An Essay on Professional Ethics | Page 2

sense of a creator of law, whose will
alone determines the boundaries of right and wrong. God is the creator
of the beings who are the subjects of law. He is the author of law--the
one lawgiver--in the same sense that he, who first discovered a plain
figure, may be said to be the author of all theorems, which may be
predicated of it. He who first called attention to the curious curve, made
by a point in the periphery of a wheel as it turns on the ground, is in a
certain sense the discoverer of all the truths, which may be
mathematically demonstrated in respect to it.
Law in its true sense is not the work of mere will--not an act of
intellectual caprice. It is a severe and necessary deduction from the
relations of things. The Divine legislator sees and knows these relations
perfectly. He can draw no wrong deduction from them. He can make no
mistake. Whatever laws have certainly emanated from Him are
certainly right. This is the sense in which it is true that "there is one
Lawgiver:" all others but attempt the work; He alone is competent to
perform it. There is no mathematical certainty in our reasoning on
moral as there is on physical relations. We know that the three angles
of a triangle are equal to two right angles with an assurance we can
never have in regard to any moral truth whatever. The Divine law is a
deduction necessarily and mathematically certain as much so as any
truth in geometry. Human law can aim only at such a probable
deduction as results from a finite and imperfect knowledge.
The system of law delivered by Moses to the Jews deserves, therefore,
the most careful study at the hands of all who believe him to have been
a divinely commissioned lawgiver. These laws were not intended for
any other people than the Israelites; they were adapted to their
circumstances, climate, country, neighbors, to the period of the world
when they were promulgated, and during which they were to prevail.
They were certainly not meant as a model for any other form of
government, for any other people, or for any other time. Many laws are
to be found there which are unnecessary and superfluous if applied
elsewhere. Many actions, innocent in themselves, are prohibited. All
the mala prohibita are not mala in se. But one thing is as clear as a

sunbeam, and that is a very important light to the student of Ethics; if
God was the author of these laws, nothing morally wrong was
commanded or allowed by them. When it was said of the Jews through
the prophet, "I gave them statutes which were not good," it cannot
mean not morally good; laws which it would be sinful in them to obey.
The word in the original is not the word appropriated in that language
to right, conformity to rule, but to goodness in its most general sense.
Good statutes mean wise and expedient statutes. By no process can the
logical mind be brought to the conclusion that the perfectly wise and
good lawgiver, in framing a code of laws for any people, would impose
as a punishment "for the hardness of their hearts," a penalty,
submission to which would itself be punishable as a sin against the law
of nature. He might command or allow as such punishment what in
itself was inexpedient and injurious to them, and which upon the
promulgation of a new law repealing the old and prohibiting what it
allowed, would become by the sanction of the same lawgiver
thenceforth universally malum prohibitum. The authority of God as a
lawgiver is certainly not confined to a mere declaration of what is right
or wrong by the law of Nature.
There can be no merely arbitrary laws. It is necessary to bear in mind
that we are now considering the province of the legislator, who ought
to enact no law without an end. "Civil legislative power," says
Rutherforth (B. II, c. vi, s. 10), "is not in the strict sense of the word an
absolute power of restraining or altering the rights of the subjects: it is
limited in its own nature to its proper objects, to those rights only in
which the common good of the society or of its several parts requires
some restraint or alteration. So that whenever we call the civil
legislative power, either of society in general or of a particular
legislative body within any society, an absolute legislative power, we
can only mean that it has no external check upon it in fact; for all civil
legislative power is in its own nature under an internal check of right: it
is a power of restraining or altering the rights of