The “worst human quality and the most great sin”

Thou hast written regarding thy aims. How blessed are these aims, especially the prevention of back-biting! I hope that you may become confirmed therein, because the worst human quality and the most great sin is backbiting; more especially when it emanates from the believers of God. If some means were devised so that the doors of back-biting could be shut eternally and each one of the believers of God unsealed his tongue in the praise of the other, then the teachings of His Holiness Baha’u’llah would be spread, the hearts illumined, the spirits glorified and the human world would attain to everlasting felicity.

I hope that the believers of God will shun completely back-biting, each one praising the other cordially and believe that back-biting is the cause of the Divine wrath, to such an extent that if a person back-bites to the extent of one word, he may become dishonored among all the people, because the most hateful characteristic of man is faultfinding. One must expose the praiseworthy qualities of the souls and not their evil attributes. The friends must overlook their shortcomings and faults and speak only of their virtues and not their defects. 

- ‘Abdu’l-Baha  (From a Tablet to Dr. N.G. Skinner, Washington, D.C., revealed August 12, 1913, at Ramleh, Egypt; Baha’i News, no. 46, November 1930)