The Idle Word | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 15, 1863

The Idle Word.

“I REMEMBER what you said.” It was a trivial thing which had been said and thus remembered—remembered so many years. The remark recoiled upon me with strange and terrible power. What! is all we have said ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years remembered? Have all our thoughtless words been indelibly stamped somewhere? Are they for ever speaking? Can they never be recalled? Are they registered for the final account? This gift of speech, how much it is abused. I do not now mean in the way of violent, profane, malicious, reproachful, or bitter language; but in the daily intercourse of life, how much we allow the superficial to take the place of the genuine, the trivial for the earnest, the unmeaning for the true. What a stream of aimless talk flows from the lips whose chief fault is that it is aimless. How many idle words are uttered; blameworthy, because that moment, that occasion given but once and forever gone, was not better improved. How much that is real is left unsaid, while we sport with unmeaning pleasure instead; yet they are caught up by deathless memories, sow their ignoble harvests, and will one day confront us to our shame.

The “idle word” was not beneath the admonition of Christ, because it not only frets away all our seriousness and vigor, but shallows those social intimacies which are meant to quicken, to improve, and to bless.