Article February 18, 1905 Issue

The Right of Inheritance

HAYNE DAVIS

There is a provision of law under which if one who has no right to land occupies it, adversely to the true owner, for twenty years, this gives him a better title to it than the true owner. But if the owner be under age during this period of occupation, a higher law comes in, annuls this law, and restores to the child his rightful estate.

Suppose a case in which the true owner is a child during the time of adverse occupancy, and when he claims his inheritance the occupant asserts his right because he has been in possession for the required length of time, and points to the law which sustains him in his position. Unless the child asserts his childhood, and relies on the higher law, the decision of the court would be given according to the lower law, because only those facts to which it applies have been brought out. The child would, therefore, lose his inheritance, though there existed a law under which he would be able to regain it, simply because he did not assert and maintain the facts which call into operation the higher law. This may illustrate what we must do to come into our inheritance as children of God.

Impostors, false beliefs, claim to be in possession under authority of material law. The heirs are deceived as to their origin and birth in the first place, and as to the law in the second. They do not realize that they are sons of God, and because sons, "heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ." In the second place, they have been deceived as to the spiritual law under which they are entitled now to the possession of their inheritance. Ignorant of the spiritual facts of being, ignorant of the inheritance to which this entitles them, and of the way of coming into it, men remain inactive while impostors, false beliefs, continue to deprive them of their inheritance.

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