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A blind and mute man was brought to Jesus. Jesus healed him, and the man began to speak and see. The people wondered whether this might be the promised Son of David. The Pharisees looked at the same work and answered it with a verdict already shaped by their rejection of Him: “This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (Matthew 12:24).
The miracle was visible. Its natural implication was unwelcome.
Jesus answered that He cast out devils “by the Spirit of God” and that the kingdom of God had therefore come upon them. The Pharisees had taken the work of the rightful King, performed by the Spirit of God, and assigned it to the ruler of the rebel order. Their judgment of Christ was not evidential but prejudicial. It did not move from the work to the conclusion the work warranted; it began with the refusal of that conclusion and reassigned the work accordingly. Their words placed God’s work under the wrong authority and revealed the authority from which their own judgment arose.
Jesus then said:
But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.
—Matthew 12:36–37
Read by itself, the final sentence might sound as though people earn a favorable judgment by saying enough good things. That is not merely a hypothetical misunderstanding. Trent Horn, presenting a Catholic case against justification by faith alone, appeals to Matthew 12:36–37 as evidence of a future justification according to works and objects to treating words as signs of the faith within the heart.1 His objection rightly prevents us from making words irrelevant. The question is whether their role in judgment makes them meritorious.
The surrounding argument supplies the answer. Jesus has traced speech back to its source: “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” The Pharisees’ accusation pronounces judgment upon Him, but in doing so it exposes them. Their verdict is not evidence concerning Christ; it is evidence concerning His accusers.
The previous occurrence showed Wisdom justified by what came from her.2 Her works revealed rather than created the character of their source. Matthew now applies that movement to human speech: words issue from the heart as fruit from a tree.
The question, then, is not whether words can purchase justification. It is why words can furnish truthful evidence in judgment—and what kind of justification Jesus says will follow.
The Words That Provoked the Warning
Matthew does not introduce Jesus’ teaching about words as a collection of independent proverbs. It is His answer to a public judgment concerning His authority:
Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw.
And all the people were amazed, and said, Is not this the son of David?
But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.
—Matthew 12:22–24
No one denies that the man has been delivered. The crowd allows the work to raise the question it naturally raises: Is this the Son of David? The Pharisees offer an alternative explanation calculated to prevent that recognition. They possess no additional evidence; they construct a conclusion that keeps the visible work from reaching its proper implication. The deed may be real, they imply, but its power comes from the devil.
Their accusation is an act of source assignment. They see fruit belonging to the kingdom of God and attribute it to a rival kingdom. As in the previous passage, the rebel authority imitates the language of legitimate judgment. Demons are real. Satanic power is real. Spiritual claims must be tested. The Pharisees employ valid categories, but the verdict precedes the inquiry. What comes from the Spirit is classified as the work of Beelzebub because acknowledging its true source would require them to acknowledge the King.
Jesus first exposes the incoherence of their verdict. A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is working against his own dominion. Jesus then identifies the actual source and consequence of the deliverance:
But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.
—Matthew 12:28
The explanations cannot both be true. Either Jesus acts by Beelzebub or He acts by the Spirit of God and manifests the arrival of God’s kingdom. The Pharisees have not made a minor mistake about the mechanism of a miracle. They have placed the King on the wrong side of the conflict.
That is why Jesus’ warning about blasphemy against the Holy Ghost follows:
Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.
And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.
—Matthew 12:31–32
Whatever further questions the warning raises, Matthew’s immediate connection is unmistakable. The Spirit has borne witness through Christ’s work, and the Pharisees have answered with a settled judgment against that testimony.
Jesus next calls them a “generation of vipers” (Matthew 12:34). The Greek is γεννήματα ἐχιδνῶν—the offspring or brood of vipers—rather than γενεά, the word often translated generation. The KJV wording preserves the older begetting sense: He identifies them by their origin and the character they reproduce.3 Their speech bears the family likeness.
The controversy has therefore moved through two questions of source. From whom does Jesus’ work come? What gives rise to the Pharisees’ words? Jesus answers the first by naming the Spirit of God. He answers the second by turning to the tree, its fruit, and the abundance of the heart. The work is evidence that identifies Christ; the prejudicial rejection of that evidence becomes evidence that identifies His accusers.
The Tree and Its Fruit
Jesus places the relation between source and evidence at the center of His answer:
Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit.
—Matthew 12:33
The command to “make the tree good” does not tell the Pharisees to transform Jesus into a good man, as though their judgment could alter what He is. Jesus demands consistency between their treatment of the tree and its fruit. If the fruit is good, they must acknowledge the tree as good; if the tree is corrupt, its fruit must bear that corruption. They cannot preserve the goodness of the deliverance while assigning its source to the devil.
That is precisely what their accusation attempts to do. A man who had been blind and mute now sees and speaks. Satan’s dominion has lost a captive. The fruit is liberation, restoration, and the visible advance of God’s kingdom. Yet the Pharisees call the source satanic. Their verdict breaks the correspondence Jesus says must exist between a tree and what grows from it.
“The tree is known by his fruit” establishes the direction of the evidence. Fruit does not produce the tree or change its kind; it makes the tree recognizable. Here Christ’s works bear witness to the Spirit and kingdom from which they arise.
Jesus then turns the principle upon His accusers:
O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.
—Matthew 12:34–35
Jesus judges their speech by the very relation they refused to honor. Calling them “evil” does not mean they are incapable of forming a true sentence, applying a real moral category, or performing an outwardly proper act. The problem lies deeper than vocabulary. They use the language of spiritual discernment—God, Satan, demons, authority—while a heart positioned against the King governs its use. True categories have been placed inside a rival interpretation.
Jesus’ question—“How can ye, being evil, speak good things?”—joins speech to identity. Good words in this setting are not merely polite, orthodox-sounding, or factually accurate in isolation. They correspond to what God is revealing and flow from a heart rightly related to Him. The Pharisees cannot speak that way while maintaining the judgment that has set them against the Spirit’s witness.
Their words are evidential in a way their judgment of Christ is not. Their verdict about Him does not arise from an honest reading of His works; it refuses what those works show. But the verdict does arise from their hearts. It is false as an assessment of Christ and true as a disclosure of His accusers.
The tree-and-fruit saying therefore operates twice. Christ’s works disclose the divine source of His authority. The Pharisees’ words disclose the rebellious source of their judgment. They misidentify His tree because their own tree is corrupt.
Out of the Abundance of the Heart
Jesus does not treat words as independent objects that appear without a history. He traces them inward:
For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
—Matthew 12:34
In Scripture, the heart is not merely the place of emotion. It is the inward center of thought, desire, trust, allegiance, and judgment. The Pharisees’ mouths have spoken the conclusion their hearts were prepared to reach. Their accusation comes from within an established posture toward Christ.
The word translated “abundance,” περίσσευμα, refers to excess or overflow.4 The mouth is not a detached instrument occasionally betraying an unrelated heart. Speech spills from what the heart contains in abundance.
He immediately restates the relation through the image of a treasury:
A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.
—Matthew 12:35
A treasury holds what has been stored. What comes out did not originate when it appeared; the spoken word makes an inward store publicly available.
Matthew’s Greek strengthens the movement. The preposition ἐκ—“out of” or “from”—repeats through the paragraph:5
- The tree is known from its fruit: ἐκ τοῦ καρποῦ.
- The mouth speaks out of the heart’s abundance: ἐκ τοῦ περισσεύματος τῆς καρδίας.
- The good or evil man brings things out of his corresponding treasury: ἐκ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ θησαυροῦ and ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ θησαυροῦ.
- A person will be justified or condemned from his words: ἐκ τῶν λόγων σου.
The preposition does not perform precisely the same task in every clause. The heart is the source from which speech comes; fruit and words supply the evidence from which a source is recognized or a judgment rendered. The repetition nevertheless joins those relations: what comes from within becomes the outward basis upon which the inward reality may be known.6
Another verbal echo is hidden by necessary differences in English translation. The Pharisees accuse Jesus of “casting out” devils. Matthew uses ἐκβάλλω. When Jesus says that a man “bringeth forth” good or evil things from his treasury, Matthew again uses ἐκβάλλω. Jesus casts demons out by the Spirit of God; a man casts or brings things out from what is stored in his heart.
The verbal echo does not equate the actions, but it keeps the question of source before us. The Pharisees claim that what Jesus casts out reveals alliance with Satan; Jesus answers that the accusation they cast out reveals their own hearts. The movement is outward:
heart → abundance → speech → evidence → judgment
The words reveal more than temperament. They disclose allegiance. Having seen the Spirit’s liberating work and heard the question “Is not this the son of David?” the Pharisees place Christ within Satan’s kingdom. Their speech exposes a heart committed to resisting the rightful King.
Jesus has now established why speech may serve as evidence. He next removes any possibility that apparently insignificant words fall outside that accountability: “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.”
Every Idle Word
Jesus’ warning widens the account beyond the accusation immediately before Him:
But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
—Matthew 12:36
The expression translated “idle word” is ῥῆμα ἀργόν. The adjective ἀργός can describe what is inactive, unproductive, useless, or worthless; hence the common rendering “careless” in this setting.7 It marks speech a person might treat as carrying no serious consequence—not a formal confession, binding testimony, or carefully reasoned verdict.
The Pharisees could have dismissed their accusation in just that way. They did not convene a court, call witnesses, or publish a theological treatise. They answered a crowd’s question with a remark: “This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub.” Jesus refuses to let the apparent informality of the utterance conceal what it reveals. A prejudicial judgment does not become harmless because it was spoken casually.
“Every” prevents us from constructing a protected category of speech that need never answer to God. Jesus does not say that only creeds, oaths, sermons, or public declarations will be examined. Words spoken without preparation still come from somewhere. Precisely because the mouth speaks from the heart’s abundance, an unguarded word may expose what guarded speech was designed to hide.
One verbal stumble does not mechanically settle a person’s eternal standing, nor does the warning equate salvation with flawless speech. Jesus has just said, “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men.” Yet forgiveness cannot become an argument that words reveal nothing. They belong to the evidence because they arise from within, not because uttering them creates the source.
The phrase “give account” makes the forum explicit. Matthew writes that people will ἀποδώσουσιν περὶ αὐτοῦ λόγον—render an account concerning the word—in “the day of judgment.” The Pharisees speak as though they occupy the bench from which Christ’s authority may be assigned. Jesus places them before another court, where their own speech will be examined under God’s authority.
There is a deliberate movement between two Greek terms. The “idle word” is a ῥῆμα; the “account” to be rendered is a λόγος. In the next sentence, Jesus uses the plural λόγοι for the words from which a person will be justified or condemned. What people speak becomes part of the account they must answer for.
No rhetorical disguise will change the source from which the words came. “We were only asking questions,” “it was merely an observation,” or “those words were not meant formally” cannot make prejudicial speech evidentially neutral. The day of judgment reveals the weight of words people treated as weightless.
Verse 36 establishes the forum, the accountability, and the scope. Verse 37 now states the opposing outcomes: “For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.”
“From Thy Words”
Matthew’s sentence is carefully balanced:
ἐκ γὰρ τῶν λόγων σου δικαιωθήσῃ, καὶ ἐκ τῶν λόγων σου καταδικασθήσῃ.
For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.
—Matthew 12:37
The KJV renders ἐκ τῶν λόγων σου as “by thy words.” That is good English, but by can identify an agent, instrument, cause, standard, or evidential basis. The preposition must be read within the argument Jesus has built.
Words are plainly not the judging agent. The person is the subject of both passive verbs: “thou shalt be justified” and “thou shalt be condemned.” Verse 36 locates both outcomes “in the day of judgment.” God occupies the judicial position; the words do not pronounce the authoritative verdict.
Nor are the words presented as payment for a favorable decision. Jesus has not told His hearers to accumulate acceptable sentences until they outweigh the rest. He has traced words back through the mouth, the treasury, and the abundance of the heart.
The more literal “from thy words” helps us hear the relation Matthew has been repeating. A tree is known from its fruit. Speech comes from the abundance of the heart. Good and evil things are brought from their corresponding treasuries. Finally, the verdict is rendered from the words as the outward evidence of that inward source.
The sequence traced earlier—heart, abundance, speech, evidence, judgment—does not run backward. Words do not manufacture a new heart or earn a new standing; they carry an inward allegiance outward toward judgment.
The words stand where an inward relation becomes publicly knowable. Calling them evidence does not weaken Jesus’ statement. A physician may diagnose a disease from its symptoms without claiming that the symptoms created it; a court may establish what happened from testimony without imagining that the testimony produced the event. Likewise, words bear witness to the heart without manufacturing its allegiance.
Calling words evidence does not make them inconsequential. In a royal court, evidence may be decisive without becoming payment: it establishes what the verdict must truthfully answer to, but it does not purchase the judge’s favor. Words therefore carry the full weight of disclosure in judgment without becoming the merit by which right standing is obtained.
The conjunction γάρ—“for”—binds verse 37 to the accountability announced in verse 36. People will answer for every idle word in the day of judgment, for from their words they will be justified or condemned. Verse 37 explains why no word can be dismissed as weightless: speech belongs to the evidence by which the Judge identifies where the speaker truly stands.
“By thy words” therefore names neither a verbal instrument that makes the sinner righteous nor merit that obligates God to acquit. It identifies the disclosed evidence from which a truthful verdict arises.
Justified and Condemned
The two verbs complete one another. Δικαιωθήσῃ is the future passive of δικαιόω: “thou shalt be justified.” Καταδικασθήσῃ is the corresponding future passive of καταδικάζω: “thou shalt be condemned.” The same person stands as the subject of either outcome, the same evidence is in view, and the same day of judgment supplies the setting. Only the verdict changes.
That opposition fixes the judicial force of δικαιόω in this sentence.8 To be justified is to receive the judgment that one stands right; to be condemned is to receive the judgment that one stands wrong and liable to judgment. Neither verb describes a gradual inward process. The sentence does not make the condemned person sinful or morally renovate the justified person. It gives authoritative judgment concerning the relation in which each stands.
Judicial does not mean arbitrary. A judge cannot make falsehood true merely by speaking from the bench. God’s judgment is perfect because His verdict neither invents nor mistakes the relation it names. He does not confuse attractively arranged fruit or rehearsed religious vocabulary with allegiance to His Son.
The passive forms also reverse the positions the Pharisees have assumed. They see the Spirit’s work and assign it to Beelzebub, forcing the evidence beneath an allegiance already chosen. In the day of judgment they will not occupy the bench. The men who pronounced their verdict upon Christ will receive the verdict of the rightful Judge.
Their accusation cannot relocate Jesus beneath Satan’s authority; their words have no jurisdiction over Him. Instead, the false verdict they pronounce upon Christ becomes truthful evidence of their own position against the Spirit’s testimony and the kingdom present in the King.
The verdict concerns the speaker, not merely the correctness of particular statements. “Thou shalt be justified” and “thou shalt be condemned” name opposing relations before the Judge. Words disclose that relation; they do not transfer their own righteousness or guilt to the person speaking them.
The forensic setting is therefore spatial and relational at its core. There is a Judge, a standard established by His rightful authority, and a person standing before Him. The verdict is forensic in form precisely because it authoritatively identifies a relation: whether that person stands rightly under God’s rule. The courtroom supplies the setting; the relation supplies the reality being judged. Justification names right standing in that relation; condemnation names the opposite.
Matthew 12:37 does not tell us everything Scripture will say about how a sinner comes to stand right before God. It does establish that the final verdict is neither purchased by verbal performance nor produced by transforming the subject through the act of judging. The words reveal the source, allegiance, and standing upon which judgment bears.
Profession and Reality
If words reveal the heart, what are we to make of words that conceal it? People can flatter those they despise, confess doctrines they do not believe, and imitate the language of faith for advantage. Hypocrisy does not overturn Jesus’ argument; it depends upon the relation He describes. The hypocrite attempts to make the fruit appear inconsistent with the tree. A lie is not meaningless speech but speech used to create false evidence.
God does not judge an isolated sentence as though nothing preceded it, followed it, or gave rise to it. He knows the treasury from which every word is drawn—the polished profession, the unguarded accusation, the explanation offered afterward, and the silences by which a person avoids acknowledging what he knows. The day of judgment does not merely count vocabulary; it discloses the correspondence between heart and speech.
Matthew 12 already exposes that correspondence. The Pharisees could speak of the law, the prophets, the coming kingdom, the Spirit of God, and the hope of Israel. If correct religious vocabulary secured justification, they would appear well supplied. Yet when the promised King acts before them by the Spirit, their governing judgment becomes audible. Their accumulated profession cannot cancel the allegiance revealed in their response to Christ.
Doctrine does not matter less than sincerity. A sincerely spoken falsehood remains false, and the Pharisees’ accusation is both revealing and wickedly wrong. Jesus exposes the authority under which their theology operates: true categories are being used inside a judgment governed by prior rejection of the Son.
Here the rebel authority analogy reaches its sharpest point. A rival government may preserve the king’s vocabulary, repeat many of his laws, and punish conduct the king also forbids. Its resemblance does not establish its legitimacy. When it claims the right to judge the king, the borrowed language serves an authority opposed to the one from which that language came. In the same way, religious speech can remain outwardly orthodox in many particulars while the heart using it stands against God’s rightful rule.
Their decisive words matter because they bring a settled judgment into the open, not because they contain a uniquely unforgivable arrangement of syllables. Acknowledging the Spirit’s testimony would require them to receive the King; instead, their accusation exposes the authority they have chosen to preserve—their own.
For the same reason, a correct confession cannot be treated as a verbal charm. Calling Jesus “Lord” does not transfer righteousness through the sound of the title. A true confession corresponds to who Jesus is and expresses submission to His rightful authority. Its truth is relational as well as grammatical: the Lord confessed by the mouth is the Lord before whom the speaker stands.
Profession, then, is neither irrelevant nor self-validating. It matters because the mouth speaks from the heart, but its meaning cannot be separated from the heart’s actual relation to Christ. False profession attempts to claim a standing that is not real. Faithful confession gives outward voice to a realignment that the confession itself did not manufacture.
How, then, should a hearer examine his own profession? Not by claiming an infallible reading of his heart or treating every passing doubt as a verdict. Paul could say, “I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:4). He knew nothing against himself, yet refused to make self-acquittal authoritative.9 Self-examination places our profession before the Lord; it does not replace His judgment with ours.
First John supplies cumulative, relational tests: Do we confess the true Christ (1 John 4:2), keep His commandments (2:3–6), and love His people (3:14)? These are not payments offered for justification, nor does any believer exhibit them without failure. They ask whether life and speech bear the family resemblance of their professed source. Assurance does not rest upon one rehearsed sentence or one anxious inspection of the heart, but upon Christ and the evidences of life that accompany belonging to Him.
Jesus’ warning therefore reaches beyond obviously hostile words. A person may condemn Christ while using Christian language if that language has been reorganized beneath another authority—personal autonomy, social approval, institutional preservation, or a theological system protected from correction by the King. The question is not merely whether our sentences can be defended in isolation, but whether they flow from a heart standing rightly toward the One of whom we speak.
The Verdict of Revealing Speech
Does Jesus teach that people earn justification by saying the right things? No. He presents words as fruit, not payment. They flow from the treasury of the heart and disclose the speaker’s relation to the King.
Words can therefore appear in judgment without becoming the cause of salvation. God neither learns the heart as an uninformed observer nor mistakes verbal polish for righteousness. The evidence does not establish the standard, control the Judge, or create the standing. It manifests the person who stands before Him.
Matthew 12 gives us an unmistakably judicial use of δικαιόω: to be justified is to receive the favorable verdict rather than condemnation. Its forensic character does not empty it of correspondence. God does not call an opposing relation right; He judges authoritatively and truly.
The warning is more searching than a command to improve our vocabulary. The Pharisees did not need a more diplomatic way to express their rejection. They needed to relinquish the judgment by which they placed the Spirit’s work beneath Satan and presumed to place the King beneath themselves. Their accusation could not change who Jesus was, but it revealed with terrible clarity who they were. They spoke as judges of Christ; their words became evidence awaiting His judgment.
“By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” is therefore neither salvation by eloquence nor condemnation by verbal accident. It is the promise of a judgment in which nothing issuing from the heart will finally remain hidden. The rightful Judge will set every person’s standing in the light, and His verdict will correspond perfectly to the truth.
Notes
- Trent Horn, “Did Jesus Teach Salvation by Faith Alone?”, Catholic Answers, October 23, 2017. Horn cites Alan P. Stanley’s reading of Matthew 12:36–37 as future justification “on the basis of” works in relation to eternal destiny, and then argues directly against treating words and works merely as indicators of inward faith. The present article agrees that words themselves answer in judgment while disputing that their role is meritorious. ↩
- James J. Burke, “Wisdom Is Justified by Her Works,” Fireproof Studies. That occurrence examines Matthew 11:19 and the way works may manifest a rightness they do not create. ↩
- For the fuller argument that biblical generation language may concern source, begetting, and reproduced character rather than merely a chronological cohort, see James J. Burke, “What Did Jesus Mean by ‘This Generation’?”, Fireproof Studies. ↩
- On περίσσευμα as abundance or overflow and θησαυρός as a place or receptacle for stored treasure, see Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., rev. and ed. Frederick William Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.vv. “περίσσευμα,” “θησαυρός.” ↩
- Greek citations follow Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010). English Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. In Matthew 12:35, the Greek text printed by Holmes omits “of the heart,” which appears in the Textus Receptus underlying the KJV. The argument does not depend upon the disputed words: verse 34 expressly names the heart as the source of speech, and verse 35 continues that established relation through the treasury metaphor in either form of the text. ↩
- On the broad source and basis relations expressed by ἐκ, see Bauer-Danker, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “ἐκ.” The contextual distinction made here is important: the same preposition marks the heart or treasury as that from which speech comes, and fruit or words as that from which recognition or judgment follows. ↩
- On ἀργός, see Bauer-Danker, Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “ἀργός.” For a focused survey of the interpretation of πᾶν ῥῆμα ἀργόν in Matthew 12:36, see Hallvard Hagelia, “‘…every careless word you utter…’: Is Matthew 12:36 a Derivative of the Second Commandment of the Decalogue?”, Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 78 (2013): 147–160. ↩
- On δικαιόω in the sense of a favorable judicial judgment and καταδικάζω as its condemning counterpart, see Bauer-Danker, Greek-English Lexicon, s.vv. “δικαιόω,” “καταδικάζω.” Their parallel future passive forms in Matthew 12:37 make the opposition explicit. ↩
- In 1 Corinthians 4:4, the KJV’s “I know nothing by myself” means that Paul knows nothing against himself; nevertheless, he says he is not thereby justified. That occurrence will receive separate treatment later in this series. ↩