EVILS OF GOSSIP | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 17, 1878

EVILS OF GOSSIP.

We have known a country society which withered away 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 and as stable as truth, evaporated into a morning mist that turned to a day’s long tears, only because of this; a father and a son were set foot to foot with the fiery breath of an anger that would never cool again between them; and a husband and a young wife, each straining at the hated leash which in the beginning had been the promise of a God-blessed love, sat mournfully by the side of the grave where all their love and all their joy lay buried, and all because of this. We have seen faith transformed to mean doubt, joy give place to grim despair, and charity take on itself the features of black malevolence, all because of the fell words of scandal, and the magic mutterings of gossip. Great crimes work great wrongs, and the deeper tragedies of human life spring from the 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,—slanderous words so easy to say, yet so hard to disprove, throwing on the innocent all the burden 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 cruelest weapons man has ever forged for his brother’s heart.—All the Year Round.