It is apparent that a thing is not necessarily bad because it is forbidden by the law.  Legislators are forever repealing and abolishing criminal statutes, and organized society is constantly ignoring laws, until they fall into disuse and die.  The laws against witchcraft, the long line of “blue laws,” the laws affecting religious beliefs and many social customs, are well-known examples of legal and innocent acts which legislatures and courts have once made criminal.  Not only are criminal statutes always dying by repeal or repeated violation, but every time a legislature meets, it changes penalties for existing crimes and makes criminal certain acts that were not forbidden before.

Judging from the kind of men sent to the State legislatures and to Congress, the fact that certain things are forbidden does not mean that these things are necessarily evil; but rather, that politicians believe there is a demand for such legislation from the class of society that is most powerful in political action.  No one who examines the question can be satisfied that a thing is intrinsically wrong because it is forbidden by a legislative body.

Other more or less popular opinions of the way to determine right or wrong are found to be no more satisfactory.  Many believe that the question of whether an act is right or wrong is to be settled by a religious doctrine; but the difficulties are still greater in this direction.  First of all, this involves a thorough and judicial inquiry into the merits of many, if not all, forms of religion, an investigation which has never been made, and from the nature of things cannot be made.  The fact is, that one’s religious opinions are settled long before he begins to investigate and quite by other processes than reason.  Then, too, all religious precepts rest on interpretation, and even the things that seem the plainest have ever been subject to manifold and sometimes conflicting construction.  Few if any religious commands can be, or ever were, implicitly relied on without interpretation.  The command, “Thou shalt not kill,” seems plain, but does even this furnish an infallible rule of conduct?

Of course this commandment could not be meant to forbid killing animals.  Yet there are many people who believe that it does, or at least should.  No Christian state makes it apply to men convicted of crime, or against killing in war, and yet a considerable minority has always held that both forms of killing violate the commandment.  Neither can it be held to apply to accidental killings, or killings in self-defense, or in defense of property or family.  Laws, too, provide all grades of punishment for different kinds of killing, from very light penalties up to death.  Manifestly, then, the commandment must be interpreted, “Thou shalt not kill when it is wrong to kill,” and therefore it furnishes no guide to conduct.  As well say:  “Thou shalt do nothing that is wrong.”  Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.