Tattlers | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 24, 1871

Tattlers.

EVERY community is cursed by the presence of a class of people who make it their business to attend to everybody’s affairs but their own. Such people are the poorest specimens of humanity which exist upon this blighted earth. It is well known that almost every person is sometimes disposed to speak evil of others, and tattling is a sin from which very few can claim to be entirely exempt. But the object of this present article is to speak of that distinct class of tattlers who make tale-bearing the constant business of their lives. They pry into the private affairs of every family in the neighborhood; they know the exact state of one neighbor’s feelings toward another; they understand everybody’s faults, and no little blunder or misdemeanor ever escapes their watchfulness. They are well posted upon everything connected with courtship and matrimony, and know who are going to marry whom, and can guess the exact time by every movement of parties suspected of matrimonial intentions; and, if there is the slightest chance to create a disturbance, excite jealousy, or “break up” a match, they take advantage of it, and do all in their power to keep people in a state of constant vexation.

They glide quietly from gentleman to lady, from mother to daughter, from father to son, and in the ears of all they pour their bitter whispers of slander and abuse, and, at the same time, pretend to be the most sincere friends of those they talk to. Their nauseous pills of slander are sugar-coated with smiles and words of friendship.

Tattlers are confined to no particular class, and they operate in all. We find them among the rich, and the poor—“upper ten” and the “lower million,” in the church and out of it. They are people who have no higher ambition than to be well informed in regard to other people’s private business, to retail scandal to their neighbors, and to exult in fiendish triumphs over the wounded feelings and bruised hearts of their innocent victims.