THE ARCH SLANDERER

It is the first scene of the human drama; the staging is in an earthly Paradise; perfection is written on everything animate and inanimate. With but one restriction man roams through Edenic beauties, a being “good and very good,” happy and holy. His communion with God is unbroken; fountains of love are opened in his heart as he beholds the beautiful mate at his side. Our wildest imaginations cannot estimate the glories of that life-morning; but behold the Serpent. He utters his first words in the scheme of ruin, and it is a slander against God. “Aha, He knows if you eat you will be like He is—knowing all things, be as gods; He is not treating you fairly; the case is misrepresented. You will not die, but you will be wise. Why does He keep back such privileges from you?” As a result of this slander, the Paradise is lost. Flowers, fruits, peace and plenty are exchanged for weeds, briers, toil, sweat, suffering, death.

Again we find his impudent presence on the day Job is offering sacrifices. Reading between the lines, we can imagine a conversation like this: “You here? You are looking for some pretense to discount My people; you say none are good—all hypocrites. What do you think of My servant Job? What have you to say about him?”

“Oh, of course,” says the slanderer, “you have him hedged around—blessing him continually. It pays Job to be good; just take away your special care of his material welfare and see—he will curse Thee to Thy face.”

An artist once painted a picture of the human tongue in a way to represent his conception of how the “tongue of slander” should appear. It was long, coiled like a serpent, tapering at the end into a barbed spear point; from each of the papilla, scarcely visible, was a needle point, from which oozed a green, slimy poison. The slandering tongue is “a fire, a world of iniquity—it defileth the whole body—it is set on fire of hell.”

The slanderer is no respecter of persons; he rakes and scrapes the uttermost parts of the earth for victims: king and peasant, rich and poor, priest and prophet; living or dead suffer alike when once this vile, inhuman spirit touches them. Bacon said: “Calumny crosses oceans, scales mountains, and traverses deserts with greater ease than the Scythian Abaris, and, like him, rides on a poisoned arrow.” The winds of the Arabian desert not only produce death, but rapid decomposition of the body; so doth slander destroy every virtue of human character. The cloven-hoof slanderer, like the filthy worm, leaves behind a trail of offal and stench though his pathway wind through a bower of earth’s sweetest flowers. A writer has said: “So deep does the slanderer sink in the murky waters of degradation and infamy that, could an angel apply an Archimedian moral lever to him, with heaven as a fulcrum, he could not in a thousand years raise him to the grade of a convict felon.”

“Whose edge is sharper than a sword; whose tongue
Out-venoms all the worms of Nile; whose breath
Rides on the posting winds, and doth belie
All corners of the world; kings, queens, and states,
Maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave
This viperous slander enter.”

Iago is said to be the greatest villain in fiction or history; the revolting crimes of Herod—slaughtering the innocent—does not compare with Iago. Herod saw in the Man Child a possible rival, and blinded by jealousy and ambition, he becomes the most heartless murderer—of all times. But what was the crime of Iago? Slander! With no object in view, no advantage to gain, and too much of a coward to make an open charge, he slanders by insinuation the beautiful Desdemona until the enraged Othello strangles her to death.

How can we reconcile this base passion in human character, as slander has no other avenue of expression? It is unnatural, inhuman, and hellish. The wolf and tiger devour to satisfy hunger; the vulture eats and fattens on rotting carcases, but the slanderer does neither. With the blood cruelty of a savage beast, the degraded appetite of the scavenger, the destroyed victims of fiendish passion only intensify and burn, but never satisfy the slanderer. This spirit was never born among men; its origin is the region of the damned, where hunger gnaws, thirst fires, lust arouses, revenge consumes—but satisfaction is unknown. The hot breath of slander comes from a bourne where dead hopes spring up eternal.

The caption of the chapter denominates the Devil as the arch slanderer; we use it because there is no word of sufficient strength to convey the idea; “arch” fails to convey the whole truth in this case. Archangel is an intelligible term, as there are many of high order; there is, however, but One slanderer. Just as he is the “father of liars”—propagating all lies—his relation to liars does not admit of comparison. He slandered from the day of his fall; he is the father of slanderers. Whether it be circulated in the “submerged world,” the quiet circles of church life, or among the “Four Hundred” of fashion—it is a deflected arrow from the one great quiver.

No being—holy men, angels, or the Son of God—can escape the tongues dripping the venom of slander through the subtle incarnation of that fountainhead of every evil suggestion or insinuation. Whatever destroys happiness, creates doubt and suspicion among the people, ending in litigation, divorces, and murders, fulfills the mission of slander. The caldron from which exudes this vile stench—filling all the earth—is seething and boiling in the Bottomless Pit, or wherever the throne of his majesty—the Devil—is located. The society of earth will never be free from the poison of evil-speaking until the Archslanderer is arrested, chained, and located in the penitentiary prepared for him from the foundation of the world.

---