I Remember In One Monastery (But This Was Not In
The Canton Ticino) The Novice Taught Me How To Make Sacramental
Wafers, And I Played Him Handel On The Organ As Well As I Could.
I
told him that Handel was a Catholic; he said he could tell that by
his music at once.
There is no chance of getting among our
scientists in this way.
Some friends say I was telling a lie when I told the novice Handel
was a Catholic, and ought not to have done so. I make it a rule to
swallow a few gnats a day, lest I should come to strain at them,
and so bolt camels; but the whole question of lying is difficult.
What IS "lying"? Turning for moral guidance to my cousins the
lower animals, whose unsophisticated nature proclaims what God has
taught them with a directness we may sometimes study, I find the
plover lying when she lures us from her young ones under the
fiction of a broken wing. Is God angry, think you, with this
pretty deviation from the letter of strict accuracy? or was it not
He who whispered to her to tell the falsehood - to tell it with a
circumstance, without conscientious scruple, not once only, but to
make a practice of it, so as to be a plausible, habitual, and
professional liar for some six weeks or so in the year? I imagine
so. When I was young I used to read in good books that it was God
who taught the bird to make her nest, and if so He probably taught
each species the other domestic arrangements best suited to it. Or
did the nest-building information come from God, and was there an
evil one among the birds also who taught them at any rate to steer
clear of priggishness?
Think of the spider again - an ugly creature, but I suppose God
likes it. What a mean and odious lie is that web which naturalists
extol as such a marvel of ingenuity!
Once on a summer afternoon in a far country I met one of those
orchids who make it their business to imitate a fly with their
petals. This lie they dispose so cunningly that real flies,
thinking the honey is being already plundered, pass them without
molesting them. Watching intently and keeping very still,
methought I heard this orchid speaking to the offspring which she
felt within her, though I saw them not. "My children," she
exclaimed, "I must soon leave you; think upon the fly, my loved
ones, for this is truth; cling to this great thought in your
passage through life, for it is the one thing needful; once lose
sight of it and you are lost!" Over and over again she sang this
burden in a small still voice, and so I left her. Then straightway
I came upon some butterflies whose profession it was to pretend to
believe in all manner of vital truths which in their inner practice
they rejected; thus, asserting themselves to be certain other and
hateful butterflies which no bird will eat by reason of their
abominable smell, these cunning ones conceal their own sweetness,
and live long in the land and see good days.
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