Jeremy Taylor naturally falls back on the Bible stories of the Hebrew midwives and Rahab the harlot, and assumes that God commended their lying, as lying, because they had a good end in view; and he asserts that “it is necessary sometimes by a lie to advantage charity by losing of a truth to save a life,” and that “to tell a lie for charity, to save a man’s life, the life of a friend, of a husband, of a prince, of an useful and a public person, hath not only been done in all times, but commended by great and wise and good men.”  From this it would appear that lying, which Jeremy Taylor sets out with denouncing as contrary to God’s nature, and as declared by our Saviour to be always of the Devil, may, under certain circumstances, be a godly sin.  Gregory of Nyssa and young Chrysostom could not have done better than this in showing the sinlessness of a sin in a good cause.

Seeing that concealment of that which is true is often a duty, and seeing also that concealment of that which ought to be disclosed is often practically a lie, Jeremy Taylor apparently; jumps to the conclusion that concealment and equivocation and lying are practically the same thing, and that therefore lying is sometimes a duty, while again it is a sin.  He holds that the right to be spoken to in truthfulness, “though it be regularly and commonly belonging to all men, yet it may be taken away by a superior right supervening; or it may be lost, or it may be hindered, or it may cease upon a greater reason.”  As “that which is but the half of a true proposition either signifies nothing or is directly a lie,” it must be admitted that “in the same cases in which it is lawful to tell a lie, in the same cases it is lawful to use a mental reservation;” and “where it is lawful to lie, it is lawful to equivocate, which may be something less than a plain lie.”  Moreover, “it is lawful upon a just cause of great charity or necessity to use, in our answers and intercourses, words of divers signification, though it does deceive him that asks.”

Jeremy Taylor ingenuously confesses that, in certain cases where lying is allowable or is a duty, “the prejudice which the question is like to have is in the meaning and evil sound of the word lying; which, because it is so hateful to God and man, casts a cloud upon anything that it comes near.”  But, on the whole, Jeremy Taylor is willing to employ with commendation that very word “lying” which is “so hateful to God and man.”  And in various cases he insists that “it is lawful to tell a lie,” although “the lie must be charitable and useful,”—­a good lie, and not a wicked lie; for a good lie is good, and a wicked lie is wicked.  He does not shrink from the consequences of his false position.

Jeremy Taylor can therefore be cited as arguing that a lie is never admissible, but that it often is commendable.  He does not seem to be quite sure of any real difference between lying and justifiable concealment, or to have in his mind an unvarying line between truthfulness and lying.  He admits that God and man hate lying, but that a good lie, nevertheless, is a very good thing.  And so he leaves the subject in more of a muddle than he found it.