If Dr. Smyth had been content to leave this matter with the explicit statement of the principles that are unvaryingly operative, he would have done good service to the world, and his work could have been commended as sound and trustworthy in this department of ethics; but as soon as he begins to question and reason on the subject, he begins to waver and grow confused; and in the end his inconclusive conclusions are pitiably defective and reprehensible.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Smyth’s Christian Ethics, pp. 392-403]

In considering “the so-called lies of necessity,” Dr. Smyth declares with frankness:  “Some moralists in their supreme regard for truth will not admit that under any conceivable circumstances a lie can be deemed necessary, not even to save life or to prevent a murderer from accomplishing his fiendish purpose.”  And then over against this he indicates his fatal confusion of mind and weakness of reasoning in the suggestion:  “But the sound human understanding, in spite of the moralists, will prevaricate, and often with great vigor and success, in such cases.  Who is right,—­Kant, or the common moral sense?  Which should be followed,—­the philosophic morality, or the practice of otherwise most truthful men?”

It is to be noted that, in these two declarations, Dr. Smyth puts lying as if it were synonymous with prevarication; else there is no reason for his giving the one as over against the other.  And this indicates a peculiar difficulty in the whole course of Dr. Smyth’s argument concerning the “so-called lie of necessity.”  He essays no definition of the “lie.”  He draws no clear line of distinction between a lie, a falsehood, a deceit, and a prevarication, or between a justifiable concealment and an unjustifiable concealment; and in his various illustrations of his position he uses these terms indiscriminately, in such a way as to indicate that he knows no essential difference between them, or that he does not care to emphasize any difference.

If, in the instance given above, Dr. Smyth means that “the sound human understanding, in spite of the moralists,” will approve lying, or falsifying with the intention to deceive, he ought to know that the sound human understanding will not justify such a course, and that it is unfair to intimate such a thing.[1] And when he asks, in connection with this suggestion, “Who is right,—­Kant, or the common moral sense?  Which should be followed, the philosophic morality, or the practice of otherwise most truthful men?” his own preliminary assertions are his conclusive answer.  He says specifically, “Kant was profoundly right when he regarded falsehood as a forfeiture of personal worth, a destruction of personal integrity;” and the “common moral sense” of humanity is with Kant in this thing, in accordance with Dr. Smyth’s primary view of the case, as over against the intimation of Dr. Smyth’s question.  As to the suggested “practice of otherwise most truthful men” in this thing,—­if men who generally tell the truth, lie, or speak falsely, or deceive, under certain circumstances, they are much like men who are generally decent, but who occasionally, under temptation, are unchaste or dishonest; they are better examples in their uprightness than in their sinning.