After expatiating in a rhetorical strain on the eternal, universal, and absolutely unchangeable character of the law of Nature or Right Reason, he specifies the sense wherein the eternal moral obligations are independent of the will of God himself; it comes to this, that, although God makes all things and the relations between them, nothing is holy and good because he commands it, but he commands it because it is holy and good.  Finally, he expounds the relation of Reward and Punishment to the law of Nature; the obligation of it is before and distinct from these; but, while full of admiration for the Stoical idea of the self-sufficiency of virtue, he is constrained to add that ’men never will generally, and indeed ’tis not very reasonably to be expected they should, part with all the comforts of life, and even life itself, without any expectation of a future recompense.’  The ’manifold absurdities’ of Hobbes being first exposed, he accordingly returns, in pursuance of the theological argument of his Lectures, to show that the eternal moral obligations, founded on the natural differences of things, are at the same time the express will and command of God to all rational creatures, and must necessarily and certainly be attended with Rewards and Punishments in a future state.

The summary of Clarke’s views might stand thus:—­

I.—­The STANDARD is a certain Fitness of action between persons, implicated in their nature as much as any fixed proportions between numbers or other relation among things.  Except in such an expression as this, moral good admits of no kind of external reference.

II.—­There is very little Psychology involved.  The Faculty is the Reason; its action a case of mere intellectual apprehension.  The element of Feeling is nearly excluded.  Disinterested sentiment is so minor a point as to call forth only the passing allusion to ’a certain natural affection.’

III.—­Happiness is not considered except in a vague reference to good public and private as involved with Fit and Unfit action.

IV.—­His account of Duties is remarkable only for the consistency of his attempt to find parallels for each amongst intellectual relations.  The climax intended in the assimilation of Injustice to Contradictions is a very anti-climax; if people were only ‘as much’ ashamed of doing injustice as of believing contradictions, the moral order of the world would be poorly provided for.

V.—­The relation of Ethics to Politics is hardly touched.  Society is born of the desire to multiply affinities through mutual interchange of good offices.

VI.—­His Ethical disquisition is only part of a Theological argument; and this helps to explain his assertion of the Independence as well as of the Insufficiency of Morality.  The final outcome of the discussion is that Morality needs the support of Revelation.  But, to get from this an argument for the truth of Revelation, it is necessary that morality should have an independent foundation in the nature of things, apart from any direct divine appointment.