Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

A stamp on everything that canted!

No millions more, if these were granted,

Henceforward would be raised or wanted.”

So an American politician, who, by caucus-packing, “wire-pulling,” and perhaps bribery, has contrived to get elected to a State legislature or to Congress, will publicly thank his fellow-citizens for having sent him there “by their voluntary, unbiased suffrages.” When the patriot, Patkul, was surrendered to the vengeance of Charles XII of Sweden, the following sentence was read over to him: “It is hereby made known to be the order of his Majesty, our most merciful sovereign, that this man, who is a traitor to his country, be broken on the wheel and quartered,” etc. “What mercy!” exclaimed the poor criminal. It was with the same mockery of benevolence that the Holy Inquisition was wont, when condemning a heretic to the torture, to express the tenderest concern for his temporal and eternal welfare. One of the most offensive forms of cant is the profession of extreme humility by men who are full of pride and arrogance. The haughtiest of all the Roman Pontiffs styled himself “the servant of the servants of God,” at the very time when he humiliated the Emperor of Germany by making him wait five days barefoot in his ante-chamber in the depth of winter, and expected all the Kings of Europe, when in his presence, to kiss his toe or hold his stirrup. Catherine of Russia was always mouthing the language of piety and benevolence, especially when about to wage war or do some rascally deed. Louis the Fourteenth’s paroxysms of repentance and devotion were always the occasion for fresh outrages upon the Huguenots; and Napoleon was always prating of his love of peace, and of being compelled to fight by his quarrelsome neighbors. While the French revolutionists were shouting “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!” men were executed in Paris without law and against law, and heads fell by cartloads from the knife of the guillotine. The favorite amusement of Couthon, one of the deadliest of Robespierre’s fellow-cutthroats, was the rearing of doves. The contemplation of their innocence, he said, made the charm of his existence, in consoling him for the wickedness of men. Even when he had reached the height of his “bad preëminence” as a terrorist, he was carried to the National Assembly or the Jacobin Club fondling little lapdogs, which he nestled in his bosom. It is told of one of his bloody compatriots, who was as fatal to men and as fond of dogs as himself, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband’s life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel’s tail, he cried out, “Good heavens, Madam! have you no humanity?”

“My children,” said Dr. Johnson, “clear your minds of cant.” If professional politicians should follow this advice, many of them would be likely to find their occupation clean gone. At elections they are so wont to simulate the sentiments and language of patriotism,—to pretend a zeal for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another thing, about which they are known to be comparatively indifferent, as if any flummery might be crammed down the throats of the people,—that the voters, whom the old party hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel O’Connell, the popular Irish orator, is said to have had a large vocabulary of stock political phrases, upon which he rang the changes with magical effect. He could whine, and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever in danger of halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped catch-words, such as his “own green isle,” his “Irish heart,” his “head upon the block,” his “hereditary bondsmen, know ye not,” etc., which never failed him in any emergency.

Offensive as are all these forms of speech without meaning, they are not more so than the hollow language of—strange to say,—some moral philosophers. Many persons have been so impressed by the ethical essays of Seneca, in which he sings the praises of poverty, and denounces in burning language the corruption of Rome and the extortion in the provinces, that they could account for the excellence of these writings only on the theory of a Christian influence; and a report gained credit that the Roman philosopher had met and conversed with the Apostle Paul. But what are these brilliant moral discourses? Reading them by the light of the author’s life and character, we find they are only words. A late German historian tells us that the same Seneca who could discourse so finely upon the abstemiousness and contentment of the philosopher, and who, on all occasions, paraded his contempt for earthly things as nothingness and vanity, amassed, during the four years of his greatest prosperity and power, a fortune of three hundred millions of sesterces,—over fifteen millions of dollars. While writing his treatise on “Poverty,” he had in his house five hundred citrus tables, tables of veined wood brought from Mount Atlas, which sometimes cost as much as twenty-five, and even seventy thousand dollars. The same Seneca, who denounced extortion with so virtuous anger, built his famous museum gardens with the gold and the tears of Numidia. The same Seneca, who preached so much about purity of morals, was openly accused of adultery with Julia and Agrippina, and led his pupil Nero into still more shameful practices. He wrote a work upon “Clemency,” yet had, beyond question, a large part of Nero’s atrocities upon his conscience. It was he who composed the letter in which Nero justified before the Senate the murder of his own mother.[13]

Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the stump and platform, and even in moral treatises, it is to be feared that they are hardly less so in the meeting-house, and there they are doubly offensive, if not unpardonable. It is a striking remark of Coleridge, that truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered so true that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors. Continual handling wears off the beauty and significance of words, and it is only by a distinct effort of the mind that we can restore their full meaning. Gradually the terms most vital to belief cease to mean what they meant when first used; the electric life goes out of them; and, for all practical purposes, they are dead. Hence it is that “the traditional maxims of old experience, though seldom questioned, have often so little effect on the conduct of life, because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, until personal experience has brought it home. And thus, also, it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas, which tendency all the efforts of an education expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning alive are barely found sufficient to counteract.”[14]

There can be little doubt that many a man whose life is thoroughly selfish cheats himself into the belief that he is pious, because he parrots with ease the phrases of piety and orthodoxy. Who is not familiar with scores of such pet phrases and cant terms, which are repeated at this day apparently without a thought of their meaning? Who ever attended a missionary meeting without hearing “the Macedonian cry,” and an account of some “little interest,” and “fields white for the harvest”? Who is not weary of the ding-dong of “our Zion” and the solecism of “in our midst”; and who does not long for a verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer “feel to take” and “grant to give”? “How much I regret,” says Coleridge, “that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other! They must ‘improve’ this and that text, and they must do so and so in a ‘prayerful’ way; and so on. A young lady urged upon me, the other day, that such and such feelings were the ‘marrow’ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London on her marrow bones only.” The language of prayer, both public and private, being made up more or less of technical expressions, tends continually to become effete. The scriptural and other phrases, which were used with good taste and judgment several generations ago, may have lost their significance to-day, and should, in that case, be exchanged for others which have a living meaning. Profound convictions, it has been truly said, are imperilled by the continued use of conventional phraseology after the life of it has gone out, so that nothing in the real experience of the people responds to it, when they hear it or when they use it. Mr. Spurgeon, in his “Lectures to Students,” remarks that “‘the poor unworthy dust’ is an epithet generally applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congregation, and not seldom by the most moneyed and grovelling; in which case the last words are not so very inappropriate. We have heard of a good man who, in pleading for his children and grandchildren, was so completely beclouded in the blinding influence of this expression, that he exclaimed, ‘O Lord, save thy dust, and thy dust’s dust, and thy dust’s dust’s dust.’ When Abraham said, ‘I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes,’ the utterance was forcible and expressive; but in its misquoted, perverted, and abused form, the sooner it is consigned to its own element the better.”

Many persons have very erroneous ideas of what constitutes religious conversation. That is not necessarily religious talk which is interlarded with religious phrases, or which is solely about divine things; but that which is permeated with religious feeling, which is full of truth, reverence, and love, whatever the theme may be. Who has not heard some men talk of the most worldly things in a way that made the hearer feel the electric current of spirituality playing through their words, and uplifting his whole spiritual being? And who has not heard other men talk about the divinest things in so dry, formal, and soulless a way that their words seemed a profanation, and chilled him to the core? It is almost a justification of slang that it is generally an effort to obtain relief from words worn bare by the use of persons who put neither knowledge nor feeling into them, and which seem incapable of expressing anything real.

When Lady Townsend was asked if Whitefield had recanted, she replied, “No; he has only canted.” Often, when there is no deliberate hypocrisy, good men use language so exaggerated and unreal as to do more harm than the grossest worldliness. We have often, in thinking upon this subject, called to mind a saying of Dr. Sharp, of Boston, a Baptist preacher, who was a hater of all cant and shams. “There’s Dr. ——,” said he, about the time of the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, “who went all the way to Europe to talk up brotherly love. If he should meet a poor Baptist minister in the street, he wouldn’t speak to him.” Robert Hall had an intense abhorrence of religious cant, to which he sometimes gave expression in blunt terms. A young preacher who was visiting him spent a day in sighing and in begging pardon for his suspirations, saying that they were caused by grief that he had so hard a heart. The great divine bore with him all the first day, but when the lamentations were resumed the next morning at breakfast, he said: “Why, sir, don’t be cast down; remember the compensating principle, and be thankful and still.” “Compensating principle!” exclaimed the young man; “what can compensate for a hard heart?” “Why, a soft head, to be sure,” said Hall, who, if rude, certainly had great provocation. Nothing is cheaper than pious or benevolent talk. A great many men would be positive forces of goodness in the world, if they did not let all their principles and enthusiasm escape in words. They are like locomotives which let off so much steam through the escape valves, that, though they fill the air with noise, they have not power enough left to move the train. There is hardly anything which so fritters spiritual energy as talk without deeds. “The fluent boaster is not the man who is steadiest before the enemy; it is well said to him that his courage is better kept till it is wanted. Loud utterances of virtuous indignation against evil from the platform, or in the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual giant; so much indignation as is expressed has found vent; it is wasted; is taken away from the work of coping with evil; the man has so much less left. And hence he who restrains that love of talk lays up a fund of spiritual strength.”[15]