Such are the feelings that would arise in a heart full of equity and justice.  What must we say then of our own heart, when we see in it a wholly different disposition?  For is it not true that we hate truth and those who tell it us, and that we like them to be deceived in our favour, and prefer to be esteemed by them as being other than what we are in fact?  One proof of this makes me shudder.  The Catholic religion does not bind us to confess our sins indiscriminately to everybody; it allows them to remain hidden from all other men save one, to whom she bids us reveal the innermost recesses of our heart, and show ourselves as we are.  There is only this one man in the world whom she orders us to undeceive, and she binds him to an inviolable secrecy, which makes this knowledge to him as if it were not.  Can we imagine anything more charitable and pleasant?  And yet the corruption of man is such that he finds even this law harsh; and it is one of the main reasons which has caused a great part of Europe to rebel against the Church.[61]

How unjust and unreasonable is the heart of man, which feels it disagreeable to be obliged to do in regard to one man what in some measure it were right to do to all men!  For is it right that we should deceive men?

There are different degrees in this aversion to truth; but all may perhaps be said to have it in some degree, because it is inseparable from self-love.  It is this false delicacy which makes those who are under the necessity of reproving others choose so many windings and middle courses to avoid offence.  They must lessen our faults, appear to excuse them, intersperse praises and evidence of love and esteem.  Despite all this, the medicine does not cease to be bitter to self-love.  It takes as little as it can, always with disgust, and often with a secret spite against those who administer it.

Hence it happens that if any have some interest in being loved by us, they are averse to render us a service which they know to be disagreeable.  They treat us as we wish to be treated.  We hate the truth, and they hide it from us.  We desire flattery, and they flatter us.  We like to be deceived, and they deceive us.

So each degree of good fortune which raises us in the world removes us farther from truth, because we are most afraid of wounding those whose affection is most useful and whose dislike is most dangerous.  A prince may be the byword of all Europe, and he alone will know nothing of it.  I am not astonished.  To tell the truth is useful to those to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who tell it, because it makes them disliked.  Now those who live with princes love their own interests more than that of the prince whom they serve; and so they take care not to confer on him a benefit so as to injure themselves.

This evil is no doubt greater and more common among the higher classes; but the lower are not exempt from it, since there is always some advantage in making men love us.  Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other.  No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence.  Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.