his hearer will draw an illogical and untrue conclusion,
and the like. Bishop Butler seems distinctly to sanction such a
proceeding, in a passage which I shall extract below.

The greatest school of evasion, I speak seriously, is the House of
Commons; and necessarily so, from the nature of the case. And the
hustings is another.

An instance is supplied in the history of St. Athanasius: he was in a
boat on the Nile, flying persecution; and he found himself pursued.
On this he ordered his men to turn his boat round, and ran right to
meet the satellites of Julian. They asked him, Have you seen
Athanasius? and he told his followers to answer, "Yes, he is close to
you." _They_ went on their course, and _he_ ran into Alexandria, and
there lay hid till the end of the persecution.

I gave another instance above, in reference to a doctrine of
religion. The early Christians did their best to conceal their Creed
on account of the misconceptions of the heathen about it. Were the
question asked of them, "Do you worship a Trinity?" and did they
answer, "We worship one God, and none else;" the inquirer might, or
would, infer that they did not acknowledge the Trinity of Divine
Persons.

It is very difficult to draw the line between these evasions, and
what are commonly called in English _equivocations_; and of this
difficulty, again, I think, the scenes in the House of Commons supply
us with illustrations.

4. The fourth method is _silence_. For instance, not giving the
_whole_ truth in a court of law. If St. Alban, after dressing himself
in the priest's clothes, and being taken before the persecutor, had
been able to pass off for his friend, and so gone to martyrdom
without being discovered; and had he in the course of examination
answered all questions truly, but not given the whole truth, the most
important truth, that he was the wrong person, he would have come
very near to telling a lie, for a half-truth is often a falsehood.
And his defence must have been the _justa causa_, viz. either that he
might in charity or for religion's sake save a priest, or again that
the judge had no right to interrogate him on the subject.

Now, of these four modes of misleading others by the tongue, when
there is a _justa causa_ (supposing there can be such)--a material
lie, that is an untruth which is not a lie, an equivocation, an
evasion, and silence,--First, I have no difficulty whatever in
recognizing as allowable the method of _silence