"A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law" The following quote depicts the relationship Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. shared. Thoreau declared that if man were left in their natural state and not influenced by society, he would unpretentiously be moral. He also declared that all people could connect to God through themselves. For the two years Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, he tried connecting himself with God and to the nature around him, in search of peace and tranquility. In relations to this quote, Martin Luther King can set forth that the "just" laws are ones of natural and spiritual state influenced by God, before the society has time to corrupt them. In addition to that, he states that the unjust laws are out of harmony with the moral laws, indicating that the depictions have been corrupted by discordant society. During King's experience in the Birmingham City Jail he expresses that a good law is one that is naturally fair: to be in coherence with what God would candidly say is right and would be a moral, just law. Both Thoreau and Dr. King believe that men are inherently good and that there is much to be found within ourselves, but had been imaginably ruined by society. The two exemplified the desire of individualism.
Thoreau and King both voluntarily face the consequences of their actions, due to them standing for what they believe in. David Thoreau had spent a night in jail for not paying a tax because he did not agree with the governments' choices of how the taxes were being used. He decided that the law of paying taxes was unjust. Thoreau proposes that as they, the people, pay for the taxes they are profoundly putting themselves in the section of not having any individualism as he continues by saying, "I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterwards.
