II. To the Principal Arguments of Both Parts

40. To the principal arguments.

The first [n.2] is in my favor, because it proves that a precept of the second table does not belong to the law of nature strictly speaking.

41. To the second [n.5] I say that although ‘God exists’ could be deduced by natural reason from principles per se known, yet this fact was not known to that rude people, unexercised in intellectual matters, save from the law given to them. Hence the Apostle says in Hebrews 11.6, “He who comes to God must believe”, meaning, that is, if he have and is unable to have any other knowledge of God. And so, if some concupiscence could be proved to be against the law of nature, yet that this concupiscence was against the law of nature was not known to corrupt men. Therefore it was necessary to explain it through the law given to them. Or in another way, concupiscences are prohibited through the commandments of the second table, and about these it is admitted that they were not known per se [n.36].

42. To the next [n.6] I say that these commandments were kept and should be kept in every state of man. In the state of blessedness, to be sure, there will be supreme observance of the affirmative and negative commandments, save perhaps only of the commandment ‘honor your parents’ - not but that there will then be the will to honor them, but that there will be no necessity to devote attention to the act, at least as far as the honor extends to the support of necessities, for no one there will need assistance. In the state of innocence too everyone was bound to keep those commandments, which were interiorly prescribed in each one’s heart. Or perhaps they descended through some exterior teaching given by God from fathers to sons, though they were not then written in a book; nor was this necessary, because people were able to retain them easily in their memory, and the people of that time had a longer life and a better disposition in natural powers than the people of a later time, when the infirmity of the people required the law to given and written down.

43. As to what was touched on in the first argument, however, about the children of Israel despoiling the Egyptians [n.4], one can say that God did not there make dispensation against the law or the commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’, because they did not take what was simply another’s. First because God was the superior lord and could transfer lordship to them, even against the will of lesser lords (and in this way Christ did not sin in allowing the demons to enter the pigs, which at once threw themselves into the sea [Mark 5.12-13]; for he did not unjustly deprive the lord of his own pigs). Second because the children of Israel, in serving the Egyptians, deserved to receive so great spoils as their wages (though the Egyptians, being unjust, refused to pay them, yet they could be compelled to do so by a higher judge), and so, because they took what was theirs by license of a higher judge, they took it licitly and justly.

44. As to the argument for the opposite from Gratian [n.7], it must be understood of the law of nature speaking broadly, and this as concerns the commandments of the second table.