"Oh, what do you want to talk so much about that?" said a boy to his mother. "It was only a white lie!"
And the poor little silly thought that you got your opinion of a lie by its colour!
A bad man may be white, or brown, or black, or yellow, but he is a bad man all the same! The colour does not matter; and so is a lie a bad thing, whether it is little or big, or white or black. I'll tell you why, girls and boys!
1. White lies give you a habit of telling lies, and when you get the habit you become a liar! In fact, white lies are almost the worse of the two, because a big black lie would scare you, but the little white lie eats into you without you knowing it.
2. White lies are like that awful disease called Cancer.
We hear a lot about it to-day, and the doctors are puzzled because they do not know how to trace it. But it eats and eats away until some of us have seen most loathsome forms of it consuming the poor body, while the life is still there, often in very intense suffering. And the doctors say, "Take care of the first pimple and have it cut out." Cancer often starts in a tiny spot or the smallest growth.
Now, the liar is just the same. He starts with lie pimples—just little white spots on his language tongue, but they grow until they eat away his best life.
In the East there is a dread disease called Leprosy.
It often begins with a little white spot, which grows and grows until the body gets rotten, and the poor fellow who has the disease has to be sent away by himself. And white lies grow and grow until the man becomes an evil one, who sometimes has to be sent off by himself in a jail, and the boy is sent off to some industrial home to keep him away so he cannot hurt others, until he has learned a better way of talking and living.
Be afraid of a lie!