respecting the oath of allegiance to the nation.  Men who sneered at the North as teaching a higher law to God which should be paramount to all terrene statutes, have been themselves among the first to hold the supreme law of the land and their oath of fealty and loyalty to that land, abrogated by the lower law of State claims and State 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 smile in death,—­nor help at His hand into His eternal and holy heavens.  All the aid man needs to ask, all the aid which God has to the asking heretofore lent, I distinctly surrender,