It is true even of a despot's law, that it reveals his nature, and shows what is requisite in the subject to constitute him in harmony with that nature. A law which does not represent the nature of things, or the real relations of the governor and the governed, has only a nominal existence, and cannot be permanent. On the definition and nature of law, see also Pomeroy, in Johnson's Encyclopædia, art.: Law; Ahrens, Cours de Droit Naturel, book 1, sec. 14; Lorimer, Institutes of Law, 256, who quotes from Burke: “All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory. They may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the substance of original justice”; Lord Bacon: “Regula enim legem (ut acus nautica polos) indicat, non statuit.” Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 64; H. C. Carey, Unity of Law.
Fairbairn, in Contemp. Rev., Apl. 1895:473—“The Roman jurists draw a distinction between jus naturale and jus civile, and they used the former to affect the latter. The jus civile was statutory, established and fixed law, as it were, the actual legal environment; the jus naturale was ideal, the principle of justice and equity immanent in man, yet with the progress of his ethical culture growing ever more articulate.” We add the fact that jus in Latin and Recht in German have ceased to mean merely abstract right, and have come to denote the legal system in which that abstract right is embodied and expressed. Here we have a proof that Christ is gradually moralizing the world and translating law into life. E. G. Robinson: “Never a government on earth made its own laws. Even constitutions simply declare laws already and actually existing. Where society falls into anarchy, the lex talionis becomes the prevailing principle.”
II. The Law of God in Particular.
The law of God is a general expression of the divine will enforced by power. It has two forms: Elemental Law and Positive Enactment.
1. Elemental Law, or law inwrought into the elements, substances, and forces of the rational and irrational creation. This is twofold:
A. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of the material universe;—this we call physical, or natural law. Physical law is not necessary. Another order of things is conceivable. Physical order is not an end in itself; it exists for the sake of moral order. Physical order has therefore only a relative constancy, and God supplements it at times by miracle.
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 210—“The laws of nature represent no necessity, but are only the orderly forms of procedure of some Being back of them.... Cosmic uniformities are God's methods in freedom.” Philos. of Theism, 73—“Any of the cosmic laws, from gravitation on, might conceivably have been lacking or altogether different.... No trace of necessity can be found in the Cosmos or in its laws.”Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Nature is not necessary. Why put an island where it is, and not a mile east or west? Why connect the smell and shape of the rose, or the taste and color of the orange? Why do H2O form water? No one knows.”William James: “The parts seem shot at us out of a pistol.” Rather, we would say, out of a shotgun. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 33—“Why undulations in one medium should produce sound, and in another light; why one speed of vibration should give red color, and another blue, can be explained by no reason of necessity. Here is selecting will.”
Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“So far as the philosophy of evolution involves belief that nature is determinate, or due to a necessary law of universal progress or evolution, it seems to me to be utterly unsupported by evidence and totally unscientific.”There is no power to deduce anything whatever from homogeneity. Press the button and law does the rest? Yes, but what presses the button? The solution crystalises [pg 537]when shaken? Yes, but what shakes it? Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 310—“The directions and velocities of the stars fall under no common principles that astronomy can discover. One of the stars—‘1830 Groombridge’—is flying through space at a rate many times as great as it could attain if it had fallen through infinite space through all eternity toward the entire physical universe.... Fluids contract when cooled and expand when heated,—yet there is the well known exception of water at the degree of freezing.” 263—“Things do not appear to be mathematical all the way through. The system of things may be a Life, changing its modes of manifestation according to immanent ideas, rather than a collection of rigid entities, blindly subject in a mechanical way to unchanging laws.”
Augustine: “Dei voluntas rerum natura est.” Joseph Cook: “The laws of nature are the habits of God.” But Campbell, Atonement, Introd., xxvi, says there is this difference between the laws of the moral universe and those of the physical, namely, that we do not trace the existence of the former to an act of will, as we do the latter. “To say that God has given existence to goodness, as he has to the laws of nature, would be equivalent to saying that he has given existence to himself.” Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 91—“Moral law, unlike natural law, is a standard of action to be adopted or rejected in the exercise of rational freedom, i. e., of moral agency.” See also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:531.