The Rights of Man

Hob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate: for the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.” — xxii. 22, 23.

Remove not the old landmark; and enter not into into the fields of the fatherless: for their Redeemer is mighty; he shall plead their cause with thee.” — xxiiL 10, 11.

[HE margin of the Forth opposite Edinburgh is fringed for several miles by a broad belt of trees, very lofty and very luxuriant, as these matters go in this northern clime The line of the shore at the spot is partly a curving bay, and partly a rocky, precipitous headland. A straight arched avenue of beeches, dimly lighted in the day-time through the telescopic opening on the sky at its further extremity, might seem the vestibule of some vast temple not made with hands of men, yet sacred to the worship of the Creator. Labyrinths of shaded walks, — now straight, now curving, — now closed on both sides by thickets, and now exposing suddenly a solitary sail on the glittering sea, or the spires of the distant city, — persuade the urban visitant that he is approaching the forbidden precincts of some feudal palace. Yet the people of all ranks pass and repass unchallenged: no liveried warder is seen watching for trespassers. At either end the visitor enters by a breach in a substantial stone wall of recent workmanship. The sides of the gateways are not squared by the tool of the mason: both openings are ragged disruptions, as if the walls had been blown up by gunpowder or breached by cannon shot, to make way for an assaulting column. Why this mark of war in a scene over which a perfect peace is brooding 1 Thereby hangs a tale; there was a war, and the peace which now prevails is the fruit of vie tory.

A few years ago, the great proprietors of the neighbourhood, believing that their rights were absolute, built the public out by a massive wall of stone and lime. The people quickly burst the (7) 30 barriers and regained possession; but they did not stop there: they organized, procured funds, and tried the case in the courts of law. They were successful, and secured for themselves and posterity the unchallenged right to one of the finest marine promenades that the varied coast-line of our island supplies. Peasants, artisans, and merchants, mothers and children, young men and maidens, tread promiscuously these stately avenues, with the firm step and upward look of the free: the neighbouring nobles have not a surer right to their castles and estates. An attempt was made, in good faith, but in ignorance, to remove an ancient landmark; it failed: the rights of the poor were defended successfully against the encroachments of the rich.

To whom did the feeble owe their victory over the strong? A court of law, you will say, and no feudal superior, threw its broad shield over them. It did: but the real cause of the event lies deeper. A mightier Redeemer espouses the cause of the poor in this land. The liberty of the subject is secured by a more ancient charter than that which constitutes the Court of Session. The Bible is the true Magna Charta of British freedom. Courts of law were established in this land at a time when the Bible was under ban, and what did our forefathers gain by the privilege 1 Courts of law did not then protect the property and person of the poor from the grasp of the powerful: they dispensed law, but not justice. The triumph of true religion brought in the era of equal rights: when the conscience was emancipated from the thraldom of the priest, the property was secure from the agressiou of the noble; when the people placed themselves under the law of God, they no longer suffered from the lawlessness of men.

There is a causal connection, and not merely a coincidence, between the spread of God’s word and the security of men’s rights in a land. This may be demonstrated either by examining the contents of the Book, or by reading its history. I know of no country really free in which the Bible is laid under restraint, and no country enslaved where the Bible is free. Some have zealously advocated the rights of man, and striven at the same time to throw discredit on the Scriptures. The double labour was labour lost. To undermine the foundation does not contribute to the stability of the superstructure: to blot out the first table of the Decalogue is not the best way of enforcing the second. If you teach that a man may have no god, or any god, or all gods, you cannot thereafter so effectually bring home the commandments, “Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet.”

Living creatures, the most noxious and loathsome, have instincts ever true to guide them in their effort to preserve their own life. Such are systems of despotism: while they know not and do not good, they know unerringly what will destroy or preserve themselves: deceitful in all else, they may be trusted for one thing — for knowing surely, and warding off vigorously, whatever would endanger their own existence. With the true instinct of self-preservation, tyrants, great and small, cast or keep out Bibles from their territory. The operation of this principle has embodied in the history and jurisprudence of nations the most convincing evidence that the word of God is the true palladium of popular liberty: the Truth’s chief enemies become the unwilling witnesses of the Truth. One obvious method of proving that the Bible favours spiritual, political, and social liberty, is to show that tyranny, spiritual, political, and social, sets itself with all the steadfastness of an instinct against the Bible.

1. The Bible and spiritual tyranny are, in their nature, reciprocally antagonist. If we show that spiritual tyranny instinctively fears and hates the Bible, we shall have proved that the religion of the Bible favours the spiritual emancipation of mankind. The Popedom is the most finished specimen of spiritual tyranny that the world has ever seen. It is not necessary to give evidence oi this; both parties to our present argument will acknowledge it. It is known and acknowledged by all who are outside of the Pope’s thraldom, that all who are within it are spiritually slaves. The right of private judgment is denounced as damnable heresy at Rome: “I believe as the Church believes,” is lauded as the most perfect creed. The best Papist is the man who has no will smd no opinion but that of his priest; and the best priest is the man who has no will but that of his superior. No man within the grasp of the Papacy is allowed to think for himself; this is evident and notorious. But this most consummate spiritual despotism counts and treats the open Bible as its most dangerous foe. Popery has use for the Bible shut, perverting and employing it thus to enforce its own decrees; but the Bible open — God’s word spoken to men, as shines his sun out of heaven upon the earth, it cannot endure. The advocates of Rome acknowledge that the use of the Bible is not freely allowed to the people: they confess that it is given only to such persons as the priest knows to be discreet, and as far as he permits them to use it. This is enough to show that the Bible is the acknowledged enemy of Rome. None but dangerous and dreaded books are so treated. In Italy, accordingly, and wherever Popery is supreme, the frontiers are more jealously guarded against the introduction of the Bible than against the inroads of armed men. In the circular letters of the Pope, in our own day, the Bible is denounced as the underminer of his throne.*

Surely sceptics, who are zealous for human liberty, should see in this an evidence that the Bible comes from the Maker and Preserver of man.

2. As Rome serves for a specimen of spiritual, Russia may serve as a specimen of political despotism. Both kinds actually exist in each; but the most outstanding characteristic of Rome is the spiritual, and of Russia the political slavery. The Pope is first and essentially a spiritual despot, and thereby he has reduced his subjects also into political bondage. The Czar is first and essentially a political despot, and thereby he has employed the material resources of the state to subjugate the souls of a nation. Rome has employed its despotism over the soul, to enslave also the body; Russia has employed its despotism over the body, to enslave also the soul. The religion of Russia is only a department of state administration. It is, like the religion of the old Roman empire, in the hands of the government, and used chiefly for the purpose of making the masses loyal. As in the pagan system of old, the Emperor becomes practically the object of attachment and religious reverence; but it is on the basis of a material temporal authority that all this semi-spiritual superstructure has been reared. Historically the Czar was a king before he became a god to Russia. Whereas it is the Pope’s spiritual authority that procures for him money and armies: it is the Emperor’s money and armies that obtain for him the superstitious homage of his ignorant subjects.

* This chapter wag written in 1856; and notwithstanding the beneficent changes that are in progress, it is left entire in this edition, that the portions which aic inapplicable to the present may serve as a monument of the past

This political tyranny, with the true instinct of self-preservation, casts out and keeps out Bibles and Christians. If the Bible be not the friend of liberty, why does the Emperor of Russia seize or turn every Bible at his frontier1? The northern Pope, like his Italian brother, has no objection to a closed Bible. You may give his people a Bible if it be in a language which they do not understand; but the Bible in the Russian tongue is contraband. If any one doubts whether Russia proscribes the Bible, let him try to introduce it within her borders: at the border line he will feel an argument that will fully convince him.

To both these species of tyranny, and to both these archtyrants, our own country and our own Queen afford a blessed contrast. In this country, mind is free: in Italy it is enslaved by a blasphemous spiritual hierarchy. If any man doubts the double fact, let him change places with some of the Italian martyrs who are wandering in exile or lying in prison for the crime of being found in their own houses with open Bibles before them. But in Italy the Bible is proscribed, while it has free course here; the inference is obvious and sure: no honest open mind can fail to take it in. Both Rome and Britain agree in the sure instinctive feeling that the Bible favours the freedom of the soul; therefore Rome keeps it out, and Britain lets it in. Rome wards it from her shores as she would the plague: Britain spreads it as sunlight over all her borders.

In Britain there is real political liberty for all classes — imperfect, indeed, but in such measure as is nowhere else seen on a large scale, except among our own sons and brothers who have planted our liberty in another soil: in Russia the government is the most absolute autocracy that it is possible to reduce to practice in human affairs: the Emperor of Russia is as strictly a despot as the limited capabilities of man will permit. Both Britain and Russia feel with unerring instinct that the Bible introduces, defends, consolidates political and civil liberty. Therefore Britain lets the Bible in, and Russia keeps it out. They know what they are doing: the creatures are acting after their kind.

3. The Bible is the enemy of social tyranny, and therefore the friend of social liberty. The most outrageous violations of human freedom in the social relations that have been known in modern times among civilized nations are the slave trade and slavery. It was Christianity that first abolished the trade, and then emancipated the slaves. There were two long battles, and two glorious victories. The first secured that no more African men should be stolen from their homes and carried into bondage by British ships: the second procured the actual freedom of all who had been already bought, or born in bondage, throughout the dominions of the Crown. No fact in recent history is more certain than this, that it was the love of Christ that gave the impulse to that holy war, and the Scriptures that directed its course. The lives of its heroes are the biographies which Christians put into the hands of the young, in the hope of winning them to a Saviour, and without reference to the question of slavery. Clarkson and Cowper, Wilberforce and Buxton, the army that overcame slavery, the chiefs and the men, were a Christian army. The force that burst its bloody bonds was the force of truth, deposited from the Scriptures into human hearts, and becoming vital in believing men. The explosive energy which prevailed to heave up and cast away the mountain-weight of self-interest opposed, was the conviction in Christians that slavery is against the word and will of God.

Those who, in the present day, keep African negroes in bondage, have done more than cross the landmark and enter the fields of the fatherless: they do not permit their brother to possess a field — they do not permit their brother to possess himself. Those who carried them from their native land at first, robbed the poor because he was poor: those who now refuse to set them free, are oppressing the afflicted in the gate. The Redeemer of these orphans is mighty, and he will plead their cause.

But surely the slaveholders believe that the Bible is on their side, for they constantly appeal to it in their own defence. Why then do they frame laws to keep the negroes from knowing it 1 Vhy do they cast citizens into prison whose only crime is that they have taught slaves to read the Bible? When the slaveholders quote Scripture in support of their institution, the fact proves that they need its support, not that they have it. When they are really convinced that the word of God gives divine sanction to their right of property in the Africans, they will teach the Africans to read, and supply each -with a Bible. The Pope and those Republicans have more in common than themselves suspect:

both are jealous of God’s word, because both hold in bondage their fellow-men.

In our own country the most conspicuous example of removing ancient landmarks and robbing the poor of their heritage occurs in connection with the day of rest. “Remember the Sabbath-day, to keep it holy,” is a very ancient landmark: the Father of our spirits set it up for the benefit of man, when man was first made. Some endeavour to tread it down, that they may rob the poor of their heritage, which lies safe behind it. How shall the poor man defend his patrimony, when his powerful neighbours are bent on adding it to their overgrown domains] His only safety is to point to the ancient landmark, and appeal to his almighty Protector. If he give up the Lord’s day to labour, he will plead in vain, This or that great man promised an equivalent. The day is his by an ancient charter from the King: it is his wisdom to fall back on that authentic instrument, and defy the aggressors. If the labourer hold his rest day on that authority, he will succeed; if not, he will fail. What man gives, man can take away. The rich are rulers everywhere: the poor will go to the wall, unless he lean direct on the Omnipotent.

The command is, “Enter not into the fields of the fatherless.” Orphans under age are the feeblest class of the community; in all countries they have been the peculiar prey of heartless oppressors. Because they have no help in man, God takes up their cause and makes it his own. If you have the prospect of leaving an orphan child behind you at your departing, you take care to assign your property for His use, but you do not place it in his power. Poor child! the first sharper who passed would snatch it from his hands. You look for some one wise and great and good, and constitute him guardian of your infant’s inheritance: you place the treasure under the guardian’s authority, for behoof of your child.

So, “the Sabbath was made for man,” but “the Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath.” It is a precious legacy from the Maker of all things to poor, short-sighted, silly children. If it were in their own hands, they would barter the boon away to swindlers. But our Father in heaven, although he made it for our use, has not y -laced it in our power. Christ is constituted Lord of the Sabbath, and yet the Sabbath is a day for man. If it were in our

o» power, it would soon be wrenched from our grasp: in his hands it is in safe keeping. If the poor know where their strength lies, they will keep their heritage. If these orphans appeal to their miighty Redeemer, the powers of the world dare not plant a foot within their fields. Let the fee-simple lie in the Trustee’s hands, and come to him weekly for the usufruct. He will preserve the capital; you will enjoy the life-rent.

So far has the law of God infused its spirit into the statute-book of this favoured land, and so complete is the supremacy of law, that we cannot point to an actual case of a rich man stepping with impunity over the ancient landmark and taking away the field of the fatherless. There is much of secret deceit which human laws can never reach; but strong-handed oppression is among us impossible. While the poor have cause to rejoice in this, the powerful have no reason to repine; when a free Bible becomes the protector of right, the rights of all classes are protected equally. There is no respect of persons with God; in as far as the principles of the Scriptures affect the jurisprudence and habits of a people, the balance is held even between conflicting interests and parties. When the common people, by a process of law, successfully maintained their own rights, they did not follow up their victory by a tumultuous assault upon the rights of the proprietors. Had they done so, law and public opinion would have conspired to repress the outrage. When the people gain a victory in a land where the word of God is not diffused and reverenced, they follow it up, and return the blow with interest; the oppressed become the oppressors. In as far as justice in our land prevails, and victors are moderate, we are indebted for the benefit to the free circulation of the Scriptures, and the hold which their doctrines have obtained upon the public mind. In proportion as the fear of the Lord pervades a community, the legislation will be wise and the executive impartial. If we accept the greater, we shall secure also the less: if a people seek first the kingdom of God, they will get it, and a kingdom on earth besides. A people religiously right, will not long remain politically wrong. As worship rises to heaven, justice radiates on earth. If faith go foremost, charity will follow.

S, JfaitbM Jfat&tr.