Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/341

Rh and intelligible formula which must very nearly represent that of which we keep a mutilated fragment in our English oath. So close is the connection, that two of the gods referred to, Frey and Thor (who is described as the almighty god), are the old English gods whose names we commemorate in Friday and Thursday. The formula belongs, with the classic ones lately spoken of, to the class of oaths of conditional favor, "so help me as I shall do rightly," while Frey and Niördh are gods whom a Norse warrior would ask for earthly help, but who would scarcely concern themselves with his soul after death. It is likely that the swearer was not indeed unmindful of what the skalds sang of Naströnd, the strand of corpses, that loathly house arched of the bodies of huge serpents, whose heads, turned inward, dripped venom on the perjurers and murderers within. But the primary formula is, as I have said, that of the oath of conditional favor, not of judgment. With the constituents of the modern English oath now fairly before us, we see that its incoherence, as usual in such cases, has an historical interpretation. What English law has done is to transplant from archaic fetich-worship the ceremony of the halidome or consecrated object, and to combine with this one-half of a pre-Christian formula of conditional favor, without the second half which made sense of it. Considering that to this combination is attached a theological interpretation which is neither implied in act nor word, we cannot wonder if in the popular mind a certain amount of obscurity, not to say mystery, surrounds the whole transaction. Nevertheless, we may well deprecate any attempt to patch up into Scotch distinctness and consistency the old formula, which will probably last untouched so long as judicial oaths shall remain in use in England.

Being in the midst of this subject, it may not be amiss to say a few words upon old and new ideas as to the administration of oaths to little children. The Canon Law expressly forbade the exacting of an oath from children under fourteen—pueri ante annos XIV non cogantur jurare. This prohibition is derived from yet earlier law. The rough old Norsemen would not take oaths from children, as comes out so quaintly in the saga of Baldur, where the goddess made all the beasts and birds and trees swear they would not harm him, but the little mistletoe only she craved no oath from, for she thought it was too young. Admitting the necessity of taking children's evidence somehow, the question is how best to do it. In England it must be done on oath, and for this end there has arisen a custom in our courts of putting the child through an inquisition as to the theological consequences of perjury, so as usually to extract from it a well-known definition which the stiffest theologian will not stand to for a moment if put straight to him, but which is looked upon as a proper means for binding the conscience of a little child. Moreover, children