We are to repress the impulsive and petulant word. Thus we train our own tongues and make it easier to subdue the other members of the body. One member cannot be allowed to lead the whole body into sin. Pluck it out, if it be the right eye or the right hand (Matt. 5:29). The members of the body are all so related as to be affected by what the others experience. “The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Cor. 12:21). Without this bridle on the tongue there is no true self-control. A tongue loose at both ends means a man whom everyone shuns as a nuisance. If the bridle is good for the horse, it is far more so for the man. The difference is that the man has to put the bridle into his own mouth and in dual capacity as rider and horse master himself, the most unmanageable of steeds. A garrulous man is a bore at best, while a woman with a sharp tongue is a terror to the community. Tell no secrets to a talkative man, and few to anyone save your wife. A man who talks to hear himself talk will be sure to tell what he ought not to say. The writer of Hebrews refuses to go on with too many details about his heroes of faith, “for the time will fail me if I tell” (Heb. 11:32), “time will leave me telling.” If the audience held the bridle, the preacher might stop sooner. The phonograph can be turned off at will, permitting only so much “canned” talk at a time. And yet talk is one of the most delightful things in all the world. But there can be too much of a good thing, if, forsooth, it is good. There are few greater nuisances than the interrupter, who breaks into a conversation with no regard for the courtesies of the occasion. He is as bad as the man who monopolizes the conversation and allows no one else to talk at all. He needs a stopper, not a bridle, in his mouth. The Rudder and the Ship (3:4) With great wealth of imagination James proceeds to illustrate still further the power of the tongue over the rest of the body. The point is clear from the illustration of the bridle and the horse, but it is made still clearer by the other figures. The importance of the subject justifies this piling up of metaphors. “This combination of the horse’s bridle and the ship’s rudder as illustrative of the tongue is found” (Hort) in Philo and Plutarch. “The argument is _à fortiori_ from the horse to the man, and still more from the ship to the man, so that the whole forms a climax, the point being throughout the same, namely, the smallness of the part to be controlled in order to have control over the whole” (Plummer).