consistent, refuse to admit any possible justification of lying. Only
he who denies an eternally absolute line between the true and the
false could admit with consistency the justification by God of an act
that is essentially hostile to the divine nature. Any exception to
this rule is likely to be where a sympathetic nature inclines a
teacher to seek for an excuse for that which seems desirable even
though it be theoretically wrong.

When it comes to the days of the Protestant Reformation, we find John
Calvin, like his prototype Augustine, and like Augustine's follower
Aquinas, standing firmly against a lie as antagonistic to the very
nature of God, and therefore never justifiable. Martin Luther, also,
is a fearless lover of the truth; but he is disposed to find excuses
for a lie told with a good end in view, although he refrains from
asserting that even the best disposed lie lacks the element of
sinfulness.[1] On the other hand, Ignatius Loyola, and his associates
in the founding of the Society of Jesus as a means of checking the
Protestant Reformation, acted on the idea that was involved in the
theology of Duns Scotus, that the only standard of truth and right is
in the absolute and arbitrary will of God; and that, therefore, if
God, speaking through his representative in the newly formed Society,
commands the telling of a lie, a lie is justifiable, and its telling
is a duty. Moreover, these Jesuit leaders in defining, or in
explaining away, the lie, include, under the head of justifiable
concealment, equivocations and falsifications that the ordinary mind
would see to be forms of the lie.[2]

[Footnote 1: See Martensen's _Christian Ethics_, p. 216. Compare, for
example, Luther's comments on Exodus I: 15-21, with Calvin's comments
on Genesis 12: 14-20.]

[Footnote 2: See Symonds's _Renaissance in Italy_, I., 263-267;
Cartwright's _The Jesuits_; Meyrick's _Moral Theology of the Church
of Rome_; Pascal's _Provincial Letters_. See, also, Kurtz's _Church
History_, II., 430.]

It is common to point to the arguments of the Jesuits in favor of lies
of expediency, in their work for the Church and for souls, as though
their position were exceptional, and they stood all by themselves in
including falsehood as a means to be employed rightfully for a good
end.

But in this they are simply logically consistent followers of those
Christian Fathers, and their successors in every branch of the Church,
who have held that a lie