Character — Ch 7c - Duty--Truthfulness, cont.

Although France has been the unquiet spirit among the nations of Europe since the reign of Louis XIV.

, there have from time to time been honest and faithful men who have lifted up their voices against the turbulent warlike tendencies of the people, and not only preached, but endeavoured to carry into practice, a gospel of peace.

Of these, the Abbe de St. -Pierre was one of the most courageous.

He had even the boldness to denounce the wars of Louis XIV.

, and to deny that monarch's right to the epithet of 'Great,' for which he was punished by expulsion from the Academy.

The Abbe was as enthusiastic an agitator for a system of international peace as any member of the modern Society of Friends.

As Joseph Sturge went to St. Petersburg to convert the Emperor of Russia to his views, so the Abbe went to Utrecht to convert the Conference sitting there, to his project for a Diet; to secure perpetual peace.

Of course he was regarded as an enthusiast, Cardinal Dubois characterising his scheme as "the dream of an honest man."

Yet the Abbe had found his dream in the Gospel; and in what better way could he exemplify the spirit of the Master he served than by endeavouring to abate the horrors and abominations of war?

The Conference was an assemblage of men representing Christian States: and the Abbe merely called upon them to put in practice the doctrines they professed to believe.

It was of no use: the potentates and their representatives turned to him a deaf ear.

The Abbe de St. -Pierre lived several hundred years too soon.

But he determined that his idea should not be lost, and in 1713 he published his 'Project of Perpetual Peace.'

He there proposed the formation of a European Diet, or Senate, to be composed of representatives of all nations, before which princes should be bound, before resorting to arms, to state their grievances and require redress.

Writing about eighty years after the publication of this project, Volney asked: "What is a people?

--an individual of the society at large.

What a war?

--a duel between two individual people.

In what manner ought a society to act when two of its members fight?

--Interfere, and reconcile or repress them.

In the days of the Abbe de St. -Pierre, this was treated as a dream; but, happily for the human race, it begins to be realised."

Alas for the prediction of Volney!

The twenty-five years that followed the date at which this passage was written, were distinguished by more devastating and furious wars on the part of France than had ever been known in the world before.

The Abbe was not, however, a mere dreamer.

He was an active practical philanthropist and anticipated many social improvements which have since become generally adopted.

He was the original founder of industrial schools for poor children, where they not only received a good education, but learned some useful trade, by which they might earn an honest living when they grew up to manhood.

He advocated the revision and simplification of the whole code of laws--an idea afterwards carried out by the First Napoleon.

He wrote against duelling, against luxury, against gambling, against monasticism, quoting the remark of Segrais, that "the mania for a monastic life is the smallpox of the mind."

He spent his whole income in acts of charity--not in almsgiving, but in helping poor children, and poor men and women, to help themselves.

His object always was to benefit permanently those whom he assisted.

He continued his love of truth and his freedom of speech to the last.

At the age of eighty he said: "If life is a lottery for happiness, my lot has been one of the best."

When on his deathbed, Voltaire asked him how he felt, to which he answered, "As about to make a journey into the country."

And in this peaceful frame of mind he died.

But so outspoken had St. -Pierre been against corruption in high places, that Maupertius, his Successor at the Academy, was not permitted to pronounce his ELOGE;

nor was it until thirty-two years after his death that this honour was done to his memory by D'Alembert.

The true and emphatic epitaph of the good, truth-loving, truth-speaking Abbe was this--"HE LOVED MUCH!"

Duty is closely allied to truthfulness of character; and the dutiful man is, above all things, truthful in his words as in his actions.

He says and he does the right thing, in the right way, and at the right time.

There is probably no saying of Lord Chesterfield that commends itself more strongly to the approval of manly-minded men, than that it is truth that makes the success of the gentleman.

Clarendon, speaking of one of the noblest and purest gentlemen of his age, says of Falkland, that he "was so severe an adorer of truth that he could as easily have given himself leave to steal as to dissemble."

It was one of the finest things that Mrs. Hutchinson could say of her husband, that he was a thoroughly truthful and reliable man: "He never professed the thing he intended not, nor promised what he believed out of his power, nor failed in the performance of anything that was in his power to fulfil."

Wellington was a severe admirer of truth.

An illustration may be given.

When afflicted by deafness he consulted a celebrated aurist, who, after trying all remedies in vain, determined, as a last resource, to inject into the ear a strong solution of caustic.

It caused the most intense pain, but the patient bore it with his usual equanimity.

The family physician accidentally calling one day, found the Duke with flushed cheeks and bloodshot eyes, and when he rose he staggered about like a drunken man.

The doctor asked to be permitted to look at his ear, and then he found that a furious inflammation was going on, which, if not immediately checked, must shortly reach the brain and kill him.

Vigorous remedies were at once applied, and the inflammation was checked.

But the hearing of that ear was completely destroyed.

When the aurist heard of the danger his patient had run, through the violence of the remedy he had employed, he hastened to Apsley House to express his grief and mortification; but the Duke merely said: "Do not say a word more about it--you did all for the best."

The aurist said it would be his ruin when it became known that he had been the cause of so much suffering and danger to his Grace.

"But nobody need know anything about it: keep your own counsel, and, depend upon it, I won't say a word to any one."

"Then your Grace will allow me to attend you as usual, which will show the public that you have not withdrawn your confidence from me?"

"No," replied the Duke, kindly but firmly; "I can't do that, for that would be a lie."

He would not act a falsehood any more than he would speak one.

[169] Another illustration of duty and truthfulness, as exhibited in the fulfilment of a promise, may be added from the life of Blucher.

When he was hastening with his army over bad roads to the help of Wellington, on the 18th of June, 1815, he encouraged his troops by words and gestures.

"Forwards, children--forwards!"

"It is impossible; it can't be done," was the answer.

Again and again he urged them.

"Children, we must get on; you may say it can't be done, but it MUST be done!

I have promised my brother Wellington--PROMISED, do you hear?

You wouldn't have me BREAK MY WORD!"

And it was done.

Truth is the very bond of society, without which it must cease to exist, and dissolve into anarchy and chaos.

A household cannot be governed by lying; nor can a nation.

Sir Thomas Browne once asked, "Do the devils lie?"

"No," was his answer; "for then even hell could not subsist."

No considerations can justify the sacrifice of truth, which ought to be sovereign in all the relations of life.

Of all mean vices, perhaps lying is the meanest.

It is in some cases the offspring of perversity and vice, and in many others of sheer moral cowardice.

Yet many persons think so lightly of it that they will order their servants to lie for them; nor can they feel surprised if, after such ignoble instruction, they find their servants lying for themselves.

Sir Harry Wotton's description of an ambassador as "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the benefit of his country," though meant as a satire, brought him into disfavour with James I. when it became published; for an adversary quoted it as a principle of the king's religion.

That it was not Wotton's real view of the duty of an honest man, is obvious from the lines quoted at the head of this chapter, on 'The Character of a Happy Life,' in which he eulogises the man "Whose armour is his honest thought, And simple truth his utmost skill."

But lying assumes many forms--such as diplomacy, expediency, and moral reservation; and, under one guise or another, it is found more or less pervading all classes of society.

Sometimes it assumes the form of equivocation or moral dodging--twisting and so stating the things said as to convey a false impression--a kind of lying which a Frenchman once described as "walking round about the truth."

There are even men of narrow minds and dishonest natures, who pride themselves upon their jesuitical cleverness in equivocation, in their serpent-wise shirking of the truth and getting out of moral back-doors, in order to hide their real opinions and evade the consequences of holding and openly professing them.

Institutions or systems based upon any such expedients must necessarily prove false and hollow.

"Though a lie be ever so well dressed," says George Herbert, "it is ever overcome."

Downright lying, though bolder and more vicious, is even less contemptible than such kind of shuffling and equivocation.

Untruthfulness exhibits itself in many other forms: in reticency on the one hand, or exaggeration on the other; in disguise or concealment; in pretended concurrence in others opinions; in assuming an attitude of conformity which is deceptive; in making promises, or allowing them to be implied, which are never intended to be performed; or even in refraining from speaking the truth when to do so is a duty.

There are also those who are all things to all men, who say one thing and do another, like Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways; only deceiving themselves when they think they are deceiving others--and who, being essentially insincere, fail to evoke confidence, and invariably in the end turn out failures, if not impostors.

Others are untruthful in their pretentiousness, and in assuming merits which they do not really possess.

The truthful man is, on the contrary, modest, and makes no parade of himself and his deeds.

When Pitt was in his last illness, the news reached England of the great deeds of Wellington in India.

"The more I hear of his exploits," said Pitt, "the more I admire the modesty with which he receives the praises he merits for them.

He is the only man I ever knew that was not vain of what he had done, and yet had so much reason to be so."

So it is said of Faraday by Professor Tyndall, that "pretence of all kinds, whether in life or in philosophy, was hateful to him."

Dr. Marshall Hall was a man of like spirit--courageously truthful, dutiful, and manly.

One of his most intimate friends has said of him that, wherever he met with untruthfulness or sinister motive, he would expose it, saying--"I neither will, nor can, give my consent to a lie."

The question, "right or wrong," once decided in his own mind, the right was followed, no matter what the sacrifice or the difficulty--neither expediency nor inclination weighing one jot in the balance.