56 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

still remains with us, even when we have wilfully left the fountains of it.

APHORISM 8. Truth cannot be persisted in without pains; but is worth them.²

It would be well if moralists less frequently confused the greatness of a sin with its unpardonableness. The two characters are altogether distinct. The greatness of a fault depends partly on the nature of the person against whom it is committed, partly upon the extent of its consequences. Its pardonableness depends, humanly speaking, on the degree of temptation to it. One class of circumstances determines the weight of the attaching punishment; the other, the claim to remission of punishment: and since it is not always easy for men to estimate the relative weight, nor always possible for them to know the relative consequences, of crime, it is usually wise in them to quit the care of such nice measurements, and to look to the other and clearer condition of culpability, esteeming those faults worst which are committed under least temptation. I do not mean to diminish the blame of the injurious and malicious sin, of the selfish and deliberate falsity; yet it seems to me, that the shortest way to check the darker forms of deceit is to set watch more scrupulous against those which have mingled, unregarded and unchastised, with the current of our life. Do not let us lie at all. Do not think of one falsity as harmless, and another as slight, and another as unintended. Cast them all aside: they may be light and accidental; but they are an ugly soot from the smoke of the pit,¹ for all that; and it is better that our hearts should be swept clean of them, without over care as to which is largest or blackest. Speaking truth is like writing fair, and comes only by practice; it is less a matter of will than of habit, and I doubt if any occasion can be trivial which permits the practice and formation of such a habit. To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meritorious, as to speak it under intimidation

¹ [Revelation ix. 2.]

² [The text of the aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “To speak and act truth ...” down to the end of § 1.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]