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.
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