In a positive command (as of the civil ruler), what _obliges_ is only the intellectual nature of him that is commanded, in that he recognizes the lawful authority of him that commands, and so far determines and modifies his general duty of obedience as to do an action immaterial in itself for the sake of the formality of yielding obedience to lawfully constituted authority.

So, in like manner, a specific promise, in itself immaterial and not enjoined by natural justice, is to be kept for the sake of the formality of keeping faith, which _is_ enjoined.
Cudworth's work, in which these are nearly all the ethical allusions, gives no scope for a summary under the various topics.
I .-- Specially excluding any such External _Standard_ of moral Good as the arbitrary Will, either of God or the Sovereign, he views it as a simple ultimate natural quality of actions or dispositions, as included among the verities of things, by the side of which the phenomena of Sense are unreal.
II .-- The general Intellectual Faculty cognizes the moral verities, which it contains within itself and brings rather than finds.
III .-- He does not touch upon Happiness; probably he would lean to asceticism.

He sets up no moral code.
IV .-- Obligation to the Positive Civil Laws in matters indifferent follows from the intellectual recognition of the established relation between ruler and subject.
V .-- Morality is not dependent upon the Deity in any other sense than the whole frame of things is.
SAMUEL CLARKE.

[1675-1729.] Clarke put together his two series of Boyle Lectures (preached 1704 and 1705) as 'A Discourse, concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation,' in answer to Hobbes, Spinoza, &c.

The burden of the ethical discussion falls under the head of the Obligations of Natural Religion, in the second series.
He enounces this all-comprehensive proposition: 'The same necessary and eternal different Relations that different Things bear one to another, and the same consequent Fitness or Unfitness of the application of different things or different relations one to another, with regard to which the will of God always and necessarily does determine itself to choose to act only what is agreeable to Justice, Equity, Goodness, and Truth, in order to the welfare of the whole universe--ought likewise constantly to determine the Wills of all subordinate rational beings, to govern all their actions by the same rules, for the good of the public, in their respective stations.