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Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves
before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also
among them.

And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan
answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth,
and from walking up and down in it."

And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright
man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?"

Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for
nought?"

Here we have in a nutshell the whole _modus operandi_ of the gossip in
all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night,
slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the
earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening,
smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed,
leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere
trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure
in his very cowardice.

"Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing.
Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all--and leaves it to
work.

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 whi