Amongst the discarded vices of the forsaken Gentile life, the following are here distinguished: _lying_, _theft_, _anger_, _idle speech_, _malice_, _impurity_, _greed_. These may be reduced to sins of temper, of word, and of act. Let us discuss them in the order in which they are brought before us.
1. "The falsehood"[127] of verse 25 is the antithesis of "the truth" from which righteousness and holiness spring (ver. 24). In accepting the one, Paul's Gentile readers "had put off" the other. When these heathen converts became Christians, they renounced the great lie of idolatry, the system of error and deceit on which their lives were built. They have passed from the realm of illusion to that of truth. "Now," the apostle says, "let your daily speech accord with this fact: you have bidden farewell to falsehood; _speak_ truth each with his neighbour." The true religion breeds truthful men; a sound faith makes an honest tongue. Hence there is no vice more hateful than jesuitry, nothing more shocking than the conduct of those who defend what they call "the truth" by disingenuous arts, by tricks of rhetoric and the shifts of an unscrupulous partizanship. "Will you speak unrighteously for God, and talk deceitfully for Him?" _As Christ's truth is in me_ cries the apostle, when he would give the strongest possible assurance of the fact he wishes to assert.[128] The social conventions and make-believes, the countless simulations and dissimulations by which the game of life is carried on belong to the old man with his lusts of deceit, to the universal lie that runs through all ungodliness and unrighteousness, which is in the last analysis the denial of God.
St Paul applies here the words of Zechariah viii. 16, in which the prophet promises to restored Israel better days on the condition that they should "speak truth each with his neighbour, and judge truth and the judgement of peace in their gates. And let none of you," he continues, "imagine evil in his heart against his neighbour; and love no false oath. For all these things do I hate, saith the Lord." Such is the law of the New Covenant life. No doubt, St Paul is thinking of the intercourse of Christians with each other when he quotes this command and adds the reason, "For we are _members one of another_." But the word _neighbour_, as Jesus showed, has in the Christian vocabulary no limited import; it includes the Samaritan, the heathen man and publican. When the apostle bids his converts "Follow what is good towards one another, and towards all" (1 Thess. v. 15), he certainly presumes the neighbourly obligation of truthfulness to be no less comprehensive.