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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, October 1, 1867.

Evils of Gossip.

It is to be hoped that the pictures clearly drawn in the following lines, do not find their original in any of the believers in present truth, but as a caution against this curse of forever saying something about our neighbors and brethren we give them to our readers:

I HAVE known a country society which withered away all to nothing under the dry-rot of gossip only. Friendships, once as firm as granite, dissolved to jelly, and then ran away to water, only because of this. Love, that promised a future as enduring as Heaven and as stable as truth, evaporated into a morning mist that turned to a days' long tears, only because of this. A father and a son were set foot to foot with the fiery breath of anger that would never cool again between them, only because of this; and a husband and his young wife, each straining at the heated leash which in the beginning had been the golden bondage of a God-blessed love, sat mournfully by the side of the grave where all their love and all their joy lay buried, and only because of this. I have seen faith transformed to mean doubt, hope give place to grim despair, and charity take on itself the features of black malevolence, all because of the spell-words of scandal and the magic mutterings of gossip. Great crimes work great wrong, and the deeper tragedies of human life spring from its larger passions; but woeful and most mournful are the uncatalogued tragedies that issue from gossip and detraction; most mournful the shipwreck often made of noble natures and lovely lives by the bitter winds and dead, salt waters of slander. So easy to say, yet so hard to disprove—throwing on the innocent all the burden and the strain of demonstrating their innocence, and punishing them as guilty if unable to pluck out the stings they never see, and to silence words they never hear—gossip and slander are the deadliest and the cruelest weapons man has ever forged for his brother's hurt.—All the Year Round.