CHAPTER IV.

TRUTHFULNESS.

We have thus far been attending to the great facts that all human life is under law; that one of the most important laws for man, if not the most important, is the moral law which springs from his very nature as a member of society; and that we are obliged, as we are also able, to govern or control ourselves so as to live according to this law. We have been speaking of the actual world of nature and human society in which we all live. Now, a very large part of our life depends for its character and its results upon what we report to each other about what is or has been. We have by nature the faculty of speech by which we communicate with each other, and we have found out the arts of writing and printing. But we have not only eyes to see and ears to hear, and the organs of three other senses, which present to our minds the realities of the outward world; we have also a faculty of imagination by which we can form to ourselves another view of things than that which our senses actually give, or have given us. We can think of things otherwise than as they are. We can use words to express our thoughts so that we shall in our speech re-present to others the realities we know, or we can alter them in our speech so that our words will not correspond to the facts as we think them to be.

We call it speaking the truth when any one describes things as they, in fact, appear to him to be, or relates events as his senses showed them to him. He may be mistaken, as his senses or his judgment may have misled him; but so long as he intends to re-pre

sent fact, he is truthful. On the contrary, when, for any cause, he means to speak, and does speak, of things or events as they were not, or are not, then he is false. He intends to deceive us, whether he succeeds in doing so or not. The first and natural use of words, or human speech, is to represent reality. We are in a very high degree dependent on each other's words as to what the facts of life are. A large part, probably the largest part, of our own words and actions are based upon our confidence that other human beings have spoken to us the truth.

In courts of law the witness who is called upon to state what he knows about the case, swears, or affirms, that he will tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." In ordinary life we go upon the assumption, generally, that the words we hear correspond to fact, that people are re-presenting to us the facts as they are, or have been; and we act in accordance with this confidence. We must live in an actual world we cannot live in an imaginary world, as it has no reality. All our own words that are based upon a falsehood told us by another, instead of a truth, have no foundation in fact, and must, therefore, count for little or nothing in the end. All that we do, thinking and believing that a certain other thing has been done, because we have been told so, when, in fact, it has not been done, lacks proper foundation, and is likely to come to naught, or to work harm instead of good. true report of facts is, then, the first condition of satisfactory intercourse of human beings with one another. They must have a substantial confidence in one another's general truthfulness. Otherwise, they can have little dealing with one another. All human undertakings must finally rest upon reality, and correspond to fact; every departure from fact means for all men loss and harm.

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Hence arises the prime necessity of truthfulness in

human society.

In the great majority of cases, men naturally tell the truth; i. e., whether it is to their own advantage or not, they re-present things in speech as these have appeared to them in reality. If this were not the case, social life, in which men inevitably depend upon one another for information and guidance, would be impossible. But, on the other hand, it is very much easier to say a false word, thus misrepresenting fact in some degree, than it is to do any one of a hundred wrong acts. More than this: when we have consciously done a bad deed, we usually wish to avoid the consequences of it, and we naturally try to escape them by lying about it. So offences against truth are the common attendants of wrong actions of a thousand kinds. "Vice has many tools," it is said; "but a lie is the handle that fits them all."

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We wish our clocks and watches to give us the true time the hour and minute that actually are, as distinguished from those that have been and those to come. So we ask that other human beings shall give us time" in what they say to us. If the clock is an hour slow or half an hour fast, we cannot blame the clock, for it is only a machine, and cannot think, or be said to have any intention to deceive us so that we shall miss a train or be late at school: we properly find fault with the maker of the clock or with the jeweller who should have regulated it so that it would keep good time. But boys and girls and men and women think; they have an intention in what they say, and if they tell us what is not true, it is usually because they mean to mislead The result of their attempts to deceive us is that we lose that confidence which is the very first condition of human dealings. A boy who is found to have told a lie is often suspected afterward of deceiving even when he has no desire or intention of reporting anything but the exact fact. When a witness has taken an oath in a court of law to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and

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nothing but the truth," and then tells a falsehood, known or afterwards found out to be such, he is punished for perjury; and if he should ever come into court again as a witness, everybody would be slow to believe him in an important matter. When a man has the reputation of being "the biggest liar in the town," what he says may very often be entirely true; but people do not believe that a thing is so because he says it. He has forfeited the confidence of those who know him, and they will not accept his sole word as probably true. He is put out of the pale of society, so to speak, in proportion to the greatness of his offences against truth, and non-intercourse with him is practically declared.

The person who tells a lie which is believed by people who have not yet "found him out," usually begins to think that a falsehood is a very easy substitute for the fact. A boy, for example, has disobeyed his father, who had commanded him not to go in swimming in the river because it is dangerous; when he is asked if he has been in the river, he boldly answers, "No." Thus he adds to his first fault a second. As his father believes him, John is quite likely to try the same plan again, until, at last, he is found out. Then his father punishes him for the disobedience and the lie; but the worst part of the whole punishment to John, if he is a selfrespecting boy, is that his father and mother will probably not take his word as sufficient, in any matter of consequence, for some time to come, until he has shown that he is again to be trusted fully. But for John, or any one else, to deceive thus, and then ask people to treat him afterward as if he had always spoken the truth, is most unreasonable. If John were a man in a position of responsibility and were detected in lying, he would probably be turned out of his place at once, because the truth is one of the first things he owes his employer. When "thought is speech and speech is truth" we can trust each other and join together with

confidence in all kinds of undertakings, great or small. But when the act is one thing and the word is another different or contrary thing, we stand apart from such a man in suspicion and 'distrust, and we refuse to work with him, since truthfulness is of the very essence of voluntary association in all kinds of works.

Our house of life must be built upon fact, or it will fall. When we repeat "Great is truth and mighty above all things," we mean to say that the facts of this universe are far stronger than any mistaken or false report of them which any one may make. They will come to the light at last, since the mind of man is evidently intended to know the truth, i. e., the reality of things. Any one, therefore, who tells us the truth, in small matters or in large, enables us so far to bring our life into harmony with the laws of all life in general and of human life in society in particular. He clears the way so that we can walk in it, if we will. But if another human being deceives us, we are led off from the right road, as when some one misdirects a traveller, and he goes the opposite way to that which he desires. to take, or in any other direction which is wrong for him, and it costs him much time and trouble to find the right way.

To tell the truth is, then, the first of services we can render one another in the great association which we call human society. Knowledge must come before action. But as we can know from our own observation but a very small part of all that we need to know, we mainly depend upon others' report of facts and events in order to act wisely and properly. Lord Bacon said: "No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth." This is, indeed, the case. When we tell the truth we are in harmony and union with the whole universe so far; but when we tell a lie we leave the world of reality, the only world that is, and enter a world of unreality which we have, for a brief