The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 402

JUSTIFICATION

362 not receive

Tho he

it.

asserted a hundred times,

able citizen," they would pay no attention to declares

it.

" I

am

But

him honorable, and then they should dare

if

an honorthe judge

to call

him

dis-

honorable, there would be a power to maintain his status against

who

those obtain

Hence a man's own declaration can not He may fancy or assume a status of

attack him.

him a

legal status.

it has no stability, it is no status. This explains why, in our own good land, a man's legal status as a citizen is determined not by himself, but solely by the king, either as sovereign or as judge. The king is judge, for all judg-

righteousness, but

ment

is

pronounced in his name

;

and, altho the judiciary can not

be denied a certain authority independent of the executive, yet in

every sentence

it is

the king's judicature which pronounces judg-

Hence a man's

ment.

Now

cision.

status depends solely

the king has decided, once for

never convicted of crime

upon the king's de-

all,

counted honorable.

is

that every citizen

Not because all Hence so

are honorable, but that they shall be counted as such.

man was never sentenced, he passes for honorable, even And as soon as he is sentenced, he is considered dishonorable, tho he is perfectly honorable. And thus his status is

long as a tho he

is not.

detertnined by his king;

what he

is,

and

judiciary, it is the king

it

he

is

accounted not according to

who determines a man's

not according to what he

A

in

but what his king counts him to be.

person's sex

is

is,

Even without the state in society,

but what the king counts him to be.

determined not by his condition, but by what

the registrar of vital statistics in his register has declared

by some mistake a

him

to be.

were registered as a boy, and therefore counted as a boy, then at the proper time she would be summoned to serve in the militia, unless the mistake were corrected, and she be counted to be what she is. It may be a. pretended, and not the real, child of the rich nobleman in whose name it is registered. And yet it makes no difference whose child it really is, for the state If

will support

it

girl

in all its rights of inheritance, because

the child of that nobleman, and

not

Hence it is the by his actual

is

it

passes for

counted to be his legitimate child.

rule in society that a man's status is determined condition, nor

whom

by his own declaration, but by

And this sovereign has the power, by his decision, to assign to a man the status to which, according to his condition, he belongs, or to put him in a status where the sovereign under

he stands.

he does not belong, but to which he

is

accounted to belong.

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