Then look at the example of master carpenters, masons, roofers, and hatters.  You know how some of you go around the building, and, when the work of your journeyman and subordinates does not please you, what do you say?  It is not praying, is it?  Forthwith, your journeymen and subordinates learn the habit.  Hence our hat-shops, and house-scaffoldings, and side-walks, and wharves, and dockyards, and cellars, and lofts ring with blasphemies.

Men argue that, if it is right for a man worth fifty or a hundred thousand dollars to swear, it can be overlooked in men who have merely their day’s wages.  Because they are poor must they be denied this one luxury?

This habit becomes more prevalent because of the infirmities of temper.  There are many men who, when at peace, are most fastidious of speech, but when aroused into the violence of passion, blaze with imprecation.  The Oriental’s wife spoken of would not have liked her husband to be profane under ordinary circumstances, but now that the camels are gone, and the sheep are gone, and the property is gone, and the boils have come, she says:  “Why don’t you swear?  Curse God and die!” Others, all the year round, have not the froth of profanity wiped from their lips, but try to expend all the fury of a twelvemonth in one red-hot paragraph of five minutes.  A man apologized for his occasional swearing by saying that, once in a year, in this way he cleared himself out.  There are men who have no control of their blasphemous utterances, who want us to send them to Congress.  Others have blasphemed in senatorial places, pretending afterwards that it was a mere rhetorical flourish.

Many fall into this habit through the frequent use of what are called by-words.  I suppose that all have favorite phrases of this kind in which there is no harm; but a profusion of this style of speech often ends in bald profanity.  It is, “I declare!” “My stars!” “Mercy on me!” “Good gracious!” “By George!” “By Jove!” and “By heavens!” and no harm is intended; but it is a very easy transition from this kind of talk to that which is positively obnoxious.  The English language is magnificent, and capable of expressing every shade of feeling and every degree of energy and zeal; and there is no need that we take to ourselves unlawful words.  If you are happy, Noah Webster offers to your tongue ten thousand epithets in which you may express your exhilaration; and if you are righteously indignant, there are in his dictionary whole armories of denunciation and scorn, sarcasm and irony, caricature and wrath.  Utter yourself against some meanness or hypocrisy in all the blasphemies that ever smoked up from perdition, and I will go on to denounce the same meanness and hypocrisy with a hundred-fold more stress and vehemency in words across which no slime has ever trailed, and through which no infernal fires have shot their forked tongues,—­words pure, innocent, all-impressive, God-honored, Anglo-Saxon,—­in which Milton sang, and Bunyan dreamed, and Shakespeare wrote.