13. Any one who understands how morality comes from God (_Ethics_, c. vi., s. ii. nn. 6-9, 13, pp. 119-125), can have no difficulty in seeing how civil power is of God also. The one point covers the other. We need no mention of God to show that disobedience, lying, and the seven deadly sins, are bad things for human nature, things to be avoided even if they were not forbidden. All the things that God forbids are against the good of man. Their being evil is distinguishable from their being prohibited, and antecedent to it. Now as drunkenness and unchastity are evil for man, so too is anarchy. The one remedy for anarchy is civil government. Even if there were no God, it would be still imperatively necessary, as we have seen, for mankind to erect political institutions, and to abide by the laws and ordinances of constitutional power. But there would be no _formal obligation_ of submission to these laws and ordinances; and resistance to this power would be no more than _philosophic sin_. (_Ethics_, c. vi., s. ii., n. 6, p. 119.) What makes anarchy truly sinful and wrong is the prohibition of it contained in the Eternal Law, that law whereby God commands every creature, and particularly every man, to act in accordance with his own proper being and nature taken as a whole, and to avoid what is repugnant to the same. (_Ethics_, c. vi., s. ii., n. 9, p. 120.) Therefore, as man is naturally social, and anarchy is the dissolution of society, God forbids anarchy, and enjoins obedience to the civil power, under pain of sin and damnation. "They that resist, purchase to themselves damnation" (Rom. xiii. 2): where the theological student, having the Greek text before him, will observe that the same phrase is used as in 1 Cor. xi. 29 of the unworthy communicant, as though it were the like sin to rend our Lord's mystical Body by civil discord as to profane His natural Body by sacrilege. But to enjoin obedience and to bestow authority are the obverse and reverse of one and the same act. God therefore gives the civil ruler power and authority to command. This is the meaning of St. Paul's teaching that there is no power but from God, and that the powers that be are ordained of God. (Rom. xiii. 1.) 14. The argument is summed up in these seven consequent propositions: (a) Civil society is necessary to human nature. (b) Civil power is necessary to civil society. (c) Civil power is naught without civil obedience. (d) Civil obedience is necessary to human nature. (e) God commands whatever is necessary to human nature. (f) God commands obedience to the civil power. (g) God commissions the civil power to rule.