CORONATION OATHS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 33, 14 August 1902, Page 16

CORONATION OATHS.

* HE Coronation ceremonies of a few days ago centred round the royal oath or obligation which the newly-crowned King took upon himself in Westminster Abbey before the notabilities of the Empire, and in the midst of a pageantry of rare magnificence. It is the custom, ancient almost as the kingly office itself, that a prince upon his accession should enter into some contract, promise, or profession before the people, or the representatives of the people, over whom he is called to rule. An inscription found some years ago among the battered ruins of ancient Babylon records how, six centuries before the birth of Christ, Nabenidus was solemnly proclaimed King of the then mighty Babylonian Empire, and how the two princes Evil-Merodach and Labusi-Kudur, were dethroned because ' they broke their oaths.' Such things were not unknown in later and more civilised days. Roy a 1 oaths have time and again been as brittle as politicians' promises. A French prince could chatter gaily once on a time regarding the emptiness of the political professions which he was to make at his coronation, and a keen and observant satirist ' pinked ' in the following strain the notorious disregard of the obligations of an oath which was prevalent in Great Britain during and for a long criod after the Cromwellian regime :—: — Oaths are but wordß, and words but wind, Too feeble implements to bind, And hold with deedß proportion, so, As shadows to a tmbßtance do.