542. The Busybody

The Busybody

1Pe_4:15 : ’93A busybody in other men’92s matters.’94

Human nature is the same in all ages. In the second century of the world’92s existence people had the same characteristics as people in the nineteenth century, the only difference being that they had the characteristics for a longer time. It was five hundred years of goodness or five hundred years of meanness, instead of goodness or meanness for forty or fifty years. Well, Simon Peter, who was a keen observer of what was going on around him, one day caught sight of a man whose characteristics were severe inspection and blatant criticism of the affairs belonging to people for whom he had no responsibility, and with the hand once browned and hardened by fishing-tackle drew this portrait for all subsequent ages: ’93A busybody in other men’92s matters.’94

That kind of person has been a trouble-maker in every country since the world stood. Appointing himself to the work of exploration and detection, he goes forth mischief-making. He generally begins by reporting the infelicity discovered. He is the advertising agent of infirmities and domestic inharmony and occurrences that but for him would never have come to the public eye or ear. He feels that the secret ought to be hauled out into light and heralded. If he can get one line of it into the newspapers, that he feels to be a noble achievement to start with. But he must not let it stop. He whispers it to his neighbors, and they, in turn, whisper it to their neighbors, until the whole town is a-buzz and agog. You can no more catch it or put it down than you can a malaria. It is in the air and on the wing and afloat. Taken by itself, it seems of little importance, but after a hundred people have handled it, and each has given it an additional twist, it becomes a story, in size and shape marvelous. If it can be kept going, after a while it will be large enough to call the attention of the courts or the presbyteries or conferences or associations. The most of the scandals abroad are the work of the one whom Peter in the text styles, ’93A busybody in other men’92s matters.’94

First, notice that such a mission is most undesirable, because we all require all the time we can get to take care of our own affairs. To carry ourselves through the treacherous straits of this life demands that we all the time keep our hand on the wheel of our own craft. While, as I shall show you before I get through, we all have a mission of kindness to others, we have no time to waste in doing that which is damaging to others.

There is our worldly calling, which must be looked after or it will become a failure. Who succeeds in anything without concentrating all his energies upon that one thing? All those who try to do many things go to pieces, either as to their health or their fortune. They go on until they pay ten cents on the dollar, or pay their body into the grave. We cannot manage the affairs of others and keep our own affairs prosperous. While we are inquiring how precarious is the business of another merchant, and finding out how many notes he has unpaid and how soon he will probably be wound up or make an assignment or hear the sheriff’92s hammer smite his counter, our own affairs are getting mixed up and endangered. While we are criticising our neighbor for his poor crops we are neglecting the fertilization of our own fields or allowing the weeds to choke our own corn. While we are trying to extract the mote from our neighbor’92s eye, we fall under the weight of the beam in our own eye. Those men disturbed by the faults of others are themselves the depot at which whole trains of faults arrive, and from which whole trains of faults start. The men who have succeeded in secular things or religious things will tell you that they have no time for hunting out the deficits of others. On the way to their counting-room they may have heard that a firm in the same line of business was in trouble, and they said: ’93Sorry, very sorry;’94 but they went in and sat down at their table and opened the book containing a full statement of their affairs to see if they were in peril of being caught in a similar cyclone.

Gadders about town, with hands in pockets and hats set far back on the head, waiting to hear baleful news, are failures now or will be failures. Christian men and women who go around with mouth and looks full of interrogation points to find how some other church member is given to exaggeration or drinks too much or neglects his home for greater outside attractions, have themselves so little grace in their hearts that no one suspects they have any. In proportion as people are consecrated and holy and useful, they are lenient with others and disposed to say: ’93Wait until we hear the other side of that matter. I cannot believe that charge made against that man or woman until we have some better testimony than that given by these scandal-mongers. I guess it is a lie.’94

If God had given us whole weeks and months and days with nothing to do but gauge and measure and scrutinize the affairs of others, there might be some excuse for such employment, but I do not know anyone who has such a surplus of time and energy and qualification that he can afford much of the time to sit as a coroner upon the dead failures of others. I can imagine that an astronomical crank could get so absorbed in examining the spots on the sun as to neglect clearing the spots off his own character. A very successful man was asked how he had accumulated such vast fortune. He replied: ’93I have accumulated about one-half of my property by attending strictly to my business, and the other half by letting other people’92s alone.’94

Furthermore, we are incapacitated for the supervisal of others because we cannot see all sides of the affair reprehended. People are generally not so much to blame as we suppose. It is never right to do wrong, but there may be alleviations. There may have arisen a conjunction of circumstances which would have flung any one of us. The world gives only one side of the transaction, and that is always the worst side. That defaulter at the bank who loaned money he ought not to have loaned did it for the advantage of another, not for his own. That young man who purloined from his employer did so because his mother was dying for the lack of medicine. That young woman who went wrong did not get enough wages to keep her from starving to death. Most people who make moral shipwreck would do right in some exigency, but they have not the courage to say No.

Better die than do the least wrong, but moderate your anathema against the wrongdoer by the circumstances which may yet develop. Be economical of your curses when all the community is hounding some man or woman. Wait, consider, pause and hope that which is charged is a base fabrication. Do not be like a jury who should render verdict against the defendant without allowing him to present his side of the case. I know not what your observation has been, but I have never known a case of default in character but there were some circumstances which ought to weigh on the side of the recreant. The most repugnant character on earth to me is the man who believes everything he hears against others and hurls all the slandered down the same embankment of denunciation. I dislike such a one more than I dislike the offender for whom he has no mercy.

Furthermore, we make ourselves a disgusting spectacle when we become busybodies. What a diabolical enterprise those undertake who are ever looking for the moral lapse or downfall of others! As the human race is a most imperfect race, all such hunters find plenty of game. There have been sewing societies in churches which tore to pieces more reputations than they made garments for the poor. With their sarcasms and sly hints and depreciation of motives, they punctured more good names than they had needles. With their scissors they cut character bias, and backstitched every evil report they got hold of. Meetings of boards of directors have sometimes ruined good business men by insinuations against them. The bad work may not have been done so much by words, for they would be libelous, but by a twinkle of the eye or a shrug of the shoulder or a sarcastic accentuation of a word. ’93Yes, he is all right when he is sober.’94 ’93Have you inquired into that man’92s history?’94 ’93Do you know what business he was in before he entered this?’94 ’93I move that the application be laid on the table until some investigations now going on are consummated.’94 It is easy enough to start a suspicion that will never down, but what a despicable man is the one who started it!

There is not an honest man in Washington or New York or any other city who cannot be damaged by such infernalism. In a village where I once lived a steamboat every day came to the wharf. An enemy of the steamboat company asked one day: ’93I wonder if that steamboat is safe?’94 The man who heard the question soon said to his neighbor: ’93There is some suspicion about the safety of that steamboat.’94 And the next one who got hold of it said: ’93There is an impression abroad that there will soon be an accident on that steamer.’94 Soon all that community, began to say: ’93That steamer is very unsafe,’94 and as a consequence we all took the stage rather than risk our lives on the river. The steamer was entirely sound and safe, but one interrogation in regard to her started a suspicion that went on until the steamboat company was ruined. Precisely so noble reputations and good enterprises and useful styles of business are slain by interrogation points. Can you imagine any creature so loathsome as the one who feels himself or herself called to question all integrity, all ability, all honesty, all character? Buzzards looking for carrion.

While I believe enough in human depravity to be orthodox, I tell you that the most of the people whom I know are doing the best they can. Faults? Oh, yes; all people except you and I have faults. But they are sorry about it, repentant on account of it, and are trying to do better. About all the married people I know of are married to the one person best suited. Nearly all the parents with whom I am acquainted are doing the best they can for their children. All the clerks in stores, so far as I know, are honest; and all persons in official position, city, state, or nation, are fulfilling their mission as well as they can. The most of those who have failed in business, so far as I know, have failed honestly. The singers are singing their best songs, the sculptors chiseling their best statues, the painters penciling their best pictures, the ministers preaching their best sermons. Take any audience that assembles in any church, and if there are five hundred people assembled, I think at least four hundred and fifty are doing the best they can, and if there be five thousand assembled, at least forty-five hundred are doing the best they can.

While I was thinking upon this subject, I made a visit to one of the national bureaus in this capital, and found that out of eleven hundred millions of money that had passed through the hands of more than four hundred employees, only three cents were unaccounted for, and the three cents were afterwards found. What a compliment to common honesty!

All people make mistakes’97say things that afterward they are sorry for, and miss opportunity of uttering the right word and doing the right thing. But when they say their prayers at night these defects are sure to be mentioned somewhere between the name of the Lord, for whose mercy they plead, and the amen that closes the supplication. ’93That has not been my observation,’94 says some one. Well, I am sorry for you, my brother, my sister. What an awful crowd you must have gotten into! Or, as is more probable, you are one of the characters that my text sketches. You have not been hunting for partridges and quail, but for vultures. You have been microscopizing the world’92s faults. You have been down in the marshes when you ought to have been on the uplands. I have caught you at last. You are ’93a busybody in other men’92s matters.’94

How is it that you can always find two opinions about any one, and those two opinions exactly opposite? I will tell you the reason. It is because there are two sides to every character’97the best side and the worst side. A well-disposed man chiefly seeks the best side. The badly-disposed seeks chiefly the worst side. Be ours the desire to see the best side, for it is healthier for us so to do and stirs admiration, which is an elevated state, while the desire to find the worst side keeps on in a spirit of disquietude and disgust and mean suspicion, and that is a pulling down of our own nature, a disfigurement of our own character. I am afraid the imperfections of others will kill us yet.

The habit I deplore is apt to show itself in the visage. A kindly man who wishes everybody well soon demonstrates his disposition in his looks. His features may fracture all the laws of handsome physiognomy, but God puts into that man’92s eyes and in the curve of his nostril and in the upper and lower lip the signature of divine approval. And you see it at a glance, as plainly as though it had been written all over his face in rose color: ’93This is one of my princes. He is on the way to coronation. I bless him now with all the benedictions that infinity can afford. Look at him. Admire him. Congratulate him.’94

On the other hand, if one be cynical about the character of others, and chiefly observant of defects and glad to find something wrong in character, the fact is apt to be demonstrated in his looks. However regular his features, and though constructed according to the laws of Kaspar Lavater, his visage is sour. He may smile, but it is a sour smile. There is a sneer in the inflation of the nostril. There is a mean curvature to the lip. There is a bad look in the eye. The devil of sarcasm and malevolence and suspicion has taken possession of him, and you see it as plainly as though from the hair line of the forehead to the lowest point in the round of his chin it were written: ’93Mine! Mine! I, the demon of the pit, have soured his visage with my curse. Look at him! He chose a diet of carrion. He gloated over the misdeeds of others. It took all my infernal engineery to make him what he is’97’92a busybody in other men’92s matters.’92’93

The slanderer almost always attempts to escape the scandal he is responsible for. When in 1741 John Wesley was preaching at Bristol and showing what reason he had to trust in the Captain of his salvation, a hearer cried out: ’93Who was your captain when you hanged yourself? I know the man who saw you when you were cut down.’94 John Wesley asked the audience to make room and let the slanderer come to the front, but when the way was open, the slanderer, instead of coming forward, fled the room. The author or distributor of slanders never wants to face his work.

On the day of Pentecost there were people endowed with what was called the ’93gift of tongues,’94 and they spake for God in many languages. But there are people in our time who seem to have the gift of evil tongues, and there is no end to their iniquitous gabble. Every city, village, and neighborhood of the earth has had driven through it these scavenger carts. When anything is said to you defamatory of the character of others, imitate Joseph John Gurney, of England, who, when a bad report was brought to him concerning anybody, asked: ’93Dost thou know any good thing to tell us concerning her? Since there is no good to relate, would it not be kinder to be silent on the evil? Charity rejoiceth not in iniquity.’94

But there is a worthy and Christian way of looking abroad upon others, not for the purpose of bringing them to disadvantage or advertising their weaknesses or putting in ’93great primer’94 or ’93paragon’94 type their frailties, but to offer help, sympathy, and rescue. That is Christlike, and he who does so wins the applause of the high heavens. Just look abroad for the people who have made great mistakes, and put a big plaster of condolence on their lacerations. Such people are never sympathized with, although they need an infinity of solace. Domestic mistakes. Social mistakes. Ecclesiastical mistakes. Political mistakes. The world has for such only jocosity and gesture of deploration. There is an unoccupied field for you, my brother. No one has been there. Take your case of medicines and go there and ask them where they are hurt and apply divine medicament.

There is a public man who has made a political mistake from which he will never recover. At the next elections he will be put back and put down into a place of disapproval from which he will never rise. Just go to that man, and unroll the scroll of one hundred splendid Americans who, after occupying high places of promotion, were relegated to private life and public scorn. Show him in what glorious company he has been placed by the anathema of the ballot-box.

There is a man or woman, who has made a conjugal mistake, and a vulture has been put into the same cage with a dove, or a lion and a lamb in the same jungle. The world laughs at the misfortune, but it is your business to weep with their woe. There is a merchant who bought at the wrong time or a manufacturer whose old machinery has been superseded by a new invention or who under change of tariff on certain styles of fabric has been dropped from affluence into bankruptcy. Go to him and recall the names of fifty business men who lost all but their honesty and God and heaven. Let them know there are hundreds of good men who have gone under that are thought of in heavenly spheres more than many who are high up and going higher. All will acknowledge that good and lovely Arthur Tappan, who failed in business, was more to be admired than William Tweed in possession of his stolen millions.

Go to that literary man who is starving with a brilliant pen in his right hand, his literary position lost, his books unsalable, and tell him of the mightiest of the past and the present who suffered from nonappreciation. Show the discouraged author, whose manuscript the publishing house will not take, that among the rejected manuscripts of the publishing houses for a while were Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre and Thackeray’92s Vanity Fair and Vestiges of Creation and Uncle Tom’92s Cabin, and that Shakespeare was comparatively unknown in England until Germany acclaimed its appreciation of the greatest of dramatists. Unroll before that discouraged public man the cartoons in the time of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and James G. Blaine, and show all the misinterpreted and pursued the fact that they have it no worse than many who have preceded them, and that in most cases it is jealousy at success that has caused the assault.

In literature it has always been hard for one man to speak well of another. Voltaire hated Rousseau. Charles Lamb could not endure Coleridge. Coleridge derides De Quincy because, while they both used opium, he says De Quincy took it for pleasure, while he (Coleridge) took it to relieve pain. Waller wars against Cowley. The hatred of Plato and Xenophon is as immortal as their works. Corneille had utter contempt for Racine. At Westminster Abbey, in the ’93Poets’92 Corner,’94 sleeps Drayton, the poet, and Goldie, who said he was not a poet; and there rests Dryden, and not far off poor Shadwell, who had pursued him with a fiend’92s fury; Pope and John Dennis, his implacable enemy. Show those wronged of criticism that they are not exceptional cases, and so comfort them to bear the outrage.

Hear it! the more you go to busying yourselves in other men’92s matters the better, if you have design of offering relief. Search out the quarrels, that you may settle them; the fallen, that you may lift them; the pangs, that you may assuage them. Arm yourself with two bottles of divine medicine, the one a tonic and the other an an’e6sthetic; the latter to soothe and quiet, the former to stimulate, to inspire to sublime action. That man’92s matters need looking after in this respect. There are ten thousand men and women who need your help, and need it right away. They do not sit down and cry. They make no appeal for help, but within ten yards of where you sit in church and within ten minutes’92 walk of your home there are people in enough trouble to make them shriek out with agony if they had not resolved upon suppression.

If you are rightly interested in other men’92s matters, go to those who are just starting in their occupations or professions and give them a boost. Those old physicians do not want your help, for they are surrounded with more patients than they can attend to, but cheer those young doctors who are counting out their first drops to patients who cannot afford to pay. Those old attorneys at the law want no help from you, for they take retainers only from the more prosperous clients, but cheer those young attorneys who have not had a brief at all lucrative. Those old merchants have their business so well established that they feel independent of banks, of all changes in tariffs, of all panics, but cheer those young merchants who are making their first mistake in bargain and sale. That old farmer who has two hundred acres in best tillage, and his barns full of harvested crops, and the grain merchant having bought his wheat at high prices before it was reaped, needs no sympathy from you; but cheer up that young farmer, whose acres are covered with a big mortgage and the drought strikes them the first year. That builder, with contracts made for the construction of half a dozen houses and the owners impatient for occupancy, is not to be pitied, but give your sympathy to that mechanic in early acquaintance with hammer and saw and bit, and amid all the limitations of a journeyman.

We pity people who have met with bereavements or accidents or great losses, but there are ’93other men’92s matters’94 that are never reported, though they are crushing to the last degree. Search them out. Alleviate them. Give them practical help. Have a word of appropriate sympathy. Do not go in at some case of bereavement and quote conventionally from the Bible, as I have heard it quoted amid such circumstances: ’93We all do fade as a leaf.’94 ’93Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble,’94 and so on. The Bible, like an apothecary store, has many medicines, and they are all good, but are not alike suited to all cases. I have heard verses of the Bible quoted when they were no more appropriate to the particular case than would be a chapter of Homer’92s Iliad or Virgil’92s Georgics.

Go forth to be a busybody in other men’92s matters, so far as you can helping them out, and help them on. The world is full of instances of those who spend their life in such alleviations. But there is one instance that overtops and eclipses all others. He had lived in a palace. Radiant ones waited upon him. He was charioted along streets yellow with gold and stopped at gates glistening with pearl and hosannaed by immortals coroneted and in snowy white. Centuries gave him not a pain. The sun that rose on him never set. His dominions could not be enlarged, for they had no boundaries, and uncontested was his reign. Upon all that lustre and renown and environment of splendors he turned his back and put down his crown at the foot of his throne, and on a bleak December night trod his way down to a stone house in Bethlehem of our world. Wrapped in what plain shawl and pursued with what enemies on swift camels and howled at with what brigands and thrust with what sharp lances and hidden in what sepulchral crypt, until the subsequent centuries have tried in vain to tell the story by sculptured cross and painted canvas and resounding doxologies and domed cathedral and redeemed nations.

He could not see a woman doubled up with rheumatism, but he touched her, and inflamed muscles relaxed and she stood straight up. He could not meet a funeral of a young man, but he broke up the procession and gave him back to his widowed mother. With spittle on the tip of his finger he turned the midnight of total blindness into the midnoon of perfect sight. He could not see a man down on his mattress helpless with palsy without calling him up to health, and telling him to shoulder the mattress and walk off. He could not find a man tongue-tied, but he gave him immediate articulation. He could not see a man with the puzzled and inquiring look of the deaf without giving him capacity to hear the march of life beating on the drum of the ear. He could not see a crowd of hungry people but he made enough good bread and a surplus that required all the baskets.

He scolded only twice that I remember, once at the hypocrites with elongated visage and the other time when a sinful crowd had arraigned an unfortunate woman, and the Lord with the most superb sarcasm that was ever uttered gave permission to any one who felt himself entirely commendable to hurl the first missile. All for others. His birth for others. His ministry for others. His death for others. His ascension for others. His enthronement for others.

That spirit which leads one to be busy for the betterment of others is going to Edenize the round earth. That spirt induced John Pounds to establish ’93Ragged Schools’94 and Father Matthew to become a temperance reformer and Peter Cooper to establish his Institute and Slater to contribute his fund for schools and Baroness Hirsch to leave more than one hundred million dollars for the improvement of her race and Cornelius Vanderbilt to flood churches and charitable institutions with his beneficence. And though our means be limited and our opportunities circumscribed, we can do the same thing on a small scale. ’93Other men’92s matters!’94 Be busybodies in improving them. With kind words, with earnest prayers, with self-sacrificing deeds, with enlarging charities, let us go forth on a new mission.

And now my words are to the invisible multitudes I reach week by week, but yet will never see in this world, but whom I expect to meet at the bar of God, and hope to see in the blessed heaven. The last word that Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist, said to me at Plainfield, New Jersey, and he repeated the message for me to others, was: ’93Never be tempted under any circumstances to give up your weekly publication of sermons throughout the world.’94 That solemn charge I will heed as long as I have strength to give them and the newspaper types desire to take them. Oh, ye people back there in the Sheffield mines of England and ye in the sheep pastures of Australia and ye amid the pictured terraces of New Zealand and ye among the cinnamon and color-enflamed groves of Ceylon and ye Armenians weeping over the graves of murdered households in Asia Minor and ye amid the idolatries of Benares on the Ganges and ye dwellers on the banks of the Androscoggin and the Alabama and the Mississippi and the Oregon and the Shannon and the Rhine and the Tiber and the Danube and the Nile and the Euphrates and the Caspian and Yellow seas; ye of the four corners of the earth who have greeted me again and again, accept this point-blank offer of everything for nothing; of everything of pardon and comfort and illumination and safety and heaven, ’93without money and without price.’94 What a Gospel for all lands, all zones, all ages! Gospel of sympathy! Gospel of hope! Gospel of emancipation! Gospel of sunlight! Gospel of enthronement! Gospel of eternal victory! Take it, all ye people, until your sins are all pardoned and your sorrows all solaced and your wrongs all righted and your dying pillow be spread at the foot of a ladder which, though like the one that was let down to Bethel, may be thronged with descending and ascending immortals, shall nevertheless have room enough for you to climb, foot over foot, on rungs of light, till you go clear up out of sight of all earthly perturbation, into the realm where ’93the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage