Indiscretion

“ If there be error, it lies with the deceiver, not the deceived. And you, my sons and disciples, banish from your faces and your breasts every expression and every thought unworthy of your honest companion, and your upright sect. For remember, if to abhor falsehood and vice be noble, to distrust truth and innocence is mean. ”

“ There is oftentimes deception, if not absolute lying, in this talker. Why does he receive the secret with the strong promise, “I will tell no one, upon my honour,” if he cannot retain it in his own bosom?
Such persons are not to be trusted twice. As soon as you discover your facts given under covenant of secrecy are blabbed to others, you say, “I shall not trust him again:” and very properly too. Of course he tells as a secret what you tell him as a secret; but if he cannot retain it, how can he expect others? ”

“ If such is the fearlessness of truth, and such the cowardice of error, the secrecy of the silent orders commends them less to the confidence which candor inspires, than to the suspicion which secrecy begets. ”

“ SIDE-LIGHTS
“You won’t condescend?” said a scornful voice.
“Since you have made up your mind, why should I?”
“It is only your word that I ask: your solemn word to me that you are innocent.”
“If you don’t believe in me, what’s the use of giving you my solemn word? I can’t prove it, and never could; the evidence was too strong.” ”

“ The fact exists, and your neighbors seem to believe it true; and whether true or false, the consequences will be the same, unless you can, by your conduct and arguments, convince them of your innocence. ”

“ If I can show you that there is a doubt—a doubt of the faintest or slightest shadow—his lordship will tell you that I have the right to demand a verdict of ‘not guilty,’ and I say that such a doubt cannot but exist. ”

“ I should not say, perhaps, suspect me; for suspicion is a more fixed and tangible thing than that which I fear; but will there not be doubts, coming in men's mind against their will, and against their reason? Will they not, from time to time, when they think of Henry Dacre, and this sad history, and these dark scandals--will they not ask themselves, What, if it were really so? ”

“ How could he raise a breath of suspicion against a woman who was trembling on the verge of mental derangement as a consequence of what he had seen or had possibly had a share in? And yet if the truth would serve to clear two innocent people from suspicion, could he justify himself in not speaking? ”

“ May God grant you the spirit of truth to speak that which is holy and right before the Lord and not what is calumnious and defamatory, the offspring of the spirit of falsehood and error. I am writing without words of flattery, to prevent you sowing the seeds of detraction and scandal among your neighbours, and from the desire that you may abstain from such behaviour and do penance for the offences you have committed. ”

“ Who has not, at some time or other of his life, experienced the force of that casuistry which is begotten of suspicion? Who has not felt how completely reason is mastered by the subtle assaults of a wily ingenuity which, whilst combining the false and the true, the possible and impossible together, makes out a mock array of evidence almost too strong for a doubt? ”

“ But secret falsehood, which in the Lord's sight is the same as open falsehood,—secret falsehood, under all its various forms of misrepresentation, deception, cunning, is daily and hourly committed by how many? by how many, too, who think that they would scorn to be guilty of a direct falsehood? Look through the business world. ”

“ What if falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?—Sometimes all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.—I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. ”

“ The most preposterous fabrication of falsehood that could be devised! The 'will,' as it is called, is nothing but a rank forgery, and the man who dares assert any claim to the estate is a damned impostor, and I'll tell him so to his face! ”

“ Its institutions vary with its years, and mark its growing wisdom; and none more so than its modes of investigating truth, and ascertaining guilt or innocence. In its nonage, when man was yet a fallible being, and doubted the accuracy of his own intellect, appeals were made to heaven in dark and doubtful cases of atrocious accusation. ”

“ Men could not arrive at such a pitch of impiety as to bear false witness (where to the guilt of a lie is added that of perjury and injury) if they had not advanced to it by allowing themselves to speak untruths in jest and banter, or under pretence of doing good. Thus men teach their tongues to speak lies, Jer. ix. 5. Those that will take a liberty to tell lies in discourse are in a fair way to be guilty of the greater wickedness of false-witness-bearing, whenever they are tempted to it, though they seemed to detest it. ”

“ You who have done any dishonest act, spoken falsehood, dealt deceitfully, all your dishonest acts, and false words, and deceitful dealings, will pass away, but the traces will remain, and God will look narrowly at them. ”

“ II. The grossest kind of lying, or speaking a known falsehood under the awful solemnity of an oath.—Men violate truth when they affix to words an arbitrary meaning or make in their own minds certain secret reservations with a design to disguise facts and deceive the hearers. When we express doubtful matters in terms and with an air of assurance, we may materially injure as well as grossly deceive our neighbour. ”

“ Hardened and impenitent sinner! the measure of your iniquity is full: the 321 price of crime has been paid: here shall your spirit dwell for ever, and for ever. You have dreamed away life’s joyous hour, nor made atonement for error, nor denied yourself aught that the fair earth presented you. ”

“ Whether unmasked by others, or by myself, is it not equally true that I have been playing false, and am now punished for it? What do the world care for your having returned to truth? You have offended by deceiving them, and that is an offence which your repentance will not extenuate. ”

“ How baseless are the structures of falsehood, which we build in opposition to the system of eternal nature! If I should escape undetected from this recess, it will be true that I never saw the face of either of these persons, and yet I am acquainted with the most secret transaction of their lives. ”

“ This aversion to all kinds of disguise, whatever be its cause, is universally diffused, and incessantly in action; nor is it necessary, that to exasperate detestation or excite contempt, any interest should be invaded, or any competition attempted; it is sufficient, that there is an intention to deceive, an intention which every heart swells to oppose, and every tongue is busy to detect. ”

“ Now that I know them all to be blotted out, and that I am an accepted person, I may the more freely confess them: the truth is, that one lie always paved the way for another, from hour to hour, from day to day, and from year to year ”

“ Deception is systematized, and iniquity is drawn “as with a cart rope.” But all is like a building upon the sand, or worse,—upon a sea-wave, unless the Lord be with us. The whole is found at last to be a mockery, like the mirage of the desert. ”

“ Sixthly, I number among false witnesses, all those who make a trade of being informers in hope of favour and reward; and to this end employ their time, either by listening in publick places, to catch up an accidental word; or in corrupting men's servants to discover any unwary expression of their master; or thrusting themselves into company, and then using the most indecent scurrilous language; fastening a thousand falsehoods and scandals upon a whole party, on purpose to provoke such an answer as they may turn to an accusation. ”

“ The gradual debasement of a word into a term of reproach is sometimes a species of scandal. It is wilfully perverted in the course of years, and made to tell a different tale,—a false tale, probably,—which generations receive as true. ”

“ This has often been the lot not only of the innocent, but of the excellent ones, of the earth, who have been greatly distressed by lying lips, and have not only had their names blackened and made odious by calumnies in conversation, but their lives, and all that is dear to them in this world, endangered by false-witness-bearing in judgment. ”

“ In making known to the peoples Thy mysteries wrought in me, strike with dumb amazement the lips of them that invent falsehood of me. “Which speak iniquity against the Righteous, in pride and contempt.” ”

“ My chance of ever holding up my head again among honest men depended on my chance of inducing her to make her disclosure complete. The one hope left for me was the hope that she might have overlooked something in the chain of evidence some mere trifle, perhaps, which might nevertheless, under careful investigation, be made the means of vindicating my innocence in the end. ”

“ In forming this opinion of the easiness of secrecy they seem to have considered it as opposed, not to treachery, but loquacity, and to have conceived the man, whom they thus censured, not frighted by menaces to reveal, or bribed by promises to betray, but incited by the mere pleasure of talking, or some other motive equally trifling, to lay open his heart without reflection, and to let whatever he knew slip from him, only for want of power to retain it. ”

“ In this review of the types of deception I have made no mention of such devices as the gaining of one's confidence for selfish ends, preying upon ignorance or fear, acting the friend while at heart the enemy, planned connivance and skilful plotting, together with the whole outfit of insincerity, villainy, and crime. ”

“ The disclosure of that secret, even if the sufferers by his deception spared him the penalties of the law, would deprive him at one blow of the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence that he had usurped. ”

“ Let them guess on; whatever they guess, I will venture to pronounce them liars, though they should guess truly: Since without being able to do any thing more than guess, they yet go on to affirm; which no honest man would do without competent evidence. ”

“ Moreover, if the question may be raised: what constitutes justice? may one not equally well ask: what constitutes veracity or its opposite? Where does the silence of indifference shade into purposed concealment, and the latter into what is unequivocally deception? At what point does deception blossom out into the unmistakable lie? One may take advantage of an accidental misunderstanding of what one has said ”

“ Now which of these, looked at by the judge, is the great offender? Is the one lie he repents of the most wicked, or are those that with small temptation he flung about daily, and so made that one notable lie easy? ”

“ In a positive sense, of course, nothing means anything, or every meaning is continuous with all other meanings: or that all evidences of guilt, for instance, are just as good evidences of innocence—but this condition seems to mean—things lying around among the stars a long time. ”

“ But we act just on the contrary. For we spend all our Time on the third Topic, and employ all our Diligence about that, and entirely neglect the first. Therefore, at the same time that we lie, we are mighty ready to show how it is demonstrated, that Lying is not right. ”

“ Admire the force of innocence, which could even move a heathen, and one of the worst of men, such as Pilate was, and assure thyself, that generally speaking, patience and silence are a thousand times better proofs of thy innocence, than returning injury for injury, and making an opprobrious and clamorous defence. ”

“ Do you not offer them a mortal insult by presenting to them such nonsense as argument? And if your constituents were capable of suffering themselves to be deceived by such unspeakable absurdities, or to accept the insult without resentment, would such an attempt at deception under any circumstances be the part of an honest man? Is there really no blush rising to your cheeks when you look at your performance?
These are the three falsehoods which, when writing my last letter, I selected for exposure from a larger number. ”

“ Now, of these four modes of misleading others by the tongue, when there is a justa causa (supposing there can be such) ,— (1) a material lie, that is, an untruth which is not a lie, (2) an equivocation, (3) an evasion, and (4) silence,—First, I have no difficulty whatever in recognizing as allowable the method of silence.
Secondly, But, if I allow of silence, why not of the method of material lying, since half of a truth is often a lie? And, again, if all killing be not murder, nor all taking from another stealing, why must all untruths be lies? ”

“ And, as I was just now remarking, this ignorance in the soul of him who is deceived may be called the true lie; for the lie in words is only a kind of imitation and shadowy image of a previous affection of the soul, not pure unadulterated falsehood. ”

“ I doubt not then, but Innocence shall make False Accusation blush, and Tyrannie Tremble at Patience. ”

“ He then went on, as had been done many times in my hearing, to show the essential difference between the two different kinds of falsehoods. A lie told merely for the injury of another, for our own interest alone, or for no object at all, he painted as a sin worthy of penance. ”

“ My last and firm determination is, that I refuse to confess as erroneous the articles which have been truly extracted from my works, and that I refuse to abjure those which have been attributed to me by false witnesses; for to abjure implies that one has held erroneous opinions—it is, in fact, to reject them, and adopt others of a contrary tendency. ”

“ Imagine not that the simple denial of the fact will settle the business. I see plainly, replied he, that I shall be obliged to speak out, or some mischief must happen either to you or me. I shall therefore disclose a secret to you, though men in our profession cannot be too much on the reserve. ”

“ But I have been taught that gossip, whether inspired by malice or not, which is according to each one's natural tendency, begins in a lie and generally ends in truth. Does gossip, as it grows, disclose the hidden sin? ”