(i) The devil is described in the New Testament as "a liar and the father thereof." A Christian is to be true and just in all his dealings, abhorring crookedness: for the essence of lying is not inexactitude in speech, but deceitfulness of intention. Christian veracity means honesty, straightforwardness, and sincerity in deed as well as in word. A writer of fiction is not a liar: to improve in the telling an anecdote or a story is not necessarily to deceive others in any culpable sense; and moralists have from time to time discussed the question whether there may not be circumstances in which to tell a verbal lie is even a moral duty--_e.g._ in order to prevent a murderer or a madman from discovering the whereabouts of his intended victim. But casuistical problems of this kind do not very frequently arise, and in all ordinary circumstances strict literal veracity is the right course to pursue. [Footnote: Of course such social conventions as "Not at home," "No trouble at all," or "Glad to see you," "No, you are not interrupting me," etc., are hardly to be classed as "lies," since they do not as a rule seriously mislead others, but are merely an expression of the will to be civil.] Christian truthfulness, however, is in any case a much wider thing than merely verbal truth-telling: it implies inward spiritual reality, a genuine desire to see things as they are, a thirst of the soul for truth, and a hatred of shams. The worst form of lying is that in which a man is not merely a deceiver of others but is self-deceived, and suffers from "the lie in the soul." The religion of Christ is always remorselessly opposed to every form or kind of humbug or of sham. Jesus Christ is the supreme spiritual realist of history. In His view the "publican" or acknowledged sinner is preferable to the Pharisee or hypocrite for the precise reason that the former is a more genuine kind of person than the latter. And to tell the truth in this deeper sense, that is, genuinely to face realities and to refuse to be put off with shams, to see through the plausibilities and to detect the hollowness of moral and social pretences and conventionalities, to have, in short, the spiritual and moral instinct for reality, is a much harder thing than to be verbally veracious. The true veracity can come only from Him who is the Truth: it is a gift of the Spirit, and proceeds from GOD who knows the counsels of men's hearts, and discerns the motives and imaginations of their minds.