This is how
people conceived of law in English society before we decided to reject God's
word as nations:
"This
law of nature, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of
course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe in
all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary
to this; an such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their
authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.
But
in order to apply this to the particular exigencies of each individual, it is
still necessary to have recourse to reason: whose office it is to discover, as
was before observed, what the law of nature directs in every circumstances of
life; by considering, what method will tend the most effectually to our own
substantial happiness. And if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor
before his transgressions, clear and perfect, unruffled by passions, unclouded
by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the talk would be pleasant
an 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 compassion 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 of infinitely more authenticity than that moral system, which is framed
by ethical writers, and denominated 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."[1]
Sir William
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England
What has the
Bible done for you?
All that is good. Our lives are becoming more oppressive because as a people we forgot this.
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