State command versus individual moral duty: The eternal tension between law and conscience

“ In matters internal to a state, the bare existence of a law imposes an obligation upon the individual citizen, whatever his personal conviction of its rightfulness or its wisdom. Yet is such obligation not absolute. The primary duty, attested alike by the law and the gospel, is submission. ”

“ The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. ”

“ Then, too, one must point out that all principles on which judges are to judge, and citizens are to live, will be thrown into confusion if the laws are once departed from; for the judges will not have any rules to follow, if they depart from what is set down in the law, and no principles on which they can reprove others for having acted in defiance of the law. ”

“ Explicit divine law regulates all the particulars of the one class of duties; the particulars of the other class of duties are left to human law, or the regulations of human society.
But this latter class of duties, that is, our social duties, are not left to the individual judgment or independent choice of men, in such a sense, that they may obey or disobey human government just as they please. Not in the least. Human government is by the divine will. Obedience to it is obligatory upon men, by the will and law of God. ”

“ Conscience! thou divine instinct, thou certain guide of an ignorant and confined, though intelligent and free being;—thou infallible judge of good and evil, who makest man to resemble the Deity. In thee consist the excellence of our nature and the morality of our actions. Without thee I perceive nothing in myself that should elevate me above the brutes, except the melancholy privilege of wandering from error to error by the assistance of an ill-regulated understanding and undisciplined reason. ”

“ The allegiance of conscience is to God. It enforces obedience to all human laws consistent with that allegiance; further than this it can not by possibility go. And as the decisions of conscience are, by the constitution of our nature, determined by our own apprehensions of the moral law, and not by authority, it follows of necessity that every man must judge for himself, and on his own responsibility, whether any given law of man conflicts with the law of God or not. ”

“ A bad law is to be obeyed for the sake of order; an immoral law is to be disobeyed for the sake of the individual conscience; and of the moral character of a particular law, or of action under it, the individual conscience is the only legitimate judge. Where the law of the land and absolute right are at variance, the citizen is bound, not only to withhold obedience, but to avow his belief, and to give it full expression in every legitimate form and way, by voice and pen, by private influence and through the ballot-box. ”

“ If we would make men religious and moral, instead of merely cute, let us place God before them; let us teach them that his will is the ground of their obligations; that they are responsible to him for all their acts; that their allegiance as moral agents is not to reason or to society, but to the heart-searching God; that the obligation to obey the laws of the land does not rest on their consent to them, but to the fact government is of God; that those who resist the magistrate, resist the ordinance of God, and that they who resist, shall receive unto themselves damnation. ”

“ A single decision by the ultimate authority in favor of a law, is a revelation to the whole body of the people that it can not be violated with impunity. The sword of justice hangs over every transgressor. The motive of fear in securing obedience, is therefore, as operative under this view of the subject, as it can be under any other. What, however, is of far more consequence, the power of conscience is left in full force. Obedience to the law is a religious duty, enjoined by the word of God and enforced by conscience. ”

“ Though there is an excess of legislation, it is not generally true that the individual citizen is burdened in his daily life by a multitude of laws;
(c) Lawmakers today are not more irreligious than the pagan rulers to whom the scriptures commanded obedience; and, even though they do not themselves believe in religion or the obligation of conscience, they do intend to give their laws every sanction that the common good requires, and thus implicitly they impose a moral obligation wherever the contrary is not manifest ”

“ The love of liberty is a noble passion—to have the free, uncontrolled disposition of ourselves, our words and actions. But alas! it is one in which we know that a large portion of the human race can never be gratified. It is mockery, to say that the laborer any where has such disposition of himself—though there may be an approach to it in some peculiar, and those, perhaps, not the most desirable, states of society. But unless he be properly disciplined and prepared for its enjoyment, it is the most fatal boon that could be conferred—fatal to himself and others. ”

“ When should laws and limits be useful to mankind but in their youth, when unlimited liberty is most fatal to them, and when they are least capable of governing themselves? To have youth left without government, is leaving fire in a magazine of powder, which will certainly blow it all up at last, and ruin all the houses that are near it.
If there is any duty on the side of a master to his servant, any obligation on him as a Christian, and as a trustee for his parents, it lies here—to limit and restrain them, if possible, in the liberty of doing evil ”

“ Hence moral life is not only primordial in the nature of mind, but what we commonly call a moral consciousness, as if we would thereby divide it permanently from the rest of consciousness, and count this remainder mere knowledge or mere aesthetic discernment as the case may be, turns out to be in fact and in truth the primary logical spring of all other possible consciousness. So profoundly and so immovably is this deepest Fountain of value and worth inseated in our being. ”

“ When we "keep consciences void of offence, toward God and men, then are we satisfied from ourselves," and expect the approbation of our judge. When we act differently, we are condemned of ourselves, and tremble to approach the enlightened tribunal. ”

“ God’s people must enjoy their liberty of conscience, and not be forced; but all the subjects in a kingdom or monarchy, or the whole world beside, must be compelled by the power of the civil sword to assemble thus and thus.
Secondly, I demand, who shall judge whether they are God’s people or no? for they say, whether the magistrate consent or consent not, that is, judge so or not, they ought to go on in the ordinances, renuente magistratu.
If the civil magistrate be to build the spiritual or Christian house, he must judge in the matter. ”

“ We have to confine ourselves, then, in any hope of finding conditions adequate for morality — conditions adequate, that is, for the life of serious duty — to the first and second of our groups. But from the second, — the systems of efficient causation construed in terms of monism and immanence, — the self-determining individual is necessarily cancelled. All the particular beings involved in the being of the monistic Whole are but modes or expressions of the sole self-activity of the Whole; they have no activity really their own, but only a derivative operation, determined by the One. ”

“ The causality of self-consciousness — the causality that creates and incessantly re-creates in the light of its own Idea, and by the attraction of it as an ideal originating in the self-consciousness purely — is the only complete causality, because it is the only form of being that is unqualifiedly free. ”

“ The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed are of equal obligation.' The courts are not bound by mere forms, nor are they to be misled by mere pretenses. ”

“ Equally certain is it that under 'a government of laws and not of men' such as we possess, power must be exercised according to law; and government, including the courts, as well as the governed, must move within its limitations.
This means that the courts and all other divisions or agencies of authority must act within the limits of their respective functions. Specifically it means in this case that we are bound to act in deference to the mandate of Congress concerning labor injunctions, as in judgment and conscience we conceive it to have been made. ”

“ In these the office of power is limited to causing right and justice to be respected in industrial and commercial transactions, to intervene in contentions to decide what is just, to secure the observance of positive laws enacted by it for the purpose of applying to every particular case the general principles of the natural and of the divine law. The rest is an affair of individual enterprise among citizens. ”

“ Insubordination to the law of Love even in the least, or strict obedience thereto, tests and discriminates between the real and the unreal Scientist. Justice, a prominent statute in the divine law, demands of all trespassers upon the sparse individual rights which one justly reserves to one's self, — Would you consent that others should tear up your landmarks, manipulate your students, nullify or reverse your rules, countermand your orders, steal your possessions, and escape the penalty therefor? ”

“ Amid the manifold disappointments and discouragements of the long battle with defect and wrong, the merely subjective ideal would tend to fade out, to decline both in vividness and in character, and so cease to attract and adequately guide effort. The only adequate support — and it is adequate — is the reality of God, the heavenly Judge, the unfailing Beholder and Sympathiser. To him, the one Absolute Conscience, in every moral disaster our conscience turns for assured refuge and certain renewal of moral courage and strength. ”

“ For when this highest form of reason is thoroughly interpreted, we know that the value of freedom and immortality lies in their indispensableness to our discipline and growth in our ideal or divine life. To no theory of the world can man give a willing and a cordial adhesion, then, if it strikes at the heart of his personal reality and contradicts those hopes of ceaseless moral growth that alone make life worth living. ”