The Origin of Law
The Enemy, of course, is the originator of Law: the unnatural idea that free spirits should be constrained by anything except their desires and power. It is this great truth that Our Father Below recognized and in the name of which He raised his Great Rebellion against the Enemy. Since the Enemy refuses to recognize this truth, he has persisted in his futile attempts to bring Law into force wherever he creates. His most notable failure, of course, brought about the current state of affairs on Earth. Man lost his stewardship of the Earth when he – as anyone might have predicted – broke the Enemy’s Law. He never seems to realize that He cannot make obedience to His Law “too easy†to prevent His subjects from breaking it.
However, far from stamping out the concept of law, the vermin of Earth continually resurrect it. Sometimes, as with the so-called “Chosen†people, this is the result of His direct interference. At other times, as with humans like Hammurabi, it is simply a case of the humans aping their betters. The worst of these latter cases, in terms of their effect on human history, was the Roman Republic.
The Roman Republic practically worshipped their laws, and though they were a promisingly mean, rapacious, and cruel people, never quite forgot, even in the days of their worst emperors – a lawless race if ever any existed – one of their earliest convictions: that having dethroned their kings, the rest of mankind, including themselves, should be subject to a standard of behavior unbreakable by any. Â
Of course, it was doubly disastrous that the Enemy contrived to have His nascent Church emerge in the womb of this backward culture. Like a sapling after a forest fire, the Church melded the Enemy’s Law with the ashes of Empire and a whole civilization that reverenced law grew up from the Atlantic to the Euphrates.
Broke their own laws, I hear the ignorant say? Of course they did! What else can one expect from humans – especially the servants of the Enemy – than hypocrisy? How else could they approach the merest frontiers of virtue?
What such objections fail to take into account is that humans are like moths to flame: though it may burn them, they will return to the light of virtue again and again, hoping that this time it may not scorch their worthless souls. Moreover, it is their very failure – as their (fortunately) increasingly maligned Paul noted – that drives them finally to seek repentance and escape our grasp. For well over a thousand years, the twin bulwarks of Church and State supported one another in the name of the law. Clearly, something had to be done, and the efforts of all Hell were marshalled against them. We will explore our counterattack in our next chapter.
