Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/500

484 considering that Jahveh set the example; as when, to ruin Ahab, he commissioned "a lying spirit" (1 Kings, xxii, 22) to deceive his prophets; or as when, according to Ezekiel, xiv, 9, he threatened to use deception as a means of vengeance.

"If the prophet he deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel."

Evidently from a race-character which evolved such a conception of a deity's principles, there naturally came no great regard for veracity. This we see in sundry cases; as when Isaac said Rebecca was not his wife but his sister, and nevertheless received the same year a bountiful harvest: "the Lord blessed him" (Genesis, xxvi, 12); or as when Rebecca induced Jacob to tell a lie to his father and defraud Esau—a lie not condemned but shortly followed by a divine promise of prosperity; or as when Jeremiah tells a falsehood at the king's suggestion. Nor do we find the standard much changed in the days of Christ and after: instance the case of Paul, who, apparently rather piquing himself on his "craft and guile," elsewhere defends his acts by contending that "the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory." (Romans, iii, 7.)

Much regard for veracity was hardly to be expected among the Greeks. In the Iliad the gods are represented not only as deceiving men but as deceiving one another. The chiefs "do not hesitate at all manner of lying." Pallas Athene is described as loving Ulysses because he is so deceitful; and, in the words of Mahaffy, the Homeric society is full of guile and falsehood." Nor was it widely otherwise in later days. The trait alleged of the Cretans—"always liars"—though it may have been more marked in them than in Greeks at large, did not constitute an essential difference. Mahaffy describes Greek conduct in the Attic age as characterized by "treachery" and "selfish knavery,"