Many lines of evidence from the side of reason converge on the Biblical teaching that civil government is a divine institution. Perhaps one of the most striking features of our later American growth is the colossal selfishness of our people. The habit of freedom from restraint is fast hardening into a lawlessness of character. * * * * * Listen to some of the palliating expressions with which our legal atmosphere is permeated: "indiscreet and untactful," "the unwritten law," "swift justice," "murder a fine art," and remember that these are the terms that play around that triangle of corrupt judge, dallying lawyer, and bribed and illiterate jury--all conspiring to "shove by justice" with technicalities. And what are those sinister figures, flitting and stalking through the land--the law-maker with his spoils, the rioter with his rock, the anarchist with his bomb, the assassin thrusting out his black hand, the lyncher with his battering ram, his rope and his rifle; these are some of the outside lawless who conspire with the inside lawless to make a scarecrow of American law, making it the perch and not the terror of the birds of prey. And who knows how soon all of these lawless ones may stand up together and, with a monarch's voice cry, Havoc in the confines of this Republic! * * * * * But we must be conscious of our Heavenly Father behind the earthly type. This unmistakably is the significance of the Biblical words: "To obey your parents in the Lord"; "To be obedient unto your masters as unto Christ"; "To fear God in honoring the face of the old man"; "To be subject unto rulers as the ministers of God." And this leads us to the great levelling truth, that we are all equally accountable to our Heavenly Father, that we are nations and individuals, in the high thought of Lincoln, "Under God." * * * * * This command carries with it the promise of a reward restated by Paul, "Honor thy father and thy mother that it may be well with thee and that thou mayest live long on the earth." In fact this is the logic of life. This retributive justice is bound up in the laws of nature. Plants that array themselves against these laws wither and die. And higher up in the animal kingdom, Kipling's verse tells us that this inexorable sequence prevails: "And these are the laws of the Jungle, And many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the law is, And the haunch and the hump is--obey." And it is true that obedience in a human being conduces to a long and prosperous life. The beautiful truth is gradually emerging in science and theology that religion is healthful. As one of my discerning fathers was often wont to say, "The whole Bible is a text-book of Advanced Biology, telling men how they may gain the fuller life." * * * * *