ful authority of him that commands, and so far determines and
modifies his general duty of obedience as to do an action immaterial in
itself for the sake of the formality of yielding obedience to lawfully
constituted authority. So, in like manner, a specific promise, in
itself immaterial and not enjoined by natural justice, is to be kept
for the sake of the formality of keeping faith, which _is_ enjoined.

Cudworth's work, in which these are nearly all the ethical allusions,
gives no scope for a summary under the various topics.

I.--Specially excluding any such External _Standard_ of moral Good as
the arbitrary Will, either of God or the Sovereign, he views it as a
simple ultimate natural quality of actions or dispositions, as included
among the verities of things, by the side of which the phenomena of
Sense are unreal.

II.--The general Intellectual Faculty cognizes the moral verities,
which it contains within itself and brings rather than finds.

III.--He does not touch upon Happiness; probably he would lean to
asceticism. He sets up no moral code.

IV.--Obligation to the Positive Civil Laws in matters indifferent
follows from the intellectual recognition of the established relation
between ruler and subject.

V.--Morality is not dependent upon the Deity in any other sense than
the whole frame of things is.

SAMUEL CLARKE. [1675-1729.]

Clarke put together his two series of Boyle Lectures (preached 1704 and
1705) as 'A Discourse, concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the
Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the
Christian Revelation,' in answer to Hobbes, Spinoza, &c. The burden of
the ethical discussion falls under the head of the Obligations of
Natural Religion, in the second series.

He enounces this all-comprehensive proposition: 'The same necessary and
eternal different Relations that different Things bear one to another,
and the same consequent Fitness or Unfitness of the application of
different things or different relations one to another, with regard to
which the will of God always and necessarily does determine itself to
choose to act only what is agreeable to Justice, Equity, Goodness, and
Truth, in order to the welfare of the whole universe--ought likewise
constantly to determine the Wills of all subordinate rational beings,
to govern all their actions by the same rules, for the good of the
public, in their respective stations. That is, these eternal and
necessary