Page:Advice to the Indian Aristocracy.djvu/20

 I apprehend, is meant. The lecture on Truth disposes of questions which have occupied casuists for ages. Before the Maharaja, Sheikh Sadi had written, what Englished, runs thus :

"Well meant falsehood is better than trouble-raising truth."

And before Sadi, Mahomet held an untruth to be commendable when it tended to reconcile foes, advantaged the faithful in war with the infidel, or pleased a wife. The Maharaja's treatment of the case must be perused to be appreciated, and like the poet and the prophet he finds untruth in words sometimes permissible. As he says, it is a most difficult question, and while no one is called upon to express concurrence with, or disapproval of, the views of individual authorities, cases in which untruth is held not only to be permissible, but obligatory, are not unknown in England, as the annals of certain of her Courts of Justice can