Konx Om Pax

34 KONX OM PAX perception of the Great Falsehood. Just as in chemistry the school boy blunders over the law of Combining Weights, and finds difficulty in accepting it, only to discover that the real difficulty of the chemist is that the law is not true; just as the golfer painfully corrects his pull and his slice, only to learn that the pull and the slice are the master strokes of the game; just as the brilliant and studious person arrives at the summit of his academic career, only to discover (if he have sufficient wit left over from the process) that the qualities required for success in life are a set different from, and even incompatible with, those which gave him his fellowship; so also we may help those weaker brethren who animadvert scomfully upon the circumstance that a poet, a philosopher, an adept, an emancipated man of any sort, rarely speaks the truth in the sense that the witness in a divorce case is expected to, by indicating to them the true nature of those sparks of light shaken ofl" from the invisible Crown of Glory, sparks which they have mistaken for corpse-lights or marsh-vapours, surrounding—they think it an inexplicable paradox l—one who, in all other respects, is so high and pure a being. The first point is, it takes two to make a lie. A. says to B.: “I have emptied all the water from the bottle,” and tells the truth. Student C. says the same words to Professor D., and lies. The bottle and its contents being the same in each case. [BONES laughs contemptuoust and is frowned at.] Because B. wants a drink and Professor D. a bottle free from moisture. This is a malicious lie if Student C. is trying to excuse his slackness, and the accident of his having truly emptied the bottle would not absolve him. This is Confusion of the Matter of Speech. [BONES opens his mouth —and shuts it again with a severe efibrt. E. says to F.: “John the Baptist had red hair,” and lies (whether in point of fact his hair was red or not), because he has no just ground for saying so.