Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/70

66 right, statutes right, officers right, all may justly demand obedience from each: for though society, government, statutes, and officers, are mere human affairs, as much so as farms, fences, top-dressing, and reapers, and are as provisional as they; yet right is Divine, is of God, not merely provisional and for to-day, but absolute and for eternity. So, then, the moral duty to respect the government, to keep the statutes, to obey the officers, is all resolvable into the moral duty of respecting the integrity of my own nature, of keeping the eternal law of nature, of obeying God. If government, statutes, officers, command me to do right, I must do it, not because commanded, but because it is right; if they command me to do wrong, I must refuse, not because commanded, but because it is wrong. There is a constitution of the universe: to keep that is to preserve the union between man and man, between man and God. To do right is to keep this constitution: that is loyalty to God. To keep my notion of it is loyalty to my own soul. To be false to my notion thereof is treason against my own nature: to be false to that constitution is treason against God. The constitution of the niverse is not amenable to men: that is the law of God, the higher law, the constant mode of action of the Infinite Father of all. In that He lives, and moves, and has His being.

It is now easy to see what are the safeguards of society, the things which promote the end and aim of society—the development of the body and spirit of all men after their law—and thus help attain the purpose of individual life. I will mention three of these safeguards, in the order of their importance.

First of all is Righteousness in the People: a religious deterinination to keep the law of God at all hazards; a sacred and inflexible reverence for right; a determined habit of fidelity each to his own conscience. This, of course, implies a hatred of wrong; a religious and determined habit of disobeying and resisting everything which contradicts the law of God—of disobeying what is false to this and our conscience. There is no safeguard for society without this. It is to man what impenetrability, with the other primary qualities, is to matter. All must begin