Editorial August 12, 1911 Issue

THE OFFENDING EAR

John B. Willis

The habit of propagating error by what might be termed conventionally-good-form gossip, is very easily acquired and very generally consented to, but when one comes to think of the misunderstandings, bickerings, ill judgments, and alienations to which it leads, he wonders that every sensible person, not to say Christian, has not awakened to its blighting significance and begun a positive and continuous resistance to its temptations.

Many people who in social intercourse would instinctively recoil from introducing topics that "naturally" as we say, nourish this wrong, find themselves upon occasion too superficially courteous, or too inherently cowardly to place any noticeable obstacle in the path of an ignoble conversation which others have precipitated. They are thus unwilling hearers at the first of that to which, not having dared to be a Daniel, they soon become accustomed, and later on, perchance, traders in. Shocked by the discovery of some wretched outcome of this error-talking habit, they may honestly undertake to "quit it;" but though they succeed in checking their own impulses, unless they begin to curb the impulse of others by refusing to hear as well as to indulge in unideal comment, their best intentioned efforts at reform will remain hopelessly handicapped.

Said one, "I have seen the deplorable results of this habit and I want you to know that of late I have been mum as a mouse." "Well done, I believe you," was answered, "but you have made it quite clear in our conversation today that your self-education in this matter is not yet half complete, for what you have told me gives full proof that though you may have said nothing, you have been 'listening at large.' When you simply refuse to hear what had better never have been spoken, you will address your corrective effort to cause instead of effect, for if you allow no evil speaking to enter your door you will have no comments in store to receive the impress, possibly the distortion, of your own prejudice and be passed along to others."

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