n
which some years before he had developed in a fine passage in the
Republic: _true law_, he says, _is right reason_.[789] In the Laws he
takes it up again, and argues that as both God and Man have reason,
there must be a direct relation between them.[790] And as Law and right
reason are identical, we may say that Law is the binding force of that
relation. And again, this means that the universe may be looked on as
one great State (_civitas_), of which both God and Man (or gods and men)
are citizens, or in another way as a State of which the constitution is
itself the Reason, or God's law, which all reasonable beings must obey.
Such obedience is itself the effort by which Man realises his own
reason: he is a part of a reasonable universe, and he cannot rebel
against its law without violating his own highest instinct. It is not
hard to see how this way of expressing the Stoic theological principle
would appeal to the Roman mind. That mind was wholly incapable of
metaphysical thinking; but it could without effort understand, with the
help of its social and political principles and experience, the idea of
supreme intelligent rule--a supreme _imperium_, as it were, to rebel
against which would be a moral _perduellio_, high treason against a
supreme Law, unwritten like his own, and resting, as he thought of his
own as resting, on the best instincts, tradition, reason, of his
community; from his own constitution and laws he could lift his mind
without much difficulty to the constitution and law of the _communis
deorum et hominum civitas_. The idea of God in any such sense as this
was indeed new to him; but he could grasp it under the expression
"universal law of right reason" when he would have utterly failed, for
example, to conceive of it as "the Absolute." He can feel himself the
citizen of a State whose maker and ruler is God, and whose law is the
inevitable force of Reason; he can realise his relationship to God as a
part of the same State, gifted with the same power of discerning its
legal basis, nay, even helping to administer its law by rational
obedience.

2. Reason as thus ruling the universe can also provide a basis for Man's
reasonable association with his fellow-men, and a religious basis if
conceived as God; for Man's recognition of the divine law, the _recta
ratio_, as binding on him, is followed quite naturally by his
recognition of the application of that law to the world he lives in.
"Human law comes into e