I think that in most cases personal isolation and disuse is the greater evil.  I think if there is no other way to constructive service except through test oaths and declarations, one must take then.  This is a particular case that stands apart from all other cases.  The man who preaches a sermon and pretends therein to any belief he does not truly hold is an abominable scoundrel, but I do not think he need trouble his soul very greatly about the barrier he stepped over to get into the pulpit, if he felt the call to preach, so long as the preaching be honest.  A Republican who takes the oath of allegiance to the King and wears his uniform is in a similar case.  These things stand apart; they are so formal as to be scarcely more reprehensible than the falsehood of calling a correspondent “Dear,” or asking a tiresome lady to whom one is being kind and civil, for the pleasure of dancing with her.  We ought to do what we can to abolish these absurd barriers and petty falsehoods, but we ought not to commit a social suicide against them.

That is how I think and feel in this matter, but if a man sees the matter more gravely, if his conscience tells him relentlessly and uncompromisingly, “this is a lie,” then it is a lie and he must not be guilty of it.  But then I think it ill becomes him to be silently excluded.  His work is to clamour against the existence of the barrier that wastes him.

I do not see that lying is a fundamental sin.  In the first place some lying, that is to say some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement, is necessary to nearly everything we do, and the truest statement becomes false if we forget or alter the angle at which it is made, the direction in which it points.  In the next the really fundamental and most generalized sin is self-isolation.  Lying is a sin only because self-isolation is a sin, because it is an effectual way of cutting oneself off from human co-operation.  That is why there is no sin in telling a fairy tale to a child.  But telling the truth when it will be misunderstood is no whit better than lying; silences are often blacker than any lies.  I class secrets with lies and cannot comprehend the moral standards that exonerate secrecy in human affairs.

To all these things one must bring a personal conscience and be prepared to examine particular cases.  The excuses I have made, for example, for a very broad churchman to stay in the Church might very well be twisted into an excuse for taking an oath in something one did not to the slightest extent believe, in order to enter and betray some organization to which one was violently hostile.  I admit that there may be every gradation between these two things.  The individual must examine his special case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibility of co-operation.  I do not see how there can be a general rule.  I have already shown why in my own case I hesitate to profess a belief in God, because, I think, the misleading element in that profession would outweigh the advantage of sympathy and confidence gained.