This sanction, we have seen, is a special form of the notion of a Providence. Those who believe in a special Providence distributing good and evil admit, in the last resort, that this distribution takes place in conformity with the conduct of the receivers and the sentiments of approval or disapproval that that conduct inspires in the divinity. The idea of a Providence, in the natural course of its development, becomes therefore one with the notion of distributive justice, and this latter, on the other hand, becomes one with the idea of divine sanction. The idea of divine sanction has been conceived up to this point as one of the essential elements of morality, and it seems, at first glance, that religion and morality here coincide, that their respective needs here unite, or rather that morality reaches completeness only by the aid of religion. The notion of distributive justice naturally involves the notion of a celestial distributor, but we have seen in a preceding work that the notion of a sanction properly so called, and the notion of a divine penal code, have in reality no essential connection with morality; that on the contrary they possess a character of immorality and irrationality; and that thus the religion of the vulgar in no respect coincides with the highest morality, but that, on the contrary, the very fundamental idea of the religion of the vulgar is opposed to morality.[62] The founders of religion believe that the most sacred law is the law of the strongest; but the idea of force logically resolves itself into the relation between power on the one hand and resistance on the other, and physical force is always, in the sphere of morals, a confession of weakness. The _summum bonum_ therefore can contain no suggestion of force of this especial kind. If human law, if civil law be condemned to rely upon a backing of physical force, it is therein precisely that it lies under the reproach of being merely civil and human. The case stands otherwise with the moral law, which is immutable, eternal, and in some sort inviolable; and in the presence of an inviolable law one can in no sense assume an attitude even of suppressed violence. Force is powerless against the moral law, and the moral law has therefore no need on its own side of a show of force. The sole sanction of which the moral law stands in need, the author has said elsewhere, as against the man who supposes himself to have abrogated it, is and ought to be the mere fact of its continued existence face to face with him, rising up before him ever anew, as the giant Hercules believed himself to have vanquished rose ever stronger to his embrace. To possess the attribute of eternity in the face of violence is the only revenge that goodness personified or not, under the figure of a god, can permit itself as against those who violate it.[63] In human societies one of the distinguishing traits of high civilization is slowness to take offence; with the progress of