"Do not fancy that the Scythians will take an oath in their concluding of an alliance with thee. The only oath among them is to keep their word without swearing. Such cautions as these do indeed become Greeks, who sign their treaties, and call upon the Gods to witness them. But, with regard to us, our religion consists in being sincere, and in keeping the promises we have made. That man, who is not ashamed to break his word with men, is not ashamed of deceiving the Gods."
To the account contained in these extracts, it may be added, that the Scythians are described by Herodotus, Justin, Horace, and others, as a moral people. They had the character of maintaining justice. Theft or robbery was severely punished among them. They believed infidelity after the marriage-engagement to be deserving of death. They coveted neither silver nor gold. They refused to give the name of goods or riches to any but estimable things, such as health, courage, liberty, strength, sincerity, innocence, and the like. They received friends as relations, or considered friendship as so sacred an alliance, that it differed but little from alliance by blood.
These principles of the Scythians, as far as they are well founded, the Quakers believe to have originated in their more than ordinary attention to that divine principle which was given to them, equally with the rest of mankind, for their instruction in moral good; to that same principle, which Socrates describes as having suggested to his mind that which was good and virtuous, or which Seneca describes to reside in men as an observer of good and evil. For the Scythians, living in solitary and desert places, had but little communication for many ages with the rest of mankind, and did not obtain their system of morality from other quarters. From the Greeks and Romans, who were the most enlightened, they derived no moral benefit. For Strabo informs us, that their morals had been wholly corrupted in his time, and that this wretched change had taken place in consequence of their intercourse with these nations. That they had no scripture or written law of God is equally evident. Neither did they collect their morality from the perusal or observance of any particular laws that had been left them by their ancestors; for the same author, who gives them the high character just mentioned, says that they were found in the practice of justice,[37] not on account of any laws, but on account of their own _natural genius or disposition_. Neither were they found in this practice, because they had exerted their reason in discovering that virtue was so much more desirable than vice; for the same author declares, that nature, and not reason, had made them a moral people: for[38] "it seems surprising, says he, that nature should have given to them what the Greeks have never been able to attain either in consequence of the long succession of doctrines of their wise men, or of the precepts of their philosophers; and that the manners of a barbarous, should be preferable to those of a refined people."