tual verities; it refreshes the heart as with living
waters when life seems all desert; it sets the heart in step with the
Infinite One who marches on through the ages.

THE ORTHODOX ACCENT

Perhaps the chief damage done by the confusion of tongues at Babel was
that it tended to a multiplicity of words. Whether it was so before
that time or not, it is certain that ever since there has been a
constant likelihood of religion and every other good thing being
drowned in floods of rhetoric. Where there are ten ways of saying a
thing it is so much easier to use them all than to do the thing in the
one way in which it may be done. Words become the chief enemies of
works. A volume containing all the words of the great Teacher would
look mighty insignificant beside the ponderous tomes of the modern
exponents of His teachings. That is because the minister has become
the preacher.

The tendency also is for laymen to prove their piety by becoming
teachers. It is so in every direction. Reforms dissipate into theses;
it is always easier to make speeches on the city beautiful than it is
to refrain from throwing the refuse in the street. We are all talking
about what ought to be done. Perhaps some leader will arise and
institute the order of the practicers.

Dreamers, philosophers, thinkers, writers have poured forth their
floods upon a thirsty world. But the only words that have been worth
anything to mankind have been those that have grown out of the
speaker's soul as it has been molded by his living and doing.

Because talking is so easy to the knowing ones it is not strange that
they should water their stock of superstitious prestige with the less
knowing ones from their reservoir of words. Then it is the most
natural thing for the glib man to set up the thing he can do most
easily as the thing essential to salvation, and thus a shibboleth
becomes the saving sign.

But salvation does not depend on any shibboleth. No man is going to
fail of seeing the Most High because he cannot render the precise name
by which one race chose to call Him, nor will the sun cease to shine
upon him should he seek the highest good in other ways than names. The
heart of the universe asks not that we be consistent with the
syllogisms of the past, but that we be true to the truth we know
ourselves.

Every man has some creed back of every deed; but when he puts his creed
up in front his deeds soon die. Where words reign they soon