Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 306, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 January 1918 — SELF-INJURY FROM LYING [ARTICLE]

SELF-INJURY FROM LYING

Vicious Habit Makes It Difficult for the Prevaricator to Succeed in an Honest Undertaking. Lying comes not of aggressive shrewdness, but of cowardice and of a shallow cunning that Is often treacherous and tricks the lie into transparency. It Is not the danger of being found out by others that is most to be dreaded; far more dreadful is it that the Hat must know himself to be a liar, the Christian Herald says. ’Tls self-respect suffers —the leaven In him loses strength and leaves him dead dough. The cunning that leads to lying is a rot that must permeate the whole character and make a man uncertain of himself. It distorts his perspective, obscures his vision, and warps his comprehension. The habit gs misreprcsi ntation leads to misconception, the judgment becomes as erratic as the tongue, and there results the man who “couldn’t tell the truth if he wanted to.” Nothing so shakes the confidence of one’s friends as known lying does; nothing so shatters one’s own self-con-fidence as does lying, whether known to others or not. The cowardice that'fathers lying increases with the lie. Fear of detection joins with self-contempt in making the liar a greater coward than before. One life calls for another in its defense. Soon a tangled web spun of falsehood makes it all the harder for the liar to succeed in even an honest undertaking. His Hes « re a chaln and hall upon his foot. They are beam In ,his eye and a weight on his heart. He flounders along, most of his energy being required to overcome the Impediment, while the truthful man easily outstrips him. The lying cheat in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,” who was always swindling everybody, died in jail for debt, while his honest neighbor, who was swindled a thousand times, steadily prospered and died rich and respected. Fiction, eh? Well, it is immortal as fiction, because It Is fact the world over.