Smoke Screen – Sunday, October 13, 1940
The spoken and the printed word are much in evidence in our day. Like all of the tools and facilities of civilization, they are used both for good and evil purposes. Sometimes they are used to express a man’s thoughts, and sometimes their are used to conceal his thoughts – to cover up with a verbal smoke- screen that which he is really thinking and planning.
The oratory with which we are repeatedly bombarded, is often confusing, but not always convincing. One despot of our day advanced the theory that every time you say a thing there are some who will believe you, whether it be true or false; and if you say it often enough and emphatically enough, increasingly greater numbers will believe you until at length your following will be large enough to accomplish your ends, whatever they may be. And upon such rotten foundations have many ideologies and movements been built, all of which, of course, are destined ultimately to crumble, and all of which are also capable, in the meantime, of causing much misery and destruction and chaos.
Such flagrant disregard for truth and honor invite quotation of the forceful and indignant words of the writer of Psalms when who said: “Let the lying lips be put to silence which speak grievous things proudly and contemptuously. * * * For I have heard the slander of many: fear was on every side * * * Let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave-” (Psalm 31:18, 13, 17) So spake the Psalmist in his righteous contempt. We shall welcome most fervently that day when men shall be known not for the words they put out for public consumption, but for what they are and for what they are thinking and planning in the secret places of their hearts. And until then it would be well to keep in mind how copiously words are used and how flagrantly they are abused, in a world that needs desperately to pause and think, while yet there is time to think, without the confusion of shouting, and without a smoke-screen of insincere talk — words without substance.
October 13, 1940
Broadcast Number 0,582