“The sovereign, or the parliament, that pretends to govern a country in opposition to the laws of God has no right to aught but revolt and contempt from every upright man; to give the sacred name of law to tyrannical enactments of that kind is a profanation, unworthy not only of Christian, but of every man who is not a slave.”
FROM commentary on Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost by Dom Prosper Guéranger:
The will of God!—there is the origin, there is the real greatness of all authority amongst men! Of himself, man has no right to command his fellow man. The number, however imposing it may be, makes no difference with this powerlessness of men over my conscience; for whether they be one, or five hundred, I, by nature, am equal to each one among them; and by adding the number of their so-called rights over me, they are only adding to the number of nothingness. But God, wishing that men should live one with the other, has thereby wished that there exist amongst them a power which should rule over the rest; that is, should direct the thousands or millions of different wills to the unity of one social end. God leaves to circumstances, though it is his providence that regulates those circumstances—he leaves to men themselves, at the beginning of any mere human society, a great latitude as to the choice of the form under which is to be exercised both the civil power itself and the mode of its transmission. But once regularly invested with the power, its depositories, its possessors, are responsible to God alone, as far, that is, as the legitimate exercise of their authority goes, because it is from God alone that that power comes to them.
It does not come to them from their people, who, not having that power themselves, cannot give it to another. So long as those rulers comply with the compact, or do not turn to the ruin of their people the power they received for its well-being—so long their right to the obedience of their subjects is the right of God himself—whether they exercise their authority in exacting the subsidies needed for government; or in passing laws which, for the general good of the people, restrain the liberty otherwise theirs by natural right; or again, by bidding their soldiers defend their country at the risk of life. In all such cases, it is God himself that commands and insists on being obeyed: in this world, he puts the sword into the hands of representatives that they may punish the disobedient; and in the next, he himself will eternally punish them, unless they have made amends.
How great, then, is not the dignity of human Law! It makes the legislator a representative of God, and at the same time, spares the subject the humiliation of feeling himself debased before a fellow man! But in order that the law oblige, that is, be truly a law, it is evident that it must be, first and foremost, conformable to the commands and the prohibitions of that God whose will alone can give it a sacred character, by making it enter into the domain of man’s conscience. It is for this reason that there cannot be a law against God or his Christ or his Church. When God is not with him who governs, the power he exercises is nothing better than brute force. The sovereign, or the parliament, that pretends to govern a country in opposition to the laws of God has no right to aught but revolt and contempt from every upright man; to give the sacred name of law to tyrannical enactments of that kind is a profanation, unworthy not only of Christian, but of every man who is not a slave.
