scheme of a self-centred monopoly on the Shinar plains, He simply touched
his tongue. The first evidence of God's touch in the re-making of man on
that memorable Pentecost day was upon his tongue.

The effect upon his tongue of the break with God has been radical and
strange. Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an
unnatural sharpness. Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that
results in a certain slipperiness of statement. Sometimes it has a bitter,
poisonous, acid quality that eats its way into the words. There is a queer
backward movement in biting sometimes. Withal a strange looseness of
speech regarding the holiest things, and the most awesome truths, and the
Holy One Himself.

The moment a man gets a vision of God he is instantly conscious of
something the matter with his tongue. The sight that comes to his eyes,
the sound to his ears makes him painfully self-conscious regarding the
defect in his tongue. Moses found himself slow-tongued. Isaiah felt the
need of the cleansing coal for his tongue.

But man's whole inner mental process was affected. A peculiar sense of
fear, of dread, is woven inextricably into the very fibre of man's being.
His first reported word after that break was, "I was afraid." That sense of
fear--a horrid, haunting, nightmare thing--has affected all his thinking
and planning and every-day speech. No phrase is oftener on man's tongue
than "I'm afraid." Isaiah's classic utterance about ears and eyes has a
counterpart equally classic from Paul's pen, about the effect of sin upon
man's mental processes. A few lines in the letter to the Ephesian circle
of churches give a sort of bill of details of the mental steps down that
slope from the Eden gate.