The Abbeville Banner

Scandal.—The Devil has a wonderful penchant for rebuking sin. Eyes which are full of beams, have an unaccountable clearness of vision in detecting motes in other eyes. Some people are brought into the world to accomplish a marvelous mission, and that mission is to ferret out obliquities in others. Of course it is not expected that these apostles have any business with themselves; their mission is violent, and does not admit of time to scrutinize their own position. What profit is it that they should pause to consider their own peccadillos, when the enormities of their neighbors loom up like mountains?

So goes the world over. Everybody minds everybody's business, but everybody neglects his own. What sort of a world would this be, if we were without each other to feed upon!—Men have eyes and ears for some purpose, and what else could they find for them to do, if not to see and hear of each other's failings, derelictions, errors, transgressions, enormities! They have tongues which must lie uselessly idle, if not employed in giving currency to such delinquencies. Be it as it is with man. The obliquities of his offended brother furnish the chief staple of conversational interest. Human error is the current coin of social intercourse, and too often the coin comes from the mint of 'the shaker?'