from each other, but cannot be divided. They subsist by a mutual co-inherence, which gives a shadow of divinity even to our human nature. "Will ye speak deceitfully for God?" is a searching Question, which most affectingly represents the grief and impatience of an uncorrupted mind at perceiving a good cause defended by ill means: and assuredly if any temptation can provoke a wellregulated temper to intolerance, it is the shameless assertion, that Truth and Falsehood are indifferent in their own natures; that the former is as often injurious (and therefore criminal) as the latter, and the latter on many occasions as beneficial (and consequently meritorious) as the former.

These reflections were forced upon me by an accident during a short visit at a neighbouring house, as I was endeavouring to form some determinate principles of conduct in relation to my weekly labors-some rule which might guide my judgment in the choice of my subjects and in my manner of treating them, and secure me from the disturbing forces of any ungentle moods of my own temper (and from such who dare promise himself a perpetual exemption?) as well as from the undue influence of passing events. I had fixed my eye, by chance, on the page of a bulky pamphlet that lay open on the breakfast table, [mechanically, as it were, imitating and at the same time preserving, the mind's attention to it's own energies by a corresponding though idle stedfastness of the outward organ. In an interval or relaxation of the thought, as the mist gradually formed itself into letters and words, one of the sentences made its' way to me, and excited my curiosity by the boldness and strangeness of its' contents. I immediately recognized the work itself, which I had often heard discussed for evil and for good. I was therefore familiar with it's general character and extensive circulation, although partly from the seclusion in which I live, and my inability to purchase the luxuries of transitory literature on my own account, and partly too from the experience, that of all books I had derived the least improvement from those that were confined to the names and passions of my contemporaries: this was either the third or the fourth number which had come within my perusal. In this however I read, not only a distinct avowal of the doctrine stated in my last paragraph, and which I had been accustomed to consider

as an obsolete article in the creed of fanatical Antinomianism, but this avowal conveyed in the language of menace and intolerant contempt. I now look forward to the perusal of the whole series of the work, as made a point of duty to me by my knowledge of its' unusual influence on the public opinion; and in the mean time I feel it incumbent on me, as a joint measure of prudence and of honesty relatively to my own undertaking, to place immediately before my Readers in the fullest and clearest light, the whole question of moral obligation respecting the communication of Truth, its' extent and conditions. I would fain obviate all apprehensions either of my incaution on the one hand, or of any insincere reserve on the other, by proving that the more strictly we adhere to the Letter of the moral law in this respect, the more compleatly shall we reconcile the law with prudence; thus securing a purity in the principle without mischief from the practice. I would not, I could not dare, address my countrymen as a Friend, if I might not justify the assumption of that sacred title by more than mere veracity, by open-heartedness. The meanest of men feels himself insulted by an unsuccessful attempt to deceive him; and hates and despises the man who had attempted it. What place then is left in the heart for Virtue to build on, if in any case we may dare practice on others what we should feel as a cruel and contemptuous Wrong in our own persons? Every parent possesses the opportunity of observing, how deeply children resent the injury of a delusion; and if men laugh at the falsehoods that were imposed on themselves during their childhood, it is because they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the Past in the Present, and so to produce by a virtuous and thoughtful sensibility that continuity in their self-consciousness, which Nature has made the law of their animal Life*. Alas! the pernicious

Ingratitude, sensuality, and hardness of heart, all flow from this source. Men are ungrateful to others only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in fragments. Annihilated as to the Past, they are dead to the Future, or seek for the proofs of it every where, only not (where alone they can be found) in themselves. A contemporary poet has exprest and illustrated this sentiment with equal fineness of thought and tenderness of feeling:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rain-bow in the sky!

So was it, when my life began;

So is it now lama man;

So let it be, when I grow old,

Or let me die.

influence of this lax morality extends from the Nursery and the School to the Cabinet and Senate. It is a common weakness with men in power, who have used dissimulation successfully, to form a passion for the use of it, dupes to the love of duping! A pride is flattered by these lies. He who fancies that he must be perpetually stooping down to the prejudices of his fellow-creatures, is perpetually re-minding and re-assuring himself of his own vast superiority to them. But no real greatness can long co-exist with deceit. The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere, lives in but half his being, selfmutilated, self-paralysed.

The latter part of the proposition, which has drawn me into this discussion, that I mean in which the morality of intentional falsehood is asserted, may safely be trusted to the reader's own moral sense. It will, however, be found in it's proper nitch of Infamy, in some future number of THE FRIEND, among other enormities in taste, morals, and theology, with which our literature continues to be outraged. The former sounds less offensively at the first hearing, only because it hides its' deformity in an equivocation, or double meaning of the word Truth, What may be rightly affirmed of Truth, used as synonimous with verbal accuracy, is transferred to it in its' higher sense of veracity. By verbal truth we mean no more than the correspondence of a given fact to given words. In moral truth, we moreover involve the intention of the speaker, that his words should correspond to his thoughts in the sense in which he expects them to be

The Child is Father of the Man,

And I would wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety. WORDSWORTH.

I am informed, that these very lines have been cited, as a specimen of despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer. Not willingly in his presence would I behold the Sun setting behind our mountains, or listen to a tale of Distress òr Virtue; I should be ashamed of the quiet tear on my own cheek. But let the Dead bury the Dead! The poet sang for the Living. Of what value indeed, to a sane mind, are the Likings or Dislikings of one man, grounded on the mere assertions of another? Opinions formed from opinions-what are they, but clouds sailing under clouds, which impress shadows upon shadows?

Fungum pelle procul, jubeo! nam quid mihi Fungo?
Conveniunt stomacho non minus ista suo.

I was always pleased with the motto placed under the figure of the Ros mary in old Herbals: Sus, apage! Haud tibi spiro.

Is it a groundless apprehension, that the Patrons and Admirers of such publications may receive the punishment of their indiscretion in the conduct

understood by others: and in this latter import we are always supposed to use the word, whenever we speak of Truth absolutely, or as a possible subject of moral merit or demerit. It is verbally true, that in the sacred Scriptures it is written: "As is the good, so is the sinner, and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath. A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry. For there is one event unto all : the living know they shall die, but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward." But he who should repeat these words, with this assurance, to an ignorant man in the hour of his temptation, lingering at the door of the ale-house, or hesitating as to the testimony required of him in the Court of Justice, would, spite of this verbal truth, be a Liar, and the Murderer of his brother's Conscience. Veracity therefore, not mere accuracy; to convey truth, not merely to say it; is the point of Duty in Dispute: and the only difficulty in the mind of an honest man arises from the doubt, whether more than veracity (i. e. the truth and nothing but the truth) is not demanded of him by the Law of Conscience; whether it does not exact Simplicity; that is, the truth only, and the whole truth. If we can solve this difficulty, if we can determine the conditions under which the Law of universal Reason commands the communication of Truth independently of consequences altogether, we shall then be enabled to judge whether there is any such pro

of their Sons and Daughters? The suspicion of Methodism must be expected by every man of rank and fortune, who carries his examination respecting the Books which are to lie on his Breakfast-table, farther than to their freedom from gross verbal indecencies, and broad avowals of Atheism in the Title-page. For the existence of an intelligent first Cause may be ridiculed in the notes of one poem, or placed doubtfully as one of two or three possible hypotheses, in the very opening of another poem, and both be considered as works of safe promiscuous reading" virginibus puerisque :" and this too by many a Father of a family, who would hold himself highly culpable in permitting his Child to form habits of familiar acquaintance with a person of loose habits, and think it even criminal to receive into his house a private Tutor without a previous inquiry concerning his opinions and principles, as well as his manners and outward conduct. How little I am an enemy to free enquiry of the boldest kind, and where the Authors have differed the most widely from my own convictions and the general faith of mankind, provided only, the enquiry be conducted with that seriousness, which naturally accompanies the love of Truth, and that is evidently intended for the perusal of those only, who may be presumed to be capable of weighing the arguments, I shall have abundant occasion of proving, in the course of this work. Quin ipsa philosophia talibus e disputationibus non nisi beneficium recipit. Nam si vera proponit homo ingeniosus veritatisque amans, nova ad eam accessio fiet sin falsa, refutatione eorum priores tanto magis stabilientur. GALILEI Syst. Cosm. p. 42.

bability of evil consequences from such communication, as can justify the assertion of its' occasional criminality, as can perplex us in the conception, or disturb us in the performance, of our duty. (The existence of a rule of Right (recta regula) not derived from a calculation of consequences, and even independent of any experimental knowledge of its' practicability, but as an Idea co-essential with the Reason of Man, and its' necessary product, I have here intentionally assumed, in order that I may draw the attention of my Readers to this important question, of all questions indeed the most important, previous to the regular solution which I hope to undertake hereafter.

The Conscience, or effective Reason, commands the design of conveying an adequate notion of the thing spoken of, when this is practicable: but at all events a right notion, or none at all. A School-master is under the necessity of teaching a certain Rule in simple arithmetic empirically, (Do so and so, and the sum will always prove true) the necessary truth of the Rule (i. e. that the Rule having been adhered to, the sum must always prove true) requiring a knowledge of the higher mathematics. for its' demonstration. He, however, conveys a right notion, though he cannot convey the adequate one.

The moral law then permitting the one on the condition that the other is impracticable, and binding us to silence when neither is in our power, we must first enquire: What is necessary to constitute, and what may allowably accompany, a right thought inadequate notion? And secondly, what are the circumstances, from which we may deduce the impracticability of conveying even a right notion; the presence or absence of which circumstances it therefore becomes our duty to ascertain? In answer to the first question, the Conscience demands: 1. That it should be the wish and design of the mind to convey the truth only; that if in addition to the negative loss implied in its' inadequateness, the notion communicated should lead to any positive error, the cause should lie in the fault or defect of the Recipient, not of the Communicator, whose paramount duty, whose inalienable right it is to preserve his own* Integrity, the integral

The best and most forcible sense of a word is often that, which is con tained in its' Etymology. The Author of the Poems (the Synagogue) fre quently affixed to Herbert's "TEMPLE," gives the original purport of the word integrity, in the following lines (fourth stanza of the 8th poem.)