeed the very character[91] of it is that it is ever finding or making new ones for itself.
Scriptural proverb.

It is nothing strange that with words of Eternal Wisdom this should be so, and in respect of them my assertion cannot need a proof. I will, notwithstanding, adduce as a first confirmation of it a scriptural proverb, one which fell from the Lord’s lips in his last prophecies about Jerusalem: Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together; (Matt. xxiv. 28;) and which probably He had taken up from Job. (xxxix. 30.) Who would venture to say that he had exhausted the meaning of this wonderful saying? For is it not properly inexhaustible? All history is a comment on these words. Wherever there is a Church or a people abandoned by the spirit of life, and so a carcase, tainting the atmosphere of God’s moral world, around it assemble the ministers and messengers of Divine justice, “the eagles,” (or vultures more strictly, for the true eagle does not feed on aught but what itself has slain,) the scavengers of God’s moral world; scenting out as by a mysterious instinct the prey from afar, and charged to remove presently the offence out of the way. This proverb, for the saying has passed upon the lips of men, and thus has become such, is being fulfilled evermore. The wicked Canaanites were the carcase, when the children of Israel entered into their land, the commissioned eagles that should remove them out of sight. At a later day the Jews were themselves the carcase, and the Romans the eagles; and when in the progress of decay, the Roman empire had[92] quite lost the spirit of life, and those virtues of the family and the nation which had deservedly made it great, the northern tribes, the eagles now, came down upon it, to tear it limb from limb, and make room for a new creation that should grow up in its stead. Again, the Persian empire was the carcase; Alexander and his Macedonian hosts, the eagles that by unerring instinct gathered round it to complete its doom. The Greek Church in the seventh century was too nearly a carcase to escape the destiny of such, and the armies of Islam scented their prey, and divided it among them. In modern times Poland was, I fear, such a carcase; and this one may affirm without in the least extenuating their guilt who partitioned it; for it might have been just for it to suffer, what yet it was most unrighteous for others to inflict. Nay, where do you not find an illustration of this proverb, from such instances on the largest scale as these, down to that of the silly and profligate heir, surrounded by sharpers and black-legs, and preyed on by these? Everywhere it is true that Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.
Extremes meet.

Or, again, consider such a proverb as the short but well-known one: Extremes meet. Short as it is, it is yet a motto on which whole volumes might be written, which is finding its illustration every day,—in small and in great,—in things trivial and in things most important,—in the histories of single men, and in those of nations and of Churches. Consider some of its every-day fulfilments,—old age ending in second childhood,—cold performing[93] the effects of heat, and scorching as heat would have done,—the extremities alike of joy and of grief finding utterance in tears,—that which is above all value declared to have no value at all, to be “invaluable,”—the second singular “thou” instead of the plural “you,” employed in so many languages to inferiors and to God, never to equals; just as servants and children are alike called by the Christian name, but not those who stand in the midway of intimacy between them. Or to take some further illustrations from the moral world, of extremes meeting; observe how often those who begin their lives as spendthrifts end them as misers; how often the flatterer and the calumniator meet in the same person: out of a sense of which the Italians say well: Who paints me before, blackens me behind; [140] observe how those who yesterday would have sacrificed to Paul as a god, will to-day stone him as a malefactor; (Acts xiv. 18, 19; cf. xxviii. 4–6;) even as Roman emperors would one day have blasphemous honours paid to them by the populace, and the next their bodies would be dragged by a hook through the streets of the city, to be flung into the common sewer. Or note again in what close alliance hardness and softness, cruelty and self-indulgence (“lust hard by hate”), are continually found; or in law,[94] how the summum jus, where unredressed by equity, becomes the summa injuria, as in the case of Shylock’s pound of flesh, which was indeed no more than was in the bond. Or observe on a greater scale, as lately in France, how a wild and lawless democracy may be transformed by the base trick of a conjuror into an atrocious military tyranny. [141] Or read thoughtfully the history of the Church and of the sects, and you will not fail to note what things apparently the most remote are yet in the most fearful proximity with one another: how often, for example, a false asceticism has issued in frantic outbreaks of fleshly lusts, and those who avowed themselves at one time ambitious to live lives above men, have ended in living lives below beasts. Again, take note of England at the Restoration exchanging all in a moment the sour strictness of the Puritans for a licence and debauchery unknown to it before. Or, once more, consider the exactly similar position in respect of Scripture, taken up by the Romanists on the one side, the Quakers and Familists on the other. Seeming, and in much being, so remote from one another, they yet have this fundamental in common, that Scripture, insufficient in itself, needs a supplement from without, those finding it in a Pope, and these in the “inward light.” [142] With these examples [95] before you, not to speak of the many others which might be adduced, [143] Too far East is West. you will own, I think, that this proverb, Extremes meet, or its parallel, Too far East is West, reaches very far into the heart of things; and with this for the present I must conclude.