Dr. Thornwell’s “Discourses on Truth"[1] are a thorough treatment of the obligation of veracity and the sin of lying.  He is clear in his definitions, marking the distinction between rightful concealment as concealment, and concealment for the purpose of deception.  “There are things which men have a right to keep secret,” he says, “and if a prurient curiosity prompts others officiously to pry into them, there is nothing criminal or dishonest in refusing to minister to such a spirit.  Our silence or evasive answers may have the effect of misleading.  That is not our fault, as it was not our design.  Our purpose was simply to leave the inquirer as nearly as possible in the state of ignorance in which we found him:  it was not to misinform him, but not to inform him at all.

[Footnote 1:  In Thornwell’s Collected Writings, II., 451-613.]

“‘Every man,’ says Dr. Dick, ’has not a right to hear the truth when he chooses to demand it.  We are not bound to answer every question which may be proposed to us.  In such cases we may be silent, or we may give as much information as we please, and suppress the rest.  If the person afterward discover that the information was partial, he has no title to complain, because he had no right even to what he obtained; and we are not guilty of a falsehood unless we made him believe, by something which we said, that the information was complete.’” “The intention of the speaker, and the effect consequent upon it, are very different things.”

Dr. Thornwell recognizes the fact that the moral sense of humanity discerns the invariable superiority of truth over falsehood.  “If we place virtue in sentiment,” he says, “there is nothing, according to the confession of all mankind, more beautiful and lovely than truth, more ugly and hateful than a lie.  If we place it in calculations of expediency, nothing, on the one hand, is more conspicuously useful than truth and the confidence it inspires; nothing, on the other, more disastrous than falsehood, treachery, and distrust.  If there be then a moral principle to which, in every form, humanity has given utterance, it is the obligation of veracity.”  “No man ever tells a lie without a certain degree of violence to his nature.”

Dr. Thornwell bases this obligation of veracity on the nature of God, and on the duty of man to conform to the image of God in which he was created.  “Jesus Christ commends himself to our confidence and love,” he says, “on the ground of his being the truth;... and makes it the glory of the Father that he is the God of truth, and the shame and everlasting infamy of the prince of darkness that he is the father of lies;” and he adds:  “The mind cannot move in charity, nor rest in Providence, unless it turn upon the poles of truth.”  “Every man is as distinctly organized in reference to truth, as in reference to any other purpose.”