The Flaw Hunters | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jan 27, 1876

The Flaw Hunters.

There are people who have a preternatural faculty for detecting evil, or the appearance of evil, in every man's character. They have a fatal scent for carrion. Their memory is like a museum. I once saw at a medical college, all the hideous distortions and monstrous growths, and revolting diseases by which humanity can be troubled or afflicted. They think they have wonderful knowledge of human nature. But it is a blunder to mistake the Newgate Calendar for a biographical dictionary!

A less offensive type of the same tendency leads some people to find apparent satisfaction in the discovery and proclamation of the slightest defect in the habits of good men, and the conduct of public institutions. They cannot talk about the benefits conferred by a great hospital without lamenting some insignificant blot in its laws, or some trifling want of prudence in its management. Speak to them about a man whose good works everybody is admiring, and they cool your ardor by regretting that he is so rough in his manner, or so smooth—that his temper is so hasty, or that he is so fond of applause. They seem to have a brief, requiring them to prove the impossibility of human perfection. They detect the slightest alloy in the pure gold of human goodness. That there are spots in the sun is, with them, something more than an observed fact—it takes rank with a priori and necessary truths.

There are people who, if they hear an organ, find out at once which are the poorest stops. If they listen to a great speaker, they remember nothing but some slip in the construction of a sentence, the consistency of a metaphor, or the evolutions of an argument. While their friends are admiring the wealth and beauty of a tree whose branches are weighed down with fruit, they have discovered a solitary bough lost in the golden affluence on which nothing is hanging.

“Poor Hazlitt was sorely troubled with them in his time.” “Littleness,” he said, “is their element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch.”