or self-interest, or vice, that its identity and power are lost.

It is not, therefore, remarkable that so little truth is told
when so little is received--that so little is expressed when so
little is apprehended. The largest field will not produce an
oat-straw that will stand alone, if there be no silica in the soil,
and the largest mind cannot express a pure truth if it has lived
always so encased that pure truth could not find its way into it.
All truth reaches our minds through various media, by which it is
more or less colored and refracted; and it is very rare that a man
has the power to embody in language and utter a truth in the
degree of perfection in which he received it. As I said at
beginning, the power to state a fact correctly, or to express a
pure truth, is among the rarest gifts of man. It never struck me
that David was remarkably hasty, when he said that all men were
liars. All men are liars, in one respect or another. They are
divisible into various classes, which may legitimately be
mentioned under two heads, viz., unconscious liars and conscious
liars.

Of those who lie, and suppose they are telling the truth, I have
already spoken. They are a large and most respectable class of
people, and their apology must be found in the theory I have
advanced; yet among these may be found men and women who will
require all the amplitude of our mantles of charity to cover them.
I have been much impressed with a passage in Dr. Bushnell's recent
volume, entitled "Christian Nurture," which incidentally touches
upon this subject, in the writer's characteristically powerful
way; and as I cannot condense it, I will copy it: