Scripture texts illustrated by general literature

Lie engenders lie. Once committed, the liar has to go on in his course of lying. It is the penalty of his transgression, or one of the penalties. To the habitual liar, bronzed and hardened in the custom, till custom becomes second nature, the penalty may seem no very terrible price to pay. To him, on the other hand, who, without deliberate intent, and against his innermost will, is overtaken with such a fault, the generative power of a first lie to beget others, the necessity of supporting the first by a second and a third, is a retribution keenly to be felt, while penitently owned to be most just.

Though it was afar off that Peter followed his Master to the high-priest’s house, yet he did follow; and, we may be sure, with little thought, and still less intention, of denying Him even once. But as he sat by the fire and warmed himself, the identification of him by a certain maid as certainly a disciple of Christ was boldly met by the affirmation, or negation, “Woman, I know Him not.” The lie was uttered; the winged word of falsehood was on its way. And there an end, he perhaps hoped. But after a little while, another bystander recognised him, and asserted the damaging recognition, “Thou art also of them.” Another denial was the consequence: “Man, I am not.” An hour passed away, and Peter, in sullen misery and bewilderment, self-consciously an abject coward and confirmed liar, had to deny for the third time Him he had denied once and again. “Of a truth,” affirmed another of the mixed company, “this fellow also was with Him; for he is a Galilean.” And Peter said, “Man, I know not what thou sayest.” And then the cock crew. And then the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And at that look—so upbraidingly expressive, so pathetically recalling recent protestations of unfaltering allegiance, and the concurrent prediction of lapse and abandonment—what could Peter do, but with shame and confusion of face, and with a heart full to bursting, go out, and weep bitterly.

When he thought thereon, he wept: thought of the Master’s look, that recalled to him the vehement assurance of loyalty met by the foretelling of his fall. Thought, too, of the graduation of his denials; a first involving a second, and the second exacting yet a third. The third was the cost of the first. He had not counted the cost then. He had to pay it now.

It was part of the prophet’s burden of woes against the doomed city, that she had “wearied herself with lies.” Easily uttered, they may multiply at a rate to trouble the teller of them, and weary him, if only with the necessity of inventing new ones to back the old. He must ever be devising fresh vouchers for his impaired and imperilled credit. He must continually be endorsing his forged notes, and forging fresh ones that will stand inspection. Fallacia alia aliam trudit. And this is weary work.

And as with actions, so with words. The same speaker of the foregoing couplet utters elsewhere the lament,—

So we read in Molière. And Corneille has a play (not original) entirely devoted to the illustration of this subject, showing qu’il faut bonne mémoire acrès qu’on a menti; the Menteur κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, being one who entasse fourbe sur fourbe, and is constrained by the law of his nature, at least of habit, which is second nature, to be ever adding to the heap of lies to which he has committed himself. A Spanish proverb—and Le Menteur is from the Spanish—declares that “for an honest man half his wits is enough, while the whole are too little for a knave;” the ways, that is, as Archbishop Trench expounds the adage, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those who walk in them; whereas the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein—a truth often and wonderfully confirmed in the lives of evil men.

Among the aphorisms of Dean Swift we read: “He who tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.”

It has been called the severe, but appropriate, punishment of historians who desert the paths of truth for those of paradox, to be compelled to defend the falsehood to which they have committed themselves against the ever-accumulating evidences of the truth. Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, feelingly sketches the case of one who, being unprepared and accosted suddenly, says hastily that which is irreconcileable with strict truth; then to substantiate and make it look probable, misrepresents or invents something else; and so has woven round himself a mesh which will entangle his conscience through many a weary day and many a sleepless night.[31] One burden laid on fault, he goes on to show, is that chain of entanglement which seems to drag down to fresh sins. “One step necessitates many others. One fault leads to another, and crime to crime. The soul gravitates downward beneath its burden. It was profound knowledge which prophetically refused to limit Peter’s sin to once. ‘Verily I say unto thee ... thou shalt deny me thrice.’”

Mr. Froude shows us Queen Elizabeth stooping to “a deliberate lie.” At times, he says, writing of her embarrassed policy in 1565, she “seemed to struggle with her ignominy, but it was only to flounder deeper into distraction and dishonour.” In October of that year she publicly denied that she had encouraged the rebellion in Scotland. In November, we read, “Never had Elizabeth been in greater danger; and the worst features of the peril were the creations of her own untruths.” Again, in May, 1566: “Meanwhile Elizabeth was reaping a harvest of inconveniences for her exaggerated demonstrations of friendliness” to the Queen of Scots. Mary taking her at her word, “Vainly Elizabeth struggled to extricate herself from her dilemma; resentment was still pursuing her for her treachery in the past autumn.... She could but shuffle and equivocate in a manner which had become too characteristic.”[32] She was but paying the price of lies—the being constrained to go on lying still. It is certain, affirms a popular essayist, that nobody yet ever did anything wrong in this world without having to tell one or more falsehoods to begin with: the embryo murderer has to tell a lie about the pistol or dagger, the would-be suicide about the poison he purchases; and in fine, “the ways down which the bad ship Wickedness slides to a shoreless ocean must be greased with lies.”[33]

English reviewers not long since were prompt to recognise in Balzac’s “La Marâtre,” as revived to Parisian popularity, what they rightly accounted wonderful, a moral immaculate and beyond reproach. And what is that moral? “The necessity of a life of lying as a punishment for the one great lie of a mercenary marriage.” One great lie is put out to interest, and the interest is compound. One great lie involves a ramification of others, great or small, if there be comparatives of magnitude in such matters; and memory, if not conscience, is for ever on the stretch. The sad expedient of renewed issues is a necessity. As with the involved victim in one of Crabbe’s Tales:—

To another section, and with another starting-point from Holy Writ, may be referred some remaining illustrations of the subject.