Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 3).pdf/69

 every thing in a light very different from all mankind,—would, after all, never allow this to be an original.—He consider'd rather Ernulphus's anathema, as an institute of swearing, in which, as he suspected, upon the decline of swearing in some milder pontificate, Ernulphus, by order of the succeeding pope, had with great learning and diligence collected together all the laws of it;—for the same reason that Justinian, in the decline of the empire, had ordered his chancellor Tribonian to collect the Roman or civil laws all together into one code or digest,—lest through the rust of time,—and the fatality of all things committed to oral tradition, they should be lost to the world for ever.

For this reason my father would oft-times affirm, there was not an oath, from