When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

G K Chesterton, quoted in The Man Who Was Orthodox edited by A L Maycock

I came across this Chesterton quote yesterday. It is only a line in a collection of items of his pithy prose. Apparently it originally appeared in a Daily News article in 1905, but the original article has been lost, so it is hard to know what he meant without the context.

It rang a bell because I recently heard one theologian say something similar about the Ten Commandments in relation to the state of western society. When you substitute “big laws” with “ten commandments” in the quote above you can perhaps see the point: if a society ignores the 10 commandments then in order to have some order the state has to introduce a myriad of sundry small laws.

Is that true? It’s plausible from experience. It seems to me that our legislators are continually busy trying to fix evils that emerge as a result of unhitching from those God-given “Words”. The trouble is we are left with a malleable and drifting set of underlying principles that guide lawmaking which results in many, many small laws.