Justice & Law Quote by Rufus King

King’s language pulls a classic revolutionary-era move: it consecrates restraint. By calling something “the law of God,” he’s not simply being pious; he’s building a ceiling over politics. The phrase “by which He makes His way known to man” frames moral order as readable and binding, a kind of higher constitution that predates statutes and outlasts majorities. In a world where new republics were experimenting with written law, this is an argument that written law can’t be the final court of appeal.

The subtext is aimed at power, not unbelief. “Paramount to all human control” is a warning shot across the bow of governments that confuse authority with omnipotence. King, a lawyer and a Federalist who lived through the Articles of Confederation’s failures and the Constitution’s birth, understood how easily a state can claim necessity and slide into coercion. Natural law and divine law language gave early American elites a shared vocabulary for saying: there are limits you don’t get to vote away.

It also functions as cultural glue. In a religiously literate public sphere, invoking God offered legitimacy that philosophical abstraction couldn’t. Yet it’s a double-edged tool: the same appeal that can restrain tyranny can also smuggle in someone’s preferred theology as “paramount” truth. King’s sentence works because it’s both moral assertion and jurisdictional claim: it relocates sovereignty upward, then uses that relocation to discipline the earthly sovereign everyone is busy inventing.