| The Building of Character |
Chapter 11 |
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Victoriousness in speech is among the hardest of life’s conquests. The words of St. James are true to common experience, when he says that the tongue is harder to tame than any kind of beast or birds or creeping things or things in the sea; indeed, that no man can tame it. Yet he does not say that we need not try to tame our tongue. On the other hand he counsels us to be slow to speak and slow to wrath. A Christian ought to learn to control his speech. The capacity for harm in angry words is appalling. No prayer should be oftener on our lips than that in the old psalm:—
“Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth;
Keep the door of my lips.”
The hasty word of an uncontrolled moment may leave sore wounding and pain in a gentle heart, may mar a sweet friendship, may set an innocent life on a career of evil. Then the hurt in him who speaks ungoverned words is scarcely less sore. The pain that quickly follows their utterance is terrible penalty for the sin. There is ofttimes a cost, too, in results, which is incalculable. Lives have been shadowed, down to their close, by words which fell in a single flash from unlocked lips. Moses was not the only man who has been shut out of a land of promise by reason of one unadvised word. It is better to suffer wrong in silence than to run the risk of speaking in the excitement of anger.
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