XII.

THEOLOGY AND LAW.1

"Lord, what love have I unto Thy Law: all the day long is my study in it."-Ps. cxix. 97.

IT is now hardly more than half a century ago that there came to England, a stranger to a strange land, one 2 who in his Indian home had spent his life in protests against idolatry, and in earnest efforts to restore a monotheistic religion. Judged as we so often judge those whom we do not know, he was only a heathen, a pious Brâhman who, however well disposed to Christianity, died in Christian England, an alien from the Christian commonwealth. His language was not ours; his habits of life and thought were strange to us; his religion was not Christianity.

But, looking earnestly beneath the surface of things, working back in thought from difference to unity, we find it is not altogether so. In race, in language, in thought, he is nearer to us than

1 An Assize Sermon preached before the University of Oxford on the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 1884.

2 Râjah Rammohun Roy.

we dreamed. The Brâhman Reformer and the Christian Priest are different, indeed, in their grasp of truth; different in the way they would set it forth; different in their life history. The Brâhman never lived to realize the truth of the God-Man, of the divine mission of the Church of Christ, of the reality of Sacramental grace. But his life was true, and real, and great. Can any doubt that its earnest seeking after God shall have its own reward? Yet it would have been so easy to say,We have nothing in common with him; we do not worship the same God.

So it is that again and again we misread the world around us, seeing the outside differences of things, while their real but hidden unity is lost. And if some unexpected points of likeness force themselves upon our notice, we put them aside as curious parallels, which do not suggest to us a common origin, a kinship which is real.

Is it not so in the case of those two highlydeveloped systems which stand over against one another in England of to-day, once identified, then associated, but now, as it seems, drifting apart,Theology and Law? Here it is so easy to point the contrast between the Divine Science, and that which exists only because man is what he is, and not what God made him to be. It is easy to say, they do not speak the same language, their modes of thought are not the same. The one soars

upwards to the very nature of God, the other sounds all the depths and shoals of human selfishness and vice. The one is as a golden net let down from heaven; the other like some huge structure built upon the earth. Law deals with things which perish in the using; Theology with truths which cannot pass away.

I. But such superficial contrasts will not satisfy us. There are strange marks of kinship in these different, and sometimes rival, systems: points of resemblance which are the more remarkable when contrasted with that knowledge of nature, which of late years has almost monopolized the name of Science.

(i.) Of these points of resemblance the first is this. Law, like Theology, is a “derived science," and not a science of discovery. We do not live in hope or fear of some new facts which will revolutionize our legal system. Law is essentially derived. It glories in the fact. Its principles lie back, far back in a pre-historic time. With all its minute and complex adjustments to modern civilization and modern life, it can say with one of old, "It was long ago that men found out what is right, and we must learn from them." What was implicit in the principle may be now explicit in the Law, but the principle has not changed. This is why Law is, perhaps inappropriately, said to be conservative. It has its roots in the past, not in the

present. Thus, like Theology, it is open to the reproach, if it be a reproach, that it is a derived science, and with Theology it offers its strong but silent protest against the narrowing of the term science to the inductive method.

(ii.) Law is a derived science, but that is not all. It claims authority, an authority which is not ephemeral, but eternal; a majesty which the present can neither give nor take away. Its appeal is not to its usefulness, its fitness to the present condition of things, but to men's reverence for authority, to their obedience, to their loyalty. And in this, while its likeness to Theology is obvious, its contrast with the popular science of nature is no less obvious. For both deal with law, yet the one is as anxious to assert, as the other is to disavow, the claim to authority for law as law. We have outgrown the confusion which is to be found even in Blackstone. We know that a law of nature is "an observed uniformity of sequence or coexistence," a fact universally true within the limits of scientific observation. But it lays claim to no necessity, it repudiates even "a tacit reference to the will of a superior." It speaks in the indicative, not in the imperative. No real student of nature will go beyond the "is" and "is not" of fact. "Must" and "cannot" lie beyond his range, except when they are illicitly smuggled in for use against the Christian miracles. But Law, in its

other sense, is nothing if it be not authoritative, if it cannot command reverence, and challenge the obedience of the enlightened conscience. Here, then, again we have a strange mark of kinship between Theology and Law.

(iii.) But we have not even yet touched the most remarkable point of agreement between the two, wherein both are distinguished from the science of external nature. There is another point, which, in our day, is of especial importance. If there is one fact which the science of nature, as we now understand it, is powerless to explain, and is sometimes anxious to explain away, it is the fact of PERSONALITY; that which distinguishes the self-conscious moral being from the beasts that perish. Trace out, if you will, the marvellous sympathies of nature; prove, if you will, that man is a microcosm of creation; follow, step by step, the minutest changes of embryological structure and development; and yet before the citadel of Personality every effort is in vain; and the besiegers, like the Syrians who came against the Prophet, are blinded and led captive by the very power that they opposed. And Law guards Personality, as nothing but Religion and Morality can. In that highlydeveloped system of Law under which we live, we have in “Person” and “ Property " a true dichotomy. The terms exclude one another. No person can possess a person. The sharp line is drawn, not