Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 March 1886 — Rev. Sam Jones on the “Unruly Member.” [ARTICLE]

Rev. Sam Jones on the “Unruly Member.”

The tongue is “an unruly member,” said St. James, “full of deadly poison.” There is many a person who, if you will go to their homes and put your ear to their heart, you will hear the blood dripping, dripping. You will ask, “What did that ?” and they will tell you, ”An inhuman tongue stabbed me there. ” God pity the man that will take his tongue and stab a human character. The tongue is the cause of all the trouble in our homes. It is not what we do. It is what we say. A man unkind to his wife! I have known a man to be polite and kind to every man that comes into his store that day, just polite, and then go home and stab his wife with meanness. Brothers, haven’t you seen cases like that? Did you not see one just while you were brushing your hair this evening ? How" many tunes a good, painstaking wife has arranged all day to make home pleasant for her husband, and when he comes in she greets him with a kiss, and before he has been at home ten minutes he takes that tongue of his and stabs her to the heart. She goes up stairs and cries as if her heart would break. God pity a woman who has got an old bear for a husband. Now, bless your soul, if I am going to be kind to any woman on earth it is my ■wife, because I sort of like her. I can’t help it to save a my soul. I feel a good deal like the Dishman who said: “Faith, may I neverlive to see my wife married again.” Never let a word slip from you that will draw a drop of blood from your precious wife's heart. Many a man has .walked up and bent over his wife’s lifeless frame, and as he saw the glow of life and beauty gone from her cheeks, and as he dropped a tear upon the pallid face of his wife, has said; “God forgive me for every unirind word I have ever spoken to her, the best, the kindest wife that ever lived.” That is my sort of religion. How unkind we are-Sometim.es to our children. I was at a camp-meeting a year or so ago. Four or five of us were standing around and a little 10-year-old 1 lack-eyed girl said -something to hgr Vt!lef,and the parent turned around and. r.i the most impatient, ruthless way he took his tongue and hewed her literally

almost to the gritand. I looked around and said: “You inhuman brute, I would not hew my child that, way for all the world. ’’ You can almost crucify your child with one stroke of your tongue. Somh. of you not only chop vour children to pieces, but yon would die liefore you would go and beg their pardon. I know wliat it is to look upon a sweet child that hod its arms around my face for the last time. It is gone, but when it is gone I never want to go into my parlor and look upon mv child and say: “O,| how those icy cold fingers point my memory back to the hasty words!” 1 lielieve, with Josh Billings, we have precepts enough to run four sueft worlds as this. What we need now is a few good examples. You go home and wake little Willie, up, get him wide awake, and get him on vour knees, and say; “Willie, who is the best maij in Cincinnati?” “Why, yon, papa,” he will answer. “Willie, who in this World would you most like to lie like ?” “ Why, you, papa.” Poor little fellow, he ain’t got much sense. The saddest thing a father eVer said to me was this. I was a pastor then, and had preached pn “Home Religion” : 1 have been a pastor now eight years of my life. He said to me about four weeks after I had preached that sermon : “Jones, I have studied my children for four weeks in all phases of their lives, and I have reached a verdict.” “What is the verdict?” He said: “Afterfour weeks of study I found out my children haven’t got a single fault that me or their mother, one of us, has not got. A direct copy of my wife and myself our children are.”