Idle Words | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 27, 1882

Idle Words.

The first kind of idle words that I shall speak of is tattling. I cannot define it, and I do not need to. It is too familiar, too common, I am sorry to say; for it is a sort of careless dealing with things that relate to you, to your affairs, and to your neighbors. It is a kind of gay frivolity upon a line of things which require sobriety and charity. Tattling runs to and fro, and dims the charity of the charitable mind, as a spider dims the light of a window, spinning his web over it. It proceeds neither from wit, nor from humor, nor from rectitude, nor from charity; but it is amusing ourselves with the thousand little scraps that relate to men and their affairs. Not only is it of no benefit to them, but it is bad for us and bad for them. And there is a great deal of it. There is a great deal of it in families that profess to be Christians. There are devout men who in the sanctuary are reverential, and who in outward life are in the habit of conducting their business, measurably, with honesty and integrity, but who, nevertheless, do take a dish of tattle home, and rather enjoy it. It is not thought to be so bad; but it is certainly idle; and if all the tattling that is done is to be arrayed in our vision, for we are to give an account of every idle word in the day of Judgment, many of us are going to be met with a procession of things which we do not expect, and which we shall find it very difficult to efface. If one would seriously analyze the line of his speech at home for a single day—one of those days that are social, easy, in which we sit together in conversation that has in it no profit and no good or kind feeling—if one could once measure what is the account of a single day, and then multiply by the days of his life, there would be an appalling account for him, if Christ be true when he says that for every idle word we shall give an account in the day of Judgment.—Beecher.