"The law established by the Creator, which has existed from the beginning, extends over the whole globe, is everywhere and at all times binding upon mankind"
About this Quote
King is doing something slyly muscular here: he wraps a political argument in the language of eternity, then dares you to disagree. By calling the law "established by the Creator" and "from the beginning", he isn’t merely praising morality; he’s attempting to move a contested claim out of the arena of legislation and into the realm of physics. If the rule is older than parliaments, then parliaments can’t repeal it. That’s the rhetorical power: it turns a policy dispute into a category error.
The line’s architecture is global and totalizing: "whole globe", "everywhere", "at all times", "binding upon mankind". Each phrase widens the net, leaving no safe pocket for local custom, factional compromise, or states-rights exception. In the late-18th/early-19th-century Atlantic world King inhabited, that universality mattered. Enlightenment talk of "natural law" and "natural rights" was the respectable grammar for arguing that certain practices were illegitimate even if profitable, traditional, or legal. King, a lawyer and statesman known for Federalist instincts and opposition to slavery’s expansion, is signaling that some human arrangements are not just imperfect but fundamentally void.
The subtext is prosecutorial: he’s building a brief, not offering a meditation. "Binding" is a legal verb as much as a moral one, implying enforceability and obligation, not sentiment. By invoking the Creator, King also sidesteps partisan theology while borrowing religion’s authority, a useful move in a young republic trying to sound principled rather than merely powerful.
The line’s architecture is global and totalizing: "whole globe", "everywhere", "at all times", "binding upon mankind". Each phrase widens the net, leaving no safe pocket for local custom, factional compromise, or states-rights exception. In the late-18th/early-19th-century Atlantic world King inhabited, that universality mattered. Enlightenment talk of "natural law" and "natural rights" was the respectable grammar for arguing that certain practices were illegitimate even if profitable, traditional, or legal. King, a lawyer and statesman known for Federalist instincts and opposition to slavery’s expansion, is signaling that some human arrangements are not just imperfect but fundamentally void.
The subtext is prosecutorial: he’s building a brief, not offering a meditation. "Binding" is a legal verb as much as a moral one, implying enforceability and obligation, not sentiment. By invoking the Creator, King also sidesteps partisan theology while borrowing religion’s authority, a useful move in a young republic trying to sound principled rather than merely powerful.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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