THE test of loyalty is one that no person in this world who arrives at the age of accountability can escape. And the test is one of loyalty to law.
But what law? Is it that law which is continually changing with the rise and fall of political parties, or the variations in legislative assemblies? Is there a varying standard of loyalty? It is manifest that such a standard could not serve as a universal test for mankind.
No; the standard is unchanging—the same for all men in all ages—because it is based upon an unchanging and unchangeable law. The only law which changes not is the law of Him who is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.”
The principles of this law come in contact with the daily life of every individual. No one can escape them. And they are the principles of religious liberty. No one, therefore, can stand in the position of a looker-on while the struggle for the preservation of that liberty is in progress. Unconsciously to himself, it may be, but none the less certainly, he is standing under one or the other of the opposing standards; and if not an active participant [674] in the contest now, he is receiving a training which will make him such in days to come.
Jesus Christ, the divine expounder of the law of God, said that “the weightier matters” of that law are justice, mercy, and truth. There can be no loyalty to that law, therefore, without an adherence to the principles of justice and mercy. The Pharisees, to whom Christ addressed these words, held the opposite idea, or at least put the opposite of it into practice. They were the greatest sticklers for “the law,” and made a most elaborate formal compliance with it; but at the same time they laid grievous burdens upon other people’s shoulders, and cared naught for the welfare and the rights of their fellow men.
It was by displaying the opposite spirit that Jesus Christ manifested his loyalty to the law of God. He came to undo the heavy burdens, to break the yokes under which men were held in bondage, to open the prison doors, to relieve in every way the distress which had become the common lot of humanity. And it is in the same way that loyalty to the divine law will manifest itself to-day.
The movements for “setting other people straight,“—for laying obligations upon their shoulders out of professed regard for “the law,” for putting upon them the yoke of Puritan theology and inflicting the penalty of fine or imprisonment upon all who refuse conformity with their ideas, partake of the Pharisaical spirit and not of the spirit of genuine loyalty to law.
It is upon the law of the Sabbath that the Pharisaical spirit fastens itself most readily. For no part of the law were the Pharisees more zealous than for that which commanded Sabbath observance. How frequently they accused Christ of Sabbath-breaking, because he had broken—not the Sabbath, but—their ideas of Sabbath observance. The record of their mistaken zeal in this respect should furnish a warning to others of a later day to beware of any movement which would force people into uniformity in the matter of observing the Sabbath.
Loyalty to the law of God will be manifested in opposition to the spirit of all such movements. Such movements are in the earth to-day, and are rapidly swelling in volume and intensity; and it is in this way that the test will be brought to the people of this day. Let those who would stand for law, stand for the law for which Christ stood, and stand for it as he did. That means that they will manifest the spirit of Christ and not that of the Pharisees. The “weightier matters of the law” are justice, mercy, and truth. Without these, a zeal for the law becomes only a cloak for anarchy.