It is possible to destroy one lie by another. They are cannibals, and eat each other. Voltaire tried to conquer the lie of a corrupt church by establishing the greater lie of the denial of any church. That is a very unfortunate process, and yet it is common enough. The best way is to set out the truth, plain, and simple, and whole, and so kill lies in flocks. Positive teaching will be found the most effective teaching. The man who takes up the business of combating error, may originate quite as many errors as he destroys. There are a hundred prominent examples. Negative teaching is barren business at best. Better show what _is_ the truth than worry oneself to show what is _not_ it.
For, as I have shown, all lies have some truth in them. That is why they kick, and struggle, and die so hard. Now, take the truth, tear away the lies patched about it, tell it all, and you have quenched that particular lie that worried you, do you not see? and every lie that roots itself in that given truth, or lives on its distortion. Declare your one truth convincingly, clearly, warmly as if you loved it, and the work is done. All that does not agree with that is, of course, false, without further breath wasted.
I might spend one day in proving that two and three are not four, another in proving that nine and six are not four, and so on _ad infinitum_. How much more sensible to prove that two and two are four, and so end the thing! How much simpler to show what is the truth than, laboriously, to expose the claims of a thousand pretenders that are _not_ it! Here are five hundred John Smiths. They each pretend to be _our_ John, the man we know and esteem so highly. I could set to work with infinite labor, and, by having commissions appointed all over the world to take evidence, and by employing a hundred or so of my friends the lawyers, I might, after a lifetime of investigation, prove the negative, that four hundred and ninety-nine of them are not John. But how much easier to walk out the real John at once, prove the positive, and let the rest pack! By proving that one truth, you see, I kill four hundred and ninety-nine lies--a good day's work that.
There is altogether too much of this negative style in all our defences of truth, too much attempt to destroy what is wrong, and too little to build what is right. And, after all, the business of the destructive, though many times very necessary and very useful, is not the highest style of work. You are never sure of your ground till, on the ruins of the towers of injustice and wrong, you erect the fortresses of justice and right.