A code is a body or system of laws or regulations. Men have evolved over a period of time a variety of codes affecting the lives of individuals and nations. These laws or regulations express the thought of men in the past or present on the social, civil, criminal, political, and religious aspects of human existence. Human codes, or compilations of human opinions, aid human progress according to the degree of truth they embody, or retard human progress by their lack of it. Consideration of what some of these codes contain shows how important to the coming of God's kingdom is their purification and improvement.
Human codes are sometimes written down in books; sometimes they are recorded only in the thoughts of men and passed along from one generation to another. Yet their influence on the lives of millions is very great. For instance, an infant is born under a social code in India which condemns him to the life of an untouchable among the several castes there established by this code. The conditions of his life and the range of his activity are determined by a merciless, unjust social code!
In other parts of the world a child may become a man, and then discover that by the rites of a religious code exercised when he was an infant he has been made a member of a religious organization without his reasoned consent. Again, a child born under a particular political code may, when he begins to take note of his status, discover that he has little or no share in determining the conduct of the government that governs him, though such government demands his first allegiance to it rather than to his God. His life pattern is largely defined by a political code which neither he nor his parents have any opportunity to reject or accept.
