your
conscientious friends observe a daily-growing disregard of absolute
truth in your statement of indifferent things, and, _a plus forte
raison_, in your statement of your own side of the question as opposed
to that of another. There are, unfortunately, a thousand opportunities
and temptations to the exaggerated mode of expression for which I blame
you; and these temptations are generally of so trifling a nature, that
the whole energies of the conscience are never awakened to resist them,
as might be the case were the evil to others and the disgrace to
yourself more strikingly manifest. Few people seem to be at all aware of
the difficulties that really attend speaking the _exact_ truth, or they
would shrink from indulging in any habits that immeasurably increase
these difficulties,--increase it, indeed, to such a degree, that some
minds appear to have lost the very power of perceiving truth; so that,
even when they are extremely anxious to be correct in their statement,
there is a total incapacity of transmitting a story to another in the
way that they themselves received it. This is one of the most striking
temporal punishments of sin,--one of those that are the inevitable
consequences of the sin itself, and quite independent of the other
punishments which the revealed will of God attaches to it. The persons
of whom I speak must sooner or later perceive that no dependence is
placed on their statements, that even when respect and affection for
their other good qualities may prevent a clear recognition of the
falsehood of their character, yet that they are now never applied to for
information on any matters of importance. Perhaps, to those who have any
sensitiveness of observation, such doubts are even the more painful the
more vaguely they are implied. For myself, I have long acquired the
habit of translating the assertions and the stories of the persons of
whom I speak into the language in which I judge they originally existed.
By the aid of a small degree of ingenuity, it is not very difficult to
ascertain, from the nature of the refracting medium, the degree and the
direction of the change that has taken place in the pure ray of truth.

Yet such people as these often deserve pity as much as blame: they are,
perhaps, unconscious of the degree in which habit has made them
insensible to the perversion of truth in their statements; and even now
they scarcely believe that what seems to them so true should appear and
re