II. Gold and beauty, each in a wrong relation. An ornament of gold is a fitting and becoming adornment of the human person. But the same thing in a swine’s snout is utterly out of place; the conjunction of the two strikes us as entirely incongruous. But it is not more so than to find a fair face united to an unlovely soul—to a soul which lacks the purity and modesty without which a woman is the most repulsive of God’s creatures. For the word translated discretion evidently means womanliness—virtue, and when we see a beautiful face and find that it belongs to one with a foul spirit, we seem to see heaven and hell united in one person. The analogy goes further; the swine uses his snout to grovel in the mire in search of that which will satisfy his animal and swinish nature, he could put a jewel of gold to no other use. And the woman of the proverb does the same thing with her beauty. She debases this jewel of God’s own workmanship to the vile use of satisfying her own grovelling and lawless desires, and thus renders the resemblance most striking.
illustration.
Nearly all the females of the East wear a jewel of gold in their nostrils, or in the septum of their nose; and some of them are exceedingly beautiful, and of great value. The Oriental lady looks with as much pleasure upon the jewel which adorns her nose as any of her sex in England do upon that which deck their ears.—Roberts.
outlines and suggestive comments.
We cannot, if we are ourselves right-minded,—if we have even good sense, apart from piety—admire such beauty. It hardly deserves the name. True loveliness consists not in mere exquisite symmetry of features. It cannot exist without expression. To constitute true beauty, the countenance must be the index of the mind and heart—of what is intellectual and what is amiable.—Wardlaw.
The most direct proverb, in the sense of “mashal,” or similitude, which has yet reached us.—Plumptre.
Beauty is an earthly jewel, and is a comely ornament, where God and nature have bestowed it. But if there be no discretion to consider whence it cometh, and by whom it is preserved; if there be no understanding to perceive what the nature of it is, to what at last it cometh, and how soon it fadeth, it is then but a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout.—Jermin.
God makes no more reckoning of sinful people without understanding, than of brute beasts without reason. Though they have human nature, and carry the shape and form of men and women, with best show, yet if there be nothing but flesh and blood and sinfulness, no beauty no bravery, make the best of them, is more acceptable to Him than is the basest of all the other creatures. It is a very homely comparison wherewith the Holy Ghost disgraceth the wicked in this book, and yet so true, that He toucheth it again in the New Testament (2 Pet. ii. 22).—Dod.
It is small praise, saith one, to have a good face and an evil nature. No one means, saith another, hath so enriched hell as beautiful faces. Art thou fair? saith an author; be not like an Egyptian temple, or a painted sepulchre. Art thou foul? let thy soul be like a rich pearl in a rude shell.—Trapp.
Beauty in the possession of an unthinking woman is more dangerous than a drawn sword in the hands of an idiot.