had opportunities of observing, with what gross and artless delusions men impose upon themselves; how readily they distinguish between actions, in the eye of justice and of reason equally criminal; how often they hope to elude the vengeance of Heaven, by substituting others to perpetrate the villanies they contrive; how often they mock God by groundless excuses; and how often they voluntarily shut their eyes, to leap into destruction.
There is another sense in which a man may be said to "bear false witness against his neighbour," a lower degree of the crime forbidden in the text, a degree in which multitudes are guilty of it; or, rather, from which scarcely any are entirely free. He that attacks the reputation of another by calumny, is doubtless, according to the malignity of the report, chargeable with the breach of this commandment.
Yet this is so universal a practice, that it is scarcely accounted criminal, or numbered among those sins which require repentance. Defamation is become one of the amusements of life, a cursory part of conversation and social entertainment. Men sport away the reputation of others, without the least reflection upon the injury which they are doing, and applaud the happiness of their own invention, if they can increase the mirth of a feast, or animate conviviality, by slander and detraction.
How it comes to pass, that men do not perceive the absurdity of distinguishing in such a manner between themselves and others, as to conceive that conduct innocent in themselves, which, in others, they would make no difficulty of condemning, it is not easy to tell. Yet it is apparent, that every man is sufficiently sensible, when his own character is attacked, of the cruelty and injustice of calumny; and it is not less evident, that those will animadvert, with all the wantonness of malice, upon the moral irregularities of others, whom the least reflection upon their own lives kindles into fury, and exasperates to the utmost severities of revenge.
To invent a defamatory falsehood, to rack the invention
