"I will give the men that have transgressed My covenant into the hands of their enemies.... Their dead bodies shall be meat for the fowls of heaven and for the beasts of the earth. Zedekiah king of Judah and his princes will I give into the hand of ... the host of the king of Babylon, which are gone up from you. Behold, I will command--it is the utterance of Jehovah--and will bring them back unto this city: They shall fight against it, and take it, and burn it with fire. I will lay the cities of Judah waste, without inhabitant." Another broken covenant was added to the list of Judah's sins, another promise of amendment speedily lost in disappointment and condemnation. Jeremiah might well say with his favourite Hosea:-- "O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? Your goodness is as a morning cloud, And as the dew that goeth early away."[147] This incident has many morals; one of the most obvious is the futility of the most stringent oaths and the most solemn symbolic ritual. Whatever influence oaths may have in causing a would-be liar to speak the truth, they are very poor guarantees for the performance of contracts. William the Conqueror profited little by Harold's oath to help him to the crown of England, though it was sworn over the relics of holy saints. Wulfnoth's whisper in Tennyson's drama-- "Swear thou to-day, to-morrow is thine own"-- states the principle on which many oaths have been taken. The famous "blush of Sigismund" over the violation of his safe-conduct to Huss was rather a token of unusual sensitiveness than a confession of exceptional guilt. The Christian Church has exalted perfidy into a sacred obligation. As Milman says[148]:-- "The fatal doctrine, confirmed by long usage, by the decrees of Pontiffs, by the assent of all ecclesiastics, and the acquiescence of the Christian world, that no promise, no oath, was binding to a heretic, had hardly been questioned, never repudiated."