Verbal Vices | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 16, 1875

Verbal Vices.

Indulgence in verbal vices soon encourages corresponding vices in conduct. Let any one talk about any mean or vile practice with familiar tone, and do you suppose, when the opportunity occurs for committing the mean or vile act, he will be as strong against it as before? It is by no means an unknown thing that men of correct lives talk themselves into sensuality, crime, and perdition. Bad language easily runs into bad deeds. Select any iniquity you please, suffer yourself to converse in its dialect, to use its slang, to speak in the character of one who relishes it, and I need not tell how soon your moral sense will lower down to its level. Becoming intimate with it, you lose your horror of it. To be too much with bad men and in bad places is not only unwholesome to man's morality, but unfavorable to his faith and trust in God. It is not every man who could live as Lot did in Sodom, and then be fit to go out of it under God's convoy. This obvious principle, of itself, furnishes a reason not only for watching the tongue, but for keeping ourselves as much as possible out of the company of bad associates.—Sel.