It is not, then, the discovery that a man has the power to lie that shakes my confidence in him; it is loss of confidence in his mendacity that I find it impossible to get over. I forgive him for telling me lies, but I cannot forgive him for not telling me the same lies, or nearly so, about the same things. This shows he has a slipshod memory, which is unpardonable, or else that he tells so many lies that he finds it impossible to remember all of them, and this is like having too many of the poor always with us. The plover and the spider have each of them their stock of half a dozen lies or so which we may expect them to tell when occasion arises; they are plausible and consistent, but we know where to have them; otherwise, if they were liable, like self-deceivers, to spring mines upon us in unexpected places, man would soon make it his business to reform them—not from within, but from without.

And now it is time I came to the drift of my letter, which is that if “An Earnest Clergyman” has not cheated himself into thinking he is telling the truth, he will do no great harm by stopping where he is. Do not let him make too much fuss about trifles. The solemnity of the truths which he professes to uphold is very doubtful; there is a tacit consent that it exists more on paper than in reality. If he is a man of any tact, he can say all he is compelled to say and do all the Church requires of him—like a gentleman, with neither undue slovenliness nor undue unction—yet it shall be perfectly plain to all his parishioners who are worth considering that he is acting as a mouthpiece and that his words are spoken dramatically. As for the unimaginative, they are as children; they cannot and should not be taken into account. Men must live as they must write or act—for a certain average standard which each must guess at for himself as best he can; those who are above this standard he cannot reach; those, again, who are below it must be so at their own risk.

Pilate did well when he would not stay for an answer to his question, What is truth? for there is no such thing apart from the sayer and the sayee. ** There is that irony in nature which brings it to pass that if the sayer be a man with any stuff in him, provided he tells no lies wittingly to himself and is never unkindly, he may lie and lie and lie all the day long, and he will no more be false to any man than the sun will shine by night; his lies will become truths as they pass into the hearer’s soul. But if a man deceives himself and is unkind, the truth is not in him, it turns to falsehood while yet in his mouth, like the quails in the wilderness of Sinai. How this is so or why, I know not, but that the Lord hath mercy on whom He will have mercy and whom He willeth He hardeneth, and that the bad man can do no right and the good no wrong. **

A great French writer has said that the mainspring of our existence does not lie in those veins and nerves and arteries which have been described with so much care—these are but its masks and mouthpieces through which it acts but behind which it is for ever hidden; so in like manner the faiths and formulæ of a Church may be as its bones and animal mechanism, but they are not the life of the Church, which is something rather that cannot be holden in words, and one should know how to put them off, yet put them off gracefully, if they wish to come too prominently forward. Do not let “An Earnest Clergyman” take things too much au sérieux. He seems to be contented where he is; let him take the word of one who is old enough to be his father, that if he has a talent for conscientious scruples he will find plenty of scope for them in other professions as well as in the Church. I, for aught he knows, may be a doctor and I might tell my own story; or I may be a barrister and have found it my duty to win a case which I thought a very poor one, whereby others, whose circumstances were sufficiently pitiable, lost their all; yet doctors and barristers do not write to the newspapers to air their poor consciences in broad daylight. Why should An Earnest (I hate the word) Clergyman do so? Let me give him a last word or two of fatherly advice.

Men may settle small things for themselves—as what they will have for dinner or where they will spend the vacation—but the great ones—such as the choice of a profession, of the part of England they will live in, whether they will marry or no—they had better leave the force of circumstances to settle for them; if they prefer the phraseology, as I do myself, let them leave these matters to God. When He has arranged things for them, do not let them be in too great a hurry to upset His arrangement in a tiff. If they do not like their present and another opening suggests itself easily and naturally, let them take that as a sign that they make a change; otherwise, let them see to it that they do not leave the frying-pan for the fire. A man, finding himself in the field of a profession, should do as cows do when they are put into a field of grass. They do not like any field; they like the open prairie of their ancestors. They walk, however, all round their new abode, surveying the hedges and gates with much interest. If there is a gap in any hedge they will commonly go through it at once, otherwise they will resign themselves contentedly enough to the task of feeding.

I am, Sir,

One who thinks he knows a thing or two about
Ethics.

XX
First Principles

The Baselessness of Our Ideas

That our ideas are baseless, or rotten at the roots, is what few who study them will deny; but they are rotten in the same way as property is robbery, and property is robbery in the same way as our ideas are rotten at the roots, that is to say it is a robbery and it is not. No title to property, no idea and no living form (which is the embodiment of idea) is indefeasible if search be made far enough. Granted that our thoughts are baseless, yet they are so in the same way as the earth itself is both baseless and most firmly based, or again most stable and yet most in motion.