the
noblest work in which the intellectual powers of man can be engaged, as
it resembles most nearly the work of the Deity. It is employed as well
in determining what is right or wrong in itself--the due proportion of
injuries and their remedies or punishments--as in enforcing what is
useful and expedient. How wide the scope of such a work! The power of
society over its individual members, or, in other words, sovereignty,
which is practically vested in the legislature, is a type of the Divine
power which rules the physical and moral universe. "There is one
Lawgiver," says the Apostle James. Not that the Supreme Being is the
sole universal lawgiver in the sense of a creator of law, whose will
alone determines the boundaries of right and wrong. God is the creator
of the beings who are the subjects of law. He is the author of law--the
one lawgiver--in the same sense that he, who first discovered a plain
figure, may be said to be the author of all theorems, which may be
predicated of it. He who first called attention to the curious curve,
made by a point in the periphery of a wheel as it turns on the ground,
is in a certain sense the discoverer of all the truths, which may be
mathematically demonstrated in respect to it.
Law in its true sense is not the work of mere will--not an act of
intellectual caprice. It is a severe and necessary deduction from the
relations of things. The Divine legislator sees and knows these
relations perfectly. He can draw no wrong deduction from them. He can
make no mistake. Whatever laws have certainly emanated from Him are
certainly right. This is the sense in which it is true that "there is
one Lawgiver:" all others but attempt the work; He alone is competent to
perform it. There is no mathematical certainty in our reasoning on moral
as there is on physical relations. We know that the three angles of a
triangle are equal to two right angles with an assurance we can never
have in regard to any moral truth whatever. The Divine law is a
deduction necessarily and mathematically certain as much so as any truth
in geometry. Human law can aim only at such a probable deduction as
results from a finite and imperfect knowledge.
The system of law delivered by Moses to the Jews deserves, therefore,
the most careful study at the hands of all who believe him to have been
a divinely commissioned lawgiver. These laws were not intended for any
other people than the Israelites; they were adapted to their
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