" To this it ought to be
applauded, Nec vox hominem sonat: it is a voice beyond the light of
nature. So we see the heathen poets, when they fall upon a
libertine passion, do still expostulate with laws and moralities, as
if they were opposite and malignant to nature: Et quod natura
remittit, invida jura negant. So said Dendamis the Indian unto
Alexander's messengers, that he had heard somewhat of Pythagoras,
and some other of the wise men of Graecia, and that he held them for
excellent men: but that they had a fault, which was that they had
in too great reverence and veneration a thing they called law and
manners. So it must be confessed that a great part of the law moral
is of that perfection whereunto the light of nature cannot aspire:
how then is it that man is said to have, by the light and law of
nature, some notions and conceits of virtue and vice, justice and
wrong, good and evil? Thus, because the light of nature is used in
two several senses: the one, that which springeth from reason,
sense, induction, argument, according to the laws of heaven and
earth; the other, that which is imprinted upon the spirit of man by
an inward instinct, according to the law of conscience, which is a
sparkle of the purity of his first estate: in which latter sense
only he is participant of some light and discerning touching the
perfection of the moral law; but how? sufficient to check the vice
but not to inform the duty.
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