a law, an ideal mode of action for the spiritual forces of man. The law
of Justice is as universal an one as the law of Attraction; though we
are very far from being able to reconcile all the phenomena of Nature
with it. The lark has the same right, in our view, to live, to sing, to
dart at pleasure through the ambient atmosphere, as the hawk has to ply
his strong wings in the Summer sunshine: and yet the hawk pounces on and
devours the harmless lark, as _it_ devours the worm, and as the worm
devours the animalcule; and, so far as we know, there is nowhere, in any
future state of animal existence, any compensation for this apparent
injustice. Among the bees, one rules, while the others obey--some work,
while others are idle. With the small ants, the soldiers feed on the
proceeds of the workmen's labor. The lion lies in wait for and devours
the antelope that has apparently as good a right to life as he. Among
men, some govern and others serve, capital commands and labor obeys, and
one race, superior in intellect, avails itself of the strong muscles of
another that is inferior; and yet, for all this, no one impeaches the
justice of God.
No doubt all these varied phenomena are consistent with one great law of
justice; and the only difficulty is that we do not, and no doubt we
cannot, understand that law. It is very easy for some dreaming and
visionary theorist to say that it is most evidently unjust for the lion
to devour the deer, and for the eagle to tear and eat the wren; but the
trouble is, that we know of no other way, according to the frame, the
constitution, and the organs which God has given them, in which the lion
and the eagle could manage to live at all. Our little measure of justice
is not God's measure. His justice does not require us to relieve the
hard-working millions of all labor, to emancipate the serf or slave,
unfitted to be free, from all control.
No doubt, underneath all the little bubbles, which are the lives, the
wishes, the wills, and the plans of the two thousand millions or more of
human beings on this earth (for bubbles they are, judging by the space
and time they occupy in this great and age-out-lasting sea of
human-kind),--no doubt, underneath them all resides one and the same
eternal force, which they shape into this or the other special form; and
over all the same paternal Providence presides, keeping eternal watch
over the little and the great, and producing variety of effect from
Unity of Force.
It is entirely true to say that justice is the constitution or
fundamental law of the moral Universe, the law of right, a rule of
conduct for man (as it is for every other living creature), in all his
moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like all other affairs),
must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is _right_ agrees
therewith and stands, while what is _wrong_ conflicts with it and falls.
The difficulty is that we ever erect _our_ notions of what is right and
just into the _law_ of justice, and insist that God shall adopt that as
His law; instead of striving to learn by observation and reflection what
His law _is_, and then believing that law to be consistent with _His_
infinite justice, whether it corresponds with _our_ limited notion of
justice, or does not so correspond. We are too wise in our own conceit,
and ever strive to enact our own little notions into the Universal Laws
of God.
It might be difficult for man to prove, even to his own satisfaction,
how it is right or just for him to subjugate the horse and ox to his
service, giving them in return only their daily food, which God has
spread out for them on all the green meadows and savannas of the world:
or how it is just that we should slay and eat the harmless deer that
only crops the green herbage, the buds, and the young leaves, and drinks
the free-running water that God made common to all; or the gentle dove,
the innocent kid, the many other living things that so confidently trust
to our protection;--quite as difficult, perhaps, as to prove it just for
one man's intellect or even his wealth to make another's strong arms his
servants, for daily wages or for a bare subsistence.
To find out this universal law of justice is one thing--to undertake to
measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call _that_
God's law of justice, is another. The great general plan and system, and
the great general laws enacted by God, continually produce what to our
limited notions is wrong and injustice, which hitherto men have been
able to explain to their own satisfaction only by the hypothesis of
another existence in which all inequalities and injustices in this life
will be remedied and compensated for. To our ideas of justice, it is
very unjust that the child is made miserable for life by deformity or
organic disease, in consequence of the vices of its father; and yet that
is part of the universal law. The ancients said that the child was
_punished_ for the sins of its father. _We_ say that this its deformity
or disease is the _consequence_ of its father's vices; but so far as
concerns the question of justice or injustice, that is merely the change
of a word.
It is very easy to lay down a broad, general principle, embodying our
own idea of what is absolute justice, and to insist that everything
shall conform to that: to say, "all human affairs must be subject to
that as the law paramount; what is right agrees therewith and stands,
what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of self-love, of
friendship, or of patriotism, must all be subordinate to this universal
gravitation toward the eternal right." The difficulty is that this
Universe of necessities God-created, of sequences of cause and effect,
and of life evolved from death, this interminable succession and
aggregate of cruelties, will not conform to any such absolute principle
or arbitrary theory, no matter in what sounding words and glittering
phrases it may be embodied.
Impracticable rules in morals are always injurious; for as all men fall
short of compliance with them, they turn real virtues into imaginary
offences against a forged law. Justice as between man and man and as
between man and the animals below him, is that which, under and
according to the God-created relations existing between them, and the
whole aggregate of circumstances surrounding them, is fit and right and
proper to be done, with a view to the general as well as to the
individual interest. It is not a theoretical principle by which the very
relations that God has created and imposed on us are to be tried, and
approved or condemned.
God has made this great system of the Universe, and enacted general laws
for its government. Those laws environ everything that lives with a
mighty network of necessity. He chose to create the tiger with such
organs that he cannot crop the grass, but must eat other flesh or
starve. He has made man carnivorous also; and some of the smallest birds
are as much so as the tiger. In every step we take, in every breath we
draw, is involved the destruction of a multitude of animate existences,
each, no matter how minute, as much a living creature as ourself. He has
made necessary among mankind a division of labor, intellectual and
moral. He has made necessary the varied relations of society and
dependence, of obedience and control.
What is thus made necessary cannot be unjust; for if it be, then God the
great Lawgiver is Himself unjust. The evil to be avoided is, the
legalization of injustice and wrong under the _false_ plea of necessity.
Out of all the relations of life grow duties,--as naturally grow and as
undeniably, as the leaves grow upon the trees. If we have the right,
created by God's law of necessity, to slay the lamb that we may eat and
live, we have no right to torture it in doing so, because that is in no
wise necessary. We have the right to live, if we fairly can, by the
legitimate exercise of our intellect, and hire or buy the labor of the
strong arms of others, to till our grounds, to dig in our mines, to toil
in our manufactories; but we have no right to overwork or underpay them.
It is not only true that we may learn the moral law of justice, the law
of right, by experience and observation; but that God has given us a
moral faculty, our conscience, which is able to perceive this law
directly and immediately, by intuitive perception of it; and it is true
that man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than what he has
ever yet come up to,--an ideal of nature that shames his actual of
history: because man has ever been prone to make necessity, his own
necessity, the necessities of society, a plea for injustice. But this
notion must not be pushed too far--for if we substitute this ideality
for actuality, then it is equally true that we have within us an ideal
rule of right and wrong, to which God Himself in His government of the
world has never come, and against which He (we say it reverentially)
every day offends. We detest the tiger and the wolf for the rapacity and
love of blood which are their nature; we revolt against the law by which
the crooked limbs and diseased organism of the child are the fruits of
the father's vices; we even think that a God Omnipotent and Omniscient
ought to have permitted no pain, no poverty, no servitude; our ideal of
justice is more lofty than the actualities of God. It is well, as all
else is well. He has given us that moral sense for wise and beneficent
purposes. We accept it as a significant proof of the inherent loftiness
of human nature, that it can entertain an ideal so exalted; and should
strive to attain it, as far as we can do so consistently with the
relations which He has created, and the circumstances which surround us
and hold us captive.
If we faithfully use this faculty of conscience; if, applying it to the
existing relations and circumstances, we develop it and all its kindred
powers, and so deduce the duties that out of these relations and those
circumstances, and limited and qualified by them, arise and become
obligatory upon us, then we learn justice, the law of right, the divine
rule of conduct for human life. But if we undertake to define and settle
"the mode of action that belongs to the infinitely perfect nature of
God," and so set up any ideal rule, beyond all human reach, we soon come
to judge and condemn His work and the relations which it has pleased Him
in His infinite wisdom to create.
A sense of justice belongs to human nature, and is a part of it. Men
find a deep, permanent, and instinctive delight in justice, not only in
the outward effects, but in the inward cause, and by their nature love
this law of right, this reasonable rule of conduct, this justice, with a
deep and abiding love. Justice is the object of the conscience, and fits
it as light fits the eye and truth the mind.
Justice keeps just relations between men. It holds the balance between
nation and nation, between a man and his family, tribe, nation, and
race, so that his _absolute_ rights and theirs do not interfere, nor
their _ultimate_ interests ever clash, nor the eternal interests of the
one prove antagonistic to those of all or of any other one. This we must
believe, if we believe that God is just. We must do justice to all, and
demand it of all; it is a universal human debt, a universal human claim.
But we may err greatly in defining what that justice is. The _temporary_
interests, and what to human view are the rights, of men, do often
interfere and clash. The life-interests of the individual often conflict
with the permanent interests and welfare of society; and what may seem
to be the natural rights of one class or race, with those of another.
It is not true to say that "one man, however little, must not be
sacrificed to another, however great, to a majority, or to all men."
That is not only a fallacy, but a most dangerous one. Often one man and
many men must be sacrificed, in the ordinary sense of the term, to the
interest of the many. It is a comfortable fallacy to the selfish; for if
they cannot, by the law of justice, be sacrificed for the common good,
then their country has no right to demand of them _self_-sacrifice; and
he is a fool who lays down his life, or sacrifices his estate, or even
his luxuries, to insure the safety or prosperity of his country.
According to that doctrine, Curtius was a fool, and Leonidas an idiot;
and to die for one's country is no longer beautiful and glorious, but a
mere absurdity. Then it is no longer to be asked that the common soldier
shall receive in his bosom the sword or bayonet-thrust which otherwise
would let out the life of the great commander on whose fate hang the
liberties of his country, and the welfare of millions yet unborn.
On the contrary, it is certain that necessity rules in all the affairs
of men, and that the interest and even the life of one man must often be
sacrificed to the interest and welfare of his country. Some must ever
lead the forlorn hope: the missionary must go among savages, bearing his
life in his hand; the physician must expose himself to pestilence for
the sake of others; the sailor, in the frail boat upon the wide ocean,
escaped from the foundering or burning ship, must step calmly into the
hungry waters, if the lives of the passengers can be saved only by the
sacrifice of his own; the pilot must stand firm at the wheel, and let
the flames scorch away his own life to insure the common safety of those
whom the doomed vessel bears.
The mass of men are always looking for what is just. All the vast
machinery which makes up a State, a world of States, is, on the part of
the people, an attempt to organize, not that ideal justice which finds
fault with God's ordinances, but that practical justice which may be
attained in the actual organization of the world. The minute and
wide-extending civil machinery which makes up the law and the courts,
with all their officers and implements, on the part of mankind, is
chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory of right.
Constitutions are made to establish justice; the decisions of courts are
reported to help us judge more wisely in time to come. The nation aims
to get together the most nearly just men in the State, that they may
incorporate into statutes their aggregate sense of what is right. The
people wish law to be embodied justice, administered without passion.
Even in the wildest ages there has been a wild popular justice, but
always mixed with passion and administered in hate; for justice takes a
rude form with rude men, and becomes less mixed with hate and passion in
more civilized communities. Every progressive State revises its statutes
and revolutionizes its constitution from time to time, seeking to come
closer to the utmost possible practical justice and right; and
sometimes, following theorists and dreamers in their adoration for the
ideal, by erecting into law positive principles of theoretical right,
works practical injustice, and then has to retrace its steps.
In literature men always look for practical justice, and desire that
virtue should have its own reward, and vice its appropriate punishment.
They are ever on the side of justice and humanity; and the majority of
them have an ideal justice, better than the things about them, juster
than the law: for the law is ever imperfect, not attaining even to the
utmost _practicable_ degree of perfection; and no man is as just as his
own idea of possible and practicable justice. His passions and his
necessities ever cause him to sink below his own ideal. The ideal
justice which men ever look up to and strive to rise toward, is true;
but it will not be realized in this world. Yet we must approach as near
to it as practicable, as we should do toward that ideal democracy that
"now floats before the eyes of earnest and religious men,--fairer than
the Republic of Plato, or More's Utopia, or the Golden Age of fabled
memory," only taking care that we do not, in striving to reach and
ascend to the impossible ideal, neglect to seize upon and hold fast to
the possible actual. To aim at the best, but be content with the best
possible, is the only true wisdom. To insist on the absolute right, and
throw out of the calculation the important and all-controlling element
of necessity, is the folly of a mere dreamer.
In a world inhabited by men with bodies, and necessarily with bodily
wants and animal passions, the time will never come when there will be
no want, no oppression, nor servitude, no fear of man, no fear of God,
but only Love. That can never be while there are inferior intellect,
indulgence in low vice, improvidence, indolence, awful visitations of
pestilence and war and famine, earthquake and volcano, that must of
necessity cause men to want, and serve, and suffer, and fear.
But still the ploughshare of justice is ever drawn through and through
the field of the world, uprooting the savage plants. Ever we see a
continual and progressive triumph of the right. The injustice of England
lost her America, the fairest jewel of her crown. The injustice of
Napoleon bore him to the ground more than the snows of Russia did, and
exiled him to a barren rock, there to pine away and die, his life a
warning to bid mankind be just.
We intuitively understand what justice is, better than we can depict it.
What it is in a given case depends so much on circumstances, that
definitions of it are wholly deceitful. Often it would be unjust to
society to do what would, in the absence of that consideration, be
pronounced just to the individual. General propositions of man's right
to this or that are ever fallacious: and not infrequently it would be
most unjust to the individual himself to do for him what the theorist,
as a general proposition, would say was right and his due.
We should ever do unto others what, under the same circumstances, we
_ought_ to wish, and should have _the right_ to wish they should do unto
us. There are many cases, cases constantly occurring, where one man must
take care of himself, in preference to another, as where two struggle
for the possession of a plank that will save one, but cannot uphold
both; or where, assailed, he can save his own life only by slaying his
adversary. So one must prefer the safety of his country to the lives of
her enemies; and sometimes, to insure it, to those of her own innocent
citizens. The retreating general may cut away a bridge behind him, to
delay pursuit and save the main body of his army, though he thereby
surrenders a detachment, a battalion, or even a corps of his own force
to certain destruction.
These are not departures from justice; though, like other instances
where the injury or death of the individual is the safety of the many,
where the interest of one individual, class, or race is postponed to
that of the public, or of the superior race, they may infringe some
dreamer's ideal rule of justice. But every departure from real,
practical justice is no doubt attended with loss to the unjust man,
though the loss is not reported to the public. Injustice, public or
private, like every other sin and wrong, is inevitably followed by its
consequences. The selfish, the grasping, the inhuman, the fraudulently
unjust, the ungenerous employer, and the cruel master, are detested by
the great popular heart; while the kind master, the liberal employer,
the generous, the humane, and the just have the good opinion of all men,
and even envy is a tribute to their virtues. Men honor all who stand up
for truth and right, and never shrink. The world builds monuments to its
patriots. Four great statesmen, organizers of the right, embalmed in
stone, look down upon the lawgivers of France as they pass to their hall
of legislation, silent orators to tell how nations love the just. How we
revere the marble lineaments of those just judges, Jay and Marshall,
that look so calmly toward the living Bench of the Supreme Court of the
United States! What a monument Washington has built in the heart of
America and all the world, not because he dreamed of an impracticable
ideal justice, but by his constant effort to be practically just!
But necessity alone, and the greatest good of the greatest number, can
legitimately interfere with the dominion of absolute and ideal justice.
Government should not foster the strong at the expense of the weak, nor
protect the capitalist and tax the laborer. The powerful should not seek
a monopoly of development and enjoyment; not prudence only and the
expedient for to-day should be appealed to by statesmen, but conscience
and the right: justice should not be forgotten in looking at interest,
nor political morality neglected for political economy: we should not
have national housekeeping instead of national organization on the basis
of right.
We may well differ as to the abstract right of many things; for every
such question has many sides, and few men look at all of them, many only
at one. But we all readily recognize cruelty, unfairness, inhumanity,
partiality, over-reaching, hard-dealing, by their ugly and familiar
lineaments, and in order to know and to hate and despise _them_, we do
not need to sit as a Court of Errors and Appeals to revise and reverse
God's Providences.
There are certainly great evils of civilization at this day, and many
questions of humanity long adjourned and put off. The hideous aspect of
pauperism, the debasement and vice in our cities, tell us by their
eloquent silence or in inarticulate mutterings, that the rich and the
powerful and the intellectual do not do their duty by the poor, the
feeble, and the ignorant; and every wretched woman who lives, Heaven
scarce knows how, by making shirts at sixpence each, attests the
injustice and inhumanity of man. There are cruelties to slaves, and
worse cruelties to animals, each disgraceful to their perpetrators, and
equally unwarranted by the lawful relation of control and dependence
which it has pleased God to create.
A sentence is written against all that is unjust, written by God in the
nature of man and in the nature of the Universe, because it is in the
nature of the Infinite God. Fidelity to your faculties, trust in their
convictions, that is justice to yourself; a life in obedience thereto,
that is justice toward men. No wrong is really successful. The gain of
injustice is a loss, its pleasure suffering. Iniquity often seems to
prosper, but its success is its defeat and shame. After a long while,
the day of reckoning ever comes, to nation as to individual. The knave
deceives himself. The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also
his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of
injustice, poor and naked and miserable. Whoso escapes a duty avoids a
gain. Outward judgment often fails, inward justice never. Let a man try
to love the wrong and to do the wrong, it is eating stones and not
bread, the swift feet of justice are upon him, following with woolen
tread, and her iron hands are round his neck. No man can escape from
this, any more than from himself. Justice is the angel of God that flies
from East to West; and where she stoops her broad wings, it is to bring
the counsel of God, and feed mankind with angel's bread.
We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and our
eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and complete
the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it by
conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice. Justice
will not fail, though wickedness appears strong, and has on its side the
armies and thrones of power, the riches and the glory of the world, and
though poor men crouch down in despair. Justice will not fail and perish
out from the world of men, nor will what is really wrong and contrary to
God's real law of justice continually endure. The Power, the Wisdom, and
the Justice of God are on the side of every just thought, and it cannot
fail, any more than God Himself can perish.
In human affairs, the justice of God must work by human means. Men are
the instruments of God's principles; our morality is the instrument of
His justice, which, incomprehensible to us, seems to our short vision
often to work injustice, but will at some time still the oppressor's
brutal laugh. Justice is the rule of conduct written in the nature of
mankind. We may, in our daily life, in house or field or shop, in the
office or in the court, help to prepare the way for the commonwealth of
justice which is slowly, but, we would fain hope, surely approaching.
All the justice we mature will bless us here and hereafter, and at our
death we shall leave it added to the common store of human-kind. And
every Mason who, content to do that which is possible and practicable,
does and enforces justice, may help deepen the channel of human morality
in which God's justice runs; and so the wrecks of evil that now check
and obstruct the stream may the sooner be swept out and borne away by
the resistless tide of Omnipotent Right. Let us, my Brother, in this, as
in all else, endeavor always to perform the duties of a good Mason and a
good man.
[Illustration]
XXXII.