blessed Saviour reduces all the law to these two: 1. Love the Lord with all thy heart: 2. Love thy neighbour as thyself. In which I observe, in verification of my former discourse, that love is the first natural bond of duty to God, and so also it is to our neighbour. And therefore all intercourse with our neighbour was founded in, and derived from, the two greatest endearments of love in the world. A man came to have a neighbour, by being a husband and a father. 12. So that still there are but two great natural laws, binding us in our relations to God and man; we remaining essentially, and, by the very design of creation, obliged to God in all, and to our neighbours in the proportions of equality, as thyself; that is, that he be permitted and promoted, in the order to his living well and happily, as thou art for love being there not an affection, but the duty that results from the first natural bands of love, which began neighbourhood, signifies justice, equality, and such reasonable proceedings, which are in order to our common end of a happy life; and is the same with that other, "Whatsoever ye would, that men should do to you, do you to them;" and that is certainly the greatest and most effective love; because it best promotes that excellent end, which God designed for our natural perfection. All other particulars are but prosecutions of these two, that is, of the order of nature: save only that there is a third law, which is a part of love too; it is self-love; and therefore is rather supposed, than at the first expressed, because a man is reasonably to be presumed to have in him a sufficient stock of self-love, to serve the ends of his nature and creation; and that is, that man demean and use his own body in that decorum, which is most orderly and proportionate to his perfective end of a happy life; which Christian religion calls sobriety; and it is a prohibition of those uncharitable, self-destroying sins of drunkenness, gluttony, and inordinate and unreasonable manners of lust, destructive of nature's intendments, or at least no ways promoting them. For it is naturally lawful to satisfy any of these desires, when the desire does not carry the satisfaction. beyond the design of nature, that is, to the violation of P Num. 4. health, or that happy living, which consists in observing those contracts, which mankind thought necessary to be made, in order to the same great end; unless where God hath superinduced a restraint, making an instance of sobriety to become an act of religion, or to pass into an expression of duty to him: but then it is not a natural, but a religious sobriety, and may be instanced in fasting or abstinence from some kinds of meat, or some times or manners of conjugation. These are the three natural laws, described in the Christian doctrine; that we live, 1. godly; 2. soberly; 3. righteously. And the particulars of the first are ordinarily to be determined by God immediately, or his vicegerents, and by reason observing and complying with the accidents of the world, and dispositions of things and persons; the second, by the natural order of nature, by sense, and by experience; and the third, by human contracts and civil laws. 13. The result of the preceding discourse is this. Man, who was designed by God to a happy life, was fitted with sufficient means to attain that end, so that he might, if he would, be happy; but he was a free agent, and so might choose. And it is possible, that man may fail of his end, and be made miserable, by God, by himself, or by his neighbour; or, by the same persons, he may be made happy in the same proportions, as they relate to him. If God be angry or disobeyed, he becomes our enemy, and so we fail: if our neighbour be injured or impeded in the direct order to his happy living, he hath equal right against us, as we against him, and so we fail that way: and if I be intemperate, I grow sick and worsted in some faculty, and so I am unhappy in myself. But if I obey God, and do right to my neighbour, and confine myself within the order and design of nature; I am secured in all ends of blessing, in which I can be assisted by these three, that is, by all my relatives; there being no end of man designed by God in order to his happiness, to which these are not proper and sufficient instruments. Man can have no other relations, no other discourses, no other regular appetites, but what are served and satisfied by religion, by sobriety, and by justice. There is nothing, whereby we can relate to any person, who can hurt us, or do us benefit, but is provided for in these three. These, therefore, are all; and these are sufficient. 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. 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, κατεῖδεν 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. ¶ Annal. vi. 6. • Lucian. in Catapl. Rhadamanthus, ‘Owóσa äv tis iμãv wovnçà igyáontai παρὰ τὸν βίον, καθ ̓ ἕκαστον αυτῶν ἀφανῆ στίγματα ἐπὶ τῆς ψυχῆς περιφέρει. — Bipont. t. iii. p. 205. t 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 |