Mark 7:32

THE USE AND MISUSE OF SPEECH

‘And they bring unto Him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech Him to put His hand upon him.’

Mark 7:32

Were his friends doing a kind action in bringing this poor afflicted man under the notice of the Great Physician? There can be no doubt about our answer. Nothing maimed or imperfect which may be healed can be in accordance with the Will of God.

I. Responsibility of speech.—God has given to us the powers of speech; we have learned to talk, to hold converse with each other. Day after day we use the gift ourselves or profit by it in others, and it has become one of those common things which we use without thinking of, and employ with little restraint. It is inevitable, we cannot doubt it, that such a gift must carry with it grave responsibilities. A word spoken can never be recalled. It goes forth like an arrow shot from a bow into an unknown space, and we can trace it in its results where we least expect it. What a terrible thing for a man to realise that what he has said and repented of, what he has suggested and is now ashamed of, has gone out of his reach for ever, accumulating an account only to be reckoned up at the last day as a terrible addition to personal sins already swollen to the dimensions of an unpayable debt!

II. Misusing the gift of speech.—There are many ways of misusing this great power with which God has entrusted us, some of which we do not always stay to consider.

(a) The lack in our modern education. There is one point in which we are all beginning to feel profoundly disappointed, and that is in the little progress which is being made in refinement, and in some of those things which we have hitherto believed to be characteristic of true education.

(b) Conversation in the workshop. Again, there are few things which more need looking to than the general tone of conversation in our large centres of industry, in the large works of our manufacturing towns, in the warehouses, in the offices where men are thrown together in great masses.

(c) Unrestrained discussion. Think only how people discuss things now in public, which our grandfathers and grandmothers would have shrunk even from mentioning—details of surgical operations, minutiæ of disease—problems, as they are called, of life. Everywhere the veil is removed, everywhere there is publicity. Surely God has put a ritual of beauty, of refinement, of purity, round the ordinary speech and intercourse of society as a safeguard against evils which are never far distant and always ready to burst in and overwhelm public manners and public morality.

(d) Untruthfulness. There is another prominent misuse of the gift of speech—and that is untruthfulness. It is very seldom that we hear a sermon or receive advice about truthfulness. Yet truth, in its widespreading reach, is a magnificent virtue, which seems to include in its expansive embrace almost every other; and a lie is not only contemptible in itself, but is the ultimate measure of the baseness of all bad actions. ‘Whatsover loveth and maketh a lie’ sums up the degradation of all that is unfit for the Golden City. Certainly, we are no strangers to the political lie, the religious lie, the social lie, the private lie.

(e) Ordinary conversation. As we think of our ordinary conversation, what are we to say of those idle, do-nothing words? Do they edify? Do they help the wayfarer in his journey through life?

Surely we all ought to do something for the recognition of a greater sense of responsibility as regards our words.

Rev. Canon Newbolt.

Illustration

‘The story is well known how Pambo, a recluse of the Egyptian desert, when about to enter on his noviciate, betook himself to an aged monk and requested from him instruction for his new lips. The old man opened his Psalter and began to read the first verse of Psalms 39 : “I said, I will take heed to my ways; that I offend not in my tongue.” “That is enough,” said Pambo, “let me go home and practise it.” And long after, being asked by one of his brethren whether he were yet perfect in his first lesson, the saint, in his turn, now an aged man, replied: “Forty-and-nine years have I dwelt in this desert, and am only just beginning to learn how to obey this commandment.” ’