LXXXIII. ON determining the duties of the individual towards his
fellow-men, and towards all that surrounds him in nature, revelation did
not think it proper to refer the motives to human intelligence, and to
allow the bases of justice and benevolence to rest on human reason
alone; but it said, "Do what is right and just and good in the eyes of
the Eternal thy God; and refrain from all that is not such, because it
pleases not thy God," whereby it wished to proclaim that the notions of
just and unjust, of good and evil, of rights and duties, should be
considered as emanating from, and prescribed by, the Divine wisdom, and
therefore obligatory only because agreeable to the Divine will. In this
also the revealed word purposed to come to the assistance of human
frailty, and to render superfluous the abstrusities--as arbitrary as
uncertain and controvertible--about which eminent philosophers tortured
their brains, for many centuries, to fix, as they thought, the
principles of the so-called _Jure_ in its innumerable ramifications of
natural and positive, public and private, civil and criminal,
commercial, maritime, canonical, feudal, of police, of finance, of war,
and what not, without ever yet arriving at a complete accord in their
specialities; whereas all right obtains a solid and effective sanction
when its origin is referred to God, who comprehending in Himself the sum
total of right, justice and moral good, and having communed with man to
enjoin to him their exercise, willed that the carrying out of their
dictates should be considered as an act of religion, of service rendered
to Him, and that violating the one or failing in the other, should be
alike regarded as an offence committed towards Him, which He will punish
severely. God, then, is the source of right; He made man acquainted with
it through His law, and committed to him its performance on earth after
rules prescribed by His will.
LXXXIV. In promulgating the duties of man towards his fellow-men, the
holy scripture assumed sometimes the negative form, to forbid all that
which may cause injury to others; and sometimes the positive form,
enjoining the practice to be followed towards all. To the first class
belong the following prohibitions, viz., of nourishing hatred, rancour,
revenge; of calumniating, or in any way whatever damaging the
reputations of others; of assailing their honour or good fame; of
restraining or obstructing others in the exercise of their rights, or in
the use and enjoyment of their properties; of practising deceptions,
impositions, frauds, and all forms of insincerity, usury, extortions,
and violence; of laying obstructions in the way of the weak or helpless;
of giving false testimony; of speaking untruth; of reporting even truth,
when it may lead to discord and strife; of occasioning danger; of
offending decency and good manners; of causing scandal; of withholding
wages or remuneration due; of keeping in pledge the clothing or
implements of the poor; of using two weights and measures; of
associating with the wicked; of breaking a pledge-word; of violating or
assailing the conjugal happiness of others; of coveting anything that
belongs to others; and other similar prohibitions recorded in the sacred
code, which can be easily collected as pertaining to this class.
Moreover, it will not be unreasonable to complete this list by the
addition of a few more particular actions, which, though not
specifically mentioned, must yet be understood to be forbidden; for, as
it is a constant rule in biblical exegesis to deduce general theories
from single laws which appear to refer to particular cases, so must, by
analogy, be comprised in an enunciated forbidden action all others of a
similar nature, character, and tendency, as being understood in the
former.
LXXXV. The positive precepts concerning a man's conduct towards his
fellow-men, are naturally enunciated in directions of a tendency
precisely opposite to those expressed negatively; that is to say, it is
_enjoined_ to practise the reverse of what has been forbidden. Now, to
begin with the more general prescriptions; it is enjoined, in the first
place, to love one's fellow-men as one's own-self, all mankind, without
any exception, being comprised in this expression, as we meet again the
same injunction with regard to the _stranger_, whom we are commanded to
love as ourselves; and Scripture explained already what is to be
understood by the word _stranger_, when it said: "Thou also hast been a
stranger in the land of Egypt"; from which it is evident that the love
inculcated extends even to adversaries and enemies. It is next commanded
to respect in every individual the dignity of man, created in the image
of God, which establishes the inviolability of person, and the equality
of all before the law, so that there should be no privileged caste, no
hereditary preeminence; desiring, on the contrary, that "under the
protection of the same law and same right should dwell the native and
the foreigner." The personal liberty of every member of the human family
is also proclaimed, as it is with that intention that the Decalogue has
put prominently forward the circumstance of Israel having been delivered
from servitude; and if, on the one hand, the condition of the times,
which had rendered the use of slavery natural and universal, did not
then admit of its sudden and immediate extirpation; on the other,
Scripture designed to mitigate its acerbity by provident and humane
laws, so as to make obvious the tendency to its future total, though
gradual, extinction. To prevent pauperism, as well as to cure its evils,
the rich were enjoined to lend money to those who needed it; and the
law, starting from the presumption that the poor man would not, or at
least should not, desire to borrow and incur a debt, unless being
deprived of the necessaries of life, ordered that such a loan to the
destitute brother be gratuitous, whilst in commercial transactions with
foreign people it permitted the charge of some reasonable interest on
loans of money, as an equivalent for the service rendered.
LXXXVI. The administration of justice being, according to the revealed
principles, a divine office, was naturally to be confided to persons
carefully selected for their intelligence, probity, incorruptibility,
and superiority to every human regard; these are therefore invested with
a judicial representation of the Divinity on earth, and are enjoined to
proceed according to the rules of the strictest justice, without ever
deferring either to the pitiable condition of the poor, or to the
influence of the powerful. As a corollary to this system, every person
is bound to appeal to these authorities in any emergency, and to refrain
from taking the law into his own hands; even for the correction of the
disorders of one's own child, the law requires a recourse to the
constituted authority, not permitting the infliction of punishments of
any kind, without the intervention of those appointed to administer
justice. Passing to the other observances, which grow out of the grand
duty to be just to all, we are strictly commanded to respect the
property, the rights and the honour of others, to be solicitous of their
welfare, as much as of our own, to act honestly, sincerely and
faithfully on every occasion, to fulfil our promises, to facilitate to
others the success to which they are justly entitled, and to pardon our
enemies. From the multifarious and varied ties which bind the individual
to family and society, issue the special duties of husband and wife, of
fathers, of children, of relations, as well as the regard due to
misfortune, respect to the aged, the virtuous, the learned, the
magistrates, and the authorities of the state, attachment to the
country, and obedience and loyalty to the sovereign, who, in the
language of the Bible, is constituted by God to govern the destinies of
the people committed to his or her care. All these duties, which branch
off into many specialities, are either explicitly declared, or
incontestably result, by analogies and sound hermeneutical deductions,
from the various texts referring to such subjects.
LXXXVII. But not to strict justice alone our conduct towards our
fellow-men must conform itself; we are bound to act on the principles of
the most generous benevolence and charity. Those acts of a noble mind
and a magnanimous heart, commonly called virtue, which are by moralists
only _recommended_, as meritorious works, are by the Divine law
_enjoined_, as obligatory, in the most absolute sense. Alms, for
instance, are, in the Mosaic law, a duty of the rich, and a right of the
needy. God is the owner of the land; He gave it to the diligent to
cultivate, and through His blessing their labours prosper; He assigned
to the poor His dues on the cultivated soil, and ordered that to them
should be left the total produce of every seventh year, the tithes of
some other years, and the gleanings of the fields and vineyards. It was
not thereby intended to render charity legal and compulsory, depriving
it of its noblest attribute, which is spontaneity, but to show more
conspicuously the importance attached to it, having otherwise left free
all acts of kindness and mercy, to which the law does not fix any
measure. To this class also belong the precepts, which make it a duty to
give timely assistance to him who is about to succumb to fatigue and
labour, to supply with provisions the discharged servant, to restore
before sunset the clothing taken in pawn, to obviate danger in building
a house, to put no obstructions before the blind, to grant every kind of
relief to whomsoever stands in need, without exacting, or even
expecting, any remuneration, to rescue those who are in danger, to
defend the weak, to protect the widow and the orphan, to attend the
sick, and to give sepulture to the dead. These and other similar
prescriptions, which make of charity a duty, carry with them the great
lesson, that justice must go always hand-in-hand with mercy, since the
all-just God is also all-merciful, and he who satisfies not both alike,
does not fully discharge his duties to society.
LXXXVIII. The Mosaic dispensation, which considers the whole world as a
grand unit, and tends to carry out the idea of moral good to its fullest
extent, could not leave unnoticed the relations of man with beings of
different species; therefore it also mentioned duties that we owe to the
irrational creatures and inanimate beings. True, God granted to man a
superiority, a dominion over all things created on earth, permitting him
the use, and even the destruction, of them, whenever this is necessary
to his own welfare, or conducive to his own advantage; but He wisely
restricted such power within certain limits. Mosaism regards the entire
universe as a temple manifesting the glory of God, and directs us to
admire in the single component parts the profound counsels and infinite
wisdom of Him who created and harmonized so many wonders. Thus we are
commanded, in the first place, to respect the laws of nature, as
established by its Supreme Author from the creation, and not to do
capriciously things that are in direct opposition to such laws. From
this principle spring the various prohibitions to couple sexually
different species of animals, to practise on them castration, to
constrain simultaneously to joint labour beasts of unequal strength, to
muzzle them while thrashing, and to use towards them any kind of
cruelty. Nay, it is enjoined that they, also, should participate in the
general rest ordained for men on festivals. It is well for us to reflect
how incomplete are as yet the modern institutions for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, when compared with those of the ancient Mosaic code.
Even the simultaneous sowing of heterogeneous species, and the
ingrafting of plants, are considered as violations of the law of nature,
which had established the distinctions. In the second place, in order
that man, while using all things for his benefit, might not imagine that
he is their absolute master, and should not forget the true Owner, who
conferred them upon him under various reservations, he was enjoined not
to appropriate at the same time two things, one of which had been born
or produced from the other; but in the act of converting to his own use
some object or being, he should spare that which gave it birth, and not
lay his hands upon both simultaneously. He is thus to learn to respect
the causes while enjoying the effects; and from the secondary causes he
will mentally ascend to the primitive one, which produced them all from
nought. This is the sense and intention of the prohibitions of taking in
a covey the mother with the young, of slaughtering a quadruped together
with that which gave it birth, of cutting down a tree, were it even for
the necessity of a siege, while we are enjoying its fruit.