It is the first scene of the human drama; the staging is in an earthly Paradise; perfection is written on everything animate and inanimate. With but one restriction man roams through Edenic beauties, a being "good and very good," happy and holy. His communion with God is unbroken; fountains of love are opened in his heart as he beholds the beautiful mate at his side. Our wildest imaginations cannot estimate the glories of that life-morning; but behold the Serpent. He utters his first words in the scheme of ruin, and it is a slander against God. "Aha, He knows if you eat you will be like He is--knowing all things, be as gods; He is not treating you fairly; the case is misrepresented. You will not die, but you will be wise. Why does He keep back such privileges from you?" As a result of this slander, the Paradise is lost. Flowers, fruits, peace and plenty are exchanged for weeds, briers, toil, sweat, suffering, death. Again we find his impudent presence on the day Job is offering sacrifices. Reading between the lines, we can imagine a conversation like this: "You here? You are looking for some pretense to discount My people; you say none are good--all hypocrites. What do you think of My servant Job? What have you to say about him?" "Oh, of course," says the slanderer, "you have him hedged around--blessing him continually. It pays Job to be good; just take away your special care of his material welfare and see--he will curse Thee to Thy face." An artist once painted a picture of the human tongue in a way to represent his conception of how the "tongue of slander" should appear. It was long, coiled like a serpent, tapering at the end into a barbed spear point; from each of the papilla, scarcely visible, was a needle point, from which oozed a green, slimy poison. The slandering tongue is "a fire, a world of iniquity--it defileth the whole body--it is set on fire of hell." The slanderer is no respecter of persons; he rakes and scrapes the uttermost parts of the earth for victims: king and peasant, rich and poor, priest and prophet; living or dead suffer alike when once this vile, inhuman spirit touches them. Bacon said: "Calumny crosses oceans, scales mountains, and traverses deserts with greater ease than the Scythian Abaris, and, like him, rides on a poisoned arrow." The winds of the Arabian desert not only produce death, but rapid decomposition of the body; so doth slander destroy every virtue of human character. The cloven-hoof slanderer, like the filthy worm, leaves behind a trail of offal and stench though his pathway wind through a bower of earth's sweetest flowers. A writer has said: "So deep does the slanderer sink in the murky waters of degradation and infamy that, could an angel apply an Archimedian moral lever to him, with heaven as a fulcrum, he could not in a thousand years raise him to the grade of a convict felon."