God can scourge men beyond endurance with a whip of straw.
A frog seems an innocent and harmless reptile enough, not pleasing nor attractive, but scarcely calculated to cause much suffering. When the Egyptians made frogs sacred, they had no notion of one day finding them an intolerable annoyance. But God can make, of the least of his creatures, a weapon to wound, a whip to scourge men. Minute microscopic fungi and entozoa destroy crops and wither up the human frame. Huge ships are utterly ruined by the working of the Teredo navalis. White ants bring down houses. And so, on this occasion, poor weak frogs made the lives of the Egyptians a burthen to them. Forced to tread on them as they walked, to feel them crawling upon their naked feet, to see them covering the floors of their chambers and the soft cushions of their beds, finding them in their ovens, their kneading-troughs, the culinary and other vessels, scarcely able to keep them out of their food, always hearing their melancholy croak, the unfortunate wretches had not a moment's comfort or peace. Constant dropping wears out a stone. A trivial annoyance becomes intolerable by repetition and persistence. Thus, even the obdurate Pharaoh, who had borne the first plague till God chose to remove it without a symptom of yielding, is cowed by the second plague, and "calls for Moses and Aaron"(Exodus 8:8).
HOMILIES BY J. ORR