• Author: The Castle
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 1 5 1916
• Tags:
• advice

UNDER-RATING The habit of belittling the great does not make small men larger nor the large smaller, and yet despite the utter want of purposes in the process, there seems to be no quality in humanity so exercised. Belittling has for its subject every class of society; it begins with authority which it carves, and of course it is merciless with equals. Its ignorant and mean purpose is not to recognize worth, and thus attempt to undo it. It is the senseless trick of the ostrich that imagines the whole body to be enveloped in darkness, because its head is hidden. The beggar shrugs with complacency at his low estimate of the nation's president, and forgets for a moment his penury and rags in stretching to his full stature and feeling as big as the chief executive. The illiterate enjoy mocking laughter at the scholar and see not the beauty, the grace and the light of intellectuality in beholding an error that escaped sweat-blinded and tired eyes. They lift themselves from their stools, and kings of thought are not as happy as are they in their undermining conceits. The lazy, glorying in belittling labor and in calling ingenuity and skill hard names, preach equality in the distribution of the fruits of toil, and so try to hide their own incapacity. The folly, the shame and the crime of thinking that subtracting from our neighbor's character or fame adds to our own. No, it diminishes the defamer and does not take a whit from the excellency of the other. Folly laughs at wisdom, ignorance at learning, poverty at wealth, falsehood at truth, and the devil dares to sneer in the very face of Christ.—The Castle.