men. "God is not a man that he should lie; neither the son
of man that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not
do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?"
(Numbers xxiii. 19.) Men may be wicked enough to promise
what they do not intend to perform, or after promising, may
change their mind, and refuse to fulfil their engagements; but
God is too holy to deceive wilfully, or to alter what has proceeded
out of his mouth. A religion, therefore, which in any
wise tends to lessen our reverence for truth, or encourages
men to alter a solemn engagement, or, what is still worse,
teaches how to absolve from oaths, cannot proceed from the
God of truth; and this is what the oral law does in certain
cases. We do not mean to accuse it of teaching, as the religion
of Rome does, that dispensation may be had from every
kind of oath. On the contrary, the rabbies assume the power
of dispensation only in the case of (
Hebrew characters), "rash
oaths;" but we mean to assert, that even that assumption is
contrary to the Word of God, and injurious to the cause of
truth; and, therefore, sufficient to overthrow the credit of the
oral law as a religion given by God. The doctrine itself is as
follows:—
(Hebrew characters)
"If any man swear a rash oath, and afterwards repent of it, because he sees that if he keep this oath it will cause him grief, and therefore changes his mind; or if something should occur to him which was not in his mind at the time when he swore, and he repent on that account; behold, a person, in such circumstances, is to ask one wise man (rabbi), or three common men in any place where there is not a wise man, and they absolve him from his oath; and then it will be lawful to do a thing which he had sworn not to do, or to leave undone a thing which he had sworn to do: and this is what is called
