News & Updates:

Like the website?
Recommend Us To a Friend

Conclusion - part 1

The conversation of the people — of the whole people, high brow and low brow — is the pulse of the level of culture and enterprise of a sect or of a nation. Conversation is the blossom of man's thoughts and ideas as they are about to go into action. What the scholar discovers in his library and the scientist in his laboratory only goes into general beneficial effect after all the people talk about it. The more Christian the world we live in is, and the more democratic, the more this is true.

A country may be said to have notable conversation when the best ideas of the libraries and laboratories quickly get into the stream of common talk. The brotherhood of Christ requires that any good ideas be shared as quickly as possible and become an integral part of all human beings. This integration is not accomplished until the ideas come out of books into the talk and repartee of the people. Galileo published his earth-moves-around-the-sun theory way back in 1632. Two hundred years later, according to one anecdote, the young people of Illinois still thought the earth was flat. When one young man, Abe Lincoln, in his New Salem store started talking of the round, re­volving earth, his young hearers shook their heads dubiously. But they repeated the strange theory to others — and now everybody in Illinois has been talked into knowing that the earth is round.

That is the way truth prevails: discovered by the "prophet," packaged to remote parts by journalists, taken up by the best talkers in every locality, until it finds its way into everybody's mouth. Only then is it fulfilled, only then has it been integrated into the pattern of culture of the people. Lincoln talked the same way about the equality of man and the wrong of slavery. By and by, so many people talked about it in the same spirit that a movement for a free country followed. Unfortunately not enough people did the right kind of talking all over the country — and so a long, bloody civil war brought about what free and vigorous conversation should have brought about peacefully.

One writer, Esme Wingfield-Stratford, writes startlingly, "The salon was the mother of the guillotine." He de­scribes how in eighteenth-century France, it became the fashion to talk philosophies, to extend, as it was held, the new "empire of light and reason." Established faiths and sanctities were questioned and ridiculed, and one might be godless if only one were not dull. The writer goes on,

The salon was thus the means by which the civilization of Versailles accomplished its own eventual downfall. The forces of authority were completely powerless to silence the voice of criticism; they might order dangerous literature, when they were capable of detecting its sting, to be burnt by a common hangman, but what booted that, when the elite of the class they were supposed to represent was in league with the enemy; when more subversive propaganda than anything that got into print was being disseminated by word of mouth; when the master iconoclasts were lionized and bidden to roar again? The salon was the mother of the guillotine (Good Talk [Lon­don: Lovat, Dickson, 1936], p. 223).

Related terms include how to speak mandarin and speaking activities.