lamentable affair of sexual immorality. Then all the ordinary barriers of discretion and reserve are broken down and children young and old are caught in the mêlée and trodden underfoot and crushed into the mire of talk that cannot touch them but to stain. Then the anxiety to maintain our side, whichever it may be, drives us to wilful blindness of the things we do not wish to see and to gross exaggeration of the things we actually know. To look on on such a field and fray ought to be the best possible corrective for the habit of unbridled speech. But, in truth, we cannot trust to any such specific for the remedy of an evil that is so persistent and so epidemic. There will always be unbridled tongues where the narrowness of culture and the perversity of taste compel absorption in the petty round of personal affairs. Do not imagine that I am pleading for the conversion of our social intercourse into a solemn and majestical occasion for the discussion of the most fundamental problems that affect, but not too obviously, our mortal life. When I am taking mine ease in my inn or looking out lazily upon the western hills, I inwardly resent the conduct of a friend who proposes to discuss with me the foundations of the universe, whether or not they are entirely sound. Enough for me, just then, that the chair I sit in has a comfortable seat and four serviceable legs. The foundations of the universe must wait for some more convenient season to be tried. But there are times when it is good to brace ourselves against a friend in manly struggle over some problem of the outward universe or the inner life; and, for the rest, our talk is not shut up to the alternatives of the most weighty and the most frivolous matters. The best defence against the trivialities of social talk, that soon run out into the slush of gossip and the mire of scandal-mongering and the like, is a well-trained, well-ordered mind, a mind, a memory, full of the good things of literature and art and song. It is the vacant mind that is the devil's work-shop in this business. Those who are conversant with the best books or even with the ephemeral products of the time, those who love music,

pictures, who are engaged in public enterprises of great pith and moment, if now and then they are surprised into unbridled speech, have in their general course a security against it for which they cannot be too glad.

But, though this aspect of my theme invites to fuller illustration, I must break away from it into another, that described by John Henry Newman in one of the most remarkable and impressive sermons that he ever preached as “unreal talk." There is plenty of such talk. The words get away from the meaning sometimes, like a horse that has got away from the wagon. We wreck ourselves upon expression; and, forgetting that words are the counters of wise men, the money of fools, we heap them up as if, knowing them to be but copper coin, we could make payment with them for honor, love, obedience, troops of friends. Consider the effusiveness of social protestation,—women who do not care a nickel for each other falling into each other's arms with mutual kisses, as if that currency could be debased to any extent and still keep its value in the exchanges of all loving hearts. To shape the phrase upon the thing is required of the true poet. But life is more than poetry; and every man should be of Milton's temper when he determined that his own life should be a true poem, a mystic, unfathomable song. To this end we should shape our words upon our feelings, our convictions, our emotions, and have done with that effusiveness, that "gush,"—how often are the common words the best!— which is not only false and lying in its immediate character, but futile for the deceit which it intends, while it reacts upon the mind and character of the purveyor with deleterious and disintegrating force. In our social amenities, in our æsthetic admirations, and in our emotional religiousness, let us cultivate that habit of understatement which Emerson so dearly loved. The Old Testament command, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," was not, I believe, so much a command against what we call profane swearing as against too lightly taking the name of the Eternal on the lips; and Jewish custom went

so far in its obedience to this interpretation that the name of the Jewish God became "the ineffable name," a name not to be spoken, and how it should be spoken ceased to be a matter of knowledge among men, the vowels of the name Jehovah being supplied from some other designation of the Almighty. This was a foolish business no doubt; but was it not a more commendable extreme than that which is so common in our modern world,—a free and easy use of the great name once ineffable, or some corresponding name, that cheapens it for the imagination and the heart; a use much oftener rhetorical than it is religious.

And these considerations bring me to that part of my subject which has been particularly assigned to me by my remote parishioner, who is sorely troubled by the habit of profanity as practised generally about her, and particularly by those in whom her personal interest is very great. This is another habit of the unbridled tongue. Not that all profanity comes under this head. Men have been known to swear with great deliberation; unable, they imagined, to secure in any other way the emphasis they wished, and felt that they must have, for what they had to say. Of these was Wendell Phillips, when, telling how a fugitive slave had been treated in his own State and city, he substituted another word for "save" in the majestic formula, "God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts !" A friend assures me that we have cursing, and not swearing, here, and also in Governor Flower's expression of indifference to the votes, and in the emphatic refusal of the President-elect to give any pledges in advance of his election to the Tammany Ring. Such nice distinctions I cannot consider here, nor the morality of such ebullitions of men generally self-controlled as that of Washington at Monmouth, when with "the sword of his mouth he clove in twain that rascally and traitorous adventurer, General Charles Lee. The habit of profanity is a habit of the unbridled tongue. I do not mean that it is altogether motiveless. Unbridled speech is seldom merely for the love of talking. It is also for the love of being heard; of being

an object, and the object, of attention for the time being. There are men and women, and especially young people, many of whom get over it, the tenure of whose existence is to their imagination the social consciousness that they are on the scene. The habit of profanity is nourished by the same shallow source, which, although it is so shallow, never yet ran dry. It is nourished also by the desire and passion to seem bright and smart, which are peculiarly an affection of those who are not so ; and, then, sometimes we have not only an unbridled tongue, but, as it were, the reins are thrown upon its back and the whip is laid on, and the driving is like that of Jehu in the day of battle. The worst example in this kind I ever knew was a young man in Harvard College, the variety and ingenuity of whose profanity would have been incomprehensible if his father had not been the rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston, then of all High Churches in the land the very highest. For it is noticeable that, with the decrease in the number of things conventionally sacred, the range of the vocabulary of profanity is curtailed. We never hear in Protestant communities those curious profanities with which Shakspere's heroes swear: "Byrlakin," for example,— i.e, "by our ladykin," our little lady, the Virgin; and "Odsbodikins,”—¿.e., “By God's little body," the transubstantiated eucharistic bread.

It is evident that any judgment of profanity, any criticism and condemnation of it from the standpoint of rational religion, must be widely different from the judgment, criticism, condemnation, of it that pertain to the traditional standpoint. I remember well that in my boyhood I heard a sermon in which profanity was held up as worse than theft or murder or adultery. "For does it not," asked the impassioned preacher, "take precedence in the decalogue of the commands against those things?" It does come before them in the order of the commandments, but that this implies precedence in the degree of its importance there is no sufficient proof. The same evidence would make keeping the Sabbath holy of more importance than the moral virtues which

the later clauses of the decalogue prescribe. When I was in Charleston, S.C., in 1865, I remember that in old St. Michael's Church a shot or shell had gone through a wooden tablet in the chancel, on which the Ten Commandments had been written, and had broken all of those relating to men's moral duties, while leaving quite intact those setting forth their duties to God; and I remarked that those which had been broken were those for which our Southern brethren had cared the least. That was because theirs was a primitive society, and in every primitive society the duties of worship antedate and overtop the duties of the social order. Even, then, if the commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," did not refer to the careless use of the Divine Name rather than to what we call profanity, no precedence given to it in the Old Testament would as such avail for us. But, this being so, it does not follow that this habit of the unbridled tongue is one to which we can afford to be indifferent, or which we can dismiss as merely vulgar, silly, and inane. It is all of these. How intensely vulgar, how profoundly silly and inane, one can discover anywhere where young men are loafing round. Let young men who do not wish to be vulgar, who do not wish to be silly and inane, set a watch at the door of their lips. Our golden youth sink to the level of the loafers of the slums, when they permit themselves their desecration of the use of sacred names. But here, again, the negative prohibition must be re-enforced by positive helps. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," says the proverb; but in this business of profanity the mouth speaketh, for the most part, out of the emptiness of the head. And it is because our golden youth are oftentimes as emptyheaded as the youth who are at the furthest possible social remove from them that they emulate their smartness in this vulgar style. Knowledge, culture, intelligence, reading, something sound and sweet and good to think about and talk about, these are the prophylactics that will make the habit of profanity as impossible for the youth or man as