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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 27, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 4.

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Falsehood

By Ruskin

FALSEHOOD.—It should be pointed out with continual earnestness that the essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told by silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence; and all these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded; so that no form of blinded conscience is so far sunk as that which comforts itself for having deceived, because the deception was by gesture or silence instead of utterance, and finally according to Tennyson's trenchant line, "A lie which is half a truth is ever the worst of lies."