more inspiring, more poignant in its sorrows, more thrilling in its achievements and its joys: all things are become new. Once we could say glibly, “The heart knoweth its own bitterness,” using the phrase to point a trivial trouble, but not now; and perhaps never again in our life-time. Thank God, it is not only the sorrowful sayings which rise in our heart with new meaning, but also those which speak of courage and strength, of loyalty and faith. There is a third danger against which we require to be on guard. Proverbs cannot be absorbed in quantity. Like pictures in a gallery, they stand on their rights, each demanding a measure of individual attention and a due period for reflection. Many chapters in the _Book of Proverbs_ are unpalatable reading, not because they are prosy, but because they are composed of independent maxims connected by no link of logical sequence or even of kindred meaning. To read consecutively through a series of these self-contained units is to impose an intolerable strain on the mind. The imagination becomes jaded, the memory dazed by the march of too swiftly changing images. The disconnected thoughts efface one another, leaving behind them only a blurred confusion. This will appear the more inevitable the more clearly we realise what a proverb is. For consider: not one nor two but countless observations of men and things have gone to the making of a single proverb; it is the conclusion to which a thousand premisses pointed the way; it is compressed experience. And further, a proverb usually gives not just the bare inference from experience, but the inference made memorable by some touch of fancy in the phrasing. Hence the meaning of a proverb is not always obvious, that it may seem the sharper when perceived. Some curious comparison, some pleasing illustration, is put forward to catch and hold attention until, from the train of thought thus raised, a truth leaps out upon us or a fact of life confronts us, familiar perhaps but now invested with fresh dignity. A proverb is not, as it were, a single sentence out of the book of human life, but is rather the epitome of a page or chapter; or, if you please, call it a summary, now of some drama of life, now of an epic or lyric poem, now again of a moral treatise. From a literary point of view proverbs are rich, over-rich feeding. They cloy. There is in the _Book of Proverbs_ a remark that adroitly puts the point: _Hast thou found honey? Eat so much as is convenient for thee_ (Pr. 25^{16}).