Charles Spurgeon on Gossip

With his characteristic insight and illustrativeness, Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) taught his ministerial students to eschew gossip.

Would it not be a great degradation of your office if you were to keep an army of spies in your pay to collect information as to all that your people said of you? And yet it amounts to this if you allow certain busybodies to bring you all the gossip of the place. Drive the creatures away. Abhor those mischief-making, tattling handmaidens to strife. Those who will fetch will carry, and no doubt the gossips go from your house and report every observation which falls from your lips, with plenty of garnishing of their own. Remember that, as the receiver is as bad as the thief, so the hearer of scandal is a sharer in the guilt of it. If there were no listening ears there would be no talebearing tongues. While you are a buyer of ill wares the demand will create the supply, and the factories of falsehood will be working full time. No one wishes to become a creator of lies, and yet he who hears slanders with pleasure and believes them with readiness will hatch many a brood into active life.¹

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¹Charles H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, Complete and Unabridged (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 328.

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Note: We are in the middle of a long blog series working through my doctoral research into the problem of gossip. We have listened to many voices along the way--proponents of gossip, those who have exacerbated or exploited the problem, those who are ambiguous or ambivalent, and now opponents of gossip both secular and religious.

Two weeks ago, we surveyed the contributions of business leaders, social workers, educators, and Jewish moral teaching against gossip.

This week, we are continuing to interact with Christian teachers throughout church history.