interests. It could not be sin in the man of
the North, if God and his country ever clashed, to say, that well as
he loved his country, he loved his God yet more. But what plea shall
shield the sin which claims to love one's own petty State better
than either country or God? They have virtually tunneled and
honey-combed into ruin the fundamental obligations of the citizen.
Jesuitism had made itself a name of reproach by the doctrine of
mental reservation, under which the Jesuit held himself absolved
from oaths of true witness-bearing, which he at any time had taken
to the nation and to God, if the truth to be told harmed the
interests of his own order, whose interests he must shield by a
silent reservation. The lesser caste, the ecclesiastical clique,
thus was held paramount to the entire nation; and oaths of fidelity
to the religious order, a mere handful of God's creatures, rode over
the rights of the God whose name had been invoked to witness
truth-telling, and over the rights of God's whole race of mankind,
to have the truth told in their courts by those who had solemnly
proclaimed and deliberately sworn that they would tell and were
telling it. The State loyalty as being a mental reservation evermore
to abrogate the oath of National loyalty:--what is it but a modern
reproduction of the old Jesuit portent?

But perjury however palliated, and whether in Old World despots or
in New World anarchists, involves, in the dread language of
Scripture, the being "clothed with cursing as with a garment." That
terrible phrase of inspiration describes, we suppose, not merely
profuse profanity, but the earthly deception which attracts the
heavenly malediction, the reply of a mocked God to a defiant
transgressor, vengeance invoked, and the invocation answered. "SO
HELP ME GOD!" is a phrase so often heard in jury-boxes and
custom-houses, beside the ballot-box, and in the assumption of each
civil office, that we do not at all times gauge its dread depth of
meaning. It is not a mere prayer of help to tell the truth, but like
the kindred Hebrew words, "So do God to me and more also!" it is an
invocation of His vengeance and an abjuration of all His further
favor if we palter with the truth. It means, "If I speak not truly
and mean not sincerely, so do I forswear and renounce henceforth all
help from God. I hope not His help in the cares of life. I hope not
His help for the pardon of sin. I ask not His grace,--nor hope from
His smil