14. But now it is to be inquired, how these become laws obliging us to sin, if we transgress, even before any positive law of God be superinduced: for else, how can it be a natural law, that is, a law obliging all nations and all persons, even such who have had no intercourse with God by way of special revelation, and have lost all memory of tradition? For either such persons, whatsoever they do, shall obtain that end, which God designed for them in their nature, that is, a happy life according to the duration of an immortal nature; or else they shall perish for prevaricating of these laws. And yet, if they were no laws to them, and decreed and made sacred by sanction, promulgation, and appendant penalties, they could not so oblige them, as to become the rule of virtue or vice. d; 15. When God gave us natural reason, that is, sufficient ability to do all that should be necessary to live well and happily, he also knew, that some appetites might be irregular, just as some stomachs would be sick, and some eyes blind and a man, being a voluntary agent, might choose an evil with as little reason, as the angels of darkness did, that is, they might do unreasonably, because they would do so; and then a man's understanding should serve him but as an instrument of mischief, and his will carry him on to it with a blind and impotent desire; and then the beauteous order of creatures would be discomposed by unreasonable, and unconsidering, or evil persons. And therefore it was most necessary, that man should have his appetites confined within the designs of nature, and the order to his end; for a will, without the restraint of a superior power or a perfect understanding, is like a knife in a child's hand, as apt for mischief as for use. Therefore it pleased God to bind man, by the signature of laws, to observe those great natural reasons, without which man could not arrive at the great end of God's designing; that is, he could not live well and happily. God, therefore, made it the first law to love him; and, which is all one, to worship him, to speak honour of him, and to express it in all our ways, the chief whereof is obedience. And this we find in the instance of that positive precept, which God gave to Adam, and which was nothing but a particular of the great general. But in this there is little scruple, because it is not imaginable, that God would, in any period of time, not take care, that himself be honoured, his glory being the very end, why he made man; and therefore it must be certain, that this did, at the very first, pass into a law. 16. But concerning this and other things, which are usually called natural laws, I consider, that the things themselves were such, that the doing them was therefore declared to be a law, because the not doing them did certainly bring a punishment proportionable to the crime, that is, a just deficiency from the end of creation, from a good and happy life: 2. and also a punishment of a guilty conscience: which I do not understand to be a fear of hell, or of any supervening penalty, unless the conscience be accidentally instructed into such fears by experience or revelation; but it is a "malum in genere rationis," a disease or evil of the reasonable faculty; that, as there is a rare content in the discourses of reason, there is a satisfaction, an acquiescency, like that of creatures in their proper place, and definite actions, and competent perfections; so, in prevaricating the natural law, there is a dissatisfaction, a disease, a removing out of the place, an unquietness of spirit, even when there is no monitor or observer. "Adeò facinora atque flagitia sua ipsi quoque in supplicium verterant. Neque frustrà præstantissimus [Plato] sapientiæ firmare solitus est, si recludantur tyrannorum mentes, posse aspici laniatus et ictus, quando ut corpora verberibus, ità sævitiâ, libidine, malis consultis animus dilaceretur," said Tacitus out of Plato', whose words are; ̓Αλλὰ πολλάκις τοῦ μεγάλου βασιλέως ἐπιλαβόμενος, ἢ ἄλλου ὁτουοῦν βασιλέως ἢ δυνάστου, κατεῖδὲν οὐδὲν ὑγιὲς ὂν τῆς ψυχῆς, ἀλλὰ διαμεμαστιγωμένην καὶ οὐλῶν μεστὴν, ὑπὸ ἐπιορκιῶν καὶ ἀδικίας. It is naturally certain, that the cruelty of tyrants torments themselves, and is a hook in their nostrils, and a scourge to their spirit'; and the pungency of forbidden lust is truly a thorn in the flesh, full of anguish and secret vexation. Quid, demens, manifesta negas? En pectus inustæ said Claudian of Rufinus. And it is certain to us, and r In Gorgia, § 61. 9 Annal. vi. 6. * Lucian. in Catapl. Rhadamanthus, ‘Owóra äv tis vμäv wovngà igyáontai παρὰ τὸν βίον, καθ ̓ ἕκαστον αυτῶν ἀφανῆ στίγματα ἐπὶ τῆς ψυχῆς περιφέρει. — Bipont, t. iii. p. 205. * Claudian, de Rufin. lib. ii. 504. verified by the experience and observation of all wise nations, though not naturally demonstrable, that this secret punishment is sharpened and promoted in degrees by the hand of Heaven, the finger of the same hand, that writ the law in our understandings. 17. But the prevarications of the natural law have also their portion of a special punishment, besides the scourge of an unquiet spirit. The man that disturbs his neighbour's rest, meets with disturbances himself: and since I have naturally no more power over my neighbour, than he hath over me, (unless he descended naturally from me,) he hath an equal privilege to defend himself, and to secure his quiet by disturbing the order of my happy living, as I do his. And this equal permission is certainly so great a sanction and signature of the law of justice, that, in the just proportion of my receding from the reasonable prosecution of my end, in the same proportion and degree my own infelicity is become certain; and this in several degrees up to the loss of all, that is, of life itself: for where no farther duration or differing state is known, there death is ordinarily esteemed the greatest infelicity; where something beyond it is known, there also it is known, that such prevarication makes that farther duration to be unhappy. So that an affront is naturally punished by an affront, the loss of a tooth with the loss of a tooth, of an eye with an eye, the violent taking away of another man's goods by the losing my own. For I am liable to as great an evil as I infer, and naturally he is not unjust, that inflicts it. And he that is drunk, is a fool or a madman for the time; and that is his punishment, and declares the law and the sin and so in proportions to the transgressions of sobriety. But when the first of the natural laws is violated, that is, God is disobeyed or dishonoured, or when the greatest of natural evils is done to our neighbour, then death became the penalty: to the first, in the first period of the world; to the second, at the restitution of the world, that is, at the beginning of the second period. He that did attempt to kill, from the beginning of ages might have been resisted and killed, if the assaulted could not else be safe; but he that killed actually, as Cain did, could not be killed himself, till the law was made in Noah's time; because there was no person living, that had equal power on him, and had been naturally injured. While the thing was doing, the assailant and the assailed had equal power; but when it was done, and one was killed, he that had the power or right of killing his murderer, is now dead, and his power is extinguished with the man. But after the flood, the power was put into the hand of some trusted person, who was to take the forfeiture. And thus, I conceive, these natural reasons, in order to their proper end, became laws, and bound fast by the band of annexed and consequent penalties. "Metum prorsus et noxiam conscientiæ pro fœdere haberi," said Tacitus"; and that fully explains my sense. 18. And thus death was brought into the world; not by every prevarication of any of the laws, by any instance of unreasonableness: for in proportion to the evil of the action would be the evil of the suffering, which in all cases would not arrive at death; as every injury, every intemperance, should not have been capital. But some things were made evil by a superinduced prohibition, as eating one kind of fruit; some things were evil by inordination: the first was morally evil, the second was evil naturally. Now the first sort brought in death by a prime sanction; the second, by degrees and variety of accident. For every disobedience and transgression of that law, which God made as the instance of our doing him honour and obedience, is an integral violation of all the band between him and us; it does not grow in degrees, according to the instance and subject matter; for it is as great a disobedience to eat, when he hath forbidden us, as to offer to climb to heaven with an ambitious tower. And therefore it is but reasonable for us to fear, and just in him to make us at once suffer death, which is the greatest of natural evils, for disobeying him: to which death we may arrive by degrees, in doing actions against the reasonableness of sobriety and justice, but cannot arrive by degrees of disobedience to God, or irreligion; because every such act deserves the worst of things, but the other naturally deserves no greater evil than the proportion of their own inordination, till God, by a superinduced law, hath made them also to become acts of disobedience as well as inordination, that is, morally evil, as well as naturally; "Ann. vi. 4. for "by the law," saith St. Paul," sin became exceedingly sinful," that is, had a new degree of obliquity added to it. But this was not at first. For therefore saith St. Paul, "Before," or "until the law, sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed, when there is no law" meaning, that those sins, which were forbidden by Moses's law, were actually in the manners of men and the customs of the world; but they were not imputed, that is, to such personal punishments and consequent evils, which afterwards those sins did introduce; because those sins, which were only evil by inordination, and discomposure of the order of man's end of living happily, were made unlawful upon no other stock, but that God would have man to live happily; and therefore gave him reason, to effect that end; and if a man became unreasonable, and did things contrary to his end, it was impossible for him to be happy; that is, he should be miserable in proportion. But in that degree and manner of evil they were imputed; and that was sanction enough to raise natural reason up to the constitution of a law. 19. Thirdly, the law of nature, being thus decreed and made obligatory, was a sufficient instrument of making man happy, that is, in producing the end of his creation. But as Adam had evil discourses and irregular appetites, before he fell, (for they made him fall,) and as the angels, who had no original sin, yet they chose evil at the first, when it was wholly arbitrary in them to do so or otherwise; so did man. "God made man upright, but he sought out many inventions." Some men were ambitious, and by incompetent means would make their brethren to be their servants; some were covetous, and would usurp that, which, by an earlier distinction, had passed into private possession: and then they made new principles, and new discourses, such which were reasonable in order to their private indirect ends, but not to the public benefit, and therefore would prove unreasonable and mischievous to themselves at last. 20. And when once they broke the order of creation, it is easy to understand, by what necessities of consequence they ran into many sins and irrational proceedings'. Elian |