Justice & Law Quote by Ezra Stiles

Stiles is doing something slyly diplomatic: praising the world’s messy governments without pretending they’re good. The opening hedge - "In justice to human society it may perhaps be said" - isn’t timidity so much as clerical statecraft. He’s issuing a moral verdict while rehearsing humility, the kind of careful posture that lets a minister talk about power without sounding like a partisan. That caution matters in an era when “polities and civil institutions” were being redesigned in real time, and when a clergyman’s authority depended on appearing above faction even as he shaped public conscience.

The key move is the double vision embedded in "however imperfect" and "very considerable wisdom". Stiles refuses utopian standards. He grants that institutions fail - often - yet insists they’re not random cruelties or mere conspiracies. They are human attempts at order that, on balance, contain accumulated intelligence: compromises, historical memory, hard-earned procedural tricks. It’s an argument against nihilism and against revolutionary impatience: if most systems have “considerable wisdom,” tearing them down isn’t automatically virtuous; reform must reckon with what already works.

The subtext is pastoral and political at once. By crediting “almost all” regimes with some wisdom, Stiles reinforces a theology of providence without naming it: history may be flawed, but it isn’t senseless. At the same time, “almost” leaves a trapdoor for tyranny. He’s offering legitimacy with conditions, urging respect for institutions while reserving the right to judge them - a tightrope walk that helped clergy speak to a society flirting with both rebellion and reaction.