[QUESTIONS FOR YOUNG MEN.]
There was, a few years ago, a law in Connecticut and Massachusetts—and I think it is still extant in Connecticut—that no man shall kiss his wife in public. Both States have laws, as have many others, that no man shall swear; and they both had laws, if they do not still have them, that no one shall smoke on the street.
It has always been considered an immoral act for a Christian to swear, but there is unquestionably a distinction to be made which is of just as much interest to the average boy as to any full-grown man. The use of sacred names in common every-day language—that is, the colloquial use of terms that represent what we reverence, what are the property of each man for himself, and his deepest thoughts—is undoubtedly a wrong. The name of God and what it represents to you and to me in our lives belongs to us, and does not concern any one else. No one, therefore, has any right to vulgarize it in our presence, and if he does so, he is infringing on sacred personal rights, and is therefore committing a wrong. That is self-evident.
There is, however, a difference between committing this actual wrong, between breaking the sturdy old New England Puritan law, and using exaggerated terms which are just as much swearing as the use of sacred names is. There are many terms which in themselves have to-day no significance—though they may have in derivation—except as exaggerated expression. One says, "Good gracious!" "Oh dear!" "Oh my!" a dozen times an hour, and is never criticised for swearing. Yet these expressions in their original forms were swearing of the most exaggerated kind, and in principle are so to-day. They all originally had the name of the Deity attached to them, the second one being probably a corruption of French "Oh Dieu!"
The important point is that although they no longer infringe on sacred things and personal rights, they are really just as much swearing to-day as they originally were. They are signs of weakness, of a desire for something stronger in the form of expression than the ordinary English phrase which precedes or follows them. The speaker feels the need of some exaggeration, and these inoffensive terms are just as unnecessary as are the offensive ones—indeed, they are only weak subterfuges which try to get the same effect without using the sacred terms.
That means a vicious, because growing, tendency to constant increase and exaggeration, which is the real principle of too much drinking that makes a drunkard, too much smoking that makes a nervous invalid, too much idleness that makes an unsuccessful life. If you will listen to the greatest orators or read their speeches, if you will read the works of the greatest authors, you will find no exaggeration of language to speak of even at most important moments, and the very temperateness of these orations and writings has a wonderful effect. Read, if you have not done so, the little speech of Mr. Lincoln's at Gettysburg, and see how simple, how temperate it is, and yet it is said by all students and judges, by any one who really studies it, to not only cover the whole subject Mr. Lincoln had in hand, but to be one of the most stirring speeches that have been made to the American public.
On the other hand, go some day and listen to a cheap stump-speaker, and in the course of half an hour you will hear that this and that is the "most magnificent," the "most frightful," the "greatest crime that cries to Heaven," and abundant other phrases out of all proportion to the subjects, which do not carry the weight of one of Lincoln's simple sentences in his address. These unnecessary superlatives are, in their way, swearing, which in principle are as bad, and as evil in their results on the user and the listener, as is the use of sacred names. They are the beginning of which the latter is the end. The feeling which makes a boy or man want to use exaggerated terms is the real evil. It grows like any other weakness, until his talk is puerile and of no value. And if he would avoid swearing, or cure himself of it, he must begin there, and not at the particular words he has discovered himself to be using, and which may have called forth criticism because they were sacred to those who heard them.