of his own words and the more of God's words the surer he is to command the hearing and the respect of men. They feel that he has a right to speak, and that he is speaking in the name and in the words of his Master. They feel too that he has forgotten himself, and is thinking only of the message from God, and of the souls before him. He is teaching them what God has first taught him. He has prayed for it, and pondered on it; the truth has gone down through his intellect and his conscience into his own heart, and out of the fulness of it he speaks. The Wise Man says, "The mouth of the wise is in his heart; but the heart of the fool is in his mouth:" and a very shallow heart it is. If for "every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account in the day of judgment,"[1] what shall be the account of the words which we have spoken in long years and in a long life, as if in God's name? If the words of God by the prophet ought to be true of us as of himself, "Is not my word fire, and as the hammer that breaketh the rocks in pieces?" what shall be judged of our cold, light, interminable flow of words with few thoughts and empty rhetoric; idle because inefficacious, and inefficacious because our own? Whose heart have we set on fire? what
- ↑ S. Matt. xii. 36.
