Words in Season
Learn to be slow to anger. This paragraph describes the even temper which is blessed to live with and blessed to die with. Temper is said to be nine-tenths of Christianity. What best proves a Christian is an even temper. It is told of a Japanese gentleman, who was led by a tract to renounce the use of intoxicants and to accept Jesus Christ, that the immediate effect on his temper was so great that his wife, who had often suffered from his uncontrollable fits of anger, said, “If this is the result of Christianity, I want to become a Christian.” When the missionaries afterward visited the place, they found her and ten other persons awaiting baptism.
As these proverbs suggest, the quickest method of overcoming and eradicating the wrong is, in the power of God, to cultivate the right. By this we shall tread the way of the wise that goeth upward toward the heavenly life of the angels, and we shall be saved from a hell of misery. See Proverbs 15:24, r.v. Philippians 3:20; Colossians 3:1.