Christian Theology - Media Sabda Org

holiness, omniscience, and omnipotence—has been derived. And it has
been the origin whence all the true principles of law and justice have been
derived. The pious study of it was the grand means of producing the
greatest kings, the most enlightened statesmen, the most accomplished
poets, and the most holy and useful men that ever adorned the world. It
is exceeded only by the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is at once the
accomplishment of its rites and predictions, and the fulfilment of its
grand plan and outline. As a system of teaching or instruction, it is the
most sovereign and most effectual; as by it is the knowledge of sin; and
it alone is the schoolmaster that leads men to Christ, that they may be
justified through faith, Gal. iii, 24. Who can absolutely ascertain the exact
quantum of obliquity in a crooked line, without the application of a
straight one? And could sin, in all its twistings, windings, and varied
involutions, have ever been truly ascertained, had not God given to man
this perfect rule to judge by? The nations who acknowledge this
revelation of God have, as far as they attend to its dictates, the wisest,
purest, most equal, and most beneficial laws. The nations that do not
receive it have laws at once extravagantly severe and extravagantly
indulgent. The proper distinctions between moral good and evil, in such
states, are not known: hence the penal sanctions are not founded on the
principles of justice, weighing the exact proportion of moral turpitude;
but on the most arbitrary caprices, which in many cases show the utmost
indulgence to first-rate crimes, while they punish minor offences with
rigour and cruelty. What is the consequence? Just what might be
reasonably expected: the will and caprice of man being put in the place
of the wisdom of God, the government is oppressive, and the people,
frequently goaded to distraction, rise up in a mass and overturn it; so that
the monarch, however powerful for a time, seldom lives out half his days.
This was the case in Greece, in Rome, in the major part of the Asiatic
governments, and is the case in all nations of the world to the present day,
where the government is despotic, and the laws not formed according to
the revelation of God.
The word lex, "law," among the Romans, has been derived from lego,
"I read," because when a law or statute was made, it was hung up in the