Editorial June 27, 1903 Issue

Rumor

Should we paint Rumor in her real vestments, every earnest Christian would shrink aghast and deny all kinship with this thousand-tongued adventuress. And yet perhaps not even the best Christian can declare himself wholly free from the seductive habit.

Rumor knows neither kindness nor exactness, she is untrue to confidence and regards not courtesy. Secrecy with uplifted finger casts her treasures to the wind when she confides the slightest hint to Rumor. Of vivid imagination, fluent speech, sensational and unscrupulous, how easy it is for Rumor to exaggerate and distort while multiplying a harmless statement of the morning and make the evening ring with a malicious jargon, until the originator of a remark finds himself, like poor Gabriel Grubb, confused, bewildered, and wholly unable to adjust the fugitive to its original impulse and expression in a moment of unsuspecting honesty and unguraded trust.

The weedy domain of Rumor may seem too remote from the clean and wholesome pathway of the Christian Scientist to contaminate it with a growth of tares and thistles, but we must be careful lest the baneful seeds find rootage and crowd out life's sweetest blossomings.

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