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NO PENALTY

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 28, 1878

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 52, No. 22.

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“NO PENALTY.”

By M. H. Brown

It is urged that the ten commandments are not a law, because they have no penalty attached to them. The argument is this: All law must have a penalty; and as the ten commandments have no penalty, only as connected with other portions of the Old Testament, they do not constitute a law in any proper or legal sense. Hence, when the law is mentioned it must include the penalties; and as those penalties are not now enforced by divine authority, it therefore follows that the law is null and void—a dead letter. The ten commandments cannot be classed as common or statute law. They are in their nature primary, fundamental, or constitutional law, which does not have fines and penalties directly attached, but is enforced by appropriate legislation. Such is the nature of constitutional law, as any one can ascertain by consulting the Constitution of the United States and its amendments.
The ten commandments are the constitution of God’s moral government, and were made the constitution of the commonwealth of Israel, being enforced by appropriate legislation.
The ten words, or articles, of the constitution were separated from all other law, and sacredly guarded, and special honor was conferred upon them, showing that they were different in their nature from other law. As we find those commandments interspersed in the Old Testament, we find the penalties attached to their violation, that is, the appropriate legislation which enforced them; and sweeping away, or destroying, the statute laws and temporary penalties of that dispensation would leave the Constitution just as complete and inviolate as the Constitution of the United States would be if every law of Congress was abolished to-morrow.
Christ and the apostles enforced God’s law in this dispensation by appropriate legislation. They made the keeping of those commandments the condition of entering into life. They taught that sin is the transgression of the law, and that the wages of sin is death. Thus this seemingly plausible argument vanishes before plain and undeniable facts. M. H. BROWN.