Scripture texts illustrated by general literature

Jacob in Esau’s goodly raiment, and his smooth skin overlaid with goatskins, was duly prepared for a consistent course of deception. But the lie upon lie he had to tell before his end was gained, must have sorely tried what of conscience he then had. The primary falsehood,—distinctly enounced in answer to his blind sire’s “Who art thou?” “I am Esau, thy firstborn,” come back from the chase with the venison Isaac had desired of his firstborn,—this initial lie had immediately to be backed by another. How had he found it so quickly? There is something revolting in the style of the unfaltering fabrication at once ready to hand, “Because the Lord thy God brought it to me.” Then ensued that solution of the old man’s misgivings by a manual examination of the disguised pretender; it was Esau’s hirsute skin, sure enough, though the voice was Jacob’s. But the blessing was given. And even after that eventful benediction, the patriarch, with a yet lingering apprehension, renewed the pointed question, in its directest form, “Art thou my very son Esau?” And Jacob said, “I am.” Lie linked to lie, in a concatenation accordingly.

Solent mendaces luere pœnas malefici, says Phædrus: liars usually pay the penalty of their guilt. And Mrs. Browning vigorously states one distinctive penalty, where she speaks of those who—

The author of “Romola” powerfully illustrates in that remarkable book the embarrassments involved in one cowardly departure from truth. In the chapter headed “Tito’s Dilemma,” the occasion arises for Tito to fabricate an ingenious lie; an occasion “which circumstance never fails to beget on tacit falsity.” Many chapters farther on we find him experiencing the inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character; and it becomes a question whether all the resources of lying will save him from being crushed by the consequences of his habitual choice. At another juncture we read: “Tito felt more and more confidence as he went on; the lie was not so difficult when it was once begun; and as the words fell easily from his lips, they gave him a sense of power such as men feel when they have begun a muscular feat successfully.” The penalty is enforced a few pages later. “But he had borrowed from the terrible usurer Falsehood, and the loan had mounted and mounted with the years, till he belonged to the usurer, body and soul.” Again: “To-night he had paid a heavier price than ever to make himself safe.”[34]

In the American story of “The Gayworthys,” the like moral attaches to the course of one unhappy woman who lets herself slide, half involuntarily, into deeper wrong: she holds her peace; she makes herself passive. “Her very soul lied to itself in its false, bewildered reasonings; that is the inherent retribution of false souls.” There are some acts of folly, remarks the most popular, probably, of contemporary English penwomen, which carry falsehood and dissimulation at their heels as certainly as the shadows which follow us when we walk towards the evening sun; and we very rarely swerve from the severe boundary-line of right without being dragged ever so much farther than we calculated upon across the border.

Corneille’s celebrated play, “Le Menteur,”—but for reading which Molière asserts his belief that he would never have written a comedy himself,—is “conveyed” from a Spanish original, and has itself been Englished by Fielding; the ingenuity of the piece consisting in the manner in which one lie is made to call for another, until their wholesale employer is inextricably caught in the toils.

laments the elder Piccolomini, in Schiller’s trilogy. The commission of one wrong, says Owen Feltham, puts a man upon a thousand wrongs, perhaps, to maintain that one: injury, with injury is defended; and we commit a greater, to maintain a less. “A lie begets a lie, till generations succeed.” Mr. Carlyle sternly moralises on the growth of accumulated falsities,—“sad opulence descending by inheritance, always at compound interest, and always largely increased by fresh acquirement on such immensity of standing capital.” One lie, says Owen, must be thatched with another, or it will soon rain through.

Benvenuto Cellini records in his autobiography, the bitter experiences he endured in being tempted to lie to the duke, his patron, lest he should forfeit the favour of the duchess—he who “was always a lover of truth and an enemy to falsehood, being then under a necessity of telling lies.” “As I had begun to tell lies, I plunged deeper and deeper into the mire,”—till a very Slough of Despond it became to him.

Fool that he was, exclaims Mr. Trollope, of one of his characters in “Framley Parsonage:” “A man can always do right, even though he has done wrong before. But the previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the path—a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.” Mr. Thackeray sermonises to the same effect: “And so, my dear sir, seeing that after committing any infraction of the moral laws, you must tell lies in order to back yourself out of your scrape, let me ask you whether you had not better forego the crime, so as to avoid the unavoidable, and unpleasant, and daily-recurring necessity of the subsequent perjury?” And the cleverest character this master of social satire ever drew, confesses how it jarred on her to begin telling lies to a confiding, simple friend: “But that is the misfortune of beginning with this kind of forgery. When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.”

Jeremy Taylor quaintly says of the devil in the ancient oracles, “When he was put to it at his oracles, and durst not tell a downright lie, and yet knew not what was truth, many times he was put to the most pitiful shifts, and trifling equivocations, and acts of knavery, which, when they were discovered, ... it made him much more contemptible and ridiculous than if he had said nothing or confessed his ignorance.”

A lie has been called a two-edged sword without a hilt, which is sure to slip and cut the hand that holds it. “After telling one lie, we are sure to tell another; and usually, after spinning a silly, very complicated, and disgusting web, which entangles and chokes us, we find out that if we had told the truth, it would have been much the easier and better plan.” Lying is likened, again, to borrowing of money-lenders; for the credit which we get by it we have always to pay heavily for; and at last we find that the interest by far exceeds the principal, and we get so inextricably involved that we never fully recover. “He who tells a lie,” says Pope, “is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.” Johnson observes that nobody can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity are very lightly uttered, and when once uttered are sullenly supported. He reminds us that Boileau, who desired to be thought a rigorous and steady moralist, having told a petty lie to Lewis the Fourteenth, continued it afterwards by false dates, thinking himself obliged in honour to maintain what, when he said it, was so well received. Pope himself is taxed with similar mendacity by Mr. de Quincey, who charges him, on a certain literary question, with knowingly “preparing for himself a dire necessity of falsehood.... Once launched upon such a course, he became pledged and committed to all the difficulties which it might impose. Desperate necessities would arise, from which nothing but desperate lying and hard swearing could extricate him.” And at a subsequent stage in the facilis descensus he is described, rather imaginatively, as feeling, and groaning as he felt, that fresh falsehoods were in peremptory demand. “This comes of telling lies,” is supposed to be his bitter reflection: “one lie makes a necessity for another.”

The Leucippus of Beaumont and Fletcher thus admonishes an intimate:—