29. Principles on which killing an assassin is defended
I do not know what those persons mean, who say that we are authorized to kill an assassin by the law of nature:
Principles like this, heedlessly assumed as self-evident truth are, I believe, often the starting point of our errors, the point of divergence from rectitude from which our subsequent obliquities proceed.
Some men seem to talk of the laws of nature as if nature were a legislatress who had sat and framed laws for the government of mankind. Nature makes no laws.
A law implies a legislator, and there is no legislator upon the principles of human duty but God.
If, by the “law of nature” is meant anything of which the sanctions or obligations are different from those of revelation, it is obvious that we have set up a moral system of our own, and in opposition to that which has been established by Heaven.
If we mean by the “law of nature” nothing but that which is accordant with revelation, to what purpose do we refer to it at all?
I do not suppose that any sober moralist will stately advance the laws of nature in opposition to the laws of God;
but I think that to advance them at all – that to refer to any principle or law in determination of our duty, irrespectively of the simple will of God, is always dangerous;
for there will be many who, when they are referred for direction to such law or principle, will regard it, in their practice, as a final standard of truth.
I believe that a reference to the laws of nature has seldom illustrated our duties and never induced us to perform them, and that it has hitherto answered little other purpose than that of amusing the lovers of philosophical morality.
The mode of proving, or of stating, the right to kill an assassin is this:
“There is one case in which all extremities are justifiable, namely, when our life is assaulted and it becomes necessary for our preservation to kill the assailant.
This is evident in a state of nature, unless it can be shown that we are bound to prefer the aggressor’s life to our own;
that is to say, to love our enemy better than ourselves, which can never be a debt of justice, nor anywhere appears to be a duty of charity.”
If I were disposed to hold argumentation like this, I would say that although we may not be required to love our enemies better than ourselves, we are required to love them as ourselves;
and that in the supposed case, it still would be a question equally balanced, which life ought to be sacrificed; for it is quite clear that if we kill the assailant, we love him less than ourselves, which may, perhaps, militate a little against “a duty of charity.”
But the truth is, that the question is not
whether we should love our enemy better than ourselves,
but whether we should sacrifice the laws of Christianity in order to preserve our lives – whether we should prefer the interests of religion to our own – whether we should be willing to “lose our life, for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s.”
This system of counter-crime is of very loose tendency:
The assailant violates his duties by attempting to kill me, and I, therefore, am to violate mine by actually killing him.
Is his meditated crime, then, a justification of my perpetrated crime?
In the case of a condemned Christian martyr who was about to be led to the stake, it is supposable that, by having contrived an explosive, he may preserve his life by suddenly firing it and blowing his persecutors into the air:
Would Christianity justify the act?
Or what should we say of him if he committed it?
We should say that whatever his faith might be, his practice was very unsound; that he might believe the gospel, but that he certainly did not fulfil its duties.
Now I contend that for all the purposes of the argument, the cases of the martyr and the assaulted person are precisely similar:
He who was about to be led to the stake and he who was about to lose his life by the assassin are both required to regulate their conduct by the same laws, and are both to be prepared to offer up their lives in testimony of their allegiance to Christianity:
the one in allegiance to her, in opposition to the violation of her moral principles and her moral spirit; and the other in opposition to errors in belief or to ecclesiastical corruptions.
It is therefore in vain to tell me that the victim of persecution would have suffered for religion’s sake, for so also would the victim of the ruffian.