Gossip by Chas. S. Robinson

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 11, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 47.

Gossip.

By Chas. S. Robinson

It might be enough to say, in the beginning, that most of the harmful gossip of our times arises from mere impertinence. People keep talking about what is, at the best, none of their business. But such reckless conversation grows serious when it is kept up concerning a living human being with a mind to trouble, a reputation to ruin, a heart to break. The likelihood of mistake, in all private judgments of our fellow-man, is simply immeasurable; any prudent person would do well to check his speech.

For, first, we rarely get the exact facts right at the start. A mere remark may be twisted in the mouth of a malevolent enemy into a wild utterance of wrong. Who is there on this earth that identifies his own sentences and words when they come back to him from the street? Who is adept enough at telling a story to be able to rehearse it twice over, and add nothing to it? Hence, things get stated wrong, and dangerously perverted.

Then, again, recollect that we never know the elements of decision which entered in to compel the course which we censure. A great many considerations inevitably have to be reckoned in a man's making up his mind, which he does not propose to publish for his neighbors to rehearse; but it is by these that his judgment is arrested, modified, and established.

Then, too, we cannot know the extenuations which are to be found in one's temperament and education. Even when facts show that a Christian has committed real sin, there must be a careful discrimination. All those questions of weak will, perverse habits, wrong companions, overmastering temptations, defective instruction, rushing memories, or alarming apprehensions, sudden attack, hereditary taint, physical distemper,—all these are to be answered before a child of God can be recklessly cast out. And these particulars are precisely what we do not know.

Then add to this that the outside world cannot learn, in any form or measure whatsoever, the penitence afterwards within the man's soul, by the offer of which in faith he finds a fresh acceptance with God, and is now an humbler and steadier man in all time to come because of his downfall. A true Christian follows up his sin with confession; and it would certainly go far to disarm our harsh judgment of him, if in the moment of our making it, we could see the sorrowful child of the Highest on his knees, alone in the closet of his contrition; if we could understand how discouraged he is to think he has surrendered again,—so discouraged, indeed, that he would give up hoping forever, but that he knows God the Judge is kinder than men are.—Chas. S. Robinson.