“I confess rather to an inverse experience.  The theoretic reasons for certain limits to the rule of veracity appear to me unanswerable; nor can I condemn any one who acts in accordance with them.  Yet when I place myself in a like position, at one of the crises demanding a deliberate lie, an unutterable repugnance returns upon me, and makes the theory seem shameful.  If brought to the test, I should probably act rather as I think than as I feel,[1] without, however, being able to escape the stab of an instant compunction and the secret wound of a long humiliation.  Is this the mere weakness of superstition?  It may be so.  But may it not also spring from an ineradicable sense of a common humanity, still leaving social ties to even social aliens, and, in the presence of an imperishable fraternal unity, forbidding to the individual of the moment the proud right of spiritual ostracism?...”

[Footnote 1:  No, a man who feels like that would be true in the hour of temptation.  His doubt of himself is only the tremulousness of true courage.]

“How could I ever face the soul I had deceived, when perhaps our relations are reversed, and he meets my sins, not with self-protective repulse, but with winning love?  And if with thoughts like these there also blends that inward reverence for reality which clings to the very essence of human reason, and renders it incredible, a priori, that falsehood should become an implement of good, it is perhaps intelligible how there may be an irremediable discrepancy between the dioptric certainty of the understanding and the immediate insight of the conscience:  not all the rays of spiritual truth are refrangible; some there are beyond the intellectual spectrum, that wake invisible response, and tremble in the dark.”

Dr. Martineau’s definition of right and wrong is this:[1] “Every action is right, which, in presence of a lower principle, follows a higher:  every action is wrong, which, in presence of a higher principle, follows a lower;” and his moral sense will not admit the possibility of falsehood being at any time higher than truth, or of veracity ever being lower than a lie.

[Footnote 1:  Types of Ethical Theory, II., 270.]

Professor Thomas Fowler, of the University of Oxford, writing as a believer in the gradual evolution of morals, and basing his philosophy on experience without any recognition of a priori principles, is much more nearly in accord, at this point,[1] with Martineau, than with Rothe, Hodge, and Smyth.  Although he is ready to concede that a lie may, theoretically, be justifiable, he is sure that the moral sense of mankind is, at the present state of average development, against its propriety.  Hence, he asserts that, even when justice might deny an answer to an improper question, “outside the limits of justice, and irrespectively of their duty to others, many persons are often restrained, and quite rightly so, from returning