outlines and suggestive comments.
In the distinction between the rich and the poor there is something not altogether pleasant to the human mind. We are apt to recoil from it. Without much thought, by the mere spontaneous promptings of our feelings, we are apt to have some dissatisfaction as we behold the advantages of riches so unequally distributed among men. And frequently the dissatisfaction increases, as we can discover no just rule of this distribution; and as we behold more and more of the contrasted advantages and disadvantages of this distinction between rich and poor. Something like this was, in my opinion, the feeling of the writer of this text. He saw the distinction between rich and poor; he felt amazed; he had a disliking for it which set his mind at work. He thought the matter over patiently and religiously. And when he had done he gathers up the whole substance into this single aphorism and writes it down. That was his satisfaction. There he left the matter. . . . He had studied it as he studied botany: From the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall. He had contemplated the loftiness of the rich and the lowliness of the poor, wherein they differed, and wherein they agreed, and especially who made them to differ. . . . His faith in God and constant recognition of Him would lead him to take along with him in all his contemplations the idea of the one Great Maker of all; and then, when he found things strange, dark, or revolting to him growing out of the distinctions between rich and poor, he leaves all that with God. But before he comes to this, and while he is engaged amid things which he can understand, he finds another side of the question which at first disquieted him. . . . Coming to examine the matter, he finds that distinction is not the real affair after all; that there are more agreements than distinctions—more resemblances than differences: the Maker of all has made the all more alike than unlike. . . . They meet together in their origin and their situation as they enter the world. They are equally dependent, helpless, miserable. . . . The two classes are very much alike in their amount of happiness. . . . The rich man is not necessarily happy nor the poor unhappy. . . . The passions which make men miserable are exercised by both classes without any visible difference in their effects. . . . There is a substantial agreement in all the organs of perception and enjoyment, and much of our felicity here depends upon the organic constitution that makes us men. . . . In intellectual faculties there is the same strong resemblance. The perception, memory, imagination, reason, which God has given, He has been pleased to give with an impartial hand. . . . There is one common end to our humanity; . . . among dead men’s bones you can find nothing to minister to human vanity. The rich and poor meet together in the tomb and at the final bar of God.—Dr. Spencer.
They meet often; yea, often is the rich forced to send for the poor, needing as much the help of his labour as the other doth the help of his money. But this maketh them to meet nearer yet, by causing the same who was rich to become poor, and he that was poor to become rich. . . . And they meet everywhere—there is no place that hath not both of them, and as there are many of the one, so there are many of the other.—Jermin.
For Homiletics on verse 3 see on chap. [xiv. 15–18], page 363; on verse 4 see on chap. [iii. 1–18], pages 29, 34, 39.
main homiletics of verses 5 and 6.
A Hedged-Up Way.
I. God will hedge in the way of the froward man. As we have seen in considering former proverbs, men in a fallen condition have a tendency to break loose from restraint—especially from Divine restraint—and to mark out a path for themselves of their own devising. (See on chap. [xxi. 8].) Every human creature shows more or less wilfulness in regard to their relations to God and His law—choosing rather to fashion his life according to his own ideas than accounting to the Divine idea and desire concerning him. And this wilfulness, if unchecked, grows with a man’s growth and strengthens with his years, until his frowardness becomes the distinctive feature of his life. But he will not have it all his own way. He will not find the crooked path which he has chosen altogether pleasant and safe. Thorns will prick his feet and pitfalls will endanger his life. He will find himself confronted and fenced-in by laws of retribution which God has set about him to admonish him to forsake his rebellious way. For all the pain of body or mind which men suffer, and all the obstacles they meet with in the way of frowardness are intended to keep them from a deeper pain and a heavier punishment. A thorn-hedge is set by the side of the highway to admonish the traveller to keep the path, and so avoid, may be, the precipice or the bog on the other side. If he attempts to climb the hedge he will be wounded, and if he is a wise man the thorn-pricks will lead him to abandon his intention, and so to escape more serious harm. If the hedge does this if fulfils the end for which it was planted. So with the pains and penalties with which God hedges in the present way of the wicked man—they are intended to lead him into a better and safer way.
II. It is a parent’s duty to hedge in the way of his child. The father stands in the place of God to his young children in this respect, for his discipline in their early years is the best possible preparation for the discipline of God later on in life. Indeed the wiser the training of the earthly father the less are his children likely to need the corrective discipline of their Heavenly Parent. The child that accustomed to bend its will to the will of a good father will not find it so hard to yield obedience to the Will of God as he who has had no such training. He will grow upon the practice of sinking his will in that of a wiser will, and it will not be irksome for him so to do. Having found his father’s yoke an easy one, and having in the path of filial obedience tasted pleasures unknown to the rebellious child, he will the more readily accept the yoke of God, and find in His service perfect freedom. But this blessed result will not be attained without much anxious and sometimes painful effort on the part of the parent. For the natural waywardness of man in general manifests itself in very early life. A child would like to be trained in the way it would go, rather than in the way that it should go. But this would in effect be no training at all. For the training of anything implies a crossing of the natural tendency—a repression in one direction, and an effort towards development in another. The training of the vine does not mean a letting it put forth its branches just where it wills or a twining of its tendrils around any object it chooses—it implies a free use of the pruning-knife and of the vine-dresser’s other implements and methods of restraint and guidance. Every child, like every unwise man, would like to set up its own hedge, and put up its own fences, and prescribe the limits and bounds of its own conduct. But as we have already seen, God lets no man do this beyond certain limits, for He Himself sets “thorns and snares in the way of the froward.” It is, therefore, cruel neglect in a parent to allow a child to do it, for thus the tendency to go in the wrong say is strengthened by indulgence, and every year the path of obedience to God becomes more difficult, and looks less inviting. If the parent does not set a hedge about his son’s path, he is only making it certain that he will encounter thorns and shares further on in life. As to the promise attached to the command in this proverb, it can hardly be said to be of universal application. Solomon himself seems to have been an exception to the rule. We have every reason to believe that his father, after his birth, would train his son most carefully and enforce his precepts by example. We must believe that David’s own bitter experience of the thorns and snares in the path of sin made him very anxious to preserve his son from wandering as he had done, and led him to train him most carefully. It is also said of the sons of a man whose life was outwardly stainless—of Samuel—that his sons “walked not in his ways” (1 Sam. viii. 3). Yet we cannot suppose that Samuel, who had seen in Eli’s family the miserable fruits of non-restraint, had neglected to train his sons. Yet the exceptions are doubtless very few in number compared with the rule,—that a rightly-trained child does not depart from the right way in his riper years, though, in Bishop Hall’s words, “God will let us find that grace is by gift, not by inheritance.”
“Lord, with what care hast Thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us: then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers.
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises.
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears;
Without our shame, within our consciences,
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array,
One cunning bosom—sin blows quite away.”—Herbert.
outlines and suggestive comments.