p. 8 | THE DEIFICATION OF LAW

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 36.

THE DEIFICATION OF LAW.

IN the city of Yonkers, New York, not long ago, as our readers will remember, it was decided that it was all right for men of wealth to play golf on Sunday. It happened soon afterward in that city that some boys, not comprehending the religious difference between golf and baseball, indulged in the latter game on Sunday. They were arrested, and at their trial Judge Kellogg, in his charge to the jury, said:—

This is no test case, and will settle nothing more than if the defendants were burglars. The highest court of the State has decided the legality of the Sunday law. If the law is too severe, the Legislature can change it, but you can not. There is no dispute of the fact that the boys were playing ball as charged. It is not necessary that the acts complained of be of a noisy nature. I therefore charge you that the acts committed by the defendants in this case constitute a violation of the law.

This position is indorsed by the Buffalo News, which says:—

The judge’s charge rests entirely upon the sacredness of a legal enactment. The law is above everything. The legality of the Sunday law had been passed upon by the highest court of the State, and being declared sound in law and fact, the judge says the law must be obeyed; nor does it matter if the breaking of the law was of a noisy nature or not; it is sufficient that the law stands properly upon the statute book to make it paramount and just.

This is in the highest degree the fulfilment of popular obedience to the will of the people, the foundation of the rule of the republic, which makes obedience to the voice of the people the first duty of freemen.

Judge Kellogg has given a righteous decision, and one that all lovers of the republican institutions and form of government should defend.

“The law is above everything,” is it? Then good-by to right and justice. Good-by to progress in government. If the law is above everything, nothing ought ever to change it; and once upon the statute book, it should stand forever and be forever enforced. And this is true of all laws that have been in the past as much as of any that exist now. All past laws that were overthrown in the march of human progress toward better government ought to have stood. Their overthrow was a crime against “the sacredness of a legal enactment.” Such logic would have kept the world forever in the Dark Ages, for the laws of that period possessed this same kind of “sacredness.” Then, as now, it was asserted that “the law is above everything.”

This was what the Jews said when they crucified Jesus Christ. “We have a law,” they shouted, “and by our law He ought to die!” And the law was “above everything,” and Jesus had to come under it.

But the Jews discovered later on that there was something greater than their law, and the man who now asserts that the law is above everything will sometime discover that there is something higher than the authority of human enactments. He will discover that right is above the law; and this is but

to say that he will discover that a just God is above everything else.

The law is human, and the deification of the law means the deification of fallen humanity, and that means the setting up of human despotism and human slavery. There is no man so good but that, entrusted with too much power and accorded too much glory, he will use them selfishly, which means despotically. Not law, but right, is above everything.—Sentinel of Liberty.