from me?" "No," replied
the duke, kindly but firmly; "I can't do that, for that would be a
lie." He would not act a falsehood any more than he would speak one.

But lying assumes many forms--such as diplomacy, expediency, and
moral reservation; and, under one guise or another, it is found more
or less pervading all classes of society. Sometimes it assumes the
form of equivocation or moral dodging--twisting and so stating the
things said as to convey a false impression--a kind of lying which a
Frenchman once described as "walking round about the truth."

There are even men of narrow minds and dishonest natures, who pride
themselves upon their Jesuitical cleverness in equivocation, in
their serpent-wise shirking of the truth and getting out of moral
backdoors, in order to hide their real opinions and evade the
consequences of holding and openly professing them. Institutions or
systems based upon any such expedients must necessarily prove false
and hollow. "Though a lie be ever so well dressed," says George
Herbert, "it is ever overcome." Downright lying, though bolder and
more vicious, is even less contemptible than such kind of shuffling
and equivocation.

CHAPTER VII

AS TO MARRIAGE.

Mention has been made of the great influence on character of the
right kind of a home, in childhood and youth. The right kind of a
home depends almost entirely on the right kind of a wife or mother.

The old saying, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure," will never
lose its force. "Worse than the man whose selfishness keeps him a
bachelor till death, is the young man, who, under an impulse he
imagines to be an undying love, marries a girl as poor, weak, and
selfish as himself. There have been cases where marriage under such
circumstances has aroused the man to effort and made him,
particularly if his wife were of the same character, but these are
so exceptional as to form no guide for people of average common
sense.

Again, there have been men, good men, whose lives measured by the
ordinary standards were successful, who never married; but those who
hear or read of them, have the feeling that such careers were
incomplete.

The most important voluntary act of every man and woman's life, is
marriage, and God has so ordained it. Hence it is an act which
should be love-prompted on both sides, and only entered into after
the most careful and prayerful deliberation.

It is natural for young people of the opposite sex, who are m