VI. Parliamentary Oaths

(Nineteenth Century.)

WHATEYER comes from Lord Sherbrooke. by speech or by writing, is sure to be sharper than a two-edged sword. But a sword with two edges may be fatal to the hand that wields it. So it seems here. The paper on Parliamentary Oaths in the last number of this Review, by proving too much, proves our contention.

In the seven pages of his article I had marked fifteen passages open to criticism; but to avoid prolixity I will endeavour to give only the premisses of Lord Sherbrooke's argument. The premisses contain the whole argument. He opposes not only all oaths Parliamentary and forensic, but all affirmations of allegiance, as superfluous and unnecessary, on the ground that the duty of allegiance is already one of perfect obligation, and that no oath or promise can add obligation to that which perfectly obliges already.

Again, he argues, that, as all men are bound to speak the truth, the adding of an oath " really weakens that which it is intended to fortify."

Finally, that the words, " So help me God," and the like, are an "imprecation" or " invocation of a curse," which is " a presumptuous sin;" and that " it is a sin and a shame that any man should be put in such a position, and not only allowed but encouraged to renounce the help of the Deity."

I believe that these are the only premisses or principles on which Lord Sherbrooke rests his case.

The conclusion is given in these words: " It seem* to me to follow from these considerations that we ought to go back to the precept which declares that our conversation should be ' Yea, yea,' and ' Nay, nay;' and the duty of a citizen to tell the truth in a court of justice will be best enforced by treating it as an obligation which every citizen is bound to perform without any contract, oath, or promise, but subject to severe punishment if he violates or evades it."

1. The article begins on Parliamentary oaths, but it ends only on forensic oaths, for I do not suppose that Lord Sherbrooke proposes to subject members of Parliament " to severe punishment" for their legislative acts. To my mind, this betrays the whole argument. Even the citizen in a court of law is not here left to his sense of " perfect obligation." He has " severe punishment " hanging over his head. The fear of eternal punishment is supposed to be so low in men that the fear of severe temporal punishment is necessary to get at the truth. No contracts, oaths, promises, declarations, then, without this will get at the truth. But there is a lingering hope that the fear of "severe punishment " may. These are not the principles or the belief of those who maintain that oaths are lawful, useful, and even morally necessary. I will, suppose then, that this severe punishment has effect upon those who have no belief in God or no fear of God. Over

•such men there is but one hold: the fear of " severe punishment." But there are, happily, some men who believe in God and fear Him. With such men an oath, or an affirmation, which is equivalent to an oath in •obligation, though not in form, adds another and higher motive than the fear of any punishment by human law. Two such motives are at least stronger than one. But it is argued that with men who believe in God -such oaths are superfluous, because they will do for conscience, without an oath, the duty to which conscience without any oath already binds them. This is assuredly a hasty and narrow estimate of men in general. Between those whom no oath can bind, and those who, without an oath, will always speak the truth, there is a multitude that no man can number who are vehemently tempted, interested, and influenced by a multiplicity of persons, events, circumstances, to shrink from the full and perfect declaration of truth, and •even to deny it. To say that the gravity and solemnity of taking an oath has no effect upon such persons, or that they would without an oath be as truthful and •exact as when sworn on oath, seems to me to contradict the communis sensus of mankind, which in all ages and in all lands has testified two things — the one, that men ought to be truthful without oaths, the other, that men are not so. The difference of value in evidence taken on oath and evidence given without oath is well known not only to lawyers, but to others whose office is at times judicial. I have had abundant proof of it in the office I hold, which compels me to find the truth, if I can, in many grave affairs; and yet I am hindered by the law of the land from administering an oath to any witness.

2. And here I cannot hut feel surprise that the form of words " So help me God" should seem to he "a presumptuous sin" in those who take it, and a " sin and shame " in those who exact it. Lord Sherhrooke puts it thus: " It is, if the words be carefully considered, the renouncing of God's mercy, the invocation of a curse, the assumption that we know better than the Deity how He oupht to treat us, that we have the right and the power to direct what that treatment should be." If these words be true of " So help me God," are they not equally true of " Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us "? But by this rule of interpretation we are saying every morning and night, " If I do not forgive others, do not forgive me." Is this also a renouncing of God's mercy, and an invocation of a curse, an assumption that we know how we ought to be treated, and a direction that so we shall be? Either this also is a presumptuous sin, or Lord Sherbrooke's interpretation will not stand. As the Lord's Prayer came from the Saviour of the world, I must believe that the interpretation must be an error; or its rebuke would fall on Him Who taught us so to pray. Lex credendi lex orandL Our belief is the rule of our prayer, and our prayer of onr belief. " Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others " is a confession of the justice of God, a submission to the equity of His law, a resolution of obedience to its perfect obligation, and a prayer for strength to be " perfect as our Father Who is in heaven is perfeet;" that is, to act to all as we pray God to act to us. The words " So help me God " are likewise an acknow ledgment of all these truths in their relation to the duty of bearing witness to the truth. That a population which daily says the Lord's Prayer, is incapable of understanding the words " So help me God " surpasses my belief. To tell us that the English people do not say or do not understand the Lord's Prayer is to say that they are without the knowledge of God. If that be so, I answer, do not abolish oaths, but instruct the people. Again, I must repeat, homo sine cognitione Dei pecus, " Men without the knowledge of God are cattle." I will not believe that the English people are cattle. They are not sunk so low. I must rather believe that a handful of speculative jurists and scep tical politicians have imposed their theories upon us " while men slept." We have waked up to find the forensic oath already half gone, and the Parliamentary oath on the verge of abolition. And all this without appeal to the people of England. But when I say instruct the people, I mean educate them with the education of their forefathers. The people of England are a Christian people, because their education till 1870 was Christian. An education which excludes Christianity from our schools will rear a people that will abolish not oaths only, but the Lord's Prayer, and much more besides. The politicians who say " The people have sunk so low that we must abolish the recognition of God from our courts and Parliament," are dooming the people never to rise again. This is not the language of patriotism or of Christianity; and cannot yet believe that patriotism and Christianity have ceased to reign over the people of England.

3. Lord Sherbrooke does not show his usual precision in the following description of Lord Redesdale's Bill. " The object was, not to provide the Sovereign with true and faithful servants, but to surround her with orthodox divines." I am inclined to think that Lord Redesdale would make short work of the first proposition; and on the second, perhaps, he would agree with me in believing that true and faithful servants are most surely to be found among those who believe in a Supreme Lawgiver, and in their own responsibility to Him. Such men gladly acknowledge their duty to Him as the highest obligation which binds them to their Sovereign. Such men may be assailed by all tho temptations common to man; they may be ambitious, covetous, false, but they are conscious of something more than an obligation arising from the civil duties of citizenship or of personal loyalty. Their allegiance as " true and faithful servants " has a twofold sanction. They have not yet got beyond the two precepts of the Divine and of the natural law: " Fear God, honour the the King." I cannot believe that the sense of obligation is " perfect " in the conscience of any man who rests his allegiance only on the natural law. It may bind by all the sanctions of honour and human fidelity; but these are not perfect until they are elevated and invested with a higher and more sacred responsibility, by a recognition of the Lawgiver from Whom these duties flow, and to Whom they bind the conscience and its acts. Lord Redesdale would then certainly answer:

" It is because I desire to surround the Sovereign with true and faithful servants, that I desire to ascertain what manner of men they are. If they are men who believe in no Supreme Lawgiver, and have no consciousness of a responsibility beyond this life, in which all manner of infidelity, both of head and heart, may be cloaked under the sheep's clothing of ' true and faithful servants,' I desire that the Sovereign should never be surrounded by such as they. And if I find that the words ' So help me God ' will keep off one of them, I will retain the words." If there be men so dead to honour, truth, and conscience as to say " So help me God," without belief in Him, they are outside the moral law. The great majority of Englishmen believe in God, in His law, in conscience, and in judgment to come. They say " So help me God " with full belief in His justice and in His mercy, and with full intention to be faithful to Him and to their Sovereign; and by these words they resolve and record their resolution of fidelity. These words are neither " execration " nor "imprecation," but a sincere and simple witness of faith in God. I shall have to return on this path here after, and, therefore, leave it for the moment. If Lord Sherbrooke is not felicitous in saying what Lord Redes-dale's Bill was not, he is hardly happier in saying what it is. It assuredly was not intended to surround the Sovereign " with orthodox divines." Somebody said the other day that " So help me God " might be said by a Mohammedan. Why not? The Mohammedan world is a rebuke to the men who tell us that God is not knowable. The " oath " may be taken by all who believe that God is, and that he is our Lawgiver and will be our Judge.

The Queen of England and Empress of India is surrounded by some two hundred and fifty millions of " orthodox divines." All her Christian, all her Catholic, all her Jewish, all her Mohammedan, perhaps even all her Hindoo subjects, all they, too, who, rejecting all revelation, yut believe in the lights and laws of natural religion, all these alike might, as theists, have made Lord Redesdale's declaration. If this be orthodoxy and divinity, then the Queen has even more theological subjects than the Pope.

4. I can hardly believe Lord Sherbrooke to be serious when he adds that to require a belief in the existence of God is ''a test which might include the rudest savage and exclude the subtlest metaphysician. The man who worships an animal, a star, a mountain, or a stream, would satisfy this remarkable test." We must have " a perfectly clear and logical statement of what is intended when we use the word God." The whole race of Israel, the whole Mohammedan, the whole Christian world believes and understands by the name of God a Supreme and Eternal Lawgiver Whom we are bound to obey, by Whom also we shall be judged. This is clear enough, and, if coherence be logical, it is also logical. And this conception of God is clear to a child without logic, and logical as well as clear to the intellect of reasoning men. It may be transcendent and surpassing comprehension, but it can be apprehended with perfect clearness; and if it be doubted by a handful, it is understood by the millions of mankind. It is in this sense that the oatha of our Legislature and of our tribunals have come down from our forefathers. They would not have ten dered these oaths to the worshippers of an animal, a star, a mountain, or a stream. In the making of Eng land they were tendered, not by pagan Saxons to pagan Saxons, but by Saxon Christians to Christian England. The common sense of mankind had not yet been pol larded by Positivists nor paralysed by Agnostics. We have gradually admitted to take these oaths of allegiance all who are Christian, or Jew, or even Theist by the light of nature. We have never yet betrayed the foundations of all moral life, personal, private, domestic, public, by effacing the name of God from our la\ s; and that because the man who has ceased to believe, and therefore to live, in subjection to God and His law places himself outside of the society of men. He has put off not only orthodoxy and divinity, but morality and the common nature by which men can trust each other. These are strong words, and if I cannot justify them I will retract them. There are only two condi tions of human life and action: the one in which, believing in God, a man's intelligence depends upon the Divine intelligence for his primary knowledge of truth, and his conscience depends upon the Divine will for the primary knowledge of right and wrong. The other condition is that in which a man, rejecting belief in God, erects his own intelligence into the test of truth and falsehood, and his own will into the rule of right and wrong. There is no third state. In a word, either God is our Lawgiver, or we make law for ourselves; either His will is our law, or our own will is-law to us, and makes law as it wills. I deny that this is Divine law, or natural law, or in any sense law at all. It is not divine morality nor natural morality, nor in any sense morality. "Independent morality," that is, morality which does not descend from the immutable perfections of God, has no basis but in the nature of man, which has already sanctioned polygamy, the exposure of infant life, suicide, the lawfulness of atheism, and much more besides. To this intellectual and moral anarchy the stream of the world is steadily descending. The nations are becoming turbulent because men are becoming lawless. All authority is weakening everywhere; parental, political, religious authority is growing feebler every day. The collective will of nations is shaking off all rule, because men one by one are breaking away from all law except their own will. To all such the words " So help me God" are no doubt a provocation, and an oath a contemptible superstition, a form which does not bind the conscience. Why? What conscience is there left in such men? And by what hold, or bond, or obligation will you bind what they call conscience? How can you take security that they are " true and faithful servants of their Sovereign "? There is no security left; the moral nature is confounded; and, as after the confusion of tongues men could not understand each other's speech, so, if there be no Divine law one and the same everywhere, and always binding all consciences alike, men cannot trust each other; but without mutual trust men cannot unite in civil life. Where the conscience of man does not reflect the law of a Supreme Ruler, society is impossible. In a word, worn by repetition, " Without God the society of mankind cannot exist."

5. But I am aware that the inclination to abolish all oaths is to be found not only in such men as I have described, but in some of the higher and nobler minds among us. They are so revolted by the profanation of oaths and so perplexed by the practical intricacies of the question, that they are ready to get rid of it at once by abolishing oaths altogether. Their higher and nobler nature tells them that without any oath they would tell the truth, and without any affirmation they would be true and faithful servants of their Sovereign. They say, "If so with me, why not with all men?" I must believe that this is not deep thinking. In the construction of a ship bolts are necessary. The taking away of one bolt is not a question of one bolt more or less: it weakens and endangers the wrhole structure. The recognition of the existence of God and of His law, and of man's responsibility to Him, contained in an oath, pervades the whole structure of the private and public life of society. This has been true from the beginning of human history. Even they who denounce and deride Theocracy cannot deny that this recognition of God and His law has created the Christian world. Every thing is sustained by the principle from which it springs. The Christian world can only be sustained by the maintenance of Christian faith. Even natural society cannot be sustained but by the maintenance of natural religion. We desire to maintain these things; and we refuse to draw even a bolt which holds its compact structure together. You desire to undo these things, and therefore you have been knowingly drawing the bolts one after another. Or you do not know what you are doing: but to rid yourself of an embarrassment you are joining in the wreck of what you say you count dear and sacred. I have been arguing as if it were a question of the Christian world. It is so no longer. The common wealth of England is Catholic, Christian, and Jewish. It is no longer any one of these exclusively, but it is still emphatically theist. It rests upon a belief in God, upon the law of God; and it is bound together by recognition of God as the Fountain of all law and the Judge of all men, Sovereign and subject alike. From this sacred structure — for even the order of nature is sacred, being the primary creation of God — not another bolt ought to be drawn till the people of England, Ireland, and Scotland by public election shall have spoken. A people is the arbiter of its own destiny. If it be found faithful, God, whom some would banish or ignore, will confirm its solid strength; if it be found faithless, it will pass sentence on itself, and He whom it has rejected may perhaps reject it likewise. Every " enabling Act of Parliament," whereby those who refuse to recognise God and His laws shall be admitted to make laws for us, is nothing less than a covert exclusion of God from the counsels and commonweal of England. A few men will do this thing, consciously knowing what they do; a multitude will do it unconsciously, not knowing and not seeing until too late that they have been used to destroy our ancient and sacred commonwealth, for which many would rather give their lives.