veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom
of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all
religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into
the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth--the one
applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the
common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the
conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations
of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded
upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth
satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, "You do not expect me to
speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness
and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary
conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated,
where clergy-truth--oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances,
is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple
affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without
any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use
upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally,
with more severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He
knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits,
for himself, at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows
that his syllables are weighed--and how far a consciousness of this
particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to
produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest
means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more
sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The
admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all
contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness--if
it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock
of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive