From him the world is peopled with his descendants, who are all
born infants, weak and helpless, without knowledge or
understanding: but to supply the defects of this imperfect state,
till the improvement of growth and age hath removed them, Adam
and Eve, and after them all parents were, by the law of
nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate
the children they had begotten; not as their own workmanship,
but the workmanship of their own maker, the Almighty, to whom
they were to be accountable for them.
Sec. 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 no body can be under a law, which 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 an useless thing,
would of itself vanish; and that ill deserves the name of
confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices.
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