And this proverb, Italian and Spanish, _If I have lost the ring, yet the fingers are still here_,[174] is another of these brave utterances of which I have been speaking. In it is asserted the comparative indifference of that loss which reaches but to things external to us, so long us we ourselves remain, and are true to ourselves. _The fingers_ are far more than _the ring_: if indeed those had gone, then _the man_ would have been maimed; but another ring may come for that which has disappeared, or even with none the fingers will be fingers still. And as at once a contrast and complement to this, take another, current among the free blacks of Hayti, and expressing well the little profit which there will be to a man in pieces of mere good luck, which are no true outgrowths of anything which is in him; the manner in which, having no root in himself out of which they grew, they will, as they came to him by hazard, go from him by the same: _The knife which thou hast found in the highway, thou wilt lose in the highway_.[175] [Sidenote: Abuse of proverbs.] But these numerous proverbs, urging self-reliance, bidding us first to aid ourselves, if we would have Heaven to aid us, must not be dismissed without a word or two at parting. Prizing them, as we well may, and the lessons which they contain, at the highest, yet it will be profitable for us at the same time always to remember that to such there lies very near such a mischievous perversion as this: “Aid thyself, and thou wilt need no other aid;” even as they have been sometimes, no doubt, understood in this sense. As, then, the pendant and counter-weight to them all, not as unsaying what they have said, but as fulfilling the other hemisphere in the complete orb of truth, let me remind you of such also as the following, often quoted or alluded to by Greek and Latin authors: _The net of the sleeping (fisherman) takes_;[176]—a proverb the more interesting, that we have in the words of the Psalmist, (Ps. cxxvii. 2,) when accurately translated, a beautiful and perfect parallel: “He giveth his beloved” (not “sleep,” as in our version, but) “in sleep;” God’s gifts gliding into his bosom, he knowing not how, and as little expecting as having laboured for them. Of how many of the best gifts of every man’s life will he not thankfully acknowledge this to have been true; or, if he refuse to allow it, and will acknowledge no _eudæmonia_, no ‘favourable providence’ in his prosperities, but will see them all as of work, how little he deserves, how little likely he is, to retain them to the end. Let us hold fast, then, this proverb as the most needful complement of those. * * * * * [Sidenote: Proverbs for young men.]