Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/279

Rh by law, taking the sacrament from the hands of each. At length it comes to pass that law seeks to turn religion out of doors. Politicians, intoxicated with ambition, giddy with power, and sometimes also drunk with strong drink, make a statute which outrages all the dictates of humanity, and then insist that it is the duty of sober men to renounce religion for the sake of keeping the wicked statute of the politicians. All tyrants have done so!

In the North, the majority of men think that the law of man is subordinate to religion—the statutes of man beneath the law of God; that as ethics, personal morals, are amenable to conscience, so politics, national morals, are amenable to the same conscience; and that religion has much to do with national as with individual life. Depend upon it, that idea is the safeguard of the State and of the law. It will preserve it, purify it, and keep it; but it will scourge every wicked law out of the temple of justice with iron whips, if need be. Depend, upon it, when we lose our hold of that idea, all hope of order is gone. But there is no danger; we are pretty well persuaded that the law of God is a little greater than the statute of an accidental president unintentionally chosen for four years. When we think otherwise, we may count our case hopeless, and give up all.

But with the controlling class of men it is not so. They tell us that we must keep any law, constitutional or not, legal or not, just or unjust: first, that we must submit passively, and let the government execute it; next, we must actively obey it, and with alacrity when called upon to execute it ourselves. This doctrine is the theory advanced in most of the newspapers of Boston. It is preached in some of the pulpits, though, thank God! not in all.

This doctrine appears in the charge of the judge of the Circuit Court to the grand jury. I believe that judge to be a good, and excellent, and honourable man; I never heard a word to the contrary, and I am glad to think that it is so. I have to deal only with his opinions, not with his theoretic doctrines of law, of which latter I profess to know nothing; but with the theoretic doctrines of