We can do that much at least for our friends. All about us is the constant, unquiet drift of gossip and distorted half-truth, as restless as the sand in the desert, dancing and whirling with every puff of wind. We can do something to arrest that drift. We can be for our friends in some measure what Isaiah said that God’s Servant, when He came, should be, the shadow of a great Rock in a weary land, stopping the drift of the sand, and sheltering our friends by our loyalty and our silence.
Don’t even repeat the gossip that comes to you, not only for the strong reason already given, but also for this little one, that you won’t likely repeat it correctly. With all the will in the world, it is one of the hardest things to retail a story just exactly as you heard it. Sir Walter Scott, speaking about anecdotes that he had heard, said he always liked to cock up their bonnets a bit and put a staff in their hands that they might walk on a little brisker and sprightlier than when they came to him! But we all do that, without meaning to do it at all. We add a little bit. We exaggerate just the tiniest fraction, and our hearer when he repeats the story does the same, and so the matter grows till it is big enough to do much mischief.
“A Whisper broke the air,
A soft light tone and low,
Yet barbed with shame and woe.
Now, might it only perish there,
Nor further go!Ah me! A quick and eager ear
Caught up the little meaning sound;
Another voice has breathed it clear,
And so it wandered round,
From ear to lip, from lip to ear,
Until it reached a gentle heart,
And that—it broke.”
There is a legend that once a king avoided death in a poisoned cup that had been handed to him by making over it the sign of the Cross—when it broke in pieces at his feet. Let us, when we are tempted to retail the vivid, poisonous piece of scandal, stop and invoke the Spirit of Christ. Is this that I am going to say about my brother the kind of thing I should say if Christ were standing by? Am I justified in turning over that bit of gossip which may be true, but which ought not to be true? Our duty, who profess and call ourselves Christians, is clear. We are to speak no slander no, nor listen to it. We are to retail evil about no man. We are to love one another.
Prayer
O Lord our God, whose command it is that we love our neighbour as ourselves, help us to cherish and protect his good name as carefully as we guard our own. Make us more willing to repeat the good about him, but slower to retail or exaggerate the evil. Grant us all a deeper sense of the deadly wrong a foolish tongue can work, and keep Thou the door of our lips. For Thy Name’s sake. Amen.
XVI
God in Front
“Thou preventest him with the blessings of goodness.”
Psalm 21:3
You know how, in a happy home, the near approach of a birthday is signalised, how parcels are mysteriously smuggled in and hidden in secret places, and, though everything seems to be going on as usual, yet the plans are being laid in train that will surprise and delight the fortunate owner of the birthday when the festal day dawns. That is our feeble, human way of trying to surprise one another with the blessings of goodness. That is how we “prevent” our beloved with tokens of our remembrance. So, says the Psalmist, does God deal with us. Not only have we—what we so much need—His forgiveness of our past, and His help and presence for the day which now is; He is working for us in the future too, sowing the days to come with blessings for us to pick up when the passage of time brings us to the places where He has hidden them.
The idea that God has been beforehand in our history, getting ready, as it were, for our coming, though not a very usual one, is very helpful, and it finds abundant illustration and proof in all directions. When a child arrives on this earth, he enters into the enjoyment of bounties and blessings prepared, not merely weeks, but literally ages before his coming. Warmth he needs, and aeons ago the coal beds were formed in the bowels of the earth. Food he needs, and God “laboured for ages,” as Sir Oliver Lodge puts it, to bring corn into existence. For corn needs soil, and, to make that, the Creator had to set the glaciers grinding over the granite, and to loosen the forces of rain and frost and running water over great stretches of time.
Every child born into the world becomes the heir of all the ages past. What blessings have been prepared for most of us, in advance, in the homes into which we were born, and the gracious influences under which we have grown up! “I have to thank the gods,” says Marcus Aurelius the pagan emperor, “that my grandfathers, parents, sisters, preceptors, relations, friends and domestics were almost all of them persons of probity.” “I have to thank the gods.” Who else is there to thank but God who prevents us in this way with the
