The painter uses the dark background of his picture to set off the bright foreground. Sunlight never looks so beautiful as when shining upon a black thunder-cloud; it is the power of contrast. Solomon in his character-painting is constantly making use of this power. He is ever setting the dark and the light side by side--making the foolish or wicked man a dark background upon which to portray the moral features of the truly wise. The fool looks more foolish, and the good man more wise, by the contrast. +I. That which is an object of mirth is a touchstone of character.+ The fool makes sport out of mischief, out of that which does harm to his fellow-creatures, and consequently involves them in misery. If we saw a man making merriment over the burning of his neighbour's house, we should conclude that he was either a maniac or utterly without a heart. A man who realised the meaning of such a calamity, and had any sympathy within him, could but be grieved at the sight. But men find occasions of mirth in matters that are far more serious moment. The wise man tells us in chap. xiv. 9, that "fools make a mock at _sin_"--that great "mischief of the universe." The saint is made sad by that in which the sinner finds an occasion of mirth. "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people" (Jer. ix. 1). "Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament; but the world shall rejoice" (John xvi. 20). But the fool not only makes sport _at_ mischief, it is his sport to _do_ mischief; the one leads to the other. The fool who thinks sin is a laughing matter will not hesitate to commit sin himself, or to do his brother the irreparable mischief of leading him in the path of sin and death. +II. Men cease to make light of sin in proportion as they have "understanding."+ The text implies that a man who has any right comprehension of the end of life, the value of the soul, the reality of Divine and eternal things, will not, _cannot,_ make a sport of mischief in any shape or degree, especially of the mischief of moral wrong. A baby might laugh at a blazing house, although its own mother might be enwrapped in the flames, but this would only be an evidence of his want of understanding. Nothing proclaims a man to be a fool so plainly as his mockery of sin. A man of wisdom has too just a sense of its terrible and ruinous consequence to feel anything but sad when he thinks of it. He knows what mischief it has worked, and is working in the universe, and his understanding of those things makes that which is the sport of the fool the subject of his most solemn thought. _OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS._ The difference between the lost and the saved is, that to one it is but trifling to life; to the other it is the gravest "_wisdom._"--_Miller._