“No.”
“What facts?”
“Selected facts.”
It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his name.
If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.
[Original]
