"Lewis was looking at the principle. When some delinquents stole some of his things, that was nothing new. Thieves you shall always have with you. The thing that Lewis noticed with alarm, a cloud the size of a man’s fist, was that indulgent and excuse-making judge. That is where the fatal disease was. The boys had the decency to commit their crime in secret, as though there was something wrong with it. The judge did what she did in the broad light of day, in a courtroom, with witnesses there, and with the approval of her own conscience. That was the promise of a societal hell . . . and here we are." — Douglas Wilson, In Which C.S. Lewis Tells Some Punks to Get Off His Lawn
There is a kind of crime that is committed in broad daylight with the approval of its own conscience - it is the crime of being soft on crime and neutral on nonsense. In Lewis' day it was some childish vandals being mollycoddled, but even he saw where that kind of nonsense would take you. In other words, the disrespectful punks in the back alley were one thing, but the respected punk with the gavel was another. Mischief at midnight on a Friday is a problem, but mannerly mayhem at 11 am on a Tuesday is worse. Sins committed as sins must, of course, be expected as part of normal life, but sins committed as virtues cannot be tolerated without changing the course of everything altogether.
Proverbs 29:18
Where there is no revelation,
the people cast off restraint;
But happy is he who keeps the law.
You cannot throw shade at order and keep any semblance of it. If you cast off justice, you cast off restraint. Where there is no clear vision of what we should expect, you can expect to find the invention of new evils clearly on display.
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