The morality of proverbs is a subject which I have not been able to leave wholly untouched until now, for of necessity it has offered itself to us continually, in one shape or another; yet hitherto I have not regularly dealt with or considered it. To it I propose to devote the present lecture. But how, it may be asked at the outset, can any general verdict be pronounced about them? In a family like theirs, spread so widely over the face of the earth, must there not be found worthy members and unworthy, proverbs noble and base, holy and profane, heavenly and earthly;—yea, heavenly, earthly, and devilish? What common judgment of praise or censure can be pronounced upon all of these? Evidently none. The only question, therefore, for our consideration must be, whether there exists any such large and unquestionable preponderance either of the better sort or of the worse, as shall give us a right to pronounce a judgment on the whole in their favour or against them, to affirm of them that their preponderating influence and weight is thrown into the balance of the good or of the evil.

And here I am persuaded that no one can have[97] devoted any serious attention to this aspect of the subject, but will own, (and seeing how greatly popular morals are affected by popular proverbs, will own with thankfulness,) that, if not without serious exceptions, yet still in the main they range themselves under the banners of the right and of the truth; he will allow that of so many as move in an ethical sphere at all, very far more are children of light and the day than of darkness and night. Indeed, the comparative paucity of unworthy proverbs is a very noticeable fact, and one to the causes of which I shall have presently to recur.
Coarse proverbs.

At the same time, when I affirm this, I find it necessary to make certain explanations, to draw certain distinctions. In the first place, I would not, by what I have said, in the least deny that an ample number of coarse proverbs are extant: it needs but to turn over a page or two of Ray’s Collection of English Proverbs, or of Howell’s, or indeed of any collection in any tongue, which has not been weeded carefully, to convince oneself of the fact;—nor yet would I deny, that of these many may, more or less, live upon the lips of men. Having their birth, for the most part, in a period of a nation’s literature and life, when men are much more plain-spoken, and have far fewer reticences than is afterwards the case, it is nothing strange that some of them, employing words forbidden now, but not forbidden then, should sound coarse and indelicate enough in our ears: while indeed there are others, whose offence and grossness[98] these considerations, while they may mitigate, are quite insufficient to excuse. But at the same time, gross words and images, (I speak not of wanton ones,) bad as they may be, are altogether different from immoral maxims and rules of life. And it is these immoral maxims, unrighteous, selfish, or otherwise unworthy rules, of which I would affirm the number to be, if not absolutely, yet relatively small.

And then further, in estimating the morality of proverbs, this also will claim in justice not to be forgotten. In the same manner as coarse proverbs are not necessarily immoral, so the application which is made of a proverb by us may very often be hardhearted and selfish, while yet the proverb itself is very far from so being. This selfishness and hardness lay not in it of primary intention, but only by our abuse; and in the cases of several, these two things, the proverb itself, and the ordinary employment of it, will demand to be kept carefully apart from one another. For instance: He has made his bed, and now he must lie on it;—As he has brewed, so he must drink;—As he has sown, so must he reap; [144]—if these are employed to justify us in refusing to save others, so far as we may, from the consequences of their own folly, or imprudence, or even guilt, why then one can only say that they are very ill employed;[99] and there are few of us with whom it would not have gone hardly, had all those about us acted in the spirit of these proverbs so misinterpreted; had they refused to mitigate for us, so far as they could, the consequences of our errors. But if the words are taken in their true sense, as homely announcements of that law of divine retaliations in the world, according to which men shall eat of the fruit of their own doings, and be filled with their own ways, who shall gainsay them? What affirm they more than every page of Scripture, every turn of human life, is affirming too, namely, that the everlasting order of God’s universe cannot be violated with impunity, that there is a continual returning upon men of what they have done, and that in their history we may read their judgment?
Charity begins at home.

Charity begins at home, is the most obvious and familiar of these proverbs, selfishly abused. It may be, no doubt it often is, made the plea for a selfish withholding of assistance from all but a few, whom men may include in their “at home,” while sometimes the proverb receives a narrower interpretation still; and self, and self only, is accounted to be “at home.” And yet, in truth, what were that charity worth, which did not begin at home, which did not preserve the divine order and proportion and degree? It is not for nothing that we have been grouped in families, neighbourhoods, and nations; and he who will not recognise the divinely appointed nearnesses to himself of some over others, who thinks to be a cosmopolite without being a patriot, a philanthropist without owning a distinguishing[100] love for them that are peculiarly “his own,” who would thus have a circumference without a centre, deceives his own heart; and affirming all men, to be equally dear to him, is indeed affirming them to be equally indifferent. Home, the family, this is as the hearth at which the affections which are afterwards to go forth and warm in a larger circle, are themselves to be kept lively and warm; and the charity which did not exercise itself in outcomings of kindness and love in the narrower, would be little likely to seek a wider range for itself. Wherever else it may end, and the larger the sphere which it makes for itself the better, it must yet begin at home. [145]

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, Prudential morality. like this, move in the region of what has been by [101] 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[102] 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.

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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[104] 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[105] 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.
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.

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[106] 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;[107] [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; Alms the salt of riches. 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]

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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 sh............