This Roman matron also committed suicide, as an encouragement to her husband whom she desired to have put an end to his own life, when he was likely to have it taken from him by the executioner; and Pliny commends her nobleness of conduct in both cases.  It is common among ethical writers, in citing this instance in favor of lying, to say nothing about the suicide, and to omit mention of the fact that the mother squarely lied, by saying that her dead boy had eaten a good breakfast, instead of employing language that might have been the truth as far as it went, while it concealed that portion of the truth which she thought it best to conceal.  It is common to quote her as simply saying of her son” He is better;"[1] quite a different version from Pliny’s, and presenting a different issue.

[Footnote 1:  See Newman Smyth’s Christian Ethics, p. 395, where this case is stated with vagueness of phrase, and as thus stated is approved.]

It was perfectly proper for that mother to conceal the signs of her sorrow from her sick husband, who had no right to know the truth concerning matters outside of his sick-room at such a time.  And if, indeed, she could say in all sincerity, as expressive of her feelings in the death of her son, by the will of the gods, “He is better,” it would have been possible for her to feel that she was entitled to say that as the truth, and not as a falsehood; and in that case she would not have intended a deceit, but only a concealment.  But when, on the other hand, she told a deliberate lie—­spoke falsely in order to deceive—­she committed a sin in so doing, and her sin was none the less a sin because it resulted in apparent good to her husband.  An illustration does not overturn a principle, but it may misrepresent it.

Another illustration, on the other side of the case, is worth citing here.  Victor Hugo pictures, in his Les Miserables,[1] a sister of charity adroitly concealing facts from a sick person in a hospital, while refusing to tell a falsehood even for the patient’s good.  “Never to have told a falsehood, never to have said for any advantage, or even indifferently, a thing which was not the truth, the holy truth, was the characteristic feature of Sister Simplice.”  She had taken the name of Simplice through special choice.  “Simplice, of Sicily, our readers will remember, is the saint who sooner let her bosom be plucked out than say she was a native of Segeste, as she was born at Syracuse, though the falsehood would have saved her.  Such a patron saint suited this soul.”  And in speaking of Sister Simplice, as never having told even “a white lie,” Victor Hugo quotes a letter from the Abbe Sicard, to his deaf-mute pupil Massieu, on this point:  “Can there be such a thing as a white lie, an innocent lie?  Lying is the absolute of evil.  Lying a little is not possible.  The man who lies tells the whole lie.  Lying is the face of the fiend; and Satan has two names,—­he is called Satan and Lying.”  Victor Hugo the romancer would seem to be a safer guide, so far, for the physician or the nurse in the sick-room, than Pliny the rhetorician, or Rothe the theologian.[2]