ching be
honest. A Republican who takes the oath of allegiance to the King and
wears his uniform is in a similar case. These things stand apart; they
are so formal as to be scarcely more reprehensible than the falsehood of
calling a correspondent "Dear," or asking a tiresome lady to whom one is
being kind and civil, for the pleasure of dancing with her. We ought to
do what we can to abolish these absurd barriers and petty falsehoods,
but we ought not to commit a social suicide against them.

That is how I think and feel in this matter, but if a man sees the
matter more gravely, if his conscience tells him relentlessly and
uncompromisingly, "this is a lie," then it is a lie and he must not
be guilty of it. But then I think it ill becomes him to be silently
excluded. His work is to clamour against the existence of the barrier
that wastes him.

I do not see that lying is a fundamental sin. In the first place some
lying, that is to say some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement, is
necessary to nearly everything we do, and the truest statement becomes
false if we forget or alter the angle at which it is made, the direction
in which it points. In the next the really fundamental and most
generalized sin is self-isolation. Lying is a sin only because
self-isolation is a sin, because it is an effectual way of cutting
oneself off from human co-operation. That is why there is no sin in
telling a fairy tale to a child. But telling the truth when it will be
misunderstood is no whit better than lying; silences are often blacker
than any lies. I class secrets with lies and cannot comprehend the moral
standards that exonerate secrecy in human affairs.

To all these things one must bring a personal conscience and be prepared
to examine particular cases. The excuses I have made, for example, for
a very broad churchman to stay in the Church might very well be twisted
into an excuse for taking an oath in something one did not to the
slightest extent believe, in order to enter and betray some organization
to which one was violently hostile. I admit that there may be every
gradation between these two things. The individual must examine his
special case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibility
of co-operation. I do not see how there can be a general rule. I have
already shown why in my own case I hesitate to profess a belief in
God, because, I think, the misleading element in that profession would
outweigh the advantage of