Words without Meaning

Abstract

Words without Meaning William Mathews (bio) My children,” said Dr. Johnson, “clear your minds of cant.” If professional politicians should follow this advice, many of them would be likely to find their occupation clean gone. At elections they are so wont to simulate the sentiments and language of patriotism,—to pretend a zeal for this, an indignation for that, and a horror for another thing, about which they are known to be comparatively indifferent, as if any flummery might be crammed down the throats of the people,—that the voters, whom the old party hacks fancy they are gulling, are simply laughing in their sleeves at their transparent attempts at deception. Daniel O’Connell, the popular Irish orator, is said to have had a large vocabulary of stock political phrases, upon which he rang the changes with magical effect. He could whine, and wheedle, and wink with one eye, while he wept with the other; and if his flow of oratory was ever in danger of halting, he had always at hand certain stereotyped catch-words, such as his “own green isle,” his “Irish heart,” his “head upon the block,” his “hereditary bondsmen, know ye not,” etc., which never failed him in any emergency. Common, however, as are meaningless phrases on the stump and platform, it is to be feared that they are hardly less so in the meeting-house, and there they are doubly offensive, if not unpardonable. It is a striking remark of Coleridge, that truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered so true that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors. Continual handling wears off the beauty and significance of words, and it is only by a distinct effort of the mind that we can restore their full meaning. Hence it is that “the traditional maxims of old experience, though seldom questioned, have often so little effect on the conduct of life, because their meaning is never, by most persons, really felt, until personal experience has brought it home. And thus, also, it is that so many doctrines of religion, ethics, and even politics, so full of meaning and reality to first converts, have manifested a tendency to degenerate rapidly into lifeless dogmas, which tendency all the efforts of an education expressly and skilfully directed to keeping the meaning alive are barely found sufficient to counteract.”1 [End Page 181] There can be little doubt that many a man whose life is thoroughly selfish cheats himself into the belief that he is pious, because he parrots with ease the phrases of piety and orthodoxy. Who is not familiar with scores of such pet phrases and cant terms, which are repeated at this day apparently without a thought of their meaning? Who ever attended a missionary meeting without hearing “the Macedonian cry,” and an account of some “little interest,” and “fields white for the harvest”? Who is not weary of the ding-dong of “our Zion” and the solecism of “in our midst”; and who does not long for a verbal millennium when Christians shall no longer “feel to take” and “grant to give”? “How much I regret,” says Coleridge, “that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other! They must improve this and that text, and they must do so and so in a prayerful way; and so on. A young lady urged upon me, the other day, that such and such feelings were the marrow of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London on her marrow-bones only.” Mr. Spurgeon, in his “Lectures to Students,” remarks that “‘the poor unworthy dust’ is an epithet generally applied to themselves by the proudest men in the congregation, and not seldom by the most moneyed and groveling; in which case the last words are not so very inappropriate. We have heard of a good man who, in pleading for his children and grandchildren, was so completely beclouded in the...