And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. The tongue is placed among our members, which defileth the whole body, and inflameth the wheel of our nativity, being set on fire by hell.
Glossa Ordinaria
The universality of iniquity. He calls it a universality, because through it nearly all crimes are either contrived, as robberies and ravishments; or perpetrated, as perjuries and false testimonies; or defended, as when any impure man, excusing the crime he has committed, feigns a good which he has not done. Which defileth the whole body. And because such is the tongue, it defiles the whole body and makes it be reckoned unclean in the sight of God; and therefore it is a grave thing to undertake the mastership: because it is set among our members, it is one of our members, too near to us. It inflameth the wheel, etc. It contaminates the whole course of temporal life, etc., up to it compels to bring to effect through the other members.
English is machine-translated from the public-domain Latin (Glossa Ordinaria, Migne, Patrologia Latina 113-114, 1852; digital text from Corpus Corporum, mlat.uzh.ch), since no public-domain English translation exists. It is not a scholarly translation. Please report errors.