Charley looked very much perplexed at this.
“You have indeed placed me in a difficulty. I know not what I would have done. I don’t know even what I _ought to do_ under these circumstances. Difficulties may perplex me, and the force of circumstances might tempt me to do what I believed to be wrong. I am a sinner, Jacques, like other mortals, I know; but one thing I am quite sure of—namely, that when men speak it should _always_ be truth and _never_ falsehood.”
Jacques looked perplexed too. He was strongly impressed with the necessity of telling falsehoods in the circumstances in which he had been placed, as just related, while at the same time he felt deeply the grandeur and the power of Charley’s last remark.
“I should have been under the sod _now_,” said he, “if I had not told a lie _then_. Is it better to die than to speak falsehood?”
“Some men have thought so,” replied Charley. “I acknowledge the difficulty of _your_ case and of all similar cases. I don’t know what should be done, but I have read of a minister of the gospel whose people were very wicked and would not attend to his instructions, although they could not but respect himself, he was so consistent and Christianlike in his conduct. Persecution arose in the country where he lived, and men and women were cruelly murdered because of their religious belief. For a long time he was left unmolested, but one day a band of soldiers came to his house, and asked him whether he was a Papist or a Protestant (Papist, Jacques, being a man who has sold his liberty in religious matters to the Pope, and a Protestant being one who protests against such an ineffably silly and unmanly state of slavery). Well, his people urged the good old man to say he was a Papist, telling him that he would then be spared to live among them, and preach the true faith for many years perhaps. Now, if there was one thing that this old man would have toiled for and died for, it was that his people should become true Christians—and he told them so; ‘but,’ he added, ‘I will not tell a lie to accomplish that end, my children—no, not even to save my life.’ So he told the soldiers that he was a Protestant, and immediately they carried him away, and he was soon afterwards burned to death.”