§. 57. The law that was to govern Adam was the same that was to govern all his
posterity, the law of reason. But his offspring having another way of entrance
into the world, different from him, by a natural birth, that produced them
ignorant, and without the use of reason, they were not presently under that
law. For nobody can be under a law that is not promulgated to him; and this law
being promulgated or made known by reason only, he that is not come to the use
of his reason cannot be said to be under this law; and Adam's children being
not presently as soon as born under this law of reason, were not presently
free. For law, in its true notion, is not so much the limitation as the
direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest, and
prescribes no farther than is for the general good of those under that law.
Could they be happier without it, the law, as a useless thing, would of itself
vanish; and that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only
from bogs and precipices. So that however it may be mistaken, the end of law is
not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the
states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no
freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others,
which cannot be where there is no law; and is not, as we are told, "a
liberty for every man to do what he lists." For who could be free, when
every other man's humour might domineer over him? But a liberty to dispose and
order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole
property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not
to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.