THE LAW BEFORE GOVERNMENT.

THUS far we have been ranging in a field, we may almost say, unobstructed by matters of difficulty and debate; we have reached, in fact, the middle of our journey, and have encountered none of the great battle points of the champions, but have only seen the smoke from afar. We seem, indeed, to have been occupied only in such kind of exploration, as could well be made for the benefit of it, and to simply bathe our feeling in that love which God has revealed in his Son. But we are now, at last, come to the borders of the Amalekites, where there is no way to get a passage, but to make one. All the questions that have troubled others are in our path also, from this point onward--questions of law, penalty, justice, righteousness, and their connections with mercy, forgiveness, and the justification of life.

A suspicion is often suggested, by those who are looking after the truth among these difficulties, that there must be some hidden ambiguity, or confusion of meaning, in the words here employed. What is said of law and justice, under the analogies of human government does not appear to hold, without qualifications not given. It can not be that such analogies of law, and justice, and penalty, and pardon, prepared in the civil state, are not to be used in religion. Like all other analogies of the outward life, they were designed to be. And yet there are few close observers, I suspect, who have not sometimes been so far impressed, by the fatalities discovered in attempts to resolve Christ's work under this kind of analogy, as to seriously doubt whether any thing reliable can be thus accomplished. There certainly can not be, unless the analogy is carefully qualified by others, such for example as those of the family, the field, the shop, the market. There is also another kind of qualifier, that is obtained by getting a partially distinct footing for the subject, in a province of thought which is not under such analogies.

And it is in this view that I now propose a distinction, which, as far as it goes, takes the subject quite away from all the governmental figures, allowing us to speak, or to reason of law and justification, without being dominated by such figures--the distinction, I mean, between law before government, and law by government; uninstituted, necessary law, and law enacted and supported by instituted government. If I am successful in the statement and development of this distinction, a considerable part of the confusion which has been felt, in these much debated matters of atonement, will, I think, disappear.

It is very obvious to any thoughtful person, that, in order of reason, whatever may be true as respects order in time, there was law before God's will, and before his instituting act; viz., that necessary, everlasting, ideal, law of Right, which, simply to think, is to be forever obliged by it. The perfections of God, being self-existent and eternal, were eternally squared by this self-existent law; for, if they had any moral quality, it lay in their conformity to some moral law, apart from which no such perfection is conceivable. Otherwise, if God's perfections came forth only after and out of his will, and after the institution of his government, then he began to will and to institute government, without any perfections, and even without any moral standard--becoming all righteousness, and commanding all right, before even the ideal law of right had arrived.

The grand, primal fact then is, that God's own nature was in law, or crystallizing in eternal obligation, before he became a lawgiver, and that he became a lawgiver only because he was already in the power of law. Not that he was in obligation to any governing force above him, or back of him; for he was himself the only being, and the container of all forces to be. The law was ideal, and not governmental, a simple thought, which to think was to be in everlasting, necessary, obligation to it. There was no command upon God, no penalty hovered by to threaten; but, thinking right, His whole nature answered in sublime, self-prompted, allegiance. And this allegiance to an idea, viz., right, was his righteousness--the sum of all his perfections, and the root and spring, in that manner, of all he governs for, or by instituted government maintains.

How it is with him, in this law before government, we shall find by a simple reference to ourselves, and the methods of our own moral nature; for we exist in His image. I think of space, for example, and this eternal, necessary idea of space goes with me, compelling me to see all outward extensions, or distances in it. I think of cause, and this necessary idea compels me, or qualifies me, to see all goings on of change, under terms of causation. These ideas are, in fact, forms of the mind; forms to which it adverts in all thinking, and without which it could not think at all. The same is true of the ideas of time, and number, and quantity. Being in the form of time, I am put on thinking when; of number, on thinking how many; of quantity on thinking how much. So I think of truth, in general idea, and having that form of thought developed, I begin to think what particular things are true. In the same way is developed the grand, all-regulative, Moral Idea of Right; which to simply think, is to be put in everlasting obligation. For it is the distinction of this idea, that it is the Monarch Principle of the soul. It puts all moral natures under an immediate, indefeasible bond of sovereignty. They become moral natures because they are set before this idea of right. Animals think no such thought, and are never set before this idea. They probably have the ideas of space, and cause, and number, but right is of a higher range; else if they could think it, they would be moral natures in common with us.

Here then, as being simply existent with a moral nature, and without being commanded, or before, we are put in a state of fixed obligation. It matters not whether we know of a God; for, if we do, we are none the more truly under law after his commandment comes than before-though we may be more effectively under it. The simple idea of right, if we accept the authority of it, and set ourselves to it for a total homage and conformity, will be a complete regulation for the life--for every thought, and act, and disposition--and will fashion us in a completely harmonic character and state of righteousness. It only can not do this after we have fallen away from it, and been thrown out of spiritual order, by the shock of our disobedience. Then it will even require a salvation to restore us.

Let us not forget, or overlook, at this point, the distinction between the eternal, one idea which contains all law, as regards the principle--being never. a simple, universal, always present, never doubtful idea--and those questions of right or wrong, so called, which relate to particular actions. Here we have abundance of doubt, and debate, and perplexed casuistry, bringing us here to one conclusion, here to another, and sometimes to none at all. To settle these questions we make appeal to custom, to Scripture usage and precept, to what is useful, to what is beautiful, setting our critical judgments at work, and our memory, and our tastes, and mental associations. But these subordinate and particular questions of duty are only executory, it will be observed, as regards the general principle, and it matters little if we mistake, or differ in these, doing it honestly, provided only we are trying to enthrone the Monarch Principle and put every thing in allegiance under it. Meantime, in this law of laws, we all agree without a shade of difference. It is the same to one human creature, in one part of the world, as to any and every other, in parts most remote; the same to the Gentile as to the Jew, to the heathen as to the Christian. Nay, it is the same to created souls in all orders, as to God uncreated, and the same to God as to them.

There is then a law before government, which is common to all moral natures, and in which all moral distinctions have their root. It is, in fact, the law of the conscience; for though it is common to speak of the conscience as a throne of government inserted, by the creative and constructive purpose of God, it does not appear to be true that God ever contrived a conscience, in any other sense than that he has appointed a moral nature for us, in distinction from one that is not. The conscience of God is only the fact itself of his moral nature, and our conscience is but the fact of our kinship with him, in the central idea that contains the mold and law of his perfections. If we use the term conscience to cover the ground, not merely of that central idea, but of all particular actions under it, the conscience would, in that case, be a really infallible oracle for infinite questions in us, apart from all helps of judgment and discriminations of reason; only it is plain as need be, and can not well escape our discovery, that we certainly have no such oracle in us; for if we have it, whence come so many unsolved questions and debates of duty?

On this point of a law before government, and a conscience that enthrones it, we require no better exposition than that which is- given by the apostle, when he declares,17 that as many as commit sin without law, [instituted law] shall also perish without the same; and that only such as sin against instituted law will be judged by it; for, though they have it not, they are yet a law [uninstituted] to themselves, their conscience bearing witness before all commandment, and apart from all administrative enforcement. What he means to say is, that their moral nature itself answers, with inevitable conviction, to the eternal, necessary principle of right; placing them, so far, in a condition where they are a law to themselves, and would be forever, if no rule, or judgment, or judge from without, should appear, to authenticate, or vindicate, the obligation they feel.

Let us now conceive it possible, that God and all moral natures exist, for a time, under this ideal, necessary law, or law of laws, having no other; that government is not yet undertaken, God having not come forth as yet, to be the maintainer of this law, or to assume it as the charge of his voluntary administration. The moral natures, in this view, simply exist upon a common footing of necessary obligation--bound, all alike and together, as a matter of inmost conviction, to do and be only right. I do not say, it will be observed, that the law moral had ever any such precedence of time, or any but a precedence of order, before the fact of government assumed. Still it can do no harm to raise the supposition of such precedence in time, if we are careful enough to use it only as a means of distinguishing certain points, in the great subject we have in discussion, that could not be as well distinguished in any other way.

Having thus all moral natures upon this common footing of ideal, necessary law, and no personal authority, or will-force embarked, as yet, in the purpose to govern for it and be its vindicator, one of two things will be the result; either that the grand impersonal law will be accepted and obeyed, or else that it will not. God, we know, will receive it in everlasting honor; for exactly that he has done from eternity; and his being thus united to the right, fixedly and totally, is his righteousness--the sum, in that manner, of all his perfections. If created minds and orders cleave also to right, in the same way, they will be instated also in the same righteousness, and so in the same perfections with God. All moral beings, united thus in their homages to right, will be united also in love; love to each other, and love to the law, by which they are set in society and everlasting chime together, as in ways of mutual right-doing. Indeed the necessary and absolute law of right, thus accepted, is very nearly answered by the relational law of love; so that any realm of being, compacted in right, will as certainly be unified in love, doing and suffering, each for each, just what the most self-immolating, dearest love requires. Even God, in such right-doing, will bend himself to any most expensive, lowest burden of sympathy, for the benefit and well-being of such as are humblest in the order of their dignity. The humblest in order, too, will as certainly magnify and worship the Infinite Right-Doer, because there is proportion in their sense of right-inspiring an homage that looks up in the lowliest, as truly as a way of sacrifice that looks down in the highest. In this manner the perfect, universal righteousness will organize a state of everlasting order and good fellowship, whose ideal we name, in the words, Complete Society.

But there is another alternative; viz., that some one or many races of moral natures, in the state of impersonal law we have described, will throw off the law, and break loose in a condition of unsubjection; and here it becomes a very important matter, as regards the great questions we have now in hand, to note the consequences that will follow, and the new kinds of work and office that will be undertaken.

First of all, the internal state of the disobedient race, or races of moral natures, will be immensely changed. As certainly as they are broken loose from right, they will be chafing in the bitter consciousness of wrong, doing wrong to each other, feeling wrong, contriving wrong, writhing in the pains of wrong. Their whole internal state will be under a nimbus of confusion. For though nothing is contrived in them and the world to have a retributive reaction, their simply being moral natures will compel them to suffer a tremendous shock of recoil. There will be a terrible disjunction of order in their parts and powers; so that what they call their soul will be scarcely better than a wrangle of contrarieties, or cage of growling antipathies. As to any self-restoration that will be effective, it is quite impossible. A flock of birds let fly could much less easily be gathered back from all the remotest points of heaven. For the internal confusion is so complex and wild--so nearly infinite-that no power of thought can conceive it, or how it should be set in the recomposition needed; no power of self-exertion accomplish the recomposition, if it were conceived. The whole moral nature, in short, is so far abused and suffers a recoil so dreadful, in the rejection of its law, that consciousness itself becomes a mordant element, with no power left to master the self-corrosive sublimation of its wrong. Not that in this fall, or self-undoing, it suffers any thing which is called justice, under the political analogies. We do not know that it suffers any thing in the scale of desert, which is the common notion of justice; we only know that it receives a shock of necessary pain, or disorder, from the violation of an immutable idea, that belongs inherently to its moral nature. If necessity does not know how to think, or any way get up a scale of justice, then it is quasi justice, and we probably can not say more--only the necessity of it is too absolute to be avoided. We may even dare to say, with all profoundest reverence to God, that if He, the All-Holy, were to cast off Right--the law before government--in the case supposed, his wrong would be an earthquake shock, strong enough to shiver the integrity of his mold, and leave him a wreck of eternal incapacity, as respects both wholeness of being and a recovered harmony in good. This, not because there is any ordinance of justice above him, but that such is right, and such his moral nature, as related thereto--both self-existent--that, without regard to justice, the crystal must so break, by its own necessary law, and so He must irrecoverably fall. Thus, too, any race of finite moral creatures, falling irrecoverably in the same way, would be not less fearfully undone; not by justice, but only by the inevitable recoil of their offended moral nature.

Secondly, as another sad consequence, the law so much loved by all the obedient natures, including God, is diminished in its honor, desecrated, trampled, and mocked, and their minds are filled with deepest concern for it. It is as if the very law of their own beatitude were dying under its wounds. Asserting itself unhelped, and vindicated by no force but its own, it seems to be even going down, or vanishing away.

These two painful and disastrous consequences having arrived under the law before government; viz., the fall of multitudes beyond any power of self-redemption; and the law itself trampled in dishonor; is there any thing that God will certainly undertake? His infinite righteousness contains the answer; for by that he is ever lastingly fastened, in profoundest homage, to the law, and about as certainly to the well-being of all moral natures related, with Himself, to the law. He will therefore regard himself as elected, by his own transcendent powers of will and working, to assume the charge of a Ruler, and will institute government; contriving by what assertions of authority, supported by what measures, he may reinforce the impersonal law, and repair its broken sway. To this end he will organize a complete frame of statutes, and penalties, and motivities general, for the will, such as He, the Infinite Lord, and Head Power of the worlds, may count worthy of his wisdom and universal sovereignty--the same combination, we may well enough suppose, that we have to admire in his word and Providential order now. In this manner, or in some other closely related, we shall see that He has taken the government upon his shoulder.

Nor is it a matter very widely different, that he will undertake the redemption, or restoration, of the fallen race, or races; for he can hardly do for the law broken down all that he would, without recovering the disobedient to their full homage and allegiance. Besides, they are fellow-natures with Himself, and the righteous love he bears them will unite him to their fallen state, in acts of tenderest sacrifice. And so the instituted government and the redeeming sacrifice will begin together, at the same date and point, and work together, for very nearly the same purpose. In the largest and most proper view, the instituted government will include redemption; for, beginning at the point of transgression, already broken loose, mere legislative and judicial action, plainly enough, can not bring in the desired state of obedience. Legislation wants redemption for its coadjutor, and only through the divine sacrifice, thus ministered, can it ever hope to consummate the proposed obedience. Redemption also wants legislation, to back its tender appeals of sacrifice, by the stern rigors of law. Both together will compose the state of complete government. We are brought out thus by our supposition, upon the conception of a redeeming work, undertaken, or that would be undertaken, for and before the ideal law of right, and apart from any conditions of government, previously instituted, or violated. Precisely how, or by what plan, the restoring agency will operate, we, of course, do not know. Doubtless it will involve the grand, principal fact, that God is in vicarious sacrifice; and, if that is best, he will go forward in just the same ways of sacrifice, and the same revelations of love, that he has made in the suffering life and death of Christ. For since he is grounded, as respects all his perfections, in the eternal law of right now cloven down, he will love the principle itself, and love its adherents, and love, for the law's sake, as well as for their own, all the transgressors and enemies who may haply be recovered to it. And so we shall have on foot a grand work of redemptive sacrifice, that has no reference whatever to claims of justice previously incurred. The problem can not, therefore, be to satisfy, or pacify justice, but simply to recompose in the violated law the shattered, broken souls, who have thrown down both themselves and it, by their disobedience.

A beginning will probably be made much like that of the Christian history, in the establishment of sacrifices, the sending of prophets, the strong discipline of Providential judgments, the long drilling and milling times of observances, defeats, and captivities. And then, when the fullness of time is come, we may look for an act of incarnation, provided ally thing can be so accomplished; for the love of God will bring him down to the fallen, and a life in the flesh among them, just as it has done in Christ. He will come in the very spirit of the law rejected, and they will see, in him, how good and beautiful it is, and what burdens of suffering it will put upon him to bear for their benefit. I am not authorized to say that, in the peculiar case supposed, he will do just every thing which he has done by Christ and his cross, I only say that he will shrink from no sacrifice, or sorrow, or cross, that he may regain the erring ones to their law, and have them reestablished in everlasting righteousness. And there appears to be no reason for doubting, that he will go. through a historic chapter of vicarious sacrifice, closely correspondent with that which is transacted in Christ.

Thus far onward we are brought, in the lead of a supposition. Let me not be understood as resting any thing on the deductions made, beyond what the certain fact of a law before government will justify. There is really no such precedence in time, but only a precedence of rational order. Instituted government is, to all created subjects of God, as old as ideal principle, and they never had a moment under this, before coming under the other. My whole object in tracing this supposed precedence of time, has been simply to get certain distinctions of idea unfolded, that will serve the future uses of my argument. The supposition is a fiction, the distinctions are profoundly real and important--allowing us to get a footing for the subject, where it will be less oppressively dominated, by the merely political, or judicial analogies.

The distinctions of idea referred to are such as these; which any one will see to be legitimated in the exposition now traced--legitimated, that is, as conceptions, though not established as existing facts.

1. That there might be a scheme of cross, and sacrifice, and restoring power, every way like that which is executed in Christ, which has nothing to do with justice proper; being related only to that quasi justice which is the blind effect, in moral natures, of a violation of their necessary law.

2. That instituted law is no necessary precondition of redemption.

3. That the righteousness of God is not by any means identical with his justice, but includes all the perfections of God in his relation to the law before government, and never requires him to execute justice under political analogies, save as it first requires him to institute an administrative government in the same.

4. That law and justice might be instituted as co-factors of redemption, having it for their object to simply work with redemption, and serve the same ends of spiritual renovation--if there was a prior fall, under the law before government, they naturally would be.

5. That justification need not have any reference to God's justice, and probably has not, but only to a reconnection, by faith, with the righteousness of God, and a consciously new confidence, in the sense of that connection.

It will probably have occurred to some readers, in conjunction with what has here been said of the law before government, to inquire how far, and in what manner, it coincides with the Scripture representation of the original trial-state of man? Here, to the human race at least begins the instituted government of God. It comes in as no after thought, to supplement the insufficiency of an ideal law which is older. In the breathing of the first breath, this also arrives, and the living soul is not complete in its moral equipment, sooner than it is put in authority by God's paternal keeping and commandment. Still it will be more convenient and rational, not to regard the fall as literally beginning at the breach of a merely instituted, almost arbitrary, apparently trivial statute, such as by the common understanding we have in the statute of the tree, but to regard the real breach as beginning at the everlasting law-principle hid in that statute, and violated in the violation of it.

This third chapter of Genesis is taken, by many scholars who are not given, at all, to the mythical interpretations, as being, in some proper sense, a myth. They discover a mythologic air in the story, and note a plain distinction of manner between it and the historic chapters that follow, or indeed between it and all other Scripture beside. Nor is it any just offense that such a conception is admitted; for a myth may as well be the vehicle of truth as any other form of language--be it epic, or ode, or parable, or fable. The sin of imputing a myth is when it is done against the fact of history, and not when it is the proper organ of history. And it may be that a myth occurs in revelation, just because there is, at the time, no culture of thought, and philosophy, and reflective reason, deep enough to express, or conceive the matter given, in a way of didactic statement. It is, in fact, historic, because it is the form of story for a matter profoundly abstruse in its nature, and possible to be conceived, as yet, in no other form.

It comes out accordingly, laboring under such limitations of thought and culture, that the eternal law of right is a tree, and the knowledge of good and evil a fruit that hangs on it, and the declared threatenings of death, notifications of the consequences otherwise unknown. Temptation figures in the story as a serpent, and the new-begun race are summoned to a conflict with him, and an assured triumph over him. Then pass out the sad pair, excluded from all possible self-recovery, as if fenced away by the flashing swords of cherubim, to work and suffer, and conquer, as God and his Son will help them.

Now there seems to be a peculiar fitness in conceiving the first sin to be thus specially concerned with the original law of duty--the law before government--because that law is really pronounced in the simple fact of being a moral nature. Existing as a moral nature, a man, Adam was already in that law, and the issuing of any command or prohibition, regarding a matter of action, would bind him, only as an executory application of that law. Not even killing, under the statute "thou shalt not kill," becomes a crime of murder, save as the perpetrator is found to have connected the statute with the prior law of laws, and done the deed as a wrong, by "malice aforethought." No particular act is sinful, save as the prior law of right is implicitly violated in it. It makes no difference, therefore, whether the forbidden tree be taken as a mythic conception of the law before government, or as an arbitrary, outward test of obedience in particular action; for no such test could touch the sense of obligation, save as it implicitly came under, and carried along with it, the already felt obligation of right. All the statutes we speak of are executory of this law, else they are nothing. Any fall must be transacted really before this law; for the guilt of breaking any law creates a fall, only as this grand, all-inclusive law is cast off, and the regulative principle of the life is changed. Be it touching a tree, or tasting a fruit, the sin has all its meaning in the fact that everlasting right is cast away, and the golden harmony of right dissolved.

This being true, I see not any way of describing a fact so deep, and, for ages, so far beyond the possible conception of men, that could be at all equal to this paradise, and tree, and fruit, and fall, and final expulsion, and flashing sword of cherubim. The profound reality of the fall must, in any view, have been passed before the eternal, inborn law of right, and the death and the curse that followed, signify a great deal more as declaratives of natural consequence, in such a breaking out of law, than they can, as penal sentences of desert, in the matter of tasting a fruit.

Here then is the want and true place of redemption. It must have some primary and even principal reference to the law before government, and not to any instituted law, or statute, or judicial penalty existing under that. Every thing God does in his legislations, and punishments, and Providential governings of the world, is done to fortify and glorify the Law before Government. All that he will do, in redemptive suffering and sacrifice, revolves about this prior Everlasting Law, in the same manner. In this law his supreme last ends are gathered; out of this law all his beatitudes and perfections have their spring. No so great thing as redemption can have principal respect to any thing else.  

[17] Rom. ii, 12-15.