tempt upon the humble friendships which we affected to cherish supremely. In our conscience and judgment, we appreciate the genuine values of social life, and we profess in our language to hold them in just estimation, but in our life and practice we honor that which is fictitious and conventional, apprehending in our conscience and judgment that we are acting a lie. Socially I cannot but believe that there is far more of truthfulness in humble than in high life. The more nearly we come down to hearty nature, and the further we go from the artificial and conventional, the nearer do we come to truth. Truth is indeed at the bottom of this well, and not in the artificial wall that rises above it, nor the buckets that go up and down as caprice or selfishness turns the windlass.

Business lying is, after all, the most universal of any. It is confined to no age and no nation. Solomon understood the world's great game when he wrote: "It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth;" and from Solomon's day down to ours, buyers have depreciated that which they would purchase, and then boasted of their bargains. When two selfish persons meet on opposite sides of a counter, there rises between them a sort of antagonism. One is interested in selling an article of merchandise at the highest practicable profit, and the other is interested in obtaining it at the lowest possible

price. Of the small, cunning lies that pass back and forth over that counter, of the half-truths told, and the whole truths suppressed, of deceptions touching the quality of goods on one side and the ability to buy on the other, it would be humiliating to tell. If every lie told in the shops, across mahogany and show-case, by buyers and sellers, were nailed like base coin to the counter, there would be no room for the display of goods. It is considered no mean compliment to a business man to say that he is sharp at a bargain; yet this sharpness is rarely more than the faculty of ingenious lying. A man who sells to me an article worth only five dollars for twice that sum is a 66 a sharp man;" but he cannot make such a sale to me without telling me, in some way, a lie. The price he puts upon his merchandise is a lie, essentially, in itself.

There is a great deal of business lying that by long habit becomes unconscious. If we take up a newspaper, we shall find that quite a number of the stores around us, kept by our excellent friends, have "the largest and finest stock of goods ever displayed in the city." We shall find that they have been selling for years at "unprecedentedly low prices," that they are "selling at less than cost," that they are pushing off goods at rates "ruinously low," and that they can offer bargains to buyers that will confound their competitors. I suppose that none of these advertisers think

they are lying, or, if they do, that their lying is of a harmful character. Lying in this way is supposed to be part of the legitimate machinery of trade. Promising definitely to finish work without the expectation of keeping the promise, or being able to keep it, is another kind of half unconscious lying. There are men engaged in various trades, in all communities, whose word is of no more value, when in the form of a promise to finish within a certain period a certain piece of work, than the fly-leaf of a last year's almanac. There are men whom every one knows who will lie without blushing about their work, and who will stand at their counter and lie all day, and then sleep with a peaceful conscience at night, having failed to fulfil a single pledge during their waking hours. Then there are people who will promise to pay bills, and promise a hundred times over, and never pay, and never expect to pay. When a bill is presented, they promise to pay, as a matter of course; and that is considered as good as the gold, until it is presented again; and then comes another promise, and another and another. The creditor knows the debtor lies, but many a debtor of this kind would feel insulted and injured by any spoken doubts of his truthfulness.

But the field is large, and I am already beyond the limits which I set for myself in these essays. It will be seen that I regard truthfulness as, on the whole, a

rare article in this world. It is in some respects necessarily so. Many men are incapable of stating a fact or telling a truth. They have not the power to comprehend or express either. The majority of men receive truth through such media of prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, sensuality, and the like, that they never get it pure, and are therefore incapable of uttering it correctly, even when their power of expression equals their power of perception, which is not commonly the case. So there is a world of unconscious lying; but I am sorry to believe that there is just as large a world of conscious lying. In politics, society, and business, the conscious and intentional lie abounds. "Lord! how this world is given to lying!"

Well, all this can be improved. Men can cultivate the power to apprehend and express truth. They can cast off the prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, and sensuality that prevent them from receiving truth. They can refrain from conscious lying; and no one doubts that the world would be greatly improved by honest efforts directed to these ends. Only the naked soul, in Eternity's white light, can be wholly truthful; but we can all try for it, and we shall find our highest account in trying.

I

HAVE every reason to believe that God loves

Shakers, but I do not think He admires them. I do not see how He can; but perhaps this is not a competent reason to offer in the premises. I saw a wagonload of what I supposed to be Shakers of both sexes, riding along the street, the other day; and I wondered what I should think of them if I had made them, I