The melancholy truth

[seminarist]

that “the human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” is by nothing proved so strongly as by the imperfect sense displayed by children of the sanctity of moral truth. Both the gentlemen and the mass of the people, as they advance in years, learn to despise and avoid falsehood; the former out of pride, and from a remaining feeling, derived from the days of chivalry, that the character of a liar is a deadly stain on their honour; the other, from some general reflection upon the necessity of preserving a character for integrity in the course of life, and a sense of the truth of the common adage, that “honesty is the best policy.” But these are acquired habits of thinking. The child has no natural love of truth, as is experienced by all who have the least acquaintance with early youth.

Sir Walter Scott