UNWORTHY ARGUMENTS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 20, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 51.

UNWORTHY ARGUMENTS.

THE New Voice has a department which it calls "Forts of Folly." In this, from week to week, the editor sets up various fortresses, in words, imaginary and otherwise, for the purpose of demolishing them. One of these forts in a recent number is, "You can't make men moral by law," and two of the editor's fusillades upon this fort are: "No! but you can make immoral men less respectable, and therefore less influential, by law." "You can make morality respectable by law." The reply is a boomerang in the hands of an unskilled thrower. It is as likely to hit him as the fort. Morality in the Christian sense is conformity to God's law, agreement with God. It exists in the heart and the motive; so it is, of course, true that "you can't make men moral by law." Men must voluntarily choose to be moral. But there are thousands of men living humanly "respectable" lives, church-members in good standing, who are covetous, and are therefore immoral, the Bible says guilty of idolatry. There are laws which are wholly in the interest of covetous (immoral) men. Of course, also, they will abide by the law. Does this make them less respectable? If a man transgress such a law, he is adjudged guilty of crime. Does such a law make "morality respectable"?

A Sunday-closing law passed by the "moral and respectable" portion of a community clearly implies that it is legitimate to sell intoxicating liquors on six days of the week, and the saloon-keeper who abides by the law is counted "respectable." According to the same law it is wrong to sell liquor on Sunday; the man who does it is "less respectable and therefore less influential, by law." Yet, after all, there may be more real principle in the latter than in the former. The man who closes his saloon does so to a bogus respectability and public influence, while the man who sells all days knows that liquor sold on Monday is just as bad, just as evil in its consequences, as liquor sold on Sunday.

"Right law" may help to make criminality less respectable; but it is not the object of law to make men right. Civil law has only two objects—keeping men civil, and protecting all men in their natural rights. When it gets outside of these it becomes a weapon of evil, a shuttlecock of politics.

All the great religious persecutions of the past have been carried on under the cover of civil law, designed to make "morality" "respectable and "immoral men less respectable." "We have a law, and by our law He ought to die," said a "respectable" member of society concerning Jesus of Nazareth.

Let prohibition, as it may, find a basis for its existence in law on a better foundation.