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.
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