James 3:5

Jam_3:5-6

The tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things

The power of the tongue

I.

WORDS ARE THE EXPRESSIONS OF THOUGHTS. Says Max Muller, with concise truth, The word is the thought incarnate. The Greek word translated brotherly love was unknown until Christianity coined it to declare a new relation revealed to men. It depended upon the Christian Church to exemplify the virtue expressed in the word humility. Every word we speak has its history, and in its appointed time each has been added to the library of the worlds thought. Words are things, said Mirabeau, and he was right.

II. WORDS, AS INCARNATE THOUGHTS, ARE REVELATIONS OF CHARACTER, The morality both of nations and men is stamped in their words. The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality-, and without hypocrisy. The speech of every Peter betrays the man. Just as the despatches of Napoleon were of glory, while those of the Iron Duke centred in duty, so may their respective characters be known. He whose thoughts are on noble things will never grovel in speech. The Incarnate Word was compelled to reach men through their own vernacular, yet the purity of His teaching is as matchless as His own Divine nature. Humanly speaking, the voice of Jacob will always be Jacobs, though he dissemble Esau. Conversation touching impurity photographs for the world an impure heart. Ecstatic language, like purling brooks, denotes shallowness of thought. Repeated quotations of others opinions are proofs of having no substantial opinions of our own. Willingness to speak freely about others business is proof positive that we are not attending to our own affairs.

III. THIS POWER OF LANGUAGE DECLARES THE SOLEMNITY OF ITS USE. The spoken word, like an arrow from the quiver, has its mark. Said Hawthorne, Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A kind word has given courage to more than one despondent heart; and, struck by a cruel word, more than one gentle spirit has sobbed itself into the grave. Each word has a meaning, and the word is that meaning sent home to another--a word alive with fear, or joy, or love, or hate. It matters not as to their derivation, the words we speak mean ourselves back of them.

IV. THIS POWER OF SPEECH EMPHASISES THE NECESSITY OF SELF-CONTROL. Man is at the same time a king to rule his tongue and a slave to suffer from its abuse. The school of life deals with a double danger--the arrogant assumptions of self and the oppositions experienced from without. The first is illustrated in the control of the nervous horse held in with bit and bridle; the other means the steadfastness of the ship that no tempest can turn from its course. The helmsmans duty on the tongue is no easy calling. It requires strength to hold the bits. The small rudder firmly held gives the promise of safety to the ship.

V. OUR WORDS SHALL CONFRONT US AT THE JUDGMENT. We often unwittingly send them on before us, as though they were sand to be blown into the eyes of others, forgetting that they shall blind or bless ourselves. It is serious business to write a book like the Pilgrims Progress, or its opposite, The Age of Reason. It is serious business to declare in speech even the gospel of Christ. It is no meaningless service to expound the Bible in the Sabbath school. It is no less serious when every word of father and mother makes its impression upon the childrens lives, to see that such words are rightly spoken. (Monday Club Sermons.)

The lawless tongue

He speaks of the tongue. He compares the tongue to the helm of a ship. The helm is a little thing in itself, and still more insignificant when compared with the mighty fabric which it controls, and yet it holds the ship to her course. Let the rudder be swept away, or let any part of its gearing break, and the ship is at the mercy of the winds and the waves. Such is the power of the human tongue. Under the control of a sanctified will it keeps the man to his courses headed, as he should be, for the harbour of eternal repose. But the power of the tongue is much more apparent when we consider the widespread mischief which it may cause. A spark will be enough, and if the fire be once started who shall stay its progress? There is hardly a more hideous sight in the world than one of the burnt districts in our Adirondack Mountains; and the saddest thought of all is, that this fated district can never regain what it has lost, can never be what it was. And perhaps a lighted match carelessly thrown among the dry leaves was the cause of it all. Behold how great a forest a little fire kindleth! Many families have been broken up, many churches have been disbanded, many communities have been set by the ears--sometimes a whole land has been laid under reproach--by a word maliciously or heedlessly spoken. Then the injuries which the lawless tongue inflicts are for the most part irreparable. There is nothing so hard to heal as a wounded reputation--the scar will always be there--and at the same time there is nothing so sensitive. Scarcely anything cuts so deep as an unkind word. How many hopes the slanderous tongue has blighted I how many hearts it has broken I how many graves it has dug! And they are irreparable wrongs. We may bitterly repent of the sin committed against our brother, we may put forth our utmost endeavours to undo the evil which we have done, but unless we can bring back the dead we cannot repair the injury. And this evil tongue, which gives our brother a wound which can never be healed, is no respecter of persons. It spares neither age nor sex. Genuine goodness, exalted worth, a life devoted to charity, are no protection. Nay, the purest, the sweetest, the holiest, the highest, the most revered and the most beloved, are the surest to be assailed. There is no such joy for an envious man as to drag some great name through the dust. We may, then, well believe what St. James tells us, that the evil tongue is under a diabolic inspiration. The tongue of the liar or the slanderer or the profane swearer is touched by a coal brought from the pit. The man speaks as he is moved by that fallen spirit who wanted to be something more than an archangel, who wanted to be something higher than the Highest. He inspires the talebearer, the gossip, the heedless talker, the obscene jester, and, above all, the malicious libeller. And if this heedless talker, this man so regardless of the feelings of his fellow-men--if this man is a follower of Christ, then his evil-speaking is the profanation of a holy thing. To use this consecrated tongue for any evil purpose is like taking a lamp from the sanctuary to hang up in some den of infamy; it is a desecration, a profanation, a sacrilege in fullest meaning of that awful word. The tongue is spoken of in Scripture as the glory of our frame. It is the tongue which lifts us so far above the inferior orders of creation. They can plan and build, they can love and hate, they can sing and moan; but they cannot speak. They have their cities and governments and granaries; they have their armies and wars and conquests; but they have no words. The tongue arouses a righteous indignation, it awakens a holy enthusiasm, it inflames a people with heroic resolves, and it has won multitudes and multitudes more to the obedience of the faith. The tongue, as if on eagles wings, bears our thoughts and thanks and aspirations to the ear of our Father. And shall we let Satan take possession of this glory of our frame? Shall we let him use it to bring his nefarious purposes to pass--this tongue with which we bless man, this tongue with which we praise God? Shall Satan use it to hurt my brother or insult my Father? If the fallen archangel would spread a scandal, if he would wound some good man to the death, if he would send some saintly woman to a premature grave, if he would publish some deadly heresy or cover the slandered daughter of Zion with a cloud, he must have a human tongue to do it; and, to our shame be it said, he has never been hindered by the want of a tongue. I am sure that no man can better begin the day than with this petition: Set a watch before my mouth. Nay, even that may not be enough: Keep Thou the door of my lips. Let no word this day go forth from my mouth that can hurt my brother or harm the cause or grieve my God. The man who has brought his tongue under complete control has solved the great problem of the Christian life; nothing after that can hold out against him. (J. B. Shaw, D. D.)

The tongue

I. THE LICENSE OF THE TONGUE.

1. The first license given to the tongue is slander. I am not of, course, speaking now of that species of slander against which the law of libel provides a remedy, but of that of which the gospel alone takes cognisance; for the worst injuries which man can do to man are precisely those which are too delicate for law to deal with. Now observe, this slander is compared in the text to poison. The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is known: there are poisons so destructive that a single drop insinuated into the veins produces death in three seconds, and yet no chemical science can separate that virus from the contaminated blood, and show the metallic particles of poison glittering palpably, and say, Behold, it is there! In the drop of venom which distils from the sting of the smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf, there is concentrated the quintessence of a poison so subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and yet so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole constitution, and convert day and night into restless misery. In St. Jamess day, as now, it would appear that there were idle men and idle women, who went about from house to house, dropping slander as they went, and yet you could not take up that slander and detect the falsehood there. You could not evaporate the truth in the slow process of the crucible, and then show the residuum of falsehood glittering and visible. You could not fasten upon any word or sentence, and say that it was calumny; for in order to constitute slander it is not necessary that the word spoken should be false--half truths are often more calumnious than whole falsehoods. It is noteven necessary that the word should be distinctly uttered; a dropped lip, an arched eyebrow, a shrugged shoulder, a significant look, an incredulous expression of countenance, nay, even an emphatic silence, may do the work: and when the light and trifling thing which has done the mischief has fluttered off, the venom is left behind, to work and rankle, to inflame hearts, to fever human existence, and to poison human society at the fountain springs of life.

2. The second license given to the tongue is in the way of persecution: therewith curse we men which are made after the similitude of God. We!--men who bear the name of Christ--curse our brethren! Christians persecuted Christians. Thus even in St. Jamess age that spirit had begun, the monstrous fact of Christian persecution; from that day it has continued, through long centuries, up to the present time. We congratulate ourselves that the days of persecution are gone by; but persecution is that which affixes penalties upon views held, instead of upon life led. Is persecution only fire and sword? But suppose a man of sensitive feeling says, The sword is less sharp to me than the slander: fire is less intolerable than the refusal of sympathy!

II. THE GUILT OF THIS LICENSE.

1. The first evil consequence is the harm that a man does himself: so is the tongue among the members, that it defiles the whole body. I will take the simplest form in which this injury is done, it effects a dissipation of spiritual energy. There are two ways in which the steam of machinery may find an outlet for its force: it may work, and if so it works silently; or it may escape, and that takes place loudly, in air and noise. There are two ways in which the spiritual energy of a mans soul may find its vent: it may express itself in action, silently; or in words noisily: but just so much of force as is thrown into the one mode of expression, is taken from the other. Few men suspect how much mere talk fritters away spiritual energy,--that which should be spent in action, spends itself in words. 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 burned 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, it is like the wheel which catches fire as it goes, and burns with a fiercer conflagration as its own speed increases. You may tame the wild beast, the conflagration of 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; 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. Jamess 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? 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. 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 matter of such strange delight? Remember therefore, this contradicts your nature and your destiny; to speak ill of others makes you a monster in Gods world: get the habit of slander, and then there is not a stream which bubbles fresh from the heart of nature,--there is not a tree that silently brings forth its genial fruit in its appointed season,--which does not rebuke and proclaim you to be a monstrous anomaly in Gods world.

4. The fourth point of guilt is the diabolical character of slander; the tongue is set on fire of hell. Now, this is no mere strong, expression--no mere indignant vituperation--it contains deep and emphatic meaning. The apostle means literally what he says, slander is diabolical. The first illustration we give of this is contained in the very meaning of the word devil. Devil, in the original, means traducer or slanderer. The first introduction of a demon spirit is found connected with a slanderous insinuation against the Almighty, implying that His command had been given in envy of His creature: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. There is another mode in which the fearful accuracy of St. Jamess charge may be demonstrated. There is one state only from which there is said to be no recovery--there is but one sin that is called unpardonable. To call evil, good, and good, evil--to see the Divinest good, and call it Satanic evil--below this lowest deep there is not a lower still. There is no cure for mortification of the flesh--there is no remedy for ossification of the heart. Oh I that miserable state, when to the jaundiced eye all good transforms itself into evil, and the very instruments of health become the poison of disease. Beware of every approach of this! Beware of that spirit which controversy fosters, of watching only for the evil in the character of an antagonist! Beware of that habit which becomes the slanderers life, of magnifying every speck of evil and closing the eye to goodness!--till at last men arrive at the state in which generous, universal love (which is heaven) becomes impossible, and a suspicious, universal hate takes possession of the heart, and that is hell! Before we conclude, let us get at the root of the matter. Man, says the Apostle James, was made in the image of God; to slander man is to slander God: to love what is good in man is to love it in God. Love is the only remedy for slander: no set of rules or restrictions can stop it; we may denounce, but we shall denounce in vain. The radical cure of it is Charity--out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned, to feel what is great in the human character; to recognise with delight all high, and generous, and beautiful actions; to find a joy even in seeing the good qualities of your bitterest opponents, and to admire those qualities even in those with whom you have least sympathy--this is the only spirit which can heal the love of slander and of calumny.If we would bless God, we must first learn to bless man, who is made in the image of God. (F. W. Robertsort, M. A.)

Boastful speech

1. A usual sin of the tongue is boasting. Sometimes the pride of the heart shooteth out by the eyes (Pro_6:17); but usually it is displayed in our speech. The tongue trumpeteth it out--

(1) In bold vaunts (1Sa_2:3; Isa_14:13).

(2) In a proud ostentation of our own worth and excellency. It is against reason that a man should be judge in his own cause. In the Olympic Games the wrestlers did not put the crowns upon their own heads; that which is lawful praise in anothers lips, in our own it is but boasting.

(3) In contemptuous challenges of God and man.

(4) Bragging promises, as if they could achieve and accomplish great matters above the reach of their gifts and strength: I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil, &o. (Exo_15:1-27.).

2. Small things are to be regarded; and we must not consider matters in their beginning only, but progress, and ultimate issue. A little sin doth a great deal of mischief, and a little grace is of great efficacy Ecc_10:13). (T. Manton.)

The use of the tongue

Talk, chat, confer, converse. But dont gossip, and dont slander. It is not often that the tongue is accused of laziness. It is generally thought to be quite too busy. It is called the unruly member, and so it is, not because it will wag, but because it will not wag in the right direction. What volumes have been written upon restraining this most important article of speech! Quaint old Quarles says: Give not thy tongue too great liberty lest it take thee prisoner. Evil speaking, said the great Brighton divine--and he knew too well what he said--is like a freezing wind, that seals up the sparkling waters and tender juices of flowers, and binds up the hearts of men in uncharitableness and bitterness of spirit, as the earth is bound up in the grip of winter. Half the lawsuits and half the wars, it may be safely asserted, have been brought about by the tongue.

Husband and wife have separated for ever, children have forsaken their homes, bosom friends have become bitter foes--all on account of fiery arrows shot by this little member. And yet, rightly used, the tongue is a most valuable factor of society. The music of the tongue: has passed into a proverb, along with its kind and timely words, earnest words, sincere words, good words, cheery words, hopeful, helpful words. What a blessing it has been and is! God be thanked for speech, the head and heart utterances which have been the hope, the joy, the comfort, the warning, the help of all people, all races, through all the ages! Next to proclaiming the everlasting truths of a free gospel, and the raising of the voice in prayer and praise, one of the best uses to which the tongue can be put is conversation. There is altogether too little of it. People talk, and we know some who can listen; but conversely the generality of people do not. Yet no other form of speech is so interesting or so edifying. How Socrates discoursed--not talked only, but could listen, compare options, and discuss them! And Plato: is it any wonder that when he discoursed the Greeks thought that Jupiter had visited the earth? All truth is two-sided; and he who sees but one side when he might have both, is like the knights, each of whom saw but one side of the shield, and that the one hidden from the other; and happy for him if the issue be not so serious. The truth is, in the hurry and worry of our life of to-day--more hurried than ever before--the race of conversationists is fast dying out, and bids to disappear with the moose and the elk, which naturalists tell us will not survive the century; and scarcely anything is a subject for more profound regret. Conversation ought to be cultivated, and especially should homely people qualify themselves for conversation, and they would not be thought homely then, just as the brilliancy of Madame de Stalls conversation triumphed so far over the plainness of her features that Curran said that she had the power of talking herself into a beauty.

The great effects of the tongue

Boasteth great things--does not mean vaingloriously boastful--magnifying its own powers and its own doings. It rather means, it has great things to boast of--to boast of with truth. The object being to show the wonderful power and efficacy of so little a member, this is the only sense of the words that is at all to the apostles purpose. How prodigious have been the effects of the tongue! How marvellously has it both stirred and stilled the passions of men! How often has it, by a very whisper, infuriated millions, and roused a desolating tempest of popular commotion! and how often by the charms of its eloquence, laid the conflicting elements of such a storm to rest! The great things which it has done have many a time, alas! been bad things: and then, when it boasts, it glories in its shame. But not the less may they be manifestations of power. It has a power for evil, as well as for good: and more frequent have been the proofs, alas! of the former than of the latter; as, indeed, the corruption of our nature might have led us to anticipate. (R. Wardlaw, D. D.)

The injury which may be wrought by an insignificant thing

In the Fisheries Exhibition there was exhibited a cable-worm that had pierced through the Atlantic Cable and stopped the communication between two continents. It was a very insignificant little creature, but its power for mischief was unlimited. (H. O. Mackey.)

How great a matter a little fire kindleth

The gradual progress of evil

It is a great point of wisdom to know how to estimate little things. Of those which are evidently great every one can see the importance; but true wisdom looks at these great objects before they have arrived at their full size. She considers that it is principally in this earlier state that they come under the power of man, and can be arranged, modified, increased, or extinguished at his pleasure; whereas in a more advanced stage, they set at defiance all his efforts. Behold a conflagration! With what dreadful fury it rages! The largest houses are devoured by it in a moment! Yet this fire, which now resists the united wisdom and power of man, originated from a small spark, and might at first have been extinguished by a child. Look also at yon tree, which is now so firmly rooted in the earth, which rears its lofty head so high, and bears its flourishing honours so thick upon it! It was once only a small seed; it was then a tender plant, so slender and so weak that the foot of accident might have crushed it, or the hand of negligence or wantonness have torn it up. Thus does Nature point out to us the growth of the strongest things from weak and almost imperceptible beginnings. And if we look into the moral world we shall find that they are not there to be considered as of less importance. Behold an abandoned and hardened murderer, who is about to receive from the hands of public justice the ignominious punishment due to his crimes! Would you know by what means he arrived at such a dreadful pitch of sin? It was one little step taken after another which brought him to it! Contemplate also the unhappy woman whose licentious conduct has banished her from the society of her own sex, and whose shameless impudence makes her shunned by all but the most worthless. To what shall we attribute this dreadful accumulation of crime? Perhaps it may have been one, the evil of which is little suspected. It is, indeed, a small spark which kindleth such a fire. It may have been only the love of admiration.

1. Let me remark, then, that evil passions in their early stage do not wear the disgusting appearance which they afterwards do when they are carried to excess. The buds even of the most noxious weeds appear pretty. The most savage animals, while yet young, only amuse us with their gambols as they lie in ambush for their prey or spring upon it. But however harmless their mirth may then be, it is easy to perceive in it the spirit which by and by will tear to pieces with fury the quivering victim.

2. I observe, further, that the foundation of all great vices is laid in those little things which often are scarcely noticed, or scarcely appear to need correction. It is by little things that habits are formed and principles become established. They resemble the spots or eruptions which sometimes appear in the human body, which are of no material importance in themselves, but are of great consequence when they are considered aa indicating a general unsoundness of constitution. It should be remembered that principle is as truly sacrificed by little offences as by great ones.

3. I remark, also, that little sins are the steps by which we travel on to greater acts of transgression. Temptation has, in general, but little force, except when it solicits to those sins which have often before been committed, or which are but a single degree beyond what we have been accustomed to commit. Thus persons are brought imperceptibly to practices and principles which would once have shocked them.

4. It follows, therefore, that little sins are what, most of all, ought to be attended to and resisted. Watch against the beginnings. The spark may soon be extinguished, but the conflagration rages with irresistible fury. The first channel by which confined waters run over their banks may soon be stopped; but by and by it becomes a torrent which tears down the mounds and spreads itself with desolating fury. Here, therefore, religion will most successfully operate in restraining at first the evil disposition as soon as it arises; in watching against those little sins by which corrupt principles and corrupt dispositions are chiefly gratified and nourished.

5. This subject presents useful lessons of instruction to parents. They form the minds of their children. And it is too much to be feared that many of those unhappy persons who have been brought to ruin have been brought to it chiefly by the operation of those very principles which their parents instilled into them and encouraged.

6. The consideration of the subject of my discourse should lead us also to deep humiliation on account of our great corruption, and to earnest prayers for the grace of Christ to pardon and to cleanse us.

7. And as we see evil arrive at its perfection by small gradations, so let us remember that good advances in the same manner. We should not despise little things, either in what is good or bad; for he that despiseth little things shall fall by little and little. The character is formed very much from the repetition of little acts; and a progress in religion is made by small successive steps, none of which ought to be despised. Try to do a little, and that little will prepare you for more. Take the first step, and that will prepare the way for a second. (J. Venn, M. A.)

Small in origin, widespread in issue

A circumstance, probably without a parallel even in the history of the United States, is reported in advices received from Ashland, Wisconsin territory

(1888), viz., the destruction of the town of Wakefield by fire through the mischievousness of a monkey. The monkey was located in the Vaudeville Theatre, and had the freedom of the place. During the evening of the 25th, he got to some kerosene and covered himself with the oil. He then set fire to himself with a lamp which was burning in the room, and then appeared at the window of the theatre amusing the people. Presently the building was in flames, and the monkey running about in its frenzy set fire to other places. The buildings in the town were of wood, and the conflagration spread from place to, place, until the whole of the town was burnt down. Gangs of roughs during the progress of the fire commenced looting the stores, and in most instances the flames had scarcely reached the respective places before the robbers commenced sacking the premises. The owners tried to protect their stores, and in the encounters many pistol shots were exchanged. The proprietor of the theatre was a man named OBrien, and between him and a storekeeper named Lewis, whose premises were destroyed, an altercation took place, Lewis blaming OBrien for allowing the monkey to be in the theatre. OBrien became enraged, and shot Lewis twice with a revolver, wounding him mortally. (J. F. B. Tinling, B. A.)

Importance of little things

He that despiseth little things, shall perish by little and little. (Son of Sirach.)

From little to great

A fire at first no bigger than the flame of a taper may consume a mansion or a palace. One Roman soldiers torch flung into the holiest of all, burned down to the ground the temple of the Lord, in the days of Titus.

From little to great

As the smallest spark will, if duly fanned, kindle a vast pyre, so is the least element of virtue capable of growth till the whole nature of the man glows with a new warmth and brightness. (Philo.)

Act and habit

I knew a lad once, a pleasant, open-hearted, merry boy as you ever saw. He was grown old enough to leave school and go to work. Come, said a companion one day, come into the publichouse and have a glass. He held back for a minute; he had never done it before, and he felt it was wrong. Oh, come on! cried his friend, laughing, and taking his arm. You must not be too particular, you know. Well, thought the lad to himself, its only once and only just a little. It was the same thing over again the next day. Then two or three times a day, and still it was only just once and only just a little. Down this wretched alley, with its miserable houses and its miserable people and its miserable children, see what looks like a heap of rags. And now he lifts the foul face of a drunkard, a face so bleared and blotted that you shrink back from it frightened. Only just once, and only just a little--this is what it has turned him into. (M. G.Pearse.)

Influence of little things

A little wheel in a vast machine may, if neglected, throw the results of that machine into destructive confusion. A little miscalculation in some process of high mathematical thought may issue in an enormous and damaging mistake. A little spark may fire a prairie; a little leak may sink a ship; a little seed may hold a future forest growth of good or evil. A dislodged stone in your pathway may seem to you to be a thing too trivial for notice, yet it may draw down the notice of an angel. That stone may cause a fall, the fall a fracture, and the fracture death; therefore it is written, He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Some slight unchronicled incident in your experience may colour your life for eternity. Some noteless action may be the germ of a power that shall spread through all the earth, and fill all hell with heightened sorrow, or all heaven with praise. (C. Stanford, D. D.)

The tiny mother of mischief

The mother of mischief may be no bigger than a gnats wing.

Fire a dangerous plaything

A child playing with a box of matches caused the destruction of two hundred and thirty-two houses in the Hungarian village of Nemedi, reducing the whole population to bankruptcy.

The tongue is a fire

Sins of the tongue

St. James goes on to say that the tongue setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell. The word course is, in the original, wheel or circle of nature, and may mean the generations of men succeeding each other with the rapidity of the revolutions of a wheel; or the course of a mans life; or the circle of human affairs. Each of these ideas might have been in the mind of the apostle, because the tongue does set on fire a whole generation of men; does ignite the whole course of a mans life; and does make the circle of social life to blaze under its fiery appliances. But St. James goes on to say of this tongue, which is itself a fire, that it is set on fire of hell. The idea is that the tongue derives all its power to do harm from the evil influences which have their origin in hell. St. James illustrates still further the power of the tongue by comparing it with ferocious beasts and other animals, and pronouncing it more ferocious and untamable than anything on earth. You can sooner make the condor of the Andes perch upon your wrist; you can sooner make leviathan sport with you in the cresting surf; you can sooner make the boa-constrictor coil harmlessly around your neck; you can sooner make the lion so gentle that a little child can lead him, than tame the tongue; for the tongue, he says, can no man tame. What a strong declaration this is concerning the power of the tongue! Well may he say it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. If we look into other portions of the Bible we shall find further metaphors to indicate the power of the tongue. Job calls it a scourge or a whip whose every blow inflicts severe wounds on the character and leaves its purple welts on the lacerated peace and reputation. Daniel styles the tongue a sharp sword, a murderous weapon, which hews down those upon whom it falls, and drips with the gore of slaughtered innocence or virtue. Jeremiah says of the tongue, it is an arrow, shot out. A pointed arrow shot by wicked archers, against those whom they wish to pierce through with anguish, and yet themselves keep at a distance from the one whose good name they aim to destroy. St. Paul, speaking of the lips through which the tongue speaks, says the poison of asps is under their lips; and St. James says it is full of deadly poison. Such being the general outlines of the character of an evil tongue, let us now descend to some particular sins of the tongue, because only as we expose those sins can their vileness and influence be made apparent.

1. The first tongue-sin which I will name is that of tattling; by this I mean a thoughtless, trifling, heedless talking. There is a process in chemistry by which you can arrest the invisible gas, and weigh it, and separate it into its constituent elements; and were there moral re-agents by which we could arrest the gaseous tattle of these busybodies, and resolve it into its elements, its constituent parts would be folly, slander, falsehood, flattery, and boastfulness.

2. The second tongue-sin is slander. Under this head I enumerate backbiting, or speaking evil of one behind his back; defaming ones good name by absolute or implied censure; detraction, envious jealousies, secret whisperings, and innuendoes, and all other ways by which the tongue wounds and injures the name and reputation of another. The devil, then, is, as Christ says, the father of lies; and every one who gives his tongue to slander, and maligns his neighbours, or utters words of falsehood or detraction, comes into the class of those false accusers, those Diaboloi of which Jesus truly said, Ye are of your father the devil. The grossest kind of slander is bearing false witness: that is, saying a person did things which he did not do. This false witness is sometimes spoken openly, sometimes in secret, but always with malicious intent; and in every instance the tongue which utters it, not only setteth on fire the course of nature, but is set on fire of hell. Another way of slandering is to impute false motives to good actions. When we say of a liberal man that he is vainglorious; of an active man in Church affairs, that he is a Diotrephes; of a prudent man, that he is miserly; of a devout man, that he is hypocritical. Another way is to distort views, words, and actions; giving them a false construction; suppressing what might appear good; magnifying what might seem to be evil. This is taking a mans words and deeds, and, like Romish inquisitors, stretching them upon the rack until they become disjointed, and the once symmetrical form is all distorted and awry by reason of the unjust treatment to which slander subjects it. Another way is by insinuations, sly suggestions, expressions of doubt, intimations as to something concealed, a qualifying of the praise of others by some question implying distrust, or lack of confidence.

3. The third tongue-sin which St. James mentions is the fretful, scolding tongue. There are those who are always complaining. Even if blessings come, they murmur because they are no greater, and are ready to find fault, not only with all the dealings of their fellow-men, but with all the providences of God.

4. Falsehood is another grievous tongue-sin; and in this I would include all kinds of lying. The lie positive, and the lie negative; the lie direct, and the lie by implication; the lie malignant, and the lie sportive; every designed departure from truth is falsehood; and every falsehood is a sin against ones own soul, a sin against your fellow-men, and a sin against God, which He will punish with fearful severity.

5. The tongue commits a great sin when it is used in filthy talking and indecent speech. It is greatly to be lamented that even in polite, and what would pass for modest, society there is too much of tampering with this sin.

6. Another tongue-sin is boasting. The tongue is a little member, but boasteth great things. Boasting results from an overestimate of ourselves, and an underestimate of others. It is selfishness manifesting itself in words. It is the inflated mind, venting itself in windy words. It betrays weakness, littleness, ignorance, vanity, self-conceit, arrogance, presumption.

7. Another sin of the tongue is flattery, or the giving of undue and undeserved praise. The desire to say something that will please the person we are speaking to, or that will secure his favour, or elevate us in his regard; or the desire, perhaps, to have him reciprocate the compliment, and flatter us, is the usual motive for this sin of the tongue.

8. Lastly, there is the sin of profanity, the taking of Gods name in vain. With what caution use an instrument of speech which has under it the poison of asps! With what assiduity should we seek to tame that most untamable of things, that it rends us not by its fierceness, and ravin not upon society by its brute-like goadings! Yet we cannot do this in our own strength or wisdom, and our prayer must be that of the Psalmist, Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth. Keep the door of my lips. We must seek for Divine grace to aid us in subduing and controlling the tongue. We must seek to have hearts created anew in Christ Jesus; for if our hearts are right with God our speech will be also. (Bp. Stevens.)

The government of the tongue

The keeping of the tongue is one of those duties that entitles a man to safety from evil times, and therefore must now be urged as a seasonable duty. The wisest monarch could hardly govern a great part of the world; how difficult then must it be to govern a world, and that a world of iniquity. The tongue is a world of iniquity, a heap of evils; as in the world many things are contained, so in the tongue. This world of iniquity is divided into two parts, undue silence, and sinful speaking. These are the higher and lower parts of this world, yet quickly may men travel from the one to the other.

I. UNDUE SILENCE, WHEN THE TONGUE RESTS IDLE, WHEN GOD CALLS IT TO WORK. Our tongues are our glory, and should not be involved in a dark cloud of silence when God calls them to shine forth.

1. Silence is unseasonable when sin rageth and roareth. Oar tongues testify that we are men, and they should show we are Christians and in a covenant with God, offensive and defensive. By this undue silence we are injurious to God, in that we do not vindicate His glory, bespattered with the sins of others. His glory, I say, Who hath given us a tongue as a banner to be displayed because of truth. This undue silence is also injurious to our neighbour. We see him pulling down the house about his ears, and yet we will not help him; selling his soul for a trifle, and yet we do not bid him rue his bargain. It is injurious likewise to ourselves, for thereby we adopt the devils children brought forth by others, and set down their debts to our own account (Eph_5:7-11). This silence also leaves a sting in our conscience, which remains inactive in the hearts of some for a while; but when the opportunity of bearing testimony against sin is gone, it bites dreadfully the hearts of those whose consciences are not seared.

2. When an opportunity of edifying others inviteth us to speak. Oh, what iniquity is contracted by the neglect of heavenly discourse among professors! A dumb Christian is a very unprofitable servant. A philosopher, seeing a man with a fair face and a silent tongue, bade him speak that he might see him. When scholars or merchants meet, we know what they are by their discourse; and why should not Christians also discover themselves?

(1) Dumb Christians are very unlike Christ, whose ordinary way it was to spiritualise all things, and turn the current of the discourse toward heaven.

(2) Either there is no religion at all, or but very little, in that heart. Nearest the heart, nearest the mouth. If fire be upon the hearth, the smoke will come out at the chimney.

(3) They are very useless sort of people; like the vine that is fruitless.

3. Silence is unseasonable when our wants are crying. These should make us cry to God, like that woman who cried to the king of Israel, saying, Help, my Lord, O King.

II. SINFUL SPEAKING: WHEN THE TONGUE IS EXERCISED, BUT ILL EXERCISED; AND THIS IS A STRONG PIECE OF THIS WORLD OF INIQUITY. I may divide it again into two parts--one against our duty to God, the other against our duty to man.

1. Against our duty to God.

(1) Rash swearing by the name of God.

(2) A light, irreverent, and profane using of the name of God in common talk.

(3) Cursing; whereby we wish some horrid ill to ourselves or neighbours; but, because it is a kind of profane prayer, I speak of it under this head.

(4) Profaning of Scripture phrases, by jesting or scoffing on the Scriptures; or using them to express the conceptions of mens wanton wits, alluding to them in common talk, and the like.

(5) Mocking of religion and seriousness.

(6) Reasoning against religion, and defending sinful opinions and practices.

(7) Murmuring and complaining. Proud hearts make us fret at the dispensations of providence (Jud_1:14-16).

2. Against our duty to man.

(1) Idle speaking--that is, words spoken to no good purpose, tending neither to the glory of God, nor the good of ourselves or others, either in spiritual or temporal things. A gracious soul will beware of idle words, as of vain thoughts.

(2) A trade of jesting. It is not unlawful to pass an innocent jest, to produce a moderate recreation. But if a jest be allowed to be sauce to our conversation, yet it is impious to make it the meat.

(3) Lying. Pernicious; officious; the sporting lie; the rash lie, when men through inadvertency and customary looseness tell an untruth. This is so common that we may say truth hath fallen in the streets. Few so tender as to avoid making a lie. Consider God is a God of truth, and therefore it is most contrary to His nature, and the devil is the father of lies. It is a badge of the old man.

(4) Uncharitable speaking of truth, to the wounding of the reputation of others. It is not enough that what ill we speak of others be true, but the speaking of it must bring a greater than the disadvantage the party gets by it.

(5) Slandering or backbiting. Of this three sorts of persons are guilty.

(a) He that raiseth a false report of his neighbour (Exo_23:1). Here is a true son of the devil, with malice and lying in conjunction.

(b) He who readily reports it, though he knows it to be false, as readily receives, though he is not sure it is true.

(c) He that spreads it. (T. Boston, D. D.)

Sins of the tongue

1. The evil tongue is the silent tongue; it is wholly mute in matters of religion; it never speaks of God or of heaven, as if it cleaved to the roof of the mouth.

2. The evil tongue is the earthly tongue. Men talk of nothing but the world, as if all their hopes were here, and they looked for an earthly eternity.

3. The evil tongue is the hasty or angry tongue; they have no command of passions, but are carried away with them as a chariot with wild horses.

4. The evil tongue is the vain tongue, that vents itself in idle words: under his tongue is vanity. A vain tongue shows a light heart; a good mans words are weighty and prudent: the tongue of the just is as choice silver, but the mouth of fools pours out foolishness.

5. The evil tongue is the censorious tongue: who art thou that judgest another? Were mens hearts more humble, their tongues would be more charitable.

6. The evil tongue is the slanderous tongue. A slanderer wounds anothers fame, and no physician can heal these wounds. The sword doth not make so deep a wound as the tongue.

7. The evil tongue is the unclean tongue that vents itself in filthy and scurrilous words: let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.

8. The evil tongue is the lying tongue: lie not one to another. Nothing is more contrary to God than a lie; it shows much irreligion; lying is a sin that doth not go alone, it ushers in other sins. Absalom told his father a lie, that he was going to pay his vow at Hebron, and this lie was a preface to his treason.

9. The evil tongue is the flattering tongue, that will speak fair to ones face but will defame: he that hateth, dissembleth with his lips. When he speaketh fair believe him not; dissembled love is worse than hatred.

10. The evil tongue is the tongue given to boasting: the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. There is a holy boasting: In God we boast all the day, when we triumph in His power and mercy: but it is a sinful boasting when men display their trophies, boast of their own worth and eminency, that others may admire and cry them up; a mans self is his idol, and he loves to have this idol worshipped: there arose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody.

11. The evil tongue is the swearing tongue. Some think it the grace of their speech; but if God will reckon with men for idle words, what will He do for sinful oaths?

12. The railing tongue is an evil tongue; this is a plague-sore breaking out at the tongue when we give opprobrious language.

13. The seducing tongue is an evil tongue. The tongue that by fine rhetoric decoys men to error: by fair speeches they deceive the hearts of the simple. A fair tongue can put off bad wares; error is bad ware, which a seducing tongue can put off.

14. The evil tongue is the cruel tongue, that speaks to the wounding the hearts of others. Healing words are fittest for a broken heart: but that is a cruel, unmerciful tongue which speaks such words to the afflicted as to cut them to the heart: they talk to the grief of those whom Thou hast wounded.

15. The evil tongue is the murmuring tongue: these are murmurers. Murmuring is discontent breaking out at the lips; men quarrel with God, and tax His providence as if He had not dealt well with them. Why should any murmur or be discontented at their condition? Doth God owe them anything? Or can they deserve anything at His hands? Oh, how uncomely is it to murmur at Providence I

16. The evil tongue is the scoffing tongue.

17. The evil tongue is the unjust tongue: that will for a piece of money open its mouth in a bad cause. (T. Watson.)

The tongue a fire

1. There is a resemblance between an evil tongue and fire.

(1) For the heat of it. It is the instrument of wrath and contention, which is the heat of a man--a boiling of the blood about the heart (Pro_17:27).

(2) For the danger of it. It kindleth a great burning. The tongue is a powerful means to kindle divisions and strifes. You know we had need look to fire. Where it prevaileth it soon turneth houses into a wilderness: and you have as much need to watch the tongue (Pro_26:18).

(3) For the scorching. Reproaches penetrate like fire.

(4) It is kindled from hell. When you feel this heat upon your spirit, remember from what hearth these coals were gathered.

2. There is a world of sin in the tongue. Some sins are formal and proper to this member, others flow from it. It acteth in some sins, as lying, railing, swearing, &c. It concurreth to others, by commanding, counselling, persuading, seducing, &c. It is made the pander to lust and sin. Oh! how vile are we if there be a world of sin in the tongue--in one member!

3. Sin is a defilement and a blot.

4. Tongue sins do much defile. They defile others. We communicate evil to others, either by carnal suggestions, or provoke them to evil by our passion. They defile ourselves. By speaking evil of them we contract guilt upon ourselves.

5. All evil tongue hath a great influence upon other members. When a man speaketh evil, he will commit it. When the tongue hath the boldness to talk

49 of sin, the rest of the members have the boldness to act it (1Co_15:33).

6. The evils of the tongue are of a large and universal influence, diffuse themselves into all conditions and states of life. There is no faculty which the tongue doth not poison, from the understanding to the locomotive; it violently stirreth up the will and affections, maketh the hands and the feet swift to shed blood (Rom_3:14-15). There is no action which it doth not reach; not only those of ordinary conversation, by lying, swearing, censuring, etc., but holy duties, as prayer, and those direct and higher addresses to God, by foolish babbling and carnal requests; we would have God revenge our private quarrel. There is no age exempted; it is not only found in young men that are of eager and fervorous spirits, but in those whom age and experience hath more matured and ripened. Other sins decay with age, this many times increaseth; and we grow more forward and pettish as natural strength decayeth, and the days come on in which is no pleasure.

7. A wicked tongue is of an infernal origin. Calumnies and reproaches are a fire blown up by the breath of hell. The devil hath been a liar from the beginning (Joh_8:44), and an accuser of the brethren, and he loveth to make others like himself. Learn, then, to abhor revilings, contentions, and reproaches, as you would hell flames; these are but the eruptions of an infernal fire; slanderers are the devils slaves and instruments. Again, if blasted with contumely, learn to slight it; who would care for the suggestions of the father of lies? The murderer is a liar. In short, that which cometh from hell will go thither again (Mat_5:22). (T. Manton.)

Misuse of the tongue

Some time ago I saw a terrible fire, or rather the reflection of it in the sky; the heavens were crimsoned with it. It burned a large manufactory to the ground, and the firemen had hard work to save the buildings which surrounded it. They poured streams of water on it from fifteen engines, but it licked it up, and would have its course till the walls gave way. That terrible fire was kindled by farthing rushlight! Some years ago I saw the black ashes of what the night before was a cheerful farmyard, with its hay-ricks, corn.stacks, stables, and cow-sheds; and lying about upon them were the carcases of a number of miserable horses and bullocks which had perished in the flames. All that was done by a lucifer-match! In America the Indians strike a spark from a flint and steel, and set fire to the dry grass, and the flames spread and spread until they sweep like a roaring torrent over prairies as large as England, and men and cattle have to flee for their lives. And the tongue is a fire. A few rash words will set a family, a neighbourhood, a nation, by the ears; they have often done so. Half the law-suits and half the wars have been brought about by the tongue. (James Bolton.)

Mischief of the tongue

Give not thy tongue too great a liberty, lest it take thee prisoner. A word unspoken is, like the sword in the scabbard, thine; if vented, thy sword is in anothers hand. If thou desire to be held wise, be so wise as to hold thy tongue. (Quarles.)

A world of iniquity

The tongue a world of wickedness

It is a world of wickedness, because most mischiefs and greatest sins among men by unbridled and wicked tongues are attempted and performed. By the tongue thieves confer together and determine of robberies; murderers by their tongues raise up brawlings, the causes of cruel murder. By their tongues adulterous and treacherous persons first tempt the chastity of others, and with their words agree upon the wickedness. By the tongue lying, dissembling, flattery, and counterfeiting is committed. By the tongue slander, backbiting, swearing, blasphemy, and perjury is uttered. By the tongue false sentence is pronounced, either to the condemning of the righteous or absolving of the wicked, both which are abominable before the Lord. By the tongue men are led into error through false doctrine, drawn to wickedness by lewd counsel. Through the tongue, by false reports, private men and princes, kingdoms and countries, towns and cities, societies and families, are set at variance. By the tongue familiars and friends have been set at daggers drawn, and their quarrels thereby have ended in blood. By the tongue quarrels are picked, contentions caused, brawlings grow, to the great hurt of private estates, and the marvellous hurt and disturbance of public weals; with filthiness of speech it corrupteth, with dissembling and flattery it deceiveth, with lying and cogging it beguileth, with false reports it slayeth, with slanders it defameth, with vain swearing it blasphemeth, with enticing it inveigleth, with smoothness of talk it enforceth, yea, almost every wickedness among the children of men is either determined, attempted, executed, or finished by the tongue. Insomuch that Sirach, having great experience thereof, falleth into a large discourse of those evils which come of the wicked tongue, as that it hath destroyed many which were at peace, that it hath disquieted many and driven them from nation to nation, that it hath broken down strong cities and overthrown the houses of great men, abated the strength of the people, and been the decay of mighty nations; that it hath cast down many virtuous women and robbed them of their labours, that it causeth that such as hearken unto it shall never rest and live quietly, that it striketh deeper than any rod, and devoureth more than the sword of the enemy, and such like. (R. Turnbull.)

A world of iniquity

A new-found world, Not a city or country only, but a world of iniquity; a sink, a sea of sin, wherein there is not only that leviathan, but creeping things innumerable (Psa_104:26). (J. Trapp.)

The tongue defiles

Leaving a stain upon the speaker, and setting a stain upon the hearer, even the guilt and filth of sin. (J. Trapp.)

The evil tongue destructive

The tongue is a centre from which mischief radiates; that is the main thought. A wheel that has caught fire at the axle is at last wholly consumed as the fire spreads through the spokes to the circumference. So also in society. Passions kindled by unscrupulous language spread through various channels and classes, till the whole cycle of human life is in flames. Reckless language first of all defiles the whole nature of the man who employs it, and then works destruction far and wide through the vast machinery of society. And to this there are no limits; so long as there is material the fire will continue to burn. (A. Plummer, D. D.)

Bet on fire of hell

The tongue hell ignited

The tongue is a fire, but how is it ignited? Whence come the sparks which make it blaze so fiercely and fatally? The answer is here plainly given. It is hell-lighted. The devil perverted mans powers at first; and he still inflames the corruption which he was the means of introducing into our nature. He applies the torch to the combustible materials which are stored up in every part of our mental and physical constitution. He is still the great tempter and destroyer. He is an actual and an active being. His prison-house, the pit of hell, is a terrible reality. Men may doubt or deny its existence--they may regard it as a mere bugbear, but that only proves how effectually Satan can yet blindfold, mislead, hoodwink, as he did at the beginning--Thou shalt not surely die. It is the region of devouring flames, of unquenchable fire; and to it we are ultimately to trace those baleful conflagrations which the tongue is the instrument of kindling. It is here identified with the devil and his angels, for whom it has been provided, and who send forth from it all evil and destructive influences. (John Adam.)

Talk the devils ammunition

The devil keeps an arsenal in every mans breast, which he fills with supplies in advance of a siege, just in the same way that a great general places his stores in a country he means to invade before he marches into it his entire army. Satan is more artful, as well as more potent, for he gets inside of a citadel that he means to besiege, and lays there a train which in the moment of assault he hopes to ignite. The powder which he thus trusts to touch is passion, for he knows that if that once explodes, the whole edifice must go. Take the temptation of anger. Suppose an irritating circumstance occurs: it is silence alone that can preserve the heart from an explosion. If a single word is uttered, it is apt, like the making of a pinhole in a steam boiler, to cause the whole fabric to burst. Talk, to use the word in its popular sense, is extremely impolitic in temptation. There is a majestic power in silence, particularly when it is silence of that kind which stands as a suppliant before the throne of grace.

A fiery tongue

Of Dr. Annesley it is recorded that, taking coffee one evening at an hotel, he heard one of two gentlemen in the next compartment swearing violently in conversation with the other, upon which he rang for the waiter and ordered a glass of water. When brought to him he said, Take it to the gentleman in the next box. The gentleman was surprised, and said he had ordered no such thing. I thought, said the venerable doctor, gravely, to cool your tongue after the fiery language you have been uttering. (Baxendales Anecdotes.)

The tongue afire

Just before crossing the Hackensack River, on the New York and Erie Railroad, I noticed by the roadside a large sign bearing, in very boldly painted letters, the words, Shut your ash-pan. I wondered what the singular and impertinent counsel meant, when in a moment I found the train on a long levy wooden bridge. I at once saw the force and propriety of the signboard suggestion. Burning coals dropping from the open ash-pan of the locomotive might destroy the bridge, interrupt travel, imperil life, and cause numberless embarrassments in a financial way. So it is very important that the faithful engineer heed the sigfiboard, Shut your ash-pan. I saw in the admonition a reminder of the words of James, The tongue is a fire.

Setting on fire the wheel of life

The functions of a wheel, set on fire by the internal friction of its own axis, are deranged; and so the organisation of human society is disturbed and destroyed by the intestine fire of the human tongue--a fire which diffuses itself from the centre, and radiates forth to the circumference by all the spokes of slander and detraction, and involves the social framework in combustion and conflagration. (J. T.Mombert, D. D.)

The tongue captured, all else may follow

Let him who has one member belonging to hell take care lest he do not altogether belong to it. He is like a bird whose foot the fowler has bound with a thread: he can fly about apparently free, but still he is in the fowlers power; and if he does not break the thread while it is yet time, the fowler draws him to himself by means of it, and at the fitting moment catches him and kills him. (J. H. A. Ebrard, D. D.)

The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES

Jas_3:5. A matter.—Better, “a forest.” The picture presented is of the wrapping of some vast forest in a flame by the falling of a single spark. Philo uses the same figure: “As the smallest spark will, if duly fanned, kindle a vast pyre, so is the least element of virtue capable of growth till the whole nature of the man glows with a new warmth and brightness.”

Jas_3:6. Course of nature.—Wheel of birth; R.V. margin, “whole sphere of life.” The wheel of life which begins rolling at birth, and continues rolling until death. “From the beginning of life till its close, the tongue is an ever-present inflammatory element of evil.” Hell.—Gehenna; the place of torment, as distinguished from Hades, the abode of the dead, or the unseen world.

Jas_3:7. Serpents.—Or, more generally, “creeping things.” “Kind of beasts” would be better “nature of beasts”; then “mankind” would read “by the nature of man.” Every nature is continually tamed, and is kept in a state of subjection by the human race.

Jas_3:8. Unruly evil.—ἀκατάσχετον, irrestrainable. Alex. and Vatican manuscripts read ἀκατάστατον, a restless, inconstant evil. Prefer “uncontrollable.” Deadly.—Death-bringing.

Jas_3:10. So to be.—“These things ought not to occur in this way.”

Jas_3:11. Send forth.—Or, “spout out.”

Jas_3:12.—The better manuscripts render thus, “Neither can a salt [spring] yield sweet water.”

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Jas_3:5-12

The Agency of the Tongue for Good and Evil.—The tongue, as a bodily organ, has no moral quality, good or bad. It is the organ of speech, and does but help to express thought and feeling in language, by means of which one man may influence another. The language-power is man’s dignity and man’s peril. So truly is it the expression of a man for apprehension by other men, that it can be said, “By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” In this paragraph St. James reminds us in what different spheres the tongue works, and what different things, good and bad, it can do. Evidently it is so supremely important an agency in our lives, that every effort should be made to have it, and to keep it, in full control. “The tongue is the best part of man, and also his worst; with good government none is more useful; and without it, none more mischievous.”

I. The tongue is man’s agency for boasting.—“And boasteth great things”; or, “vaunts great words which bring about great acts of mischief.” Boasting is the expression of pride and self-conceit; and it implies that a man fails to see things as they really are, but swells them out by his imagination, so that they may increase his self-importance. The boaster

(1) injures himself by his boasting, for it is a habit that grows by exercise;

(2) does mischief to others, because undue praise of self always tries to gain support in the disparagement of other people—and men are always injured when they are compelled to take up false impressions;

(3) dishonours God, who “desireth truth in the inward parts,” and cannot allow His work in a man to be exaggerated, misrepresented, and therefore misjudged. Boasting is one of the surest signs of moral weakness, Those who give way to it are altogether untrustworthy in the relations of life. No one feels safe in having dealings with them.

II. The tongue is man’s agency for inciting to moral evil.—“The tongue is a fire.” A spark of fire which, if only it fall in fitting place, will do fearfully destructive work.

1. The unclean word may burn up innocence in other souls.

2. The slanderous word may burn up the reputations of other people.

3. The critical word may burn up trustfulness in other people.

4. The doubtful word may burn up honesty in other people. A word spoken, or heard, in early life may work as a deadly poison through a whole life. The serpent in Eden incited Eve to disobey with his words. “Every idle [mischievous] word that man shall speak, he shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.”

III. The tongue is man’s agency for doing wild and wicked things.—“A world of iniquity among our members.” With this should be taken the untamableness of the tongue. It is a wild animal, that even at its best, and in the best men, is but imperfectly brought into control. “Three temptations to ‘smite with the tongue are specially powerful for evil, viz. as a relief from passion, as a gratification of spite, as revenge for wrong. The first is experienced by hot-tempered folk; the second yielded to by the malicious; the third welcomed by the otherwise weak and defenceless; and all of us at times are in each of these divisions.” See the prayer of the Catechism, that we may be kept from “evil-speaking, lying, and slandering.” “The tongue is an unruly [restless] evil, full of deadly poison.” What evil is wrought by the slanderer, traducer, liar, foul-mouthed, and blasphemer!

IV. The tongue is man’s agency for both blessing and cursing.—It is not St. James’s immediate purpose to show how much good can be accomplished by the tongue, when it is in fitting Christian control. He is dealing with the unrestrained tongue, as that is suggested by the free talk of the would-be teachers. He is showing what lengths the evil may run to when the curb is taken off. Here he is showing what contrasted things it can do. It can “bless God,” and at the very same time “curse men.” What a strange and unreasonable thing that appears to be! How impossible it should be to Christian disciples, whose fountain has been cleansed, whose will is renewed, and who ought to have only pure, loving, worthy things for which they want the tongue to be their agency. Jas_3:11 is probably “a vivid picture of the mineral springs abounding in the Jordan Valley, near the Dead Sea; with which might be contrasted the clear and sparkling rivulets of the north, fed by the snows of Lebanon. Nature had no confusion in her plans; and thus to pour out cursing and blessing from the same lips were unnatural indeed.” Get the control which makes the tongue utter blessing, and it will cease to curse. Fail to get the control, and let the tongue curse; it will then very soon cease to be able to bless.

SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES

Jas_3:5-6. The Tongue.—In the development of Christian truth a peculiar office was assigned to the apostle James. It was given to St. Paul to proclaim Christianity as the spiritual law of liberty, and to exhibit faith as the most active principle within the breast of man. It was St. John’s to say that the deepest quality in the bosom of Deity is love, and to assert that the life of God in man is love. It was the office of St. James to assert the necessity of moral rectitude: his very name marked him out peculiarly for this office; he was emphatically called “the Just”; integrity was his peculiar characteristic. A man singularly honest, earnest, real. Accordingly, if you read through his whole epistle, you will find it is, from first to last, one continued vindication of the first principles of morality against the semblances of religion. This is the mind breathing through it all: all this talk about religion, and spirituality—words, words, words—nay, let us have realities. How can we speak of the gospel, when the first principles of morality are forgotten? when Christians are excusing themselves, and slandering one another? How can the superstructure of love and faith be built, when the very foundations of human character—justice, mercy, truth—have not been laid?

I. The licence of the tongue.—

1. The first licence given to the tongue is slander. It is compared to poison. The deadliest poisons are those for which no test is known. In the drop of venom which distils from the sting of the smallest insect, or the spikes of the nettle-leaf, there is concentrated the quintessence of a poison so subtle that the microscope cannot distinguish it, and yet so virulent that it can inflame the blood, irritate the whole constitution, and convert day and night into restless misery. In St. James’s day, as now, idle men and women went about from house to house, dropping slander as they went, and yet you could not take up that slander and detect the falsehood there.

2. The second licence given to the tongue is in the way of persecution: “therewith curse we men.” Even in St. James’s day that spirit had begun. Christians persecuted Christians. From that day it has continued, through long centuries, up to the present time. Persecution is that which affixes penalties upon views held, instead of upon life led.

II. The guilt of this licence.—

1. The first evil consequence is the harm that a man does himself. Calumny effects a dissipation of spiritual energy. Few men suspect how much mere talk fritters away spiritual energy—that which should be spent in action spends itself in words. In these days of loud profession, and bitter, fluent condemnation, it is well for us to learn the Divine force of silence.

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. Neither can you stop the consequences of a slander. It is like the Greek fire used in ancient warfare, which burned unquenched beneath the water; or like the weeds which, when you have extirpated them in one place, are sprouting forth vigorously in another spot.

3. The third element of guilt lies in the unnaturalness of the calumny. “My brethren, these things ought not so to be”; ought not—that is, they are unnatural. The truest definition of evil is that which represents it as something contrary to nature; evil is evil, because it is unnatural. The teaching of Christ was the recall of man to nature. Christianity is the regeneration of our whole nature, not the destruction of one atom of it. The office of the tongue is to bless. Slander is guilty, because it contradicts this.

4. The fourth point of guilt is the diabolical character of slander. The tongue is “set on fire of hell.” This is no mere strong expression; it contains deep and emphatic meaning. Slander is diabolical. “Devil,” in the original, means traducer or slanderer. Beware of that habit which becomes the slanderer’s life, of magnifying every speck of evil and closing the eye to goodness—till at last men arrive at the state in which generous, universal love (which is heaven) becomes impossible, and a suspicious, universal hate takes possession of the heart, and that is hell. Love is the only remedy for slander.—F. W. Robertson.

Jas_3:6. The Evils of the Tongue.—Amongst the most important of all subjects must be reckoned the government of the tongue. The consideration of it is well calculated to convince the profane, pluck off the mask from the hypocrites, humble the sincere, and to edify every description of persons. In these words we have given us such a description of the tongue, as, if it had proceeded from any other than an inspired writer, would have been deemed a libel upon human nature.

I. The true character of the human tongue.—

1. It is a fire. Fire, in its original formation, was intended for the good of man; if subordinate, it is highly beneficial, but its tendency is to consume and to destroy. So with the tongue. Even the smallest spark is capable of producing such incalculable mischief as may be beyond the power of man to repair. So a single motion of the tongue may irritate and inflame a man, and change him instantly into a savage beast and an incarnate devil.

2. It is a world of iniquity. There is not any sin which does not stand in the nearest connection with the tongue, and employ it in its service. Search the long catalogue of sins against God, against our neighbour, against ourselves, and there will not be found one that has not the tongue as its principal ally.

II. Its effects.—

1. Defiling. Sin in the heart defiles the soul; when uttered by the lips, “it defileth the whole body.” Utterance gives solidity and permanency to that which before existed in idea. Though all communications are not equally polluting, yet there is a stain left, which nothing but the Redeemer’s blood can ever wash away.

2. Destruction. Look at individuals; what malignant passions it has kindled in them! Visit families; what animosities and inextinguishable feuds! Survey churches, nations; it has kindled flames of war, and spread desolation.

III. The reason of its producing these effects.—

1. It is “set on fire of hell.” Satan is the source and author of all the evils that proceed from the tongue. The wickedness of the heart may account for much; but if the flames were not fanned by Satanic agency, they would not rage with such an irresistible force, and to such a boundless extent.

1. How great must be the evils of the human heart. If God should leave us without restraint, there is not one of us but would proclaim all the evil of his heart, as much as the most loathsome sensualist or most daring blasphemer.

2. How much do we need the influences of the Holy Spirit. It is absolutely impossible for man to tame this unruly member. The Holy Spirit will help our infirmities. Christ will give us His Spirit if we call upon Him.

3. How careful should we be of every word we utter. Immense injury may we do by one unguarded word. We may take away a character which we can never restore, or inflict a wound we can never heal. We must account for every idle word. Let our tongue be as choice silver, or a tree of life, to enrich and comfort the Lord’s people. Let our “speech be always with grace seasoned with salt,” for God’s honour and man’s good.—C. Simeon, M.A.

The Sins of the Tongue.

I. Among the many sins of the tongue are idle words. “Avoid foolish talking.” A wise man “sets a watch on the door of his lips” even when he utters a pleasantry.

II. Malicious words are cousins in sin to idle words. Kind words are the oil that lubricates every-day inter-course. There was an ancient male-diction that the tongue of the slanderer should be cut out. A slanderer is a public enemy.

III. A filthy imagination comes out on the tongue.

IV. There is profane swearing. This is the most gratuitous and inexcusable of sins. The man who swears turns speech into a curse, and before his time rehearses the dialect of hell.—Theodore L. Cuyler.

Defiling Power of the Tongue.—There is a great pollution and defilement in sins of the tongue. Defiling passions are kindled, vented, and cherished by this unruly member. And the whole body is often drawn into sin and guilt by the tongue. The snares into which men are sometimes led by the tongue are insufferable to themselves and destructive of others. The affairs of mankind and of societies are often thrown into confusion, and all is set aflame, by the tongues of men. There is no age of the world, nor any condition of life, private or public, but will afford examples of this. Where the tongue is guided and wrought upon by a fire from heaven, there it kindleth good thoughts, holy affections, and ardent devotions. But when it is set on fire of hell, as in all undue heats it is, there it is mischievous, producing rage and hatred, and those things which serve the purposes of the devil. As therefore you would dread fires and flames, you should dread contentions, revilings, slanders, lies, and everything that would kindle the fire of wrath in your own spirit, or in the spirit of others.—Matthew Henry.

Jas_3:8. The Taming of the Tongue.—Here is a single position, guarded with a double reason. The position is—“No man can tame the tongue.” The reasons:

1. It is unruly.

2. It is full of deadly poison. Each reason hath a terrible second. The evil hath for its second “unruliness”; the poisonfulness hath “deadly.” The fort is so barricaded that it is hard scaling it; the refractory rebel so guarded with evil and poison, so warded with unruly and deadly, as if it were with giants in an enchanted tower, as they fabulate, that no man can tame it.

I. The nature of the thing to be tamed.—The tongue, which is

(1) a member; and

(2) an excellent, necessary, little, and singular member.

II. The difficulty of accomplishing this work of taming.—A threefold instruction for the use of the tongue is insinuated to us.

1. Let us not dare to pull up God’s mounds; nor like wild beasts, break through the circular limits wherein He hath cooped us. “Weigh thy words in a balance, and make a door and bar for thy mouth.” Let thy words be few, true, weighty, that thou mayest not speak much, not falsely, not vainly. Remember the bounds.

2. Since God hath made the tongue one, have not thou a tongue and a tongue. Some are double-tongued, as they are double-hearted. The slanderer, the flatterer, the swearer, the talebearer, are monstrous men; as misshapen stigmatics as if they had two tongues and but one eye, two heads and but one foot.

3. Do not put all strength into the tongue, to the weakening and enervation of the other parts. He that made the tongue can tame the tongue. He that gave man a tongue to speak can give him a tongue to speak well. Let us move our tongue to intreat help for our tongues; and, according to their office, let us set them on work to speak for themselves. We must not be idle ourselves; the difficulty must spur us to more earnest contention. Look how far the heart is good; so far the tongue. If the heart believe, the tongue will confess; if the heart be meek, the tongue will be gentle; if the heart be angry, the tongue will be bitter. The tongue is but the hand without to show how the clock goes within. A vain tongue discovers a vain heart. “The heart of fools is in their mouth; but the mouth of the wise is in their heart.”—Thomas Adams.

Jas_3:10. The Discipline of the Tongue from the Christian Standpoint.—“My brethren, these things ought not so to be.” The Christian regards his body, and the various relations with men into which his body enables him to come, as the agency and the sphere in which his renewed and regenerated self is to find and exercise its ministry. His idea for himself he gains through a proper apprehension of the human Christ. Christ was a Spirit, but that Spirit could only work through the agency of a human body, and in those spheres which the human body enabled him to occupy. It was therefore essential that Christ should have His body—every part and force of His body—under perfect control, and at perfect command. His experience would not really be like ours if He had that command as a result of something other than self-discipline. The delay of His ministry until He was thirty years old suggests that, even in His case, prolonged self-culture was necessary, in order to gain practical command of all His bodily powers and forces. If we can realise this, and carefully keep away the idea that He had a sinful nature, we shall find ourselves drawn nearer to One, who was “in all points tempted like as we are,” for we shall see that His powers of silence, restrained speech, wise speech, were as truly (on the human side) the results of self-discipline, and self-culture, as the same speech-mastery is in our case. It will then come to us that we have in our Divine-human Lord the model of that control of our tongue, of that mastery of our speech-power, which we recognise as the first Christian demand made on us, and the last to which we succeed in worthily responding. The impossibility of gaining that self command, which so often oppresses us, is relieved when we can see that one man has fully gained it, and that, as a man, He gained it in the same way that we must, by the self-discipline of years, in the inspiration and leading of the indwelling Spirit.

Jas_3:11-12. The Lesson of the Fountain and the Fig.—These illustrations impress the inconsistency of Christians using their tongues for unworthy ministries. With a clean soul can only go clean uses of the power of speech. The thought is similar to that so abruptly, and almost startlingly, expressed by St. John. The Christian man “cannot sin, because he is born of God.” Sin and the divine life in souls cannot conceivably go together. A fountain pours forth only what is consistent with itself. If its store of water is in any sense impregnated, you cannot expect to draw sweet water from it. If the stores are sweet, you cannot expect to find foul streams pouring forth, and it would be a surprise and an offence if you did. A wild fig tree properly enough bears wild figs; but if the branch is grafted into the good fig, and receives its good life, you properly expect that it will bear only good figs. It should be thus with Christians. What a man’s speech should be is not here considered; what a Christian man’s speech should be is presented to our view. And it must be consistent with himself, the fitting expression of his new life. You do not expect to hear unclean or unloving speech from a Christian professor. You are sure that there is something wrong if you do. This consideration suggests the appeal which St. James would make. The fountain, in the case of the Christian, had long been polluted, and the streams flowing from it had long been foul, so that the very channels and pipes had become impregnated with evil, and defiled even fresh water that flowed through them. In the case of the Christian the fountain-head had been cleansed and sweetened, so that what was ready to flow forth was pure; but there remained the difficulty of the foul channels and pipes. And the work of daily Christian living is the cleansing of the old channels and pipes, so that the cleansed fountain may pour forth the streams that, untainted and wholly sweet, shall flow into all the associations of the life—sweet even flowing from the tongue which had so long been the instrument of evil.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 3

Jas_3:6. Mischief done by the Slanderous Tongue.—A man who, for a moment’s gossiping gratification, drops an idle word affecting a neighbour’s character, resembles that Scotchman who, from partiality to the flora of his native land, sowed a little thistledown in the British colony where he had raised his tabernacle, and where that nuisance to agriculturists had been unknown up to that time. It grew and flourished; and breezes—like the active wind of talk, that soon propagates a slander—carried the winged seeds hither and thither, to found for their obnoxious species thousands of new homes.—F. W. Robertson.

The Consequences of Slander.—Never 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” (lit. “the wheel of nature”). You may tame the wild beast; the conflagration of the American forest will cease when all the timber and all the dry underwood is consumed; but you cannot arrest the progress of that cruel word which you uttered carelessly yesterday or this morning.

Mischief of a Bitter Word.—A bitter word dropped from our lips against a brother is like a pistol fired amongst mountains. The sharp report is caught up and intensified and echoed by rocks and caves, till it emulates the thunder. So a thoughtless, unkind word in passing from mouth to mouth receives progressive exaggerations, and, snowball-like, increases as it rolls. Gossip-mongers are persons who tear the bandages from social wounds, and prevent their healing; they are persons who bring flint and steel, and acid and alkali together, and are justly chargeable with all the fire and ebullition. A whisper-word of slander is like that fox with a firebrand tied to its tail that Samson sent among the standing corn of the Philistines. It brings destruction into wide areas of peace and love. Evil-speaking is like a freezing wind, that seals up the sparkling waters and tender juices of flowers, and binds up the hearts of men in uncharitableness and bitterness of spirit, as the earth is bound up in the grip of winter, when

“The bitter blast of north and east

Makes daggers at the sharpened eaves.”

Jas_3:6. The “Course of Nature.”—The Greek word translated “course” is derived from a verb signifying “to run,” and according to the way the accent is placed, it is read either a wheel or a course. In the verse the former sense is preferable, as expressing the constant recurrence of similar events in this life; so the old Greek poet (Anacreon) puts it: “Like a chariot-wheel our life rolls on.” And Isidorus writes, “Time like a wheel rolls round upon itself.” But the allusion of James has also been applied to the unceasing succession of men born one after another, as if he had said, “The tongue has been the means of plaguing our ancestors; it still plagues us, and will hereafter plague our descendants.” Plutarch uses the simile, the “stream of nature,” referring to the successive generations of men; and Simplicius speaks of “the unceasing circle of nature, wherein there is a constant production of some things by the decay of others.” The best critics seem to consider that the apostle has mankind in view in this clause of the verse.—Parkhurst.

Jas_3:8. The Tongue.—“Some men have a tongue as rough as a cat’s, and biting as an adder’s.” “The tongue was intended for an organ of the Divine praise; but the devil often plays upon it, and then it sounds like the screech-owl.” “Let your language be restrained within its proper channels; if a river swells over its bank, it leaves only dirt and filthiness behind.” “The evil-speaker or whisperer is accuser, witness, judge, and executioner of the innocent.” “In the temple at Smyrna there were looking-glasses which represented the best face as crooked and ugly; so is every false tongue.” “It is a fountain both of bitter waters and of pleasant; it sends forth blessing and cursing; it praises God and rails at men; it is sometimes set on fire, and then it puts whole cities in combustion; it is unruly, and no more to be restrained than the breath of the tempest; it is volatile and fugitive; reason should go before it, and when it does not repentance comes after it.” “There are some persons so full of nothings, that, like the strait sea of Pontus, they perpetually empty themselves by their mouths, making every company or single person they fasten on to be their Propontis.” “The talking man makes himself artificially deaf, being like a man in the steeple when the bells ring.” “Great knowledge, if it be without vanity, is the most severe bridle of the tongue. For so have I heard that all the noises and pratings of the pool, the croaking of frogs and toads, is hushed and appeased upon the instant of bringing upon them the light of a candle or torch. Every beam of reason and ray of knowledge checks the dissolutions of the tongue.” When it breaks out in trivialities and vanities, these “are like flies and gnats upon the margin of a pool; they do not sting like an asp or bite deep as a bear, yet they can vex a man into a fever of impatience, and make him incapable of rest and counsel.”

Jas_3:10. Eastern Swearing and Offensive Language.—Oaths may be classified as of two kinds—in one the name of God is used, in the other that of some other object; in both cases for the same purpose. Though it is common for people in the East at the present day to use the name of God in their oaths, yet they more frequently swear by something else—as by some person or themselves, or some part of themselves, as the head or hand, or by some animal or inanimate thing. Nothing is more common than the use of such oaths. They not only employ them to confirm what they say, but to add, as it seems, strength to their expressions. (See Mat_26:74.) But beyond this they employ them with no purpose whatever—even the most solemn forms—in speaking to their animals, or in soliloquising, until, to those who can understand the language they speak, nothing is more wearisome or painful. They use them in all companies, and on all occasions—both men and women, old and young. There seems to be among them an utter perversion of conscience as to the moral intent or obligation of an oath. Aside from the positive sin of thus employing an oath, this deadness of conscience is the worst feature, as it is one of the worst results of this thoughtlessly sinful practice. Surely the command of the Saviour to “swear not at all” has unusual pertinence and force in the presence of a custom at once so common and wicked. Again, the use of obscene and offensively bad language has a development among the Orientals wholly unknown to us. This also pervades all classes in the community, and is employed by both sexes. I was informed by persons long resident in the East that the use of obscene, vile language passes any ordinary conception among any cooler-blooded Western people. I am sure I have never heard such torrents of verbal abuse anywhere else as in some parts of Egypt or Turkey or Palestine. We were pursued with the vilest epithets, for example, at Hebron, or in the streets of Shechem, or of Endor, or in some of the villages in Bashan, east of the Jordan. In speaking to each other, especially when angry, they not only heap abuse on one another, but on every member of their respective families—wife, children, father, mother, living or dead, present, past, and to come; and beyond this on their religion, in terms often so aggravatingly bad as that even a dragoman will refuse to repeat it. It is in reference to this almost universal practice the Saviour speaks when He says: “Whosoever shall say to his brother Raca, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire” (Mat_5:22).

Jas_3:12. Grafting the Olive on the Fig Tree.—The metaphor here used is one which the Roman gardeners, who were fond of horticultural paradoxes, endeavoured to realise, and, according to an old naturalist, Columella was the first who attempted to unite by inoculation or inarching trees of so opposite a character as the fig and olive. The subjoined statement by Pliny is interesting as bearing upon this subject: “After that the fig tree hath gotten some strength, and is grown to a sufficient highness to bear a graft, the branch or bough of the olive being well cleansed and made neat, and the head end thereof thwited (sio) and shaped sharp, howbeit not yet cut from the mother stock, must be set fast in the shank of the fig tree, where it must be kept well and surely tied with bands. For the space of three years it is suffered to grow indifferently between two mothers, or rather, by the means thereof two mother stocks are grown and united together; but in the fourth year it is cut wholly from the own mother, and is become altogether an adopted child to the fig tree wherein it is incorporate. A pretty device, I assure you, to make a fig tree bear olives, the secret whereof is not known to every man” (Pliny, lib. xvii., cap. 19).—W. R. C.

The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.

Jas 3:5. Μεγαλαυχεῖ) boasts itself greatly: makes great pretensions, both respecting the past, and with a view to the future. There is often great importance in those things which the careless think small. The idea of greatness is also conveyed by the words, world, the course of nature, and hell, Jas 3:6.—ἰδοὺ, behold) The word behold, used for the third time, is prefixed to the third comparison.—ὀλίγον) So just before, μικρόν, a little. The Alex. MS. reads ἡλίκον,[34] with which the Latin version, and not that alone, plainly agrees: and yet I have with good reason removed this various reading from my margin: (1st) because it is plainly an alliteration with ἡλίκην which follows: (2d) because even Latin writers retain the word modicum. This is sufficient for maintaining the received reading.

[34] Ἡλίκον is the reading of BC corrected and Vulg. So Lachm. and Tisch. Ὀλιγον is the reading of Rec. Text, with A corrected and later authorities.

Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1860) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Jam_3:5. Application of the comparison, particularly of the second illustration, μικρόν, pointing back to ἐλαχίστου.

μεγαλαυχεῖν] which expresses the contrast to μικρόν is not = μεγάλα ἐργάζεσθαι (Oecumenius, Theophylact, Calvin, Laurentius, Pott, Bouman, and others), for the idea of doing is precisely not contained in the word, but it denotes proud conduct in word and behaviour, which has for supposition the performance of great things, and is always used in a bad sense. This certainly does not appear to suit οὕτως, as in the preceding the discourse is not about talking, on which account Lange prefers the reading μεγάλα αὐχεῖ; but also this expression = boasteth great things, does not exclude, but includes that secondary meaning, for why would not James otherwise have written simply μεγάλα ποιεῖ? But οὕτως is so far not unsuitable, as the performance of great thingsas they are spoken of in the foregoingforms the reason of the boasting of the tongue. On a mere inanis jactatio it is not natural here to think. This first clause already points to what follows, where the destructive power of the tongue is described. This description begins with a figure: What a fire kindles what a forest. In justification of the reading ἡλίκον (instead of ὀλίγον), de Wette (with whom Brückner agrees), translating ἡλίκον πῦρ: what a great fire, observes, that the burning of the forest is contemplated in its whole extent. But the verb ἀνάπτει, as Wiesinger correctly observes, is opposed to this explanation; also this clause forms the transition from the foregoing to what follows, and therefore must still contain the reference to μικρόν, which certainly is afterwards laid aside. This does not, however, constrain us to the rejection of the reading ἡλίκον (against Wiesinger and Bouman), since this word, which indeed chiefly emphasizes greatness, can also be used to give prominence to smallness; see Pape. The older expositors, according to its meaning, correctly explained the quantus of the Vulgate by quantulus; thus Cajetan., Paes, and others; the same explanation by Lange. If Brückner thinks that it is not appropriate to take ἡλίκον here in this signification, owing to the following ἡλίκην, it is, on the contrary, to be observed that precisely the opposition of the same word in a different signification is entirely in accordance with the liveliness of the sentiment.

On the use of ἡλίκος in the interrogative explanatory sense, see A. Buttmann, p. 217 [E. T. 253]. Erasmus, Laurentius, Grotius, Baumgarten, Augusti explain the word ὕλη by materia, lignorum congeries, as it has in Sir_28:10 the signification of fuel; but the image is evidently much more lively and graphic when ὕλη is retained in its usual meaning: forest. Corresponding descriptions in Homer, Il. xi. 155. Pindar, Pyth. iii. 66; see also Sir_11:32. Philo, de migr. Abrah. 407 A. In Stobaeus it is said: Parva facula cacumen Idae incendi potest.

Meyer — Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament — English translation by Peter Christie, edited by Frederick Crombie (T&T Clark, 1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Jas 3:5 . ἡ γλῶσσα …; For this idea of the independent action of a member of the body taken as though personality were attached to it see Mat 5:29-30 ; Mat 15:19 ; it is quite in the Hebrew style, cf. in the O.T. the same thing in connection with anthropomorphic expressions. Moffatt ( Expository Times , xiv. p. 568) draws attention to Plutarch’s essay, De Garrulitate , 10, where the union of similar nautical and igneous metaphors (as in Jas 3:4-6 ) is found; “the moralist speaks first of speech as beyond control once it is uttered, like a ship which has broken loose from its anchorage. But in the following sentence, he comes nearer to the idea of James by quoting from a fragment of Euripides these lines:

Μικροῦ γὰρ ἐκ λαμπτῆρος Ἰδαῖον λέπας Πρήσειεν ἄν τις · καὶ πρὸς ἄνδρʼ εἰπὼν ἕνα ,

Πύθοιντʼ ἂν ἀστοὶ πάντες .”

καὶ μεγάλα αὐχεῖ : ἅπ . λεγ . in N.T.; the same would apply to the alternative reading (see critical note above) μεγαλαυχεῖ . In Sir 48:18 we have, καὶ ἐμεγαλαύχησεν ὑπερηφανίᾳ αὐτοῦ . Mayor most truly remarks: “There is no idea of vain boasting, the whole argument turns upon the reality of the power which the tongue possesses”; this fully bears out what has been implied above, that this section has for its object the attempt to pacify the bitterness which had arisen in certain Synagogues of the Diaspora owing to controversies aroused by the harangues of various “teachers”. ἰδοὺ ἡλίκον πῦρ ἡλίκην ὕλην ἀνάπτει : at the risk of being charged with fancifulness the surmise may be permitted as to whether this picture was not suggested by the sight of an excited audience in some place of meeting; when an Eastern audience has been aroused to a high pitch, the noise of tongues, and gesticulation of the arms occasioned by the discussion following upon the oration which has been delivered, might most aptly be compared to a forest fire; the tongue of one speaker has set ablaze all the inflammable material which controversy brings into being. The possibility that the writer had something of this kind in his mind should not be altogether excluded. ἀνάπτει occurs in the N.T. elsewhere only in Luk 12:49 ; Taylor (quoted by Mayor) says: “On fires kindled by the tongue see Midr. Rabb. on Lev. (Lev 14:2 ) where the words are almost the same as those in St. James, quanta incendia lingua excitat! ”

The Expositor's Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll (1897–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

On the contrary part he showeth how great discommodities arise by the intemperance of the tongue, throughout the whole world, to the end that men may so much the more diligently give themselves to moderate it.

Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain. Text via Bolls.life.

boasteth great things--There is great moment in what the careless think "little" things [BENGEL]. Compare "a world," "the course of nature," "hell," Jam 3:6, which illustrate how the little tongue's great words produce great mischief.

how great a matter a little fire kindleth--The best manuscripts read, "how little a fire kindleth how great a," &c. ALFORD, for "matter," translates, "forest." But GROTIUS translates as English Version, "material for burning": a pile of fuel.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Verse 5. Boasteth great things.] That is, can do great things, whether of a good or evil kind. He seems to refer here to the powerful and all commanding eloquence of the Greek orators: they could carry the great mob whithersoever they wished; calm them to peaceableness and submission, or excite them to furious sedition.

Behold, how great a matter] See what a flame of discord and insubordination one man, merely by his persuasive tongue, may kindle among the common people.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

And boasteth great things. The verb μεγαλαυχεῖν means to boast one’s self, or to vaunt. But James in this passage did not intend to reprove ostentation so much as to show that the tongue is the doer of great things; for in this last clause he applies the previous comparisons to his subject; and vain boasting is not suitable to the bridle and the helm. He then means that the tongue is endued with great power.

I have rendered what Erasmus has translated the impetuosity, the inclination, of the pilot or guide; for ὁρμὴ means desire. I indeed allow that among the Greeks it designates those lusts which are not subservient to reason. But here James simply speaks of the will of the pilot.

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

(5) Even so . . .—Thus, like the tiny rudder of the mighty ship, whereon its course most critically depends—the tongue is a little member; for it “vaunts great words which bring about great acts of mischief.” The verb translated boasteth is peculiar to this place, but occurs so often in the works of Philo that we may be almost certain St. James had read them. And many other verses of our Epistle suggests his knowledge of this famous Alexandrian Jew.

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!—It would be more in the spirit and temper of this imaginative passage to render it, “Behold, how great a forest a little spark kindleth!” Thus it is expressed in the Latin Vulgate; and note our own margin, “wood.” The image constantly recurs in poetry, ancient and modern; and in the writer’s mind there seems to have been the picture “of the wrapping of some vast forest in a flame, by the falling of a single spark,” and this in illustration of the far-reaching mischief resulting from a single cause. (Comp. Sir_28:10.)

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

5. and boasteth great things] The Greek verb is a compound word, which does not occur elsewhere, but is used not unfrequently by Philo. The fact is not without interest, as indicating, together with the parallelisms just referred to, St James’s probable acquaintance with that writer.

how great a matter a little fire kindleth] The form of the Greek is somewhat more emphatic. A little fire kindles how great a mass of timber. The word translated “matter” means primarily “a forest—wood in growth;” and with this meaning, which is adopted in the Vulgate “silvam”, the illustration would stand parallel to Homer’s simile:

“As when a spark scarce seen will set ablaze

The illimitable forest.”

Iliad ii. 455.

So in Virgil, Georg. ii. 303, we have a fuller description of the spark which, dropped at hazard, kindles the bark, and the branches, and the foliage:

“And as in triumph seizes on the boughs,

And reigns upon the throne of pine-tree tops,

And wraps the forest in a robe of flame.”

The word, however, had gradually passed into the hands of the metaphysicians, and like the Latin materia, which originally meant “timber” (a meaning still traceable in the name of Madeira, “the well-timbered island”), had come to mean matter as distinct from form, and then passing back, with its modified meaning, into common use, had been used for a pile, or heap of stuff, or materials of any kind. On the whole then, while admitting the greater vividness of the Homeric similitude, St James is likely to have meant a mass of materials rather than a forest. Comp. Pro_16:27, and Sir_28:10, where we have exactly the same comparison. The Authorised Version may be accordingly received as not far wrong. Here again it may be noted that Philo employs the same similitude to illustrate the growth of goodness in the soul: “As the smallest spark will, if duly fanned, kindle a vast pyre, so is the least element of virtue capable of growth till the whole nature of the man glows with a new warmth and brightness,” (Philo, de Migr. Abr. p. 407). But he also frequently uses the comparison in reference to the rapid extension of evil.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Even so the tongue is a little member,.... Like the bit in the horse's mouth, or like the helm of a ship.

And boasteth great things: and does them; for this word may be taken in a good sense: a bridled and sanctified tongue, that is influenced by the grace of God, and directed by the Spirit of God, as it speaks great and good things, it has great power, weight, and influence: the tongue of the just is as choice silver, and the lips of the righteous feed many, Pro 10:20, the Gospel, as preached by Christ's faithful ministers, who are the church's tongue, when it comes not in word only, but in power, is the power of God unto salvation: faith comes by hearing it, and hearing by this word; by it souls are convinced, converted, and comforted, enlightened, quickened, and sanctified.

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth; what vast quantities of wood, large forests, stately buildings, and populous towns and cities, are at once seized on by a little fire, a few sparks, and in a short time burnt down, and utterly destroyed. One of the proverbs of Ben Syra is,

"burning fire kindles great heaps;''

suggesting, that an evil tongue does great mischief, as did the tongue of Doeg the Edomite, as the gloss upon it observes: from hence the apostle passes to consider the abuse or vices of the tongue.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

5 Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!

Ver. 5. Boasteth great things] Gr. μεγαλαυχει. It doth magnifically lift up itself, as an untamed horse doth his head. It exalts itself and exults of great things. It walketh through the earth, and faceth the very heavens, Psa 73:9. It can run all the world over, and bite at everybody; being as a sharp razor, that doth deceit, that instead of shaving the hair cutteth the throat, Psa 52:2. It is made in the shape of a sword; and David felt it as a sword in his bones, Psa 42:10. It is thin, broad, and long, as an instrument most fit to empty both the speaker’s and the hearer’s heart. It is of a flame colour, as apt to set on fire the whole wheel of nature, Jas 3:6.

Behold how great a matter] Or wood. Camerarius tells a story of two brethren walking out in a star light night. Saith one of the brethren, Would I had a pasture as large as this element; and said the other, Would I had as many oxen as there be stars. Saith the other again, Where would you feed those oxen? In your pasture, replied he. What? whether I would or no? Yea, said he, whether you will or no. What, in spite of me? Yes, said he. And thus it went on from words, till at length each sheathed his sword in the other’s bowels.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Even so the tongue is a little member - Little compared with the body, as the bit or the rudder is, compared with the horse or the ship.

And boasteth great things - The design of the apostle is to illustrate the power and influence of the tongue. This may be done in a great many respects: and the apostle does it by referring to its boasting; to the effects which it produces, resembling that of fire, Jam 3:6; to its untameableness, Jam 3:8-9; and to its giving utterance to the most inconsistent and incongruous thoughts, Jam 3:9-10. The particular idea here is, that the tongue seems to be conscious of its influence and power, and boasts largely of what it can do. The apostle means doubtless to convey the idea that it boasts not unjustly of its importance. It has all the influence in the world, for good or for evil, which it claims.

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! - Margin, “wood.” The Greek word ὕλην hulēn, means a wood, forest, grove; and then fire-wood, fuel. This is the meaning here. The sense is, that a very little fire is sufficient to ignite a large quantity of combustible materials, and that the tongue produces effects similar to that. A spark will kindle a lofty pile; and a word spoken by the tongue may set a neighborhood or a village “in a flame.”

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

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[BIBLIOGRAPHY]

Et magna exaltat, Greek: megalauchei; which is not only magnifice loqui et gloriari, but also magna facere.

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[BIBLIOGRAPHY]

Quantus ignis, for quantulus by the Greek, Greek: oligon pur.

The tongue is indeed a little member, yet doth great things:[2] causeth great evils and mischiefs, when it is not carefully governed; as a little fire,[3] it kindleth and consumeth a great wood. It is a world of iniquity, the cause of infinite evils, dissensions, quarrels, seditions, wars, &c. It defileth the whole body, even the body politic of kingdoms. This fire, kindled by hell, sets all in a flame during the course of our lives, (literally, the wheel of our nativity ) from our cradle to our grave. (Witham)

George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).

The accommodation of the former similitudes.

The tongue is a little member, i.e. one of the lesser, in comparison of the body.

And boasteth great things; the Greek word signifies, according to its derivation, the lifting up of the neck (as horses, mentioned Jam 3:3, are wont to do in their pride) in a way of bravery and triumph; and hence it is used to express boasting and glorying, but here seems to imply something more, viz. not only the uttering big words, but doing great things, whether good and useful, as in the former similitudes, or evil, as in what follows; or its boasting how great things it can do: q.d. The tongue, though little, is of great force and efficacy, and it will tell you so itself; it not only boasts what its fellow members can do, but especially what itself can.

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! Another similitude, in which he sets forth the evil the tongue, as little as it is, doth, where it is not well governed, as in the former he had shown the good it may do, when kept under rule.

A matter; the word signifies either any combustible stuff, or, as in the margin, wood, that being the ordinary fuel then in use.

A little fire kindleth; even a spark, the smallest quantity or particle, which may do great mischief, when lighting in suitable matter.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

5. Little… great—More accurate and vivid rendering, according to Tischendorf’s pointing: Behold how little a fire, the tongue, kindleth a forest how great! As a fire, a world of iniquity, is the tongue placed among our members; bespotting the whole body, and inflaming the wheel of nature. The especial point is, that the smallness of the tongue should not blind us to the importance of controlling it by the conscience, but in fact arouse us to the thought of the greatness of its effects and the importance of its control. A little fire may result in the conflagration of how wide a prairie, or how great a city!

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

(1) Application, of illustration. The tongue is only a little member, but it boasts great things. The true reading appears to be megala aujcei (A, B, C). The compound verb of the Textus Receptus, megalaucein, is found in the LXX. (Eze_16:50; Zep_3:11 RAPC 2Ma 15:32; Ecc 48:18)

(2) Third illustration. A very small fire may kindle a very large forest. JHlikon (a, A, (2) B, C, (1) Vulgate) should be read instead of ojligon (A, (1) C, (2) K, L, ff). It is equivalent to quantulus as well as quantus. A somewhat similar thought to the one before us is found in Ecc 11:32, "Of a spark of fire a heap of coals is kindled." Ulh "Matter," A.V; "wood," R.V The word is only found here in the New Testament. In the LXX it is used for a "matter" of judgment in Job_19:29; "matter" in the philosophical sense in RAPC Wis 11:18. (cf. 15:13); the "matter" of a book in RAPC 2Ma 2:24; the "matter" of a fire in Ecc 28:10 (the whole passage, vers. 8-12, is wroth comparing with the one before us); and for "forest" in Job_38:40; Isa_10:17. It is most natural to take it in this sense here (so Syriac and Vulgate, silva) "The literal meaning is certainly to be preferred to the philosophical" (Lightfoot on Revision, p. 140). Forest fires are frequently referred to by the ancients. Virgil"s description of one ("Georgies," 2:303) is well known; so also Homer"s ("Iliad," 11:155).

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Boasteth great things - Hath great influence.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

5. So the tongue. Though so small it can control the body like a bridle, or the helm of a ship. It is a power. Boasteth great things. Claims great powers. How great a matter … fire. As a spark may burn a house, a little thing like the tongue may stir up great trouble.

B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.

Likewise

This word signals the analogy of the tongue to the horses' bits and the ships' rudders mentioned in the previous verses. AT: "In the same way"

boasts great things

Here "things" is a general word for everything about which these people are proud.

Notice also

"Think about"

how small a fire sets on fire a large forest

In order to help people understand the harm that the tongue can cause, James speaks of the harm that a small flame can cause. AT: "how a small flame can start a fire that burns many trees"

The tongue is also a fire

The tongue is a metonym for what people say. James calls it a fire because of the great damage it can do. AT: "The tongue is like a fire" (See: Metonymy and Metaphor)

a world of sinfulness set among our body parts

The enormous effects of sinful speaking are spoken of as if they were a world by themselves. (See: Metaphor)

It stains the whole body

Sinful speaking is spoken of metaphorically as if it stained one's body. And becoming unacceptable to God is spoken of as if it were dirt on the body. (See: Metaphor)

sets on fire the course of life

The phrase "course of life" refers to a person's entire life. AT: "it ruins a person's entire life" (See: Metaphor)

life. It is itself set on fire by hell

The word "itself" refers to the tongue. Also, here "hell" refers to the powers of evil or to the devil. This can be stated in active form. AT: "life because the devil uses it for evil" (See: Active or Passive and Metaphor)

translationWords

boast

sin

hell

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.

5. μεγάλα αὐχεῖ with ABC*P; μεγαλαυχεῖ in אC2KL and later MSS. ἡλίκον, for ὀλίγον of T.R., with אA2BCP; ὀλίγον, a change to an easier reading, has a good deal of later support, A*vidC2KL &c.

5. μεγάλα αὐχεῖ, boasteth great things. There is no thought of an unfounded boast. The achievements on which the tongue prides itself are real achievements.

ἰδοὺ ἡλίκον πῦρ κ.τ.λ.: a third similitude. The tongue is like a spark that sets on fire a mighty forest.

ἡλίκον, how small. Like quantulus in Latin, ἡλίκος has both meanings, ‘how great,’ ‘how small.’ The var. lect. ὀλίγον points to the latter signification here. Alford compares Lucian, Hermot. 5 παπαῖ, ὧ Ἑρμότιμε, ἡλίκους ἡμᾶς ἀποφαίνεις, οὐδὲ κατὰ τοὺς πυγμαίους ἐκείνους, ἀλλὰ χαμαιπετεῖς παντάπασιν ἐν χρῷ τῆς γῆς.

ἡλίκην ὓλην ἀνάπτει, in quam magna silva incendium fecit, O.L., quam magnam silvam incendit V.; ‘how great a matter’ A.V.; ‘how much wood’ R.V.; ‘how great a forest’ R.V. marg. The A.V. rendering ‘matter,’ i.e., a mass of materials, timber, firewood, etc., is a frequent and classical meaning of ὕλη from Homer downwards: Od. 3:257 πολλὴν δʼ ἐπεχεύατο ὕλην (shipbuilding material), so ὕλη ναυπηγησίμη Plato Legg. 705 c. But the prevailing use of the word in the sense of forest, and the aptness and frequency of the illustration, are in favour of that interpretation here: comp. Il. XI. 155 f. ὡς δʼ ὅτε πῦρ ἀΐδηλον ἐν ἀξύλῳ ἐμπέσῃ ὕλῃ· | πάντῃ τʼ εἰλυφόων ἄνεμος φέρει, οἱ δέ τε θάμνοι | πρόῤῥιζοι πίπτουσιν ἐπειγόμενοι πυρὸς ὁρμῇ. Pind. Pyth. III. 36 πολλὰν δʼ ὄρει πῦρ ἐξ ἑνὸς | σπέρματος ἐνθορὸν ἀίστωσεν ὕλαν. Plut. Symp. VII. p. 730 E τὸ πῦρ τὴν ὕλην ἐξ ἦς ἀνήφθη μητέρα καὶ πατέρα οὖσαν ἤσθιε. Psalms 82 (LXX.) 14 ὡσεὶ πῦρ ὅ διαφλέξει δρυμόν, ὡσεὶ φλὸξ κατακαύσαι ὄρη. See also Virg. Georg. II. 303, Aen. II. 304, x. 405, XII. 521. The passage in the Georgic indicates the hidden, unnoticed beginning; in Aen. II. the terror; in x. the swift progress; in II. and XII. the violence and destructive fury. Comp. also Lucr. 3:1243 f. ignis ubi ingentes silvas ardore cremarat … quacunque e causa flammeus ardor | horribili sonitu silvas exederat altis | ab radicibus et terram percoxerat igni.

Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge University Press, 1896; 21 vols, various authors incl. Carr, Maclear, Plummer, Farrar, Lumby, Moule, M. R. James, Simcox) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

5.] Application of the comparison. Thus also the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things (μεγάλα αὐχεῖ (or μεγαλαυχεῖ) is interpreted by Œc., μεγάλα ἐργάζεται, and so Thl., Calv., De Wette, al., in the Homeric sense of εὔχεται εἶναι. But Huther well observes that there is no need for thus forcing the word out of its ordinary meaning, for the deeds of the tongue follow. This μεγάλα αὐχεῖ is the method which it uses to accomplish its deed; it vaunts great words which bring about great acts of mischief). Behold, how small (ἡλίκος is ‘quantulus’ as well as ‘quantus,’ e. g. in Lucian, Hermot. 5, παπαί, ὦ Ἑρμότιμε, ἡλίκους ἡμᾶς ἀποφαίνεις, οὐδὲ κατὰ τοὺς πυγμαίους ἐκείνους, ἀλλὰ χαμαιπετεῖς παντάπασιν ἐν χρῷ τῆς γῆς. De Wette however understands it here “how great,” and thinks that not the smallness of the first spark, but the greatness of the fire in its ultimate extent, is intended. Against this, as Wiesinger and Huther observe, is ἀνάπτει, which can hardly mean ‘consumes,’ but must be said of the first lighting up. Seneca has the very similar words, “quam lenibus initiis quanta incendia oriantur,” Contr. v. 5) a fire kindleth how great a forest (ὕλη is taken by some Commentators to mean “materia, lignorum congeries,” as in ref. Sir. So Jerome on Isa 66:15, Isa 66:16, vol. iv. p. 813, “Parvus ignis quam grandem succendit materiam:” Erasm., Grot., al. But the ordinary meaning gives a far livelier and more graphic sense here. Cf. also Hom. Il. β. 455, ἠΰτε πῦρ ἀΐδηλον ἐπιφλέγει ἄσπετον ὕλην, and λ. 155, ὡς δʼ ὅτε πῦρ ἀΐδηλον ἐν ἀξύλῳ ἐμπέσῃ ὕλῃ. The comparison is beautifully used in a good sense by Philo, De Migr. Abr. § 21, vol. i. p. 455, σπινθὴρ γὰρ καὶ ὁ βραχύτατος ἐντυφόμενος ὅταν καταπνευσθεὶς ζωπυρηθῇ, μεγάλην ἐξάπτει πυράν· καὶ τὸ βραχύτατον οὖν ἀρετῆς, ὅταν ἐλπίσι χρησταῖς ὑποθαλπόμενον ἀναλάμψῃ, καὶ τὰ τέως μεμυκότα καὶ τυφλὰ ἐξωμμάτωσε, καὶ τὰ ἀφαυανθέντα ἀναβλαστεῖν ἐποίησε, καὶ ὅσα ὑπὸ ἀγονίας ἐστείρωτο εἰς εὐφορίαν εὐτοκίας περιήγαγεν [Tischdf. in his 8th edn., omitting with 1 the καί in ver. 6, carries on the sentence to ἡ γλῶσσα, construing ἡλίκον πῦρ as an accusative, and ἡλίκην ὕλην as in apposition with it]).

Henry Alford, The Greek Testament (1849–1861) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

5. μεγάλα αὐχεῖ is equivalent to μεγαλαυχεῖ, “be haughty,” which has here been separated into its component parts in order to make a good parallel to μικρὸν μέλος ἐστίν. The phrase is here used in the sense not of an empty boast, but of a justified, though haughty, sense of importance; cf. Moulton and Milligan, Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, p. 94.

The usual associations, however, of μεγαλαυχεῖν are bad, as here. A boasting compatible with proper humility would probably be expressed by καυχᾶσθαι. Cf. Zep 3:11, Eze 16:50, Eccles. 48:18, 2 Macc. 15:32, 4 Macc. 2:15.

Perhaps the alliteration μικρόν, μέλος, μεγάλα is intentional, cf. v. 7.

μεγάλα αὐχεῖ] BAC*P ff vg boh.

μεγαλαυχεῖ] אC2KL minn. This seems to be emendation to a more familiar word.

5b-6. The tongue is as dangerous as a fire. Cf. Ecclus. 28:12, 22.

ἡλίκον, “how small.”

ἡλίκον] BאA2CP vg.

ὀλίγον] A*C2KL minnomn vid ff m syrutr boh sah. Emendation.

ἡλίκην, “how much.” For the double question, cf. Mar 15:24, Luk 19:15, and see Winer, § 66. 5. 3.

ὕλην. The abundant references in ancient literature to forest fires, sometimes with direct reference to the smallness of the spark which leads to vast destruction, and the repeated use of this comparison in ethical discussions make it likely that ὕλην here means “forest” rather than “fuel.”

In Homer, Il. ii, 455

ἠὒτε πῦρ ἀΐδηλον ἐπίφλέγει ἄσπετον ὕλην

the comparison is to describe the glitter of the armour of a great host; in the similar verse Il. xi, 155, it is the rout of a fleeing army.

Pindar, Pyth. iii, 36-37

πολλὰν τʼ ὄρει πῦρ ἐξ ἑνὸς

σπέρματος ἐνθορὸν ἀΐστωσεν ὕλαν.

Euripides, Ino, fragm. 411

μικροῦ γὰρ ἐκ λαμπτῆρος Ἰδαῖον λέπας

πρήσειεν ἄν τις.

Ps.-Phocylides, Poema admonitorium, 144

ἐξ ὀλίγου σπινθῆρος ἀθέσφατος ἀθεται ὕλη.

Philo, De decal. 32, M. p. 208 [ἐπιθυμία] οἷα φλὸξ ἐν ὕλῃ νέμεται δαπανῶσα πάντα καὶ φθείρουσα.

The above quotations refer to a forest fire. The following are significant in using with similar purpose the figure of a great conflagration in a city or in general.

Philo, De migr. Abr. 12, M. p. 455 σπινθὴρ γὰρ καὶ ὁ βραχύτατος ἐντυφόμενος, ὅταν καταπνευσθεὶς ζωπυρηθῇ, μεγάλην ἐξάπτει πυράν.

Seneca, Controversiarum excerpta, v, 5, nesciebas quanta sit potentia ignium ….

Diogenes of Oinoanda (Epicurean philosopher, second century after Christ), fragm. xxxviii, 3 (ed. William, Leipzig, 1907, p. 46) καὶ σπινθῆρι μεικρῷ πάνυ τηλικόνδε ἐπεξάπτεται πῦρ, ἡλίκον καταφλέγει λιμένας καὶ πόλεις.

Among Hebrew writers, Isa 9:18, Isa 10:18, Psa 83:14 use the figure of a forest fire; and Ecclus. 11:32 uses the figure of the small spark which kindles “a heap of many coals.” The tongue is compared with a fire in Psa 120:3 f., and in Midrash, Leviticus rabba, 16: R. Eleasar in the name of R. Jose b. Zimra: “What fires it [the tongue] kindles!” (see Schöttgen, Horae hebraicae, pp. 1021 f.). But the specific parallels make it seem plain that this comparison is drawn from a standing simile of current Greek popular philosophy.

International Critical Commentary — older volumes (1896–1929), various authors — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Boasteth great things [μεγαλαυχει] . The best texts separate the compound, and read megala aujcei, of course with the same meaning. Aujcei, boasteth, only here in New Testament.

How great a matter a little fire kindleth [ηλικον πυρ ηλικην υλην αναπτει] . The word ulh (only here in New Testament) means wood or a forest, and hence the matter or raw material of which a thing is made. Later, it is used in the philosophical sense of matter - "the foundation of the manifold" - opposed to the intelligent or formative principle nouv, mind. The authorized version has taken the word in one of its secondary senses, hardly the philosophical sense it would seem; but any departure from the earlier sense was not only needless, but impaired the vividness of the figure, the familiar and natural image of a forest on fire. So Homer :

"As when a fire Seizes a thick - grown forest, and the wind Drives it along in eddies, while the trunks Fall with the boughs amid devouring flames." Iliad, 11, 156.

Hence, Rev., rightly, " Behold how much wood or how great a forest is kindled by how small a fire.

This, too, is the rendering of the Vulgate : quam magnum silvam.

Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament (1887–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.