The Power of Truth
Truth
is the rock foundation of every great character. It is loyalty to
the
right as we see it; it is courageous living of our lives in harmony
with our ideals; it is always—power.Truth
ever defies full definition. Like electricity it can only be
explained by noting its manifestation. It is the compass of the
soul,
the guardian of conscience, the final touchstone of right. Truth is
the revelation of the ideal; but it is also an inspiration to
realize
that ideal, a constant impulse to live it.Lying
is one of the oldest vices in the world—it made its début in the
first recorded conversation in history, in a famous interview in
the
garden of Eden. Lying is the sacrifice of honor to create a wrong
impression. It is masquerading in misfit virtues. Truth can stand
alone, for it needs no chaperone or escort. Lies are cowardly,
fearsome things that must travel in battalions. They are like a lot
of drunken men, one vainly seeking to support another. Lying is the
partner and accomplice of all the other vices. It is the cancer of
moral degeneracy in an individual life.Truth
is the oldest of all the virtues; it antedated man, it lived before
there was man to perceive it or to accept it. It is the
unchangeable,
the constant. Law is the eternal truth of Nature—the unity that
always produces identical results under identical conditions. When
a
man discovers a great truth in Nature he has the key to the
understanding of a million phenomena; when he grasps a great truth
in
morals he has in it the key to his spiritual re-creation. For the
individual, there is no such thing as theoretic truth; a great
truth
that is not absorbed by our whole mind and life, and has not become
an inseparable part of our living, is not a real truth to us. If we
know the truth and do not live it, our life is—a lie.In
speech, the man who makes Truth his watchword is careful in his
words, he seeks to be accurate, neither understating nor
over-coloring. He never states as a fact that of which he is not
sure. What he says has the ring of sincerity, the hallmark of pure
gold. If he praises you, you accept his statement as "net,"
you do not have to work out a problem in mental arithmetic on the
side to see what discount you ought to make before you accept his
judgment. His promise counts for something, you accept it as being
as
good as his bond, you know that no matter how much it may cost him
to
verify and fulfil his word by his deed, he will do it. His honesty
is
not policy. The man who is honest merely because it is "the best
policy," is not really honest, he is only politic. Usually such
a man would forsake his seeming loyalty to truth and would work
overtime for the devil—if he could get better terms.Truth
means "that which one troweth or believes." It is living
simply and squarely by our belief; it is the externalizing of a
faith
in a series of actions. Truth is ever strong, courageous, virile,
though kindly, gentle, calm, and restful. There is a vital
difference
between error and untruthfulness. A man may be in error and yet
live
bravely by it; he who is untruthful in his life knows the truth but
denies it. The one is loyal to what he believes, the other is
traitor
to what he knows."What
is Truth?" Pilate's great question, asked of Christ nearly two
thousand years ago, has echoed unanswered through the ages. We get
constant revelations of parts of it, glimpses of constantly new
phases, but never complete, final definition. If we but live up to
the truth that we know, and seek ever to know more, we have put
ourselves into the spiritual attitude of receptiveness to know
Truth
in the fullness of its power. Truth is the sun of morality, and
like
that lesser sun in the heavens, we can walk by its light, live in
its
warmth and life, even if we see but a small part of it and receive
but a microscopic fraction of its rays.Which
of the great religions of the world is the real, the final, the
absolute truth? We must make our individual choice and live by it
as
best we can. Every new sect, every new cult, has in it a grain of
truth, at least; it is this that attracts attention and wins
adherents. This mustard seed of truth is often overestimated,
darkening the eyes of man to the untrue parts or phases of the
varying religious faiths. But, in exact proportion to the basic
truth
they contain do religions last, become permanent and growing, and
satisfy and inspire the hearts of men. Mushrooms of error have a
quick growth, but they exhaust their vitality and die, while Truth
still lives.The
man who makes the acquisition of wealth the goal and ultimatum of
his
life, seeing it as an end rather than a means to an end, is not
true.
Why does the world usually make wealth the criterion of success,
and
riches the synonym of attainment? Real success in life means the
individual's conquest of himself; it means "how he has bettered
himself" not "how he has bettered his fortune." The
great question of life is not "What have I?" but "What
am I?"Man
is usually loyal to what he most desires. The man who lies to save
a
nickel, merely proclaims that he esteems a nickel more than he does
his honor. He who sacrifices his ideals, truth and character, for
mere money or position, is weighing his conscience in one pan of a
scale against a bag of gold in the other. He is loyal to what he
finds the heavier, that which he desires the more—the money. But
this is not truth. Truth is the heart's loyalty to abstract right,
made manifest in concrete instances.The
tradesman who lies, cheats, misleads and overcharges and then seeks
to square himself with his anæmic conscience by saying, "lying
is absolutely necessary to business," is as untrue in his
statement as he is in his acts. He justifies himself with the petty
defence as the thief who says it is necessary to steal in order to
live. The permanent business prosperity of an individual, a city or
a
nation rests finally on commercial integrity alone, despite all
that
the cynics may say, or all the exceptions whose temporary success
may
mislead them. It is truth alone that lasts.The
politician who is vacillating, temporizing, shifting, constantly
trimming his sails to catch every puff of wind of popularity, is a
trickster who succeeds only until he is found out. A lie may live
for
a time, truth for all time. A lie never lives by its own vitality,
it
merely continues to exist because it simulates truth. When it is
unmasked, it dies.When
each of four newspapers in one city puts forth the claim that its
circulation is larger than all the others combined, there must be
an
error somewhere. Where there is untruth there is always conflict,
discrepancy, impossibility. If all the truths of life and
experience
from the first second of time, or for any section of eternity, were
brought together, there would be perfect harmony, perfect accord,
union and unity, but if two lies come together, they quarrel and
seek
to destroy each other.It
is in the trifles of daily life that truth should be our constant
guide and inspiration. Truth is not a dress-suit, consecrated to
special occasions, it is the strong, well-woven, durable homespun
for
daily living.The
man who forgets his promises is untrue. We rarely lose sight of
those
promises made to us for our individual benefit; these we regard as
checks we always seek to cash at the earliest moment. "The miser
never forgets where he hides his treasure," says one of the old
philosophers. Let us cultivate that sterling honor that holds our
word so supreme, so sacred, that to forget it would seem a crime,
to
deny it would be impossible.The
man who says pleasant things and makes promises which to him are
light as air, but to someone else seem the rock upon which a life's
hope is built is cruelly untrue. He who does not regard his
appointments, carelessly breaking them or ignoring them, is the
thoughtless thief of another's time. It reveals selfishness,
carelessness, and lax business morals. It is untrue to the simplest
justice of life.Men
who split hairs with their conscience, who mislead others by deft,
shrewd phrasing which may be true in letter yet lying in spirit and
designedly uttered to produce a false impression, are untruthful in
the most cowardly way. Such men would cheat even in solitaire. Like
murderers they forgive themselves their crime in congratulating
themselves on the cleverness of their alibi.The
parent who preaches honor to his child and gives false statistics
about the child's age to the conductor, to save a nickel, is not
true.The
man who keeps his religion in camphor all week and who takes it out
only on Sunday, is not true. He who seeks to get the highest wages
for the least possible amount of service, is not true. The man who
has to sing lullabies to his conscience before he himself can
sleep,
is not true.Truth
is the straight line in morals. It is the shortest distance between
a
fact and the expression of it. The foundations of truth should ever
be laid in childhood. It is then that parents should instil into
the
young mind the instant, automatic turning to truth, making it the
constant atmosphere of the mind and life. Let the child know that
"Truth above all things" should be the motto of its life.
Parents make a great mistake when they look upon a lie as a disease
in morals; it is not always a disease in itself, it is but a
symptom.
Behind every untruth is some reason, some cause, and it is this
cause
that should be removed. The lie may be the result of fear, the
attempt to cover a fault and to escape punishment; it may be merely
the evidence of an over-active imagination; it may reveal
maliciousness or obstinacy; it may be the hunger for praise that
leads the child to win attention and to startle others by wonderful
stories; it may be merely carelessness in speech, the reckless use
of
words; it may be acquisitiveness that makes lying the handmaid of
theft. But if, in the life of the child or the adult, the symptom
be
made to reveal the disease, and that be then treated, truth
reasserts
itself and the moral health is restored.Constantly
telling a child not to lie is giving life and intensity to "the
lie." The true method is to quicken the moral muscles from the
positive side, urge the child to be honest, to be faithful, to be
loyal, to be fearless to the truth. Tell him ever of the nobility
of
courage to speak the true, to live the right, to hold fast to
principles of honor in every trifle—then he need never fear to face
any of life's crises.The
parent must live truth or the child will not live it. The child
will
startle you with its quickness in puncturing the bubble of your
pretended knowledge; in instinctively piercing the heart of a
sophistry without being conscious of process; in relentlessly
enumerating your unfulfilled promises; in detecting with the
justice
of a court of equity a technicality of speech that is virtually a
lie. He will justify his own lapses from truth by appeal to some
white lie told to a visitor, and unknown to be overheard by the
little one, whose mental powers we ever underestimate in theory
though we may overpraise in words.Teach
the child in a thousand ways, directly and indirectly, the power of
truth, the beauty of truth, and the sweetness and rest of
companionship with truth.
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