Epistle.
St. James i. 22-27.
Dearly beloved:
Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if a man be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his natural countenance in a glass. For he beheld himself, and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was. But he that hath looked into the perfect law of liberty, and hath continued in it, not becoming a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work: this man shall be blessed in his deed. And if any man think himself to be religious, not bridling his tongue, but deceiving his own heart, this man's religion is vain. Religion pure and unspotted with God and the Father, is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation; and to keep one's self undefiled from this world.
Gospel.
St. John xvi. 23-30.
At that time Jesus said to his disciples:
Amen, amen I say to you, if you ask the Father anything in my name, he will give it you. Hitherto you have not asked any thing in my name. Ask, and you shall receive: that your joy may be full. These things have I spoken to you in proverbs. The hour cometh when I will no more speak to you in proverbs, but will show you plainly of the Father. In that day you shall ask in my name: and I say not to you, that I will ask the Father for you. For the Father himself loveth you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came forth from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and I go to the Father. His disciples say to him: Behold now thou speakest plainly, and speak-est no proverb. Now we know that thou knowest all things, and that for thee it is not needful that any man ask thee. In this we believe that thou camest forth from God.

Sermon LXXIV.
Sins Of The Tongue.

And if any man think himself to be religious,
not bridling his tongue, but deceiving his own heart,
this man's religion is vain.
—St. James i. 26.

My dear brethren, we see by these words that we have a rule by which to find out whether or not we deserve to be called sincere Christians or hypocrites. In order to be a sincere Christian, what has a man to do? He has to get control of himself; to get his soul and all that it can desire subject to the law of God; to get all pride, covetousness, lust, anger, envy, gluttony, and sloth under the control of his own will; to get that will subject to and one with the will of God; and, what is more, he must keep himself in this state of mind at least so far as to restrain himself from committing mortal sin and the graver venial sins if he desire sincerely to keep his soul well out of danger. He who acts thus is a truly good man, and that man's religion is not vain.

What is the first thing to be done to begin to live in this way? It is to examine and see in what way a man commits the greater number of sins. One will soon find that the tongue of man is the means by which a man sins most frequently and in the most devilish manner. For, says St. James, "The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity, … defileth the whole body, … being set on fire by hell." We see from this how dangerous to the soul is the tongue of man. As we do see this, are we not bound to keep in check, at all costs, this source of evil? Any one can see that, if he does not bridle his tongue, his religion is vain indeed. In fact, it is nothing but a merely outward show. It is hypocrisy of the worst kind. But what are the sins of the tongue we most often hear? They are blasphemies, curses, and oaths; the retailing of our neighbors faults with delight and evident pleasure; quarrels, bickerings, constant reproaches for faults that are past, gone, and even sincerely repented of long ago; immodest and impure conversations, with jokes and stories a heathen feels ashamed of; hints and little words that seem almost nothing, yet injuring seriously the reputation of some one, separating friends, and making even those near and dear to each other by every tie cold and distant for a long time, if not for the rest of their lives. God deliver us all from the evil tongue! It works in our very homes. The husband becomes by it bitterness and gall to his wife and family. The wife becomes a torture to husband and children. Both by it make home a curse instead of a blessing, and separate those of whom the word of God declares, "Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." Too often do we see sad examples of this kind. Too often do we find such a husband, who is like a roaring wild beast in his home, and a wife whose tongue once set going, even for a slight cause, is like a clock running down, or like the mill-clapper, so often used as a figure of an unruly tongue. The bad tongue of a child is the ruin of all in the house. That child is a tale-bearer and a traitor against those who begot him. A detestable habit of the evil tongue is what the world calls "damning our neighbor with faint praise," or, in other words, praising him highly, even to the skies, and putting in a little word of evil that destroys him all the more surely. One will excuse himself by saying: "But, after all, I spoke well of him. It can't do any harm!" Yet he knows in his inmost soul he has ruined or seriously injured his neighbor. How would I feel if I were spoken of in this manner? is the question one should have asked himself before he said a word.

How common is it to find persons the moment they see anything wrong done by another or hear of it hurry in great glee to tell it at once! Do we not know, my dear brethren, that such a one is a scandalizer of men, and that the Christian rule requires us to be silent then under pain of sin? But the greater the evil done the more delighted are they to tell it. It should be just the other way. Never reveal to any one the sin of your neighbor, unless to save an innocent person or another from damage of some kind. This damage must be serious to oblige one to tell, even then, the sin of another, for he is equally obliged by God not to tell it under ordinary circumstances.

Remember, then, that no one can be a true Christian unless he keeps from these sins by bridling his tongue. Otherwise, as the text declares, "this man's religion is vain."

Sermon LXXV.
Perseverance In Prayer.

Yet if he shall continue, knocking, I say to you,
although he will not rise and give him,
because he is his friend;
yet because of his importunity he will rise;
and give him as many as he needeth.
—St. Luke xi. 8.

Many people complain that their prayers are not heard. Again and again they have made some special requests for temporal, or it may be even for spiritual, blessings, and nothing seems to have come of these petitions. Others get what they ask for, but they are not so favored; and they almost make up their minds that it is of no use for them to pray. They think, perhaps, that they are too great sinners for God to hear them; or that they do not know how to pray right; or they are even tempted to believe that prayer is a mistake altogether; that God's will is not moved by it; that, if any one does seem to get anything by it, it is only by chance, and would have come without it just as well.

Now what can be the reason of the failure of these good people in prayer? Is it, perhaps, because what they asked was really an evil for them, and so God could not in mercy grant it, but had to give them something better instead, which they have not noticed? Or is it that they did not strive to do their best to win what they wanted also by their own exertions as well as by prayer; that they would not put their own shoulder to the wheel? If it was some virtue, such as charity or patience, that they were asking for, and meanwhile took no real pains to cultivate and practise it, no wonder that God would not give it to them. Or, lastly, is the reason for their disappointment that they were praying for others whose will was obstinately set against their prayers? A mother prays for her son, and her prayers are heard, though they may not seem to be. Graces are granted to him, but he resists them. God has not promised to send them, in such a torrent as to sweep away and break down all opposition, though he may yet do so, if she will only persevere.

Persevere! Ah! that word suggests what may be the real difficulty, the true reason for the seeming uselessness of so many good prayers. They are good as far as they go, but there are not enough of them. The effect that is to come of them is to come all at once; it is like the fall of a tree in the woods under the blows of the axe: the tree will come down, but not at the first, the second, the tenth, or perhaps even the hundredth stroke.

Yes, my brethren, our Lord could no doubt grant our prayers as soon as we made them, but he does not wish to do so. And I think we can see at least two reasons why he does not. First, if he grants what we ask at once we will go off with what he has given us, and hare no more to say to him. And, strange to say, he enjoys our society; he has himself said his delight is to be with the children of men. So he keeps us around him, though it be only to tease, as a father would the children he loved, if he could not keep them any other way. And, secondly, he knows that it is good for us to be with him; and that every time we pray in earnest we come nearer to him, and our souls become stronger. So it is that, both for his own sake and for our good, he sometimes will not grant our prayers unless we persevere in them for a very long while.

Our Lord has given us to understand this importance of persevering in prayer very plainly in the Gospel read on these days, called Rogation Days, between to-day and the Feast of the Ascension. He represents to us in the parable of this Gospel a man who has gone to bed, and is roused at midnight by a friend who wants to borrow some bread to set before an unexpected guest. He at first tells the disturber to leave him alone; he says that he cannot be bothered to get up at such an inconvenient time; he pretends to drop off asleep, and keeps his friend outside knocking and pounding for so long a time that he almost gives it up as useless. "Yet," says our Lord, "if he shall continue knocking, I say to you, although he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth."

This is the lesson, then, it may be, for those who have had no success at their prayers. They did well to begin, but they did not keep at it long enough. Let them go at it once again, and keep on. Let them ask, and keep asking, and they shall receive; let them seek long enough, and they shall find; let them keep knocking and making a disturbance, and at last the door shall be opened, and they shall obtain what they desire.