We need no mention of God to show that disobedience, lying, and the
seven deadly sins, are bad things for human nature, things to be
avoided even if they were not forbidden. All the things that God
forbids are against the good of man. Their being evil is
distinguishable from their being prohibited, and antecedent to it. Now
as drunkenness and unchastity are evil for man, so too is anarchy. The
one remedy for anarchy is civil government. Even if there were no God,
it would be still imperatively necessary, as we have seen, for mankind
to erect political institutions, and to abide by the laws and
ordinances of constitutional power. But there would be no _formal
obligation_ of submission to these laws and ordinances; and resistance
to this power would be no more than _philosophic sin_. (_Ethics_, c.
vi., s. ii., n. 6, p. 119.) What makes anarchy truly sinful and wrong
is the prohibition of it contained in the Eternal Law, that law
whereby God commands every creature, and particularly every man, to
act in accordance with his own proper being and nature taken as a
whole, and to avoid what is repugnant to the same.
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