CREDULITY FOR SLANDER

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 6, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 17.

CREDULITY FOR SLANDER.

IN daily life credulity finds its food in the ready credence given to slander and iniquity. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people believe an infamous story if only given with sufficient detail. The hundredth alone demands corroboration. It is so much easier to believe evil than good!—just as it is easier to write a telling satire than a wholesome panegyric. Repeat a story, no matter how bad, with aplomb and the air of conviction, and you carry your audience with you. Mention the sum for which ministers have been bought, and that which they have paid as hush money, and your hearers will rise to the fly, swallow it, and never ask whether it is made of living protoplasmic material, or of silk, dead feathers, and brown fluff. It does not signify how impossible in detail, how infamous in application, how improbable in circumstance—it is a bait which credulity cannot withstand; and the more unlikely the conditions of the story, the more certain are they to be accepted. All those who are able to delve deep into another’s mind come to tracts of credulity—that is, to beliefs entirely unsupported by evidence—which make them wonder at the folly, and sometimes despair of the advance, of humanity.—London Queen.