Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 3 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 3 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
The next is derivative therefrom, Righteousness in the Establishments of
the People. Under this name I include three things, namely,
institutions, constitutions, and statutes. Institutions are certain
modes of operation, certain social, ecclesiastical, or political
contrivances for doing certain things. Thus an agricultural club is a
social institution to help farming; a private school is a social
institution for educating its pupils; a church is an ecclesiastical
institution for the promotion of religion; an aristocracy is a political
institution for governing all the people by means of a few, and for the
sake of a few; a congress of senators and representatives is a
legislative institution for making statutes; a jury of twelve men is a
judicial institution to help execute the statutes; universal suffrage is
a democratic institution for ruling the State.
Constitutions are fundamental rules of conduct for the nation, made by
the highest human authority in the land, and only changeable thereby,
determining what institutions shall be allowed, how administered, by
whom and in what manner statutes shall be made.
Statutes are particular rules of conduct to regulate the action of man
with man, of individuals with the State, and of the State with
individuals.
Statutes are amenable to the constitutions; the constitutions to the
institutions; they to the people; all subjectively to the conscience of
the individual, and objectively to the conscience of God.
Establishments are the machinery which a people contrives wherewith to
carry out its ideas of the right or the expedient. In the present state
of mankind, they are indispensable to accomplish the purpose of
individual life. There are indeed a few men who for their good conduct,
after they are mature, require no human laws whatever. They regulate
themselves by their idea of right, by their love of truth, of justice,
of man and God. They see the law of God so clear that they need no
prohibitive statutes to restrain them from wrong. They will not lie nor
steal, though no statutes forbid, and all other men both lie and steal;
not if the statutes command falsehood and theft. These men are saints.
The wealth of Athens could not make Aristides unjust. Were all men like
Jesus of Nazareth, statutes forbidding wrong would be as needless as
sails to a shark, a balloon to a swallow, or a railroad to the lightning
of heaven. This is always a small class of men, but one that continually
increases. We all look to the time when this will include all men. No
man expects to find law books and courts in the kingdom of heaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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