f the American forest will cease when all the timber and the dry
underwood is consumed; but you cannot arrest the progress of that
cruel word which you uttered carelessly yesterday or this
morning,--which you will utter perhaps, before you have passed from
this church one hundred yards: that will go on slaying, poisoning,
burning beyond your own control, now and for ever.

3. The third element of guilt lies in the unnaturalness of calumny.
"My brethren, these things ought not so to be;" _ought not_--that is,
they are unnatural. That this is St. James's meaning is evident from
the second illustration which follows: "Doth a fountain send forth at
the same place, sweet water and bitter?" "Can the fig tree, my
brethren, bear olive berries, or a vine, figs?"

There is apparently in these metaphors little that affords an argument
against slander; the motive which they suggest would appear to many
far-fetched and of small cogency; but to one who looks on this world
as a vast whole, and who has recognised the moral law as only a part
of the great law of the universe, harmoniously blending with the
whole, illustrations such as these are the most powerful of all
arguments. The truest definition of evil is that which represents it
as something contrary to nature: evil is evil, because it is
unnatural; a vine which should bear olive berries, an eye to which
blue seems yellow, would be diseased: an unnatural mother, an
unnatural son, an unnatural act, are the strongest terms of
condemnation. It is this view which Christianity gives of moral evil:
the teaching of Christ was the recall of man to nature, not an
infusion of something new into Humanity. Christ came to call out all
the principles and powers of human nature, to restore the natural
equilibrium of all our faculties; not to call us back to our own
individual selfish nature, but to human nature as it is in God's
ideal--the perfect type which is to be realised in us. Christianity is
the regeneration of our whole nature, not the destruction of one atom
of it.

Now the nature of man is to adore God and to love what is god-like in
man. The office of the tongue is to bless. Slander is guilty because
it contradicts this; yet even in slander itself, perversion as it is,
the interest of man in man is still distinguishable. What is it but
perverted interest which makes the acts, and words, and thoughts of
his brethren, even in their evil, a matte