Proverbs 27:3

Proverbs THE WEIGHT OF SANDProverbs 27:3 . This Book of Proverbs has a very wholesome horror of the character which it calls ‘a fool’; meaning thereby, not so much intellectual feebleness as moral and religious obliquity, which are the stupidest things that a man can be guilty of. My text comes from a very picturesque and vivid description, by way of comparison, of the fatal effects of such a man’s passion. The proverb-maker compares two heavy things, stones and sand, and says that they are feathers in comparison with the immense lead-like weight of such a man’s wrath. Now I have nothing more to do with the immediate application of my text. I want to make a parable out of it. What is lighter than a grain of sand? What is heavier than a bagful of it? As the grains fall one by one, how easily they can be blown away! Let them gather, and they bury temples, and crush the solid masonry of pyramids. ‘Sand is weighty.’ The accumulation of light things is overwhelmingly ponderous. Are there any such things in our lives? If there are, what ought we to do? So you get the point of view from which I want to look at the words of our text. I. The first suggestion that I make is that they remind us of the supreme importance of trifles. If trivial acts are unimportant, what signifies the life of man?

For ninety-nine and a half per cent. of every man’s life is made up of these light nothings; and unless there is potential greatness in them, and they are of importance, then life is all ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Small things make life; and if are small, then it is so too. But remember, too, that the supreme importance of so-called trivial actions is seen in this, that there may be every bit as much of the noblest things that belong to humanity condensed in, and brought to bear upon, the veriest trifle that a man can do, as on the greatest things that he can perform. We are very poor judges of what is great and what is little. We have a very vulgar estimate that noise and notoriety and the securing of, not great but ‘big,’ results of a material kind make the deeds by which they are secured, great ones. And we think that it is the quiet things, those that do not tell outside at all, that are the small ones. Well! here is a picture for you. Half-a-dozen shabby, travel-stained Jews, sitting by a river-side upon the grass, talking to a handful of women outside the gates of a great city. Years before that, there had been what the world calls a great event, almost on the same ground-a sanguinary fight, that had settled the emperorship of the then civilised world, for a time.