The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There are two kinds of injustice — the one on the part of those who inflict wrong, the other on the part of those who, when they can, do not shield from wrong those upon whom it is being afflicted … he who does not prevent or oppose wrong, if he can, is just as guilty of wrong …&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If that virtue [Justice] which centers on the ... maintenance of human society, were not to accompany the pursuit of knowledge, that knowledge would seem isolated and barren of results. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Honor to parents the Law ranks second only to honor to God, and if a son does not respond to the benefits received by them—for the slightest failure in his duty towards them—it hands him over to be stoned … The mere intention of doing wrong to one’s parents or of impiety against God is followed by instant death.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Starting from the very beginning with the food of which we partake from infancy and the private life of the home, he [Moses] left nothing, however insignificant, to the discretion and caprice of the individual.&nbsp; What meats a man could abstain from, and what he may enjoy; with what persons he should associate; what period should be devoted respectively to strenuous labor and to rest—for all this our leader made the Law the standard and rule, that we might live under it as under a father and master, and be guilty of no sin through willfulness or ignorance … [By comparison] most [other] men, so far from living in accordance with their own laws, hardly know what they are … But, should anyone of our nation be questioned about the laws, he would repeat them all more readily than his own name … [the Laws], as it were, [are] engraven on our souls.&nbsp; A transgressor is a rarity; evasion of punishment by excuses an impossibility. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Our democracy is not so much a house to be built, but a conversation to be had [slightly paraphrased] ... What the Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future.&nbsp; All its elaborate machinery—Its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights—are designed to force us into a conversation, a “deliberative democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building alliances of consent.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who wrought at Bayeux [a place in Normandy whose name is given to a famous tapestry 224 feet in length], eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past — figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">This, then, ought to be the chief end of all men, to make the interest of each individual and of the whole body politic identical.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is the great merit of a liberal society that it reduces the necessity of agreement to a minimum compatible with the diversity of individual opinions that will exist in a free society.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We the People</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[No state] shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"><strong>Almighty God</strong></em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> — do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion [“establishment clause”], or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [“free exercise clause”] ...</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[The Constitution] defines our most fundamental rights and protections in open-ended terms: “freedom of speech,” for example, and “equal protection under the laws,” “due process of law,” “unreasonable searches and seizures,” “free exercise” of religion and “cruel and unusual punishment.”&nbsp; These terms are not self-defining; they did not have clear meanings even to the people who drafted them.&nbsp; The framers fully understood that they were leaving it to future generations to use their intelligence, judgment and experience to give concrete meaning to the expressed aspirations.</em></p>