PERNICIOUS SAYINGS

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 7, 1876

PERNICIOUS SAYINGS.

THERE are some common sayings that are so plainly conceived in sin, that one cannot help wondering how they ever came to pass into adages. Still they are heard from the lips of men making high professions of morality and even of religion, and are handed down from generation to generation as precious heirlooms of language.

One of the most common of these and one of the wickedest is: “It will make no difference a hundred years hence,” applied to some error that might have been avoided, some sin that need never have been committed, or some word uttered that had better have been left unspoken. Now, if we stop and think, there is no simple act but that will make a difference a hundred years hence, and perhaps a great difference. The cackling of a flock of geese is a very simple thing, but it saved Rome and had its influence upon the succeeding years of a nation’s existence. The impulse of one conspirator to save a friend saved the Gunpowder Plot from destroying a whole parliament, and perhaps changed the whole future of English history. A burnt finger may delay a journey that would have cost a life and turned the path of whole generations. It is an insult to the good God, who does not let a sparrow fall without his cognizance, to say that any act, however simple, may not have its influence on following years and after ages.

There is another saying touching the sowing of wild oats, that is, perhaps, the worst of the lot. It has driven many a lad to destruction, furnishing him with an easily-spoken excuse for youthful follies and youthful sins sure to bring misery in their wake. That Christian statesman and author, Thomas Hughes, has spoken most eloquently against the use of this saying. “In all the range of accepted British maxims,” he exclaims, “there is none, take it for all in all, more thoroughly abominable than this one as to the sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and I will defy you to make anything but a devil’s maxim of it. What a man—be he young, old, or middle-aged—sows, that, and nothing else, shall he reap.”

Was there ever anything truer? We see boys sowing wild oats every day; and we see them as men reaping the crop they have sown. These wild oats bear bitter grain. Sometimes their fruitage is disgrace that is paraded out to the world as Satan’s victory. Sometimes it is the dishonoring of a parent’s tender love; and its fruitage is gray hair brought to the grave in sorrow, lines of suffering on the faces of loved ones, and bitter remorse that we have turned the sweetest thing on earth to gall. Oh, these wild oats! They are like the witch-grass and the white-weed in the farmer’s land;—they cannot be rooted out, and they taint every good crop that follows after their sowing. Boys need not sow wild oats. The ground is waiting for good, sweet seed that will thrive and bring forth teeming harvests of goodness; and God is ready to care for the crop with the sunshine of his love and the tender rains that fall from his hand.

There is another saying that we hear now, that seems to me strikingly untrue in view of the lessons taught us by the world’s history: “Vox populi, vox Dei”—“The voice of the people is the voice of God.” We swamp all true progress by such a saying. Was it the voice of the people that called first for the Reformation? No; it was the voice of Heaven-endowed, defiant, impetuous Martin Luther;—and he was in a very small minority indeed when he began. The voice of the people and the hand of the people, saving some strong spirits, were against him; and had he listened to them as the voice of God, he would have accomplished no revolution against corrupt and thriving popes.

Oh, no! The voice of the people is not always the voice of God, or Lot would have stayed in Sodom, and Lot’s wife would not have been transformed into a pillar of salt. Was the voice of the people the voice of God when the people cried out, “Crucify him!” and shouted in derision as He climbed Calvary with his burden of the cross? No; this “vox populi, vox Dei” is a stumbling-block to progress; for through man’s proneness to error it is often the cry of sin and oppression, of persecution and of shame.

Let us be careful with these and other sayings, lest by uttering them we be guilty of light words and harmful words, which may injure our fellow-men and displease God.—Illustrated Christian Weekly.