Utopia

everyone sees this opinion, namely that men who are clever with cautions, or rather with traps, and who are catchers of unwary citizens, and artificers of legal forms (that is, of exceptions), and those most skilled in contractual law, and arrangers of lawsuits, and those who are perverted, inverted, consulted, and considered high priests of justice and equity—these are the only ones deemed worthy to give responses regarding what is fair and good. Furthermore, and this is much more significant, they are the ones who, with command and power, decide what each person may possess, what they may not, to what extent, and for how long. This is surely the judgment of common sense hallucinating. For since most of humanity is blinded by the thick pus of ignorance, we consider that each person has a cause that is nearly as equitable as the law demands, or as the law supports.

If we wanted to examine these laws according to the standard of truth and the prescription of Evangelical simplicity, no one would be so stupid as not to understand, and no one so insane as not to confess—if you pressed the point—that justice and right as they exist today in pontifical canon law sanctions, and justice and equity in civil laws and the decrees of princes, differ as much as the institutions of CHRIST, the founder of human affairs, and the rites of his disciples differ from the decrees and pleasures of those who think that the heaps of Croesus and Midas are the goal of goods and the summit of happiness. Thus, if you now wish to define justice as the ancient authors were pleased to do—that which gives each person their own right—you would either find it nowhere in public, or (if I may be permitted to say so) we would have to admit it is a certain kind of kitchen manager.