Sirach (5:13) says: “Honor and shame are in talk; and the tongue of man is his fall.” He also has this: “If thou blow the spark, it shall burn; if thou spit upon it, it shall be quenched; and both these come out of thy mouth” (28:12). It looks as if James had seen this passage from the Twelve Patriarchs (Benjamin 6:5): “The good mind hath not two tongues, of blessing and of cursing, of contumely and of honour, of sorrow and of joy, of quietness and of confusion, of hypocrisy and of truth.” We may omit the inconsistency of “sorrow and of joy,” for that is the lot of all of us, but certainly the tongue must not play the part of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Therewith bless we the Lord and Father,” the only instance of this precise combination of words in the Bible, expressing God’s power and loving approachableness (cf. Matt. 11:25). The highest function of human speech (Hort) is the praise of God the Father. Note how when Zacharias recovered his speech, he first praised God (Luke 1:64). It is glorious to praise God in prayer, in song, in sermon. “O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall show forth thy praise” (Psalm 51:15). “Praise ye Jehovah. Praise Jehovah, O my soul. While I live will I praise Jehovah: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being” (Psalm 146:1 f.). “Bless, and curse not” (Rom. 12:14). Curse not God in anger or in flippant profanity. The tongue that praises God surely will not profane his name. But curse not men who are made after the likeness of God, those who are like God in their moral and spiritual nature and not like the beasts of the field (Gen. 1:26; 2 Cor. 3:18). And yet, _horribile dictu_, this is precisely what we do. “Therewith curse we men.” James here includes himself in the common run of humanity. The tongue exercises this strange power of running away with us like a runaway horse with the bit in his mouth. The scorn of men for men is seen in John 7:49, in the Pharisees’ sneer at the mob: “This multitude that knoweth not the law are accursed.” It is most likely, however, personal abuse that James here refers to. Men who are made in God’s image are abused by the very tongue that blesses God. We curse other children of our common Father, God. James does not mean, even by implication, to approve cursing at all. It is the wicked man whose “mouth is full of cursing” (Psalm 10:7). If we do not love our brother, we do not love God (1 John 4:20). And yet “out of the same mouth cometh forth blessing and cursing.” We make our tongue a sort of combination of Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. “My brethren, these things ought not so to be”—a mild statement all the more effective from its very temperateness.