ircumstances, climate, country, neighbors, to the period of the world
when they were promulgated, and during which they were to prevail. They
were certainly not meant as a model for any other form of government,
for any other people, or for any other time. Many laws are to be found
there which are unnecessary and superfluous if applied elsewhere. Many
actions, innocent in themselves, are prohibited. All the _mala
prohibita_ are not _mala in se_. But one thing is as clear as a sunbeam,
and that is a very important light to the student of Ethics; if God was
the author of these laws, nothing morally wrong was commanded or
allowed by them. When it was said of the Jews through the prophet, "I
gave them statutes which were not good," it cannot mean not morally
good; laws which it would be sinful in them to obey. The word in the
original is not the word appropriated in that language to right,
conformity to rule, but to goodness in its most general sense. Good
statutes mean wise and expedient statutes. By no process can the logical
mind be brought to the conclusion that the perfectly wise and good
lawgiver, in framing a code of laws for any people, would impose as a
punishment "for the hardness of their hearts," a penalty, submission to
which would itself be punishable as a sin against the law of nature. He
might command or allow as such punishment what in itself was inexpedient
and injurious to them, and which upon the promulgation of a new law
repealing the old and prohibiting what it allowed, would become by the
sanction of the same lawgiver thenceforth universally _malum
prohibitum_. The authority of God as a lawgiver is certainly not
confined to a mere declaration of what is right or wrong by the law of
Nature.

There can be no merely arbitrary laws. It is necessary to bear in mind
that we are now considering the province of the legislator, who ought to
enact no law without an end. "Civil legislative power," says Rutherforth
(B. II, c. vi, s. 10), "is not in the strict sense of the word an
absolute power of restraining or altering the rights of the subjects: it
is limited in its own nature to its proper objects, to those rights only
in which the common good of the society or of its several parts requires
some restraint or alteration. So that whenever we call the civil
legislative power, either of society in general or of a particular
legislative body within any society, an absolute legislative power, we
can only mean that