As for
the other--if he does not know how to invest his own thoughts safely
he will invest mine still worse; he will hold God's most precious
gift of falsehood too cheap; he has come by it too easily; cheaply
come, cheaply go will be his maxim. The good liar should be the
converse of the poet; he should be made, not born.
It is not loss of confidence in a man's strict adherence to the
letter of truth that shakes my confidence in him. I know what I do
myself and what I must lose all social elasticity if I were not to
do. * Turning for moral guidance to my cousins the lower animals--
whose unsophisticated instinct proclaims what God has taught them
with a directness we may sometimes study--I find the plover lying
when she reads us truly and, knowing that we shall hit her if we
think her to be down, lures us from her young ones under the fiction
of a broken wing. Is God angry, think you, with this pretty
deviation from the letter of strict accuracy? or was it not He who
whispered to her to tell the falsehood, to tell it with a
circumstance, without conscientious scruples, and not once only but
to make a practice of it, so as to be an habitual liar for at least
six weeks in the year? I imagine so. When I was young I used to
read in good books that it was God who taught the bird to make her
nest, and, if so, He probably taught each species the other domestic
arrangements which should be best suited to it.
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