viation from that good
rule which prescribeth truth in all our words; rendering us unlike
and disagreeable to God, who is the God of truth (who loveth truth,
and practiseth it in all His doings, who abominateth all falsehood);
including a treacherous breach of faith towards mankind; we being
all, in order to the maintenance of society, by an implicit compact,
obliged by speech to declare our mind, to inform truly, and not to
impose upon our neighbour; arguing pusillanimous timorousness and
impotency of mind, a distrust in God's help, and diffidence in all
good means to compass our designs; begetting deception and error, a
foul and ill-favoured brood: lying, I say, is upon such accounts a
sinful and blamable thing; and of all lies those certainly are the
worst which proceed from malice or from vanity, or from both, and
which work mischief, such as slanders are.

Again, to bear any hatred or ill-will, to exercise enmity towards
any man, to design or procure any mischief to our neighbour, whom
even Jews were commanded to love as themselves, whose good, by many
laws, and upon divers scores, we are obliged to tender as our own,
is a heinous fault; and of this apparently the slanderer is most
guilty in the highest degree. For evidently true it is which the
wise man affirmeth, "A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted
with it;" there is no surer argument of extreme hatred; nothing but
the height of ill-will can suggest this practice. The slanderer is
an enemy, as the most fierce and outrageous, so the most base and
unworthy that can be; he fighteth with the most perilous and most
unlawful weapon, in the most furious and foul way that can be. His
weapon is an envenomed arrow, full of deadly poison, which he
shooteth suddenly, and feareth not: a weapon which by no force can
be resisted, by no art declined, whose impression is altogether
inevitable and unsustainable. It is a most insidious, most
treacherous and cowardly way of fighting; wherein manifestly the
weakest and basest spirits have extreme advantage, and may easily
prevail against the bravest and worthiest; for no man of honour or
honesty can in way of resistance or requital deign to use it, but
must infallibly without repugnance be borne down thereby. By it the
vile practiser achieveth the greatest mischief that can be. His
words are, as the psalmist saith of Doeg, devouring words: "Thou
lovest all devouring words, O t