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| Truth is More Important Than Expression. What is Meant by Strife About Words.
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Chapter 28.—Truth is More
Important Than Expression. What is Meant by Strife About
Words.
61. Such a teacher as is here
described may, to secure compliance, speak not only quietly and
temperately, but even vehemently, without any breach of modesty,
because his life protects him against contempt. For while he
pursues an upright life, he takes care to maintain a good
reputation as well, providing things honest in the sight of God and
men,2014
fearing
God, and caring for men. In his very speech even he prefers to
please by matter rather than by words; thinks that a thing is well
said in proportion as it is true in fact, and that a teacher should
govern his words, not let the words govern him. This is what the
apostle says: “Not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of
Christ should be made of none effect.”2015
To the same effect also is what
he says to Timothy: “Charging them before the Lord that they
strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the
hearers.”2016
Now this
does not mean that, when adversaries oppose the truth, we are to
say nothing in defence of the truth. For where, then, would be
what he says when he is describing the sort of man a bishop ought
to be: “that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort
and convince the gainsayers?”2017
To strive about words is not to
be careful about the way to overcome error by truth, but to be
anxious that your mode of expression should be preferred to that of
another. The man who does not strive about words, whether he
speak quietly, temperately, or vehemently, uses words with no other
purpose than to make the truth plain, pleasing, and effective; for
not even love itself, which is the end of the commandment and the
fulfilling of the law,2018
| 2018 1 Tim. i. 5 and Rom.
xiii. 10. | can be rightly exercised unless
the objects of love are true and not false. For as a man with a
comely body but an ill-conditioned mind is a more painful object
than if his body too were deformed, so men who teach lies are the
more pitiable if they happen to be eloquent in speech. To speak
eloquently, then, and wisely as well, is just to express truths
which it is expedient to teach in fit and proper words,—words
which in the subdued style are adequate, in the temperate, elegant,
and in the majestic, forcible. But the man who cannot speak both
eloquently and wisely should speak wisely without eloquence, rather
than eloquently without wisdom.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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