What a Sneer Means by S. S. Times

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 12, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 27.

What a Sneer Means

By S. S. Times

No child sneers. Growing boys and girls sometimes say cutting things, and the child whom bad parental training has turned into a little pseudo-adult perhaps may sneer, just as he comments on the political situation; but the true child as such does not sneer. The generosity and trustfulness of a child's judgment are incompatible with the contemptuous spirit. Sneering is an artificial growth, a something which, like atheism, is not natural but forced. Its presence indicates the passing of the simplicities of childhood; and it equally indicates that maturity has not yet come.

For no old people sneer—that is, no mature people. If one have an aged friend who slips into speech of bitter scorn, he so far and for the moment disappoints one; he has lapsed into the crudity of an earlier age. Mellowness means the death of scorn.

There is something about the spirit of a sneer which is an advertisement of immaturity. We may be quite sure that some young people whom we have known as masters of the art of the abbreviated and staccato expression of contempt—young people who can compress an adverse verdict into an expressive sniff—are blissfully unconscious how they advertise the very thing their sneer is designed to conceal—the fact that they are not yet grown up.

The truth is, the sneer is the confession of weakness. The scornful man is in an attitude of self-defense, usually against either superior knowledge (everybody knows how quick people are to despise what they do not understand), or in the presence of superior strength, or he is fending off remorse and shame; the cynicism and scornful censoriousness of the impenitent is, of course, a byword among the students of human nature.

In the presence of evil our Lord was sometimes very angry; and, as when evil men put stumbling-blocks in the path of little children, His wrath was Titanic, electric, shattering. But He despised none; the spirit of scorn was not in Him. For He looked at men not with the narrow gaze of a vindictive and explosive self-love, but as from the ramparts of heaven. And the detachment of His judgment of men armed Him against their contempt and pride; He was "dumb to their scorn, and turned upon their laughter only the dominance of earnest eyes." May His gentleness make us great, His magnanimity save us from pettiness, and His reverence for the work of God control our judgments, making us ashamed of crude contempt, and crushing the rising of the spirit of scorn in our unchastened hearts.—S. S. Times.