The basis of right is the natural love of our fellow-beings which nature has planted within us. Nature also commands us to honor God. It is not fear which renders worship necessary; it is the bond which exists between God and man. If popular or royal decrees could determine right, a whim of the multitude might render lawful theft, adultery, or forgery. If it be true that a proclamation dictated by fools can change the order of nature, why may not evil become, one day, good? But the sages teach that the human mind did not invent law; it has its birth-place in the bosom of God, and is co-eternal with him; it is nothing else than the unerring reason of Jupiter himself; it is reflected in the mind of the wise man; it can never be repealed. This “right reason which comes to us from the gods” (_recta et a numine deorum tracta ratio_) is what is usually termed the _natural_ law; and the beautiful language of Cicero recalls this magnificent verse of the IVth Psalm: “Quis ostendit nobis bona? Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine.” V.--INFLUENCE OF PANTHEISM ON MODERN LAW. Pagan teaching, how elevated soever it may be, is always incomplete; and this is evident even from the words of Cicero. Since law comes from God, it is very clear that it will be known more or less correctly according as our idea of God is more or less correct. This it is that gives so great a superiority, first, to the law of Moses, before the coming of Jesus Christ, and to all Christian legislation since. The Jews had not merely a vague knowledge of the precepts of the divine law. This law, in its principal provisions, had been directly revealed to them. Christians have something better still, since the Eternal Word was made man, and the Word is precisely “the true light which enlighteneth every man coming into this world.”[56] The philosophers of antiquity saw this light from afar off; we have _beheld_ that of which they merely affirmed the existence; the Jews contemplated it as through a veil, and awaited its coming. IT was made flesh; it brought us life; “it shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.”[57] It is not the fault of the Word or of his manifestation, says S. Thomas on this subject, if there are minds who see not this light. There is here, not darkness, but closed eyes.[58] It is God himself, therefore, whom man refuses to acknowledge when he rejects the fundamental law, which alone deserves the name of law. Human pride and insolence go beyond forgetfulness or simple negation when they have the audacity to put a human law in the place of and above the divine law; which last crime is nothing less than the deification of man. This philosophic consequence of the secularization of the law was inevitable, and is openly displayed in modern doctrines. Atheists, properly so called, are rare; but the present generation is infected with Pantheism. Now, Pantheism proclaims, without disguise and without shame, the divinity of man.