It is a usual Excuse of some sort of Swearers, That they swear only some peculiar Oath, and that one kind of Oath cannot amount to such a Crime as the more scrupulous pretend.
Answ. An Apology equally excusing with the Thief’s that should alledg, that he commits all his Robberies upon the same Horse; and the Drunkard, that should offer to justify his beastliness, by affirming, that he never foxes himself, but with one sort of Wine, or in such a peculiar unalter’d Bowl. Remember what an Apostle somewhere says of sinning, Whosoever shall keep the whole (James 2. 10) law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. Just as a man that wounds a Buck in the Vitals, is truly and properly said to have kill’d the Deer, altho the Shaft reach’d but the Head or Heart, leaving the Legs and other parts untouch’d. Thus in a Globe, tho there be numerous parts, yet he is guilty of breaking the whole Globe, that breaks it but within the Arctick Circle, tho near the Equator it have escap’d that violence; for wheresoe’er you break it, you break the Globe; its Essence consisting in the entireness that is ruined by the fraction of any part. Sin, because natural to us, is so readily learnt by us, that as in shooting, by practising to hit Wrens and silly Sparrows, we learn the art of killing Feldifares, Thrushes, and the other sort of Birds we never aimed at; so by committing some small sin, we learn, tho insensibly (and perhaps undesignedly) to commit other and grosser kinds of sins.
One act may make us do dispositively, what Moses is recorded to have done literally (at the foot of (Exod. 32. 19) Mount Sinai) break all the Ten Commandments at once; for single disobediences, if presumptuous, may have the power to exile that Fear of God, whose expulsion comprises in it the whole trade of sin, which (Conscience once despised) is known without being learnt. If a reverence to the Commandment were that which did place limits to the variety of your Oaths, it would not permit you the use of any one, but lay an equal restraint in relation to them all; since the sinfulness of swearing does consist, not in the diversity of our Oaths, but in their forbiddenness. But this Excuse it self is often wanting to many of our Gallants, who not content with the received forms of dishonouring their Maker’s name, do as much affect Novelty in their Oaths, as in the Fashion; and if they have a gift of singularity in swearing, are as proud of it, as of their Mistress’s favour: Such people are as Nice as Impious in their Oaths, they will never use any till it be stale and threadbare, but (ever like their Cloaths) leave them off before they have been worn long enough to grow old. But whilst they are thus industrious in the discovery of new ways of provoking their Creator, ‘tis much to be feared, that they do but (if I may so speak) find out for themselves a Northwest Passage to Damnation.