'_Above all things_, my brethren, swear not.' If, as is generally assumed, this refers to the custom of using profane oaths in common conversation, how remote from modern ideas is the place assigned to this vice, which perhaps affects human happiness as little as any other that can be mentioned, in the scale of criminality, and how curiously characteristic is the fact that the vice to which this supremacy of enormity is attributed continued to be prevalent during the ages when theological influences were most powerful, and has in all good society faded away in simple obedience to a turn of fashion which proscribes it as ungentlemanly! For a long period Acts condemning it were read at stated periods in the churches,[20] and one of these described it as likely, by provoking God's wrath, to 'increase the many calamities these nations now labour under.' How curiously characteristic is the restriction in common usage of the term 'immoral' to a single vice, so that a man who is untruthful, selfish, cruel, or intemperate might still be said to have led 'a moral life' because he was blameless in the relations of the sexes! In the estimates of the character of public men the same disproportionate judgment may be constantly found in the comparative stress placed upon private faults and the most gigantic public crimes. Errors of judgment are not errors of morals, but any public man who, through selfish, ambitious, or party motives, plunges or helps to plunge his country into an unrighteous or unnecessary war, subordinates public interest to his personal ambition, employs himself in stimulating class, national, or provincial hatreds, lowers the moral standard of public life, or supports a legislation which he knows to tend to or facilitate dishonesty, is committing a crime before which, if it be measured by its consequences, the gravest acts of mere private immorality dwindle into insignificance. Yet how differently in the case of brilliant and successful politicians are such things treated in the judgment of contemporaries, and sometimes even in the judgments of history!