SAY SOMETHING!

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 744, 17 August 1929, Page 10

SAY SOMETHING!

THE QTJIET CORNER.

(Written for THE SUN by the Rev. Charles Chandler, Assistant City Missioner.) “ 1/V b,HY time yer opens per mouth yer sez somethink,” said an impudent young urchin to some very unsuspecting person within my hearing not so long ago. I thereupon began to Query that ejaculation. Do tee really say something every time ice open our mouths? I am afraid not. When something is really said, men will stop to listen, and having listened, they will remember and repeat. The greatest things that have been said are still re-echoing down the corridors of time. Great utterances, like snowballs rolling down a hill, will gather as they go. A snowflake becomes an avalanche. One man who is prepared to say something is greater than a multitude. Most of US are frightened to say anything until others are ready to say it with us. “If only we could speak with a united, voice,” says someone. “Say something yourself good friend," comes the wise man's rejoinder. What you say yourself will be far more valuable than the feeble utterance of a thousand ultra-cautious folk who only speak in chorus. When John the Baptist wanted to call some smug people of his day “a generation of vipers.” he did not summon a meeting, form a deputation. or put it in writing. He made it a solo. When the Master whose advent John came to proclaim called those same people “whited sepulchres ” He was. in the terms of modern journalism, making “good copy.” He was saying something. Religions are founded, civilisations are moulded, empires are built, and wrongs are righted, all by people who are prepared' to say something. They play all the solos in the grand symphony of life. What such, folk are saying today becomes the topic of general conversation tomorrow. In Parliament they are the statesmen; the rest are merely politicians. Every great religious and economic movement is. as Emerson has said, but “the lengthened shadow of one man"—the lengthened shadow of one man who was prepared to say something. NEXT WEEK: NEVER LET THE HOT RUN COLD.