utterance of virtuous indignation against evil from the
platform, or in the drawing-room, do not characterize the spiritual
giant: so much indignation as is expressed, has found vent, is wasted,
is taken away from the work of coping with evil; the man has so much
less left. And hence he who restrains that love of talk, lays up a
fund of spiritual strength.

With large significance, St. James declares, "If any man offend not in
word, the same is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body."
He is entire, powerful, because he has not spent his strength. In
these days of loud profession, and bitter, fluent condemnation, it is
well for us to learn the divine force of silence. Remember Christ in
the Judgment Hall, the very Symbol and Incarnation of spiritual
strength; and yet when revilings were loud around Him and charges
multiplied, "He held His peace."

2. The next feature in the guilt of calumny is its uncontrollable
character: "the tongue can no man tame." You cannot arrest a
calumnious tongue, you cannot arrest the calumny itself; you may
refute a slanderer, you may trace home a slander to its source, you
may expose the author of it, you may by that exposure give a lesson so
severe as to make the repetition of the offence appear impossible; but
the fatal habit is incorrigible: to-morrow the tongue is at work
again.

Neither can you stop the consequences of a slander; you may publicly
prove its falsehood, you may sift every atom, explain and annihilate
it, and yet, years after you had thought that all had been disposed of
for ever, the mention of a name wakes up associations in the mind of
some one who heard the calumny, but never heard or never attended to
the refutation, or who has only a vague and confused recollection of
the whole, and he asks the question doubtfully, "But were there not
some suspicious circumstances connected with him?"

It is like the Greek fire used in ancient warfare, which burnt
unquenched beneath the water, or like the weeds which when you have
extirpated them in one place are sprouting forth vigorously in another
spot, at the distance of many hundred yards; or, to use the metaphor
of St. James himself, it is like the wheel which catches fire as it
goes, and burns with a fiercer conflagration as its own speed
increases; "it sets on fire the whole course of nature" (literally,
the wheel of nature). You may tame the wild beast, the conflagration
o