WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS.
Friendly gossip.
A great deal of good sermonizing, by the way, is expended on gossip, which is denounced as one of the seven deadly sins of society; but, after all, gossip has its better side; if not a Christian grace, it certainly is one of those weeds which show a good warm soil.
The kindly heart, that really cares for everything human it meets, inclines toward gossip in a good way. Just as a morning-glory throws out tendrils, and climbs up and peeps cheerily into your window, so a kindly gossip can’t help watching the opening and shutting of your blinds, and the curling smoke from your chimney.
Persistency.
If you will have your own way, and persist in it, people have to make up with you.
Right side of human nature.
Human nature is always interesting, if one takes it right side out.
Human nettles.
It is rather amusing to a general looker-on in this odd world of ours to contrast the serene, cheerful good faith with which these constitutionally active individuals go about criticising, and suggesting, and directing right and left, with the dismay and confusion of mind they leave behind them wherever they operate.
They are often what the world calls well-meaning people, animated by a most benevolent spirit, and have no more intention of giving offence than a nettle has of stinging. A large, vigorous, well-growing nettle has no consciousness of the stings it leaves in the delicate hands that have been in contact with it; it has simply acted out its innocent and respectable nature as a nettle. But a nettle armed with the power of locomotion on an ambulatory tour, is something the results of which may be fearful to contemplate.
Flaws in gems.
Ideal heroes are not plentiful, and there are few gems that don’t need rich setting.
Impossibility of evading trouble.
People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it. It’s all very well for a gentle, acquiescent spirit to be carried through life by one bearer. But when half a dozen bearers quarrel and insist on carrying one opposite ways, the more facile the spirit, the greater the trouble.
Righteousness through repentance.
Perhaps there is never a time when man or woman has a better chance, with suitable help, of building a good character, than just after a humiliating fall which has taught the sinner his own weakness, and given him a sad experience of the bitterness of sin.
Nobody wants to be sold under sin, and go the whole length in iniquity; and when one has gone just far enough in wrong living to perceive in advance all its pains and penalties, there is often an agonized effort to get back to respectability, like the clutching of the drowning man for the shore. The waters of death are cold and bitter, and nobody wants to be drowned.
“I told you so.”
“Whence is the feeling of satisfaction which we have when things that we always said we knew turn out just as we predicted? Had we really rather our neighbor would be proved a thief and a liar than to be proved in a mistake ourselves? Would we be willing to have somebody topple headlong into destruction for the sake of being able to say, ‘I told you so’?”
Gossip.
In fact, the gossip plant is like the grain of mustard-seed, which, though it be the least of all seeds, becometh a great tree, and the fowls of the air lodge in its branches, and chatter mightily there at all seasons.