TIME OF THE JUDGES, 2003

[Trenchist 864]

 

T I M E   O F   T H E   J U D G E S

 

or

 

TREATISE ON THE VIRTUES OF 

CLERICAL JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT

 

☩

 

 

Published in the year 2003, by,

 

 

Rabbi-Cardinal Elim Temmeck of Esbec

Scholastic Fraternity of Lemkn Hill

 

Dedicated to Friar Jacques-Baptiste, Master of Canon Law

 

‘Judges and officers appoint in your gates, 

and they shall judge righteously and without bribe.’

 

AWAKE

 

WIDE are the Blessings of our Lord G-d Most High. Should His Love falter but for a moment, we shall exist no longer. The laws of the world are kept aloft solely by constant wish of the Lord. The stone, the fish, the fruit of the tree and the birth of a newborn owe not their continuation to the whim of a rogue angel or to the worship of reason, or to kings temporal who grasp at any rein of power and say ‘I made this.’ They are kept harmoniously and absolutely due to Him.

 

And yet still, manifold are our sins. The first sin of Saul and the sin of Horen, whence the Good Spirit departed as sacrilege was laid before the Tabernacle. The imprudence of the blasphemer, the forlorn prince, the corrupt wizard and the madmen who hoist the black flag and proclaim any falsity but The Truth. The sin of Man is accumulative. We are weak and faulty. We shy away from suffering for virtue. We do not deserve Him. And still, it occurs today to the wiseman and to the fool alike, who say: The expanse of our universe has endured, despite all injury. We are owed to His Love.

 

But FINITE is the blessing of the Lord Most High. We exist in perpetual EXILE. We are detached from Salvation so long as the covenants are not adhered, and the continuation of our world is on borrowed time. The Covenant of Horen promises us the breath of life. We are indebted eternally for our existence. PRAISE, PRAISE, PRAISE The Lord our G-d.

 

THE STATE OF THINGS

 

And still evil prospers. Corruption reeks. In the halls of our erstwhile fathers as in our present homes still. It is evident by the failings of modern kings. The vigil of those anointed has faltered. Power, war, rebellion. SCHISM, like Saul, before the Tabernacle. Naked and bare faced they declared G-d is wrong. That His One Ministry is untrue. They are tried their due. They have lost their mandate. History has coalesced in the continued stumble of princes. It is imperative, then, for the upholding of the Covenant that justice be administered by agents more pious. That the shepherd boy in his virtue step up to the throne and proclaim: You are not deserving! and receive the crown himself.

 

There still stand, erected, statues to ung-dly things, and curses being celebrated in streets of forsaken cities. The deck of our Exile Ship is muddled with disorder, while our sails are catching fire. The Lands of Horen, our inheritance, are violated. Shall the madman still be allowed to profane? Shall the facade of prosperity and tolerance be exalted? Evil grows in complacency. The shaking of hands is Blessed so long as the hands are clean, but so many hands are stained. So many hands are no longer the hands of Horen but the hands of twisted, corrupted things.

 

The prerogative of Judges was bestowed upon the Priesthood of Owyn in his time. To guide, and to correct. The Mother Church has since its inception kept to the Promise as a shoreline against the tides of dissent. The flame that banishes the shadow. Then take, I say, its light, the Mercyflame, and shine it on the faces of the wicked. The sloth of kings have left our ship, our craft of Exile, to sink. In negligence, our ship is ridden by holes, steered by sailors who know not North from South, and the storm has caught up. Shall we ever reach the coast, Salvation, the Promise? Shall we reunite with the Lord or allow darkness and vileness to consume all in the sea of suffering?

 

I earnestly pray we shall not. I pray to the Prophets and to the canonised and to the beatified and to the venerated and to the martyrs and to the virtuous to aid us absolve before G-d. Abandon us not so long as one virtuous man remains on the ship. And Blessed be The Name, for a great awakening in our chronicle has began, by tenure of our Holy Priests. The succession of the Priesthood of Owyn can not rest now. The leader of the generation is with us. The Holy Spirit pervades in this age. 

 

It is time again, like in the time of the Wisemen and the Sages and the Warriors of Yore to enact justice where it had been absent. 

 

THE LEAP FORWARD

 

How, then, should Horen rule? By what standard do we achieve excellence in the courts, and therefore in the land? We know not to ask our fathers, and not their fathers either. We know that the ordering of things has been faulty, they have never been failsafe. We know that whenever a secular institution arises it at once lends its existence to a timekeeper. By the borrowed time of its own architects and their human failings, a lofty ideology might falter. By the borrowed time that mighty ideas are given until the wave of human corruption, that of greed and corruption and egotism either wrecks them wholly at once or erodes their promise through the trickle of years, leaving in its wake only an imitation of the promise, and then the only thing left to tell are words, often written in begrudged blood, on the pages of the Human chronicle.

 

We must look onto institutions, or rather, An Institution, that has survived the test of time since its inception, an institution that has refused to wed the spirit of any age but the Spirit that had imbued in it its Foundation and its Mission. The Holy Mother Church is that sole Institution that trifled not with time, and acquiesced to no worldly scruple. Any effort to render her a body to secular ends has recoiled, to the woe of her assailant. And albeit the conceit of man, or perhaps of Iblis, has at times mistreated and wronged her, sometimes so profanely as to render the gates of Heaven shut and the sin of Horen so heavy that only the words of Prophets, the very sparse sages of eras could redeem Creation. Those men whose dictated purpose on terra was prescribed in the Book of Creation in the inception of time and that Bid them, by Divine Will, and without compromise: Save My People, and save them they did.

 

The Priesthood of Owyn are the appointed judges of Man. They are, surviving in uninterrupted succession, in a consecutive Faithful ordainment since the day of the Prophet himself, the bulwark by which the realms of Man might prosper, and by the necessity of which without they would perish into doom, by the machinations of evil things that had not their ultimate love at heart.

 

The courts of the Church are the halls where law is the very Justice so many others claim to uphold. It is the very definition: The rudimentary principle that is intertwined and made as one with the manifested Love, Mercy and Honesty that is Our Lord Most High.

 

Ecclesiastical Oversight, if not the direct appointment of clerics as judges is a necessity to be adopted in every court of Mankind. When standards of legality are considered in parallel to the standards of abject Virtue, there shall be no misuse, and no malpractice. The Priesthood of Owyn are a dynasty of spirit who are united in one composite; their Calling to service as the Will of G-d. Their creed knows not the gift of money or power. It knows only His Mission, that is the Salvation of all, and to them there shall be no substitute of higher conviction, not in any secular titan of law or any lay chief judge.

 

To the legists and lawmen of the laity, who devise and enforce the myriad of practiced law in the realms of Man, I say thus; the Calling by which you live and toil, by which your hand draws the pen and your voice cries arguments, and the amounted centuries of legal frameworks which you uphold in life as in work; they are things good and inspired. Because the truth of this Calling lies not in the innate nature of Man to compile libraries of bureaucracy, but in the same nature of Man that draws the Selected to the cloth. It is the love of Justice and Peace and Mankind. The judge, the lawyer, the shepherd, are all in principle one in the same, borne of a love for the flock and its justice and made real in the Mission of the Church. Assume the Cloth, study the Scriptures and judge righteously at the gates, without bribe or corruption.

 

[HeyitsNano 1582]

"This was true," Atticus Keen intones. "The folly of men, their pride and their forgetfulness, has charted us on this course of Exile. Kings squabble over crowns wrought of ash, while their courts revel in corruption."

[framalam 837]

Lucien watches his fellow slop posters auspiciously.

[Lortime 1153]

The Bishop Andrikev was in the middle of writing a treatise of his own, albeit one of anger not love, as the good Cardinal's work crossed his desk.  "It is increasingly evident why you were appointed to the Holy Mother's High Court, Father. It is glorious to find another adherent of the legal school."

He mused, before returning to his inkwell.

Edited November 20, 2024 by Lortime