IV

CHRIST IN THE REALM OF LAW

'But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully.'

1 TIM. i. 8.

SOME of the most remarkable discoveries in science have entered the mind, as it were, suggestively or by analogy from some other calling in life. These sidelights of science, or broken lights, as we may call them, steal in unexpectedly: broken lights in a double sense, we may call them, since they help to break up into fresh groups what seemed so fixed and uniform that we had forgotten perspective and taken shadows for substances, until we needed a new point of view altogether. It comes to the same thing if we say that in theology our mental concepts are never to be taken for the realities themselves of things unseen and eternal. What is meant by a hard theology is that bloodless account of God, as dealing with certain abstractions, such as sin, righteousness, and so forth, and as regarding His creatures as guilty or innocent, according as certain conceptions of guilt and innocence

-purely forensic, let us add-are assigned to them. This is that cast of theology which has come down to us, in the West, in almost an unbroken tradition of Roman law, which has overshadowed and thrown into the shade those brighter, more benignant conceptions of God's Fatherly character which have become the cherished convictions of our day. It is strange to think how that phrase, 'the reign of law,' has changed places in science and theology in our day. The reign of law is, in science, regarded as its most cherished conviction. By slow degrees, as it were, and at the end of a hard-fought battle, the age has settled down to accept without dispute this notion of the reign of law. All science is without exception uniformitarian. The man who disputes this, and flinches from the phrase, the reign of law,' is at once put out of court. He was either born in the pre-scientific age or he is still in the theological or the metaphysical stage of thought, and is not yet enfranchised into the purely positive stage. The reign of law is now the dominant notion in science, and we may say of a student of science that he has not broken the shell of his subject until he enters into and accepts the phrase in its entirety. Now, strange as it may sound, the reign of law in theology was an accepted notion ages before it had occurred

In this respect

to men of science to fly this flag. science and theology have changed places as time went on-or, to speak more distinctly, the catchwords of the one school have passed over and become the catchwords of another school entirely opposed. As long as Roman theology reigned without a rival in the West these legal conceptions of God overshadowed every other. In the East we admit that it was otherwise. There a milder and more intuitional and directly spiritual conception of God shaped the minds. of men. But in the West, with scarcely an exception, the magisterial conception of God as our Maker and Lawgiver, just and stern, shaped the minds of men, and laid the foundation of those plans of salvation and schemes of imputed righteousness on which bodies of divinity have been constructed.

Now, singular as it may sound, the reign of law is as much out of date in theology as it has become the fashionable phrase in science. Who cares to think of God as our great 'Lawgiver'? Who regards the law any longer as more than our schoolmaster to lead us unto Christ? The last word of theology is like that of the apostle, 'Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.' Men have silently

dropped, in the West as much

as in the East, the

Roman notion of a lawmaker. That God is a great

Magistrate ruling according to a code and enforcing it by a scheme of rewards and punishments, seems to us too bare and bald a conception to draw our souls to Him any longer. The whole evidential school of last century has been described as a jurybox kind of religion. It rests, as Paley puts it, on the testimony of twelve honest men, and, as this jury is agreed and unanimous, its verdict is able to support the most suspicious and even supernatural class of truths. Much of this has long since been swept off to the theological lumber-room, and we need not slay our slain or call up for judgment the dead and forgotten worthies of the old evidential school. But at least it remains true that the reign of law is no longer a theological catchword, but the same is true of science, or rather the two have changed places. Instead of the reign of law in theology, we speak of grace and forgiveness. 'Mercy rejoiceth against judgment.'

Nor have we far to seek for an explanation of these changed conceptions-law in science has displaced law in theology as the reigning idea. But the term 'law' has also undergone a silent transformation. By law is now meant no longer some arbitrary appointment a statute or judgment enforced by a penalty and resting on enactment as its ultimate ground.

We have dug down deeper; we have gone beyond lex and got at jus as the ultimate ground of law. No one ever used the term lex gentium, but from earliest times a sense of a vera lex, recta ratio, naturæ congruens, constans, sempiterna, has engraved itself on men's minds as the basis of that jus gentium which we improperly describe as international law. We have outgrown, in a word, the limited sense of law as mere code, or statute law, laid down by the State Legislature and enforced by the executive, and as carrying little or no sanction beyond the express penalty laid down in the code. Law in the mere Act of Parliament sense is no longer the keynote to the phrase 'reign of law' in science. It is law in the sense of jus: that which is inherently right, based on eternal and immutable morality-that memorable phrase of Cudworth, which we lay stress on here. Law is in that sense that which is necessary, and not dependent on any arbitrary will. Hence it needs no sanctions, calls for no penalties-it has one sanction, and one executive. Some of our deeper thinkers, as for example Bishop Butler, have had a glimpse of this deeper sense of law. When he speaks of natural law he uses the term in the exact sense of modern science. By the law of gravity, for instance, we mean that property which is inalienable from matter by