II. Viewed in the light of reason, an oath owes its sacredness, not to any virtue in itself, but to the Great Being to whom it is so direct an appeal, and to the good and rational belief that He knows all things, and is the ultimate judge of all. But the same uninformed principle which can regard the winds and waves as possessed of a power independent of His, seems also to have conferred on the oath an influence and divinity exclusively its own. I have met with many among the more grossly superstitious, who deemed it a kind of ordeal, somewhat similar to the nine ploughshares of the dark ages, which distinguished between right and wrong, truth or falsehood, by some occult intrinsic virtue. The innocent person swears, and like the guiltless woman when she had drunk the waters of jealousy, thrives none the worse;--the guilty perjure themselves, and from that hour cease to prosper. I remember--by the way, a very early recollection--that when a Justice of Peace Court was sitting in my native town, many years ago, a dark cloud came suddenly over the sun; and that a man who had been lounging on the street below, ran into the Court-room to see who it was that, _by swearing a false oath_, had occasioned the obscuration. It is a rather singular coincidence, and one which might lead us to believe in the existence of something analogous to principle in even the extravagancies of human belief, that the only oath deemed binding on the gods of classical mythology--the oath by the river Styx--was one of merely intrinsic power and virtue. Bacon, indeed, in his “Wisdom of the Ancients” (a little book but a great work), has explained the fable as merely an ingenious allegory; but who does not know that the Father of modern philosophy found half the Novum Organum in superstitions which existed before the days of Orpheus?