Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/756

698 A T A T the flight of James, and during the excitement against the Catholics, he partially gained his liberty, and brought an appeal against his sentence before the Lords, who, while admitting the sentence to be unjust, confirmed it by a majority of thirty-five to twenty-three. The Commons, however, passed a bill annulling the sentence ; and a con ference was held in which the Lords, while again acknow ledging that legally they were wrong, adhered to their former determination. The matter was finally settled by Gates receiving a royal pardon, with a salary of 300 a year. In November 1689 he was again seen in West minster Hall, when Peterborough, Salisbury, and others were impeached. In 1690, finding that there was no hope of preferment in the English Church, he became a Baptist, but in less than a year was ejected from their body. In 1691 he became acquainted with William Fuller, whom he induced to forge another plot, though not with the success he had himself attained. He appears to have lived after this chiefly in retirement, though we read in Evelyn that in 1696 he dedicated to William a book against James. He died 13th July 1705. Authorities. Oates s, Dangerfield s, and Bedloe s Narratives; State Trials ; Journals of Houses of Parliament ; North s Examcn ; the various memoirs and diaries of the period ; Fuller s Narrative ; Uryden s Absalom and Achitophel ; Burnet s History ; Narcissus Luttrell s Relation. Lingard gives an exhaustive and trustworthy account of the Popish terror and its victims ; and the chief inci dents in Oates s career are graphically described by Macaulay. On the question of the place of his education see Notes and Queries, 22d December 1883. (0. A.) OATH, Anglo-Saxon ddh, a word found throughout the Teutonic languages (Gothic aiths, modern German eid), but without ascertainable etymology. The verb to swear is also Old Teutonic (Gothic svaran, modern German schivoren); this word, too, is not clear in original meaning, but is in some way connected with the notion of answering, indeed it still forms part of the word ansiver, Anglo-Saxon and-swarian ; it has been suggested that the swearer answered by word or gesture to a solemn formula or act. Among other terms in this connexion, the Latin jurare, whence English law has such derivatives as jury, seems grounded on the metaphorical idea of binding (root ju, as in jungo) ; the similar idea of a bond or restraint may perhaps be traced in the Greek 6 pKo?. It may be worth notice that the Latin sacramentum (whence modern French serment) does not really imply the sacredness of an oath, but had its origin in the money paid into court in a Roman lawsuit, the loser forfeiting his pledge, which went to pay for the public rites (sacra) ; thence the word passed to signify other solemn pledges, such as military and judicial oaths. The subject of oaths and swearing, difficult in itself, has been made more obscure by the unsatisfactory methods employed by most writers on it. This is not due to want of ability in the writers themselves, among whom are included such men as Calvin and Paley, but to their not having followed their subject on the lines of historical development ; on the contrary, the usual plan has been to accommodate to modern views, and discuss with modern arguments, an institution which originated in an early stage of knowledge, and has been confused by the changes it has undergone while being carried on into the midst of new ideas. The student who finds, by consulting modern theo logical and legal authorities, how indefinite are their views of the binding operation of an oath and the consequences of breaking it (apart from prosecution for perjury) will understand that its meaning must be sought, not among those who now administer and take it, but in the history of older states of culture in which it arose. The very formula, " so help you God," by which legal oaths are administered in England, has not for ages had any precise signification. An oath may be defined as an asseveration or promise made under non-human penalty or sanction. Writers, viewing the subject among civilized nations only, have sometimes defined the oath as an appeal to a deity. It will be seen, however, by some following examples, that the harm or penalty consequent on perjury may be considered to result directly, without any spirit or deity being men tioned ; indeed it is not unlikely that these mere direct curses invoked on himself by the swearer may be more primitive than the invocation of divinities to punish. Oaths scarcely belong to the lowest or savage level of life, unless when rude tribes may have learned them from more civilized neighbours. Their original appearance may rather have been in a somewhat higher barbaric stage of society, where legal forms had already come into use, and oaths were needed as a means of strengthening testimony or promise. Examples of the simplest kind of curse-oath may be seen among the Nagas of Assam, where two men will lay hold of a dog or a fowl by head and feet, which is then chopped in two with a single blow of the dao, this being emblematic of the fate expected to befall the perjurer. Or a man will stand within a circle of rope, with the im plication that if he breaks his vow he may rot as a rope does, or he will take hold of the barrel of a gun, a spear head, or a tiger s tooth, and solemnly declare, "If I do not faithfully perform this my promise, may I fall by this!" (Butler in Journ. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, 1875, p. 316). Another stage in the history of oaths is that in which the swearer calls on some fierce beast to punish him if he lies, believing that it has the intelligence to know what he says and the power to interfere in his affairs. In Siberia, in lawsuits between Russians and the wild Ostyaks, it is described as customary to bring into court the head of a bear, the Ostyak making the gesture of eating, and calling on the bear to devour him in like manner if he does not tell the truth (Erman, Travels in Siberia, vol. i. p. 492, London, 1848). Similar oaths are still sworn on the head or skin of a tiger by the Santals and other indigenous tribes of India. To modern views, a bear or a tiger seems at any rate a more rational being to appeal to than a river or the sun, but in the earlier stage of nature-religion these and other great objects of nature are regarded as animate and personal. The prevalence of river-worship is seen in the extent to which in the old and modern world oaths by rivers are most sacred. In earlier ages men swore inviolably by Styx or Tiber, and to this day an oath on water of the Ganges is to the Hindu the most binding of pledges, for the goddess will take awful vengeance on the children of the perjurer In New Guinea certain tribes are reported to swear by the sun, or a mountain, or a weapon, that the sun may burn them, or the mountain crush them, or the weapon wound them if they forswear themselves. The Tunguz brandishes a knife before the sun, saying, " If I lie may the sun plunge sickness into my entrails like this knife." The natural transition from swearing by these great objects of nature to invoking gods conceived in human form is well shown in the treaty -oath between the Macedonians and the Carthaginians recorded by Polybius (vii. 9) ; here the sun and moon and earth, the rivers and meadows and waters, are invoked side by side with Zeus and Hera and Apollo, and the gods of the Carthaginians. The heaven-god, able to smite the perjurer with his lightning, was invoked by the Romans, when a hog was slain with the sacred flint representing the thunderbolt, with the invocation to Jove so to smite the Roman people if they broke the oath (Liv., i. 24 ; Polyb., iii. 25). Another form of this Aryan rite was preserved by the old Slavonic nation of Prussia, where a man would lay his right hand on his own neck and his left on the holy oak, saying, " May Perkun (the thunder- god) destroy me ! " The oaths of the lower culture show