The Nashville Daily Union

The Sanctity of the Oath of Allegiance.

The Rev. Dr. Williams, of the Baptist church in New York, has preached a sermon of great power on the present crisis of our national affairs and its results. We make the following extracts:

The sanctity of an oath is another great truth now receiving significant illustrations. The Old World has had potentates who, pledged by solemn and repeated oaths to freer institutions, have trampled peremptorily on the bond given to liberty, when the toys of despotism tempted them: and they have snatched at absolute power through sheer perjury. At the bar of man they found, and it may be that they feared no punishment. "There be higher than they." The Higher than the highest regardeth. In our own land this recklessness has been shown respecting the oath of allegiance to the nation. Men who sneered at the North, as teaching a higher law to God, which should be paramount to all terrene statutes--have been among themselves the first to hold the supreme law of the land, and their own oaths of fealty and loyalty to that land, abrogated by the lower law of State claims and State interest. It could not be sin in the man of the North, if God and his country ever clashed, to say that, well as he loved his country, he loved his God yet more. But what plea shall shield the sin which claims to love one's own petty State better than either country or God? They have virtually tunnelled and honeycombed into ruin the fundamental obligations of the citizen. Jesuitism has made itself a name of reproach by the doctrine of mental reservation, under which the Jesuit held himself absolved from oaths of true witness-bearing, which he had at any time taken to the nation and God, if the truth to be told harmed the interests of his own order, whose interests he must shield by a silent mental reservation. The lesser class, the ecclesiastical clique, thus was held paramount to the entire nation; and oaths of fidelity to the religious order, a mere handful of God's creatures, rode over the rights of the God whose name had been invoked to witness truth-telling, and over the rights of God's whole race of mankind, to have the truth told in their courts, by those who had solemnly proclaimed and deliberately sworn that they would tell, and were telling it. The State loyalty, as being a mental reservation--evermore to abrogate the oath of national loyalty--what is it but a modern reproduction of the old Jesuit portent? But perjury, however palliated, and whether in Old World despots or in New World anarchists, involves, in the dread language of Scripture, the being "clothed with cursing as with a garment." That terrible phrase of inspiration describes, we suppose, not merely profuse profanity, but the earthly deception which attracts the heavenly malediction; the reply of a mocked God to a defiant transgressor; vengeance invoked, and the invocation answered. "So HELP ME GOD!" is a phrase so often heard in jury-boxes, in custom-houses, beside the ballot-box, and in the assumption of each civil office, that we do not at all times gauge its dread dept of meaning. It is not a mere prayer of help to tell the truth: but, like the kindred Hebrew words, "So do God to me, and more also!" it is an invocation of his vengeance, and an abjuration of all his further favor, if we palter with the truth. It means--"If I speak not truly, and mean not sincerely, so do I forswear and renounce, henceforth, all help from God. I hope not his help in the cares of life--I hope not his help for the pardon of sin--I ask not his grace--not hope from his smile in death--not help at his hand into his eternal, holy heavens. All the aid man needs to ask--all the aid which God has to the asking heretofore lent, I distinctly surrender, if he, truth-seeing, sees me now truth-wresting." Now the risk of trifling with such a thunderbolt is not small. The many noble, excellent, and Christian men who have been heedlessly involved in this rebellion in spite of past oaths to the nation, it is not our task to judge. But the act itself of disregarding such sworn loyalty to their whole country--the act in its general principles, apart from all personal partakers in it--we may and we must ponder. Now, in this respect, if these views of our national oaths be just, our present rebellion has been not merely treasonable, but its cradle-wrappings, its very swaddling-bands, have been manifold layers of perjury--its infancy has been clad with cursing as with a garment. The oath will come out of this era a more august solemnity, and better understood than it went in.