“A holy man used to say when he returned home from a night of table-talk that he would never accept such an invitation again, so remorseful did such nights always leave him; so impossible did he find it for him to hold his peace, and to speak only at the right moment, and only in the right way. And, without his holiness, I have often had his remorse, and so, I am quite sure, have many of you. There is no table we sit at very long that we do not more or less ruin either to ourselves or to some one else. We either talk too much, and thus weary and disgust people; or they weary and disgust us. We start ill-considered, unwise…topics. We blurt out our rude minds in rude words. We push aside our neighbor’s opinion, as if both he and his opinion were worthless, and we thrust forward our own as if wisdom would die with us. We do not put ourselves into our neighbor’s place. We have no imagination in conversation, and no humility, and no love. We lay down the law, and we instruct people who could buy us in one end of the market and sell us in the other if they thought us worth the trouble. It is easy to say grace; it is easy to eat and drink in moderation and with decorum and refinement; but it is our tongue that so ensnares us. For some men to command their tongue; to bridle, and guide, and moderate, and make just the right use of their tongue, is a conquest in religion, and in morals, and in good manners, that not one in a thousand of us has yet made over ourselves.” And, fact is, the damage we have far too often done with our words is too often never repaired. We can’t repair it, either because we don’t even know that damage was done or because the wound we caused was too great and hurts too much, or because the opportunity to repent and restore either never appeared or was missed when it did. Someone’s reputation was harmed by the words we spoke and sometimes harmed in the minds of people who neither know the person nor will ever meet him. Gossip we spread is then spread by others still farther and wider and no one can collect all the ill-reports even if he wished to do so. Our words have spread dissension and then the division between others takes on a life of its own and can’t be undone."

Alexander Whyte, [Walk, Character, and Conversation of our Lord], 244-246