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Bible Dictionaries
Slander
Charles Buck Theological Dictionary
or According to Dr. Barrow, is uttering false speeches against our neighbour, to the prejudice of his fame, safety, welfare; and that out of malignity, vanity, rashness, ill nature, or bad design. The principal kinds of slander are these:
1. Charging others with facts they are not guilty of.
2. Affixing scandalous names and odious characters which they deserve not.
3. Aspersing a man's actions with foul names, importing that they proceed from evil principles, or tend to bad ends, when it doth not or cannot appear.
4. Perverting a man's words or acts disadvantageously by affected misconstruction.
5. Partial or lame representation of men's discourse or practice, suppressing some part of the truth, or concealing some circumstances which ought to be explained.
6. Instilling sly suggestions which create prejudice in the hearers.
7. Magnifying and aggravating the faults of others.
8. Imputing to our neighbour's practice, judgment, or profession, evil consequences which have no foundation in truth. Of all the characters in society, a slanderer is the most odious, and the most likely to produce mischief. "His tongue, " says the great Massilon, "is a devouring fire, which tarnishes whatever it touches; which exercises its fury on the good grain equally as on the chaff; on the profane as on the sacred; which, wherever it passes, leaves only desolation and ruin; digs even into the bowels of the earth; turns into vile ashes what only a moment before had appeared to us so precious and brilliant, acts with more violence and danger than ever, in the time when it was apparently smothered up and almost extinct; which blackens what it cannot consume, and sometimes sparkles and delights before it destroys.
It is an assemblage of an iniquity, a secret pride, which discovers to us the mote in our brother's eye, but hides the beam which is in our own; a mean envy, which, hurt at the talents or prosperity of others, makes them the subjects of its censures, and studies to dim the splendour of whatever outshines itself; a disguised hatred, which sheds in its speeches the hidden venom of the heart; an unworthy duplicity which praises to the face, and tears in pieces behind the back; a shameful levity, which has no command over itself or words, and often sacrifices both fortune and comfort to the imprudence of an amusing conversation; a deliberate barbarity, which goes to pierce an absent brother; a scandal, where we become a subject of shame and sin to those who listen to us; an injustice, where we ravish from our brother what is dearest to him. It is a restless evil, which disturbs society; spreads dissention through cities and countries; disunites the strictest friendship; is the source of hatred and revenge; fills wherever it enters with disturbances and confusion; and every where is an enemy to peace, comfort, and Christian good breeding.
Lastly, it is an evil full of deadly poison: whatever flows from it is infected, and poisons whatever it approaches; even its praises are empoisoned; its applauses malicious; its silence criminal; its gestures, motions, and looks, have alltheir venom, and spread it each in their way. Still more dreadful is this evil when it is found among those who are the professed disciples of Jesus Christ. Ah! the church formerly held in horror the exhibitions of gladiators, and denied that believers, brought up in the tenderness and benignity of Jesus Christ, could innocently feast their eyes with the blood and death of these unfortunate slaves, or form an harmless recreation of so inhuman a pleasure; but these renew more detestable shows; for they bring upon the stage not infamous wretches devoted to death, but members of Jesus Christ, their brethren; and there they entertain the spectators with wounds which they inflict on persons" who have devoted themselves to God. Barrow's Works, vol. 1: ser. 17, 18; Massilon's Sermons, vol. 1: ser. 5: English trans. and article EVIL SPEAKING.
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Buck, Charles. Entry for 'Slander'. Charles Buck Theological Dictionary. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/cbd/s/slander.html. 1802.
