Religion: Quibbles

Lies in their more delicate shadings were considered last week by the Bishop of Southwell, addressing teachers at Nottingham, England. "I should be prepared," said he, "to exonerate a person who tells a lie to save an innocent life . . . just as I should uphold a starving man who stole food to keep himself alive." Commentators listed in the Bishop's support Victor Hugo, whose nun in Les Miserable—; told with the author's approval her first lie, for hounded Jean Valjean. Otherside supporters recalled famed Presbyterian evangelist Robert Elliott Speer's sermon The Margin of Safety, in which, admitting that the dividing line between Evil and Good is often hard to determine, he held that therefore good Christians would keep well on the side of good.