The effect upon his tongue of the break with God has been radical and strange.  Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an unnatural sharpness.  Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that results in a certain slipperiness of statement.  Sometimes it has a bitter, poisonous, acid quality that eats its way into the words.  There is a queer backward movement in biting sometimes.  Withal a strange looseness of speech regarding the holiest things, and the most awesome truths, and the Holy One Himself.

The moment a man gets a vision of God he is instantly conscious of something the matter with his tongue.  The sight that comes to his eyes, the sound to his ears makes him painfully self-conscious regarding the defect in his tongue.  Moses found himself slow-tongued.  Isaiah felt the need of the cleansing coal for his tongue.

But man’s whole inner mental process was affected.  A peculiar sense of fear, of dread, is woven inextricably into the very fibre of man’s being.  His first reported word after that break was, “I was afraid.”  That sense of fear—­a horrid, haunting, nightmare thing—­has affected all his thinking and planning and every-day speech.  No phrase is oftener on man’s tongue than “I’m afraid.”  Isaiah’s classic utterance about ears and eyes has a counterpart equally classic from Paul’s pen, about the effect of sin upon man’s mental processes.  A few lines in the letter to the Ephesian circle of churches give a sort of bill of details of the mental steps down that slope from the Eden gate.

Paul is urging these friends to live no longer as they, in common with all the races, had been living, in “the vanity of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their hearts; who, being past feeling, gave themselves up to lasciviousness to make a greedy trade of all uncleanness.”  Here are seven steps down.  The first five are put in reverse order.  Beginning where they have been, he traces the five steps back to the starting point, and then adds the two likely to follow with any who persist past this point.

The start of all sin is in the setting of one’s self against God.  Choosing some other way than His.  It is called here “hardening of the heart.”  The native juices of the heart are drawn away from God and dry up.  In this Book the heart is the seat of both affection and will.  It is the pivotal organ of life.  Any trouble there quickly and surely affects the whole being.  Then follows “ignorance.”  Of course.  The heart controls both ear and eye, the two great channels inward of knowledge.  The hardening of the heart locks both doors.  And hard on the heels of that comes “Alienated from the life of God.”  That is, cut off, shut out of fellowship and intimacy.  Life is union with God.  Through union God’s life flows into us.  Union is rooted in knowledge and in sympathy, fellow-feeling, a common desire and purpose.  The man snapping that tying cord cuts himself off.