a talebearer, a slanderer, a backbiter, or a liar,—­when you begin to see and admit that about yourself, you will not wonder at what the Bible says with such bitter indignation about the diabolical sins of the tongue.  If you would just begin to-night to watch yourselves—­on the way home from church, at home after the day is over, to-morrow morning when the letters and the papers are opened, and so on,—­how instinctively, incessantly, irrepressibly you speak about the absent in a way you would be astounded and horrified to be told they were at that moment speaking about you, then you would soon be wiser than all your teachers in the sins and in the government of the tongue.  And you would seven times every day pluck out your tongue before God till He gives it back to you clean and kind in that land where all men shall love their neighbours, present and absent, as themselves.

Take detraction for an example, one of the commonest, and, surely, one of the most detestable of the sins of the tongue.  And the etymology here, as in this whole region, is most instructive and most impressive.  In detraction you draw away something from your neighbour that is most precious and most dear to him.  In detraction you are a thief, and a thief of the falsest and wickedest kind.  For your neighbour’s purse is trash, while his good name is far more precious to him than all his gold.  Some one praises your neighbour in your hearing, his talents, his performances, his character, his motives, or something else that belongs to your neighbour.  Some one does that in your hearing who either does not know you, or who wishes to torture and expose you, and you fall straight into the snare thus set for you, and begin at once to belittle, depreciate, detract from, and run down your neighbour, who has been too much praised for your peace of mind and your self-control.  You insinuate something to his disadvantage and dishonour.  You quote some authority you have heard to his hurt.  And so on past all our power to picture you.  For detraction has a thousand devices taught to it by the master of all such devices, wherewith to drag down and defile the great and the good.  But with all you can say or do, you cannot for many days get out of your mind the heart-poisoning praise you heard spoken of your envied neighbour.  Never praise any potter’s pots in the hearing of another potter, said the author of the Nicomachean Ethics.  Aristotle said potter’s pots, but he really all the time was thinking of a philosopher’s books; only he said potter’s pots to draw off his readers’ attention from himself.  Now, always remember that ancient and wise advice.  Take care how you praise a potter’s pots, a philosopher’s books, a woman’s beauty, a speaker’s speech, a preacher’s sermon to another potter, philosopher, woman, speaker, or preacher; unless, indeed, you maliciously wish secretly to torture them, or publicly to expose them, or, if their sanctification is begun, to sanctify them to their most inward and spiritual sanctification.