We waked not until the fingers of the sunny morn touched
our eyelids. We looked out and. Housatonic
slept as quiet as a baby’s dream. Pillars
of white cloud set up along the heavens looked like
the castles of the blest, built for hierarchs of heaven
on the beach of the azure sea. The trees sparkled
as though there had been some great grief in heaven,
and each leaf had been God-appointed to catch an angel’s
tear. It seemed as if God our Father had looked
down upon earth, his wayward child, and stooped to
her tear-wet cheek, and kissed it.
Even so will the darkness of our country’s crime
and suffering be lifted. God will roll back the
night of storm, and bring in the morning of joy.
Its golden light will gild the city spire, and strike
the forests of Maine, and tinge the masts of Mobile;
and with one end resting upon the Atlantic beach and
the other on the Pacific coast, God will spring a
great rainbow arch of peace, in token of everlasting
covenant that the land shall never again be deluged
with crime.
LIES: WHITE AND BLACK.
There are ten thousand ways of telling a lie.
A man’s entire life may be a falsehood, while
with his lips he may not once directly falsify.
There are those who state what is positively untrue,
but afterwards say, “may be,” softly.
These departures from the truth are called “white
lies;” but there is really no such thing as a
white lie. The whitest lie that was ever told
was as black as perdition. No inventory of public
crimes will be sufficient that omits this gigantic
abomination. There are men, high in Church and
State, actually useful, self-denying, and honest in
many things, who, upon certain subjects, and in certain
spheres, are not at all to be depended upon for veracity.
Indeed, there are multitudes of men who have their
notions of truthfulness so thoroughly perverted, that
they do not know when they are lying.
With many it is a cultivated sin; with some it seems
a natural infirmity. I have known people who seemed
to have been born liars. The falsehoods of their
lives extended from cradle to grave. Prevarication,
misrepresentation, and dishonesty of speech appeared
in their first utterances and was as natural to them
as any of their infantile diseases, and was a sort
of moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. But many
have been placed in circumstances where this tendency
has day by day, and hour by hour, been called to larger
development. They have gone from attainment to
attainment, and from class to class, until they have
become regularly graduated liars.
The air of the city is filled with falsehoods.
They hang pendent from the chandeliers of our finest
residences; they crowd the shelves of some of our
merchant princes; they fill the side-walk from curb-stone
to brown-stone facing. They cluster around the
mechanic’s hammer, and blossom from the end
of the merchant’s yard-stick, and sit in the
doors of churches. Some call them “fiction.”
Some style them “fabrication.” You
might say that they were subterfuge, disguise, delusion,
romance, evasion, pretence, fable, deception, misrepresentation;
but, as I am ignorant of anything to be gained by
the hiding of a God-defying outrage under a lexicographer’s
blanket, I shall chiefly call them what my father
taught me to call them—lies.
