the whole, and he asks the question doubtfully, "But were there not
some suspicious circumstances connected with him?"

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

There is apparently in these metaphors little that affords an argument
against slander; the motive which they suggest would appear to many
far-fetched and of small cogency; but to one who looks on this world
as a vast whole, and who has recognised the moral law as only a part
of the great law of the universe, harmoniously blending with the