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I. MAN HAS RIGHTS.

1. Man has an inalienable right to the enjoyment of that happiness for which he was created. What is necessary to this?

(1) Physical health. Where there is a diseased, enfeebled body there cannot be happiness. But what millions in this free country of ours, who have committed no crime, are doomed by the tyrannic force of commercial cupidity, and by the injustice of legislation, to spend their time in filthy garrets and in foetid alleys.

(2) Intellectual culture is essential to happiness. We have a mind as well as a body; nay, we are mind. There is no paradise for man where the tree of knowledge does not bloom, knowledge gives a new interest to life, a new meaning to the universe, a new sphere for the full play of our faculties. If, then, knowledge is essential to happiness, what is necessary to knowledge is a right.

(3) A good conscience is a necessary element of happiness. He who surrenders his conscience to the dictates of others, degrades his nature; and he who is forced to lend his support to principles contrary to his own convictions is an insulted and an injured man.

(4) Social respect is another element in happiness. Whatever tends to degrade a man in the estimation of his contemporaries is an infringement of this right.

2. Man has an inalienable right to those conditions essential to the discharge of his obligations. Duty meets us everywhere, it is ubiquitous, it meets us at home and abroad, in solitude and society, in business and in pleasure. The cardinal duties of our being may be put into three groups, domestic, civil, and religious.

(1) The domestic group, The duty of filial reverence and love meets us at the beginning of our history, and is enjoined both by nature and the Bible. "Honour thy father and thy mother," is a mandate that not only rings in the Decalogue, but echoes ever more through natural reason and conscience. It is not incumbent on any child to honour morally ignoble parents, or to love those whose characters arc false, and mean, and corrupt. Nor could they do so. Parental government, therefore, is based upon the right that children have to expect from parents the spiritually noble and pure.

(2) The civil group. Outside of the domestic sphere, out lying close to its door, there is the great world of our fellow creatures which we can society. This society has its institutions, its laws, and government. We live in this world, and we cannot live without it. Whoever is the chief administrator of the laws that govern society, whether placed in his supreme position by lineage or suffrage, for his whole life or for a certain period, he is the king, and we are commanded to honour and obey him. But this duty implies that the king is honour-worthy, and that his laws are righteous.

(3) The religious group. The great duty that grows out of our relation to our Maker is this, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," etc. But this supreme obligation of humanity implies rights on man's raft. If the Supreme Being requires me to love Him supremely He must furnish me with a revelation of Himself, and with capacities capable of understanding and appreciating that revelation. He must appear as the infinitely lovely One, the altogether beautiful, in order to kindle my highest affections. Now in relation to Him our rights are equal to our obligations. He has given us all that we require to fulfil the duties He demands.

II. MAN HAS WRONGS. His wrongs are the antitheses — or rather, deprivations and violations of his rights.

1. How man's wrongs are inflicted. The despoilers of his rights may be divided into two classes, the external and the internal.

(1) The external. Who and what outside of man deprive him of his rights? Unrighteous government. Who can look at some of the laws of England without denouncing them as unrighteous. Take the laws in relation to land. Take the laws in relation to labour. Honest labour is an institution of heaven. And is not that law unrighteous which, to support regal luxuries, and gorgeous pageantries, government pensions, huge naval and military establishments, despoils the honest worker of much of the produce of his labour? Secular monopoly. Vast as are the resources of this earth, they are not boundless. It is the purpose of our Maker that all men should have an adequate, if not an equal participation in them. He, therefore, who appropriates to his own personal use an amount which would be sufficient supply the wants of a number, is a monopolist, and interferes with the rights or the multitude. Social chicanery. It has been said that so rife is the ravenous greed and the unscrupulous dishonesty in society, that one can scarcely have a business transaction with any man without the liability of being cheated. Justice between man and man is generally torpid, and often extinct. The spirit of fraud and falsehood fills the air.

(2) The internal. There are elements or forces in the human soul that are perhaps greater despoilers of rights than any that are without: in fact, the external tyrants derive their energy and continuance from them, outward despots would scarcely live were it not for the inward. Indolence. Perhaps in most men naturally the desire for rest is stronger than that for action. The lazy hang on others, they will fawn on and flatter tyrants,, only let them have a little more "folding of the hands in sleep." Servility. This, indeed, is an offspring of the former. It means the loss of all sense of manly independency. Credulity is also the child of indolence; not until men rouse themselves to intellectual study so as to become qualified to form an independent judgment, will they free themselves from those fraudulent forces and impostures that "turn aside the right of a man." Intemperance in either form, eating or drinking, is one of the greatest despoilers of human rights.

2. How man's wrongs arc to be removed.

(1) Not by violent declamation against existing authorities. Demagogism has ever done more harm than good.

(2) Nor yet can you regain your rights by physical force. The real chains that fetter men are too subtle to be cut by the sword.

(3) How then? By the promotion of sound knowledge. Popular ignorance is the cradle of tyrannies. By sound knowledge I mean primarily, a knowledge of the ethics of Christ.

(Homilist.)

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KJV: To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most High,

WEB: To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the Most High,