XII. When supernatural duties are necessarily exacted, natural are not rejected as needless. The law of God therefore is, though principally delivered for instruction in the one, yet fraught with precepts of the other also. The Scripture is fraught even with laws of Nature; insomuch that Gratian1 defining Natural Right, (whereby is meant the right which exacteth those general duties that concern men naturally even as they are men,) termeth “Natural Right, that which the Books of the Law and the Gospel do contain.” Neither is it vain that the Scripture aboundeth with so great store of laws in this kind: for they are either such as we of ourselves could not easily have found out, and then the benefit is not small to have them readily set down to our hands; or if they be so clear and manifest that no man endued with reason can lightly be ignorant of them, yet the Spirit as it were borrowing them from the school of Nature, as serving to prove things less manifest, and to induce a persuasion of somewhat which were in itself more hard and dark, unless it should in such sort be cleared, the very applying of them unto cases particular is not without most singular use and profit many ways for men’s instruction. Besides, be they plain of themselves or obscure, the evidence of God’s own testimony added to the natural assent of reason concerning the certainty of them, doth not a little comfort and confirm the same.
Wherefore inasmuch as our actions are conversant about things beset with many circumstances, which cause men of sundry wits to be also of sundry judgments concerning that which ought to be done; requisite it cannot but seem the rule of divine law should herein help our imbecility, that we might the more infallibly understand what is good and what evil. The first principles of the Law of Nature are easy; hard it were to find men ignorant of them. But concerning the duty which Nature’s law doth require at the hands of men in a number of things particular, so far hath the natural understanding even of sundry whole nations been darkened, that they have not discerned no not gross iniquity to be sin2. Again, being so prone as we are to fawn upon ourselves, and to be ignorant as much as may be of our own deformities, without the feeling sense whereof we are most wretched, even so much the more, because not knowing them we cannot so much as desire to have them taken away: how should our festered sores be cured, but that God hath delivered a law as sharp as the two-edged sword, piercing the very closest and most unsearchable corners of the heart3, which the Law of Nature can hardly, human laws by no means possible, reach unto? Hereby we know even secret concupiscence to be sin, and are made fearful to offend though it be but in a wandering cogitation. Finally, of those things which are for direction of all the parts of our life needful, and not impossible to be discerned by the light of Nature itself; are there not many which few men’s natural capacity, and some which no man’s, hath been able to find out? They are, saith St. Augustine4, but a few, and they endued with great ripeness of wit and judgment, free from all such affairs as might trouble their meditations, instructed in the sharpest and the subtlest points of learning, who have, and that very hardly, been able to find out but only the immortality of the soul. The resurrection of the flesh what man did ever at any time dream of, having not heard it otherwise than from the school of Nature? Whereby it appeareth how much we are bound to yield unto our Creator, the Father of all mercy, eternal thanks, for that he hath delivered his law unto the world, a law wherein so many things are laid open, clear, and manifest, as a light which otherwise would have been buried in darkness, not without the hazard, or rather not with the hazard but with the certain loss, of infinite thousands of souls most undoubtedly now saved.
We see, therefore, that our sovereign good is desired naturally; that God the author of that natural desire had appointed natural means whereby to fulfil it; that man having utterly disabled his nature unto those means hath had other revealed from God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally must now supernaturally be attained. Finally, we see that because those latter exclude not the former quite and clean as unnecessary, therefore together with such supernatural duties as could not possibly have been otherwise known to the world, the same law that teacheth them, teacheth also with them such natural duties as could not by light of Nature easily have been known.
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Footnotes
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“Jus naturale est, quod in Lege et Evangelio continetur.” p. 1, d. 1. [Corp. Jur. Can. p. 2. Lugd. 1584.] ↩
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Joseph. lib. secundo contra Apion. [c. 37.] “Lacedæmonii quomodo non sunt ob inhospitalitatem reprehendendi, fœdumque neglectum nuptiarum? Elienses vero et Thebani ob coitum cum masculis plane impudentem et contra naturam, quem recte et utiliter exercere putabant? Cumque hæc omnino perpetrarunt, etiam suis legibus miscuere.” Vid. Th. 1, 2, q. 94, 4, 5, 6. “Lex naturæ sic corrupta fuit apud Germanos, ut latrocinium non reputarent peccatum.” [t. xi. 204.] August. (aut quisquis auctor est) lib. de quæst. Nov. et Vet. Test. “Quis nesciat quid bonæ vitæ conveniat, aut ignoret quia quod sibi fieri non vult aliis minime debeat facere? At vero ubi naturalis lex evanuit oppressa consuetudine delinquendi, tunc oportuit manifestari scriptis, ut Dei judicium omnes audirent [legem manifestari, ut in Judæis omnes homines audirent:] non quod penitus obliterata est, sed quia maxima ejus auctoritate carebant, idololatriæ studebatur, timor Dei in terris non erat, fornicatio operabatur, circa rem proximi avida erat concupiscentia. Data [danda] ergo lex crat, ut et quæ sciebantur auctoritatem haberent, et quæ latere cœperant manifestarentur.” Quæst. iv. [t. iii. App. 44.] ↩
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Heb. iv. 12. ↩
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[“Humanis argumentationibus hæc invenire conantes, vix pauci magno præditi ingenio, abundantes otio, doctrinisque subtilissimis eruditi, ad indagandam solius animæ immortalitatem pervenire potuerunt.” De Trin. lib. xiii. c. 12. tom. viii. 935.] ↩