For the Commandment Is a Lamp; and the Law Is Light
From the Maxwell Children: Elder Maxwell spoke regularly to civic and educational groups. His time was largely taken up by his calling, but he felt a desire and need to continue to reach out to those who were not members of the Church, and he was not reluctant to share gospel principles and insights in non-Church settings.
Elder Maxwell was a member of the Presidency of the First Quorum of the Seventy when he delivered this address to the Utah State Bar on July 17, 1980.
It is a privilege to speak to this distinguished group. I commend you for the service you render; let others be sarcastic about the legal profession. I respect those in your profession who practice advocacy without animosity. I admire those lawyers who go beyond merely resolving conflict by judicial decision—who manage conflict by peacemaking. The human disputes that come to you have, with a grim momentum, already crashed through society’s safety barriers of marriage, family, friendship, and community.
Thus, appreciation is due to you when you rise to the role of reconciliation—after everyone else has failed! But even your profession cannot save people from themselves.
If I fall short in striving to say significant things today—your finely trained minds will quickly note that failure. I hope you will respect the motives behind the substance of what is said, for I have come out of respect for your profession and our rich legal heritage. However, for what I say, I alone am responsible.
In Proverbs, we read, “For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light” (Proverbs 6:23), a reflection of the Old Testament values. Americans’ traditional regard for law is irretrievably intertwined with the law’s sources. The Anglo-Saxon and Roman influences are surely there, especially the law’s Judeo-Christian perspectives in which some things are viewed as wrong per se. Efforts (including by some in your profession) to renounce those historical perspectives—to leave the light of the lamp—are a cause for concern. As Joseph Sobran warned: “ . . . Razing the past is not a matter of freeing ourselves from something alien: it is a kind of self-mutilation.”[1]
There are differences—some deep—which separate us as Americans, but a majority probably support the view that there are certain ordering principles in the universe—a spiritual ecology that carries its own sure consequences when violated in which progress, as G. K. Chesterton said, means “that we are always changing the world to suit the vision, [not] that we are always changing the vision.”[2]
Some disdain the religious roots of the law, but it must be asked, “What of the accumulated experience of the past?” Justice Holmes declared, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”[3] Yet there are efforts to move away from our experience and traditional values, such as belief in God. Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the number of those who wish to play at being God. Such societal supervisors deny the existence of divine standards but are very serious about imposing their own—or the lack of them.
It is no accident that the lessening, or loss, of belief in certain absolute truths, such as the existence of God and the reality of immortality, has occurred at the same time there has been a sharp gain in the size and power of governments.
Once we remove belief in God from the center of our lives, as the source of truth and as a determiner of justice, a tremendous vacuum is created into which selfishness surges, a condition which governments delight in managing.
Tens of thousands of regulations emerge receiving attention not given the Ten Commandments, perhaps because the Ten Commandments, which are so much a part of our Judeo-Christian heritage, are not flexible; they resist rationalization. Any amendments to the Ten Commandments could come only from the original Source. We cannot amend the seventh commandment to read, for instance, “Thou shalt not commit adultery except between consenting adults.”
We are, of course, free to obey or not to obey those commandments, discarding the lamp noted in Proverbs. But we cannot get that lamp to make light by using a substitute fuel. By legislation and regulation, we may vainly try to create a zone of private morality. But there is, ultimately, no such thing as private morality; there is not an indoor and an outdoor set of Ten Commandments.
Those who disavow the existence of certain absolute truths must forever forego disapproving of anything on moral grounds. They may try to evoke a response by using the old words that went with the old values, but they will soon learn that words cannot, for long, be appropriated productively, minus their moral content.
Secular leaders may even try to rally the troops to battle by issuing the old watch cries, but it won’t work; one can only smile sadly when those who believe the universe is senseless nevertheless speak passionately of a particular event as a “senseless tragedy.”
C. S. Lewis warned eloquently that the man of religion views mankind quite differently than secularists:
To the Materialist, things like nations, classes, and civilizations must be more important than individuals because the individuals live only 70-odd years each, and the group may last for centuries. But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live eternally; and races, civilizations and the like, are in comparison the creatures of the day.[4]
Secularism has its own frightening orthodoxy. Make no mistake about it—as secularization finds itself increasingly “in charge” it will be visibly irritated when challenged.
John Stuart Mill warned, however, that “a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands. . . will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”[5]
Unlike the search in ancient Israel for a leader of stature—“higher than any people from his shoulders and upward” (1 Samuel 10:23)— secularized democracy does not search for Sauls but dwarfs its people. They need only be tall enough to reach the trough.
Even if one approves of the trends in the following examples, at least he must acknowledge the degree of departure from past values. Ronald Butt wrote in the London Times of one such sharp departure:
For nearly 2,000 years of Christian civilization, taking the life of an unborn child was regarded as a vile and heinous moral offense which degraded humanity. When an abortion was done to save the life of the mother or to prevent a woman from the consequences of rape, those responsible, including the doctors, acted in consciousness that a grave moral decision was involved. Abortions to avoid illegitimate births, or otherwise for convenience, were performed with a secrecy that was as much the mark of the shame attaching to the deed as a consequence of its illegality.[6]
Many families are changing, too—another departure of significance. So many moderns avoid lasting relationships, seeking rather to travel light, unencumbered by family, community, and tradition. Such people travel more lightly! But not more happily, as they empty themselves by seeking selfish fulfillment. Divorces are up over 65 percent since 1970. The number of unmarried couples living together is up over 157 percent in the decade past. Fewer and fewer children live with both parents![7]
Agencies to which children can turn to challenge their parents are now more than mere fantasy. Ironically, some of those who, in the 1960s, almost gleefully put an end to “in loco parentis” on college campuses now seek to substitute the state for parents.
In the concern for children’s rights, will we, therefore, end up gutting the institution of the family? In a secular state, will the family, as observed, be reduced to a mere political subdivision with parents being mere minor civil servants?[8] What we do with the family will determine what happens to our whole society.
As we all should, do not let professional intensity cause you to falter in your own families. A good day in court cannot compensate for a bad day at home. Winning points at the office roundtable is not as vital as that which happens at your supper table. Go on being a true friend to your family and a good friend of the court. Your and my largest influence on the next generation and the future will be through our children and grandchildren, though we may flatter ourselves that it is otherwise. So much else of what we do will merely end up in the attic of history.
Another departure from the past is how pornography first uses the oxygen of freedom to flourish and then proceeds to pollute the very atmosphere which made its existence possible in the first place. Industrial smelters are constrained—but smut shops flourish! There is no Environmental Protection Agency (nor should there be) watching over the pornography pollution, which steadily settles into the marrow of a society made vulnerable by spiritual valuelessness.
Can our constitutional system accommodate the concerns of those who may find themselves going up against an increasingly secular state? Jesus asked His followers to render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s (see Mark 22:21). But you and I live in a time when Caesar may ask too much. Will the establishment clause of our Constitution be strong enough to deflect efforts to make irreligion the state religion? Or will those with religious convictions in America, as Sobran put it so well, be asked to step to the back of the bus and not be uppity about it?[9]
Those who hold strong religious views frequently find themselves dealing with issues that others insist are solely secular. You will recall in the Lincoln-Douglas debates on slavery how Douglas took the position that popular sovereignty ought to prevail so far as the expansion of slavery into the territories was concerned. Douglas said he didn’t care “whether [slavery] was voted up or down,” an attitudinal forerunner of that numerical democracy which has no fixed moral content. Abraham Lincoln wisely replied to Douglas:
Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong with slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it; because no man can logically say he doesn’t care whether a wrong is voted up or down.
He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do a wrong.[10]
Our First Amendment freedoms will now be needed to resist and outlast fashionable secularism. I have said publicly before that those who would prune particular branches from the tree of the First Amendment will—in the later heat of the day—find no shade and shelter there. In an irreligious society, freedom of religion is the easiest branch to hack away at! Mark it down, however, our First Amendment freedoms will finally flourish or diminish together.
Ironically, secularism does produce an artificial sense of freedom.
Morris West warned, however:
Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints…. It is only later that the terror comes. One is free—but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself.[11]
Dostoevsky described a secular and dispirited society in which people would say, “there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger.”[12]
Once a society loses its capacity to declare that some things are wrong per se, then it finds itself forever building temporary defenses, drawing new lines—but forever falling back and losing its nerve. A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything!
Lance Morrow wrote recently with insight—not about the greening but the coarsening of America:
What would once have been intolerable and impermissible public conduct has now become commonplace. If it is not exactly accepted, then at least it is abjectly and wearily endured….
Somehow, Americans have also misplaced the moral confidence with which to condemn sleaziness and stupidity. It is as if something in the American judgment snapped, and has remained so long unrepaired that no one notices anymore….
Much of today’s offensiveness began in the guise of a refreshing virtue: honesty. The result is a legacy of insufferable and interminable candor. The idealism has vanished. We are left with the residue of bad habits, ugly noises, and moral slackness.[13]
The need is great for discerning citizens who can take the real measure of all exploiters. Greed for improved TV ratings may clothe itself in the fabric of the First Amendment, but it is still greed. Pornographers do not really care if a film contains any frames that are “socially redeeming”; they simply check the box office receipts. Thus, everyone who is protected by the First Amendment does not really cherish the amendment, while others who cherish the amendment may, from time to time, be unprotected by it.
Perhaps our Republic is a “tired democracy.” If so, its fatigue comes from the calisthenics of selfishness; its despair comes not from a monetary but a moral devaluation.
The traditional lamp of the law is, therefore, even more needed to help us find our way. The more that lamp flickers, the darker it will get and the more difficult it will be to discern between what Ezekiel called the “holy and the profane” (Ezekiel 22:26).
Can a “tired democracy” rejuvenate itself without referencing standards that have served mankind well over the centuries? Can a people hooked on hedonism be saved from themselves? It may be true, for instance, that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah had absolute free speech. It is also probable that they had nothing worth saying. Those surfeited in sensualism produce sounds, but not the speech John Stuart Mill and our Founding Fathers had in mind.
Once a critical mass of citizens assumes that there are no absolute values and no Divine commandments—no lamp to light the way— then the sanctity of the law is also called into question. So are the institutions of the law. If nothing is finally right, then nothing is wrong, either. And if there are no fixed standards, then one man’s view is just as valid as another. And why do we need laws? Or judges?
Obviously, our society must be, as it has been, one in which people are clearly free to live with or without God as they may choose. Yet St. Teresa of Avila[14] said it brilliantly—for those who live without God in the world—their mortal existence is no more than a night in a second-class hotel.[15]
We have paid a terrible price in years past when certain groups in our society were improperly disenfranchised, having, in a sense, no stake in our society. Indeed, we are not yet fully free of some of those same concerns today. But I raise my small voice on behalf of those of all races, creeds, and colors who hold to traditional values, who may come to feel that they are gradually being disenfranchised while, at the same time, they are being told to be sure to pay their taxes to sustain an increasingly secularized system.
If these concerns are shared, what are we to do, individually and collectively?
First, we must always start with our own lives. The need for spiritually intact individuals is as great as the need for intact families. The individual must be our starting point in reinstating moral goodness instead of enshrining the secular good life.
Second, more than any other group in our society, lawyers can influence all three branches of government—whether state or federal— by their presence in legislative bodies, in relationships with executive departments, and certainly in the courts. In the coming collisions of various rights (society vs. family, privacy vs. morality), lawyers and judges will be “at the battle’s front.”[16] The probing skirmishes are even now underway.
Third, none of us should commit the sin of silence, letting something trendy but wrong prevail simply because no voices are raised in resistance. Tacit approval one day becomes explicit approval the next.
Hedonism will later produce its own heroic heretics, but we cannot wait for leadership. The points of influence are there now, in quiet conversation or legislation, in a courtroom or a legislative chamber, with clients or colleagues.
Fourth, in the decline of Greek democracy in the fourth century B.C., many opinion makers in the Greek city-state found themselves withdrawing into their private lives and businesses, letting the government take care of itself. This symptom of a “tired democracy” is present today; it calls for fresh waves of public service by us all, including the legal profession. When we are in proper public service, we are on the Lord’s errand.
In conclusion, the light from the lamp of the law flickers, casting long shadows; excesses threaten its extinction.
The consequences of these excesses will combine, cruelly perhaps, making this decade the longest decade in history, the very decade in which we will celebrate the bicentennial of our Constitution. Let us keep the lamp burning brightly in this decade and all that follow!
Thank you for listening, and God bless you!
[1] M. J. Sobran, The Human Life Review (Winter 1980), 118.
[2] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane Company, 1908), 195.
[3] Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1881), 1. (Eds.)
[4] C. S. Lewis, “Man or Rabbit,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics.
[5] John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 43 (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.), 323.
[6] As quoted in M. J. Sobran’s The Human Life Review (Winter 1980), 3.
[7] U. S. News and World Report, June 16, 1980, 50.
[8] M. J. Sobran, The Human Life Review (Fall 1979), 2.
[9] M. J. Sobran, The Human Life Review (Summer 1978), 58–59.
[10] Abraham Lincoln, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 7th Debate Part II, October 15, 1858.
[11] Morris West, The Devil’s Advocate (New York: William Morrow Co., 1959), 292.
[12] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, pt. 2, book 5, ch. 5.
[13] Lance Morrow, “Back to Reticence!” Time, Feb. 4, 1980, 86.
[14] St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) Spanish mystic, religious reformer, author, and theologian of the Roman Catholic Church. She was canonized as a saint in 1622 and was the first woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church.
[15] See Saint Teresa of Jesus [of Avila], The Way of Perfection, rev. by Fr. Benedict Zimmerman (London: Burns Oates, 1952), ch. 40, paragraph 8, 237. (Eds.)
[16] Mary Brown, “It May Not Be on the Mountain Height,” Hymns (1948), no. 75. (Eds.)