Sincerity consists in
dealing openly with every one in things that concern himself, reserving
concerns useless to him, and purely our neighbors' or our own. Husbands
and wives, parents and children, fellow-citizens and friends, or
strangers, owning but the bond of humanity, let such _discrete_
sentences--if we may use rhetorically a musical word--from your lips
afford a sweeter consonance than can vibrate and flow from all the pipes
and strings of orchestra or organ. So sympathy and verity shall be at
one: mercy and truth shall meet together, righteousness and peace shall
kiss each other.
Another form of sympathetic lying appears in a part of the social
machinery whose morality has somehow been more strangely and unhappily
overlooked,--we mean in _letters of introduction_. But the falsehood is
only by perversion. The letter of introduction is an affair of noble
design, to bring together parties really related, to give room for the
elective affinities of friendship, to furnish occasion for the
comparison of notes to the votaries of science, to extend the privilege
of all liberal arts, and promote the offices of a common brotherhood.
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