May not, asked Plato, this type be the pattern--the 'idea'-- of man formed by God and laid up 'in a heavenly place'?
If so, men would have attained to a valid science of politics when by careful reasoning and deep contemplation they had come to know that pattern.

Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of sense would be seen in their due relation to the eternal and immutable purposes of God.
Or the relation of man to God's purpose was thought of not as that between the pattern and the copy, but as that between the mind of a legislator as expressed in enacted law, and the individual instance to which the law is applied.

We can, thought Locke, by reflecting on the moral facts of the world, learn God's law.

That law confers on us certain rights which we can plead in the Court of God, and from which a valid political science can be deduced.

We know our rights with the same certainty that we know his law.
'Men,' wrote Locke, 'being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business; they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's, pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as if we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.'[26] [26] Locke, _Second Treatise of Government_, 1690, ed.