Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 225

Chap. IV]

only

when

§ 53.

it

this

201

operated in harmony with the order of

society ordained

which

THE FIVE FACULTIES

of

God.

authority bound

obliged, therefore, to

The Laws and its

human

reguhitions to

and itself were and this claim had

subjects

meet a fixed claim

;

been established by God himself in the ordinances of his Creation, and had received its fuller interpretation in his special Revelation. Hence, though whatever the magistracy ordained as law was actually valid, as such, within the circle of their authority, and though as such it bound the conscience formally, the obligation that this enforced law should legitimate itself as law before a higher tribunal, and in other v/ays be corrected, could not be ignored. From this obligation the study of law in the higher sense is born for profound and scientific study alone can obtain an insight into the nature of law in general, and into the special relations of law, as they should be in order to correspond to the relations which have been divinely ordained in creation and by history mutually between man and man or among groups of men. The view, which formed the point of departure in this, was accurate in every way, viz., that there would have been no need of a magistracy, nor of the regulation of law, nor of a consequent study of law, if there had been no moral evil among men. In a sinless state, the correspondence of the social life to the demands of the holiest law would be spontaneous. Hence, when this faculty originated, it was still ;

common confession that sin alone was the cause that one man was clothed with compulsory authority over the other.

the

In a sinless society every occasion for the appearance of such

compulsory authority would fall away, because every one feel himself immediately and in all things bound by the authority of God. And so it has come to pass that the Juridical facult}^ as well as the Medical and the Theological, has disclosed the tendency to oppose an existing evil. If the Theological faculty tended to militate against evil in the heart of man, and the Medical to overcome evil in the human body, in like manner the Juridical faculty has tended to resist evil in the realm of Justice. In connection with this,

a

would

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