The state with us rests on equal rights of all men; but on what do the equal rights themselves rest? What supports or upholds them? The state covers or represents the whole temporal order, and they, therefore, have not, and cannot have, their basis or support in that order. Besides the temporal there is no order but the spiritual, covered or represented by the church. The equal rights, then, which are with us the basis of the state, depend themselves on the church or spiritual order for their support. Take away that order or remove the church, or even suppress the freedom and independence of the church, and you leave them without any support at all. The absolutism of the state follows, then, as a necessary consequence, and might usurps the place of right. Hence political principles must find their support in theology, and the separation of church and state in the sense of separating political from theological principles is as hostile to the state as to the church, and to liberty as to religion. It is not easy to controvert this conclusion, if we consider whence our rights are derived, and on what they depend for their reality and support. These rights, which we do not derive from the state or civil society, and hold independently of it, among which the Declaration of Independence enumerates "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which it asserts to be "inalienable," whence do we hold them but from God, our Creator? This is what is meant when they are called the natural rights of man. They are called natural rights, because rights held under the natural law, but the natural law in the sense of the jurists and theologians, not in the sense of the physicists or natural philosophers--a moral law addressed to reason and free-will, and binding upon all men, whatever their state or position; not a physical law, like that by which clouds are formed, seeds germinate, or heavy bodies tend to the centre of the earth; for it is a law that does not execute itself and is not executed at all without the action of the reason and will of society. It is necessarily a law prescribed by the Author of nature, and is called the natural law, the law of natural justice, or the moral law, in distinction from the revealed or supernatural law, because promulgated by the supreme Lawgiver through natural reason, or the reason common to all men, which is itself in intimate relation with the Divine Reason. {10}