ions as a very poor thing, and
asked, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I command
you?" He aimed a parable at the hollowness of merely saying, "I go,
sir." But, worthless though such phrases be, the act which substitutes
professions for actual service is no trifle; and our Lord felt the
importance of words, empty or sincere, so profoundly as to stake upon
this one test the eternal destinies of His people: "By thy words thou
shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." Now, the
tongue is thus important because it is so prompt and willing a servant
of the mind within. We scarcely think of it as a servant at all: our
words do not seem to be more than "expressions," manifestations of what
is within us.

But a thought, once expressed, is transformed and energetic as a bullet
when the charge is fired; it modifies other minds, and the word which we
took to be far less potent than a deed becomes the mover of the fateful
deeds of many men. And thus, being at once powerful and unsuspected, it
is the most treacherous and subtle of all the forces which we wield.

And the ninth commandment does not undertake to bridle it by merely
forbidding us in a court of justice to wrong our fellow-man by perjury.

We transgress it whenever we conceive a strong suspicion and repeat it
as a thing we know; when we allow the temptation of a biting epigram to
betray us into an unkind expression not quite warranted by the facts;
when we vindicate ourselves against a charge by throwing blame where it
probably but not certainly ought to lie; or when we are not content to
vindicate ourselves without bringing a countercharge which it would
perplex us to be asked to prove; when we give way to that most shallow
and meanest of all attempts at cleverness which claims credit for
penetration because it can discover base motives for innocent actions,
so that high-mindedness becomes pride, and charity withers up into love
of patronising, and forbearance shrivels into lack of spirit. The
pattern and ideal of such cleverness is the east wind, which makes all
that is fair and sensitive to shut itself up, forbids the bud to expand
into a blossom, and puts back the coming of the springtime and of the
singing bird.

There are very gifted persons who have never found out that a kindly and
winning phrase may have as much literary merit as a stinging one, and it
is quite as fine a thing to be like the dew on Hermon on as to shoo