Chapter XXII. Of Lawful Oaths and Vows

III. Whosoever taketh an oath ought duly to consider the weightiness of so solemn an act, and therein to avouch nothing but what he is fully persuaded is the truth. Neither may any man bind himself by oath to anything but what is good and just, and what he believeth so to be, and what he is able and resolved to perform. Yet it is a sin to refuse an oath touching anything that is good and just, being imposed by lawful authority.

What changed, and when. The sentence in bold was not touched in 1788. It survived for more than a century and was struck out in 1903, in the revision of the northern Presbyterian church of the United States. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936), which rejected almost everything else in that revision, nevertheless kept this deletion.

Why. The general purpose of the revision of 1903 is dealt with in another article of this section; but we know of no official statement of reasons for this particular change. The context may be pointed out: the modern emphasis on liberty of the individual conscience, and the old Presbyterian wariness of oaths imposed by the civil power, which the Scots had suffered in the eighteenth century. But this is context, not documented cause.

What the text of 1647 rested on. The Assembly cites Numbers 5:19-21 and Nehemiah 5:12: two cases in which one who has authority puts others to an oath.

What this change shows. Its reach ought to be measured carefully, for it is less than it seems. The preceding paragraph of the same chapter, which the revision did not touch, still says that "a lawful oath, being imposed by lawful authority", in matters of weight, "ought to be taken". The duty, then, remains; what was removed is the express affirmation that to refuse to fulfil it is sin. Nor did the sentence oblige anyone to swear anything whatever before anyone whatever: it required that the matter be "good and just" and the authority "lawful". It answered those who hold every oath to be unlawful: so it is explained by the classic commentators on the Confession, who name the Quakers "and some others".
But the detail is revealing. What disappears is precisely the point at which the individual conscience had to yield: before a lawful authority requiring something good and just, to refuse is no longer called sin. The Confession of 1647 knows liberty of conscience very well; it devotes chapter XX to it: "God alone is Lord of the conscience". But it understands it as freedom from "the doctrines and commandments of men" which are contrary to the Word or beside it, not as a right for each man to be the final judge of his own duties. That second idea is the modern one, and it is the one which here leaves its mark.