God made us social beings, it is true, but society is not necessarily the Constitution of the United States!  Because God meant some form of government should exist, does not at all prove that we are justified in supporting a wicked one.  Man confers the rights and regulates the duties of citizenship.  God never made a citizen, and no one will escape, as a man, from the sins he commits as a citizen.  This is the first time that it has ever been held an excuse for sin that we “went with the multitude to do evil!”

Certainly we can be under no such responsibility to become and remain citizens, as will excuse us from the sinful acts which as such citizens we are called to commit.  Does God make obligatory on his creature the support of institutions which require him to do acts in themselves wrong?  To suppose so, were to confound all the rules of God’s moral kingdom.

President Wayland has lately been illustrating, and giving his testimony to the principle, that a combination of men cannot change the moral character of an act, which is in itself sinful—­that the law of morals is binding the same on communities, corporations, &c. as on individuals.

After describing slavery, and saying that to hold a man in such a state is wrong—­he goes on: 

“I will offer but one more supposition.  Suppose that any number, for instance one half of the families in our neighborhood, should by law enact that the weaker half should be slaves, that we would exercise over them the authority of masters, prohibit by law their instruction, and concert among ourselves means for holding them permanently in their present situation.  In what manner would this alter the moral aspect of the case?”

A law in this case is merely a determination of one party, in which all unite, to hold the other party in bondage; and a compact by which the whole party bind themselves to assist every individual of themselves to subdue all resistance from the other party, and guaranteeing to each other that exercise of this power over the weaker party which they now possess.

Now I cannot see that this in any respect changes the nature of the parties.  They remain, as before, human beings, possessing the same intellectual and moral nature, holding the same relations to each other and to God, and still under the same unchangeable law, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.  By the act of holding a man in bondage, this law is violated.  Wrong is done, moral evil is committed.  In the former case it was done by the individual; now it is done by the individual and the society.  Before, the individual was responsible only for his own wrong; now he is responsible both for his own, and also, as a member of the society, for all the wrong which the society binds itself to uphold and render perpetual.

The scriptures frequently allude to the fact, that wrong done by law, that is by society,