Proverbs 27

Perfume

Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart. Proverbs 27:9.

Do you remember the very first bottle of perfume you ever had? How proud you were of it! Up till then you had had only an occasional sprinkle from the crystal bottle on mother's dressing-table; but now you had a whole bottleful of deliciousness all for your very own. Do you remember how you tried to make it last; and how you put it on your handkerchief only on special days such as Sundays; and how, when you pulled your handkerchief out of your pocket, you gave it an extra flourish, and hoped that everybody was noticing that it was perfumed?

Do you remember, too, how eager you were to give a sprinkle as a treat to the people you loved best? You wanted them to enjoy the sweetness. And oh! how sad you were when the last drop had been squeezed out of the bottle! You took out the stopper, and filled the empty bottle with water, and shook it up well, and tried to pretend that there was still a perfume of the perfume left. You really loved that perfume, didn't you?

There are very few who don't love perfume of some kind. The people we read of in the Bible loved it and used it greatly. But the perfumes they used in Bible days were rather different from those we use now. They were pungent rather than sweet. They were made chiefly in the form of ointments which were employed in anointing the body a very necessary thing in climates so hot as that of Palestine. Even their names sound unusual to our ears. Here are a few of them camphire, cassia, frankincense, myrrh, spikenard, tragacanth. They were made chiefly from gum or resin, and the bark or the leaves of trees.

Now the best perfumes we have are made from real flowers. In the south of France, between Cannes and Nice, there lies a sunny belt of land where most of the flowers which make our perfumes grow. There you will see acres upon acres of the roses, jasmine, violets, heliotrope, and carnations whose essence we buy bottled in the chemist's shop. The petals of these millions of blooms are gathered by the peasants and carried by them to the perfume factories. There they are treated by steam heat, or laid on layers of fat until they give up their sweetness. Some of the flowers, such as the rose, yield their perfume readily, but others, like the violet and the jasmine, need special coaxing before they will part with their essence. Someone has called this essence or perfume “the soul of the flower.” That is a fine idea. It is beautiful to think that, when the flowers are withered and gone, their soul still lives in their perfume.

There are three things I should like you to remember about perfume.

1. The first is that no two perfumes are alike. You can pick out essence of roses from essence of violets anywhere. People are just the same; no two in all the world are quite alike. Some have one kind of sweetness, some another, and we must not expect everybody to be sweet in the same way. That would be most uninteresting. What we have to do is to find out each person's particular sweetness, and admire that.

In some people, I am sorry to say, the sweetness is very faint, so faint that you can hardly perceive it. Such people are like flowers on a gloomy day they are not yielding their perfume. What they require is a good blaze of sunshine to draw out their sweetness, a blaze of happiness in other words. Try to give them a little happiness; be kind to them. You will be astonished to see how their sweetness will develop.

2. The next thing I want you to remember is that the perfume is the most precious part of the flower. It is the part we should miss most were it taken away. We should not miss a petal or two from the many on the rose, but we should be sad indeed if it lost its sweetness: and if a sweet-pea were only a “pea” without the “sweet” we should not love it half so much. It is the perfume that makes some flowers precious.

Again, it is the same with people. It is their sweetness that makes us love them. They may be young or old, short or tall, dark or fair, plain or beautiful we never notice these details. What really matters is that they are sweet, and so we love them. If you want to be loved, boys and girls, don't forget to grow a perfume.

3. The third thing is that a perfume imparts itself to others. If you have a scent sachet in your drawer, you know how all your clothes smell of it. They have caught and kept its sweetness.

There is a Persian fable which tells of a man who picked up a lump of clay and carried it home with him. He soon discovered that it had a smell so exquisite that it perfumed all the room. He took it up and looked at it, but he could discover nothing extraordinary about it, so he asked, “O lump of clay, what art thou? Art thou some wonderful gem, or some rich perfume in disguise?” “Nay,” was the reply, “I am but a lump of clay.” “Then whence this sweetness?” “Ah, friend,” answered the clay, “shall I tell the secret? I have been dwelling with the rose. ”

Boys and girls, we may all resemble that lump of clay. We may all be perfume-bearers. We may dwell with Christ, our Rose, and, having caught some of His fragrance, may help to shed it abroad through the world.