favor. He stood, surveying the audience until silence reigned throughout the crowded hall.
"Law is divine," said he. "From the starry worlds overhead to the minutest insect at our feet, law is the one great fact which binds every object and every being to an immutable fiat that is coeval with creation, and which our puny efforts may strive in vain to oppose. The same is true of the moral world. God has written his law in every human soul, with the penalties annexed for its violation; and as well might you attempt to blot Arcturus from the skies as to evade its retributions on the evil doer. What is government? The reverend gentleman who occupied this platform asserts that governments are divine, when all history teems with their sacrilegious proceedings. Or does he mean simply that this government is divine? If so, where is its sign-manual? The proper function of law as applied to society, is the protection of the rights of the individual. When it fails in this it is no longer binding on the conscience, according to the authority of one of the brightest lights in jurisprudence, whence this nation borrowed its common law. In other words all human enactments must conform to the natural or revealed law before they can impose obligations to obey them, since that is coeval with mankind and dictated by God himself; of binding force over all the globe in all countries, and at all times. The reverend gentlemen raises the objection, that if every one were allowed to follow the dictates of his own conscience, anarchy would soon follow; and draws a lamentable picture of divisions in the church, civil war and a
