Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/619



N the beginning of independent ethical thought, during the two centuries following the Reformation, its problem seems to have presented itself in a twofold manner, or to have been approached under two aspects. In the first place, after the individualism of the Renaissance, it was necessary to establish the existence of fixed and eternal laws of morality. The church was no longer the sufficient authority in morals; there was a demand for more than the word of some schoolman to settle questions of ethical principle. For the Protestant, the Bible was still sufficient in all practical matters; but in scientific circles the new spirit of inquiry could not be so easily satisfied. The Roman Church could point with much truth to the individualism consequent on the rejection of her authority, to which the wild license of some sects bore striking witness. In this emergency, the resource was ready at hand in the familiar conception of the Law of Nature, as the common law of humanity. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are filled with treatises in which this is the fundamental thought—a law natural to man, and binding upon him even apart from his knowledge of it as also imposed by God. Either as friend or foe it was distinguished from the divine law of revelation, which had its sanctions primarily in another life. The sanctions of the natural law were such as were discoverable in this life, and through unaided reason. The aim of the theory was to substitute a natural authority in place of that imposed by the church.

This was the purpose of all the great moralists down to the close of the seventeenth century. Hooker's aim was to show that the divine law is revealed not only in Scripture, but also through all the grades of nature. Ecclesiastical polity, therefore, is not bound down to the letter of the law, but can be