or intemperance, the
task would be pleasant and easy; we should need no other guide but
this. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience; that
his reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and
error.

THIS has given manifold occasion for the benign interposition of
divine providence; which, in companion to the frailty, the
imperfection, and the blindness of human reason, hath been pleased,
at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce it's
laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus
delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found
only in the holy scriptures. These precepts, when revealed, are found
upon comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature, as
they tend in all their consequences to man's felicity. But we are not
from thence to conclude that the knowlege of these truths was
attainable by reason, in it's present corrupted state; since we find
that, until they were revealed, they were hid from the wisdom of ages.
As then the moral precepts of this law are indeed of the same original
with those of the law of nature, so their intrinsic obligation is of
equal strength and perpetuity. Yet undoubtedly the revealed law is
(humanly speaking) of infinitely more authority than what we generally
call the natural law. Because one is the law of nature, expressly
declared so to be by God himself; the other is only what, by the
assistance of human reason, we imagine to be that law. If we could be
as certain of the latter as we are of the former, both would have an
equal authority; but, till then, they can never be put in any
competition together.

UPON these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of
revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws
should be suffered to contradict these. There is, it is true, a great
number of indifferent points, in which both the divine law and the
natural leave a man at his own liberty; but which are found necessary
for the benefit of society to be restrained within certain limits. And
herein it is that human laws have their greatest force and efficacy;
for, with regard to such points as are not indifferent, human laws are
only declaratory of, and act in subordination to, the former. To
instance in the case of murder: this is expressly forbidden by the
divine, and demonstrably by the natural law; and from these
prohibitions arises the true unlawfulness of this