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True Education
Teachers can do much to discourage the evil habit of backbiting,
gossip, and ungenerous criticism that is the curse of the community,
the neighborhood, and the home. No pains should be spared to
impress upon students the fact that this habit reveals a lack of culture,
refinement, and true goodness of heart. It unfits a person both for
the society of the truly cultured and refined in this world and for
association with the holy ones of heaven.
We think with horror of the cannibal who feasts on the still
warm flesh of his victim, but are the results of this practice more
terrible than the agony and ruin caused by misrepresenting motive,
blackening reputation, dissecting character? The young should be
taught what God says about these things: “Death and life are in
the power of the tongue.”
Proverbs 18:21
. Backbiters are classed
with “haters of God,” with “inventors of evil things,” with those who
are “violent, proud, boasters,” “full of envy, murder, strife, deceit,
evil-mindedness.”
Romans 1:30, 31, 29
. People whom God accounts
as citizens of Zion are those “who speak the truth from their heart;
who do not slander with their tongue, ... nor take up a reproach
against their neighbors.”
Psalm 15:2, 3
, NRSV.
God’s Word condemns also the use of meaningless phrases and
expletives that border on profanity. It condemns deceptive compli-
ments, evasions of truth, exaggerations, and misrepresentations in
trade, that are current in society and in the business world. “Let your
‘Yes’ be, ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these
is from the evil one.”
Matthew 5:37
. “Like a maniac who shoots
deadly firebrands and arrows, so is one who deceives a neighbor and
says ‘I am only joking!’”
Proverbs 26:18, 19
, NRSV.
Closely allied to gossip is the covert insinuation, the sly innu-
endo, by which the unclean in heart imply the evil they dare not
openly express. Teach young people to shun like leprosy every
approach to these practices.
In the use of language there is perhaps no fault that old and
young are more ready to pass over lightly in themselves than hasty,
impatient speech. They think it a sufficient excuse to plead, “I was
off my guard, and did not really mean what I said.” But God’s Word
does not treat it lightly. The Scripture says: “Do you see someone
who is hasty in speech? There is more hope for a fool than for