'The sand is weighty.'--PROVERBS, xxvii. 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. I want to know whether the first
preaching of the Gospel in Europe by the Apostle Paul, or the battle
of Philippi, was the great event, and which of the two was the little
one. I vote for the Jews on the grass, and let all the noise of the
fight, though it reverberated through the world for a bit, die away,
as 'a little dust that rises up, and is lightly laid again.' Not the
noisy events are the great ones; and as much true greatness may be
manifested in a poor woman stitching in her garret as in some of the
things that have rung through the world and excited all manner of
vulgar applause. Trifles may be, and often are, the great things in
life.
And then remember, too, how the most trivial actions have a strange
knack of all at once leading on to large results, beyond what could
have been expected. A man shifts his seat in a railway carriage, from
some passing whim, and five minutes afterwards there comes a
collision, and the bench where he had been sitting is splintered up,
and the place where he is sitting is untouched, and the accidental
move has saved his life. According to the old story a boy, failing in
applying for a situation, stoops down in the courtyard and picks up a
pin, and the millionaire sees him through the window, and it makes his
fortune. We cannot tell what may come of anything; and since we do not
know the far end of our deeds, let us be quite sure that we have got
the near end of them right. Whatever may be the issue, let us look
after the motive, and then all will be right. Small seeds grow to be
great trees, and in this strange and inexplicable network of things
which men call circumstances, and Christians call Providence, the only
thing certain is that 'great' and 'small' all but cease to be a
tenable, and certainly altogether cease to be an important
distinction.
Then another thing which I would have you remember is, that it is
these trivial actions which, in their accumulated force, make
character. Men are not made by crises. The crises reveal what we have
made ourselves by the trifles. The way in which we do the little
things forms the character according to which we shall act when the
great things come. If the crew of a man-of-war were not exercised at
boat and fire drill during many a calm day, when all was safe, what
would become of them when tempests were raging, or flames breaking
through the bulk-heads? It is no time to learn drill then. And we must
make our characters by the way in which, day out and day in, we do
little things, and find in them fields for the great virtues which
will enable us to front the crises of our fate unblenching, and to
master whatsoever difficulties come in our path. Geologists nowadays
distrust, for the most part, theories which have to invoke great
forces in order to mould the face of a country. They tell us that the
valley, with its deep sides and wide opening to the sky, may have been
made by the slow operation of a tiny brooklet that trickles now down
at its base, and by erosion of the atmosphere. So we shape
ourselves--and that is a great thing--by the way we do small things.
Therefore, I say to you, dear friends! think solemnly and reverently
of this awful life of ours. Clear your minds of the notion that
anything is small which offers to you the alternative of being done in
a right way or in a wrong; and recognise this as a fact--'sand is
weighty,' trifles are of supreme importance.
II. Now, secondly, let me ask you to take this saying as suggesting
the overwhelming weight of small sins.
That is only an application in one direction of the general principle
that I have been trying to lay down; but it is one of such great
importance that I wish to deal with it separately. And my point is
this, that the accumulated pressure upon a man of a multitude of
perfectly trivial faults and transgressions makes up a tremendous
aggregate that weighs upon him with awful ponderousness.
Let me remind you, to begin with, that, properly speaking, the words
'great' and 'small' should not be applied in reference to things about
which 'right' or 'wrong' are the proper words to employ. Or, to put it
into plainer language, it is as absurd to talk about the 'size' of a
sin, as it is to take the superficial area of a picture as a test of
its greatness. The magnitude of a transgression does not depend on the
greatness of the act which transgresses--according to human
standards--but on the intensity with which the sinful element is
working in it. For acts make crimes, but motives make sins. If you
take a bit of prussic acid, and bruise it down, every little
microscopic fragment will have the poisonous principle in it; and it
is very irrelevant to ask whether it is as big as a mountain or small
as a grain of dust, it is poison all the same. So to talk about
magnitude in regard to sins, is rather to introduce a foreign
consideration. But still, recognising that there is a reality in the
distinction that people make between great sins and small ones, though
it is a superficial distinction, and does not go down to the bottom of
things, let us deal with it now.
I say, then, that small sins, by reason of their numerousness, have a
terrible accumulative power. They are like the green flies on our
rose-bushes, or the microbes that our medical friends talk so much
about nowadays. Like them, their power of mischief does not in the
least degree depend on their magnitude, and like them, they have a
tremendous capacity of reproduction. It would be easier to find a man
that had not done any one sin than to find out a man that had only
done it once. And it would be easier to find a man that had done no
evil than a man who had not been obliged to make the second edition of
his sin an enlarged one. For this is the present Nemesis of all evil,
that it requires repetition, partly to still conscience, partly to
satisfy excited tastes and desires; so that animal indulgence in drink
and the like is a type of what goes on in the inner life of every man,
in so far as the second dose has to be stronger than the first in
order to produce an equivalent effect; and so on _ad infinitum_.
And then remember that all our evil doings, however insignificant they
may be, have a strange affinity with one another, so that you will
find that to go wrong in one direction almost inevitably leads to a
whole series of consequential transgressions of one sort or another.
You remember the old story about the soldier that was smuggled into a
fortress concealed in a hay cart, and opened the gates of a virgin
citadel to his allies outside. Every evil thing, great or small, that
we admit into our lives, still more into our hearts, is charged with
the same errand as he had:--' Set wide the door when you are inside,
and let us all come in after you.' 'He taketh with him seven other
spirits worse than himself, and they dwell there.' 'None of them,'
says one of the prophets, describing the doleful creatures that haunt
the ruins of a deserted city, 'shall by any means want its mate,' and
the satyrs of the islands and of the woods join together! and hold
high carnival in the city. And so, brethren! our little transgressions
open the door for great ones, and every sin makes us more accessible
to the assaults of every other.
So let me remind you how here, in these little unnumbered acts of
trivial transgression which scarcely produce any effect on conscience
or on memory, but make up so large a portion of so many of our lives,
lies one of the most powerful instruments for making us what we are.
If we indulge in slight acts of transgression be sure of this, that we
shall pass from them to far greater ones. For one man that leaps or
falls all at once into sin which the world calls gross, there are a
thousand that slide into it. The storm only blows down the trees whose
hearts have been eaten out and their roots loosened. And when you see
a man having a reputation for wisdom and honour all at once coming
crash down and disclosing his baseness, be sure that he began with
small deflections from the path of right. The evil works underground;
and if we yield to little temptations, when great ones come we shall
fall their victims.
Let me remind you, too, that there is another sense in which 'sand is
weighty.' You may as well be crushed under a sandhill as under a
mountain of marble. It matters not which. The accumulated weight of
the one is as great as that of the other. And I wish to lay upon the
consciences of all that are listening to me now this thought, that an
overwhelming weight of guilt results from the accumulation of little
sins. Dear friends! I do not desire to preach a gospel of fear, but I
cannot help feeling that, very largely, in this day, the ministration
of the Christian Church is defective in that it does not give
sufficient, though sad and sympathetic, prominence to the plain
teaching of Christ and of the New Testament as to future retribution
for present sin. We shall 'every one of us give account of himself to
God'; and if the account is long enough it will foot up to an enormous
sum, though each item may be only halfpence. The weight of a lifetime
of little sins will be enough to crush a man down with guilt and
responsibility when he stands before that Judge. That is all true, and
you know it, and I beseech you, take it to your hearts, 'Sand is
weighty.' Little sins have to be accounted for, and may crush.
III. And now, lastly, let me ask you to consider one or two of the
plain, practical issues of such thoughts as these.
And, first, I would say that these considerations set in a very clear
light the absolute necessity for all-round and ever-wakeful
watchfulness over ourselves. A man in the tropics does not say,
'Mosquitoes are so small that it does not matter if two or three of
them get inside my bed-curtains.' He takes care that not one is there
before he lays himself down to sleep. There seems to be nothing more
sad than the complacent, easy-going way in which men allow themselves
to keep their higher moral principles and their more rigid
self-examination for the 'great' things, as they suppose, and let the
little things often take care of themselves. What would you think of
the captain of a steamer who in calm weather sailed by rule of thumb,
only getting out his sextant when storms began to blow? And what about
a man that lets the myriad trivialities that make up a day pass in and
out of his heart as they will, and never arrests any of them at the
gate with a 'How camest thou in hither?' 'Look after the pence, and
the pounds will look after themselves.' Look after your trivial acts,
and, take my word for it, the great ones will be as they ought to be.
Again, may not this thought somehow take down our easy-going and
self-complacent estimate of ourselves? I have no doubt that there are
a number of people in my audience just now who have been more or less
consciously saying to themselves whilst I have been going on, 'What
have _I_ to do with all this talk about sin, sin, sin? I am a
decent kind of a man. I do all the duties of my daily life, and nobody
can say that the white of my eyes is black. I have done no great
transgressions. What is it all about? It has nothing to do with me.'
Well, my friend! it has this to do with you--that in your life there
are a whole host of things which only a very superficial estimate
hinders you from recognising to be what they are--small deeds, but
great sins. Is it a small thing to go, as some of you do go on from
year to year, with your conduct and your thoughts and your loves and
your desires utterly unaffected by the fact that there is a God in
heaven, and that Jesus Christ died for you? Is that a small thing? It
manifests itself in a great many insignificant actions. That I grant
you; and you are a most respectable man, and you keep the commandments
as well as you can. But 'the God in whose hand thy breath is, and
whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified.' I say that that is
not a small sin.
So, dear brethren! I beseech you judge yourselves by this standard. I
charge none of you with gross iniquities. I know nothing about that.
But I do appeal to you all, as I do to myself, whether we must not
recognise the fact that an accumulated multitude of transgressions
which are only superficially small, in their aggregate weigh upon us
with 'a weight heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.'
Last of all, this being the case, should we not all turn ourselves
with lowly hearts, with recognition of our transgressions,
acknowledging that whether it be five hundred or fifty pence that we
owe, we have nothing to pay, and betake ourselves to Him who alone can
deliver us from the habit and power of these small accumulated faults,
and who alone can lift the burden of guilt and responsibility from off
our shoulders? If you irrigate the sand it becomes fruitful soil.
Christ brings to us the river of the water of life; the inspiring, the
quickening, the fructifying power of the new life that He bestows, and
the sand may become soil, and the wilderness blossom as the rose. A
heavy burden lies on our shoulders. Ah! yes! but 'Behold the Lamb of
God that beareth away the sins of the world!' What was it that crushed
Him down beneath the olives of Gethsemane? What was it that made Him
cry, 'My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?' I know no answer but one,
for which the world's gratitude is all too small. 'The Lord hath laid
on Him the iniquity of us all.'
'Sand is weighty,' but Christ has borne the burden, 'Cast thy burden
upon the Lord,' and it will drop from your emancipated shoulders, and
they will henceforth bear only the light burden of His love.