THE TONGUE by William George Jordan

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 31, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 44.

THE TONGUE.

By William George Jordan

THE second most deadly instrument of destruction is the dynamite gun; the first is the human tongue. The gun merely kills bodies; the tongue kills reputations, and, ofttimes, ruins characters. Each gun works alone; each loaded tongue has a hundred accomplices. The havoc of the gun is visible at once. The full evil of the tongue lives through all the years.

The crimes of the tongue are words of unkindness, of anger, of malice, of envy, of bitterness, of harsh criticism, gossip, lying, and scandal. Theft and murder are awful crimes, yet in a single year the aggregate sorrow, pain, and suffering they cause in a nation are microscopic when compared with the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue. Place in one of the scale-pans of justice the evils resulting from the acts of criminals, and in the other the grief and tears and suffering resulting from the crimes of respectability, and you will start back in amazement as you see the scale you thought the heavier shoot high in air.

At the hands of thief or murderer few of us suffer, even indirectly. But from the careless tongue of friend, the cruel tongue of enemy, who is free? No human being can live a life so true, so fair, so pure as to be beyond the reach of malice, or immune from the poisonous emanations of envy. The insidious attacks against one's reputation, the loathsome innuendoes, slurs, half lies, by which jealous mediocrity seeks to ruin its superiors, are like those insect parasites that kill the heart and life of a mighty oak. So cowardly is the method, so stealthy the shooting of the poisoned thorns, so insignificant the separate acts in their seeming, that one is not on guard against them. It is easier to dodge an elephant than a microbe.—William George Jordan.