(3) The true relation between the will of God and the ethically good must be conceived of as, indeed, involving a profound and indissoluble identity--what He wills being always and necessarily right, though He wills it in perfect freedom--but yet as moving in the logical order of thought, that right is not made right by His willing it, but that He wills it because it is right. ==Civil Authority.== =8.= Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), holding the natural state of man as utterly selfish and a state of war, gave to civil government, as necessary to the social order, supreme authority, and asserted that the basis of all moral obligation was positive law issued by the sovereign. Duty rested on the legal statute, whose direction was final. It knew no higher law. The theory was a repetition of the travesty of ethics in Plato's Republic. It has had no following, and needs no confutation. But a theory that thus ignored individual conscience and essential right, reducing morality to civic obedience, with no other foundation than the positive enactment of a monarch, at once and strongly re-acted in strengthening the conviction of the necessity and truth of the intuitional view of the moral faculty, and of the importance of finding a better basis for the ethical principle, both in the constitution of mankind and in the author of nature. ==The Sympathetic Theory.== =9.= The Sympathetic Theory is naturally associated with that conception of conscience which makes it consist fundamentally, not in intellect, but in instinct or feeling. Taking the suggestion from Hume, the theory was elaborated by Adam Smith (1723-1790). It explained moral obligation as produced by the special action of our nature in which we spontaneously sympathize with certain intentions or conduct of our fellow-men--this sympathy taking the form of approval. The bond to duty was viewed as thus formed by these instinctive sentiments pointing out what is morally good and obligating to corresponding behavior. Of course the individual's sympathetic appreciation had to be broadened and trained by the standard of general sentiment. And the explanation was helped out by noting the adaptation of this rule of conduct to promote personal and social happiness. But a theory resting duty on a basis so thoroughly subjective, and so uncertain and changeful as are men's unguided feelings, likely often to be in sympathy with evil, could not commend itself to wide acceptance. It presented neither the ground of right nor a safe rule. ==Utilitarianism.==