An intellectual conflict about truth, and, indeed, about divine truth, is the struggle of our age. This fact is already seen and admitted by a few, but, ere long, it will be still more generally acknowledged. God is a spirit of truth; and even on this account is His adversary, the spirit of contradiction, termed “a liar from the beginning;” and, of all the powerful instruments and wicked devices of that evil one, the lie is the first and chiefest. And this suggests to me to notice, in passing, a point in the moral systems of our day, notwithstanding that it does not properly lie within our prescribed limits. In most of our ethical treatises the question of falsehood and untruth is but carelessly treated, and seldom discussed with that prominence and gravity which its great importance demands. Overt transgressions of the laws belong rather to jurisprudence than to ethics, which properly treats of and analyzes the leading faults of human character as so many diseases of the soul. Now, the worst among these are usually denominated mortal, _i.e._, likely to bring the soul unto death; but the lie, in the full import of the term--the intrinsic proper lie of the soul, as the predominant fault in a character of untruth--a whole life become, as it were, one great lie, is far more than mortal--it is even death itself. And it is even of this sin--this secret revolting against and wounding of the Spirit, even the divine Spirit of Eternal Truth--that is said in Holy Writ, that it shall be forgiven neither in this world nor in the next.