What is wrong with the fool, is primarily his moral condition; and accordingly for the moment we need not trouble to distinguish between the weak fool and the coarse. What is censured in them both is neither their present silliness nor their grossness, but their unwillingness to learn. They have what amounts to an error of moral vision, and they desperately need to realise the fact. Mr. Chesterton has somewhere said, “The fool is one who has an impediment in his thought. It is _not_, as the modern fellows say, put there by his grandmother. I have wandered over the world (so to speak) trying to find some faithful, simple soul who really believed in his own grandmother. He does not exist. The first act of the fool, when he is articulate, is to teach his grandmother how to suck eggs. Fools have no reverence. Fools have no humility.” Doubtless a man must not be blamed for the initial quality of his mind, and possibly the Wise were too caustic to the congenitally stupid. But then the Wisdom they were teaching was not intellectually difficult to acquire; it was not book-learning but that Wisdom which is from on high and can be revealed to babes and sucklings. As for the third class, the Scorner or Chief Fool; he too suffers from corruption of moral vision. But with him the distortion is desperate: he calls white black and black white. For this alert, deliberate Fool, the Wise had little hope or none at all; he has chosen the path of Folly with his eyes open. All they can do is to meet his scorn with a greater scorn, and make their appeal in his hearing. One does not wonder that the Wise were baffled by this type of man. There is hope of such a person, but the hope is in the fact of Christ. This Fool has wit enough to rethink the situation, if he chose. He may some day have imperative cause to reconsider his view of life, and so may discover first that Christ is truth, and then learn that Christ can pardon. We turn now to the sayings themselves, or rather to a selection from them, for the sons of Folly provoked very many proverbs. A number are humorous and spicy--the sort of phrases that might catch the ear of a crowd, raise a laugh at the fool’s expense, and remain fixed in the hearer’s memory by the barb of wit. Think, for instance, of the feeble, vacillating eyes that so often accompany and reflect a weak intellect or character: _Wisdom stands ever before the mind of a prudent man, But the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth_ (Pr. 17^{24}). and for comment on the mind behind the eyes, this will do: _The mind of a fool is like a cartwheel, And his thoughts like a rolling axle-tree_ (E. 33^{5}).