To his ear our words have a very different significance
from that which they bear to our fellow-beings. We should recollect,
that the falsehood which may make it impossible for us to judge
righteous judgment of our fellow-beings stands before the Lord only
as a falsehood; and that, in whatever form it comes, from the courteous
white lie--as man dares to call it--of polished society, to the
double-dyed blackness of malignant hypocrisy, God sees only the
varying shades of dissimulation; springing, in whatever form, from a
deep-running undercurrent of selfishness and worldliness. We may be
deceived into believing words are genuine when they are not so; but
every disingenuous word uttered is, before God, the image and likeness
of the duplicity that reigns within. To us they may seem the beautiful
garments that envelop purity and truth; but to him they are the foul and
flimsy veils that strive to conceal the soul's deformity.
Man, in the pride of his artifice, often exults because he has outwitted
his neighbor by his lying words, while all the time he has far more
outwitted himself. He has degraded his own soul,--set upon it a foul
mark that can be washed out only by the bitter tears of penitence, and
yet holds his head aloft in fancied superiority over his fellows, while
before God and the angels he stands like Cain, with the mark of sin
impressed upon his forehead.
That man should be condemned for lying words all will admit, but when
men converse idly, or without any particular thought one way or the
other as to what they are saying, they are apt to suppose that no
especial moral character belongs to the words they utter.
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