uth is the corner-stone of all excellence, for without it nothing else
is true, genuine, or real. From the hour of his conversion his
truthfulness was increasingly dominant and apparent. In fact, there was
about him a scrupulous exactness which sometimes seemed unnecessary. One
smiles at the mathematical precision with which he states facts, giving
the years, days, and hours since he was brought to the knowledge of God,
or since he began to pray for some given object; and the pounds,
shillings, pence, halfpence, and even farthings that form the total sum
expended for any given purpose. We see the same conscientious exactness
in the repetitions of statements, whether of principles or of
occurrences, which we meet in his journal, and in which oftentimes there
is not even a change of a word. But all this has a significance. It
_inspires absolute confidence_ in the record of the Lord's dealings.

First, because it shows that the writer has disciplined himself to
accuracy of statement. Many a falsehood is not an intentional lie, but
an undesigned inaccuracy. Three of our human faculties powerfully affect
our veracity: one is memory, another is imagination, and another is
conscience. Memory takes note of facts, imagination colours facts with
fancies, and conscience brings the moral sense to bear in sifting the
real from the unreal. Where conscience is not sensitive and dominant,
memory and imagination will become so confused that facts and fancies
will fail to be separated. The imagination will be so allowed to invest
events and experiences with either a halo of glory or a cloud of
prejudice that the narrator will constantly tell, not what he clearly
sees written in the book of his remembrance, but what he beholds painted
upon the canvas of his own imagination. Accuracy will be, half
unconsciously perhaps, sacrificed to his own imaginings; he will
exaggerate or depreciate--as his own impulses lead him; and a man who
would not deliberately lie may thus be habitually untrustworthy: you
cannot tell, and often he cannot tell, what the exact truth would be,
when all the unreality with which it has thus been invested is
dissipated like the purple and golden clouds about a mountain, leaving
the bare crag of naked rock to be seen, just as it is in itself.

George Muller felt the immense importance of exact statement. Hence he
disciplined himself to accuracy. Conscience presided over his narrative,
and demanded that everything else sh