How to Cure Gossip

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 12, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 23.

How to Cure Gossip.

A New York pastor has this advice to give on the subject. It is certainly an original plan:

Adopt this rule: Let all who come to you with stories about mutual acquaintances know that you intend, as soon as your duties allow, to wait upon the parties spoken of disparagingly and repeat just what was said, and who said it. Still better, take out your memorandum-book, and ask the party to allow you to copy the words, so that you can make no mistake.

You will have to do this probably not more than three times. It will fly among your acquaintances on the wings of the gossips, and persons who come to talk against other persons in your presence will begin to feel as if they were testifying under oath.

But you ask: "Will it not be mean to go off and detail conversations?" Not at all, when your interlocutor understands that he must not talk against an absent person in your presence, without expecting you to convey the words to the absent person and the name of the speaker. Moreover, what right has any man or woman to approach you and bind you to secrecy, and then poison your mind against another? If there be any difference in your obligations, are you not bound more to the man who is absent than the man who is present? If you can thus help to kill gossip, it will not matter if you lose a friend or two; such friends as these, who talk against others to you, are the very persons to talk against you to them.

Try our rule. We know it to be good. We use it. It is known in the church of which we are pastor that if any one speaks to us disparagingly of an absent member, we hold it our duty to go to that absent member immediately, and report the conversation and the names, or still better, to make the party disparaging face the party disparaged. We have almost none of this to do. Amid the many annoyances which necessarily come to the pastor of a large church, and still larger congregation, we think that we are as free from the annoyance of gossips as it is possible for a man to be who lives among his fellow-men.

Try our rule; try it faithfully, with meekness and charity, and if it does not work well, let us know.—N. Y. Examiner.