This is the picture of the tongue in its natural state, the tongue of the unregenerate man. The Spirit of God can cleanse a man’s mouth of profanity and unclean speech. “Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile” (Psalm 34:13). Paul puts up the bars: “Nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, or jesting, which are not befitting” (Eph. 5:4). Once more he says: “Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth” (4:29). Surely, if one has such an untamable little animal in his mouth as the tongue, he needs to watch it with ceaseless care. The evil of the tongue echoes and re-echoes through a community and often through the ages. The evil slander can never be stopped. The lie is fleet of foot and eludes truth in a race. “It is a restless evil,” “plague of disorder that it is” (Moffatt), “a disorderly evil” (Hort), _iniquitum malum_ (Vulgate). It is unstable and unreliable, inconsistent and quixotic. It can never be trusted to the full. It will turn on one when off guard, like the lion when the keeper turns his eye away. It can be brought under no rules that will work. “It is full of deadly poison.” It is “death-bringing” poison like the poison of asps under their lips (Psalm 140:3). “Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear” (Psalm 58:4). The poison of the serpent is deposited in a little pocket under the mouth. So the tongue is charged with the venom of hate, as the serpent with poison. The hiss of the serpent and the hiss of the goose are often reproduced in the sibilant tongue of slander. Sweet and Bitter Water (3:9-11) The inconsistency of the conduct of the tongue is graphically portrayed by these verses. Plummer happily terms it “the moral contradictions of the reckless talker.” There is in very truth moral chaos if the Christian does not control his tongue. Inconsistency is not an evil per se. If one is wrong, he ought to be inconsistent enough to change and do right. But it is terrible to see a professing Christian lightly lapse into loose and licentious language. “The fires of Pentecost will not rest where the fires of Gehenna are working” (Plummer). James had spoken (1:8) of the double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. The tongue with the gift of _double-entendre_ is one of the very worst, for its word passes muster in polite circles and yet carries to the initiated a sinister or salacious meaning. Epictetus (Ench. xxxiii, § 16) says, “But dangerous also is the approach to indecent speaking.” But the double tongue talks one way with one person, another with another; it is the way of hypocrisy, the slick tongue, the oily tongue of the two-faced man whose word cannot be depended upon, whose word is not so good as his bond.