It holds of God as of every being who
has a thought to think and a word to utter:
To thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
5. God's sanctity is in His being true to Himself. His veracity is
part of His sanctity. He cannot in His speech, or revelation of
Himself, contradict what He really has in His mind, without ceasing to
be holy and being no longer God. But the sanctity of intellectual
creatures must be, like their every other pure perfection, modelled on
the corresponding perfection of their Maker. Holiness must mean
truthfulness in man, for it means truthfulness in God. God's words
cannot be at variance with His thought, for God is essential holiness.
Nor can man speak otherwise than as he thinks without marring the
attribute of holiness in himself, that is, without doing wrong.
6. To speak against one's mind is an act falling upon undue matter.
Words are naturally signs of thoughts. Not that the words of any given
language, as English or German, have any natural connection with the
thoughts that they express; but it is natural to men, natural to every
intellectual being, to have some mode of expressing his thoughts by
outward signs; and once a sign is recognized as the sign of a certain
thought, so long as the convention remains unrepealed, whoever uses
that sign, not having in his mind at the time the thought which that
sign signifies, but the contradictory to it, is doing violence to the
natural bond between sign and thing signified, by putting forward the
former where the latter is not behind it.
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