the ear; how it is kept and how it is lost; how it is used and how it is
abused.

1. The Psalmist uses a very striking expression in the 94th Psalm when
he is calling for justice, and is teaching God's providence over men. 'He
that planted the ear,' the Psalmist exclaims, 'shall he not hear?' And,
considering his church and his day, that is not a bad remark of Cardinal
Bellarmine on that psalm,--'the Psalmist's word _planted_,' says that
able churchman, 'implies design, in that the ear was not spontaneously
evolved by an act of vital force, but was independently created by God
for a certain object, just as a tree, not of indigenous growth, is of set
purpose planted in some new place by the hand of man.' The same thing is
said in Genesis, you remember, about the Garden of Eden,--the Lord
planted it and put the man and the woman, whose ears he had just planted
also, into the garden to dress it and keep it. How they dressed the
garden and kept it, and how they held the gate of their ear against him
who squatted down before it with his innuendoes and his lies, we all know
to our as yet unrepaired, though not always irreparable, cost.

2. One would almost think that the scornful apostle had the Garden of
Eden in his eye when he speaks so bitterly to Timothy of a class of
people who are cursed with 'itching ears.' Eve's ears itched
unappeasably for the devil's promised secret; and we have all inherited
our first mother's miserable curiosity. How eager, how restless, how
importunate, we all are to hear that new thing that does not at all
concern us; or only concerns us to our loss and our shame. And the more
forbidden that secret is to us, and the more full of inward evil to
us--insane sinners that we are--the more determined we are to get at it.
Let any forbidden secret be in the keeping of some one within earshot of
us and we will give him no rest till he has shared the evil thing with