atures, who pride
themselves upon their jesuitical cleverness in equivocation, in their
serpent-wise shirking of the truth and getting out of moral back-doors,
in order to hide their real opinions and evade the consequences of
holding and openly professing them. Institutions or systems based upon
any such expedients must necessarily prove false and hollow. "Though
a lie be ever so well dressed," says George Herbert, "it is ever
overcome." Downright lying, though bolder and more vicious, is even less
contemptible than such kind of shuffling and equivocation.

Untruthfulness exhibits itself in many other forms: in reticency on the
one hand, or exaggeration on the other; in disguise or concealment; in
pretended concurrence in others opinions; in assuming an attitude of
conformity which is deceptive; in making promises, or allowing them
to be implied, which are never intended to be performed; or even in
refraining from speaking the truth when to do so is a duty. There are
also those who are all things to all men, who say one thing and do
another, like Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways; only deceiving themselves
when they think they are deceiving others--and who, being essentially
insincere, fail to evoke confidence, and invariably in the end turn out
failures, if not impostors.

Others are untruthful in their pretentiousness, and in assuming merits
which they do not really possess. The truthful man is, on the contrary,
modest, and makes no parade of himself and his deeds. When Pitt was
in his last illness, the news reached England of the great deeds of
Wellington in India. "The more I hear of his exploits," said Pitt, "the
more I admire the modesty with which he receives the praises he merits
for them. He is the only man I ever knew that was not vain of what he
had done, and yet had so much reason to be so."

So it is said of Faraday by Professor Tyndall, that "pretence of all
kinds, whether in life or in philosophy, was hateful to him." Dr.
Marshall Hall was a man of like spirit--courageously truthful, dutiful,
and manly. One of his most intimate friends has said of him that,
wherever he met with untruthfulness or sinister motive, he would expose
it, saying--"I neither will, nor can, give my consent to a lie." The
question, "right or wrong," once decided in his own mind, the right
was followed, no matter what the sacrifice or the difficulty--neither
expediency nor inclination weighing one jot in the balance.

There was no