Bible Dictionaries
Babblings

　　(1 Timothy 6:20, 2 Timothy 2:16 οὐκ ἔσται ὁ λόγος σου ψευδής, iv. 5094).

　　The standing type of the religious babbler is Bunyan’s ‘Talkative,’ who will ‘talk of things Heavenly or things Earthly … things sacred or things profane, things past or things to come, things more essential or things circumstantial.’ To this masterly characterization ‘of the evil excesses of some of the prophets, lunatic preachers, and loquacious hypocrites’ in Puritan times may be added R. H. Hutton’s description (Contemporary Thought and Thinkers, London, 1894, i. 257) of a certain rampant sceptic of yesterday as a man ‘hurling about wildly loose thoughts over which he has no intellectual control.’ These are the profane babblers of the Pastoral Epistles. They were not only unsettling to the Church-‘If I had said “I will speak thus,” I should have been faithless to the generation of thy children,’ Psalms 73:15 -but the unreal words corrupted the babbler himself, as the writer not obscurely hints. His nature is subdued to what he works among (cf. Emerson; ‘I cannot listen to what you are saying for thinking of what you are’).

　　To use unreal words, to be constantly dealing with the greatest things, and yet to be too shallow or flippant to realize their majesty, was, in the Apostolic Age, and ever since has been, the peculiar snare and peril of religious speakers, and gives point to the taunt of Carlyle: ‘When a man takes to tongue-work, it is all over with him.’ The Carthusian student who went to a teacher and got the text ‘I will take heed to my ways that I sin not with my tongue,’ found that enough for a lifetime.

　　On the whole subject Newman’s lines (‘Flowers without Fruit,’ in Verses on Various Occasions) are an apt and instructive commentary:

　　‘Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control

　　That o’er thee swell and throng.’

　　Literature.-In addition to the works cited above, see A. Whyte, Bunyan Characters, i. [Edinburgh, 1895] 180; J. Kelman, The Road, i. [do. 1911] 180; Joseph Butler, Sermons, ed. Gladstone, Oxford, 1896, no. 4.

　　W. M. Grant.