een possible for her to feel that she was entitled to say
that as the truth, and not as a falsehood; and in that case she would
not have intended a deceit, but only a concealment. But when, on the
other hand, she told a deliberate lie--spoke falsely in order to
deceive--she committed a sin in so doing, and her sin was none the
less a sin because it resulted in apparent good to her husband. An
illustration does not overturn a principle, but it may misrepresent
it.

Another illustration, on the other side of the case, is worth citing
here. Victor Hugo pictures, in his _Les Miserables_,[1] a sister of
charity adroitly concealing facts from a sick person in a hospital,
while refusing to tell a falsehood even for the patient's good. "Never
to have told a falsehood, never to have said for any advantage, or
even indifferently, a thing which was not the truth, the holy truth,
was the characteristic feature of Sister Simplice." She had taken the
name of Simplice through special choice. "Simplice, of Sicily, our
readers will remember, is the saint who sooner let her bosom be
plucked out than say she was a native of Segeste, as she was born at
Syracuse, though the falsehood would have saved her. Such a patron
saint suited this soul." And in speaking of Sister Simplice, as never
having told even "a white lie," Victor Hugo quotes a letter from the
Abbe Sicard, to his deaf-mute pupil Massieu, on this point: "Can there
be such a thing as a white lie, an innocent lie? Lying is the absolute
of evil. Lying a little is not possible. The man who lies tells
the whole lie. Lying is the face of the fiend; and Satan has two
names,--he is called Satan and Lying." Victor Hugo the romancer would
seem to be a safer guide, so far, for the physician or the nurse in
the sick-room, than Pliny the rhetorician, or Rothe the theologian.[2]

[Footnote 1: Book VII.]

[Footnote 2: Yet Victor Hugo afterwards represents even Sister
Simplice as lying unqualifiedly, when sorely tempted--although not in
the sick-room.]

A well-known physician, in speaking to me of this subject, said:
"It is not so difficult to avoid falsehood in dealing with anxious
patients as many seem to suppose. _Tact_, as well as _principle_, will
do a good deal to help a physician out, in an emergency. I have never
seen any need of lying, in my practice." And yet another physician,
who had been in a widely varied practice for forty years, said that he
had never found it necessary to t