Gammon

Feilding Star, Volume VII, Issue 76, 5 December 1885, Page 3

Gammon

There is no person in society so odious as the person of many professions. This term is not used in the sense of occupation. It is used to designate professions of the lip. It is used to point out the individual who, by expressing disapproval of his neighbor, implies great personal superiority, and who goes about with the obvious intention of reforming his generation, who makes a conspicuous point of his principles, who leaves none of his good qualities to your imagination or to your powers of discovery, it is not pleasant toilisten to this person reciting all the cardinal virtues he embodies. Obtrusive goodness is much more objectionable than cleverly concealed badness. Human nature, prone to err, is much in sympathy with the sinner who sins within the bounds of decency and does not shock "the public sensibility, but there is about the man who makes a profession of his virtue, a something which antagonizes his fellow men. He is an unpleasant contrast, and, since every man keeps a corner of, his nature dark, we look with more or less suspicion on the one who rams his virtues down the public throat. And we generally find, in the long tud, this professor to be an utter scoundrel.