Justice & Law Quote by William Blackstone

Blackstone is doing something more audacious than blessing the Bible from the bench: he is constructing a legal hierarchy that lets English law claim both heaven and “nature” as its upstream sources. By pairing “revealed or divine law” with an “original law of nature,” he offers a two-key system where scripture and reason appear to converge. That convergence is the trick that makes the passage work. Revelation alone could look sectarian; natural law alone could look abstract. Together they create a self-reinforcing authority that feels universal and therefore harder to argue with.

The key phrase is “upon comparison.” Blackstone isn’t merely asserting that scripture rules; he’s claiming that when you check revelation against nature, you discover they’re “really part” of the same moral order. Subtext: if a rule is truly rational, it will harmonize with Christianity as Blackstone understands it. That’s less a neutral observation than a gatekeeping move, one that frames dissent as either irrational or impious.

Context matters. Writing in the 18th century, Blackstone’s Commentaries aimed to systematize the common law and make it legible, defensible, and teachable. He’s speaking as a judge and institutional consolidator, not a mystic. The line “no human laws should be suffered to contradict these” is a warning and a promise: lawmakers are constrained, but the legal system is sanctified. It’s jurisprudence as legitimacy machine, fusing moral philosophy and Protestant scripture to stabilize the state’s authority while making that authority sound like inevitability.