KIND WORDS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 11, Issue 10, 11 March 1909, Page 397

KIND WORDS

Kind words are the music of the world. • They have a power which seems to be beyond natural causes. There is hardly a power on earth, equal to them. It seems as _if they could almost do what in reality God alone can do,

namely, soften the hard and angry hearts of men. Even quarrels give way to kind words, for an. unforgiving heart is a rare monster. Words have a power of their own for good or evil. Hence it is that an unkind word rankles longer in the heart than an angry gesture, nay, oftener than a blow. n d words are like revelations from heaven^ -unravelling complicated misunderstandings and softening' the hardened convictions of years. Why, then, are we ever else but kind? Kind in words? There are some difficulties. It is hard for a clever man to be kind in hia words. He has a temptation — a temptation bordering on the irresistible — to say clever .things, and, . somehow, clever things are hardly ever kind things. There is a drop ever of acid or bitter in them. And on the whole "to say clever things of others is hardly ever without sin. There is something in genius which is analogous~to a sting. ~ Its sharpness, its delicacy, its pain, its poison— genius has all these., things as well as the sting. A man who lays himself out " to" amuse is never a safe man to have for a friend or even an -acquaintance. He is not a man whom any one really, loves or respects. No one was ever drawn nearer to God by a sarcasm. Our Lord's words in the Gospel should be our model.