Words govern the world. Let any one who doubts it, canvass the motives
by which his own action is decided. Considerations are presented to his
mind, showing him that a certain course of conduct is right, or good, or
expedient, or pleasant, and he adopts it. The considerations presented
to his mind decide his action. But those considerations are in the form
of arguments, and those arguments exist in words. The true original
power, indeed, is in the thought. It is the thinker who generates the
steam. But thought unexpressed accomplishes nothing. The writer and the
speaker engineer it into action.
Thought, indeed, even in the mind of its originator, exists in words.
For we really think only in words. Much more, then, must the thought
have some verbal expression, written or spoken, before it can influence
the opinions or the actions of others. A man may have all the wisdom of
Solomon, yet will he exercise no influence upon human affairs unless he
gives his wisdom utterance. Profound thinkers sometimes, indeed, utter
very little. But they must utter something. They originate and give
forth a few thoughts or discoveries, which minds of a different order,
writers and talkers, pick up, reproduce, multiply, and disseminate all
over the surface of society. When a man unites these two functions,
being both an original thinker and a skilful and industrious writer, the
influence which he may exert upon his race is prodigious. If any one,
for instance, would take the pains to trace the influences which have
sprung from such a man as Plato, he would have an illustration of what
is meant. Plato, while living, had no wealth, rank, or position of any
kind, to add force to what he said or did. Whatever he has done in the
world, he has done simply by his power as a thinker and a writer. There
were many Grecians quite as subtle and acute in reasoning as he. But
their thoughts died with them. Plato, on the other hand, was an
indefatigable writer, as well as an acute and profound thinker. He gave
utterance to his ideas in words which, even in a dead language, have to
this day a living power. When Plato was dead, there remained his written
words. They remain still. They have entered successively into the
philosophies, the creeds, and the practical codes, of the Grecian world,
the Roman, the Saracen, and the Christian. At this very hour hundreds of
millions of human beings unconsciously hold opinions which the words of
that wise old Greek have helped to mould. The mere brute force of a
military conqueror may make arbitrary changes in the current of human
affairs. But no permanent change is ever made except by the force of
opinion. The words of Plato have done more to influence the destinies of
men than have a hundred such men as Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. Four
hundred millions of Chinese, in half the actions which go to make up
their lives, are now governed by maxims and opinions which have come
down to them from remote antiquity, from a man whose very existence is
almost a myth. Those military heroes whose influence on society has been
permanent have been propagandists as well as warriors. Opinions and
codes have gone with, and survived, their conquering armies. The armies
of the elder Napoleon were routed at Waterloo. But the Napoleonic ideas
survived the shock, and they are at this day a part of the governing
power of the world. It was the Koran--the words, and the creed of
Mahomet--that gave to the Mahometan conquest its permanent hold upon the
nations.
Spoken words have in themselves greater power than merely written ones.
There is a wonderful influence in the living voice to give force and
emphasis to what is uttered. But the written word remains. What is lost
in immediate effect, is more than gained in the permanent result. The
successful writer has an audience for all time. He being dead still
speaks. Men are speaking now, who have gone to their final account
twenty centuries ago. Paul possibly may not have had the same influence
with a popular assembly as the more eloquent Apollos. But Paul is
speaking still through his ever-living Epistles. He is speaking daily to
more than a hundred millions of human beings. He is exerting through his
writings a power incomparably greater than that even which he exercised
as a living speaker.
All men have not the commanding gifts of the apostle Paul. Yet after
all, the main difference between ordinary men and men of the Pauline
stamp, is not so much in their natural powers, as in the spirit and
temper of the men, in that entire consecration to the service of Christ
which Paul had, and which they have not. It is wonderful to see how much
may be accomplished even by men of ordinary talents, when they have that
zeal and single-mindedness which may be attained by one as well as by
another. We are accountable for the talents which we have, not for what
we have not. But let each man see to it that he uses to the utmost every
talent which his Lord has committed to his trust.
How much, for instance, may be accomplished by a man who has a gift for
addressing a popular assembly! Such a man by a few wise words, spoken at
the right time and place, may do as much in five minutes, in pushing
forward a general cause, as another man can do by the laborious drudgery
of years. The words of the speaker touch the secret springs of action in
a thousand breasts. He sends away a thousand men and women animated with
a new impulse to duty, and that impulse is propagated and reproduced
through hundreds of channels for long years to come.
Words are never entirely idle. They have at times a power like that of
the electric bolt. They may sting like a serpent, and bite like an
adder. In the ordinary intercourse of society, a man of good
conversational powers may, even in discharging the customary civilities
of life, put forth a large influence. The words dropped from minute to
minute, throughout the day, in the millions of little transactions all
the while going on between man and man, have an incalculable power in
the general aggregate of the forces which keep society in motion.
As with spoken, so with written words. The man who knows how to weave
them into combinations which shall gain the popular ear, and sink into
the popular heart, has a mighty gift for good or evil. The self-denying
and almost saintly Heber, by all his years of personal toil on the
plains of India, did not accomplish a tithe of what has been
accomplished for the cause of missions by his one Missionary Hymn. It
would hardly be an exaggeration to say that those few written words are
worth more to the cause than the lives of scores of ordinary
missionaries. How many anxious souls, just wavering between a right and
a wrong decision, have been led to make the final choice, and to decide
for Christ, by that beautiful hymn beginning "Just as I am, without one
plea"? Who can doubt that the patient invalid of Torquay, in the hour
that she penned those touching words, did more for the conversion of
sinners than many a minister of the gospel has done in the course of a
long and laborious life? What a fund of consolation for pious hearts
through all time is laid up in the hymns of that other sweet singer,
Mrs. Steele?
But as with spoken, so with written words, the great aggregate of their
force is not contained in these few brilliant and striking exceptions,
but in the millions of mere ordinary paragraphs which meet the eye from
day to day, in the columns of the daily and weekly press, and which have
apparently but an ephemeral existence. The dashing torrent and the
mighty river are the more noticeable objects to the casual observer. But
it is the minute myriad drops of the rain and the dew that cause the
real wonders of vegetation. So these words which we read, and think we
forget, hour by hour, all day long, are continually sinking into the
soil of the heart, and influencing imperceptibly the growth of the germs
of thought. The aggregate of all these minute, unnoticed influences is
prodigious, incalculable.
Whoever can put words together wisely, either by the tongue or the pen,
has a precious talent, which he may not innocently lay up in a napkin.
The gift, like that of wealth, is not his by right of ownership, but
only as a steward. It is his as a means to do good for the honor of his
Lord, and the welfare of his fellow-men. As I said in the beginning of
these remarks, the world is governed by words. Let Christian men, by the
industrious use of the gifts they have received, see to it that a
greater proportion of this governing force in the world is contributed
by the friends of Christ. Let them unceasingly fill up with the words of
truth and righteousness every accessible channel of thought and opinion,
and thus occupy till Christ come.