spread with more than usual good things. The preacher, however, found from the Squire’s wife that there was hardly anything for dinner, and what there was she was ashamed for him to sit down to. The Superintendent heard her in mute astonishment. He lifted his dark eyes, and looking her in the face with penetration and austerity, he rose gently from the table and said, —
“Brother Hopkins, I want my horse immediately; I must leave this house.”
“Why, Brother Robson, what is the matter?”
“Enough the matter! Why, sir, your house isn’t fit to stay in, and you haven’t anything fit to eat or drink, and I won’t stay.”
The preacher mounted his horse and took his departure.
Both the Squire and his lady were confounded at such unexpected conduct. They stood in their room as though thunderstruck, not knowing what to say or what to do. But the preacher was gone, and could not be re-called.
After a few moments poor Sister Hopkins wept like a child. “Dear me,” said she to the Squire, “this is a terrible thing. It will be all over the village, and everybody will be laughing at me. How shall I meet the Superintendent again? I did not mean anything by what I said; it is only my way. I never thought it wrong. Had I known our new minister didn’t like such a way of talk I would not have talked so. Oh, how vexed I am!”
The result of this was that Mrs. Hopkins saw herself as others saw her. She ceased making these empty and meaningless apologies, and became a wiser and better woman. The next time Superintendent Robson went to the Squire’s he found a “house fit for him to stay in and things fit for him to eat.”
VIII.
THE COMMON SWEARER
“Take not His name, who made thy tongue, in vain, It gets thee nothing, and hath no excuse.”
He is a transgressor of the third commandment of the Decalogue, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” He transgresses without any laudable purpose, and without any necessity. He is thoughtless, foolish, and void of the fear of God. “His mouth,” as an old divine says, “is black with oaths, and the very soot of hell hangs about his lips.” He degrades the most excellent things into the meanest associations. Sometimes he indulges to such an extent in his sin, that the main substance of his speech is swearing. It is more than an adjunct or concomitant of his conversation; it is the body and soul of it. Sometimes you may hear him, with an air of self-complacency, give utterance to his profanity, as though he regarded it an ornament of rhetoric, giving spice and condiment to his thoughts. There are occasions when he considers his talk only reliable in its truthfulness as this evil accompanies it. He would not be a man in his own judgment if he did not swear. He thinks he magnifies his own importance in the estimation of other people; but, alas! he promotes his own shame and disgrace before the eyes of the wise and good.
The common swearer is confined to no rank or age in society. I have heard the youth who was barely in his teens indulge in this sin, as though it had been a part of his parental or day-school education. I have heard the young gentleman, so-called, recently returned from the walks of a University, pollute his lips and character with this shameful vice. I have heard the man who laid claim to wealth, to intelligence, to respectability, and to honour, pour forth his swearing words. I have heard the man who has stood in official relation to the state, and who considered himself a “justice of the peace,” break the holy commandment with impunity. I have even heard one, called by the misnomer, “lady,” do disgrace to her sex by this sinful fault in conversation. In the household, with a group of little ones whose minds were just unfolding to receive first impressions, I have heard the parents swear as though they were licensed to do so by reason. In company, where common civility ought to have restrained, I have heard the utterances of the swearer’s horrid voice. In the street, where public decency ought to have deterred, I have again and again heard the revolting expressions of this talker’s leprous tongue. In the shop, while transacting business, I have heard him give vent to his blasphemies, when a kind reproof has only seemed for the time to enrage his demoniacal spirit to more fiery ebullitions. How humiliating is this sin to human nature! How it severs from everything that is holy and honourable! How it insults and blasphemes the glorious Lord of earth and heaven! How closely it allies to “the prince of the power of the air”!
“It might puzzle a philosopher,” says Ogden, “to trace the love of swearing to its original principle, and assign its place in the constitution of man.
“Is it a passion, or an appetite, or an instinct? What is its just measure, its proper object, its ultimate end?
“Or shall we conclude that it is entirely the work of art? a vice which men have invented for themselves without prospect of pleasure or profit, and to which there is no imaginable temptation in nature?
“If it be an accomplishment, it is such an one as the meanest person may make himself master of; requiring neither rank nor fortune, neither genius nor learning.
“But if it be no test of wit, we must allow, perhaps, that it wears the appearance of valour. Alas! what is the appearance of anything? The little birds perch upon the image of an eagle.
“True bravery is sedate and inoffensive: if it refuse to submit to insults, it offers none; begins no disputes, enters into no needless quarrels; is above the little, troublesome ambition to be distinguished every moment; it hears in silence, and replies with modesty; fearing no enemy, and making none; and is as much ashamed of insolence as cowardice.”
The swearer may ask, “Where is the evil of an oath when it is used for the support of truth?” If your character is good, the person with whom you converse will require no oath. He will depend upon the simple and bare declaration of the matter: and if you swear, it will take a per-centage from your character in his estimation, and he will not believe the statement any the sooner for the oath connected with it. Can you think that the high and holy name of God is intended to be debased by association with every trivial and impertinent truth which may be uttered? “No oath,” says Bishop Hopkins, “is in itself simply good, and voluntarily to be used; but only as medicines are, in case of necessity. But to use it ordinarily and indifferently, without being constrained by any cogent necessity, or called to it by any lawful authority, is such a sin as wears off all reverence and dread of the Great God: and we have very great cause to suspect that where His name is so much upon the tongue, there His fear is but little in the heart.”
Again, the same author says, “Though thou swearest that which is true; yet customary swearing to truths will insensibly bring thee to swear falsehoods. For, when once thou art habituated to it, an oath will be more ready to thee than a truth; and so when thou rashly boltest out somewhat that is either doubtful or false, thou wilt seal it up and confirm it with an oath, before thou hast had time to consider what thou hast said or what thou art swearing: for those who accustom themselves to this vice lose the observation of it in the frequency; and, if you reprove them for swearing, they will be ready to swear again, that they did not swear. And therefore it is well observed of St. Austin, ‘We ought to forbear swearing that which is truth; for, by the custom of swearing, men oftentimes fall into perjury, and are always in danger of it.’”
Take a few considerations, with a view to show the evil of swearing, and to deter from the practice of it.
1. Consider that Name by which the Swearer generally commits his sin. “The name of God,” says Jeremy Taylor, “is so sacred, so mighty, that it rends mountains, it opens the bowels of the deepest rocks, it casts out devils, and makes hell to tremble, and fills all the regions of heaven with joy; the name of God is our strength and confidence, the object of our worshippings, and the security of all our hopes; and when God hath given Himself a name, and immured it with dread and reverence, like the garden of Eden with the swords of cherubim, and none durst speak it but he whose lips were hallowed, and that at holy and solemn times, in a most holy and solemn place; I mean the high priest of the Jews at the solemnities when he entered into the sanctuary, – then He taught all the world the majesty and veneration of His name; and therefore it was that God made restraints upon our conceptions and expressions of Him; and, as He was infinitely