As preliminary to a treatment of man's state of apostasy, it becomes necessary to consider the nature of that law of God, the transgression of which is sin. We may best approach the subject by inquiring what is the true conception of
I. Law in General.
1. Law is an expression of will.
The essential idea of law is that of a general expression of will enforced by power. It implies: (a) A lawgiver, or authoritative will. (b) Subjects, or beings upon whom this will terminates. (c) A general command, or expression of this will. (d) A power, enforcing the command.
These elements are found even in what we call natural law. The phrase “law of nature” involves a self-contradiction, when used to denote a mode of action or an order of sequence behind which there is conceived to be no intelligent and ordaining will. Physics derives the term “law” from jurisprudence, instead of jurisprudence deriving it from physics. It is first used of the relations of voluntary agents. Causation in our own wills enables us to see something besides mere antecedence and consequence in the world about us. Physical science, in her very use of the word “law,” implicitly confesses that a supreme Will has set general rules which control the processes of the universe.
Wayland, Moral Science, 1, unwisely defines law as “a mode of existence or order of sequence,” thus leaving out of his definition all reference to an ordaining will. He subsequently says that law presupposes an establisher, but in his definition there is nothing to indicate this. We insist, on the other hand, that the term “law” itself includes the idea of force and cause. The word “law” is from “lay” (German legen),—something laid down; German Gesetz, from setzen,—something set or established; Greek νόμος, from νέμω,—something assigned or apportioned; Latin lex, from lego,—something said or spoken.
All these derivations show that man's original conception of law is that of something proceeding from volition. Lewes, in his Problems of Life and Mind, says that the term “law” is so suggestive of a giver and impresser of law, that it ought to be dropped, and the word “method” substituted. The merit of Austin's treatment of the subject is that he “rigorously limits the term ‘law’ to the commands of a superior”; see John Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223. The defects of his treatment we shall note further on.
J. S. Mill: “It is the custom, wherever they [scientific men] can trace regularity of any kind, to call the general proposition which expresses the nature of that regularity, a law; as when in mathematics we speak of the law of the successive terms of a converging series. But the expression ‘law of nature’ is generally employed by scientific men with a sort of tacit reference to the original sense of the word ‘law,’ namely, the expression of the will of a superior—the superior in this case being the Ruler of the [pg 534]universe.” Paley, Nat. Theology, chap. 1—“It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient operative cause of anything. A law presupposes an agent; this is only the mode according to which an agent proceeds; it implies a power, for it is the order according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing.” “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Rules do not fulfill themselves, any more than a statute-book can quell a riot” (Martineau, Types, 1:367).
Charles Darwin got the suggestion of natural selection, not from the study of lower plants and animals, but from Malthus on Population; see his Life and Letters, Vol. I, autobiographical chapter. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:248-252—“The conception of natural law rests upon the analogy of civil law.” Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 333—“Laws are only the more or less frequently repeated and uniform modes of the behavior of things”; Philosophy of Mind, 122—“To be, to stand in relation, to be self-active, to act upon other being, to obey law, to be a cause, to be a permanent subject of states, to be the same to-day as yesterday, to be identical, to be one,—all these and all similar conceptions, together with the proofs that they are valid for real beings, are affirmed of physical realities, or projected into them, only on a basis of self-knowledge, envisaging and affirming the reality of mind. Without psychological insight and philosophical training, such terms or their equivalents are meaningless in physics. And because writers on physics do not in general have this insight and this training, in spite of their utmost endeavors to treat physics as an empirical science without metaphysics, they flounder and blunder and contradict themselves hopelessly whenever they touch upon fundamental matters.” See President McGarvey's Criticism on James Lane Allen's Reign of Law: “It is not in the nature of law to reign. To reign is an act which can be literally affirmed only of persons. A man may reign; a God may reign; a devil may reign; but a law cannot reign. If a law could reign, we should have no gambling in New York and no open saloons on Sunday. There would be no false swearing in courts of justice, and no dishonesty in politics. It is men who reign in these matters—the judges, the grand jury, the sheriff and the police. They may reign according to law. Law cannot reign even over those who are appointed to execute the law.”