or life in safety. The king
thus reigns by right of human necessity, and obedience to him and to
constituted authorities under him is man's whole duty, and the sum of
virtue. Might creates right. Conscience is but another name for the fear
of punishment. The intimate connection of religion with civil freedom in
the English Commonwealth no doubt went far in uprooting in Hobbes all
religious faith; and while he did not openly attack Christianity, he
maintained the duty of entire conformity to the monarch's religion,
whatever it might be, which is of course tantamount to the denial of
objective religious truth.(22)

Hobbes may fairly be regarded as *the father of modern ethical
philosophy*,--not that he had children after his own likeness; but his
speculations were so revolting equally to thinking and to serious men, as
to arouse inquiry and stimulate mental activity in a department previously
neglected.

The gauntlet thus thrown down by Hobbes was taken up by *Cudworth* (A. D.
1617-1688), the most learned man of his time, whose "Intellectual System
of the Universe" is a prodigy of erudition,--a work in which his own
thought is so blocked up with quotations, authorities, and masses of
recondite lore, that it is hardly possible to trace the windings of the
river for the debris of auriferous rocks that obstruct its flow. The
treatise with which we are concerned is that on "Eternal and Immutable
Morality." In this he maintains that the right exists, independently of
all authority, by the very nature of things, in co-eternity with the
Supreme Being. So far is he from admitting the possibility of any
dissiliency between the Divine will and absolute right, that he turns the
tables on his opponents, and classes among Atheists those of his
contemporaries who maintain that God can command what is contrary to the
intrinsic right; that He has no inclination to the good of his creatures;
that He can justly doom an innocent being to eternal torments; or that
whatever God wills is just because He wills it.

*Samuel Clarke* (A. D. 1675-1729) followed Cudworth in the same line of
thought. He was, it is believed, the first writer who employed the term
_fitness_ as defining the ground of the immutable and eternal right,
though the idea of fitness necessarily underlies every system or theory
that assigns to virtue intrinsic validity.

*Shaftesbury* (A. D. 1671-1713) represents virtue as residing, not in the
nature or relations of things,