Let there be light

“A long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

~Thomas Paine

In the time of John the Baptist…

“He saw his people deceived, self-satisfied, and asleep in their sins.He longed to rouse them to a holier life.”
~ELLEN G.WHITE
THE DESIRE OF AGES



If justice is left out…

“And so if justice is left out, what are kingdoms except great robber bands? For what are robber bands except little kingdoms? The band also is a group of men governed by the orders of a leader, bound by a social compact, and its booty is divided according to a law agreed upon. If by repeatedly adding desperate men this plague grows to the point where it holds territory and establishes a fixed seat, seizes cities and subdues people, then it more conspicuously assumes the name of kingdom, and this name is now openly granted to it, not for any subtraction of cupidity, but by addition of impunity. For it was an elegant and true reply that was made to Alexander the Great by a certain pirate whom he had captured. When the king asked him what he was thinking of, that he should molest the sea, he said with defiant independence: ‘The same as you when you molest the world! Since I do this with a little ship I am called a pirate. You do it with a great fleet and are called emperor’.”

~Saint Augustine

Natural law

There is a true law, right reason, agreeable to nature, known to all men, constant and eternal, which calls to duty by its precepts, deters from evil by its prohibition… This law cannot be departed from without guilt… Nor is there one law at Rome and another at Athens, one thing now and another afterward; but the same law, unchanging and eternal, binds all races of man and all times; and there is one common, as it were, master and ruler – God, the author, promulgator and mover of this law. Whoever does not obey it departs from [his true] self, contemns the nature of man and inflicts upon himself the greatest penalties…

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
Roman statesman, jurist, and orator