Attempts at Classification
are like nailing battens of our own flesh and blood upon ourselves as an inclined plane that we may walk up ourselves more easily; and yet it answers very sufficiently.
A Clergyman’s Doubts
Under this heading a correspondence appeared in the Examiner, 15th February to 14th June, 1879. Butler wrote all the letters under various signatures except one or perhaps two. His first letter purported to come from “An Earnest Clergyman” aged forty-five, with a wife, five children, a country living worth £400 a year, and a house, but no private means. He had ceased to believe in the doctrines he was called upon to teach. Ought he to continue to lead a life that was a lie or ought he to throw up his orders and plunge himself, his wife and children into poverty? The dilemma interested Butler deeply: he might so easily have found himself in it if he had not begun to doubt the efficacy of infant baptism when he did. Fifteen letters followed, signed “Cantab,” “Oxoniensis,” and so forth, some recommending one course, some another. One, signed “X.Y.Z.,” included “The Righteous Man” which will be found in the last group of this volume, headed “Poems.” From the following letter signed “Ethics” Butler afterwards took two passages (which I have enclosed, one between single asterisks the other between double asterisks), and used them for the “Dissertation on Lying” which is in Chapter V of Alps and Sanctuaries.
To the Editor of the Examiner.
Sir: I am sorry for your correspondent “An Earnest Clergyman” for, though he may say he has “come to smile at his troubles,” his smile seems to be a grim one. We must all of us eat a peck of moral dirt before we die, but some must know more precisely than others when they are eating it; some, again, can bolt it without wry faces in one shape, while they cannot endure even the smell of it in another. “An Earnest Clergyman” admits that he is in the habit of telling people certain things which he does not believe, but says he has no great fancy for deceiving himself. “Cantab” must, I fear, deceive himself before he can tolerate the notion of deceiving other people. For my own part I prefer to be deceived by one who does not deceive himself rather than by one who does, for the first will know better when to stop, and will not commonly deceive me more than he can help. As for the other—if he does not know how to invest his own thoughts safely he will invest mine still worse; he will hold God’s most precious gift of falsehood too cheap; he has come by it too easily; cheaply come, cheaply go will be his maxim. The good liar should be the converse of the poet; he should be made, not born.
It is not loss of confidence in a man’s strict adherence to the letter of truth that shakes my confidence in him. I know what I do myself and what I must lose all social elasticity if I were not to do. * Turning for moral guidance to my cousins the lower animals—whose unsophisticated instinct proclaims what God has taught them with a directness we may sometimes study—I find the plover lying when she reads us truly and, knowing that we shall hit her if we think her to be down, lures us from her young ones under the fiction of a broken wing. Is God angry, think you, with this pretty deviation from the letter of strict accuracy? or was it not He who whispered to her to tell the falsehood, to tell it with a circumstance, without conscientious scruples, and not once only but to make a practice of it, so as to be an habitual liar for at least six weeks in the year? I imagine so. When I was young I used to read in good books that it was God who taught the bird to make her nest, and, if so, He probably taught each species the other domestic arrangements which should be best suited to it. Or did the nest-building information come from God and was there an Evil One among the birds also who taught them to steer clear of pedantry? Then there is the spider—an ugly creature, but I suppose God likes it—can anything be meaner than that web which naturalists extol as such a marvel of Providential ingenuity?
Ingenuity! The word reeks with lying. Once, on a summer afternoon, in a distant country I met one of those orchids whose main idea consists in the imitation of a fly; this lie they dispose so plausibly upon their petals that other flies who would steal their honey leave them unmolested. Watching intently and keeping very still, methought I heard this person speaking to the offspring which she felt within her though I saw them not.
“My children,” she exclaimed, “I must soon leave you; think upon the fly, my loved ones; make it look as terrible as possible; cling to this thought in your passage through life, for it is the one thing needful; once lose sight of it and you are lost.”
Over and over again she sang this burden in a small, still voice, and so I left her. Then straightway I came upon some butterflies whose profession it was to pretend to believe in all manner of vital truths which in their inner practice they rejected; thus, pretending to be certain other and hateful butterflies which no bird will eat by reason of their abominable smell, these cunning ones conceal their own sweetness, live long in the land and see good days. Think of that, O Earnest Clergyman, my friend! No. Lying is like Nature, you may expel her with a fork, but she will always come back again. Lying is like the poor, we must have it always with us. The question is, How much, when, where, to whom and under what circumstances is lying right? For, once admit that a plover may pretend to have a broken wing and yet be without sin if she have pretended well enough, and the thin edge of the wedge has been introduced so that there is no more saying that we must never lie. *