"31st Degree - Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander (Inspector Inquisitor)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

No doubt all these varied phenomena are consistent with one great law of justice; and the only difficulty is that we do not, and no doubt we cannot, understand that law. It is very easy for some dreaming and visionary theorist to say that it is most evidently unjust for the lion to devour the deer, and for the eagle to tear and eat the wren; but the trouble is, that we know of no other way, according to the frame, the constitution, and the organs which God has given them, in which the lion and the eagle could manage to live at all. Our little measure of justice is not God's measure.

His justice does not require us to relieve the hard working millions of all labour, to emancipate the serf or slave, unfitted to be free, from all control.

No doubt, underneath all the little bubbles, which are the lives, the wishes, the wills, and the plans of the two thousand millions or more of human beings on this earth (for bubbles they are,
judging by the space and time they occupy in this great and age-outlasting sea of human-kind), no doubt, underneath them all resides one and the same eternal force, which they shape into this or the other special form; and over all the same paternal Providence presides, keeping eternal watch over the little and the great, and producing variety of effect from Unity of Force.

It is entirely true to say that justice is the constitution or fundamental law of the moral Universe, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man (as it is for every other living creature), in all his moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like all other affairs), must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is right agrees therewith and stands, while what is wrong conflicts with it and falls. The difficulty is that we ever erect our notions of what is right and just into the law of justice, and insist that God shall adopt that as His law; instead of striving to learn by observation and reflection what His law is, and then believing that law to be consistent with His infinite justice, whether it corresponds with our limited notion of justice, or does not so correspond. We are too wise in our own conceit, and ever strive to enact our own little notions into the Universal Laws of God.

It might be difficult for man to prove, even to his own satisfaction, how it is right or just for him to subjugate the horse and ox to his service, giving them in return only their daily food, which God has spread out for them on all the green meadows and savannas of the world: or how it is just that we should slay and eat the harmless deer that only crops the green herbage, the
buds, and the young leaves, and drinks the free-running water that God made common to all; or the gentle dove, the innocent kid, the many other living things that so confidently trust to our
protection; quite as difficult, perhaps, as to prove it just for one man's intellect or even his wealth to make another's strong arms his servants, for daily wages or for a bare subsistence.

To find out this universal law of justice is one thing to undertake to measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call that God's law of justice, is another. The great general plan and system, and the great general laws enacted by God, continually produce what to our limited notions is wrong and injustice, which hitherto men have been able to explain to their own satisfaction only by the hypothesis of another existence in which all inequalities and injustices in this life will be remedied and compensated for. To our ideas of justice, it is very unjust that the child is made miserable for life by deformity or organic disease, in consequence of the vices of its father; and yet that is part of the universal law. The ancients said that the child was
punished for the sins of its father. We say that this its deformity or disease is the consequence of its father's vices; but so far as concerns the question of justice or injustice, that is merely the
change of a word.

It is very easy to lay down a broad, general principle, embodying our own idea of what is absolute justice, and to insist that everything shall conform to that to say, "all human affairs must be subject to that as the law paramount; what is right agrees therewith and stands, what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, must all be subordinate to this universal gravitation toward the eternal right." The difficulty is that this Universe of necessities God-created, of sequences of cause and effect, and of life evolved
from death, this interminable succession and aggregate of cruelties, will not conform to any such absolute principle or arbitrary theory, no matter in what sounding words and glittering
phrases it may be embodied.

Impracticable rules in morals are always injurious; for as all men fall short of compliance with them, they turn real virtues into imaginary offenses against a forged law. Justice as between man and man and as between man and the animals below him, is that which, under and according to the God-created relations existing between them, and the whole aggregate of circumstances surrounding them, is fit and right and proper to be done, with a view to the general as well as to the individual interest. It is not a theoretical principle by which the very relations that God has created and imposed on us are to be tried, and approved or condemned.

God has made this great system of the Universe, and enacted general laws for its government. Those laws environ everything that lives with a mighty network of necessity. He chose to create the tiger with such organs that he cannot crop the grass, but must eat other flesh or starve. He has made man carnivorous also; and some of the smallest birds are as much so as the tiger. In every step we take, in every breath we draw, is involved the destruction of a multitude of animate existences, each, no matter how minute, as much a living creature as ourself. He has made necessary among mankind a division of labour, intellectual and moral. He has made necessary the varied relations of society and dependence, of obedience and control.

What is thus made necessary cannot be unjust; for if it be, then God the great Lawgiver is Himself unjust. The evil to be avoided is, the legalization of injustice and wrong under the false plea of necessity. Out of all the relations of life grow duties, as naturally grow and as undeniably, as the leaves grow upon the trees. If we have the right, created by God's law of necessity, to
slay the lamb that we may eat and live, we have no right to torture it in doing so, because that is in no wise necessary. We have the right to live, if we fairly can, by the legitimate exercise of our intellect, and hire or buy the labour of the strong arms of others, to till our grounds, to dig in our mines, to toil in our manufactories; but we have no right to overwork or underpay them.

It is not only true that we may learn the moral law of justice, the law of right, by experience and observation; but that God has given us a moral faculty, our conscience, which is able to perceive this law directly and immediately, by intuitive perception of it; and it is true that man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than what he has ever yet come up to, an ideal of nature that shames his actual of history; because man has ever been prone to make necessity, his own necessity, the necessities of society, a plea for injustice. But this notion must not be pushed too far for if we substitute this ideality for actuality, then it is equally true that we have within us an ideal rule of right and wrong, to which God Himself in His government of the world has never come, and against which He (we say it reverentially) every day offends. We detest the tiger and the wolf for the rapacity and love of blood which are their nature; we revolt against the law by which the crooked limbs and diseased organism of the child are the fruits of the father's vices; we even think that a God Omnipotent and Omniscient ought to have permitted no pain, no poverty, no servitude; our ideal of justice is more lofty than the actualities of God. It is well, as all else is well. He has given us that moral sense for wise and beneficent purposes. We accept it as a significant proof of the inherent loftiness of human nature, that it can entertain an ideal so exalted; and should strive to attain it, as far as we can do so consistently with the relations which He has created, and the circum.stances which surround us and hold us captive.

If we faithfully use this faculty of conscience; if, applying it to the existing relations and circumstances, we develop it and all its kindred powers, and so deduce the duties that out of these relations and those circumstances, and limited and qualified by them, arise and become obligatory upon us, then we learn justice, the law of right, the divine rule of conduct for human life. But if we undertake to define and settle "the mode of action that belongs to the infinitely perfect nature of God," and so set up any ideal rule, beyond all human reach, we soon come to judge and condemn His work and the relations which it has pleased Him in His infinite wisdom to create.

A sense of justice belongs to human nature, and is a part of it. Men find a deep, permanent, and instinctive delight in justice, not only in the outward effects, but in the inward cause, and by their nature love this law of right, this reasonable rule of conduct, this justice, with a deep and abiding love. Justice is the object of the conscience, and fits it as light fits the eye and truth the mind.

Justice keeps just relations between men. It holds the balance between nation and nation, between a man and his family, tribe, nation, and race, so that his absolute rights and theirs do not interfere, nor their ultimate interests ever clash, nor the eternal interests of the one prove antagonistic to those of all or of any other one. This we must believe, if we believe that God is just. We must do justice to all, and demand it of all; it is a universal human debt, a universal human claim. But we may err greatly in defining what that justice is. The temporary interests, and what to human view are the rights, of men, do often interfere and clash.

The life-interests of the individual often conflict with the permanent interests and welfare of society; and what may seem to be the natural rights of one class or race, with those of another.

It is not true to say that "one man, however little, must not be sacrificed to another, however great, to a majority, or to all men." That is not only a fallacy, but a most dangerous one. Often
one man and many men must be sacrificed, in the ordinary sense of the term, to the interest of the many. It is a comfortable fallacy to the selfish; for if they cannot, by the law of justice, be
sacrificed for the common good, then their country has no right to demand of them self-sacrifice; and he is a fool who lays down his life, or sacrifices his estate, or even his luxuries, to insure the safety or prosperity of his country. According to that doctrine, Curtius was a fool, and Leonidas an idiot; and to die for one's country is no longer beautiful and glorious, but a mere absurdity.

Then it is no longer to be asked that the common soldier shall receive in his bosom the sword or bayonet-thrust which otherwise would let out the life of the great commander on whose fate hang the liberties of his country, and the welfare of millions yet unborn.

On the contrary, it is certain that necessity rules in all the affairs of men, and that the interest and even the life of one man must often be sacrificed to the interest and welfare of his country. Some must ever lead the forlorn hope: the missionary must go among savages, bearing his life in his hand; the physician must expose himself to pestilence for the sake of others; the sailor, in
the frail boat upon the wide ocean, escaped from the foundering or burning ship, must step calmly into the hungry waters, if the lives of the passengers can be saved only by the sacrifice of his own; the pilot must stand firm at the wheel, and let the flames scorch away his own life to insure the common safety of those whom the doomed vessel bears.

The mass of men are always looking for what is just. All the vast machinery which makes up a State, a world of States, is, on the part of the people, an attempt to organize, not that ideal justice which finds fault with God's ordinances, but that practical justice which may be attained in the actual organization of the world. The minute and wide-extending civil machinery which makes up the law and the courts, with all their officers and implements, on the part of mankind, is chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory of right. Constitutions are made to establish justice; the decisions of courts are reported to help us judge more wisely in time to come. The nation aims to get together the most nearly just men in the State, that they may incorporate into statutes their aggregate sense of what is right. The people wish law to be
embodied justice, administered without passion. Even in the wildest ages there has been a wild popular justice, but always mixed with passion and administered in hate; for justice takes a rude form with rude men, and becomes less mixed with hate and passion in more civilized communities. Every progressive State revises its statutes and revolutionizes its constitution from time to time, seeking to come closer to the utmost possible practical justice and right; and