INHERITANCE. The laws and observances which determine the acquisition and regulate the devolution of property, are among the influences whick affect the vital interests of states ; and it is therefore of high consequence to ascertain the nature and bearing of the laws and observances re lating to this subject, which come to us vvith the sanction of the Bible. We may also premise that, in a condition of society such as that in which we now live, wherein the two diverging tendencies which favour immense accumulations on the one hand, and lead to poverty and pauperism on the other, are daily becoming more and more decided, disturbing, and baneful tnere seems To be required, on the part of those who take Scripture as their guide, a careful study of the foundations of human society, and of the laws of property, as they are developed in the divine records which contain the revealed will of God.
That will, in truth, as it is the source of all created things, and specially of the earth and its intelligent denizen, man, so is it the original foun dation of property, and of the laws by which its inheritance should be regulated. God, as the Creator of the earth, gave it to man to be held, cultivated, and enjoyed (Gen. i. 28, sq. ; Ps. cxv.
; Eccles. v. 9). The primitive records are too brief and fragmentary to supply us with any details respecting the earliest distribution or transmission of landed property ; but from the passages to which rcference has been made, the imporiant fact ap pears to be established beyond a question, that the origin of property is to be found, not in the achievements of violence, the success of the sword, or any imaginary implied contract, but in the will and the gift of the common Creator and bountiful Father of the human race. It is equally clear that the gift was made, not to any favoured portion of our race, but to the race itself—to man as repre sented by our great primogenitor, to whom the use of the divine gift was first graciously vouchsafed. The individual appropriation of portions of the earth, and the transmission of the parts thus appro priated—in other words, the consuetudinary laws of property—would be determined in each instance by the peculiar circumstances in which an individual, a family, or a clan, might find itself placed in rela tion to the world and its other inhabitants ; nor is it now, in the absence of written evidence, possible to ascertain, and it is useless, if not worse, ta attempt to conjecture, what these laws were. This,
however, is certain, that if in any case they inflicted injury, if they aided the aggrandisement of the few, and tended to the depression of the many, they thereby became unjust, and not only lost their divine sanction, but, by opposing the very purposes for which the earth was given to man, and opemt ing in contravention of the divine will, they were disowned and condemned of God, the tenure of the property was forfeited, and a recurrence to first principles and a re-distribution became due alike to the original donor, and to those whom he had in tended impartially to benefit.
Thc enforcement of these principles has, in diffe rent periods of human history, been made by the seen hand of God, in those terrible providential visitations which upturn the very foundations of society and reconstruct the social frame. The Deluge was a kind of revocation of the Divine gift; the Creator took back into his own hands the earth which men had filled with injustice and vio lence. The trust, however, was, after that terrible punishment, once more committed to man, to be held, not for himself, but for God ; and to be so used and improved as to further the divine will by furthering human good. And, whatever conduct may have been pursued, at any period, at variance with the divine purpose, yet it is in trust, not in ab solute possession, it is for God's purposes, not our own, that the earth at large, and every portion of the earth, has been and is still held. In truth, man is the tenant, not the proprietor, of the earth. It is the temporary use, not the permanent posses sion .of it that he enjoys. The lord of ten thousand broad acres, equally with the poor penniless squat ter, is a sojourner and pilgrim in the land, as all his fathers were, and is bound, not less than the other, to remember, not only that property has its duties as well as its rights, but also that its best titles are held by a momentary tenure. revocable at the will of an omnipotent power, and subject to unerring scrutiny, in rega/d both to their origin and their use, in a court where the persons of men are not respected, where justice is laid to the line, and judgment to the plummet (Is. xxiii. 17).