to the civil laws, for it is he that decrees, interprets, alters, and abrogates them.  He is lord over the property, the life, and the death of the citizens, and can do no one wrong.  For he alone has retained his original natural right to all, which the rest have entirely and forever renounced.  He must have regard, indeed, to the welfare of the people, but he is accountable to God alone.  The obligation of the subject to obey is extinguished in one case only,—­when the civil power is incapable of providing him further with external and internal protection.  For the rest, Hobbes declares the existing public order the lawful one, the evils of arbitrary rule much more tolerable than the universal hostility of the state of nature, and aversion to tyrants a disease inherited from the republicans of antiquity.

The sovereign, by the laws and by instruction, determines what is good and evil; he determines also what is to be believed.  Religion unsanctioned by the state is superstition.  The temporal ruler is also the spiritual ruler, the king, the chief pastor, and the clergy his servants.  One and the same community is termed state in so far as it consists of men, and church in so far as it consists of Christian men (the ecclesiastical commonwealth).  The dogmas which the law prescribes are to be received without investigation, to be swallowed like pills, without mastication.

The principle that every passion and every action is in its nature indifferent, that right and wrong exist only in the state, that the will of a despot is to determine what is moral and what immoral, has given just offense.  Moreover, this was not, in fact, Hobbes’s deepest conviction.  Even without ascribing great importance to isolated statements,[1] it must be admitted that his doctrine was interpreted more narrowly than it was intended.  He does not say that no moral distinctions whatever exist before the foundation of the state, but only that the state first supplies a fixed criterion of the good.  Moral ideas have a certain currency before this, but they lack power to enforce themselves.  Further, when he ascribes the origin of the state to self-interest, this does not mean that reason, conscience, generosity, and love for our fellows are entirely wanting in the state of nature, but only that they are not general enough, and, as against the passions, not strong enough to furnish a foundation for the edifice of the state.  Not only exaggeration in statement but also uncouthness of thought may be forgiven the representative of a movement which is at once new and strengthened by the consciousness of agreement with a naturalistic theory of knowledge and physics; and the vigor of execution compels admiration, even though many obscurities remain to be deplored (e. g., the relation of the two moral standards, the standard of the reason or natural law and the standard of positive law).  And recognition must be accorded to the significant kernel of doctrine formed, on the one hand, by the