LET YOUR LIFE TALK by W. E. Cornell

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 16, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 49.

LET YOUR LIFE TALK.

By W. E. Cornell

BY W. E. CORNELL.

THERE are times and seasons that try men’s souls, great and thrilling events, when questions of momentous concern are to be decided, or when life itself is at stake. But there are times, and they come often, when the injunction of the apostle applies with singular force, “In patience possess ye your souls.” Such a time is when it reaches the ear that a scandalous tale is being circulated about us. Every power of the being is roused to its fullest capacity. Words are inadequate to express our contempt for the wretch who first set it afloat, and the first thing we want to do is to “run it down.” If there is a grain of truth in the report, we are all the more chaffed, and all the more anxious to “prove there is no truth in it.”

The fact that we make so much fuss about it is pretty good evidence that it is not wholly false. What is the best way to treat it? If there is no truth in the charge, our most intimate friends will not believe it, and as concerns those who do not know us, they never give it a passing notice, for the world is full of rumors. We are concerned only in that with which we are personally acquainted or intimately connected. We can “live down” a scandal a good deal easier than we can “chase it down.” The following, that went the rounds of the papers shortly after General Grant died, contains so much of truth that it will bear repeating:—

Sooner or later a lie is always exploded. Take the case of General Grant. When he began to rise in the army, his envious rivals circulated the report that he was coarse, illiterate, and a drunkard. President Lincoln gave a quietus to the charge of drunkenness. But the notable part of the business is that Grant, without replying to a single slander or invention, managed in the course of his career to completely vindicate himself. He never said, “I am not a drunkard,” but lived so as to show all the world that he was a sober man. He never denied that Rawlins and others wrote his dispatches, but let the public gradually discover the facts. When it was said that his silence was dullness and incapability, he never claimed that he could make a speech, but when the time came, spoke often and successfully in public. People who credited him with no literary ability found out during the last year of the general’s life that he resembled Cæsar in his ability to handle the pen as well as the sword. The wonder is, not that these falsehoods were all exposed, but that the silent and superb contempt with which the general treated them should have triumphantly

refuted them all. There is a lesson to be learned by liars from the life of this silent and patient man. No man can be talked or written down except by himself.