Can Neither Make Nor Destroy

Princes may make laws and repeal them, but they can neither make nor destroy virtue, and how indeed should they be able to do what is impossible to the Deity himself?  Virtue being as immutable in its nature as the divine will which is the ground of it.

-- Ethan Allen (1738 -  1789), farmer, businessman, philosopher, and patriot hero during the era of the Vermont Republic, Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784) Ch. IV, Section II - Containing a Disquisition of the Law of Nature, as it respects the Moral System, interspersed with Observations on Subsequent Religions