he thinks to be true, but which, although he swears according to his conviction, is really false, also incurs the guilt of perjury; unless he has used moral diligence to arrive at the truth. He who binds himself by oath to the performance of any thing, not intending to fulfil his promise, or having had the intention neglects its performance, is also guilty of perjury; and this equally applies to those who, having bound themselves to God by vow, neglect its fulfilment.
This commandment is also violated, if justice, which is one of the three conditions of an oath, be wanting; and hence he who swears to commit a mortal sin, to perpetrate murder, for instance, violates this commandment, although he should have really intended to commit the crime, and his oath should have possessed what we before pointed out as a necessary condition of every oath, that is, truth. To these are to be added oaths sworn through a sort of contempt; such as an oath not.to ob serve the Evangelical counsels of celibacy and poverty. None, it is true, are obliged to embrace these counsels, but by swearing to their non-observance, they are contemned and violated. This commandment is also sinned against, and the second condition of an oath, which is "judgment," is violated by swearing on slight grounds and mere conjecture, although what is sworn be true, and believed to be so by him who swears; be cause, notwithstanding its truth, it still involves a sort of false hood; for he who swears with such indifference exposes him self to extreme danger of perjury. To swear by false gods is likewise to swear falsely: what more opposed to truth than to appeal to lying and false deities as to the true God? [1]
But as the Scripture, when it prohibits perjury, adds: "Thou shalt not profane the name of thy God," a it therefore prohibits all irreverence not only to his name, but also to those things to which, in accordance with this commandment, reverence is due; such as the Word of God, the majesty of which has been recognised and revered not only by the pious, but also some times by the impious, as we read in Judges of Eglon, king of the Moabites. [2] But he who, to support heresy and impiety, wrests the Sacred Scriptures from their genuine and true meaning, is guilty of the most flagrant irreverence towards the Divine Word; and of this we are admonished by these words of the prince of the Apostles: "There are some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." [3] It is also a shameful irreverence of the .Scripture, to pervert the words and sentences which it contains, and which should be mentioned with due reverence, to some profane purpose, such as scurrility, fable, vanity, flattery, detraction, superstition, satire, and the like. Such profanation of the Divine Word the Council of Trent commands to be severely reprehended. [4] In
