In order to understand what childish untruth really amounts to we must carefully note its after-effects on the perpetrator. It seems certain that many children experience a qualm of conscience when uttering that, of the falsity of which they are more or less aware. This is evidenced in the well-known devices by which the young casuist thinks to mitigate the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds mentally, "I do not mean it," "in my mind," or some similar palliative. Such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.
The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie, which catches the conscience at its tenderest, is much more than this passing qualm, and has been remembered by many in later life. Here is a case. A young lady whom I know remembers that when a child of four she had to wear a shade over her eyes. One day on walking out with her mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in front, and nearly struck a lamp-post. Her mother then scolded her, but presently remembering the eyes, said: "Poor child, you could not see well". She knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and for long afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie.
Such remorse, in certain cases prolonged beyond the first lie, comes to the little offender as he or she lies in bed and recalls the untruths of the day. Some children suffer greatly from this periodic reflection on their lies.
Some of the more poignant of the sufferings which come to the sensitive child from saying what is false are those of fear, fear of those terrific penalties which religious teaching attaches to the lying tongue. It seems likely that childish devices for allaying their qualms when saying what is untrue are intended somehow to make things right with God, and so to avoid the dreaded chastisement. I am sure, too, that the subsequent remorse, especially at night, is very largely a dread of some awful manifestation of God's wrath.
While I should set down much of this horror of children at discovering themselves liars to a dread of supernatural penalties, I should not set down the whole. I am disposed to think that there is another force at work in the little people's consciousness.
In order to explain what I mean, I must begin by saying that a tendency towards conscious falsehood, though common, does not seem to be universal among children. Several mothers assure me that their children have never seriously put forth an untruth. I can say the same about two children who have been especially observed for the purpose.
I am ready to go further and to suggest that where a child is brought up normally, that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community, he tends, quite apart from moral instruction, to acquire a respect for truth. One may easily see that children accustomed to truth-speaking show all the signs of a moral shock when they are confronted with a false statement. I remember after more than twelve years one little boy's outbreaks of righteous indignation at meeting with untrue statements about his beloved horses and other things in one of his books, for which he had all a child's reverence. The idea of knowingly perpetrating an untruth, so far as I can judge, is simply awful to a child who has been thoroughly habituated to the practice of truthful statement. May it, then, not well be that when a preternatural pressure of circumstances pushes the child over the boundary line of truth, he feels a shock, a horror, a giddy and aching sense of having violated law—law not wholly imposed by the mother's command, but rooted in the very habits of social life?
Our inquiry has led us to recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but have tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check by others, will develop into the vices of cruelty and lying. On the other hand it has shown us that there are other and counteracting impulses, germs of human sympathy and of respect for the binding custom of truthfulness. So far from saying that child-nature is utterly bad or beautifully perfect, we should say that it is a disorderly jumble of impulses, each pushing itself upwards in lively contest with the others, some towards what is bad, others towards what is good. It is on this motley group of tendencies that the hand of the moral cultivator has to work, selecting, arranging, organising into a beautiful whole.