‘I have always been most obedient when most taxed with disobedience. But my right hand is not the right hand of Melinda. The right I revere is not the right adored by sycophants, the jus vagum, the capricious command of princes or ministers. I follow the law of God (which is laid down by him for the rule of my conduct) when I follow the laws of human nature: which, without any testimony, we know must proceed from God, and upon these are founded the rights of man, or what is ordered for man.’
On this passage I will observe that I think it would be difficult for Mr. Tooke himself to find a more precious instance of unmeaning jargon in the writings of any school-divine. Mr. Tooke first pretends gravely to define the essence of law and just from the etymology of those words, by saying that they are something laid down and something ordered; and when pressed by the difficulty that there are many things laid down and many things ordered which are neither ‘law’ nor ‘just,’ makes answer that their obligation depends on a higher species of law and justice, to wit, a law which is no where laid down, and a justice which is no where ordered, except indeed by the nature of things, on which the etymology of these two words does not seem to throw much light. At one time, it seems quite demonstrable that the essence of all law, right, and justice consists in its being ordered or communicated by words: the very idea is absurd, unless we conceive of it as some thing either spoken or written in a book; and yet the very next moment this fastidious reasoner sets up the unwritten, uncommunicated law of God, which he says must conform to the laws of human nature, as the rule of his conduct, and as paramount to all other positive orders and commands whatever. What is this original law of God or nature, which Mr. Tooke sets up as the rule of right? Is it the good of the whole, or self-interest? Is it the voice of reason, or conscience, or the moral sense? Here then we have to set out afresh in our pursuit, and to grope our way as well as we can through the old labyrinth of morality, divinity, and metaphysics. This new-invented patent lamp of etymology goes out just as it is beginning to grow dark, and as the path becomes intricate.
Neither can I at all see why our author should quarrel with M. Portalis for using these words in their common sense. He affirms that the whole of this gentleman’s speech is a piece of wretched mummery, that his distinction between what is right and what is commanded is a senseless ambiguity, and that explanation would undo him. Yet he himself, two pages after, discovers that this distinction has a real meaning in it, and that he has acted upon it all his life. ‘The one,’ he says, ‘is the jus vagum, the capricious command of princes; the other is the law of God and nature.’ It is not impossible but M. Portalis might have given quite as profound an explanation of his own meaning. Junius’s sarcasm did not, it seems, entirely cure Mr. Tooke ‘of the little sneering sophistries of a collegian.’
Mr. Tooke next makes strange havoc with a whole host of metaphysical agents; like Sir Richard Blackmore,
‘Undoes creation at a jerk,
And of redemption makes damn’d work.’
‘Rebelling angels, the forbidden tree,
Heaven, hell, earth, chaos, all’—
are weighed in the balance and found wanting. We cannot say with Marvell, that the argument
‘Holds us a while misdoubting his intent,