Things not worth trying is the 11th chapter of Charles Spurgeon's book, John Plowman's Talk. Things not worth trying. That is a wise old saying. Spend not all you have, believe not all you hear, tell not all you know, and do not all you can. There is so much work to be done that needs our hands that it is a pity to waste a grain of our strength. When the game is not worth the candle, drop it at once. It is wasting time to look for milk in a gate post, or blood in a turnip, or sense in a fool. Never ask a covetous man for money till you have boiled the flint soft. Don't sue a debtor who has not a penny to bless himself with. You will only be throwing good money after bad, which is like losing your ferret without getting a rabbit. Never offer a looking-glass to a blind man. If a man is so proud that he will not see his faults, he will only quarrel with you for pointing them out to him. It is of no use to hold a lantern to a mole, or to talk of heaven to a man who cares nothing but his dirty money. There is a time for everything, and it is a silly thing to preach to drunken men. It is casting pearls before swine. Get them sober, and then talk to them soberly. If you lecture them while they are drunk, you act as if you were drunk yourself. Do not put a cat on a coach box, or men in places for which they are not fitted. There's no making apples and plums. Little minds will still be little, even if you make them beetles or church wardens. It's a pity to turn a monkey into a minister, or a maidservant into a mistress. Many preachers are good tailors spoiled, and capital shoemakers turned out of their proper calling. When God means a creature to fly, He gives it wing. And when he intends men to preach, he gives them abilities. It is a pity to push a man into war if he cannot fight. Better discourage a man's climbing than help him to break his neck. Silk purses are not to be made out of sow's ears. And pigs will never play well on the flute. Teach them as long as you like. It is not wise to aim at impossibilities. It is a waste of powder to fire at the man in the moon. Making deal boards out of sawdust is a very sensible scheme compared with what some of my London friends have been aiming at. For they have been trying to get money by buying shares in companies. They might quite as soon catch the wind in a net, or carry water in a sieve. Bubbles are fine fun for boys, but bubble companies are edged tools that none should play with. If my friend has money which he can afford to lose, there is still no reason why you should hand it over to a set of knaves. If I wanted to get rid of my leg, I should not get a shark to snap it off for me. Give your money to fools sooner than let rogues wheedle you out of it. It is never worthwhile to do unnecessary things. Never grease a fat sow or praise a proud man. Don't make clothes for fishes or coverings for altars. Don't paint lilies or garnish the gospel. Never bind up a man's head before it is broken, or comfort a conscience that makes no confession. Never hold up a candle to show the sun, or try to prove a thing which nobody doubts. I would advise no one to attempt a thing which will cost more than it is worth. You may sweeten a dunghill with lavender water. And a bad living man may keep up a good character by an outward show of religion, but it will turn out a losing business in the long run. If our nation were sensible, it would sweep out a good many expensive but useless people, who eat the malt which lies in the house that Jack built. They live on the national estate, but do it little service. To pay a man a pound for earning a penny is a good deal wiser than keeping bishops who meet together by the score and consult about the best way of doing nothing. If my master's old dog was as sleepy as the bishops are, we would get shot or drown, for he wouldn't be worth the amount of the dog tax. However, their time of reckoning is on the road, as sure as Christmas is coming. Long ago, my experience taught me not to dispute with anybody about tastes and whims. One might as well argue about what you can see in the fire. It is of no use plowing the air or trying to convince a man against his will in matters of no consequence. It is useless to try to end a quarrel by getting angry over it. It is much the same as pouring oil on a fire to quench it and blowing coals with the bellows to put them out. Some people like rows. I don't envy their choice. I'd rather walk ten miles to get out of a dispute than half a mile to get into one. I have often been told to be bold and take the bull by the horns, but, as I rather think that the amusement is more pleasant than profitable, I shall leave it to those who are so cracked already that an ugly poke with a horn would not damage their skulls. Solomon says, Leave off strike before it be meddled with, which is much the same as if he had said, Leave off before you begin. When you see a mad dog, don't argue with him unless you are sure of your logic. Better get out of his way, and if anybody calls you a coward, you need not call him a fool. Everybody knows that. Meddling in corals never answers. Let hornets nest so long. And don't pull down old houses over your own head. Meddlers are sure to hurt their own characters. If you scrub other people's pigs, you will soon need scrubbing yourself. It is the height of folly to interfere between a man and his wife, for they will be sure to leave off biting each other and turn their whole strength upon you, and serve you right, too. If you will put your spoon into other people's broth and it scalds you, who is to blame but yourself? One thing more, don't attempt to make a strong-headed woman give way, but remember, if she will, she will. You may depend on it. If she won't, she won't, and there is an end on it. The other day I cut out of a newspaper a scrap from America, which shall be my tailpiece. Dip the Mississippi dry with a teaspoon. Twist your heel into the toe of your boot. Send up fishing hooks with balloons and fish for stars. Get astride a gossamer and chase a comet. When a rainstorm is coming down like the cataract of Niagara, remember where you left your umbrella. Choke a flea with a brick bat. In short, prove everything hitherto considered impossible to be possible. But never attempt to coax a woman to say she will, when she has made up her mind to say she won't. Debt is the twelfth chapter of Charles Spurgeon's book, John Plowman's Talk. Debt. When I was a very small boy, in pinafores, and went to a woman's school, it so happened that I wanted a stick of slate pencil, and had no money to buy it with. I was afraid of being scolded for losing my pencil so often, for I was a real careless little fellow, and so did not dare to ask at home, what then was John to do? There was a little shop in the place where nuts and tops and cakes and balls were sold by old Mrs. Dearson. And sometimes I had seen boys and girls get trusted by the old lady. I argued with myself that Christmas was coming, and that somebody or other would be sure to give me a penny then, and perhaps even a whole silver sixpence. I would, therefore, go into debt for a stick of slate pencil, and be sure to pay at Christmas. I did not feel easy about it, but still I screwed my courage up and went into the shop. One farthing was the amount, and as I had never owed anything before, and my credit was good, the pencil was handed over by the kind dame, and I was in debt. It did not please me much, and I felt as if I had done wrong, but I little knew how soon I should smart for it. How my father came to hear of this little stroke of business I never knew, but some little bird or other whistled it to him. and he was very soon down upon me in right earnest. God bless him for it. He was a sensible man and none of your children spoilers. He did not intend to bring up his children to speculate and play at what big rogues call financing and therefore he knocked my getting into debt on the head at once and no mistake. He gave me a very powerful lecture upon getting into debt and how like it was to stealing. and upon the way in which people were ruined by it, and how a boy who would owe a farthing might one day owe a hundred pounds and get into prison and bring his family into disgrace. It was a lecture indeed. I think I can hear it now and can feel my ears tingling at the recollection of it. Then I was marched off to the shop like a deserter marched into barracks, crying bitterly all down the street and feeling dreadfully ashamed, because I thought everybody knew I was in debt. The farthing was paid amid many solemn warnings, and the poor debtor was set free, like a bird let out of a cage. How sweet it felt to be out of debt! How did my little heart vow and declare that nothing should ever tempt me into debt again? It was a fine lesson, and I have never forgotten it. If all boys were inoculated with the same doctrine when they were young, it would be as good as a fortune to them, and save them wagonloads of trouble in the afterlife. God bless my father, say I, and send a breed of such fathers into old England to save her from being eaten up with villainy. For what with companies and schemers and paper money, the nation is getting to be as rotten as touchwood. Ever since that early sickening, I have hated debt as Luther hated the Pope. And if I say some fierce things about it, you must not wonder. To keep debt, dirt, and the devil out of my cottage has been my greatest wish ever since I set up housekeeping. And although the last of the three has sometimes got in by the door or the window, for the old serpent will wriggle through the smallest crack, yet thanks to a good wife, hard work, honesty, and scrubbing brushes, the two others have not crossed the threshold. Debt is so degrading that if I owed a man a penny, I would walk twenty miles in the depth of winter to pay him, sooner than feel that I was under an obligation. I should be as comfortable with peas in my shoes, or a hedgehog in my bed, or a snake up my back, as with bills hanging over my head at the grocers, and the bakers, and the tailors. Poverty is hard, but debt is horrible. A man might as well have a smoky house and a scolding wife, which are said to be the two worst evils of our life. We may be poor and yet respectable, which John Plowman and wife hope they are and will be. But a man in debt cannot even respect himself. and he is sure to be talked about by the neighbors, and that talk will not be much to his credit. Some persons appear to like to be owing money, but I would as soon be a cat up a chimney with the fire alight, or a fox with the hounds at my heels, or a hedgehog on a pitchfork, or a mouse under an owl's claw. An honest man thinks a purse full of other people's money to be worse than an empty one. He cannot bear to eat other people's cheese, wear other people's shirts, and walk about in other people's shoes. Neither will he be easy while his wife is decked out in the milliner's bonnets and wears the draper's flannels. The jackdaw and the peacock's feathers was soon plucked, and borrowers will surely come to poverty. A poverty of the bitterest sort, because there is shame in it. Living beyond their incomes is the ruin of many of my neighbors. They can hardly afford to keep a rabbit and must needs drive a pony in a chase. I am afraid extravagance is the common disease of the times, and many professing Christians have caught it to their shame and sorrow. Good cotton or stuffed gowns are not good enough nowadays. Girls must have silks and satins, and then there's a bill at the dressmakers as long as a winter's night, and quite as dismal. Show and style and smartness run away with a man's means. Keep the family poor and the father's nose down on the grindstone. Frogs try to look as big as bulls and burst themselves. A pound a week apes 500 a year and comes to the county court. Men burn candles at both ends and then say they are very unfortunate. Why don't they put the saddle on the right horse and say that they are extravagant? Economy is half the battle in life. It is not so hard to earn money as to spend it well. Hundreds would never have known want if they had not first known waste. If all poor men's wives knew how to cook, how far a little might go. Our minister says the French and the Germans beat us hollow in nice, cheap cookery. I wish they would send missionaries over to convert our gossiping women into good managers. This is a French fashion which would be a deal more useful than those fine pictures in Mrs. Scrippery's window, with ladies rigged out in a new style every month. Dear me, some people are much too fine nowadays to eat what their fathers were thankful to see on the table, and so they please their palates with costly feeding, coming to the workhouse and expect everybody to pity them. They turned up their noses at bread and butter and came to eat raw turnips stolen out of the fields. They who live like fighting cocks at other men's costs will get their combs cut or perhaps get roasted for it one of these days. If you have a great store of peas, you may put them more in the soup, but everybody should fare according to his earnings. He is both a fool and a knave who has a shilling coming in, and on the strength of it spends a pound which does not belong to him. Cut your coat according to your cloth is sound advice, but cutting other people's cloth by running into debt is as like thieving as fourpence is like a groat. If I meant to be a rogue, I would deal in marine stores, or be a petty-fogging lawyer, or a priest, or open a loan office, or go out picking pockets. But I would scorn the dirty art of getting into debt without a prospect of being able to pay. Debtors can hardly help being liars, for they promise to pay when they know they cannot. And when they have made up a lot of false excuses, they promise again, and so they lie as fast as a horse can trot. You have debts, and make debts still. If you've not lied, lie you will. Now, if owing leads to lying, who shall say that it is not a most evil thing? Of course there are exceptions, and I do not want to bear hard upon an honest man who is brought down by sickness or heavy losses. But take the rule as a rule, and you will find debt to be a great dismal swamp, a huge mud hole, a dirty ditch. Happy is the man who gets out of it after once tumbling in, but happiest of all is he who has been by God's goodness kept out of the mire altogether. If you once ask the devil to dinner, it will be hard to get him out of the house again. Better to have nothing to do with him. Where a hen has laid one egg, she is very likely to lay another. When a man is once in debt, he is likely to get into it again. Better keep clear of it from the first. He who gets in for a penny will soon be in for a pound. And when a man is over shoes, he is very liable to be over boots. Never owe a farthing, and you will never owe again. If you want to sleep soundly, buy a bed of a man who is in debt. Surely it must be a very soft one, or he never could have rested so easy on it. I suppose people get hardened to it, as Smith's donkey did when its master broke so many sticks across its back. It seems to me that a real honest man would sooner get as lean as a greyhound than feast on borrowed money. and would choke up his throat with march dust before he would let the landlord make chalks against him behind the door for a beer score. What pins and needles tradesman's bills must stick in a fellow's soul? A pig on credit always grunts. Without debt, without care. Out of debt, out of danger. But owing and borrowing are bramble bushes full of thorns. If ever I borrow a spade of my next-door neighbor, I never feel safe with it, for fear I should break it. I never can dig in peace as I do with my own. But if I had a spade at the shop and knew I could not pay for it, I think I should set to and dig my own grave out of shame. Scripture says, owe no man anything, which does not mean pay your debts, but never have any to pay. And my opinion is that those who willfully break this law ought to be turned out of the Christian church, neck and crop, as they say. Our laws are shamefully full of encouragement to credit. Nobody need be a thief now. He has only to open a shop and make a fail of it, and it will pay him much better. As the proverb is, he who never fails will never grow rich. Why, I know a tradesman who have failed five or six times and yet think they are on the road to heaven. The scoundrels, what would they do if they got there? They are a deal more likely to go where they shall never come out till they have paid the uttermost farthing. But people say, how liberal they are. Yes, with other people's money. I hate to see a man steal a goose and then give religion the giblets. Piety by all means, but pay your way as part of it. Honesty first, then generosity. But how often religion is a cloak for deceiving. There's Mrs. Scamp as fine as a peacock, all the girls out of boarding school learning French and the piano, the boys swolling about in kid gloves, and G. B. Scamp Esquire, driving a fast-trotting mare and taking the chair at public meetings while his poor creditors cannot get more than enough to live from hand to mouth. It is shameful and beyond endurance to see how genteel swindling is winked at by many in this country. I'd off with their white waistcoats and kid gloves and patent leather boots if I had my way, and give them the county crop and the prison livery for six months. Gentlemen or not, I'd let them see that big rogues could dance on the treadmill to the same tune as little ones. I'd make the land too hot to hold such scamping gentry if I were a Member of Parliament, or a Prime Minister. As I have no such power, I can at least write against the fellows and let off the steam of my wrath in that way. My motto is, pay as you go, and keep from small scores. Short reckonings are soon cleared. Pay what you owe, and what you're worth you'll know. Let the clock tick, but no tick for me. Better go to bed without your supper than get up in debt. Sins and debts are always more than we think them to be. Little by little a man gets over head and ears. It is the petty expenses that empty the purse. Money is round and rolls away easily. Tom Thriftless buys what he does not want because it is a great bargain, and so he is soon brought to sell what he does want and find it a very little bargain. He cannot say no to his friend, who wants him to be security. He gives grand dinners, makes many holidays, keeps a fat table, lets his wife dress fine, never looks after his servants, and by and by he is quite surprised to find that quarter days come round so very fast, and that creditors bark so loud. He has sowed his money in the fields of thoughtlessness, and now he wonders that he has to reap the harvest of poverty. Still, he hopes for something to turn up to help him out of difficulty, and so muddles himself into more troubles, forgetting that hope and expectation are a fool's income. Being hard up, he goes to market with empty pockets, and buys at whatever prices tradesmen like to charge him, and so he pays more than double and gets deeper and deeper into mire. This leads him to scheming, and trying little tricks and mean dodges, for it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright. This is sure not to answer, for schemes are like spiders' webs, which never catch anything better than flies, and are soon swept away. As well attempt to mend your shoes with brown paper, or stop a broken window with a sheet of ice, as to try to patch up falling business with maneuvering and scheming. When the schemer is found out, he is like a dog in church, whom everybody kicks at, and like a barrel of powder, which nobody wants for a neighbor. They say poverty is a sixth sense, and it had need be, for many debtors seem to have lost the other five, or were born without common sense. For they appear to fancy that you not only make debts, but pay them by borrowing. A man pays Peter with what he has borrowed of Paul, and thinks he is getting out of his difficulties, when he is only putting one foot into the mud to pull his other foot out. It is hard to shave an egg, or pull hairs out of a bald pate, but they are both easier than paying debts out of an empty pocket. Samson was a strong man, but he could not pay debts without money, and he is a fool who thinks he can do it by scheming. As to borrowing money of loan societies, it's like a drowning man catching at razors. Both Jews and Gentiles, when they lend money, generally pluck the geese as long as they have any feathers. A man must cut down his outgoings and save his incomings if he wants to clear himself. You can't spend your penny and pay debts with it, too. Stimp the kitchen if the purse is bare. Don't believe in any way of wiping out debts except by paying hard cash. Promises make debts, and debts make promises, but promises never pay debts. Promising is one thing, and performing is quite another. A good man's word should be as binding as an oath, and he should never promise to pay unless he has a clear prospect of doing so in due time. Those who stave off payment by false promises deserve no mercy. It is all very well to say, I'm very sorry, but a hundred years of regret pay not a farthing of debt. Now, I'm afraid all the sound advice might as well have been given to my master's cocks and hens, as to those who have got into the way of spending what is not their own. For advice to such people goes in at one ear and out at the other. Well, those who won't listen will have the feel, and those who refuse cheap advice will have to buy dear repentance. But to young people beginning life, A word may be worth a world, and this shall be John Plowman's short sermon with three heads to it. Always live a little below your means, never get into debt, and remember, he who goes a borrowing, goes a sorrowing.