,
just as Cicero and the Jurists do, between perpetual right, which is
binding on all and everywhere, and positive right, which is only for
certain times and certain peoples. I once read with enjoyment the
_Euthyphro_ of Plato, who makes Socrates uphold the truth on that point,
and M. Bayle has called attention to the same passage.

183. M. Bayle himself upholds this truth with considerable force in a
certain passage, which it will be well to quote here in its entirety, long
as it is (vol. II of the Continuation of _Divers Thoughts on the Comet_,
ch. 152, p. 771 _seqq._): 'According to the teaching of countless writers
of importance', he says, 'there is in nature and in the essence of certain
things a moral good or evil that precedes the divine decree. They prove
this doctrine principally through the frightful consequences that attend
the opposite dogma. Thus from the proposition that to do wrong to no man
would be a good action, not in itself but by an arbitrary dispensation of
God's will, it would follow that God could have given to man a law directly
opposed at all points to the commandments of the Decalogue. That is
horrifying. But here is a more direct proof, one derived from metaphysics.
One thing is certain, that the existence of God is not an effect of his
will. He exists not because he wills his existence, but through the [242]
necessity of his infinite nature. His power and his knowledge exist through
the same necessity. He is all-powerful, he knows all things, not because he
wills it thus, but because these are attributes necessarily identified with
him. The dominion of his will relates only to the exercise of his power, he
gives effect outside himself only to that which he wills, and he leaves all
the rest in the state of mere possibility. Thence it comes that this
dominion extends only over the existence of creatures, and not over their
essential being. God was able to create matter, a man, a circle, or leave
them in nothingness, but he was not able to produce them without giving
them their essential properties. He had of necessity to make man a rational
animal and to give the round shape to a circle, since, according to his
eternal ideas, independent of the free decrees of his will, the essence of
man lay in the properties of being animal and rational, and since the
essence of the circle lay in having a circumference equally distant from
the centre as to all its parts. This is what has caused the Christian