Untitled article by C. P. B.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · July 24, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 29

The Source of Civil Power.

By C. P. B.

THAT civil government is ordained of God is plainly taught in the Scriptures of truth; but that this is so in the sense contended for by National Reformers, namely, that governments are endowed with extraordinary rights and powers, rights and powers which do not grow out of the very conditions under which governments exist, which do not primarily belong to the people, but which come directly and specially to the government from God, is sustained neither by the testimony of inspiration, nor by the nature of man and the conditions under which he exists.

John Locke, the most profound moral philosopher of any age, shows plainly and incontrovertibly in his treatise on “Civil Government,” that every power which justly belongs to the State belongs first of all to the individual, and comes to the State from the individual. “God,” he says, “having made man such a creature, that, in his own judgment, it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong obligations of necessity, convenience, and inclination to drive him into society.” And it may properly be observed that in doing this, God ordained civil government as well as every other relation that grows out of the conditions under which man exists.

“The first society,” says Mr. Locke, “was between man and wife, which gave beginning to that between parents and children; to which, in time, that between master and servant came to be added; and although all these might, and commonly did meet together, and make up but one family, wherein the master or mistress of it had some sort of rule proper to a family; each of these, or all together, came short of political society. . . . Conjugal society is made by voluntary compact between man and woman. It draws with it mutual support and assistance, and a communion of interests too. . . . But the husband and wife, though

they have but one concern, yet having different understandings, will unavoidably sometimes have different wills too; it therefore being necessary that the last determination, i. e. the rule, should be placed somewhere; it naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and stronger. But this reaching but to the things of their common interest and property, leaves the wife in full and free possession of what by contract [or by nature] is her peculiar right, and gives the husband no more power over her life than she has over his.”

Again, on this very point, Mr. Locke remarks, that the power of the husband over the wife is so far from being absolute that she “has in many cases a liberty to separate from him; where natural right or their contract allows it.”

We do not understand by this that Mr. Locke denies that marriage is a divine institution, but that he asserts that it is entered into by agreement, and that the just powers of the husband are derived from the consent of the wife, which consent, together with compliance with whatever forms may be required by civil society, constitutes her his wife, and that the wife is under obligation to the husband only in that which natural right or their contract allows. The same he shows is true in civil society. He says: “Men being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one with another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties.” But that men will and must do this is made certain by the very fact that they are created social beings with equal rights; it follows, therefore, that in creating them thus and associating them together, God ordained that they should thus organize, therefore “the powers that be,” the civil powers, “are ordained of God.” This view of the matter preserves the perfect harmony which exists between the teaching of the Scriptures on one hand, and the nature of man and the facts of history on the other; while the National Reform theory arrays the Bible against facts as we know them to exist, and makes the Creator responsible for a great deal of very bad and tyrannical government. C. P. B.