One can indeed imagine circumstances where this would not be true.  If you are persuaded that you have had revealed to you a glorious gospel of light and blessedness, it is impossible not to thirst to impart such tidings most eagerly to those who are closest about your heart.  We are not in that position.  We have as yet no magnificent vision, so definite, so touching, so ‘clothed with the beauty of a thousand stars,’ as to make us eager, for the sake of it, to murder all the sweetnesses of filial piety in an aggressive eristic.  This much one concedes.  Yet let us ever remember that those elders are of nobler type who have kept their minds in a generous freedom, and have made themselves strong with that magnanimous confidence in truth, which the Hebrew expressed in old phrase, that if counsel or work be of men it will come to nought, but if it be of God ye cannot overthrow it.

Even in the case of parents, and even though our new creed is but rudimentary, there can be no good reason why we should go further in the way of economy than mere silence.  Neither they nor any other human being can possibly have a right to expect us, not merely to abstain from the open expression of dissents, but positively to profess unreal and feigned assents.  No fear of giving pain, no wish to soothe the alarms of those to whom we owe much, no respect for the natural clinging of the old to the faith which has accompanied them through honourable lives, can warrant us in saying that we believe to be true what we are convinced is false.  The most lax moralist counts a lie wrong, even when the motive is unselfish, and springs from the desire to give pleasure to those whom it is our duty to please.  A deliberate lie avowedly does not cease to be one because it concerns spiritual things.  Nor is it the less wrong because it is uttered by one to whom all spiritual things have become indifferent.  Filial affection is a motive which would, if any motive could, remove some of the taint of meanness with which pious lying, like every other kind of lying, tends to infect character.  The motive may no doubt ennoble the act, though the act remains in the category of forbidden things.  But the motive of these complaisant assents and false affirmations, taken at their very best, is still comparatively a poor motive.  No real elevation of spirit is possible for a man who is willing to subordinate his convictions to his domestic affections, and to bring himself to a habit of viewing falsehood lightly, lest the truth should shock the illegitimate and over-exacting sensibilities either of his parents or any one else.  We may understand what is meant by the logic of the feelings, and accept it as the proper corrective for a too intense egoism.  But when the logic of the feelings is invoked to substitute the egoism of the family for the slightly narrower egoism of the individual, it can hardly be more than a fine name for self-indulgence and a callous indifference to all the largest human interests.