H. Clay Trumbull

“ May Marduk, the great lord, cause him to carry dropsy as an ever-entangling net; may Shamash the judge, greatest of heaven and earth, decide all his lawsuits, standing relentlessly against him; may Sin, the light dwelling in the brilliant heavens, cover him with leprosy as a garment; like a wild ass may he lie down at the wall surrounding his city; may Ishtar, mistress of heaven and earth, lead him into evil daily before the god and the king; may Ninib, born in the temple Ekura, the sublime son of Bêl, uproot his area, his limit, and his boundary stone ”

“ Truthfulness is the self-consistency of character; falsehood is a breaking up of the moral integrity." "The liar is rightly regarded as an enemy to mankind. A lie is not only an affront against the person to whom it is told, but it is an offense against humanity." But what of all that? "There are occasions when the interests of society and the highest motives of Christian love may render it much more preferable to discharge the duty of self-defense through the humanity of a successful falsehood, than by the barbarity of a stunning blow or a pistol-shot. ”

“ Death had passed upon all men. Yet in the hearts of the death-smitten there was still a longing for life. Sin-leprous souls yearned for that in-flow of new being, which could come only through inter-union with the divine nature, in oneness of life with the Author and Source of all life. Revelation and prophecy had assured the possibility and the hope of such inter-union. Rite and ceremony and symbol, the wide-world over, signified man’s desire, and man’s expectation, of covenanted access to God, through personal surrender, and through life-giving, life-representing blood. ”

“ Yes, let all men perish, let all gods cease to exist, let the stars that shine above grow dim, let all seas be dried up, let all mountains be leveled to the ground, let wars rage, blood flow in streams, let millions of millions of Harischandras be thus persecuted; yet let truth be maintained, let truth ride victorious over all, let truth be the light,—truth alone the lasting solace of mortals and immortals. ”

“ Here was the covenant of blood; here was the communion feast, in partaking of the flesh of the fitting and accepted sacrifice;—toward which all rite and symbol, and all heart yearning and inspired [282] prophecy, had pointed, in all the ages. Here was the realization of promise and hope and longing, in man’s possibility of inter-union with God through a common life—which is oneness of blood; and in man’s inter-communion with God, through participation in the blessings of a common table. ”

“ God speed and shield the flying boy! At the next station, the guard of the train gave the alarm, and soon a pack of five blood-hounds, with their mounted brutal keepers, were on his track, and in full pursuit. Bravely but vainly Manning sought to retain the freedom he had won at such fearful risk. Plunging into the recesses of a dismal swamp, he had brief hope that he should evade his pursuers; but soon the baying of the hounds was in his strained ears, and about him were the ringing echoes of the on-spurring guard. His hiding-place was speedily surrounded, and his hope of escape cut off. ”

“ Water, which is the gift of God to the thirsty soul, mocks the thirsty soul when it brings with it salt, which is the representative of life. Salt in water is a savor of death unto death, while salt and water are also a savor of life unto life.
While salt as the equivalent of life is a symbol of permanency, it becomes, as the equivalent of death, a symbol of doom and destruction. ”

“ PROFFERED WELCOME BY THE FATHER. The primitive passover sacrifice was an offering of blood by the head of the household on the threshold of his home, as a token of his welcome to the guest who would cross over that blood and thereby become one with the family within. It was not an outsider or a stranger who proffered a threshold sacrifice, but it was the house-father who thus extended a welcome to one who was yet outside. The welcoming love was measured by the preciousness of the sacrifice. The richer the offering, the heartier the welcome. ”

“ There is no lie that is not contrary to truth. For as light and darkness, piety and impiety, justice and injustice, sin and righteousness, health and sickness, life and death, so are truth and a lie contrary the one to the other. ”

“ If we place it in calculations of expediency, nothing, on the one hand, is more conspicuously useful than truth and the confidence it inspires; nothing, on the other, more disastrous than falsehood, treachery, and distrust. If there be then a moral principle to which, in every form, humanity has given utterance, it is the obligation of veracity." "No man ever tells a lie without a certain degree of violence to his nature." ”

“ Man as he is needs a “new heart,” a new nature, a new life; and that need can be supplied by the Author of life, through that regeneration which is indicated, and which, in a sense, is realized in new blood which is pure at the start, and which purifies by its purging inflow. The recognition of this truth, and the outreaching of man in its direction, are at the basis of all forms of sacrifice in all the ages. And this wonderful attainment of primitive man everywhere, we are asked to accept as man’s mere natural inheritance from the sensory quiverings of his ancestral tadpole! ”

“ Thus we see that the first three of the ten requirements of the loving covenant of God's people with their God are simply the requirements to worship God as the only God, to worship him in unhindered spirituality, and to worship him in all sincerity. These three fundamental requirements seem to have been in the mind of our Lord Jesus when he said to the woman of Samaria at the well of Jacob: "God"—the One God—"is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth." ”

“ Yet, although the main sin and guilt and curse of a lie are ever on him who utters that lie, whatever be his motive in so doing, the evil consequences of lying are immeasurable in the community as a community; and whoever is guilty of a new lie adds to the burden of evil that weighs down society, and that tends to its disintegration and ruin. The bond of society is confidence. A lie is inconsistent with confidence; and the knowledge that a lie is, under certain circumstances, deemed proper by a man, throws doubt on all that that man says or does under any circumstances. ”

“ Having caused us to sit fronting each other on a straw-carpet, he made an incision in each of our right legs, from which he extracted blood, and inter-changing it, he exclaimed aloud: ‘If either of you break this brotherhood now established between you, may the lion devour him, the serpent poison him, bitterness be in his food, his friends desert him, his gun burst in his hands and wound him, and everything that is bad do wrong to him until death.’” [29] The same blood now flowed in the veins of both Stanley and Mirambo. They were friends and brothers in a sacred covenant; life for life. ”

“ Yet this doomed and dead sea of salt is a source of life to man in its exhaustless supply of salt for his use. Preeminently is this salt of the Dead Sea a savor of life and of death.
The salt of the ocean is the world's treasure. Without it the greater portion of the earth's inhabitants would perish for lack of what vivifies and preserves animal life. Yet because of the salt in the ocean the very water, which man and beast must have or perish of thirst, is useless to both man and beast. ”

“ As to me, this world of phenomena—if it have all its truth in these phenomena, and no more profound significance, if it have nothing beyond itself to reveal to me—becomes a repulsive phantom, in whose presence I curse the consciousness which has called it into existence, and I invoke against it annihilation as a deity. ”

“ Here seems to be an illustration of cutting the covenant of blood-brotherhood, by sharing the life of a substitute human victim. It is much the same in the wild West as in the primitive East.
So simple a matter as the clasping of hands in token of covenant fidelity, is explicable, in its universality, only as a vestige of the primitive custom of joining pierced hands in the covenant of blood-friendship. Hand-clasping is not, by any means, a universal, nor is it even the commonest, mode of friendly and fraternal salutation among primitive peoples. ”

“ In primitive thought, and in a sense in scientific fact, the blood is the life and the life is in the blood; hence they who share in each other's blood are sharers in a merged and common life. Covenanting in this way with a solemn appeal to God, or to the gods, has been a mode of sacred union from the earliest dawn of human history. ”

“ So also in dealing with the would-be criminal, a lie is not justifiable in order to save one's life, or one's possessions that are dearer than life, nor yet to prevent the commission of a crime or to guard the highest interests of those whom we love. Yet concealment of that which ought to be concealed is as truly a duty when disclosure would lead to crime, or would imperil the interests of ourselves or others, as it is in all the ordinary affairs of life; but lying as a means of concealment is not to be tolerated in such a case any more than in any other case. ”

“ It would seem to be because of such cramping, that no one of the modern students of myth and folk-lore, of primitive ideas and customs, and of man’s origin and history, has brought into their true prominence, if indeed he has even noticed them in passing, the universally dominating primitive convictions: that the blood is the life; that the heart, as the blood-fountain, is the very soul of every personality; that blood-transfer is soul-transfer; that blood-sharing, human, or divine-human, secures an inter-union of natures ”

“ If a robber, with a pistol in his hand, were in a man's bedroom at night, it would not be wrong for the defenseless inmate to remain quiet in his bed, in concealment of the fact that he was awake, if thereby he could save his life, at the expense of his property. If a would-be murderer were seeking his victim, and a man who knew this fact were asked to tell of his whereabouts, it would be that man's duty to conceal his knowledge at this point by all legitimate means. He might refuse to speak, even though his own life were risked thereby; for it were better to die than to lie. ”