We want the truth always--clear-eyed, sharp-cut, marble-faced truth. We want to know the facts and realities of our position, just as they are. The mariner sails away into the lonely sea. The mystery of the unfathomed deep sways miles down beneath his passing keel. The mystery of the overarching heavens swims far above with mazy constellation and revolving sphere. Between the mystery of the sky and the mystery of the sea he steers right on, in calm and tempest confident, in night and noonday secure. For he there, on the trackless wastes that girdle in the great wide world, alone with the silence of Nature and God, _knows_ the facts of his position, the realities of his place. The charts lie spread before him. Island, continent, lone sea-rock, hidden shoal, they are all mapped to his eye. The faithful needle points due north. The true sun rises where he always has. The faithful, changeless stars look down at midnight. The truth saves him, rocked in the arms of the wild sea. The reality holds him secure. Ask him, looking out, in the night watch, over the black sea and up to the inky deeps, and down to the dim-lighted compass before him, ask him his opinion of _a lie_! What his honest notion may be about a false light on yonder headland, a false latitude on his chart for this island or that shoal, a mistaken measurement of depth across this bay or through yonder straits! Ask him the nature and effects of _a lie_ in the chart he sails by!
And we are all sailors. We want true charts. The false chart is our ruin. The false beacon on the headland is kindled by the fiends. It leads to death--a wreck-strewn sea, dashing white up the black cliffs, and bubbling cries, rising above the tempest's roar and the surges' boom, as, one by one, the swimmers sink to darkness through the foam!
Nay, for us, sailors over life's seas, sailors into eternity's dimness, the lie wears its Father's likeness. And the liar, the man who makes a lie, or helps a lie to success, a lie of word or deed, a lying boast merely, or a bad, vile, lying system, is my enemy, your enemy, humanity's enemy. He has deserted God's army, has denied his human brotherhood so far, has gone over, soul and body, to Satan. He is God's enemy and man's thenceforward.