The Updated Edition of the Government of the Tongue: "Death and Life are in the power of the Tongue." Proverbs 18:21($10.95Value)

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"Death and Life are in the power of the Tongue." Proverbs 18:21 "Faults of the tongue as are the hardest to avoid because they are exemplified to us every day in common practice, and some of them are even recommended as reputable and ingenious. And it is a strange insinuative power that example and custom have over us. We see this influence in every trivial secular instance in our every habit. And for this very reason, all sobriety and strict virtue now lies under heavy prejudice, and no part of that virtue is more prejudiced than that of the tongue, which current and common custom has now enfranchised from all the bonds that moralists and preachers of the Gospel had laid upon it. But the greater the difficulties are, the more it ought to awaken our diligence, for if we are loose and careless, odds are that we will be carried away with the rest. We had better therefore fix ourselves. And by sober recollection of the ends for which speech was given us and the account we must one day give of our use of it, we had better impress upon ourselves the baseness and the danger of misemploying our tongue in this use of speech." "The tongue is a busy and active part of us that can scarcely be kept from motion, and if that activity is not resolved to good employments, it will be practicing itself upon bad. For the mind is like the stomach in requiring wholesome nourishment, and if it is not supplied with that which is wholesome, it will at last indulge in those things to which the fleshly nature is most inclined. So that, if in our conversation we do not interchange sober and useful notions between us, we will at best only traffic in toys and baubles and most commonly, infection and poison. Whoever would keep their tongue from exposing themself or others to sin, must tune it to a quite contrary key by making it an instrument and an incentive to virtue." "And if you must speak of other people's faults of the tongue, let it not be to defame but to amend; let us convert our detraction and backbiting into admonition and fraternal correction. If people had the zeal for virtue to which they pretend when they inveigh against vice, they would surely take this course of action, for this method alone provides for the possibility of reforming the offender."