Editorial August 7, 1920 Issue

The Reign of Law

Frederick Dixon

THE world is suffering very largely from the belief that there is a law of evil. It is perfectly obvious that if such a law exists, it is useless and impossible to fight against it. Law, scientifically, is not an enactment which can be modified or set aside by a legislative body, or by the fiat of autocracy. It is the working of Principle, which is absolute; consequently law itself is absolute, and being absolute, cannot be escaped from. The effect of this must be not only intensely dispiriting, but absolutely crushing to anybody who believes himself under a law of evil. It is, indeed, the crushing sense of inability to escape from this which operates with such disastrous effect in the physical universe.

Almost a single example of what this means will make the whole argument clear. It is a fully accepted medical dogma that there is a law of heredity. This law of heredity works in the most remorseless fashion. It may skip a generation, it may skip two or three generations, but it is always liable again to assert itself in some horrible trait of character or manifestation of disease, which makes the person marked out for its operation a misery to himself, and perhaps a terror to mankind. A degenerate or a sick man is the complete victim of such a law. The world has been taught that it is impossible for him to escape its effects, and he bows to the world's decision, sometimes in desperation and sometimes in despair. Nor is the world which believes in the law, and which is consequently aware of the impotence of the victim in the meshes of the law, in any way fair to him. If it is merely a case of disease, it regards him with a certain amount of pity or loathing, according to the nature of the disease; if, on the other hand, it is a case of vice or criminality, it turns upon him with the anger of society, fighting for its own protection.

Now the curious part of all this is not that purely materialistic mentalities should be deceived by such a claim of law, but that a so-called Christian public should be equally deceived by it. To the man who believes that nothing exists but matter and its various manifestations, a sick man or a degenerate can only be observed and treated as a sick or a dangerous animal. The law is there, and there is no more chance of fighting the law than of preventing the revolution of the earth. It is when it comes to the so-called Christian theology that the wonder grows. For according to the teaching of the Bible, everything that ever was created, was created good, so that there is no room for evil at all. Orthodox Christian theology, faced, therefore, with the manifestation of evil, and being thoroughly materialistic in all its conceptions,—as, in spite of its theological dogmas, it must be, inasmuch as it has accepted matter as the creation of God, Principle,—has to find a way out of its dilemma, and it finds this way in the most illogical manner, by some theory of free will, predestination, or divine permission.

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