she held them innocent. Another device
was the oath. The parties went to the Church altar and swore their
innocence or the justice of their cause. But all these methods gave
room for chicane. Kings and knights protested that the oath led to
indiscriminate perjury, that if the priests' hands were tickled with
money the hot iron was only painted, and that a suitable fee could
render the boiling liquid innocuous to the skin of a baby. They
therefore drew their swords, exclaiming, "Away with this priestly
jugglery! These weapons are better than fire or water or oil, and God
can decide the right in single combat as in the Churchman's ordeal."

"Is it not true," asked King Gundobald of Bishop Avitus, "that the event
of national wars and private combats is directed by the judgment of God;
and that his providence awards the victory to the juster cause?" The
Bishop could not answer "No," for if he did he would have demolished the
whole Church system of ordeals, so he yielded to the arguments of his
sovereign.

Single combats, under the Gothic code, were fought according to judicial
forms. They were held, Robertson says, "as solemn appeals to the
omniscience and justice of the Supreme Being." Shakespeare is careful to
to notice this feature. When Bolingbroke and Norfolk, in _Richard II._,
challenge each other as traitors, the king consents to their duel in the
following terms:

At Coventry, upon Saint Lambert's day: There shall your swords and
lances arbitrate The swelling difference of your settled hate. Since we
cannot atone you, we shall see Justice design the victor's chivalry.

Modern duelling is thus a survival of the old judicial combat. The
"point of honor" is the excuse for a practice which has lost its
original sanction. The appeal to God is forgotten, and the duellists
talk of "satisfaction." Illogical no doubt, but this is only one of many
customs that survive their original meaning.

Now the Church cannot hold itself guiltless in regard to this folly. She
cherished the superstition on which it rested. She taught the policy
of appealing to God, and only frowned on the particular method which
brought no grist to her mill. Her own methods were still more senseless.
Unless the laws of nature were constantly subverted, her ordeals must
have operated at random when they were not regulated by fraud. The hand
of guilt might be harder than that of innocence, and more likely to bear
a moment's contact with hot iron or bo