’The soul of religion is the practick part.’—­Christian.

Since we all have a tongue, and since so much of our time is taken up with talk, a simple catalogue of the sins of the tongue is enough to terrify us.  The sins of the tongue take up a much larger space in the Bible than we would believe till we have begun to suffer from other men’s tongues and especially from our own.  The Bible speaks a great deal more and a great deal plainer about the sins of the tongue than any of our pulpits dare to do.  In the Psalms alone you would think that the psalmists scarcely suffer from anything else worth speaking about but the evil tongues of their friends and of their enemies.  The Book of Proverbs also is full of the same lashing scourge.  And James the Just, in a passage of terrible truth and power, tells us that we are already as good as perfect men if we can bridle our tongue; and that, on the other hand, if we do not bridle our tongue, all our seeming to be religious is a sham and a self-deception,—­that man’s religion is vain.

With many men and many women great talkativeness is a matter of simple temperament and mental constitution.  And a talkative habit would be a childlike and an innocent habit if the heart of talker and the hearts of those to whom he talks so much were only full of truth and love.  But our hearts and our neighbours’ hearts being what they are, in the multitude of words there wanteth not sin.  So much of our talk is about our absent neighbours, and there are so many misunderstandings, prejudices, ambitions, competitions, oppositions, and all kinds of cross-interests between us and our absent neighbours, that we cannot long talk about them till our hearts have run our tongues into all manner of trespass.  Bishop Butler discourses on the great dangers that beset a talkative temperament with almost more than all his usual sagacity, seriousness, and depth.  And those who care to see how the greatest of our modern moralists deals with their besetting sin should lose no time in possessing and mastering Butler’s great discourse.  It is a truly golden discourse, and it ought to be read at least once a month by all the men and all the women who have tongues in their heads.  Bishop Butler points out to his offending readers, in a way they can never forget, the certain mischief they do to themselves and to other people just by talking too much.  But there are far worse sins that our tongues fall into than the bad enough sins that spring out of impertinent and unrestrained loquacity.  There are many times when our talk, long or short, is already simple and downright evil.  It is ten to one, it is a hundred to one, that you do not know and would not believe how much you fall every day and in every conversation into one or other of the sins of the tongue.  If you would only begin to see and accept this, that every time you speak or hear about your absent neighbour what you would not like him to speak or hear about you, you are in that