We must obey civil authority, but we are not slaves or chattels of that authority. The state's authority over us is not dominative; it is only a power for our good and utility. The civil authority has no more right to invade the rights of its meanest citizen than it has to lie or to blaspheme. God gives civil authority to the established community, and the community entrusts this to its ruler; authority is a divine institution, rulers are directly a human institution and only indirectly divine. When the ruler has once been set up, has had authority entrusted to him, obedience must be given to him while he acts in keeping with his contract. Kant and his followers erroneously separate the juridic from the moral order; they deny that beyond the state there are any rights preeminent to the state's rights, yet they say there is an innate liberty which belongs to every human being equally and inalienably. The moral order comprehends all factors that are necessary to make the free activity of man in every respect well disposed, and among these factors is the juridic order itself. Man is naturally social, and whatever means are necessary to preserve human society are also naturally befitting man. Such means are to preserve for each man what are his, and to abstain from injuring other men. Now, so to act, that is, to abstain from murder, theft, and the like, to fulfil contracts, are strictly juridic duties, and at the same time moral duties. Therefore the moral order comprehends the juridic order. The end of the state, then, is not the public good considered as an end in itself. The individual citizen is not his own end in life, and so no mere multitude of men ever can become their own end. If the end of the state is the public good, then private good is subordinate to this, and the public good becomes man's final end, which is subversive of human dignity and is despotism. A clear definition of the power of the state to interfere with the rights to life and limb of the individual citizen is very important, because, as has been said, of late there is an alarming tendency on the part of the civil authority to override the rights of private citizens, even in the most democratic forms of government. Encroachment on the liberty of the individual is characteristic of unchristian political societies, and all states are now receding from Christianity. A striking example of this tyranny is the laws recently passed in ten American states for the mutilation of degenerates. This definition is more readily made by considering concrete examples of public conduct.