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 persons 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." 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."

It is said that Pambos, an illiterate saint of the middle ages, being unable to read, came to some one to be taught a psalm. Having learned the simple verse, "I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue," he went away, saying that was enough if it was practically acquired. When asked six months, and again many years after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master this. A man may have a heart overflowing with love and sympathy, even though he is not in the habit of exhibiting on his cards "J. Good Soul, Philanthropist," and was never known to unfold his cambric handkerchief with the words, "Let us weep." On the other hand, nothing is easier than to use a set phraseology without attaching to it any clear and definite meaning,—to cheat one's self with the semblance of thought or feeling, when no thought or feeling exists. It has been truly said that when good men who have no deep religious fervor use fervent language, which they have caught from others, or which was the natural expression of what they felt in other and better years,above all, when they employ on mean and trivial occasions expressions which have been forged in the fires of affliction. and hammered out in the shock of conflict, they cannot easily imagine what a disastrous impression they produce

*Sermon by Rev. F. W. Robertson.

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on keen and discriminating minds. The cheat is at once detected, and the hasty inference is drawn that all expressions of religious earnestness are affected and artificial. The honest and irrepressible utterance of strong conviction and deep emotion commands respect; but intense words should never be used when the religious life is not intense. Costing little, words are given prodigally, and sacrificial acts must toil for years to cover the space which a single fervid promise has stretched itself over. No wonder that the slow acts are superseded by the available words, the weighty bullion by the current paper-money. If I have conveyed all I feel by language, I am tempted to fancy, by the relief experienced, that feeling has attained its end and realized itself. Farewell, then, to the toil of the 'daily sacrifice!' Devotion has found for itself a vent in

words."*

Art, as well as literature, politics, and religion, has its cant, which is as offensive as any of its other forms. When Rossini was asked why he had ceased attending the opera in Paris, he replied, "I am embarrassed at listening to music with Frenchmen. In Italy or Germany, I am sitting quietly in the pit, and on each side of me is a man, shabbily dressed, but who feels the music as I do; in Paris I have on each side of me a fine gentleman in straw-colored gloves, who explains to me all I feel, but who feels nothing. All he says is very clever, indeed, and it is often very true; but it takes the gloss off my own impression,-if I have any."

"Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson."

CHAPTER VI.

SOME ABUSES OF WORDS.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.- PROVERBS XVII. 27.

Learn the value of a man's words and expressions, and you know him. . . He who has a superlative for everything, wants a measure for the great or small. LAVATER.

Words are women; deeds are men.- GEORGE HERBERT.

He that uses many words for the explaining of any subject, doth, like the cuttle-fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. — RAY.

HE old Roman poet Ennius was so proud of knowing

three hearts. The Emperor Charles V. expressed himself still more strongly, and declared that in proportion to the number of languages a man knows, is he more of a man. According to this theory, Cardinal Mezzofanti, who understood one hundred and fourteen languages, and spoke thirty with rare excellence, must have been many men condensed into one. Of all the human polyglots in ancient or modern times, he had perhaps the greatest knowledge of words. Yet, with all his marvellous linguistic knowledge, he was a mere prodigy or freak of nature, and, it has been well observed, scarcely deserves a higher place in the Pantheon of intellect than a blindfold chess-player or a calculating boy. Talking foreign languages with a fluency and accuracy which caused strangers to mistake him for a compatriot, he attempted no work of utility,— left no trace of his colossal powers; and therefore, in contemplating them, we can but wonder at his gifts, as we wonder

at the Belgian giant or a five-legged lamb. In allusion to his hyperbolical acquisitions, De Quincey suggests that the following would be an appropriate epitaph for his eminence: "Here lies a man who, in the act of dying, committed a robbery,-absconding from his fellow-creatures with a valuable polyglot dictionary." Enormous, however, as were the linguistic acquisitions of Mezzofanti, no man was ever less vain of his acquirements,-priding himself, as he did, less upon his attainments than most persons upon a smattering of a single tongue. "What am I," said he to a visitor, "but an ill-bound dictionary?" The saying of Catherine de Medicis is too often suggested by such prodigies of linguistic acquisition. When told that Scaliger understood twenty different languages-"That's twenty words for one idea," said she; "I had rather have twenty ideas for one word." In this reply she foreshadowed the great error of modern scholarship, which is too often made the be-all and the end-all of life, when its only relation to it should be that of a graceful handmaid. The story of the scholar who, dying, regretted at the end of his career that he had not concentrated all his energies upon the dative case, only burlesques an actual fact. The educated man is too often one who knows more of language than of idea,- more of the husk than of the kernel,

more of the vehicle than of the substance it bears. He has got together a heap of symbols,- of mere counters,with which he feels himself to be an intellectual Rothschild; but of the substance of these shadows, the sterling gold of intellect, coin current throughout the realm, he has not an eagle. All his wealth is in paper,- paper like bad scrip, marked with a high nominal amount, but useless in exchange and repudiated in real traffic. The great