PROFITING BY SLANDER by Sunday School Times

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 9, 1880

PROFITING BY SLANDER.

By Sunday School Times

ONE of the rarest, as it is one of the most difficult, of Christian acquirements, is the art of profiting by slander. Just here there are peculiar opportunities of self-improvement. Granted that an enemy's malicious criticism upon your character and doings is pure caricature, yet a caricature, though it distorts and disguises the features, is, after all, an exaggeration of the more prominent of them. You are not likely to hear of all your weaknesses and angularities from those who wish to stand well in your esteem, and who shrink from giving you pain. If you wish to see yourself as others see you, listen to the bitter and scathing sarcasms that leap to the lips of one you have bitterly angered. And when your indignation and sense of injustice are gone, your wounded vanity ought to admit that what gave point to your enemy's gibe was the truth that was exaggerated in his slander. To attempt to veil the disclosed fault from yourself would make you a conscious hypocrite. The only course for a true man is to meet it, and fight it prayerfully. That is one way to extract good from evil.—Sunday School Times.