If a word spoken in time be worth one piece of money, silence in its place is worth two.[109]

  [109] Here we have a variant of Thomas Carlyle’s favourite
        maxim, “Speech is silvern; silence is golden.”

Silence is the fence round wisdom.[110]

  [110] “Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and
        if he were sensible of this he would not be
        ignorant.”—­Saadi.

A saying ascribed to Esop has been frequently cited with admiration.  The sage Chilo asked Esop what God was doing, and he answered that he was “depressing the proud and exalting the humble.”  A parallel to this is presented in the answer of Rabbi Jose to a woman who asked him what God had been doing since the creation:  “He makes ladders on which he causes the poor to ascend and the rich to descend,” in other words, exalts the lowly and humbles the haughty.

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The lucid explanation of the expression, “I, God, am a jealous God,” given by a Rabbi, has been thus elegantly translated by Coleridge:[111]

  [111] The Friend, ed. 1850, vol. ii, p. 249.

“Your God,” said a heathen philosopher to a Hebrew Rabbi, “in his Book calls himself a jealous God, who can endure no other god besides himself, and on all occasions makes manifest his abhorrence of idolatry.  How comes it, then, that he threatens and seems to hate the worshippers of false gods more than the false gods themselves?”

“A certain king,” said the Rabbi, “had a disobedient son.  Among other worthless tricks of various kinds, he had the baseness to give his dogs his father’s names and titles.  Should the king show anger with the prince or his dogs?”

“Well-turned,” replied the philosopher; but if God destroyed the objects of idolatry, he would take away the temptation to it.”

“Yea,” retorted the Rabbi; “if the fools worshipped such things only as were of no farther use than that to which their folly applied them—­if the idol were always as worthless as the idolatry is contemptible.  But they worship the sun, the moon, the host of heaven, the rivers, the sea, fire, air, and what not.  Would you that the Creator, for the sake of those fools, should ruin his own works, and disturb the laws applied to nature by his own wisdom?  If a man steal grain and sow it, should the seed not shoot up out of the earth because it was stolen?  O no!  The wise Creator lets nature run its own course, for its course is his own appointment.  And what if the children of folly abuse it to evil?  The day of reckoning is not far off, and men will then learn that human actions likewise reappear in their consequences by as certain a law as that which causes the green blade to rise up out of the buried cornfield.”

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