LXXXIII. ON determining the duties of the individual towards his fellow-men, and towards all that surrounds him in nature, revelation did not think it proper to refer the motives to human intelligence, and to allow the bases of justice and benevolence to rest on human reason alone; but it said, "Do what is right and just and good in the eyes of the Eternal thy God; and refrain from all that is not such, because it pleases not thy God," whereby it wished to proclaim that the notions of just and unjust, of good and evil, of rights and duties, should be considered as emanating from, and prescribed by, the Divine wisdom, and therefore obligatory only because agreeable to the Divine will. In this also the revealed word purposed to come to the assistance of human frailty, and to render superfluous the abstrusities--as arbitrary as uncertain and controvertible--about which eminent philosophers tortured their brains, for many centuries, to fix, as they thought, the principles of the so-called _Jure_ in its innumerable ramifications of natural and positive, public and private, civil and criminal, commercial, maritime, canonical, feudal, of police, of finance, of war, and what not, without ever yet arriving at a complete accord in their specialities; whereas all right obtains a solid and effective sanction when its origin is referred to God, who comprehending in Himself the sum total of right, justice and moral good, and having communed with man to enjoin to him their exercise, willed that the carrying out of their dictates should be considered as an act of religion, of service rendered to Him, and that violating the one or failing in the other, should be alike regarded as an offence committed towards Him, which He will punish severely. God, then, is the source of right; He made man acquainted with it through His law, and committed to him its performance on earth after rules prescribed by His will.