Are _the civil laws the rules of good and bad, just and unjust, honest and dishonest_? And what, I pray you, are the rules of the civil law itself? Even the law of God and Nature. If the civil laws swerve from these more authentic laws, they are Lesbian rules. _What the lawgiver commands is to be accounted good, what he forbids, bad._ This was just the garb of the Athenian sophisters, as they are described by Plato. Whatsoever pleased the great beast, the multitude, they call holy, and just, and good. And whatsoever the great beast disliked, they called evil, unjust, profane. But he is not yet arrived at the height of his flattery. _Lawful kings make those things, which they command, just by commanding them._ At other times, when he is in his right wits, he talketh of sufferings, and _expecting their reward in heaven. And going to Christ by martyrdom. And if he had the fortitude to suffer death he should do better._ But I fear all this was but said in jest. How should they expect their reward in heaven, if his doctrine be true, _that there is no reward in heaven_? Or how should they be martyrs, if his doctrine be true, that _none can be martyrs, but those who conversed with Christ upon earth_? He addeth, _before empires were, just and unjust were not_. Nothing could be written more false in his sense, more dishonourable to God, more inglorious to the human nature; than that God should create man, and leave him presently without any rules, to his own ordering of himself, as the ostrich leaveth her eggs in the sand. But in truth there have been empires in the world ever since Adam. And Adam had a law written in his heart by the finger of God, before there was any civil law. Thus they do endeavour to make goodness, and justice, and honesty, and conscience, and God himself, to be empty names, without any reality, which signify nothing, further than they conduce to a man’s interest. Otherwise he would not, he could not, say, that _every action as it is invested with its circumstances, is indifferent in its own nature_.