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 tells of a nation, who had a law binding them to beat their parents to death with clubs, when they lived to a decrepit and unprofitable age. The Persian Magi mingled with their mothers and all their nearest relatives. And by a law of the Venetians, says Bodinus, a son in banishment was redeemed from the sentence, if he killed his banished father. And in Homer's time, there were a sort of pirates, who professed robbing, and did account it honourable. But the great prevarications of the laws of nature were in the first commandment; when the tradition concerning God was derived by a long line, and there were no visible remonstrances of an extraordinary power, they were quickly brought to believe, that he whom they saw not, was not at all, especially being prompted to it by pride, tyranny, and a loose imperious spirit. Others fell to low opinions concerning God, and made such as they list of their own; and they were like to be strange gods, which were of man's making. When man, either maliciously or carelessly, became unreasonable in the things that concerned God, God was pleased to "give him over to a reprobate mind," that is, an unreasonable understanding, and false principles concerning himself and his neighbour, that his sin against the natural law might become its own punishment, by discomposing his natural happiness. Atheism and idolatry brought in all unnatural lusts, and many unreasonable injustices. And this we learn from St. Paul: "As they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things, which are not convenient";" that is, incongruities towards the end of their creation; and so they became "full of unrighteousness, lust, covetousness, malice, envy, strife, and murder, disobedient to parents, breakers of covenants, unnatural in their affections," and in their passions and all this was the consequent of breaking the first natural law. 66 They changed the truth of God into a lie: for this cause God gave them up unto vile affections"." : 2 De Rep. 1. i. c. 4. * Οὐκ ἄδοξον ἦν παρὰ τοῖς παλαιοῖς τὸ λῃστεύειν, ἀλλ ̓ ἔνδοξον.—Scholiast, in Hom. Odyss. T'. Vide etiam A. Gel, 1. xi. c. 18. ὁ Ὅσοι ἀπὸ ἀκαθάρτου πνεύματος ἐμπεφορημένοι, καὶ ὑπὸ φαύλης ἀνατροφῆς καὶ ἐθῶν φαύλων καὶ νόμων πονηρῶν διαφθαρέντες τὰς φυσικὰς ἐννοίας ἀπώλεσαν.—Just. Mart, Dial. Tryph. Rom. i. 25, 26, &c. d Ver. 28, &c. • Ver. 25, 26. 21. Now God, who takes more care for the good of man, than man does for his own, did not only imprint these laws in the hearts and understandings of man, but did also take care to make this light shine clear enough to walk by, by adopting some instances of the natural laws into religion. Thus the law against murder became a part of religion in the time of Noah; and some other things were then added concerning worshipping God, against idolatry, and against unnatural and impure mixtures. Sometimes God superadded judgments, as to the 23,000 Assyrians for fornication. For although these punishments were not threatened to the crime in the sanction and expression of any definite law, and it could not naturally arrive to it by its inordination; yet it was as agreeable to the Divine justice to inflict it, as to inflict the pains of hell upon evil livers, who yet had not any revelation of such intolerable danger: for it was sufficient, that God had made such crimes to be against their very nature; and they who will do violence to their nature, to do themselves hurt, and to displease God, deserve to lose the title to all those good things, which God was pleased to design for man's final condition. And because it grew habitual, customary, and of innocent reputation, it pleased God to call this precept out of the darkness, whither their evil customs and false discourses had put it; and by such an extra-regular, but very signal punishment, to remind them, that the natural permissions of concubinate were only confined to the ends of mankind, and were hallowed only by the faith and the design of marriage. And this was signified by St. Paul, in these words: "They that sin without the law, shall also perish without the lawf;" that is, by such judgments, which God hath inflicted on evil livers in several periods of the world, irregularly indeed, not signified in kind, but yet sent into the world with designs of a great mercy; that the ignorances, and prevarications, and partial abolitions of the natural law, might be cured and restored, and by the dispersion of prejudices the state of natural reason be redintegrate. 22. Whatsoever was besides this, was accidental and emergent; such as were the discourses of wise men, which God raised up in several countries and ages, as Job, and f Rom. ii. 12. Eliphaz, and Bildad, and those of the families of the patriarchs dispersed into several countries; and constant tradition in some noble and more eminent descents. And yet all this was so little and imperfect, not in itself, but in respect of the thick cloud man had drawn before his understanding, that darkness covered the face of the earth in a great proportion. Almost all the world were idolaters; and when they had broken the first of the natural laws, the breach of the other was not only naturally consequent, but also, by Divine judgment, it descended infallibly. And yet God, pitying mankind, did not only still continue the former remedies, and added blessings, " giving them fruitful seasons, and filling their hearts with food and gladness," so leaving the nations without excuse; but also made a very noble change in the world: for having chosen an excellent family, the fathers of which lived exactly according to the natural law, and with observation of those few superadded precepts, in which God did specificate their prime duty, having swelled that family to a great nation, and given them possession of an excellent land, which God took from seven nations, because they were egregious violators of the natural law, he was pleased to make a very great restitution and declaration of the natural law, in many instances of religion and justice, which he framed into positive precepts, and adopted them into the family of the first original instances, making them as necessary in the particulars, as they were in the primary obligation; but the instances were such, whereof some did relate only to the present constitution of the commonwealth; others to such universal contracts, which obliged all the world, by reason of the equal necessity of all mankind to admit them. And these himself writ on tables of stone, and dressed up their nation into a body politic by an excellent system of politic laws, and adorned it with a rare. religion, and left this nation as a piece of leaven in a mass of dough, not only to do honour to God, and happiness to themselves, by those instruments, which he had now very much explicated, but also to transmit the same reasonable propositions into other nations: and he therefore multiplied them to a great necessity of a dispersion, that they might serve the ends of God and of the natural law, by their ambulatory life and their numerous disseminations. And |