p. 139 | Evils of Gossip by All the Year Round

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 4, 1865

Evils of Gossip

By All the Year Round

Evils of Gossip.—I have known a country society which withered away all to nothing, under the dry rot of gossip only. Friendships, once as firm as granite, dissolved to jelly, and then run away to water, only because of this; love, that promised a future as enduring as Heaven 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, only because of this; and a husband and his young wife, each straining at the hated leash which in the beginning had been the golden bondage of a God-blessed love, sat mourning by the side of the grave where all their love

and all their joy lay buried, and only because of this I have seen faith transformed to mean doubt, hope give place to grim despair; and charity take on itself the features of black malevolence, all because of the spell words of scandal, and the magic mutterings of gossip. Great crimes work great wrong, and the deeper tragedies of human life spring from its larger passions; but woeful and most melancholy 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. So easy to say, yet so hard to disprove,—throwing on the innocent all the burden and the strain 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 the cruellest weapons man has forged for his brother's hurt.—All the Year Round.