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Good morning. A few days ago my 10 year old granddaughter taught me a new card game. Luckily the rules were fairly simple and after a bit I could get into the game and enjoy it. The rules of any game are arbitrary-there is no reason why one card should mean you lose a life or another that you miss a turn-what matters is that people should know the rules and abide by them, otherwise the game collapses. But what about the rules which hold us together as a society? What about the conventions on which parliament operates? Recently, in response to the judgement of the Commons Privileges Committee Jonathan Freedland wrote: It is not only democracy but civilisation itself that rests on our acceptance of the rule of law…assisted by the rituals, costume and ceremonies of the courtroom, we construct ‘the law’ as somehow above the mere whim or bias of this or that individual. It is the only way we can get along..the alternative is the law of the jungle. What interested me about that is his statement that we construct the law. And of course in once sense we do. We have to agree through parliament both what our laws should be and even more fundamentally the rules of how we make them. But our whole civilisation has in fact been built up on the conviction that law is more than a human construct. It has been rooted in the moral law, sometimes called natural law, indicating that a sense of right and wrong is natural to us as human beings. When I was a curate I used to teach in a primary school a couple of times a week. On one occasion I asked the class to imagine they were marooned on an island with a few friends and they had to draw up a short list of rules to live by. It was amazing how close their lists came to the ten commandments-don’t murder, steal, lie and so on. These ten commandments, given to Moses on Mount Sinai (1), were at one time written beside the altar in churches all over the land. Western civilisation was shaped partly by them- and partly by the Greek view that all human beings are capable of using their minds to discern right and wrong. St Paul wrote that although most people don’t have the Jewish law ‘they show that what the law requires is inscribed in their hearts and to this their conscience gives supporting witness. (2)' Western civilisation is rooted in the conviction that though laws of course have to be agreed, at their heart is a moral law, a law natural to all human beings. Not just a set of rules, as in a game of cards, but something essential for what it is to be human. Something which comes with obligations and carries a sense of ‘ought’. (1) The text of the Ten Commandments appears twice in the Hebrew Bible: at Exodus 20:2–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21 (2) Romans 2.14/15