The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague of boils.  Actually—­life not being, like the Book of Job, an allegory—­he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter.

The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a heritage of malignant gossip.  In the town of Lincoln, in England, there exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous “Jew’s House,” associated with the gruesome legend of “the boy of Lincoln”—­a child, it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral feasts.  Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia.

Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind of Europe!  Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause!  What criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown—­gossip?

A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft.  Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity.  At any time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and death upon the neighbours or their cattle.

You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest horse-pond.  Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous Salem trials appallingly evidence.  Men high in the state, as well as helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with “witch-moles” or incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of the malignant gossip.

In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too culpably particeps criminis in this phenomenon under consideration.  If the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is certainly true of any piece of gossip.  Whoever it may be that sows the evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard.