Others are untruthful in their pretentiousness, and in assuming
merits which they do not really possess. The truthful man is, on
the contrary, modest, and makes no parade of himself and his
deeds. When Pitt was in his last illness, the news reached
England of the great deeds of Wellington in India. "The more I
hear of his exploits," said Pitt, "the more I admire the modesty
with which he receives the praises he merits for them. He is the
only man I ever knew that was not vain of what he had done, and
yet had so much reason to be so."
So it is said of Faraday by Professor Tyndall, that "pretence of
all kinds, whether in life or in philosophy, was hateful to him."
Dr. Marshall Hall was a man of like spirit--courageously
truthful, dutiful, and manly. One of his most intimate friends
has said of him that, wherever he met with untruthfulness or
sinister motive, he would expose it, saying--"I neither will, nor
can, give my consent to a lie." The question, "right or wrong,"
once decided in his own mind, the right was followed, no matter
what the sacrifice or the difficulty--neither expediency nor
inclination weighing one jot in the balance.
There was no virtue that Dr. Arnold laboured more sedulously to
instil into young men than the virtue of truthfulness, as being
the manliest of virtues, as indeed the very basis of all true
manliness. He designated truthfulness as "moral transparency,"
and he valued it more highly than any other quality.
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