“Are there cases,” he asks, “where lying is allowable?  Can we make out the so-called ‘white lie’ to be morally permissible?” Then he takes up the cases of children and the insane, who are not entitled to know all the truth, and asks if it be right not only to conceal the truth but to falsify it, in talking with them.  Concealment may be a duty, he admits, but he denies that falsifying is ever a duty.  “How shall ethics ever be brought to lay down a duty of lying [of ’white lying’], to recommend evil that good may come?  The test for us is, whether we could ever imagine Christ acting in this way, either for the sake of others, or—­which would be quite as justifiable, since self-love is a moral duty—­for his own sake.”

As to falsifying to a sick or dying man, he says, “we overestimate the value of human life, and, besides, we in a measure usurp the place of Providence, when we believe we may save it by committing sin.”  In other words, Dorner counts falsifying with the intention of deceiving, even with the best of motives, a lie, and therefore a sin—­never justifiable.  Like Augustine, Dorner recognizes degrees of guilt in lies, according to the spirit and motive of their telling; but in any event, if there be falsehood with the purpose of deceiving, it is a sin—­to be regretted and repented of.

Dorner makes a fresh distinction between the stratagems of war and lying, which is worthy of note.  He says that playful fictions, after the manner of riddles to be guessed out, are clearly allowable.  So “in war, too, something like a game of this kind is carried on, when by way of stratagem some deceptive appearance is produced, and a riddle is thus given to the enemy.  In such cases there is no falsehood; for from the conditions of the situation,—­whether friendly or hostile,—­the appearance that is given is confessedly nothing more than an appearance, and is therefore honest.”

The simplicity and clearness of Dorner, in his unsophistical treatment of this question, is in refreshing contrast with the course of Rothe,—­who confuses the whole matter in discussion by his arbitrary claim that a lie is not a lie, if it be told with a good purpose and a loving spirit.  And the two men are representative disputants in this controversy of the centuries, as truly as were Augustine and Chrysostom.

A close friend of Dorner was Hans Lassen Martensen, “the greatest theologian of Denmark,” and a thinker of the first class, “with high speculative endowments, and a considerable tincture of theosophical mysticism."[1] Martensen’s “Christian Ethics” do not ignore God and the Bible as factors in any question of practical morals under discussion.  He characterizes the result of such an omission as “a reckoning of an account whose balance has been struck elsewhere; if we bring out another figure, we have reckoned wrong.”  Martensen’s treatment of the duty of veracity is a remarkable exhibit of the workings of a logical mind in full view of eternal principles, yet measurably hindered and retarded by the heart-drawings of an amiable sentiment.  He sees the all-dividing line, and recognizes the primal duty of conforming to it; yet he feels that it is a pity that such conformity must be so expensive in certain imaginary cases, and he longs to find some allowance for desirable exceptions.[2]