Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 December 1886 — "Tetchiness." [ARTICLE]

"Tetchiness."

A Methodist clergyman whom we shall call Gilford was noted as being the most unpopular man in the Southern Conference, to which he belonged. Each congregation to which he was sent was charmed when he arrived with bis zeal, his sincerity, his gentleness. But before the two years allotted to each minister in a pulpit by that denomination had passed, it was eager to have him go. “What is the matter with Brother Gifford?” asked the Bishop of a presiding elder. “He is a fervent Christian, and a warm-hearted, well-bred man. Yet people avoid him as if he had the plague. What is wrong?” “He is tetchy, ” was the reply. “He is perpetually on the lookout for slights. If you preached to a congregation of ten thousand sinners, he would think you aimed the sermon at him alone, and resent it as a personal insult. All the good the man might do in the world is balked by his miserable irascibility.” In every community there are men who, like Gifford, feel that their chief errand into the world is to protect their own personality. A crab changes its shell once a month, and when destitute of any covering, it creeps into a hole where no enemy can strike its raw flesh. But these human crabs, always without shells, thrust themselves in the way of hurts. Among men of genius they are a common class. Byron, Victor Eugo, belonged to it, and several poets and artists now living provoke ridicule by their readiness to resent impartial 'criticism as insult. They are as ludicrous as the vain fellow in the old play who cries out, “I know you were talking of me, because you laughed.” “Few men,” says Sydney Smith, “learn before middle age that nobody is noticing them. ” This personal irritability proceeds always from an exaggerated idea of our own importance, and too petty an idea of our work in the world. If our minds were full of the work set before us, we rghould be indifferent to the opinions of casual lookers-on.— Youth’s Comjpanion.