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Spelling and arithmetic, history, etymology, and geography, are not tasks set over school-children by a hard taskmaster, who keeps them from sunshine and out-of-door play. They are catch-words of the universe. They are the implements by which each brain is to be trained to do great work for the one in whom it lives. What every earnest soul asks is not gold, fame, or pleasure.
By the standards of conventional propriety her act was the maddest folly; and yet she was still happy over it. There was one disquieting trait about him that made her a little uneasy. He used the catch-words of the street gamins of New York without any consciousness of incongruity.
So much for the familiar catch-words and their validity. A little discouraged by the fatuity of all lay discussion, our playwright may be pictured as retreating to the clubrooms of the American Dramatists and there finding his fellow-craftsmen all busy as bees on scenarios overflowing with not particularly original sin.
Some fell down on simple words, others handled difficult ones with ease and spelled glibly through some which many of the older people present had forgotten existed. Soon the class narrowed down to two. Back and forth, back and forth the words rolled until the teacher pronounced one of the old standby catch-words. One of the contestants shook his head, puzzled, and surrendered.
Phrases are the keynotes to life; they set the tune to which men insensibly shape their course, and so rule us for good and ill. This is a time of talk, and formidable is the force of phrases. Catch-words are creative; they do not prove that a thing is they cause it to be." "Then an unscrupulous phrase-maker may be a danger to the community," Beth observed.
Then the brutal minions of the law fell upon the hapless Toad; loaded him with chains, and dragged him from the Court House, shrieking, praying, protesting; across the marketplace, where the playful populace, always as severe upon detected crime as they are sympathetic and helpful when one is merely 'wanted, assailed him with jeers, carrots, and popular catch-words; past hooting school children, their innocent faces lit up with the pleasure they ever derive from the sight of a gentleman in difficulties; across the hollow-sounding drawbridge, below the spiky portcullis, under the frowning archway of the grim old castle, whose ancient towers soared high overhead; past guardrooms full of grinning soldiery off duty, past sentries who coughed in a horrid, sarcastic way, because that is as much as a sentry on his post dare do to show his contempt and abhorrence of crime; up time-worn winding stairs, past men-at-arms in casquet and corselet of steel, darting threatening looks through their vizards; across courtyards, where mastiffs strained at their leash and pawed the air to get at him; past ancient warders, their halberds leant against the wall, dozing over a pasty and a flagon of brown ale; on and on, past the rack-chamber and the thumbscrew-room, past the turning that led to the private scaffold, till they reached the door of the grimmest dungeon that lay in the heart of the innermost keep.
His powers of study helped him to "get up his cases" with crushing completeness. He quickly realized the value of catch-words, but his epigrams not being hardened in the fire of life refused to stick.
It was a vast weltering world, and at last I had a sort of leadership against the Gang you know it was called the Gang a sort of compromise of scoundrelly projects and base ambitions and vast public emotional stupidities and catch-words the Gang that kept the world noisy and blind year by year, and all the while that it was drifting, drifting towards infinite disaster.
It is no part of my plan to analyse this deplorable failure of the Churches as moral agencies. The explanation would be complex, and is now superfluous. The clergy were, like the majority of their fellows, obsessed by the military system and unable to realise the possibility of a change. In part they were deluded by the catch-words of superficial literature.
But he knew, scientifically, no more of what lay behind it all than a ploughman may know of what lies beneath the furrows he turns. Quimby Develops His Theories Mrs. Eddy took over the catch-words of his system and its loose assumptions, and a reasonably careful comparison of the Quimby manuscripts and "Science and Health" shows not only Mrs.
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