"Empty names without any reality": Bramhall on the commonwealth's need of natural law
Flatterers are the common moths of great palaces, where “Alexander's friends” are more numerous than “the king's friends;” but such gross palpable pernicious flattery as this is, I did never meet with, so derogatory both to piety and policy. What deserved he, who should do his uttermost endeavour to poison a common fountain, whereof all the commonwealth must drink? He doth the same, who poisoneth the mind of a sovereign prince. Are “the civil laws the rules of good and bad, just and unjust, honest and dishonest?” And what I pray you are the rules of the civil law itself? ... “What the lawgiver commands, is to be accounted good; what he forbids, bad.” This was just the garb of the Athenian sophisters, as they are described by Plato; whatsoever pleased “the great beast” (the multitude), they called holy, and just, and good; and whatsoever “the great beast” disliked, they called evil, unjust, profane" ... He addeth, “Before empires were, just and unjust were not.” No thing could be written more false in his sense, more dishonour able to God, more inglorious to the human nature;—that God should create man, and leave him presently without any rules to his own ordering of himself, as the ostrich leaveth her eggs in the sand. But in truth there have been empires in the world ever since Adam; and Adam had a law written in his heart by the finger of God, before there was any civil law. Thus they do endeavour to make goodness, and justice, and honesty, and conscience, and God Himself, to be empty names without any reality, which signify nothing, further than they conduce to a man’s interest.
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