Spoken words have in themselves greater power than merely written ones. There is a wonderful influence in the living voice to give force and emphasis to what is uttered. But the written word remains. What is lost in immediate effect, is more than gained in the permanent result. The successful writer has an audience for all time. He being dead still speaks. Men are speaking now, who have gone to their final account twenty centuries ago. Paul possibly may not have had the same influence with a popular assembly as the more eloquent Apollos. But Paul is speaking still through his ever-living Epistles. He is speaking daily to more than a hundred millions of human beings. He is exerting through his writings a power incomparably greater than that even which he exercised as a living speaker.
All men have not the commanding gifts of the apostle Paul. Yet after all, the main difference between ordinary men and men of the Pauline stamp, is not so much in their natural powers, as in the spirit and temper of the men, in that entire consecration to the service of Christ which Paul had, and which they have not. It is wonderful to see how much may be accomplished even by men of ordinary talents, when they have that zeal and single-mindedness which may be attained by one as well as by another. We are accountable for the talents which we have, not for what we have not. But let each man see to it that he uses to the utmost every talent which his Lord has committed to his trust.
How much, for instance, may be accomplished by a man who has a gift for addressing a popular assembly! Such a man by a few wise words, spoken at the right time and place, may do as much in five minutes, in pushing forward a general cause, as another man can do by the laborious drudgery of years. The words of the speaker touch the secret springs of action in a thousand breasts. He sends away a thousand men and women animated with a new impulse to duty, and that impulse is propagated and reproduced through hundreds of channels for long years to come.
Words are never entirely idle. They have at times a power like that of the electric bolt. They may sting like a serpent, and bite like an adder. In the ordinary intercourse of society, a man of good conversational powers may, even in discharging the customary civilities of life, put forth a large influence. The words dropped from minute to minute, throughout the day, in the millions of little transactions all the while going on between man and man, have an incalculable power in the general aggregate of the forces which keep society in motion.
As with spoken, so with written words. The man who knows how to weave them into combinations which shall gain the popular ear, and sink into the popular heart, has a mighty gift for good or evil. The self-denying and almost saintly Heber, by all his years of personal toil on the plains of India, did not accomplish a tithe of what has been accomplished for the cause of missions by his one Missionary Hymn. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that those few written words are worth more to the cause than the lives of scores of ordinary missionaries. How many anxious souls, just wavering between a right and a wrong decision, have been led to make the final choice, and to decide for Christ, by that beautiful hymn beginning "Just as I am, without one plea"? Who can doubt that the patient invalid of Torquay, in the hour that she penned those touching words, did more for the conversion of sinners than many a minister of the gospel has done in the course of a long and laborious life? What a fund of consolation for pious hearts through all time is laid up in the hymns of that other sweet singer, Mrs. Steele?
But as with spoken, so with written words, the great aggregate of their force is not contained in these few brilliant and striking exceptions, but in the millions of mere ordinary paragraphs which meet the eye from day to day, in the columns of the daily and weekly press, and which have apparently but an ephemeral existence. The dashing torrent and the mighty river are the more noticeable objects to the casual observer. But it is the minute myriad drops of the rain and the dew that cause the real wonders of vegetation. So these words which we read, and think we forget, hour by hour, all day long, are continually sinking into the soil of the heart, and influencing imperceptibly the growth of the germs of thought. The aggregate of all these minute, unnoticed influences is prodigious, incalculable.
Whoever can put words together wisely, either by the tongue or the pen, has a precious talent, which he may not innocently lay up in a napkin. The gift, like that of wealth, is not his by right of ownership, but only as a steward. It is his as a means to do good for the honor of his Lord, and the welfare of his fellow-men. As I said in the beginning of these remarks, the world is governed by words. Let Christian men, by the industrious use of the gifts they have received, see to it that a greater proportion of this governing force in the world is contributed by the friends of Christ. Let them unceasingly fill up with the words of truth and righteousness every accessible channel of thought and opinion, and thus occupy till Christ come.
X.
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.
The study of language has ever been considered a study of high importance, regarded merely as a means of intellectual cultivation.