p. 471 | THE TONGUE

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 28, 1880

THE TONGUE.

Pythagoras used to say that a "wound from the tongue is worse than a wound from the sword; for the latter affects only the body, the former the spirit—the soul."

It was a remark of Anacharsis, that "the tongue was at the same time the best part of a man and his worst; that with good government none is more useful, and without it none is more mischievous."

"Boerhave," says Dr. Johnson, "was never soured by calumny and detraction, nor ever thought it necessary to confute them. 'For,' said he, 'they are sparks, which, if you don't blow, they will go out of themselves.'"

"We cannot," says Cato, "control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to despise them."

"Slander," says Bacon, "cannot make the subject of it either better or worse. It may represent us in a false light, or place a likeness of us in a bad one. But we are the same. Not so that slanderer; the slander that he utters makes him worse, the slandered never."

"No one," says Jerome, "loves to tell a tale of scandal except to him who loves to hear it. Learn, then, to rebuke and check the detracting tongue, by showing that you do not listen to it with pleasure."

"No man sees the wallet on his own back," says the old proverb, alluding to the fable of the traveler with two packs, the one before stuffed with the faults of his neighbors, the one behind with his own.

It was a maxim of Euripides, "either to keep silence, or to speak something better than silence."

"Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips; incline not my heart to any evil thing." Ps. 141:3, 4.