PIOUS LYING by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 24, 1880

"PIOUS LYING."

By Editor

THAT was the heading we saw in a daily paper, in staring capitals, last week. Pious lying! An inspection of the article showed what the words meant—lying done by professedly pious people, for pious ends, on the principle that the end justifies the means. Used in this sense, the words become not only intelligible but significant.

For it must be confessed that there has been a vast deal of this kind of lying in the world. It is due to pious lying that there is enough "wood of the true cross" in existence to build a man-o'-war; that several Cathedrals lay claim to the possession of the only genuine "relics" of this or that apostle or saint; that juggling "miracles" are performed in the presence of the credulous "faithful." Pious lying has invented all the legendary lore of Romanism. Pious lying encourages sham appearances of the Virgin at Lourdes and Marburg, and it has been proved in open court that priests aid and abet these impositions for a so-called religious end. Pious lying has invented all sorts of fables about the dying beds of notorious infidels. We expect to hear from Christian pulpits the assertion that Julian the apostate died exclaiming, "Galilean, thou hast conquered!" and that Voltaire's death-bed was a scene of blaspheming despair, notwithstanding both fables have been disproved again and again. The repeaters of these pious lies are generally innocent; which makes the case still worse, for the most dangerous of lies is that which has come to be accepted as truth.

Protestants are usually wont to assume a superior virtue, and to thank God they are not as other men in this matter of pious lying. But we have heard of a Protestant church, not a thousand miles from here, which habitually makes false statements about its financial condition. We have known prominent pastors accustomed to take to a newspaper office articles written by themselves, and containing the grossest exaggerations of their church work. We have known churches to dismiss their pastors for good reasons, and then pass a series of resolutions commending them to sister churches in terms that would have made an apostle blush. We have heard a pastor descant in a funeral sermon on virtues that no one had discovered in the dead but himself, and even he not while the man was in the flesh. We have heard of Christian laymen who seem to have the habit of attaining their ends but by trickery, indirection and deceit, even when plain-dealing would be a straighter and surer road to success.

Such instances are more than enough to show that "pious lying"—which may include deeds as well as words—is not the unknown thing it ought to be among the people of whom no man has a right to expect the like. The ordinary social code of Anglo-Saxon people everywhere stamps lying with an ineffaceable brand of disgrace. To lie is a thing that any gentleman scorns to do, simply because lying is so unutterably mean that he will not lower himself to do it. Shall the moral standard of the church of Christ be less lofty than that of society? It will not do for Christian people to make any exceptions in this matter. A lie is a lie, by whomsoever told and for whatsoever purpose. Every Christian's word should be as good as his bond, and until it is, not only in relation to business affairs but in every relation of life, the church will fail of securing that respect which unswerving honesty always inspires.—Examiner and Chronicle.