[Footnote 2:  Here is another illustration of Dr. Smyth’s strange confusion of concealment with deception.  It would seem as though a man must have blinders before his own eyes, to render him incapable of perceiving the difference between concealing a possible cause of fright from an animal, and intentionally deceiving that animal.]

If, indeed, the duty of truthfulness were only a social obligation, there might be a force in this reasoning that is lacking when we see that falsehood and deceit are against the very nature of God, and are a violation of man’s primal nature.  A lie is a sin, whenever and however and to whomsoever spoken or acted.  It is a sin against God when uttered in his sight.

Man is given authority from God over all the lower animals;[1] and he is empowered to take their lives, if necessary for his protection or for his sustenance.  In the exercise of this right, man is entitled to conceal from the animals he would kill or capture the means employed for the purpose; as he is entitled to conceal similarly from his fellow-man, when he is authorized to kill him as an enemy, in time of war waged for God.  Thus it is quite proper for a man to conceal the hook or the net from the fish, or the trap or the pitfall from the beast; but it is not proper to deceive an animal by an imitation of the cry of the animal’s offspring in order to lure that animal to its destruction; and the moral sense of the human race makes this distinction.

[Footnote 1:  Gen. 1:28; 9:1-3.]

An illustration that has been put forward, as involving a nice question in the treatment of an animal, is that of going toward a loose horse with a proffered tuft of grass in one hand, and a halter for his capture concealed behind the back in the other hand.  It is right to conceal the halter, and to proffer the grass, provided they are used severally in their proper relations.  If the grass be held forth as an assurance of the readiness of the man to provide for the needs of the horse, and it be given to him when he comes for it, there is no deception practiced so far; and if, when horse and man are thus on good terms, the man brings out the halter for its use in the relation of master and servitor between the two, that also is proper, and the horse would so understand it.  But if the man were to refuse the grass to the horse, when the two had come together, and were to substitute for it the halter, the man would do wrong, and the horse would recognize the fact, and not be caught again in that way.

Even a writer like Professor Bowne, who is not quite sure as to the right in all phases of the lying question, sees this point in its psychological aspects to better advantage than those ethical writers who would look at the duty of truthfulness as mainly a social virtue:  “Even in cases where we regard truth as in our own power,” he says, “there are considerations of expediency which are by no means to be disregarded.