_Under this heading a correspondence appeared in the_ Examiner, 15_th_
_February to_ 14_th_ _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. *
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.