Telling the Truth

There is a sentence from one of the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that suggests a deeply significant subject: “Veracity,” he said, “does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.”

Too often it is assumed that the truth has been told if someone simply says the right words. Too often it is assumed that a person has told the truth when actually he has told a half-truth and withheld the other half. But no one has told the truth when he has deliberately left a false impression, no matter what words he has used or how he has used them.

Men might mislead other men by the inflection of their voices, by insinuation and innuendo, by gesture, by what they suggest rather than by what they say, and by what they leave unsaid. They might say so much and imply much more, and then hide behind the literal limits of language. In many such ways men frequently falsify, and often we could not legally prove that they had perpetrated an untruth, yet morally we may know that they intended not to tell the truth.

There are those who, as Isaiah indicts the, “make a man an offender for a word,” those who resort to slick, legal loopholes, those who insincerely rely upon the letter of the law and ignore every intention of honor and honesty. Whatever our words we shall ultimately have to answer for the broad intent of our actions and utterances and not merely for legal terminology or technicalities, not merely for the letter of the law.

The whole intent of a man, what he means to do and what he means not to do, what he means to say and what he means not to say, what he thinks in his heart, what he is in his soul, are all involved in “telling” the truth, for which we are all accountable before our fellow men and before our eternal Father.

God grant that in our time we may hear and know and speak and write and live the truth, and not rely on tricky technicalities or legal loopholes or ambiguous utterance that is a mere mask for falsehood. “Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.” The mere appearance of truthfulness is not enough.