The Sunday Eight O'Clock/A Clean Tongue
"LET me see your tongue," our old family physician used to say to me when as a youngster I went to him for advice as to the various ailments which were wont to beset me.
"A clean tongue tells a good deal about a boy's bodily health," he was given to saying.
In like manner I have found since those days that a clean tongue is a pretty accurate index of a boy's moral condition. I have not infrequently been startled, not to say ashamed, at organization dinners, at fraternity firesides, and at class smokers to hear the risque talk that is current. I have wondered if the systems of these men might not be the better of a moral cleansing, as a mother I once knew used to wash out the mouth of her son with soap and water after he had uttered a dirty or an irreverent word.
An acquaintance recounted to me only a few weeks ago his experience at the meeting of an undergraduate technical society organized presumably for the purpose of furthering educational progress, where the papers and the talk, and the illustrations were filled with suggestions that were unspeakably vulgar; and the worst of it all was that many fellows seemed to look upon this as clever and witty. It often takes a discriminating mind to sense the difference between that which is foul and that which is funny, and sometimes, I am ashamed to admit, the older man and even the teacher is as serious an offender as is the undergraduate. "We need a few snappy ones," the fellows say, "to liven up the crowd," but it is a poor crowd that requires vulgar narrative to animate it.
I was not long ago at the funeral exercises of a man old in years and wide in experience. There were present to do him honor and to speak words of praise of his life, statesmen and teachers, and business men prominent throughout this country. A volume of eulogies of his work and his carrer was afterwards published, but the most forceful and effective thing uttered about him was said by a working man who had been associated with him for many years.
"I have known this man for forty years," he said, "and during this time he has never to my knowledge spoken an unclean word or made an impure suggestion."
"Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," the apostle said, and so a clean tongue means clean thoughts, a clean life, high ideals, high purposes, and these things together spell an immeasurable influence for good.
May