Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/334

312 "mouth of truth" and taking oath of his innocence, lest it should really close on him as tradition says it does on the forsworn. The ordeal by the mouthful of food is still popular in Southern Asia for its practical effectiveness: the thief in the household, his mouth dry with nervous terror, fails to masticate or swallow fairly the grains of rice. So in old England, the culprit may have failed to swallow the consecrated cor-snæd, or trial-slice of bread or cheese; it stuck in his throat, as in Earl Godwin's in the story. To this day the formula, "May this mouthful choke me if I am not speaking the truth!" keeps up the memory of the official ordeal. Not less effective is the ordeal by curse, still used in Russia to detect a thief. The babushka, or local witch, stands with a vessel of water before her in the midst of the assembled household, and makes bread-pills to drop in, saying to each in order, "Ivan Ivanoff, if you are guilty, as this ball falls to the bottom, so your soul will fall into hell." But this is more than any common Russian will face, and the rule is that the culprit confesses at sight. This is the best that can be said for ordeals. Under their most favorable aspect, they are useful delusions or pious frauds. At worst they are those wickedest of human deeds, crimes disguised behind the mask of justice. Shall we wonder that the world, slowly trying its institutions by the experience of ages, has at last come to the stage of casting out the judicial ordeal; or shall we rather wonder at the constitution of the human mind, which for so many ages has set up the creations of delusive fancy to hold sway over a world of facts?

From the ordeal we pass to the oath. The oath, for purposes of classification, may be best defined as an asseveration made under superhuman penalty, such penalty being (as in the ordeal) either magical or religious in its nature, or both combined. Here, then, we distinguish the oath from the mere declaration, or promise, or covenant, however formal. For example, the covenant by grasping hands is not in itself an oath, nor is even that wide-spread ancient ceremony of entering into a bond of brotherhood by the two parties mixing drops of their blood, or tasting each other's. This latter rite, though often called an oath, can under this definition be only reckoned as a solemn compact. But when a Galla of Abyssinia sits down over a pit covered over with a hide, imprecating that he may fall into a pit if he breaks his word, or when in our police-courts we make a Chinaman swear by taking an earthen saucer and breaking it on the rail in front of the witness-box, signifying, as the interpreter then puts it in words, "If you do not tell the truth, your soul will be cracked like this saucer," we have here two full oaths, of which the penalty, magical or religious, is shown in pantomime before us. By-the-way, the English judges who authorized this last sensational ceremony must have believed that they were calling on a Chinaman to take a judicial oath after the manner of his own country; but they acted under