A State Without a Law

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 21, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 28.

“A State Without a Law”

WHAT would occur if the world to-day was without law? if all the laws were swept away with one dire act of international and world-wide legislation and decree? Every thinking mind would make answer at once in one word, “Chaos.” Yes, it would be chaos, confusion, and a carnival of crime if there were law to define it. Chaos, we are told, reigns in the “Empire state,” the great commonwealth of New York, especially among the lawyers. The people generally do not know that law is abolished; they suppose the same laws in force which have been for years. They go on in the same way, as do all the officials, carrying out the old forms just as tho they were law. They do not know what else to do.

The facts are these: A bill was passed last winter, signed by Governor Hughes, Feb. 17, 1909, consolidating all general statutes in the state. In 1904 a Board of Statutory Consolidation had been constituted by law, consisting of four very able lawyers. These men served without pay in “directing and controlling the simplification, arrangement, and consolidation” of the General Statutes of the state. Their work extended as far back as 1778, a period of 130 years. The report of five years’ labor consisted of six large tomes of 7,000 pages. It was rushed through, of course. The New York World says:

“Every law affecting property, corporations, real estate, wills, municipalities, excise, railroads, copartnership and the thousand and one interests and businesses which compose the life and machinery of the state, existing on or before Feb. 17, 1909, was repealed by the Consolidated Laws act, whether it had been on the statute books since 1778 or whether it was but a year or a day old. Not only that, but the entire Penal Code of the state was abolished, and a fifth of the Code of Civil Procedure, more than 600 sections out of some 3,000, was wiped out.”

Of course, it is understood that the consolidated code is the law, but it is unobtainable. In the words of Prof. H. Gerald Chapin, of Fordham University, New York: “To all intents and purposes this state to-day is a state without laws. The laws are there, ‘true enough, and far too many of them when all is said and done, but of what use are laws which no man can know?”

Surely, this is bad enough, and all will probably admit that it was a colossal blunder to provide that the new consolidated-law statute should go into immediate effect on the signature of the governor. Time should have been given for the promulgation of the new code.

Yet men will accuse God of a more egregious blunder than this. They would teach us that His great and all-comprehensive fundamental law of the Decalogue was in force till John came (so one class teach) and was then abolished, and the new law comes to us three and one half years later, this side the Crucifixion. Others teach that the whole system of law in operation among the Jews was swept away at the Crucifixion, and that the new law was given on the day of Pentecost, in Romans 13, and elsewhere. In other words, nine of the ten precepts of the Decalogue were reenacted from time to time during a period of from fifty days to thirty years subsequent to the Crucifixion. For a period, then, there was no law. God had abdicated His throne, so to speak. There was therefore no sin during this time; for “sin is the transgression of the law;” “by the law is the knowledge of sin;” “sin is not imputed when there is no law;” and “where no law is, there is no transgression.” 1 John 3:4; Rom. 3:20; 5:12; 4:15.

In other words, men represent God as abolishing the law which convicts of sin, leaving mankind sinless, and yet permitting His Son to die to save men from sins which did not exist. It is no wonder that confusion and chaos exist among those who hold to such theories.

Would you be saved from chaos in the moral world, reader? Know then that God is not man that He should thus blunder; that His laws are not so involved that they must be recodified or consolidated or reconstructed; that His great, moral, fundamental law is eternal like Himself, unchangeable like His own character, unrepealable, perfect; that every soul is subject to its claims; that it holds every transgressor under its condemnation; that it witnesses to the perfection and genuineness of every one forgiven in Christ Jesus.

The great commonwealth of New York through the blunders of finite man may be “a state without a law,” but the government of God is absolutely perfect and eternally unchangeable. Well does Jehovah say of such, by the psalmist: “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself; but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.” See Ps. 50:17-22.