Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the [[141]]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.
King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,” i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.
The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium, [[142]]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”
The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
C.—PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its [[143]]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a [[144]]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the [[145]]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; the Faust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.