[Footnote 3:  Snow, cited in Ibid.]

[Footnote 4:  Kolben, and Barrow, cited in Cycl. of Descrip.  Sociol., IV., 25.]

[Footnote 5:  Cycl. of Descrip.  Sociol., IV., 26.]

[Footnote 6:  Cycl. of Descrip.  Social., IV., 27.]

[Footnote 7:  Head Hunters of Borneo, p. 209.  See also Boyle, cited in Spencer’s Cycl. of Descrip.  Social., III., 35.]

[Footnote 8:  St. John’s Life in the Forests of the Far East, I., 88 f.]

The Veddahs of Ceylon, one of the most primitive of peoples, “are proverbially truthful."[1] The natives of Java are peculiarly free from the vice of lying, except in those districts which have had most intercourse with Europeans.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Bailey, cited in Spencer’s Cycl. of Descrip.  Social., III., 32.]

[Footnote 2:  Earl, and Raffles, cited in Ibid., p. 35.]

It is found, in fact, that in all the ages, the world over, primitive man’s highest ideal conception of deity has been that of a God who could not tolerate a lie; and his loftiest standard of human action has included the readiness to refuse to tell a lie under any inducement, or in any peril, whether it be to a friend or to an enemy.  This is the teaching of ethnic conceptions on the subject.  The lie would seem to be a product of civilization, or an outgrowth of the spirit of trade and barter, rather than a natural impulse of primitive man.  It appeared in full flower and fruitage in olden time among the commercial Phoenicians, so prominently that “Punic faith” became a synonym of falsehood in social dealings.

Yet it is in the face of facts like these that a writer like Professor Fowler baldly claims, in support of the same presupposed theory as that of Lecky, that “it is probably owing mainly to the development of commerce, and to the consequent necessity, in many cases, of absolute truthfulness, that veracity has come to take the prominent position which it now occupies among the virtues; though the keen sense of honor, engendered by chivalry, may have had something to do in bringing about the same result."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Principles of Morality, II., 220.]

III.

BIBLE TEACHINGS.

In looking at the Bible for light in such an investigation as this, it is important to bear in mind that the Bible is not a collection of specific rules of conduct, but rather a book of principles illustrated in historic facts, and in precepts based on those principles,—­announced or presupposed.  The question, therefore, is not, Does the Bible authoritatively draw a line separating the truth from a lie, and making the truth to be always right, and a lie to be always wrong? but it is, Does the Bible evidently recognize an unvarying and ever-existing distinction between a truth and a lie, and does the whole sweep of its teachings go to show that in God’s sight a lie, as by its nature opposed to the truth and the right, is always wrong?