| Things to Live For |
Chapter 12 |
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There are some preachers who fall into a perilous habit of talking about themselves in the pulpit. They tell incidents in which they have had a more or less conspicuous part. They repeat what good people have said to them or about them, not even withholding the compliments. They take pains that their agency in important achievements shall not fail to be known, and are careful in announcing meetings in which they are to participate to say that they will speak on the occasion. If these clergymen realized that nearly every time they speak thus of themselves in public, they not only violate the spirit of the Master’s teaching, but also lessen their influence with their people and make their ministry less effective, they would forever seal their lips against so dangerous a theme.
There are men who seem never to think of anything save in its relation to themselves. A clergyman of the generation just past, as he grew old would attend the funerals of all the men of his own age, and would seek the opportunity to say “a few words” on the occasion. Instead, however, of extolling the virtues of the deceased, he would glide, perhaps unconsciously, into autobiographical reminiscence, telling the friends, not what the good man in the coffin had done, but what he, the speaker, had done in connection with him. Surely it is a sad illustration of the danger of talking about one’s self, that a man should become such a slave to the habit that even in a funeral sermon all he can do is to grow garrulous over reminiscences of his own life.
In all lines this tendency to talk about one’s self has abundant illustration. There are generous givers the worth of whose charity is discounted everywhere by the vanity which always sees that their gifts are well announced. There are writers whose finest pages are disfigured by the continual recurrence of the first personal pronoun singular. They write scarcely a paragraph in which they do not flaunt their miserable egoism. There are conversationalists who, whatever subject they discuss, always manage to talk about themselves.
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