INSTITUTED GOVERNMENT.

WHAT is to be understood by God's instituted government has been already indicated in a general way; if we are to conceive it more accurately, we must first of all, distinguish what is included in a moral nature as being necessary to it; and then all that we find superadded, or conjoined to it, will be the administrative matter God has instituted, as a religious polity for the world. A moral nature, in the closest sense of the term, appears to be no matter of divine contrivance, more than the circles are in which the heavens are set--it must be a nature that can think the everlasting law, and has liberty of will to reject, or embrace it. God is not obliged to create this moral nature, but if such a nature is to be created, it can not, as far as the necessary idea is concerned, be either less or different. But there is room outside of this, for a large creative outfit and providential management, where contrivance, and counsel, and statute, and judgment, and all that belongs to an administrative polity may get ample range of opportunity. And here we find the instituted government of God. In this government, counsel and will are added, to maintain the everlasting law. God undertakes, in this, to be its Guardian and Vindicator, making specific applications, adding retributive enforcements, casting soul and body, as far as contrivance may, and arranging the whole economy of causes, to throw the strongest possible motives on the side of right, and against the choice of wrong, or continuance in it.

Inasmuch, too, as the government he institutes looks beyond mere ideas of legal enforcement, comprehending, or at least associating, purposes of recovery, he will incorporate a grand machinery of discipline, and also of reconciliation, working by all the g secret griefs of persons, and public woes of society--by the migrations of conquered peoples, by the persecutions of religion, by the oppressions of governments, by the wars and rebellions overruled. And then to these he will add, for the same final end, what is more effective than all discipline, the incarnate mission of Christ, and all Christly causes, the mission also of the Holy Spirit, with all Spirit-causes threading the world's bosom; the church also, the word, life, death, resurrection, and eternal judgment. The matter is large, but solidly compacted in God's eternal counsel, not intelligible always to us, but intelligible to Him--good as intelligible; because it is the solemn ordering of his will, for the one good end of right.

That we may conceive the nature and offices of this instituted government more exactly, let us note a few points that will require to be observed, in the right understanding of the relation it holds to the law before government, and also farther on, to the vicarious sacrifice and free salvation of Christ.

1. Let it be observed that law and obligation do not begin with God's will, and are not created by his will. It appears to be the supposition of many, that God creates all law by his will, and can make any thing right, or obligatory, by his enactment. Contrary to this he makes nothing obligatory which is not right, or somehow helpful to right, enacting nothing in which he is not first commanded, as, regards the principle, by that everlasting, ideal law, in which even his goodness itself is fashioned. In one view, all the statutes he enacts are explicatory, simply, of the law before government. In another view, they are only vindicatory of the same. So that the one fundamental precept of right contains, or demands, in a way of organic enforcement, all the statutes ordained; having these for its complete explication, or fulfillment, and being fitly vindicated by the executive energy of these. The law before government measures, in this manner, all the law declared by government, only it obtains an immense accession of authority by the specifications in which it is drawn out, and the sanctions of God's infinite will superadded for its enforcement.

It is a great mistake of multitudes, and one that amounts well nigh to a superstition, that they take the decalogue, or ten commandments, for the fundamental law of duty and religion, back of which there is no first principle more radical, or inclusive. Just contrary to this, they are most, of them statutes reenacted from the common law maxims, prevalent among the people to whom they are given. Indeed, they have a great part of their excellence, in that which is their defect; viz., in their merely preventive, negative form; running, all but one of them--"thou shalt not," "thou shalt not,"--as if made for a people who had lost all sense of obligation to the positive good of a well-doing, right-doing life, and could only be reached, by commanding them away from wrongs they love to practice. In the one positive statute--"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and thy neighbor as thyself," there was really something fundamental; it was in fact the law of laws; but for just that reason, it was too much, and the ten particular negatives signified more to such low servile natures, because of their contracted quantity and minatory sound.

2. The instituted government differs from the law before government, in the fact that it inaugurates justice and penal sanctions. There is no express sanction to vindicate the law absolute, and no definitely understood sanction. Certain effects of disorder and pain would follow disobedience, but that they would follow in any scale of desert, we do not know. The justice they will execute, therefore, is only a blind quasi justice, if it be any thing which deserves the name. But the instituted government of God is fast anchored in the terms of justice, declaring definite penalties, and maintaining them with: impartial exactness. It rules by the majestic will-force of God, asserted in its statutes and penalties. And, in this fact, it gains a mighty accession of power; especially when considered as in reference to minds already broken loose from obedience.

In one view, it was the beauty and dignity of the impersonal law, that it spoke only by its own excellence, with no adventitious, or external compulsions to help it. It would rule by what it is, and not by what will be done for it when violated. In this manner it would most fitly address righteous minds; speaking to them even as it does to God. No sanctions appealing to interest, or fear, would be at all appropriate to them, but would even be a mockery rather of their liberty; for to be in the right is already their choice, and they love it, even as God does, because it is right. Enforcements are wholly out of place, till such time as they are sunk away from right into the lower ranges of motivity, where the smart of justice and its penal sanctions becomes fit argument for them. To arrest them now and turn them back, on such kind of consideration as prepares them to be taken with the love of goodness and right for their own sake, is the first thing wanted. Nothing will answer for them, in a way of being recovered, but to have their collision with a government fortified by sanctions penally threatened and judically executed. And this brings me to say--

3. That instituted government, if not taken in the large view as containing, is the necessary co-factor of, redemption. By it the law before government is reënacted, or applied specifically, and the definitely enforced applications are so many points of obligation impressed. The soul therefore, living under sin, can not drum itself to sleep in mere generalities of wrong; for it hears condemning thunders breaking in from almost every point of duty in the scheme of life. The moral sense too is mightily quickened by the arrival of justice, and the tremendous energy in which it comes. For it is a great mistake to imagine that the sanctions of justice are valuable only as intimidations. They are God's strange work, and the fearful earnestness they show raises our moral impressions, or convictions, to the highest pitch of tensity. Capital punishments, in the civil state have their value, in the same way, not in merely making it fearfully perilous to commit the crime so punished, but a great deal more in the tremendous reverberation raised in our moral nature, when the public law utters its opinion of the crime, in sanctions so appalling. Operating in these ways, to enforce and sharpen moral conviction, the Scriptures are always conceiving the instituted law as a necessary co-factor in the matter of redemption. It is even declared, to be "not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient;" as if it were set like the cherubim before Paradise, to flash, and cut, and drive away, and pen the guilty in their outcast lot. So far the instituted government is law for the sake of redemption. It is called, indeed, "the letter that killeth," "the ministration of condemnation;" but the meaning is simply, that the knowledge of sin is by it, and that when a soul is truly slain by the law, it is only the more ready to be quickened by the faith of a gratuitous mercy. Good in itself it becomes death unto the subject, that sin may appear sin, according to its now discovered perversity and exceeding sinfulness. And so--this is the gospel outline--"what the law could not do in that it was weak, through the flesh [or fallen state of sin] God sending his Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh, and [to be a Saviour] for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law [even the eternal righteousness of God] might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit."

There is also still another point of view, in which the instituted government of God works redemptively. All the previous history of the world, from the creation downward, till the fullness of time for Christ is come; all the migrations, deliverances, captivities; all the callings, and covenants, and prophetic inspirations, have been managed to bring on the fit day, and get the preparations ready. And, besides all this, the people have had a religion organized by statute, and been drilling in rites and observances, divinely ordered--all profoundly related to the grand vicarious sacrifice to come. In this manner, the religious mind has been cast in the mold of Christian ideas, and a language has been provided, otherwise impossible, on artificial roots, for the reception and perpetual publication of the new gospel. God's instituted law therefore, instead of being a simply killing agency, a ministration of death, was in fact, casting molds of life from the first, and commanding on, so to speak, unto the great salvation. Christ never could have come, in fact, if the law had not been casting patterns for him, and getting ready all the great external matters of the world's empire. Again--

4. It is important, at this early point, to notice a distinction which will often be recurring in the future stages of the argument; viz., the distinction between righteousness and justice. Thus the righteousness of God is the rightness of God, before the eternal, self-existent law of right; and the justice of God is the vindicatory firmness of God, in maintaining his own instituted law. One is by obedience to a law before God's will; the other is by the retributive vindication of a law that is under and by God's will itself. One is without option, before immutable, unconditioned, everlasting law; the other is what God wills and does, in the world of conditions, that is of means and measures. God must be righteous; God will be just. That he must be, because it is right; this he will be, because he has undertaken to maintain the right and govern for it. There is the character from which he rules; here is the reason of polity by which he rules. Without that, he could not be himself; without this he can not administer a government that will command his subjects. Righteousness is necessary to the endowment of his person; justice is necessary for a wholly different reason; one for the reason of character, the other for the reason of polity Nothing can ever dispense with that; this can be tempered only by that which conspires with it, working for the same ends. Righteousness in God accordingly is satisfied only with righteousness in men; justice is satisfied with whatever makes good the dishonors of violated law, working with it, to fulfill its end.

The justice of God is grounded in the wants of his government; being that which enforces it, that which creates respect for it, and for the ruler, and gives the emphasis of immovable authority to his word and will. He must govern by no fast and loose method, surrender nothing to chance, or caprice, or the inability to inflict pain. And so he must command a character of justice for his government, even as he has a character of righteousness for himself, in the everlasting, immovable adhesion of his nature to right.

5. It is another distinction of God's instituted government, that, while the law before government is impersonal, this is intensely personal, and finally becomes a person, or scarcely different from a person. I have already spoken of the fact that, being from the will of God, it takes on, so far, a personal character. What I would now say is more; viz., that we commonly do not go back of God, when we think of his government--never do it, in fact, save when we are occupied reflectively on its grounds and reasons--but we practically take God for his government, and his government for God. It is now a wholly concrete affair, and no more an abstraction. In this manner, it gets vivacity, and a look of reciprocity. We do not like, in fact, to call it a government, for that is not relational enough to meet our feeling, but we drop the institutional conception, taking up the personal, and calling it King--God is King, that is government enough; and we prefer to let our mind be occupied wholly with his royalties and the homage due to his attributes. More intensely, because externally personal, the government is still to become; for Christ will be visible Messiah, that is visible King, King of Righteousness and so of Peace; whereupon, beholding the government now upon his shoulder, we shall crown him gladly with our invocation--"Give the King thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the King's son." Nor will the glorious kingship be any the less personal and tenderly dear, that being withdrawn from sight, he is substituted by the Holy Spirit invisible, going through all things, and present every where; for he will be the Spirit of Christ shed forth on us by Christ, and maintaining, in the very center of our hearts, a Kingdom which is righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.

It is sufficiently obvious, from these specifications, that the instituted government of God is a matter of no secondary interest, compared with the law before government in which it is grounded. It is the mental habit of some, to be specially pleased with that which is back in the field of abstractions; and such might think it better to have only the ideal law, without any polity of concrete government organized to enforce it. In which, under the pretext of depth, they take up, in fact, the most superficial judgment possible. They consent, in this, to let go just that without which existence itself were of no value; for how soon should we cast off the ideal law in some experiment of disobedience, and then our moral nature itself is a broken affair, past all power of self-recovery. Without redemption existence is valueless, and there is no redemption without an instituted government.

But there comes in here from an opposite direction, or from within the fold of the gospel itself, a class of theological objectors, who apprehend a complete sweeping away of God's instituted law and justice, by the free remission of sins. I propose no argument just here with their objections, I will only state them that they may not seem to be overlooked.

Thus they insist that, if Christ does not bear the penalties of sins himself, and yet takes them away from the guilty, he thereby also takes away all due enforcements of law, and leaves the precept to be mere advice. Where go the laws of God, when the penalties of transgression are remitted gratis, by universal proclamation, and the promise given to every transgressor that he shall even be justified? What could any civil state, or government hope, from a law punishing assassination by death, and promulgating, at the same time, a free pardon to every criminal suing for it?

In confirmation of their argument, they also remind us that when certain teachers, claiming a more than common illumination, toss all such objections aside, extolling it as one of the fine things in Christ, that he finds government enough in God's love and paternity, and is willing to let go what are called the Jewish rigors, the effects are such as to show most convincingly the essential lightness of the doctrine. A proper insight of human nature, saying nothing of the gospel, ought, they contend, to open our eyes to a discovery of what is more competent; for to make a government of mere love and paternity is, in fact, to make just no government at all, but is, simply to throw the whole matter of duty and character loose upon the chances of a coaxing process, where the subject, living in a lower plane, has too little care for the goodness shown him, to get any thing out of it, but a license of impunity for whatever he likes best. In such doctrine there is no ring of conviction. God and religion die out of it, and a certain modishness of philanthropy is all that can long remain.

The objectors also vary their argument, alleging that when God forgives sin, without some penal satisfaction, his rectoral honor and character are made equivocal, if not fatally diminished. Sin they say, and truly, tramples the honor of God. If then he farther consents to let it do so, what becomes of his authority and respect as a ruler? To vindicate the integrity of his position by punishments duly enforced, would countervail the dishonors of transgression. But what becomes of his honor and rectoral authority, when his threatenings turn out to be but a mock ammunition, in which there is no projectile included? Who will be awed by his will when he governs only in terrorem, with the terror, in fact, omitted?

Again the righteousness of God appears, they say, to be made equivocal, in the same manner. He commands what is right to be done, because it is right, and because right is an everlasting and absolute law in its own nature--necessary to all created mind, necessary even to himself. About this grand ideal of right he builds the whole fabric of his government; all his laws assert and interpret this; all his penalties enforce this; all his judgments are the discipline he wields for this. What then does it signify that he freely remits all the possible wrongs of wrong-doing, as against his great central principle of right, or righteousness? The principle, indeed, is none the less right; it is only deserted; that too by Him who undertook to be its vindicator and defender. The enforcement is now gone, and with it, what was more impressive, the solid majesty of that greatness, which itself was built up in the principle of it, and stood in sacred awe before the eyes of all creatures, as the unchangeable Righteousness.

It is another variation also of the damage or loss they discover in God's rectoral character, that the supposed free-remission is not only a discontinuance of his operative justice, but appears to blur the evidences of justice, in his character. The power of God's attitude, before his subjects will be determined, to a great extent, they allege, and truly, by the impression he makes of his immovable adhesion to justice. The punishments denounced against transgression will themselves have a certain deterring force, as being denounced, but a vastly greater force comes into impression, whether in the civil state or in the government of God over souls, when justice is duly exalted and consecrated, by what may be called the dread sacrifice and strange work of punishment: There is such majesty in justice thus consecrated, that moral natures feel it all through and tremble responsively to it. Punishments have a Certain value, as appeals to fear, and as motives addressed to self-interest, but the sense of goodness, armed by justice, strikes into the moral nature itself far more deeply and by an immediate efficacy. It can not therefore be taken away without great apparent loss.

In arguments like these, showing the probability of damage to the integrity and authority of God's government, from a free remission of sins, coupled with no penal satisfaction of justice, there is, it must be admitted, an appearance of reason. How far it is an appearance deduced from political analogies, that will disappear when such analogies are duly qualified, will be hereafter seen.