5. The System (Remastered)

The System

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is Ephesians 5:5, and our subject is ‘The System.’

“For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”

The tenth commandment forbids the evil desire and taking of that which is properly our neighbors’. St. Paul, in Ephesians 5:5, calls such covetousness ‘idolatry.’ How shall we understand this, and why is it idolatry? Why, even more than the whoremonger or the unclean person, is the man who violates the tenth commandment, on a par with the man who violates the first, an idolater?

In evil covetousness, a man takes a lawless course and redefines it as a justifiable one. Man has always been prone to justify his every act. Justification is a necessary cover for man so that man is always trying to justify himself in whatever he does. But the tenth commandment puts its finger on a particular aspect of man’s sin. That particular form whereby he takes that which is properly his neighbor’s, and then vindicates it as a way of life, justifies it, makes his will into righteousness and therefore worships and exalts his will as though it were the will of God.

Having defined that, now let us turn aside for a moment and examine something that occurred in California at the beginning of the century. In the ’90’s and the early 1900’s, San Francisco was ruled by a man named Abraham Ruth. He was the political boss of San Francisco; an attorney, a very brilliant, a very able man. There had been political bosses before Ruth, but Ruth took the existing political structure, refined it, and developed it into what was, in a sense, a work of art. He brought together business, government, labor, the unions, and crime, into a league whereby they ruled the city and exploited it for their own purposes. 

Subsequently, under the influence of two men; Rudolph Spreckels, and James D. Phelan, two very wealthy men, the whole thing was exposed. These two men put up a sizable amount of money, were able to get a special prosecuting attorney, Mr. Heaney, and expose the entire system, as it was called. It ended up with Ruth in jail. In jail he wrote his confessions, which were published in the San Francisco papers. In describing the course which led him to power in San Francisco politics, Abe Ruth justified his course by speaking of the foolishness of democracy. Ruth had been a distinguished graduate of the University of California to Berkley, and graduated from the U.C. law school with exceptional honors. As Franklin Hichborn, who wrote the definitive study of Ruth’s system, entitled, The System. As he wrote:

“His first political convention, he tells us in his Confessions, showed him that representative government was a farce.” ⁱ

Up to that point Ruth had been an organizer of a movement for civic reform. He then became an organizer of the corruption. Its principle was this, and I’ve heard it from the mouths of many people, when the people are larcenists, they deserve to be taken, and somebody will. 

And what Ruth discovered was that the Bible was true, that men are sinners, that “there is none righteous, no not one,” “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That he discovered, but he did not discover that man can be regenerated in Jesus Christ. So, deciding that men are depraved, he then figured the thing to do was to take advantage of that fact, to organize it, and it was the best way to have social order. There were no loose ends left, crime was organized, business was organized, labor was organized, government was organized, the churches were organized, everything was controlled. But we are not justified in robbing a thief because he is a thief, and the cure for corruption, Ruth to the contrary, was not more corruption. 

Now what Ruth organized, and what Hichborn called ‘the system,’ is not new in history. A few years ago excavations in Nuzi cities, a very powerful kingdom that was ruling in Abraham’s day, and in power long before Abraham, in fact, the basic law that prevailed throughout the Middle East at that time, was the law of the Nuzi And we have evidences from their documents that they had a ‘system’ working in their cities - political bosses, controlling and organizing every aspect of the life of the city. 

Hichborn’s term for it, ‘the system,’ is a good one. By ‘system’ he means the organization of corruption and graft in every area of life into a form of political order. Labor, business, civil government, and the churches, unite to form a system of entrenched theft and covetousness, which exploits the people.

But the system rests on the already existing corruption of the people. It cannot exist without it. This is why, as we saw about a month ago, it is useless to spend your time documenting what the enemy is doing or what conspiracies are doing. They are always there, they have always been there in society, from the very beginning. Unless you can abolish sin from the world, you will have conspiracies and evil groups of men but, they have always been ineffectual in every period of history where there has been health. Just as we are all continually exposed to every kind of disease, so that there are cold germs, tubercular germs, and other germs all around us, but we never come down with them unless our resistance is weakened. So no society will ever come down with the ‘infection; of any conspiracy, unless its resistance is weakened or destroyed. And it’s no cure to tell a man that he has TB, or a cold. The cure is to give him health and to lay down some rules for health. 

And so it is, the cure for society is not dealing with the enemy, but dealing with the principles of health. And there was no health in San Francisco, and as a result, when Phelan and Spreckels and began their investigation and exposed it, the deeper their investigation went, the more the hostility increased. And eventually the whole reform movement blew up. Heaney, the prosecuting attorney, was shot at, and incapacitated. Ruth came out of prison, the system continued. And Phelan and Spreckels, after facing all kinds of hostility, found doors closed in their faces everywhere. In fact, Phelan was at that time one of the most prominent, one of the most honest, democratic leaders in the United States. And it was felt that he deserved a post in Wilson’s Cabinet when Wilson won his first election. The system reached right up to Washington and laid down the rule, “nothing doing, no job for Phelan,” and so he was barred from the Cabinet.

Ruth’s morality was wrong, but his judgment was sound; people did not want honest government. Every man, being covetous, was an idolater worshipping his own will. And therefore when the chips were down, although polls indicated that most of San Francisco was against Abe Ruth, when the chips were down, they were with Abe Ruth because they were no different than Ruth. They were covetous men, wanting what their neighbor had. Every honest man is a threat to a thief. Men of integrity are threats to a liar because honesty and integrity are a standing indictment to every sinner. And thus, the real criminals, in the eyes of the people, were finally Speckles and Phelan, the two honest, dedicated citizens who had put up a great deal of money to try to overthrow the system. 

The covetousness in the heart of every man, which while it made them gripe against Ruth and Schmitt and the others, when the chips were down, they lined up with the evil men because to strike at one man’s idolatry, his covetousness, was ultimately to strike at all. There is no reform possible for such men apart from regeneration. If you have the dictatorial power to impose a hard and savage law, you can briefly keep such people in line, but not very long. Where men are covetous, their idolatry will rule society and tear it asunder. And no bribe nor any threat will alter the situation. 

There’s a very amusing personal episode from the life of the painter, Breugel. And Breugel lived in Antwerp, was a very successful and a very wealthy painter. He brought in a servant girl to be his housekeeper. She was a very attractive, a very pleasant girl. He was tempted to marry her which would have been a tremendous step upward for her because she would have been then on a par with some of the most wealthy and powerful women in Antwerp - quite an inducement. But she had a habit of lying. Her excuse in every situation, every time she faced a problem, was not to say, “Oh I didn’t do it,” or “I was wrong there,” but to lie. And so Breugel made an agreement with her. He said “I find you very pleasant, very entertaining to be around, very attractive. I’ll marry you on one condition, that you quit lying. And I’ll give you time to break yourself of the habit.” And so he got a long rod, and put in the corner. And he said, “Every time I catch you in a lie, I’m going to put a notch in here, and when the pole is notched from top to bottom, out you go. No marriage!” It was a very short time before the pole was notched from top to bottom, and she was out of the house. The inducement was great, but her nature was stronger. 

The sinner, instead of changing, seeks to remake the world in his own image, which is idolatry. And this servant girl, instead of mending her ways, was all the more insistent that every lie she told, no matter how preposterous, was the truth. It only confirmed her in her lie. It only made her all the more insistent in it. Why? Because she was guilty of idolatry. She coveted the position, but the root of her covetousness was more than a desire for being mistress of a very lovely home and having a position of wealth and prestige, it was that her will be done, her way be right. And so she lost everything. 

The covetous man therefore, instead of changing, strikes out at the honesty, or the happiness of others. We saw in the parable our Lord told of the vineyard and the workers, that our Lord said, 

“Is thy eye evil because I am good?”

Or as Moffatt renders it: 

“Have you a grudge because I am generous?”

It is the privilege of God the Creator to make man and to remake man and the world. In the beginning God created all things, including man, and He is now in the process of remaking all things with Jesus Christ as the principle of recreation. Unto man God gives the opportunity to share in that remaking by means of his godly work and his obedience to law. These are the God-ordained means of reestablishing dominion and bringing all things into captivity to Christ. 

But the wicked, covetous man, the idolater, steps outside of this lawful path and seeks by lawless means to remake the life and the world that is around him. As a result, he assaults everything that is his neighbor’s, because he is God in his own eyes, an idolater. He cannot accept the world as it is, he must remake it in his own image. Thus, the covetous man has his ‘system.’ He seeks a state of affairs whereby lawlessness is turned into law and he tries to get the results of law by his covetousness. He wants society to further his lawlessness, and yet protect him in it. And just as the political ‘system’ is the organization of and corruption into a form of political order, so the personal ‘system’ uses covetousness and lawlessness as a means to a new form of personal and social order, to remake the world in terms of man’s image. And the result is moral anarchism and social collapse. 

Now, the names for such a ‘system’ vary. You can call it Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Socialism, or welfare economy, democracy, whatever you want, but the goal is always the same. Under a façade of morality, a system is created whereby man says it is lawful for him to desire and to take what is properly his neighbor’s, and instead of being regenerated, he tries to remake the world in terms of his own covetousness.

And wherever you have this ‘system,’ whether it goes under the name of democracy or Nazism or Communism or Socialism, its result is a general decline in morality. Theft, murder, adultery, false witness and covetousness all increase because man is a unity. If he can legalize and justify seizing his neighbor’s wealth or property, he will then legalize and justify taking his neighbor’s wife. 

It’s not surprising that right now the biggest seller of our day is a book entitled, The Sensuous Woman, the purpose of which is to vindicate every kind, not only of adultery, but of perversions - every kind. In hardback it has sold fantastically. It is now going into paperback. And the first printing of the paperback edition is two million copies. Every imaginable perversion is vindicated. Should we be surprised? Not at all. When you vindicate man’s lawlessness, his covetousness in one realm; taking another man’s property through taxes, through socialism, through inheritance tax, income tax, man being a unity is going to legalize taking his neighbor’s wife, or as in the case of this book, his neighbor’s dog. 

The more self-righteous they become, the wider the gap between profession and performance. Today man, in this day of the ‘system,’ call it by any name you will, professes more morality than ever before in history. We’ve never had more peace movements in history. We’ve never had more movements professing reverence for life and how terrible it is to kill. We’ve never had more opposition to things like the death penalty, and people bleeding for every criminal, and you can go on down the list; the environment, everything. To read the papers, this is the most sensitive age in all history, the most noble. And yet it is also the age of the greatest mass murders, the greatest general decline in morality, the most fearful wars, the most flagrant advocacy of abortion. the most savage prison camps, tortures, and enslavement. 

And add to this the report which you received last week, and I trust you read, of Congressman John G. Schmitz, who reported:

“Here in Congress, legislation has been introduced in both House and Senate to allow the killing of unborn children throughout the United States, and to remove the Federal personal income tax for all children after the second. Testimony before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce revealed a bill is pending in the Florida State Legislature which would legalize the killing of old people (‘euthanasia’), and that a bill in the Hawaii State Legislature would compel the sterilization of all women after they have their second child. Such legislation heralds the coming of a new Nazism to our land.” ⁱⁱ

This is in an age that professes itself to be the most sensitive period, morally, in all history. The words of St. Paul can well describe our generation. 

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…”

Romans 1:22.

Professing themselves to be lovers of life and mankind, they are revealing themselves as haters and murderers of men because, as covetous men, desiring what is their neighbors’, they are idolaters, and their will is their god, and they will kill and destroy anything that stands in their way. 

The tenth commandment therefore is an extremely important one. 

“Thou shalt not covet.” 

Thou shalt not desire and take anything that is thy neighbor’s.

* * *

Let us pray. 

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that is thy Law that governs men and nations. And that in this day when men make their will, their evil, covetous, desire and seizure, into law, thy Law shall prevail and confound them. We thank thee our Father that thy justice shall flow and overwhelm all thine enemies according to thy Word like overrunning waters. And so, our God, we wait on thee. Make us strong in thy Law-Word and zealous in thy service, unto the end that the kingdoms of this world may become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. In Jesus' name. Amen. 

* * *

Are there any questions now, first of all with respect to our lesson? 

Yes.

[Audience] Could you comment on the meaning of the word ‘unclean’ from our passage, Dr. Rushdoony? ⁱⁱⁱ

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. The “nor unclean person.” Now, the word ‘unclean’ also appears in the Old Testament, the uncleanness of a thing. It also appears in the New Testament as the word ‘fornication.’ 

Now, today the word ‘fornication’ has been very much restricted in its meaning, so that by ‘fornication,’ it means sexual relations outside of marriage apart from adultery, adultery being where a married person is involved, and ‘fornication’ referring to sexual relations between unmarried persons. 

Now, the word fornication definitely does include such sexual relations, but it is broader. Thus, we get from the same word, the word ‘pornography.’ It refers in general to lasciviousness. The word ‘fornication,’ therefore, would cover the entire pornographic industry from the producer to the customer. It covers every form of perversion. It also covers rebellion against authority. So it’s a very broad and important term. It’s one of the most important terms in the Bible. And it’s been limited in its meaning. That’s the meaning of unclean. 

Any other questions? Yes.

[Audience] Did any of the clergy stand up against ‘the system?’

[Dr. Rushdoony] Yes. In San Francisco at that time, the one minister who stood up and fought it was run out of the ministry. He was one of the powerful Methodist pulpits in the city of San Francisco, and he stood with these two men, and the end result was he was run out of the ministry. 

Now, what we can do is not to try to make the mistake these men did, which was endlessly to document to try to expose the evil; this doesn’t accomplish anything. What we can do is to begin to rebuild, you see. We have to reconstruct first. We’ve got to know the Law of God and obey it for ourselves. Second, we rebuild Christian institutions. This is where the Christian school movement is important. This is where rebuilding and reestablishing new churches, new colleges, every kind of new institution, you create. 

Today, for example, Christian schools like St. Thomas Episcopal School in Houston, Fairfax Christian School in Fairfax Virginia, and many others like them, they are creating a different kind of person. And when you multiply these schools across country, you realize that a different type of child is developing in America today. 

Now, when you put against this, all the millions that people have poured into political reform, trying to elect somebody, who when he’s elected is no different than the man before him, and maybe worse, you realize how most of the reform movements have been a waste of time. You have to reconstruct.

Yes.

[Audience] Wasn’t this all foreordained, though? ^iv

[Dr. Rushdoony] Of course. We have to recognize always the sovereign purposes and counsel of God here. But when we speak about the human aspect of it, we have to emphasis the duty that is ours. The duties are ours, the results are in the hands of God. So we do what we can, in every age, then we leave the results in God’s hands. 

Yes.

[Audience] Can you expand on what you think the mistake of this clergyman was, Dr. Rushdoony? ^v

[Dr. Rushdoony] Well, yes. In this case, the mistake of this man was that… Well, to tell the story of this particular man. He had one of the most prominent pulpits in the city, a downtown pulpit. It had reached the point where evening services were becoming difficult because there were so many prostitutes standing around the church steps, soliciting the young men as they went into the church. It was getting to be a major problem and there was no relief, so he went into the matter swinging, but the problem was, his church officers included people who were prominent in the city, prominent in the labor unions and the government, in business, and they were involved in the whole thing. He was trying to clean up the problem out in the streets, and he had a problem right in his church, that’s where the real problem was. And he didn’t face up to it until it was too late, and suddenly he realized that in fighting what was out in the streets and in the city hall, he was stomping on the toes of most of his congregation, and they stomped on his, and he was thrown out. They said they wanted someone to preach the simple Gospel and not to interfere into what wasn’t his business.

So you see, he started the reform in the wrong place. What was inside that church was worse than what was outside on the steps, because they were right up on the steps a good deal of the time. 

Yes.

[Audience] This is rather like a farmer who focuses on a creating a healthy soil rather than majoring on the elimination of weeds. ^vi

[Dr. Rushdoony] A very good application of the same principle. I asked Dr. Walter Lammerts several years back if he used any of the pesticides and whatnot. He said, “No I don’t need to. I provide a healthy soil for my plants. And that takes care of the matter. You see, Pasteur himself, who was the founder of bacteriology, said, “In health, the soil is everything.” That is, the bacteria are always there, the problem is what’s the health of the body, of the soil, of the animal? That’s the key. 

[Audience] Sometimes this external opposition only makes the church stronger since it comes from the hand of God. ^vii

[Dr. Rushdoony] A very good point, and I think a great deal could be said to vindicate that. For example, when you go to the history of the Early Church, you find every heresy, every conspiracy. Really, it was providential. Why? Because it pushed the Church into making a stand where a stand was necessary, to clear up a clouded area of thinking, to apply the faith to a particular area. So we can say the same thing today. That we do have threats from various sources. But these threats are not only a judgment from God, not only an instance of satanic forces working, but they are also a mandate from God that we wake up and realize where we as Christians have fallen short and have neglected the Law of God, and if we began to apply it, the situation would take care of itself.

If there are no further questions, I’d like to share something with you. Incidentally, before I do, a thing that tickled to no end this week. As I think you know, our Chalcedon Report has been growing quite steadily, and we do have a number of very interesting and outstanding people throughout the country and abroad on our mailing list. 

Now this week we got the most distinguished name yet, George Washington. George Washington is an attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the firm of Washington and Washington. So now we have George Washington on our mailing list. 

I’d like to read something to you that is relevant to what we’ve been studying about the law. It’s from a book by Sir Arthur Bryant, the historian, and it is about Henry II, of England, of the dynasty. Henry II we know better as the father of the so-called Richard the Lionhearted and King John, and the husband of Eleanor Aquitaine, one of the most notable and famous women of the Middle Ages, and one of the most interesting and exciting women, not always the best behaved, but a very interesting personality. 

His realm was a tremendously large one because his realm took in not only all of what is today England, but a major portion of France; all the way to the Pyrenees, or the Spanish border because when he married Eleanor Aquitaine, who was the ex-wife of King Louis of France, he gained a major portion of France. 

Now, Henry II was quite a strange person. In some ways, we would call him a very weird person. But his dedication to law made him greater than himself in some respects. Well, let’s see what Sir Arthur Bryant had to say here. 

“High among the founders of the world of ideas and institutions we inherit was the king who eight hundred years ago created a framework for the Common Law. To his contemporaries the first Plantagenet was, like Napoleon, a terrifying phenomenon. At the core of his being lay a daemonic energy. This ruthless, formidable man, with his bullet head, sandy, closecropped hair and hoarse cracked voice, who ascended the throne of England at twenty-one and died before he was forty-seven, was always on the move, always imposing his will, always ordaining. His restless vitality drove both his wife and children to rebellion [in fact, he had his wife locked up for about seventeen years before his death - who bore him seven or eight children - RJR]; slaving far into the night over the business of an empire that stretched from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees, and constantly travelling from place to place, he never wasted a moment or tolerated the least delay. Beneath his urbane manner and hail-fellow good humour ran the diabolical temper of the Angevins; there were times when he tore off his clothes in rage and gnawed the straw from his mattresses [we also have accounts where he would roll on the floor and chew the carpet, but this was part of the way of keeping his temper in line to avoid knocking someone’s head off, and he could have - he took it out on the furniture and the rug and the mattress until he calmed down - RJR]. All who opposed him were met with unrelenting, unscrupulous resolution.

Yet those who worked with Henry II loved him. The praises of his judges and Exchequer officials were based on more than flattery. For his devotion to their common task — the creation of order in his kingdom’s affairs — was the consuming passion of his life.

Above all, he sought to make his rule endure. It is this that constitutes his claim to greatness. The supreme object of his crowded, stormy life was to create institutions that could preserve his inheritance after his death from the disintegrating forces that threaten all emergent societies. He used the prerogative to bring the whole system of freehold tenure under national law. By making the smaller landowner’s right to his property dependent on royal instead of feudal courts, he struck at the root of the great lord’s power over his military tenants. And he dealt a death-blow to trial-by-battle and private war. Selfish, crafty, unscrupulous, the great lawyer-king wielded the sword of justice ‘for the punishment of evil-doers and the maintenance of peace and quiet for honest men’. His judges made his remedies available in every corner of the realm. With the precedents they enshrined in their judgments they little by little created a common law for all England. They established the same system for north, south, east and west, for town and country, for Norman, Englishman and Welshman. They nationalised, as it were, the Law.

Henry’s achievement was far in advance of his age. By the end of his reign, there was no major offense against the public peace, which could not bring the offender within range of a royal writ. Hence forth, whoever gave law to England was to have a machinery by which it could be enforced against the strong as well as the weak. The professional judges Henry trained, the courts in which they sat, the writs they devised to meet popular needs, and the judgments they left behind to guide their successors, helped to ensure that justice should be done even in the royal absence, or in the reign of a weak or unjust sovereign. By making the common law the permanent embodiment of a righteous king sitting in judgment. The great Angevin established the English habit of obedience to law, which has been the strongest of all the forces making for the nations peaceful continuity and progress.” ^viii

I think this is especially interesting, because, you see, Henry II, by putting the nation’s strength in something bigger than himself, the law; by ‘common law’ is meant the Biblical Law, the Mosaic Law, established a strength in the kingdom which was able to survive two worthless sons, Richard the Lionhearted and John, and to give a continuity and a strength to England that has given it more stability over the centuries than other countries with far greater assets have been able to maintain. This is a very telling witness to the importance of the right kind of legal foundation. 

Now the law cannot survive too many generations if the people continue reprobate, but what Henry II did prove was that it could survive for some time, that if the kingdom were dependent upon the king or the people, it would quickly go downhill. But the law could keep it together through a couple of bad generations. In terms of the future, this means that the law is the greatest security for a people; a true and a Biblical concept of law. 

* * *

Let us bow our heads now for the benediction. 

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always. Amen.

i. Franklin Hichborn, “The System,” as Uncovered by the San Francisco Graft Prosecution (San Francisco: James H. Barry Company, 1915), p. 13 f., ft.

ii. John G. Schmitz, “Government Against Life,” Weekly News Report, Aug. 19, 1970.

iii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

iv.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

v.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

vi.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

vii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

viii. Arthur Bryant. The Fire and the Rose. London: Collins, 1965, p. 15,16.