What was now required was not that law, or that the principles and foundations of law, should be overthrown; but, on the contrary, that those principles of morality, that are universal, and are commonly recognized among mankind, should be made, with the most searching and binding force, the law of the new society; and that the sanction of this law should be changed from the present to the future life. Much that had necessarily been incorporated in the Mosaic Dispensation, because needed for its limited, national, mundane purpose, must now be held to have answered its purpose, and to be terminated as far as the new, universal, society was concerned. Everything that was special belonged to this head; and, _à fortiori_, everything that was exclusive, and so conflicted with the universal law, which was, above all things, a law of brotherhood. It could be nothing else. In this view, the mother idea of Christianity is the substitution, as the rule of individual life, of the universal natural law for the positive written, municipal law of the Hebrews, and of every other people. It has no written law of its own. It appeals to the unwritten law, which is inscribed not on tables of stone and brass, but on the fleshly tables of the heart; that is to say, to what is in man. And this, we may observe in passing, it is, which enables it to live and grow, and to develop, and accommodate itself to every increase of knowledge, and to the advancing conditions of society. Still local mundane governments must be maintained; and this also would require a law. Law was, therefore, henceforth divided into two parts: that which is universal, natural, unwritten, which God reveals to men’s hearts, and for the observance of which they will hereafter be accountable to God; and that which is shaped by the wisdom and the folly, the knowledge and the ignorance, the necessities, the circumstances, and the interests of human legislators, and of separate, often hostile, nations. For this latter men would be accountable, primarily, to the State. The State would enact, and must administer and execute it. Only in cases in which the State was Christian (none such then existed, but the time might come when the kingdoms of the world would be the kingdoms of Christ and of God), would the principles of the municipal law not conflict with the principles of the divine, universal law. But even in cases where they were in conflict, the Christian, as human society is ordained of God, would, as a matter of conscience, even when not of right and reason, submit to it. This, however, would be understood as having its limits, for there would be cases in which we must obey God and not man.