Bishop Butler would have been your preacher, and the sermon would have been a better one than I can ever hope to preach. I have not seriously thought of doing this; and, if I had, one thing would have deterred me. I have a parishioner who has never heard me preach, and she has requested me to preach on a certain subject, which is a part of the general subject I have chosen for my discourse this morning. This is going to be her sermon; and in Bishop Butler's there isn't anything on that particular aspect of the matter on which she is particularly anxious I should preach.

The Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha abound in good sayings about the tongue, its uses and abuses; and the most of them are in that line of literature which was dominant in Judea for some three or four centuries, the midpoint of which was the beginning of our era. This was the line of literature called Gnomic; that is to say, proverbial, aphoristic. The praise of wisdom entered so largely into it that the Jewish name for it in the mass was "Chokmah,"

Wisdom. The great examples of it in the Old Testament are Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, in the Apocrypha The Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus, which is also called The Wisdom of Jesus, the Son of Sirach; while in the New Testament its sole representative is the Epistle of James, which, if not written by James, the brother of Jesus, was written by some one impersonating him. The teaching of the rabbis and the earlier teachings of Jesus ran very much upon this line. But with so much warmth does James express himself that it is hardly to be doubted that, whoever he was and whenever he wrote, he had had such experience of loose and evil tongues that something very different from the calmness of proverbial wisdom got into and gave warmth and color to his phrase. "Behold," he says, "how much wood is kindled by how small a fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity among our members, which defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the wheel of our life, and is set on fire of hell." So strong his feeling was about the Imatter that he declared, "If any man thinketh himself to

be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain." It is from this passage that I have taken the title of my subject, "The Unbridled Tongue."

Judged by this standard, a great deal of religion would be vanity, even where there is no deliberate slander, no malicious misrepresentation, no wilful lying or bearing of false witness with a view to furthering our own selfish ends or compassing another's harm. Every community has enough. of these things and to spare. The secret of Iago did not die with him. Like George IV., he was "the father of a great many of his countrymen," and they intermarried in all nations, and their progeny is as the stars of heaven for multitude. But these things, however common, are not the faults of the unbridled tongue. The slanderer, the backbiter, the false witness, rides no runaway beast. With one firm hand upon the rein, he with the other drives his levelled spear straight for some open joint, and bears his adversary down; no mimic tourney his, but murderous intent, and he is happiest when he can come upon his victim from behind and deal an unsuspected blow. Such wickedness is not uncommon, and every day men as big-hearted as Othello, women of Desdemona's purity, are subject to its stress; statesmen are blighted by its curse; and humble village-folk, whose good name equally with the loftiest is the immediate jewel of their souls, discover that it has been filched by some malicious neighbor, and not enriching him has, in its going, left them poor indeed. But these are not the tragedies of the unbridled tongue. It would have been superfluous for James to say that the deliberate slanderer or perjurer, however he might think himself to be religious, was not so. He could not think himself to be so, unless religion and morality were as completely severed in his thought as in Benvenuto Cellini's, whose prayers and homicides and adulteries were a happy family, a society for mutual admiration. If many thousands have not so dissevered their morality and religion, it is not because the preachers have not given them

license to do so with their doctrine of salvation by faith alone and their contempt for the good works of morality as filthy rags.

But, in setting forth the dangers and the miseries of the unbridled tongue, I shall not feel obliged to confine myself rigorously to those that were uppermost or exclusively in the mind of the New Testament writer. Evidently, he was thinking almost, or quite entirely, of that talkativeness which the rough humor of our popular speech, that often goes straight to its mark, where that of our professional humorists fumbles in the dark, calls "talking with the mouth," meaning to imply a certain disconnection between the mouth and the mind, the tongue and the brain. There is much of this, a disposition to be talking abstracted from the consideration of what is to be said, with very little or no regard or thought of doing either good or harm. This "determination of words to the mouth" is equally the curse of our conventional "society" and the country-call or parish sewing-meeting, which has been the butt of so much cruel sarcasm and contempt. We read in the Apocalypse that upon one occasion there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour; but that would not have happened if one of these talkative persons, whom we are now considering, had been present. To such a one "a dead pause" in the conversation is of all things the most dreadful, corpse-like thing; and he proceeds to bury it under a heap of words, indifferent to their quality, if, happily, they serve the end in view. There are some sentences of Bishop Butler on this head that are so good that I cannot find it in my heart to substitute for them my own poorer stuff. "The wise man observes," he says, "that there is a time to speak and a time to keep silence. One meets with people in the world who seem never to have made the last of these observations. And yet these great talkers do not at all speak from their having anything to say, as every sentence shows, but only from their inclination to be talking. Their conversation is merely an exercise of the tongue; no other human faculty has any share in it."

"Oh that you would altogether hold your peace" he quotes from Job; "and it should be your wisdom." "Remember likewise," he says, "that there are persons who love fewer words, an inoffensive sort of people, and who deserve some regard, though of too still and composed tempers for you. Of this number was the Son of Sirach; for he plainly speaks from experience when he says, 'As hills of sand are to the steps of the aged, so is one of many words to a quiet man.'. . . It is indeed a very unhappy way these people are in: they in a manner cut themselves out from all advantages of conversation, except that of being entertained by their own talk. . . . But, if we consider conversation as an entertainment, as somewhat to unbend the mind, as a diversion from the cares, the business, the sorrows of life, it is of the very nature of it that the discourse be mutual. . . . Attention to the continued discourse of one alone grows more painful often than the cares and business we come to be diverted from."

...

It does not seem to me, however, that in these considerations, and those additional to them in the discourse of the good bishop, there is enough allowance made for a certain nervous volubility,—an affection which is not uncommon, and which afflicts the most timid and retiring people to a pre-eminent degree. It is their device to save themselves from the horrors of self-consciousness. They wrap themselves in words to hide the nakedness of their individual personality from the common view. They rattle on as if a moment's pause would be the signal for them to be turned loose, like Godiva in the story, without any banishment of vulgar gazers from the streets, and without the glory of her hair. It is very certain that there are such people, and that they call for pity rather than for blame. Their case is very different from that of those who talk and talk because they must be attracting attention to themselves, or they are miserable.

If even such a habit as that of these persons ended with itself, it would not deserve the stern disapprobation of the New Testament writer nor the serious attention I am giving

to it here. But it does not end in itself. When anything rather than silence is the rule, the stream of talk cannot very long run clear of any but the most trivial or indifferent matters. It will very soon drag in the gossip of the town, the personal affairs and characters of neighbors, relatives, and friends, the secrets that have been intrusted to us, and our own that we had better keep. The dread of being dull and tame is whip and spur to the unbridled tongue; and so the plain fact is decorated and distorted until its original semblance is entirely gone. Mythology is no ancient business altogether. It is as alive and rampant in our own time as in any period of the past. But, alas! it not only idealizes men and women up, but also down, and this much oftener than the other! It often seems to us, where we know the truth concerning this or that social matter, and are confronted by some image of it as distorted and colossal as the spectre of the Brocken in comparison with the traveller projecting it, that some one in the transformation scene must have done some lying of the tallest kind. But it is not necessary to suppose this. It is only necessary to suppose that one here and another there has improved a little

a very little — on the story as it came to him; this quite unconsciously. "Keep the ball a-rolling!" cried the political enthusiasts; and, from a snow-ball that a boy could throw, it became a bulk to crush a man. "Keep the ball a-rolling!" cry the unbridled talkers, and, from a mere nothing to begin with, their snow-ball gathers various dirt, as if it were rolled along the car-tracks of our city as they have been of late, until at length some man, and oftener some woman, is crushed to death-socially, if not morally

under the monstrous weight of the accumulated bulk of mere infinitesimal exaggerations.

Better, perhaps you think, a briefer diagnosis of this miserable disease, and some remedial suggestions. But it ought to be a remedial suggestion to look upon the matter honestly and see it as it is. The danger is never greater than when the public mind is generally engrossed with some