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Conclusion - part 2
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A society is as good or as bad, as wise or as stupid, as its general conversation. Conversation is the bloom which brings forth the fruit. If it is indecent, silly, wrongheaded, secular, the fruits will be sin, secularism, injustice, and decay. If people may talk about everything except religion, then a creeping secularism will inevitably overtake their whole civilization. If people never rise above gossip, other people whose conversation does rise above it, will eventually take them over.
Conversation is the real lay apostolate. "Go out and teach all nations," said Christ to His disciples. His disciples are the arteries of culture and civilization, the arteries of His Mystical Body. But you and I, the ordinary talkers, must be the capillaries that carry the gospel of the good, the true, the beautiful to the outermost and lowliest members of the human race — to everyone we meet along life's way. Our ambition will be to live up to St. Paul's instruction: "Your manner of speaking must always be gracious, with an edge of liveliness, ready to give each questioner the right answer." The world is a collection of souls all groping for the right answer. As good conversationalists we will throw sweetness and light into the troubled anxiety of our fellow men. We will realize that most of them are knee-deep in problems of shelter and clothing, of food and health, of marriage and children, of salaries and taxes, and therefore we will talk graciously and sympathetically and interestingly about these matters. But in doing so we will not forget that these things are after all merely the shell of man's higher nature. We will always assume that every man is secretly trying to follow the gleam, is trying to fashion his character to the image of his Maker. Therefore we will talk about the necessary earthy things always with an eye to man's final end, and sometimes, in the right time and place, we will talk about that final end itself. If we talk like that, we cannot easily be tactless and offensive, and it is hard to see how we could be really dull or boresome. Surely we cannot then fail to "make friends and influence people," and, what is most important, influence them the way their better nature wants to be influenced. As a teacher of literature, I cannot resist the urge to end this book on conversation with a sonnet an English poet, Robert Herrick, a clergyman, put at the head of his book of lyrics. If one changes the verbs sing and write, to talk, it can most appropriately be quoted to describe the range of good conversation from what creeps, crawls, and marries, to what paints, speculates, and moralizes, from nature to the supernatural, from ourselves to our fellows — and never quite loses sight of the heavenly goal post. I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers; I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes. I write of Youth, of Love, and have access By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness; I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece, Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris; I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white; I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King. I write of Hell; I sing and ever shall, Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
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