Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/69

Rh of right, and objectively to right itself—to conscience and to God.

As the individuals, all, the majority, or some controlling men, come to social self-consciousness, they express these natural laws, or their notion thereof, in certain rules of social conduct. They say, “This shall all men do, for it is right; that shall no man do, for it is wrong. The nation makes its social resolutions, social statutes, in its act of prayer; for legislation is to the State what prayer is to the man—often an act of penitence, of sorrow, of fear, and yet of faith, hope, and love. When it rises higher it revises and makes better rules of conduct: they derive all their objective and real value from their conformity with the law of God; all their subjective and apparent value from their conformity with the nation's notion thereof. The only thing which makes it right, and a social moral duty for society, or any of its members, to keep these social statutes, is that they are right, or thought so. In the progress of society, its rules of conduct get revised a good many times: now it is done by gradual, peaceful development—now by sudden and stormy revolutions, when society is penitent for the sin of the past, and in great anxiety and concern of mind through fear of the future. These social statutes are only provisional, to help men climb up to the purpose of social life. They are all amenable subjectively to the notion of right; objectively to right itself—to the conscience of the individuals and to God.

Then society appoints officers whose special conventional function is to see to the execution of these social rules of conduct. They are legally amenable to the rules of conduct they are to carry out, socially amenable to the community that appoints them, individually amenable to their own conscience and to God.

To sum up all this in one formula: officers are conventionally amenable to society; society, with its officers and its rules of conduct, amenable to the purpose of society; the design of individual life, to the individuals that compose it; individuals, with their rules of conduct, amenable each to his own conscience; and all to the law of the universe, to the Eternal Right, which represents the conscience of God. So far as society is right, government