So, all along the centuries, the religious teacher who holds to the line between truth and falsehood as an eternal line must, if logically consistent, refuse to admit any possible justification of lying.  Only he who denies an eternally absolute line between the true and the false could admit with consistency the justification by God of an act that is essentially hostile to the divine nature.  Any exception to this rule is likely to be where a sympathetic nature inclines a teacher to seek for an excuse for that which seems desirable even though it be theoretically wrong.

When it comes to the days of the Protestant Reformation, we find John Calvin, like his prototype Augustine, and like Augustine’s follower Aquinas, standing firmly against a lie as antagonistic to the very nature of God, and therefore never justifiable.  Martin Luther, also, is a fearless lover of the truth; but he is disposed to find excuses for a lie told with a good end in view, although he refrains from asserting that even the best disposed lie lacks the element of sinfulness.[1] On the other hand, Ignatius Loyola, and his associates in the founding of the Society of Jesus as a means of checking the Protestant Reformation, acted on the idea that was involved in the theology of Duns Scotus, that the only standard of truth and right is in the absolute and arbitrary will of God; and that, therefore, if God, speaking through his representative in the newly formed Society, commands the telling of a lie, a lie is justifiable, and its telling is a duty.  Moreover, these Jesuit leaders in defining, or in explaining away, the lie, include, under the head of justifiable concealment, equivocations and falsifications that the ordinary mind would see to be forms of the lie.[2]

[Footnote 1:  See Martensen’s Christian Ethics, p. 216.  Compare, for example, Luther’s comments on Exodus I:  15-21, with Calvin’s comments on Genesis 12:  14-20.]

[Footnote 2:  See Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, I., 263-267; Cartwright’s The Jesuits; Meyrick’s Moral Theology of the Church of Rome; Pascal’s Provincial Letters.  See, also, Kurtz’s Church History, II., 430.]

It is common to point to the arguments of the Jesuits in favor of lies of expediency, in their work for the Church and for souls, as though their position were exceptional, and they stood all by themselves in including falsehood as a means to be employed rightfully for a good end.

But in this they are simply logically consistent followers of those Christian Fathers, and their successors in every branch of the Church, who have held that a lie for righteous purposes was admissible when the results to be secured by it were of vital importance.  All the refinements of casuistry have their value to those who admit that a lie may be right under certain conceivable circumstances; but to those who, like Augustine and Aquinas, insist that a lie is a sin per se, and therefore never admissible, casuistry itself has no interest as a means of showing when a sin is not sinful.[1]