it is called nature, sometimes reason (natural law and rational law are
synonymous, as also natural religion and the religion of the reason), by
which is understood that which is permanent and everywhere the same in
contrast to the temporary and the changeable, that which is innate in
contrast to that which has been developed, in contrast, further, to that
which has been revealed. Whatever passes as law in all places and at all
times is natural law, says Grotius; that which all men believe forms the
content of natural religion, says Lord Herbert. Before long it comes to
be said: that _alone_ is genuine, true, healthy, and valuable which has
eternal and universal validity; all else is not only superfluous and
valueless but of evil, for it must be unnatural and corrupt. This step is
taken by Deism, with the principle that whatever is not natural or rational
in the sense indicated is unnatural and irrational. Parallel phenomena are
not wanting, further, in the philosophy of law (Gierke, _Althusius_). But
these errors must not be too harshly judged. The confidence with which they
were made sprang from the real and the historical force of their underlying
idea.

As already stated, the "natural" forms the antithesis to the supernatural,
on the one hand, and to the historical, on the other. This combination of
the revealed and the historical will not appear strange, if we remember
that the mediaeval view of the world under criticism was, as Christian,
historico-religious, and, moreover, that for the philosophy of religion the
two in fact coincide, inasmuch as revelation is conceived as an historical
event, and the historical religions assume the character of revealed. The
term arbitrary, applied to both in common, was questionable, however: as
revelation is a divine decree, so historical institutions are the products
of human enactment, the state, the result of a contract, dogmas, inventions
of the priesthood, _the results of development, artificial constructions_!
It took long ages for man to free himself from the idea of the artificial