Richard Chenevix Trench

“ For these, sitting a little time after in the open theatre at Corinth, beheld this flight of cranes hovering above them, and one said scoffingly to another, “Lo, there, the avengers of Ibycus!” The words were caught up by some near them; for already the poet’s disappearance had awakened anxiety and alarm. Being questioned, they betrayed themselves, and were led to their doom; and The cranes of Ibycus passed into a proverb, very much as our Murder will out, to express the wondrous leadings of God whereby continually the secretest thing of blood is brought to the open light of day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every layman in Castile might make a king, every clerk a pope. The Spaniard’s contempt for his peninsular neighbours finds its emphatic utterance in another: Take from a Spaniard all his good qualities, and there remains a Portuguese.
We may too, I think, remark how a nation will occasionally in its proverbs indulge in a fine irony upon itself, and show that it is perfectly aware of its own weaknesses, follies, and faults. This the Spaniards must be allowed to do in their proverb, Succours of Spain, either late, or never. ”

“ The selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the servility, which no longer as with an inward shame creeps into men’s acts, but utters itself boldly as the avowed law of their lives, the sense of the oppression of the strong, of the insecurity of the weak, and, generally, the whole character of life, alike outward and inward, as poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East ”

“ Thus, even with the example of so grave a divine as Bishop Sanderson before me, I should hesitate to employ in a sermon such a proverb as Over shoes, over boots—one which he declares to be the motto of some, who having advanced a certain way in sin, presently become utterly wretchless, caring not, and counting it wholly indifferent, how much further in evil they advance. ”

“ For, indeed, what a body of popular good sense and good feeling, as we shall then perceive, is contained in the better, which is also the more numerous, portion of them; what a sense of natural equity, what a spirit of kindness breathes out from many of them; what prudent rules for the management of life, what shrewd wisdom, which though not of this world, is most truly for it, what frugality, what patience, what perseverance, what manly independence, are continually inculcated by them. What a fine knowledge of the human heart do many of them display ”

“ 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 ”

“ We have a fair measure of an author’s true popularity, I mean of the real and lasting hold which he has taken on his nation’s heart, in the extent to which it has been thus done with his writings.
There is another way in which additions are from time to time made to the proverbial wealth of a people. Some event has laid strong hold of their imagination, has stirred up the depths of their moral consciousness ”

“ Popularity essential.
Herein in great part the force of a proverb lies, namely, that it has already received the stamp of popular allowance. A man might produce, (for what another has done, he might do again,) something as witty, as forcible, as much to the point, of his own; which should be hammered at the instant on his own anvil. Yet still it is not “the wisdom of many;” it has not stood the test of [15] experience; it wants that which the other already has, but which it only after a long period can acquire—the consenting voice of many and at different times to its wisdom and truth. ”

“ In respect of love indeed, not the Roman only, but Greek and Roman alike, are immeasurably inferior to those which many modern nations could supply. Thus a proverb of such religious depth and beauty as our own, Marriages are made in heaven, it would have been quite impossible for all heathen antiquity to have produced, or even remotely to have approached. ”

“ 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 [137] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The world has now endured so long, and the successive generations of men have thought, felt, enjoyed, suffered, and altogether learned so much, that there is an immense stock of wisdom which may be said to belong to humanity in common, being the gathered fruits of all this its experience in the past. ”

“ I am convinced that we may learn from the proverbs current among a people, what is nearest and dearest to their hearts, the aspects under which they contemplate life, how honour and dishonour are distributed among them, what is of good, what of evil report in their eyes, with very much more which it can never be unprofitable to know. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 One man, no man 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What was urged in my first lecture of their popularity was not at all intended in this sense; and the sound common sense, the wit, the wisdom, the right feeling, which are their predominant characteristics, alike contradict any such supposition. They spring rather from the sound healthy kernel of the nation, whether in high place or in low; and it is surely worthy of note, how large a proportion of those with the generation of which we are acquainted, owe their existence to the foremost men of their time, to its philosophers, its princes, and its kings ”

“ Thus, in a discourse warning against sins of the tongue, there are many words which we might produce of our own to describe the mischief it inflicts that would be flatter, duller, less likely to be remembered than the old proverb: The tongue is not steel, but it cuts. On God’s faithfulness in sustaining, [143] upholding, rewarding his servants, there are feebler things which we might bring out of our own treasure-house, than to remind our hearers of that word: He who serves God, serves a good Master. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is indeed another of our own, not unworthy to be set beside this, announcing, though with quite another image, the same fact of the tardy but terrible arrivals of judgment: God comes with leaden feet, but strikes with iron hands. And then, how awfully sublime another which has come down to us as part of the wisdom of the ancient heathen world ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the help of an instance or two we can best realize to ourselves how great an advantage it thus obtains for itself. Suppose, for example, one were to content himself with saying, “He may wait till he is a beggar, who waits to be rich by other men’s deaths,” would this trite morality be likely to go half so far, or to be remembered half so long, as the vigorous comparison of this proverb: He who waits for dead men’s shoes may go barefoot? [12] Or again, what were “All men are mortal,” as compared with the proverb: Every door may be shut but death’s door? ”

“ Proud of the rich treasures which in this kind it possessed, he has very reluctantly discovered on a fuller investigation of the whole subject, how many of these which he counted native, the peculiar heirloom and glory of his own land, must at once and without hesitation be resigned to others, who can be shown beyond all doubt to have been in earlier possession of them: while in respect of many more, if his own nation can put in a claim to them as well as others, yet he is compelled to feel that it can put in no better than, oftentimes not so good as, many competitors. ”