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GAZETTE
SEPTEMBER 1979
Service for the Opening of the
Michaelmas Law Term
St. Michan's Chu r ch, Dublin, Monday, 1st October 1979
(The Archbishop of Dublin, DR . HENRY McADOO)
The ultimate context of this Service for the opening of
the Law Term is that of a society whose presuppositions
are Christian. Yet it is a society very much
in via;
a
society in a state of becoming; a society in which the
effort to express its Christian presuppositions in practice
is in continuing conflict with human greed, envy and
violence; a society in which the quest for justice takes
many forms and encounters hydra-headed opposition. It
is a society seeking not to be become a Utopia but a
society groping through countless setbacks after the
realisation of its best self while at the same time recogniz-
ing that its very structures are open to radical criticism
and can even lend themselves to injustice.
Social settings change: yesterday's economic dogma
becomes to-day's economic heresy. Emphases in politics
change in their distribution and vary in the manner of
their application, but justice in its essence does not change
and moulds and controls the forms and instruments of its
own administration.
I was forcibly struck by this when last week I turned up
a sermon delivered to the magistrates at Grantham in
Lincoln in the year 1623. It was delivered by a famous
Anglican, Robert Sanderson, a victim of the Cromwellian
overthrow of the English Church, later in happier days to
become Bishop of Lincoln and one of the outstanding
moral theologians of the Anglican Church. He
courageously applied the principles of justice to the social
abuses of his own time. Nor did he shrink from con-
demning the contemporary oppression of the rural poor
by nobles and rich men, and doing so publicly to their
faces when preaching before the Court.
The sermon he preached to the magistrates on that
June day three hundred and fifty-six years ago illustrates
the essentials which do not and cannot change if im-
perfect men are to administer justice to and for their im-
perfect brethren. It must have taken three quarters of an
hour to deliver, so I suppose that seventeenth-century
hearers were endowed with a stamina matching that of
their clergy in the pulpit.
Things are different now — so, recognizing that our
society provides the ultimate context, may we for a few
minutes allow Sanderson's theme to set the tone and to
provide the immediate context for the work of this dis-
tinguished gathering whose members, at the different
levels of the administration of justice, are continuously
serving their fellows as individuals and serving the nation
as a whole.
Sanderson took a superb passage from the Book of Job
(29:14 -17) and made of it a brief guide for the interpreter
and administrator of law and justice: "I put on righteous-
ness, and it clothed me: my judgment was as a robe and
diadem. I was eyes to the blind, and feet I was to the
lame. I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I
knew not I searched out. And I brake the jaws of the
wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth."
And so let Sanderson preach to us in his paragraph
2 1 0
summing up what he sees as the Christian basis of law-
administration, and we shall see that some things do not
change and must not change if we are to contribute to
achieving a measure of the just society for our own time
and place.
These verses from the Book of Job, he says, spell out
four duties for all in positions of authority "and more
especially for those that are in the Magistracy, or in any
office appertaining to Justice."
And he continues "Those duties are four. One, and the
first, as a more transcendent and fundamental duty. The
other three, as accessory helps thereto. . .. that first is, a
care and love and zeal of Justice. A good Magistrate
should so make account of the administration of Justice,
as of his chiefest business, making it his greatest glory and
delight: v. 14 /
put on righteousness, and it clothed me:
my judgement was as robe and diadem.
The second is a
forwardness unto the works of mercy, and charity, and
compassion. A good Magistrate should have compassion
of those that stand in need of his help, and be helpful unto
them: v. 15 and 16
I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I
to the lame: I was a father to the poor.
The third is
diligence in examination. A good Magistrate should not
be hasty to credit the first tale, or be carried away with
light informations; but he should hear, and examine, and
scan, and sift matters as narrowly as may be for the find-
ing out of the turth: v. 16
And the cause which I knew not
I searched out.
The fourth is courage and resolution in
executing. A good Magistrate, when he goeth upon sure
grounds, should not fear the faces of men, be they never
so mighty or many; but without respect of persons
execute that which is equal and right even upon the
greatest offender: v. 17
And I brake the jaws of the
wicked and plucked the spoil out of his teeth."*
Four necessary qualities then he sees - a zeal for
justice and fair play, the steady exercise of charity and
compassion, the careful uncovering of the truth of the
situation and a courageous impartiality.
As in a mirror, a mirror cast centuries ago, we see the
face of our own times and their needs reflected. We see
more, for we discern things that do not change; principles
which bear on human needs and situations and which
remain valid and essential for the man of the atomic
era
just as much as for the man who endured the political and
economic upheavals of civil war in seventeenth-century
England.
More still, we can descry the features of a great truth,
the great truth for the members of "the household of
faith," (Gal. 6: 10), the truth which explains why these
principles of justice and charity cannot alter or be affected
by time's corrosion or by changing fashions. It is because
they are themselves reflections on that central and living
truth
Hensley Henson used to call it "the great text"
"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever." (Heb. 13:8).
•Sermon I
Ad Magistratum
(L.A.C.T. ed Vol. II pp 173-4).