puppy dog chained up in the innermost courts,
and even yelps out some insignificant little
white lie of conventional kindliness, and B.
buries his owl deep in the ivy bush of formal
civilities, and never once lets him loose to go
mousing after unpleasant candour. And the
result is that A. finds B. something better than
a puppy, and B. finds A. something brighter
than an owl. Had they in the beginning told
the truth as it seemed to them, they would
have hated each other cordially to the last days
of their lives, and have never found out the
virtues mutually possessed. And can any person
in his clear moral senses hesitate as to which is
the greater evil, white lying, active or passive,
or bitter black uncharity and hate?

There is a species of lying which always
puzzles me as to its lawfulness or unlawfulness,
and whether it is in colour grey or purer white,
with perhaps a darker smear only in the
shadows; I mean the lies told to avoid giving
unnecessary pain, or to avoid letting out some
damaging or destructive truth. We all agree, I
think, in certain examples even on this point, as
when the death or disaster of one beloved is
kept secret from a sick person, and false
messages even made up, and apocryphal voyages and
altogether fanciful statements—the devices of
loving hypocrisy—resorted to, to conceal the
awful truth which would probably kill outright
if known. If the truth there would be murder,
and nothing less, ought it to be told? Can we
indeed set this one virtue supreme and regnant
over all the rest? building a golden throne for it
alone, while ranging all the others on wooden
footstools, unequal in height, in grandeur, or in
power. The need of white lies, active or
passive, does come in sometimes when an opposing
virtue claims the higher place, and it is moral
pedantry to try and deny that need.

But passing by this circumstance of sickness
and the care demanded, and the sacrifice even
of truth to keep alive the flickering flame, I
confess willingly that the necessity of telling
white lies to hide disastrous truths is generally
only the result of a previous sin; so that it is
but one sin to bolster up, or salve over, or keep
buried, another sin; which is a kind of
compound interest in evil anything but desirable.
That slur upon your mother's name, my child,
and the awkward dates of your baptism and her
marriage must never be told you; else your
proud young heart—proud in the purity and
fearless honour of youth—will droop and wither
and finally die out for shame and sorrow at the
scorn that can be pointed, as surely as if I were
to give you a dose of poison in your morning's
milk. But there again! the first sin has to be
cemented by a second—evil like misfortunes
generally coming pickaback, with a terrible
tendency to accumulate. If the first wrong had not
been done the second would not have been
needed; and yet, must the innocent suffer for
the guilty? Yet I am puzzled at the lawfulness
of this white lie, and hold rather to the colder
and sterner truth with the painful possibility in
the background—the possibility of a life's
despair—to be met with and combated the
bravest possible! Still again (for all questions
honestly argued go through an eternal see-saw)
the motive must be allowed due weight, and
no man's conscience should be put in irons:
keeping well off though that dangerous shoal
of Jesuitism, of doing evil that good may
come.

I vaguely remember a very beautiful anecdote
touching this question, but I do not know where
I have met with it, consequently cannot turn
back to my authority so as to give it in due force
and beauty. Perhaps some of my readers may
be more accurate, and with a stricter knowledge
of references. A certain Scottish nobleman,
who had taken part in the Jacobite troubles and
was consequently exiled and a price set upon his
head, stole back to his own again after long
years were past, and when he thought the keen
eyes of justice would be bleared and blinking.
Suspected who he was, and arrested, there was
only one man whose testimony could positively
identify him—some old retainer, or foster-father,
or faithful henchman, or clansman true and leal
—some one, at all events, who had the best
right to speak, and whose word would be
conclusive. The two were confronted in the
courthouse, and the old man, after having quietly
scanned the other from head to foot, swore
positively, unflinchingly, deliberately, that this
was not the laird. Afterwards, when the truth
became known and he was taxed with his lie,
his answer was: " I wad rather trust my soul to
God than my puir master in the hands of these
ruffians." Which has always seemed to me
to be one of the sublimest bits of human love,
and simple if erring faith, possible to be met
with.

If this act of perjury was a crime, so then in
inverse degree has been all sheltering of
fugitives and hiding of the proscribed; all disguises
(which are only lies in action instead of in words),
and all travesties to cheat the enemy; all pretences
of serving men and maids; the Jane Lanes; the
Lady Nithsdales; the guards and stokers of that
negro underground railway with its contraband
freight—they are all liars to be condemned, not
heroes and heroines to be admired; and their
clever stratagems and crafty doublings to throw
the blood-hounds off the scent, making them
believe the thing that is not and so pass over
the thing that is—they are all lies, white, black,
or grey, according to the thermometer of your
virtue. Surely yes!—is mere verbal accuracy the
sole form of truth worth fighting for?—is there
not a higher truth of deed than any simple
untruth by word? I cannot but think, then, that
once admit the supreme necessity of verbal
truth or even of servile truth before and against
all other motives of human action, and you have
circumscribed the sphere of human virtue and
impoverished the soil of human greatness. And
that too in such wise as can never be recovered.

It is easy to understand why truth is made so
much account of as a social and human virtue—
for is it not the very policeman of the soul?
detective and protective at once? Truth is the