“Figs, the good figs, very good; and the bad, very bad.”
If you were going round the market in Guernsey, you would, at the end of summer, see baskets of a certain kind of fruit, which we never meet with in the markets in our part of the country. And that is—green figs. The reason is that they need very hot summers to ripen them, so they are only grown in old-fashioned gardens in the South of England, in the Channel Islands, or in Southern Europe.
They are a very delightful fruit, like a very small pear, and they must be eaten when they are just ripe; then, they are as sweet as honey, with a beautiful flavor that belongs to no other fruit. But they very soon grow rotten if they are kept.
Well, the prophet Jeremiah saw two baskets full of figs. One basket contained nothing but good figs, very good; and the other nothing but bad figs, very bad, which could not be eaten, they were so bad.
They were grown on the same tree, and under the same sunshine, and yet their fate had been very different. One basketful had been left a little too long, till one or two figs rotted, and then they rotted all the others.
And this is a fact worth remembering; the better a thing is when it is good, the worse it is when it is bad.
There is another fruit, which is called the medlar. When picked, it is as hard as a stone. When it is rotten, it is fit to eat, but that is all that can be said of it. It is just tolerable. But when the fig is rotten, it is so bad that it cannot be touched. Medlars are nothing very much at the best of times, and they are uneatable when they are sound. Figs are exquisite when they are quite ripe, and disgusting when they are bad.
That is the way with the tongue. When the tongue is good, it has the power of saying beautiful things—things that are kind and sweet, comforting and friendly, helpful and encouraging, great and wise, true and gentle. But when the tongue is bad—alas! there is nothing too bad for it to say; as a wise Christian once said, “It is full of deadly poison.”
A man once told his servant that he was going to have some friends to dine with him, and she must get the best thing there was in the market. When they came to sit down to dinner, she had tongue at every course. The master was very angry, and said that, if that was the best thing in the market, he would just as soon have the worst. The next day, there was tongue again provided. When the servant was called, she said that tongue was both the best thing and the worst thing in the market, for with it we could bless God, and with it we could curse men.
If you are keeping a basket of fruit for any length of time, it is necessary to look at it, day by day, and to throw out the bad ones, or they will make all the rest bad. So, if you would keep the tongue right and wholesome, you must be careful not to use evil words, or they will spoil all the good words that you say.
I heard of a man, the other day, who, when he was in a temper, used bad language, and people who had heard him give way like that could never forget it. And even when he spoke gently and kindly, they remembered the strong language they had heard him speak, and his better words did them no good.
Habit is everything in speech. Accustom yourself to use good words, and they will come to your lips without thinking about them. Don’t pick up the bad words that you hear; throw them down if they come your way, for they will spoil all the others. John Ruskin’s mother made him learn a great part of the Bible by heart, and that is how he was able to use such grand and beautiful words. Choose the best, and habit will make it the easiest.
It is the same with the ear and the eye, with the hand and the memory, and with every good power that we possess. The better they are when they are good, the worse they are when they are bad. Whatever is good, and keeps good, is likely to become better. If you like to use your powers well, it will be harder for you to do ill with them. If you train yourself to hear bad stories, you will not be satisfied till you hear worse. An ill-trained ear helps the eye into bad ways. Wrong hearing and wrong seeing make wrong memories. You can always make good figs bad by putting them with bad ones.
The best way to live is to learn to love the good, and the true, and the beautiful, for that keeps the heart right, and then everything is as it should be.