{"schema_version":1,"access":"public","rights":"Public-domain or compatibly licensed source editions; provenance is retained per record.","work":{"slug":"leviathan","title":"Leviathan","author":"Thomas Hobbes","tradition":"european","language":"en-17c","genre":"political philosophy","period":"1651","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207","original":{"text":"### Introduction\n\nNature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.\n\nTo describe the Nature of this Artificiall man, I will consider\n\nFirst the Matter thereof, and the Artificer; both which is Man.\n\nSecondly, How, and by what Covenants it is made; what are the Rights and just Power or Authority of a Soveraigne; and what it is that Preserveth and Dissolveth it.\n\nThirdly, what is a Christian Common-Wealth.\n\nLastly, what is the Kingdome of Darkness.\n\nConcerning the first, there is a saying much usurped of late, That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men. Consequently whereunto, those persons, that for the most part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to shew what they think they have read in men, by uncharitable censures of one another behind their backs. But there is another saying not of late understood, by which they might learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is, Nosce Teipsum, Read Thy Self: which was not meant, as it is now used, to countenance, either the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors; or to encourage men of low degree, to a sawcie behaviour towards their betters; But to teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himselfe, and considereth what he doth, when he does Think, Opine, Reason, Hope, Feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions. I say the similitude of Passions, which are the same in all men, Desire, Feare, Hope, &c; not the similitude or The Objects of the Passions, which are the things Desired, Feared, Hoped, &c: for these the constitution individuall, and particular education do so vary, and they are so easie to be kept from our knowledge, that the characters of mans heart, blotted and confounded as they are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts. And though by mens actions wee do discover their designee sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances, by which the case may come to be altered, is to decypher without a key, and be for the most part deceived, by too much trust, or by too much diffidence; as he that reads, is himselfe a good or evill man.\n\nBut let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him onely with his acquaintance, which are but few. He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also find not the same in himselfe. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.\n\nPART I. OF MAN\n\n### Part I, Chapter I\n\nOF SENSE\n\nConcerning the Thoughts of man, I will consider them first Singly, and afterwards in Trayne, or dependance upon one another. Singly, they are every one a Representation or Apparence, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us; which is commonly called an Object. Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of mans body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences.\n\nThe Originall of them all, is that which we call Sense; (For there is no conception in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.\n\nTo know the naturall cause of Sense, is not very necessary to the business now in hand; and I have els-where written of the same at large. Nevertheless, to fill each part of my present method, I will briefly deliver the same in this place.\n\nThe cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this Seeming, or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved action, For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the apparence, in another. And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained.\n\nBut the Philosophy-schooles, through all the Universities of Christendome, grounded upon certain Texts of Aristotle, teach another doctrine; and say, For the cause of Vision, that the thing seen, sendeth forth on every side a Visible Species(in English) a Visible Shew, Apparition, or Aspect, or a Being Seen; the receiving whereof into the Eye, is Seeing. And for the cause of Hearing, that the thing heard, sendeth forth an Audible Species, that is, an Audible Aspect, or Audible Being Seen; which entring at the Eare, maketh Hearing. Nay for the cause of Understanding also, they say the thing Understood sendeth forth Intelligible Species, that is, an Intelligible Being Seen; which comming into the Understanding, makes us Understand. I say not this, as disapproving the use of Universities: but because I am to speak hereafter of their office in a Common-wealth, I must let you see on all occasions by the way, what things would be amended in them; amongst which the frequency of insignificant Speech is one.\n\nCHAPTER II. OF IMAGINATION\n\n### Part I, Chapter II\n\nOF IMAGINATION\n\nThat when a thing lies still, unlesse somewhat els stirre it, it will lye still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat els stay it, though the reason be the same, (namely, that nothing can change it selfe,) is not so easily assented to. For men measure, not onely other men, but all other things, by themselves: and because they find themselves subject after motion to pain, and lassitude, think every thing els growes weary of motion, and seeks repose of its own accord; little considering, whether it be not some other motion, wherein that desire of rest they find in themselves, consisteth. From hence it is, that the Schooles say, Heavy bodies fall downwards, out of an appetite to rest, and to conserve their nature in that place which is most proper for them; ascribing appetite, and Knowledge of what is good for their conservation, (which is more than man has) to things inanimate absurdly.\n\nWhen a Body is once in motion, it moveth (unless something els hinder it) eternally; and whatsoever hindreth it, cannot in an instant, but in time, and by degrees quite extinguish it: And as wee see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rowling for a long time after; so also it happeneth in that motion, which is made in the internall parts of a man, then, when he Sees, Dreams, &c. For after the object is removed, or the eye shut, wee still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it, that Latines call Imagination, from the image made in seeing; and apply the same, though improperly, to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it Fancy; which signifies Apparence, and is as proper to one sense, as to another. Imagination therefore is nothing but Decaying Sense; and is found in men, and many other living Creatures, as well sleeping, as waking.\n\nThe decay of Sense in men waking, is not the decay of the motion made in sense; but an obscuring of it, in such manner, as the light of the Sun obscureth the light of the Starres; which starrs do no less exercise their vertue by which they are visible, in the day, than in the night. But because amongst many stroaks, which our eyes, eares, and other organs receive from externall bodies, the predominant onely is sensible; therefore the light of the Sun being predominant, we are not affected with the action of the starrs. And any object being removed from our eyes, though the impression it made in us remain; yet other objects more present succeeding, and working on us, the Imagination of the past is obscured, and made weak; as the voyce of a man is in the noyse of the day. From whence it followeth, that the longer the time is, after the sight, or Sense of any object, the weaker is the Imagination. For the continuall change of mans body, destroyes in time the parts which in sense were moved: So that the distance of time, and of place, hath one and the same effect in us. For as at a distance of place, that which wee look at, appears dimme, and without distinction of the smaller parts; and as Voyces grow weak, and inarticulate: so also after great distance of time, our imagination of the Past is weak; and wee lose( for example) of Cities wee have seen, many particular Streets; and of Actions, many particular Circumstances. This Decaying Sense, when wee would express the thing it self, (I mean Fancy it selfe,) wee call Imagination, as I said before; But when we would express the Decay, and signifie that the Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. So that Imagination and Memory, are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.\n\nMuch memory, or memory of many things, is called Experience. Againe, Imagination being only of those things which have been formerly perceived by Sense, either all at once, or by parts at severall times; The former, (which is the imagining the whole object, as it was presented to the sense) is Simple Imagination; as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is Compounded; as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure. So when a man compoundeth the image of his own person, with the image of the actions of an other man; as when a man imagins himselfe a Hercules, or an Alexander, (which happeneth often to them that are much taken with reading of Romants) it is a compound imagination, and properly but a Fiction of the mind. There be also other Imaginations that rise in men, (though waking) from the great impression made in sense; As from gazing upon the Sun, the impression leaves an image of the Sun before our eyes a long time after; and from being long and vehemently attent upon Geometricall Figures, a man shall in the dark, (though awake) have the Images of Lines, and Angles before his eyes: which kind of Fancy hath no particular name; as being a thing that doth not commonly fall into mens discourse.\n\nThe imaginations of them that sleep, are those we call Dreams. And these also (as all other Imaginations) have been before, either totally, or by parcells in the Sense. And because in sense, the Brain, and Nerves, which are the necessary Organs of sense, are so benummed in sleep, as not easily to be moved by the action of Externall Objects, there can happen in sleep, no Imagination; and therefore no Dreame, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of mans body; which inward parts, for the connexion they have with the Brayn, and other Organs, when they be distempered, do keep the same in motion; whereby the Imaginations there formerly made, appeare as if a man were waking; saving that the Organs of Sense being now benummed, so as there is no new object, which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression, a Dreame must needs be more cleare, in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts. And hence it cometh to pass, that it is a hard matter, and by many thought impossible to distinguish exactly between Sense and Dreaming. For my part, when I consider, that in Dreames, I do not often, nor constantly think of the same Persons, Places, Objects, and Actions that I do waking; nor remember so long a trayne of coherent thoughts, Dreaming, as at other times; And because waking I often observe the absurdity of Dreames, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking Thoughts; I am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dreame not; though when I dreame, I think my selfe awake.\n\nAnd seeing dreames are caused by the distemper of some of the inward parts of the Body; divers distempers must needs cause different Dreams. And hence it is, that lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object (the motion from the brain to the inner parts, and from the inner parts to the Brain being reciprocall:) and that as Anger causeth heat in some parts of the Body, when we are awake; so when we sleep, the over heating of the same parts causeth Anger, and raiseth up in the brain the Imagination of an Enemy. In the same manner; as naturall kindness, when we are awake causeth desire; and desire makes heat in certain other parts of the body; so also, too much heat in those parts, while wee sleep, raiseth in the brain an imagination of some kindness shewn. In summe, our Dreams are the reverse of our waking Imaginations; The motion when we are awake, beginning at one end; and when we Dream, at another.\n\nThe most difficult discerning of a mans Dream, from his waking thoughts, is then, when by some accident we observe not that we have slept: which is easie to happen to a man full of fearfull thoughts; and whose conscience is much troubled; and that sleepeth, without the circumstances, of going to bed, or putting off his clothes, as one that noddeth in a chayre. For he that taketh pains, and industriously layes himselfe to sleep, in case any uncouth and exorbitant fancy come unto him, cannot easily think it other than a Dream. We read of Marcus Brutes, (one that had his life given him by Julius Caesar, and was also his favorite, and notwithstanding murthered him,) how at Phillipi, the night before he gave battell to Augustus Caesar, he saw a fearfull apparition, which is commonly related by Historians as a Vision: but considering the circumstances, one may easily judge to have been but a short Dream. For sitting in his tent, pensive and troubled with the horrour of his rash act, it was not hard for him, slumbering in the cold, to dream of that which most affrighted him; which feare, as by degrees it made him wake; so also it must needs make the Apparition by degrees to vanish: And having no assurance that he slept, he could have no cause to think it a Dream, or any thing but a Vision. And this is no very rare Accident: for even they that be perfectly awake, if they be timorous, and supperstitious, possessed with fearfull tales, and alone in the dark, are subject to the like fancies, and believe they see spirits and dead mens Ghosts walking in Churchyards; whereas it is either their Fancy onely, or els the knavery of such persons, as make use of such superstitious feare, to pass disguised in the night, to places they would not be known to haunt.\n\nFrom this ignorance of how to distinguish Dreams, and other strong Fancies, from vision and Sense, did arise the greatest part of the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyres, Fawnes, nymphs, and the like; and now adayes the opinion than rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts, and Goblins; and of the power of Witches. For as for Witches, I think not that their witch craft is any reall power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false beliefe they have, that they can do such mischiefe, joyned with their purpose to do it if they can; their trade being neerer to a new Religion, than to a Craft or Science. And for Fayries, and walking Ghosts, the opinion of them has I think been on purpose, either taught, or not confuted, to keep in credit the use of Exorcisme, of Crosses, of holy Water, and other such inventions of Ghostly men. Neverthelesse, there is no doubt, but God can make unnaturall Apparitions. But that he does it so often, as men need to feare such things, more than they feare the stay, or change, of the course of Nature, which he also can stay, and change, is no point of Christian faith. But evill men under pretext that God can do any thing, are so bold as to say any thing when it serves their turn, though they think it untrue; It is the part of a wise man, to believe them no further, than right reason makes that which they say, appear credible. If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience.\n\nAnd this ought to be the work of the Schooles; but they rather nourish such doctrine. For (not knowing what Imagination, or the Senses are), what they receive, they teach: some saying, that Imaginations rise of themselves, and have no cause: Others that they rise most commonly from the Will; and that Good thoughts are blown (inspired) into a man, by God; and evill thoughts by the Divell: or that Good thoughts are powred (infused) into a man, by God; and evill ones by the Divell. Some say the Senses receive the Species of things, and deliver them to the Common-sense; and the Common Sense delivers them over to the Fancy, and the Fancy to the Memory, and the Memory to the Judgement, like handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood.\n\nThe Imagination that is raysed in man (or any other creature indued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signes, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beast. For a dogge by custome will understand the call, or the rating of his Master; and so will many other Beasts. That Understanding which is peculiar to man, is the Understanding not onely his will; but his conceptions and thoughts, by the sequell and contexture of the names of things into Affirmations, Negations, and other formes of Speech: And of this kinde of Understanding I shall speak hereafter.\n\nCHAPTER III. OF THE CONSEQUENCE OR TRAYNE OF IMAGINATIONS\n\n### Part I, Chapter III\n\nOF THE CONSEQUENCE OR TRAYNE OF IMAGINATIONS\n\nBy Consequence, or Trayne of Thoughts, I understand that succession of one Thought to another, which is called (to distinguish it from Discourse in words) Mentall Discourse.\n\nWhen a man thinketh on any thing whatsoever, His next Thought after, is not altogether so casuall as it seems to be. Not every Thought to every Thought succeeds indifferently. But as wee have no Imagination, whereof we have not formerly had Sense, in whole, or in parts; so we have no Transition from one Imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our Senses. The reason whereof is this. All Fancies are Motions within us, reliques of those made in the Sense: And those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after Sense: In so much as the former comming again to take place, and be praedominant, the later followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, is such manner, as water upon a plain Table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another succeedeth, it comes to passe in time, that in the Imagining of any thing, there is no certainty what we shall Imagine next; Onely this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.\n\nThis Trayne of Thoughts, or Mentall Discourse, is of two sorts. The first is Unguided, Without Designee, and inconstant; Wherein there is no Passionate Thought, to govern and direct those that follow, to it self, as the end and scope of some desire, or other passion: In which case the thoughts are said to wander, and seem impertinent one to another, as in a Dream. Such are Commonly the thoughts of men, that are not onely without company, but also without care of any thing; though even then their Thoughts are as busie as at other times, but without harmony; as the sound which a Lute out of tune would yeeld to any man; or in tune, to one that could not play. And yet in this wild ranging of the mind, a man may oft-times perceive the way of it, and the dependance of one thought upon another. For in a Discourse of our present civill warre, what could seem more impertinent, than to ask (as one did) what was the value of a Roman Penny? Yet the Cohaerence to me was manifest enough. For the Thought of the warre, introduced the Thought of the delivering up the King to his Enemies; The Thought of that, brought in the Thought of the delivering up of Christ; and that again the Thought of the 30 pence, which was the price of that treason: and thence easily followed that malicious question; and all this in a moment of time; for Thought is quick.\n\nThe second is more constant; as being Regulated by some desire, and designee. For the impression made by such things as wee desire, or feare, is strong, and permanent, or, (if it cease for a time,) of quick return: so strong it is sometimes, as to hinder and break our sleep. From Desire, ariseth the Thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we ayme at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our own power. And because the End, by the greatnesse of the impression, comes often to mind, in case our thoughts begin to wander, they are quickly again reduced into the way: which observed by one of the seven wise men, made him give men this praecept, which is now worne out, Respice Finem; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it.\n\nThe Trayn of regulated Thoughts is of two kinds; One, when of an effect imagined, wee seek the causes, or means that produce it: and this is common to Man and Beast. The other is, when imagining any thing whatsoever, wee seek all the possible effects, that can by it be produced; that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when wee have it. Of which I have not at any time seen any signe, but in man onely; for this is a curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any living creature that has no other Passion but sensuall, such as are hunger, thirst, lust, and anger. In summe, the Discourse of the Mind, when it is governed by designee, is nothing but Seeking, or the faculty of Invention, which the Latines call Sagacitas, and Solertia; a hunting out of the causes, of some effect, present or past; or of the effects, of some present or past cause, sometimes a man seeks what he hath lost; and from that place, and time, wherein hee misses it, his mind runs back, from place to place, and time to time, to find where, and when he had it; that is to say, to find some certain, and limited time and place, in which to begin a method of seeking. Again, from thence, his thoughts run over the same places and times, to find what action, or other occasion might make him lose it. This we call Remembrance, or Calling to mind: the Latines call it Reminiscentia, as it were a Re-Conning of our former actions.\n\nSometimes a man knows a place determinate, within the compasse whereof his is to seek; and then his thoughts run over all the parts thereof, in the same manner, as one would sweep a room, to find a jewell; or as a Spaniel ranges the field, till he find a sent; or as a man should run over the alphabet, to start a rime.\n\nSometime a man desires to know the event of an action; and then he thinketh of some like action past, and the events thereof one after another; supposing like events will follow like actions. As he that foresees what wil become of a Criminal, re-cons what he has seen follow on the like Crime before; having this order of thoughts, The Crime, the Officer, the Prison, the Judge, and the Gallowes. Which kind of thoughts, is called Foresight, and Prudence, or Providence; and sometimes Wisdome; though such conjecture, through the difficulty of observing all circumstances, be very fallacious. But this is certain; by how much one man has more experience of things past, than another; by so much also he is more Prudent, and his expectations the seldomer faile him. The Present onely has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory onely, but things To Come have no being at all; the Future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions Past, to the actions that are Present; which with most certainty is done by him that has most Experience; but not with certainty enough. And though it be called Prudence, when the Event answereth our Expectation; yet in its own nature, it is but Presumption. For the foresight of things to come, which is Providence, belongs onely to him by whose will they are to come. From him onely, and supernaturally, proceeds Prophecy. The best Prophet naturally is the best guesser; and the best guesser, he that is most versed and studied in the matters he guesses at: for he hath most Signes to guesse by.\n\nA Signe, is the Event Antecedent, of the Consequent; and contrarily, the Consequent of the Antecedent, when the like Consequences have been observed, before: And the oftner they have been observed, the lesse uncertain is the Signe. And therefore he that has most experience in any kind of businesse, has most Signes, whereby to guesse at the Future time, and consequently is the most prudent: And so much more prudent than he that is new in that kind of business, as not to be equalled by any advantage of naturall and extemporary wit: though perhaps many young men think the contrary.\n\nNeverthelesse it is not Prudence that distinguisheth man from beast. There be beasts, that at a year old observe more, and pursue that which is for their good, more prudently, than a child can do at ten.\n\nAs Prudence is a Praesumtion of the Future, contracted from the Experience of time Past; So there is a Praesumtion of things Past taken from other things (not future but) past also. For he that hath seen by what courses and degrees, a flourishing State hath first come into civill warre, and then to ruine; upon the sights of the ruines of any other State, will guesse, the like warre, and the like courses have been there also. But his conjecture, has the same incertainty almost with the conjecture of the Future; both being grounded onely upon Experience.\n\nThere is no other act of mans mind, that I can remember, naturally planted in him, so, as to need no other thing, to the exercise of it, but to be born a man, and live with the use of his five Senses. Those other Faculties, of which I shall speak by and by, and which seem proper to man onely, are acquired, and encreased by study and industry; and of most men learned by instruction, and discipline; and proceed all from the invention of Words, and Speech. For besides Sense, and Thoughts, and the Trayne of thoughts, the mind of man has no other motion; though by the help of Speech, and Method, the same Facultyes may be improved to such a height, as to distinguish men from all other living Creatures.\n\nWhatsoever we imagine, is Finite. Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an Image of infinite magnitude; nor conceive the ends, and bounds of the thing named; having no Conception of the thing, but of our own inability. And therefore the Name of GOD is used, not to make us conceive him; (for he is Incomprehensible; and his greatnesse, and power are unconceivable;) but that we may honour him. Also because whatsoever (as I said before,) we conceive, has been perceived first by sense, either all at once, or by parts; a man can have no thought, representing any thing, not subject to sense. No man therefore can conceive any thing, but he must conceive it in some place; and indued with some determinate magnitude; and which may be divided into parts; nor that any thing is all in this place, and all in another place at the same time; nor that two, or more things can be in one, and the same place at once: for none of these things ever have, or can be incident to Sense; but are absurd speeches, taken upon credit (without any signification at all,) from deceived Philosophers, and deceived, or deceiving Schoolemen.\n\nCHAPTER IV. OF SPEECH\n\n### Part I, Chapter IV, 1\n\nOF SPEECH\n\nThe Invention of Printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of Letters, is no great matter. But who was the first that found the use of Letters, is not known. He that first brought them into Greece, men say was Cadmus, the sonne of Agenor, King of Phaenicia. A profitable Invention for continuing the memory of time past, and the conjunction of mankind, dispersed into so many, and distant regions of the Earth; and with all difficult, as proceeding from a watchfull observation of the divers motions of the Tongue, Palat, Lips, and other organs of Speech; whereby to make as many differences of characters, to remember them. But the most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of Speech, consisting of Names or Apellations, and their Connexion; whereby men register their Thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutuall utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither Common-wealth, nor Society, nor Contract, nor Peace, no more than amongst Lyons, Bears, and Wolves. The first author of Speech was GOD himselfe, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight; For the Scripture goeth no further in this matter. But this was sufficient to direct him to adde more names, as the experience and use of the creatures should give him occasion; and to joyn them in such manner by degrees, as to make himselfe understood; and so by succession of time, so much language might be gotten, as he had found use for; though not so copious, as an Orator or Philosopher has need of. For I do not find any thing in the Scripture, out of which, directly or by consequence can be gathered, that Adam was taught the names of all Figures, Numbers, Measures, Colours, Sounds, Fancies, Relations; much less the names of Words and Speech, as Generall, Speciall, Affirmative, Negative, Interrogative, Optative, Infinitive, all which are usefull; and least of all, of Entity, Intentionality, Quiddity, and other significant words of the School.\n\nBut all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel, when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language. And being hereby forced to disperse themselves into severall parts of the world, it must needs be, that the diversity of Tongues that now is, proceeded by degrees from them, in such manner, as need (the mother of all inventions) taught them; and in tract of time grew every where more copious.\n\nThe generall use of Speech, is to transferre our Mentall Discourse, into Verbal; or the Trayne of our Thoughts, into a Trayne of Words; and that for two commodities; whereof one is, the Registring of the Consequences of our Thoughts; which being apt to slip out of our memory, and put us to a new labour, may again be recalled, by such words as they were marked by. So that the first use of names, is to serve for Markes, or Notes of remembrance. Another is, when many use the same words, to signifie (by their connexion and order,) one to another, what they conceive, or think of each matter; and also what they desire, feare, or have any other passion for, and for this use they are called Signes. Speciall uses of Speech are these; First, to Register, what by cogitation, wee find to be the cause of any thing, present or past; and what we find things present or past may produce, or effect: which in summe, is acquiring of Arts. Secondly, to shew to others that knowledge which we have attained; which is, to Counsell, and Teach one another. Thirdly, to make known to others our wills, and purposes, that we may have the mutuall help of one another. Fourthly, to please and delight our selves, and others, by playing with our words, for pleasure or ornament, innocently.\n\nTo these Uses, there are also foure correspondent Abuses. First, when men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conceptions, that which they never conceived; and so deceive themselves. Secondly, when they use words metaphorically; that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others. Thirdly, when by words they declare that to be their will, which is not. Fourthly, when they use them to grieve one another: for seeing nature hath armed living creatures, some with teeth, some with horns, and some with hands, to grieve an enemy, it is but an abuse of Speech, to grieve him with the tongue, unlesse it be one whom wee are obliged to govern; and then it is not to grieve, but to correct and amend.\n\nThe manner how Speech serveth to the remembrance of the consequence of causes and effects, consisteth in the imposing of Names, and the Connexion of them.\n\nOf Names, some are Proper, and singular to one onely thing; as Peter, John, This Man, This Tree: and some are Common to many things; as Man, Horse, Tree; every of which though but one Name, is nevertheless the name of divers particular things; in respect of all which together, it is called an Universall; there being nothing in the world Universall but Names; for the things named, are every one of them Individual and Singular.\n\nOne Universall name is imposed on many things, for their similitude in some quality, or other accident: And whereas a Proper Name bringeth to mind one thing onely; Universals recall any one of those many.\n\nAnd of Names Universall, some are of more, and some of lesse extent; the larger comprehending the lesse large: and some again of equall extent, comprehending each other reciprocally. As for example, the Name Body is of larger signification than the word Man, and conprehendeth it; and the names Man and Rationall, are of equall extent, comprehending mutually one another. But here wee must take notice, that by a Name is not alwayes understood, as in Grammar, one onely word; but sometimes by circumlocution many words together. For all these words, Hee That In His Actions Observeth The Lawes Of His Country, make but one Name, equivalent to this one word, Just.\n\nBy this imposition of Names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the consequences of Appellations. For example, a man that hath no use of Speech at all, (such, as is born and remains perfectly deafe and dumb,) if he set before his eyes a triangle, and by it two right angles, (such as are the corners of a square figure,) he may by meditation compare and find, that the three angles of that triangle, are equall to those two right angles that stand by it. But if another triangle be shewn him different in shape from the former, he cannot know without a new labour, whether the three angles of that also be equall to the same. But he that hath the use of words, when he observes, that such equality was consequent, not to the length of the sides, nor to any other particular thing in his triangle; but onely to this, that the sides were straight, and the angles three; and that that was all, for which he named it a Triangle; will boldly conclude Universally, that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever; and register his invention in these generall termes, Every Triangle Hath Its Three Angles Equall To Two Right Angles. And thus the consequence found in one particular, comes to be registred and remembred, as a Universall rule; and discharges our mentall reckoning, of time and place; and delivers us from all labour of the mind, saving the first; and makes that which was found true Here, and Now, to be true in All Times and Places.\n\nBut the use of words in registring our thoughts, is in nothing so evident as in Numbering. A naturall foole that could never learn by heart the order of numerall words, as One, Two, and Three, may observe every stroak of the Clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one; but can never know what houre it strikes. And it seems, there was a time when those names of number were not in use; and men were fayn to apply their fingers of one or both hands, to those things they desired to keep account of; and that thence it proceeded, that now our numerall words are but ten, in any Nation, and in some but five, and then they begin again. And he that can tell ten, if he recite them out of order, will lose himselfe, and not know when he has done: Much lesse will he be able to add, and substract, and performe all other operations of Arithmetique. So that without words, there is no possibility of reckoning of Numbers; much lesse of Magnitudes, of Swiftnesse, of Force, and other things, the reckonings whereof are necessary to the being, or well-being of man-kind.\n\nWhen two Names are joyned together into a Consequence, or Affirmation; as thus, A Man Is A Living Creature; or thus, If He Be A Man, He Is A Living Creature, If the later name Living Creature, signifie all that the former name Man signifieth, then the affirmation, or consequence is True; otherwise False. For True and False are attributes of Speech, not of things. And where Speech in not, there is neither Truth nor Falshood. Errour there may be, as when wee expect that which shall not be; or suspect what has not been: but in neither case can a man be charged with Untruth.\n\n### Part I, Chapter IV, 2\n\nSeeing then that Truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise Truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly; or els he will find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs; the more he struggles, the more belimed. And therefore in Geometry, (which is the onely Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind,) men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call Definitions; and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.\n\nBy this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true Knowledge, to examine the Definitions of former Authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down; or to make them himselfe. For the errours of Definitions multiply themselves, according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoyd, without reckoning anew from the beginning; in which lyes the foundation of their errours. From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little summs into a greater, without considering whether those little summes were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the errour visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to cleere themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their bookes; as birds that entring by the chimney, and finding themselves inclosed in a chamber, flitter at the false light of a glasse window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in. So that in the right Definition of Names, lyes the first use of Speech; which is the Acquisition of Science: And in wrong, or no Definitions’ lyes the first abuse; from which proceed all false and senslesse Tenets; which make those men that take their instruction from the authority of books, and not from their own meditation, to be as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men endued with true Science are above it. For between true Science, and erroneous Doctrines, Ignorance is in the middle. Naturall sense and imagination, are not subject to absurdity. Nature it selfe cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousnesse of language; so they become more wise, or more mad than ordinary. Nor is it possible without Letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or (unless his memory be hurt by disease, or ill constitution of organs) excellently foolish. For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man.\n\nSubject To Names, is whatsoever can enter into, or be considered in an account; and be added one to another to make a summe; or substracted one from another, and leave a remainder. The Latines called Accounts of mony Rationes, and accounting, Ratiocinatio: and that which we in bills or books of account call Items, they called Nomina; that is, Names: and thence it seems to proceed, that they extended the word Ratio, to the faculty of Reckoning in all other things. The Greeks have but one word Logos, for both Speech and Reason; not that they thought there was no Speech without Reason; but no Reasoning without Speech: And the act of reasoning they called syllogisme; which signifieth summing up of the consequences of one saying to another. And because the same things may enter into account for divers accidents; their names are (to shew that diversity) diversly wrested, and diversified. This diversity of names may be reduced to foure generall heads.\n\nFirst, a thing may enter into account for Matter, or Body; as Living, Sensible, Rationall, Hot, Cold, Moved, Quiet; with all which names the word Matter, or Body is understood; all such, being names of Matter.\n\nSecondly, it may enter into account, or be considered, for some accident or quality, which we conceive to be in it; as for Being Moved, for Being So Long, for Being Hot, &c; and then, of the name of the thing it selfe, by a little change or wresting, wee make a name for that accident, which we consider; and for Living put into account Life; for Moved, Motion; for Hot, Heat; for Long, Length, and the like. And all such Names, are the names of the accidents and properties, by which one Matter, and Body is distinguished from another. These are called Names Abstract; Because Severed (not from Matter, but) from the account of Matter.\n\nThirdly, we bring into account, the Properties of our own bodies, whereby we make such distinction: as when any thing is Seen by us, we reckon not the thing it selfe; but the Sight, the Colour, the Idea of it in the fancy: and when any thing is Heard, wee reckon it not; but the Hearing, or Sound onely, which is our fancy or conception of it by the Eare: and such are names of fancies.\n\nFourthly, we bring into account, consider, and give names, to Names themselves, and to Speeches: For, Generall, Universall, Speciall, Oequivocall, are names of Names. And Affirmation, Interrogation, Commandement, Narration, Syllogisme, Sermon, Oration, and many other such, are names of Speeches.\n\nAnd this is all the variety of Names Positive; which are put to mark somewhat which is in Nature, or may be feigned by the mind of man, as Bodies that are, or may be conceived to be; or of bodies, the Properties that are, or may be feigned to be; or Words and Speech.\n\nThere be also other Names, called Negative; which are notes to signifie that a word is not the name of the thing in question; as these words Nothing, No Man, Infinite, Indocible, Three Want Foure, and the like; which are nevertheless of use in reckoning, or in correcting of reckoning; and call to mind our past cogitations, though they be not names of any thing; because they make us refuse to admit of Names not rightly used.\n\nAll other names, are but insignificant sounds; and those of two sorts. One, when they are new, and yet their meaning not explained by Definition; whereof there have been aboundance coyned by Schoole-men, and pusled Philosophers.\n\nAnother, when men make a name of two Names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent; as this name, an Incorporeall Body, or (which is all one) an Incorporeall Substance, and a great number more. For whensoever any affirmation is false, the two names of which it is composed, put together and made one, signifie nothing at all. For example if it be a false affirmation to say A Quadrangle Is Round, the word Round Quadrangle signifies nothing; but is a meere sound. So likewise if it be false, to say that vertue can be powred, or blown up and down; the words In-powred Vertue, In-blown Vertue, are as absurd and insignificant, as a Round Quadrangle. And therefore you shall hardly meet with a senselesse and insignificant word, that is not made up of some Latin or Greek names. A Frenchman seldome hears our Saviour called by the name of Parole, but by the name of Verbe often; yet Verbe and Parole differ no more, but that one is Latin, the other French.\n\nWhen a man upon the hearing of any Speech, hath those thoughts which the words of that Speech, and their connexion, were ordained and constituted to signifie; Then he is said to understand it; Understanding being nothing els, but conception caused by Speech. And therefore if Speech be peculiar to man (as for ought I know it is,) then is Understanding peculiar to him also. And therefore of absurd and false affirmations, in case they be universall, there can be no Understanding; though many think they understand, then, when they do but repeat the words softly, or con them in their mind.\n\nWhat kinds of Speeches signifie the Appetites, Aversions, and Passions of mans mind; and of their use and abuse, I shall speak when I have spoken of the Passions.\n\nThe names of such things as affect us, that is, which please, and displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourses of men, of Inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our different passions. And therefore in reasoning, a man bust take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of Vertues, and Vices; For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice; one Prodigality, what another Magnanimity; one Gravity, what another Stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.\n\nCHAPTER V. OF REASON, AND SCIENCE.\n\n### Part I, Chapter V\n\nOF REASON, AND SCIENCE\n\nWhen a man Reasoneth, hee does nothing els but conceive a summe totall, from Addition of parcels; or conceive a Remainder, from Substraction of one summe from another: which (if it be done by Words,) is conceiving of the consequence of the names of all the parts, to the name of the whole; or from the names of the whole and one part, to the name of the other part. And though in some things, (as in numbers,) besides Adding and Substracting, men name other operations, as Multiplying and Dividing; yet they are the same; for Multiplication, is but Addition together of things equall; and Division, but Substracting of one thing, as often as we can. These operations are not incident to Numbers onely, but to all manner of things that can be added together, and taken one out of another. For as Arithmeticians teach to adde and substract in Numbers; so the Geometricians teach the same in Lines, Figures (solid and superficiall,) Angles, Proportions, Times, degrees of Swiftnesse, Force, Power, and the like; The Logicians teach the same in Consequences Of Words; adding together Two Names, to make an Affirmation; and Two Affirmations, to make a syllogisme; and Many syllogismes to make a Demonstration; and from the Summe, or Conclusion of a syllogisme, they substract one Proposition, to finde the other. Writers of Politiques, adde together Pactions, to find mens Duties; and Lawyers, Lawes and Facts, to find what is Right and Wrong in the actions of private men. In summe, in what matter soever there is place for Addition and Substraction, there also is place for Reason; and where these have no place, there Reason has nothing at all to do.\n\nOut of all which we may define, (that is to say determine,) what that is, which is meant by this word Reason, when wee reckon it amongst the Faculties of the mind. For Reason, in this sense, is nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Substracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts; I say Marking them, when we reckon by our selves; and Signifying, when we demonstrate, or approve our reckonings to other men.\n\nAnd as in Arithmetique, unpractised men must, and Professors themselves may often erre, and cast up false; so also in any other subject of Reasoning, the ablest, most attentive, and most practised men, may deceive themselves, and inferre false Conclusions; Not but that Reason it selfe is always Right Reason, as well as Arithmetique is a certain and infallible art: But no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. And therfore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever: And when men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamor and demand right Reason for judge; yet seek no more, but that things should be determined, by no other mens reason but their own, it is as intolerable in the society of men, as it is in play after trump is turned, to use for trump on every occasion, that suite whereof they have most in their hand. For they do nothing els, that will have every of their passions, as it comes to bear sway in them, to be taken for right Reason, and that in their own controversies: bewraying their want of right Reason, by the claym they lay to it.\n\nThe Use and End of Reason, is not the finding of the summe, and truth of one, or a few consequences, remote from the first definitions, and settled significations of names; but to begin at these; and proceed from one consequence to another. For there can be no certainty of the last Conclusion, without a certainty of all those Affirmations and Negations, on which it was grounded, and inferred. As when a master of a family, in taking an account, casteth up the summs of all the bills of expence, into one sum; and not regarding how each bill is summed up, by those that give them in account; nor what it is he payes for; he advantages himselfe no more, than if he allowed the account in grosse, trusting to every of the accountants skill and honesty; so also in Reasoning of all other things, he that takes up conclusions on the trust of Authors, and doth not fetch them from the first Items in every Reckoning, (which are the significations of names settled by definitions), loses his labour; and does not know any thing; but onely beleeveth.\n\nWhen a man reckons without the use of words, which may be done in particular things, (as when upon the sight of any one thing, wee conjecture what was likely to have preceded, or is likely to follow upon it;) if that which he thought likely to follow, followes not; or that which he thought likely to have preceded it, hath not preceded it, this is called ERROR; to which even the most prudent men are subject. But when we Reason in Words of generall signification, and fall upon a generall inference which is false; though it be commonly called Error, it is indeed an ABSURDITY, or senseless Speech. For Error is but a deception, in presuming that somewhat is past, or to come; of which, though it were not past, or not to come; yet there was no impossibility discoverable. But when we make a generall assertion, unlesse it be a true one, the possibility of it is unconceivable. And words whereby we conceive nothing but the sound, are those we call Absurd, insignificant, and Non-sense. And therefore if a man should talk to me of a Round Quadrangle; or Accidents Of Bread In Cheese; or Immaterial Substances; or of A Free Subject; A Free Will; or any Free, but free from being hindred by opposition, I should not say he were in an Errour; but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, Absurd.\n\nI have said before, (in the second chapter,) that a Man did excell all other Animals in this faculty, that when he conceived any thing whatsoever, he was apt to enquire the consequences of it, and what effects he could do with it. And now I adde this other degree of the same excellence, that he can by words reduce the consequences he findes to generall Rules, called Theoremes, or Aphorismes; that is, he can Reason, or reckon, not onely in number; but in all other things, whereof one may be added unto, or substracted from another.\n\nBut this priviledge, is allayed by another; and that is, by the priviledge of Absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man onely. And of men, those are of all most subject to it, that professe Philosophy. For it is most true that Cicero sayth of them somewhere; that there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of Philosophers. And the reason is manifest. For there is not one of them that begins his ratiocination from the Definitions, or Explications of the names they are to use; which is a method that hath been used onely in Geometry; whose Conclusions have thereby been made indisputable.\n\nThe first cause of Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method; in that they begin not their Ratiocination from Definitions; that is, from settled significations of their words: as if they could cast account, without knowing the value of the numerall words, One, Two, and Three.\n\nAnd whereas all bodies enter into account upon divers considerations, (which I have mentioned in the precedent chapter;) these considerations being diversly named, divers absurdities proceed from the confusion, and unfit connexion of their names into assertions. And therefore\n\nThe second cause of Absurd assertions, I ascribe to the giving of names of Bodies, to Accidents; or of Accidents, to Bodies; As they do, that say, Faith Is Infused, or Inspired; when nothing can be Powred, or Breathed into any thing, but body; and that, Extension is Body; that Phantasmes are Spirits, &c.\n\nThe third I ascribe to the giving of the names of the Accidents of Bodies Without Us, to the Accidents of our Own Bodies; as they do that say, the Colour Is In The Body; The Sound Is In The Ayre, &c.\n\nThe fourth, to the giving of the names of Bodies, to Names, or Speeches; as they do that say, that There Be Things Universall; that A Living Creature Is Genus, or A Generall Thing, &c.\n\nThe fifth, to the giving of the names of Accidents, to Names and Speeches; as they do that say, The Nature Of A Thing Is In Its Definition; A Mans Command Is His Will; and the like.\n\nThe sixth, to the use of Metaphors, Tropes, and other Rhetoricall figures, in stead of words proper. For though it be lawfull to say, (for example) in common speech, The Way Goeth, Or Leadeth Hither, Or Thither, The Proverb Sayes This Or That (whereas wayes cannot go, nor Proverbs speak;) yet in reckoning, and seeking of truth, such speeches are not to be admitted.\n\nThe seventh, to names that signifie nothing; but are taken up, and learned by rote from the Schooles, as Hypostatical, Transubstantiate, Consubstantiate, Eternal-now, and the like canting of Schoole-men.\n\nTo him that can avoyd these things, it is not easie to fall into any absurdity, unlesse it be by the length of an account; wherein he may perhaps forget what went before. For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles. For who is so stupid, as both to mistake in Geometry, and also to persist in it, when another detects his error to him?\n\nBy this it appears that Reason is not as Sense, and Memory, borne with us; nor gotten by Experience onely; as Prudence is; but attayned by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to Assertions made by Connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogismes, which are the Connexions of one Assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call SCIENCE. And whereas Sense and Memory are but knowledge of Fact, which is a thing past, and irrevocable; Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependance of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something els when we will, or the like, another time; Because when we see how any thing comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, wee see how to make it produce the like effects.\n\nChildren therefore are not endued with Reason at all, till they have attained the use of Speech: but are called Reasonable Creatures, for the possibility apparent of having the use of Reason in time to come. And the most part of men, though they have the use of Reasoning a little way, as in numbring to some degree; yet it serves them to little use in common life; in which they govern themselves, some better, some worse, according to their differences of experience, quicknesse of memory, and inclinations to severall ends; but specially according to good or evill fortune, and the errors of one another. For as for Science, or certain rules of their actions, they are so farre from it, that they know not what it is. Geometry they have thought Conjuring: but for other Sciences, they who have not been taught the beginnings, and some progresse in them, that they may see how they be acquired and generated, are in this point like children, that having no thought of generation, are made believe by the women, that their brothers and sisters are not born, but found in the garden.\n\nBut yet they that have no Science, are in better, and nobler condition with their naturall Prudence; than men, that by mis-reasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd generall rules. For ignorance of causes, and of rules, does not set men so farre out of their way, as relying on false rules, and taking for causes of what they aspire to, those that are not so, but rather causes of the contrary.\n\nTo conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the Pace; Encrease of Science, the Way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the End. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like Ignes Fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt.\n\nAs, much Experience, is Prudence; so, is much Science, Sapience. For though wee usually have one name of Wisedome for them both; yet the Latines did always distinguish between Prudentia and Sapientia, ascribing the former to Experience, the later to Science. But to make their difference appeare more cleerly, let us suppose one man endued with an excellent naturall use, and dexterity in handling his armes; and another to have added to that dexterity, an acquired Science, of where he can offend, or be offended by his adversarie, in every possible posture, or guard: The ability of the former, would be to the ability of the later, as Prudence to Sapience; both usefull; but the later infallible. But they that trusting onely to the authority of books, follow the blind blindly, are like him that trusting to the false rules of the master of fence, ventures praesumptuously upon an adversary, that either kills, or disgraces him.\n\nThe signes of Science, are some, certain and infallible; some, uncertain. Certain, when he that pretendeth the Science of any thing, can teach the same; that is to say, demonstrate the truth thereof perspicuously to another: Uncertain, when onely some particular events answer to his pretence, and upon many occasions prove so as he sayes they must. Signes of prudence are all uncertain; because to observe by experience, and remember all circumstances that may alter the successe, is impossible. But in any businesse, whereof a man has not infallible Science to proceed by; to forsake his own natural judgement, and be guided by generall sentences read in Authors, and subject to many exceptions, is a signe of folly, and generally scorned by the name of Pedantry. And even of those men themselves, that in Councells of the Common-wealth, love to shew their reading of Politiques and History, very few do it in their domestique affaires, where their particular interest is concerned; having Prudence enough for their private affaires: but in publique they study more the reputation of their owne wit, than the successe of anothers businesse.\n\nCHAPTER VI. OF THE INTERIOUR BEGINNINGS OF VOLUNTARY MOTIONS COMMONLY CALLED THE PASSIONS, AND THE SPEECHES BY WHICH THEY ARE EXPRESSED.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VI, 1\n\nOF THE INTERIOUR BEGINNINGS OF VOLUNTARY MOTIONS COMMONLY CALLED THE PASSIONS, AND THE SPEECHES BY WHICH THEY ARE EXPRESSED\n\nThere be in Animals, two sorts of Motions peculiar to them: One called Vitall; begun in generation, and continued without interruption through their whole life; such as are the Course of the Bloud, the Pulse, the Breathing, the Concoctions, Nutrition, Excretion, &c; to which Motions there needs no help of Imagination: The other in Animal Motion, otherwise called Voluntary Motion; as to Go, to Speak, to Move any of our limbes, in such manner as is first fancied in our minds. That Sense, is Motion in the organs and interiour parts of mans body, caused by the action of the things we See, Heare, &c.; And that Fancy is but the Reliques of the same Motion, remaining after Sense, has been already sayd in the first and second Chapters. And because Going, Speaking, and the like Voluntary motions, depend alwayes upon a precedent thought of Whither, Which Way, and What; it is evident, that the Imagination is the first internall beginning of all Voluntary Motion. And although unstudied men, doe not conceive any motion at all to be there, where the thing moved is invisible; or the space it is moved in, is (for the shortnesse of it) insensible; yet that doth not hinder, but that such Motions are. For let a space be never so little, that which is moved over a greater space, whereof that little one is part, must first be moved over that. These small beginnings of Motion, within the body of Man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called ENDEAVOUR.\n\nThis Endeavour, when it is toward something which causes it, is called APPETITE, or DESIRE; the later, being the generall name; and the other, oftentimes restrayned to signifie the Desire of Food, namely Hunger and Thirst. And when the Endeavour is fromward something, it is generally called AVERSION. These words Appetite, and Aversion we have from the Latines; and they both of them signifie the motions, one of approaching, the other of retiring. So also do the Greek words for the same, which are orme and aphorme. For nature it selfe does often presse upon men those truths, which afterwards, when they look for somewhat beyond Nature, they stumble at. For the Schooles find in meere Appetite to go, or move, no actuall Motion at all: but because some Motion they must acknowledge, they call it Metaphoricall Motion; which is but an absurd speech; for though Words may be called metaphoricall; Bodies, and Motions cannot.\n\nThat which men Desire, they are also sayd to LOVE; and to HATE those things, for which they have Aversion. So that Desire, and Love, are the same thing; save that by Desire, we alwayes signifie the Absence of the object; by Love, most commonly the Presence of the same. So also by Aversion, we signifie the Absence; and by Hate, the Presence of the Object.\n\nOf Appetites, and Aversions, some are born with men; as Appetite of food, Appetite of excretion, and exoneration, (which may also and more properly be called Aversions, from somewhat they feele in their Bodies;) and some other Appetites, not many. The rest, which are Appetites of particular things, proceed from Experience, and triall of their effects upon themselves, or other men. For of things wee know not at all, or believe not to be, we can have no further Desire, than to tast and try. But Aversion wee have for things, not onely which we know have hurt us; but also that we do not know whether they will hurt us, or not.\n\nThose things which we neither Desire, nor Hate, we are said to Contemne: CONTEMPT being nothing els but an immobility, or contumacy of the Heart, in resisting the action of certain things; and proceeding from that the Heart is already moved otherwise, by either more potent objects; or from want of experience of them.\n\nAnd because the constitution of a mans Body, is in continuall mutation; it is impossible that all the same things should alwayes cause in him the same Appetites, and aversions: much lesse can all men consent, in the Desire of almost any one and the same Object.\n\nBut whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, evill; And of his contempt, Vile, and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the Person of the man (where there is no Common-wealth;) or, (in a Common-wealth,) From the Person that representeth it; or from an Arbitrator or Judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the Rule thereof.\n\nThe Latine Tongue has two words, whose significations approach to those of Good and Evill; but are not precisely the same; And those are Pulchrum and Turpe. Whereof the former signifies that, which by some apparent signes promiseth Good; and the later, that, which promiseth evill. But in our Tongue we have not so generall names to expresse them by. But for Pulchrum, we say in some things, Fayre; in other Beautifull, or Handsome, or Gallant, or Honourable, or Comely, or Amiable; and for Turpe, Foule, Deformed, Ugly, Base, Nauseous, and the like, as the subject shall require; All which words, in their proper places signifie nothing els, but the Mine, or Countenance, that promiseth Good and evill. So that of Good there be three kinds; Good in the Promise, that is Pulchrum; Good in Effect, as the end desired, which is called Jucundum, Delightfull; and Good as the Means, which is called Utile, Profitable; and as many of evill: For evill, in Promise, is that they call Turpe; evill in Effect, and End, is Molestum, Unpleasant, Troublesome; and evill in the Means, Inutile, Unprofitable, Hurtfull.\n\nAs, in Sense, that which is really within us, is (As I have sayd before) onely Motion, caused by the action of externall objects, but in apparence; to the Sight, Light and Colour; to the Eare, Sound; to the Nostrill, Odour, &c: so, when the action of the same object is continued from the Eyes, Eares, and other organs to the Heart; the real effect there is nothing but Motion, or Endeavour; which consisteth in Appetite, or Aversion, to, or from the object moving. But the apparence, or sense of that motion, is that wee either call DELIGHT, or TROUBLE OF MIND.\n\nThis Motion, which is called Appetite, and for the apparence of it Delight, and Pleasure, seemeth to be, a corroboration of Vitall motion, and a help thereunto; and therefore such things as caused Delight, were not improperly called Jucunda, (A Juvando,) from helping or fortifying; and the contrary, Molesta, Offensive, from hindering, and troubling the motion vitall.\n\nPleasure therefore, (or Delight,) is the apparence, or sense of Good; and Molestation or Displeasure, the apparence, or sense of evill. And consequently all Appetite, Desire, and Love, is accompanied with some Delight more or lesse; and all Hatred, and Aversion, with more or lesse Displeasure and Offence.\n\nOf Pleasures, or Delights, some arise from the sense of an object Present; And those may be called Pleasures Of Sense, (The word Sensuall, as it is used by those onely that condemn them, having no place till there be Lawes.) Of this kind are all Onerations and Exonerations of the body; as also all that is pleasant, in the Sight, Hearing, Smell, Tast, Or Touch; Others arise from the Expectation, that proceeds from foresight of the End, or Consequence of things; whether those things in the Sense Please or Displease: And these are Pleasures Of The Mind of him that draweth those consequences; and are generally called JOY. In the like manner, Displeasures, are some in the Sense, and called PAYNE; others, in the Expectation of consequences, and are called GRIEFE.\n\nThese simple Passions called Appetite, Desire, Love, Aversion, Hate, Joy, and griefe, have their names for divers considerations diversified. As first, when they one succeed another, they are diversly called from the opinion men have of the likelihood of attaining what they desire. Secondly, from the object loved or hated. Thirdly, from the consideration of many of them together. Fourthly, from the Alteration or succession it selfe.\n\nHope— For Appetite with an opinion of attaining, is called HOPE.\n\nDespaire— The same, without such opinion, DESPAIRE.\n\nFeare— Aversion, with opinion of Hurt from the object, FEARE.\n\nCourage— The same, with hope of avoyding that Hurt by resistance, COURAGE.\n\nAnger— Sudden Courage, ANGER.\n\nConfidence— Constant Hope, CONFIDENCE of our selves.\n\nDiffidence— Constant Despayre, DIFFIDENCE of our selves.\n\nIndignation— Anger for great hurt done to another, when we conceive the same to be done by Injury, INDIGNATION.\n\nBenevolence— Desire of good to another, BENEVOLENCE, GOOD WILL, CHARITY. If to man generally, GOOD NATURE.\n\nCovetousnesse— Desire of Riches, COVETOUSNESSE: a name used alwayes in signification of blame; because men contending for them, are displeased with one anothers attaining them; though the desire in it selfe, be to be blamed, or allowed, according to the means by which those Riches are sought.\n\nAmbition— Desire of Office, or precedence, AMBITION: a name used also in the worse sense, for the reason before mentioned.\n\nPusillanimity— Desire of things that conduce but a little to our ends; And fear of things that are but of little hindrance, PUSILLANIMITY.\n\nMagnanimity— Contempt of little helps, and hindrances, MAGNANIMITY.\n\nValour— Magnanimity, in danger of Death, or Wounds, VALOUR, FORTITUDE.\n\nLiberality— Magnanimity in the use of Riches, LIBERALITY\n\nMiserablenesse— Pusillanimity, in the same WRETCHEDNESSE, MISERABLENESSE; or PARSIMONY; as it is liked or disliked.\n\nKindnesse— Love of Persons for society, KINDNESSE.\n\nNaturall Lust— Love of Persons for Pleasing the sense onely, NATURAL LUST.\n\nLuxury— Love of the same, acquired from Rumination, that is Imagination of Pleasure past, LUXURY.\n\nThe Passion Of Love; Jealousie— Love of one singularly, with desire to be singularly beloved, THE PASSION OF LOVE. The same, with fear that the love is not mutuall, JEALOUSIE.\n\nRevengefulnesse— Desire, by doing hurt to another, to make him condemn some fact of his own, REVENGEFULNESSE.\n\nCuriosity— Desire, to know why, and how, CURIOSITY; such as is in no living creature but Man; so that Man is distinguished, not onely by his Reason; but also by this singular Passion from other Animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by praedominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall Pleasure.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VI, 2\n\nReligion Superstition; True Religion— Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, superstition. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, TRUE RELIGION.\n\nPanique Terrour— Feare, without the apprehension of why, or what, PANIQUE TERROR; called so from the fables that make Pan the author of them; whereas in truth there is always in him that so feareth, first, some apprehension of the cause, though the rest run away by example; every one supposing his fellow to know why. And therefore this Passion happens to none but in a throng, or multitude of people.\n\nAdmiration— Joy, from apprehension of novelty, ADMIRATION; proper to man, because it excites the appetite of knowing the cause.\n\nGlory Vaine-glory— Joy, arising from imagination of a man’s own power and ability, is that exultation of the mind which is called GLORYING: which, if grounded upon the experience of his own former actions, is the same with Confidence: but if grounded on the flattery of others, or onely supposed by himselfe, for delight in the consequences of it, is called VAINE-GLORY: which name is properly given; because a well-grounded Confidence begetteth attempt; whereas the supposing of power does not, and is therefore rightly called Vaine.\n\nDejection— Griefe, from opinion of want of power, is called dejection of mind.\n\nThe Vaine-glory which consisteth in the feigning or supposing of abilities in ourselves, which we know are not, is most incident to young men, and nourished by the Histories or Fictions of Gallant Persons; and is corrected often times by Age, and Employment.\n\nSudden Glory Laughter— Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much Laughter at the defects of others is a signe of Pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper workes is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves onely with the most able.\n\nSudden Dejection Weeping— On the contrary, Sudden Dejection is the passion that causeth WEEPING; and is caused by such accidents, as suddenly take away some vehement hope, or some prop of their power: and they are most subject to it, that rely principally on helps externall, such as are Women, and Children. Therefore, some Weep for the loss of Friends; Others for their unkindnesse; others for the sudden stop made to their thoughts of revenge, by Reconciliation. But in all cases, both Laughter and Weeping, are sudden motions; Custome taking them both away. For no man Laughs at old jests; or Weeps for an old calamity.\n\nShame Blushing— Griefe, for the discovery of some defect of ability is SHAME, or the passion that discovereth itself in BLUSHING; and consisteth in the apprehension of some thing dishonourable; and in young men, is a signe of the love of good reputation; and commendable: in old men it is a signe of the same; but because it comes too late, not commendable.\n\nImpudence— The Contempt of good reputation is called IMPUDENCE.\n\nPitty— Griefe, for the calamity of another is PITTY; and ariseth from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe; and therefore is called also COMPASSION, and in the phrase of this present time a FELLOW-FEELING: and therefore for Calamity arriving from great wickedness, the best men have the least Pitty; and for the same Calamity, those have least Pitty, that think themselves least obnoxious to the same.\n\nCruelty— Contempt, or little sense of the calamity of others, is that which men call CRUELTY; proceeding from Security of their own fortune. For, that any man should take pleasure in other mens’ great harmes, without other end of his own, I do not conceive it possible.\n\nEmulation Envy— Griefe, for the success of a Competitor in wealth, honour, or other good, if it be joyned with Endeavour to enforce our own abilities to equal or exceed him, is called EMULATION: but joyned with Endeavour to supplant or hinder a Competitor, ENVIE.\n\nDeliberation— When in the mind of man, Appetites and Aversions, Hopes and Feares, concerning one and the same thing, arise alternately; and divers good and evill consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively into our thoughts; so that sometimes we have an Appetite to it, sometimes an Aversion from it; sometimes Hope to be able to do it; sometimes Despaire, or Feare to attempt it; the whole sum of Desires, Aversions, Hopes and Feares, continued till the thing be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call DELIBERATION.\n\nTherefore of things past, there is no Deliberation; because manifestly impossible to be changed: nor of things known to be impossible, or thought so; because men know, or think such Deliberation vaine. But of things impossible, which we think possible, we may Deliberate; not knowing it is in vain. And it is called DELIBERATION; because it is a putting an end to the Liberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our own Appetite, or Aversion.\n\nThis alternate succession of Appetites, Aversions, Hopes and Feares is no less in other living Creatures than in Man; and therefore Beasts also Deliberate.\n\nEvery Deliberation is then sayd to End when that whereof they Deliberate, is either done, or thought impossible; because till then wee retain the liberty of doing, or omitting, according to our Appetite, or Aversion.\n\nIn Deliberation, the last Appetite, or Aversion, immediately adhaering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that wee call the WILL; the Act, (not the faculty,) of Willing. And Beasts that have Deliberation must necessarily also have Will. The Definition of the Will, given commonly by the Schooles, that it is a Rationall Appetite, is not good. For if it were, then could there be no Voluntary Act against Reason. For a Voluntary Act is that, which proceedeth from the Will, and no other. But if in stead of a Rationall Appetite, we shall say an Appetite resulting from a precedent Deliberation, then the Definition is the same that I have given here. Will, therefore, Is The Last Appetite In Deliberating. And though we say in common Discourse, a man had a Will once to do a thing, that neverthelesse he forbore to do; yet that is properly but an Inclination, which makes no Action Voluntary; because the action depends not of it, but of the last Inclination, or Appetite. For if the intervenient Appetites make any action Voluntary, then by the same reason all intervenient Aversions should make the same action Involuntary; and so one and the same action should be both Voluntary & Involuntary.\n\nBy this it is manifest, that not onely actions that have their beginning from Covetousness, Ambition, Lust, or other Appetites to the thing propounded; but also those that have their beginning from Aversion, or Feare of those consequences that follow the omission, are Voluntary Actions.\n\nThe formes of Speech by which the Passions are expressed, are partly the same, and partly different from those, by which we express our Thoughts. And first generally all Passions may be expressed Indicatively; as, I Love, I Feare, I Joy, I Deliberate, I Will, I Command: but some of them have particular expressions by themselves, which nevertheless are not affirmations, unless it be when they serve to make other inferences, besides that of the Passion they proceed from. Deliberation is expressed Subjunctively; which is a speech proper to signifie suppositions, with their consequences; as, If This Be Done, Then This Will Follow; and differs not from the language of Reasoning, save that Reasoning is in generall words, but Deliberation for the most part is of Particulars. The language of Desire, and Aversion, is Imperative; as, Do This, Forbear That; which when the party is obliged to do, or forbear, is Command; otherwise Prayer; or els Counsell. The language of Vaine-Glory, of Indignation, Pitty and Revengefulness, Optative: but of the Desire to know, there is a peculiar expression called Interrogative; as, What Is It, When Shall It, How Is It Done, and Why So? Other language of the Passions I find none: for Cursing, Swearing, Reviling, and the like, do not signifie as Speech; but as the actions of a tongue accustomed.\n\nThese forms of Speech, I say, are expressions, or voluntary significations of our Passions: but certain signes they be not; because they may be used arbitrarily, whether they that use them, have such Passions or not. The best signes of Passions present, are either in the countenance, motions of the body, actions, and ends, or aims, which we otherwise know the man to have.\n\nAnd because in Deliberation the Appetites and Aversions are raised by foresight of the good and evill consequences, and sequels of the action whereof we Deliberate; the good or evill effect thereof dependeth on the foresight of a long chain of consequences, of which very seldome any man is able to see to the end. But for so far as a man seeth, if the Good in those consequences be greater than the evill, the whole chain is that which Writers call Apparent or Seeming Good. And contrarily, when the evill exceedeth the good, the whole is Apparent or Seeming Evill: so that he who hath by Experience, or Reason, the greatest and surest prospect of Consequences, Deliberates best himself; and is able, when he will, to give the best counsel unto others.\n\nContinual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense. What kind of Felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know, than enjoy; being joys, that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of School-men, Beatifical Vision, is unintelligible.\n\nThe form of speech whereby men signifie their opinion of the Goodnesse of anything is PRAISE. That whereby they signifie the power and greatness of anything is MAGNIFYING. And that whereby they signifie the opinion they have of a man’s felicity is by the Greeks called Makarismos, for which we have no name in our tongue. And thus much is sufficient for the present purpose to have been said of the passions.\n\nCHAPTER VII. OF THE ENDS OR RESOLUTIONS OF DISCOURSE\n\n### Part I, Chapter VII\n\nOF THE ENDS OR RESOLUTIONS OF DISCOURSE\n\nOf all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End, either by attaining, or by giving over. And in the chain of Discourse, wheresoever it be interrupted, there is an End for that time.\n\nIf the Discourse be meerly Mentall, it consisteth of thoughts that the thing will be, and will not be; or that it has been, and has not been, alternately. So that wheresoever you break off the chayn of a mans Discourse, you leave him in a Praesumption of It Will Be, or, It Will Not Be; or it Has Been, or, Has Not Been. All which is Opinion. And that which is alternate Appetite, in Deliberating concerning Good and Evil, the same is alternate Opinion in the Enquiry of the truth of Past, and Future. And as the last Appetite in Deliberation is called the Will, so the last Opinion in search of the truth of Past, and Future, is called the JUDGEMENT, or Resolute and Final Sentence of him that Discourseth. And as the whole chain of Appetites alternate, in the question of Good or Bad is called Deliberation; so the whole chain of Opinions alternate, in the question of True, or False is called DOUBT.\n\nNo Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of Fact, it is originally, Sense; and ever after, Memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not Absolute, but Conditionall. No man can know by Discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely: but onely, that if This be, That is; if This has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing.\n\nAnd therefore, when the Discourse is put into Speech, and begins with the Definitions of Words, and proceeds by Connexion of the same into general Affirmations, and of these again into Syllogismes, the end or last sum is called the Conclusion; and the thought of the mind by it signified is that conditional Knowledge, or Knowledge of the consequence of words, which is commonly called Science. But if the first ground of such Discourse be not Definitions, or if the Definitions be not rightly joyned together into Syllogismes, then the End or Conclusion is again OPINION, namely of the truth of somewhat said, though sometimes in absurd and senslesse words, without possibility of being understood. When two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it one to another; which is as much as to know it together. And because such are fittest witnesses of the facts of one another, or of a third, it was, and ever will be reputed a very Evill act, for any man to speak against his Conscience; or to corrupt or force another so to do: Insomuch that the plea of Conscience, has been always hearkened unto very diligently in all times. Afterwards, men made use of the same word metaphorically, for the knowledge of their own secret facts, and secret thoughts; and therefore it is Rhetorically said that the Conscience is a thousand witnesses. And last of all, men, vehemently in love with their own new opinions, (though never so absurd,) and obstinately bent to maintain them, gave those their opinions also that reverenced name of Conscience, as if they would have it seem unlawful, to change or speak against them; and so pretend to know they are true, when they know at most but that they think so.\n\nWhen a mans Discourse beginneth not at Definitions, it beginneth either at some other contemplation of his own, and then it is still called Opinion; Or it beginneth at some saying of another, of whose ability to know the truth, and of whose honesty in not deceiving, he doubteth not; and then the Discourse is not so much concerning the Thing, as the Person; And the Resolution is called BELEEFE, and FAITH: Faith, In the man; Beleefe, both Of the man, and Of the truth of what he sayes. So then in Beleefe are two opinions; one of the saying of the man; the other of his vertue. To Have Faith In, or Trust To, or Beleeve A Man, signifie the same thing; namely, an opinion of the veracity of the man: But to Beleeve What Is Said, signifieth onely an opinion of the truth of the saying. But wee are to observe that this Phrase, I Beleeve In; as also the Latine, Credo In; and the Greek, Pisteno Eis, are never used but in the writings of Divines. In stead of them, in other writings are put, I Beleeve Him; I Have Faith In Him; I Rely On Him: and in Latin, Credo Illi; Fido Illi: and in Greek, Pisteno Anto: and that this singularity of the Ecclesiastical use of the word hath raised many disputes about the right object of the Christian Faith.\n\nBut by Beleeving In, as it is in the Creed, is meant, not trust in the Person; but Confession and acknowledgement of the Doctrine. For not onely Christians, but all manner of men do so believe in God, as to hold all for truth they heare him say, whether they understand it, or not; which is all the Faith and trust can possibly be had in any person whatsoever: But they do not all believe the Doctrine of the Creed.\n\nFrom whence we may inferre, that when wee believe any saying whatsoever it be, to be true, from arguments taken, not from the thing it selfe, or from the principles of naturall Reason, but from the Authority, and good opinion wee have, of him that hath sayd it; then is the speaker, or person we believe in, or trust in, and whose word we take, the object of our Faith; and the Honour done in Believing, is done to him onely. And consequently, when wee Believe that the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate revelation from God himselfe, our Beleefe, Faith, and Trust is in the Church; whose word we take, and acquiesce therein. And they that believe that which a Prophet relates unto them in the name of God, take the word of the Prophet, do honour to him, and in him trust, and believe, touching the truth of what he relateth, whether he be a true, or a false Prophet. And so it is also with all other History. For if I should not believe all that is written By Historians, of the glorious acts of Alexander, or Caesar; I do not think the Ghost of Alexander, or Caesar, had any just cause to be offended; or any body else, but the Historian. If Livy say the Gods made once a Cow speak, and we believe it not; wee distrust not God therein, but Livy. So that it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, than what is drawn from authority of men onely, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is Faith in men onely.\n\nCHAPTER VIII. OF THE VERTUES COMMONLY CALLED INTELLECTUAL, AND THEIR CONTRARY DEFECTS\n\n### Part I, Chapter VIII, 1\n\nOF THE VERTUES COMMONLY CALLED INTELLECTUAL, AND THEIR CONTRARY DEFECTS\n\nVertue generally, in all sorts of subjects, is somewhat that is valued for eminence; and consisteth in comparison. For if all things were equally in all men, nothing would be prized. And by Vertues INTELLECTUALL, are always understood such abilityes of the mind, as men praise, value, and desire should be in themselves; and go commonly under the name of a Good Witte; though the same word Witte, be used also, to distinguish one certain ability from the rest.\n\nThese Vertues are of two sorts; Naturall, and Acquired. By Naturall, I mean not, that which a man hath from his Birth: for that is nothing else but Sense; wherein men differ so little one from another, and from brute Beasts, as it is not to be reckoned amongst Vertues. But I mean, that Witte, which is gotten by Use onely, and Experience; without Method, Culture, or Instruction. This NATURALL WITTE, consisteth principally in two things; Celerity Of Imagining, (that is, swift succession of one thought to another;) and Steddy Direction to some approved end. On the Contrary a slow Imagination, maketh that Defect, or fault of the mind, which is commonly called DULNESSE, Stupidity, and sometimes by other names that signifie slownesse of motion, or difficulty to be moved.\n\nAnd this difference of quicknesse, is caused by the difference of mens passions; that love and dislike, some one thing, some another: and therefore some mens thoughts run one way, some another: and are held to, and observe differently the things that passe through their imagination. And whereas in his succession of mens thoughts, there is nothing to observe in the things they think on, but either in what they be Like One Another, or in what they be Unlike, or What They Serve For, or How They Serve To Such A Purpose; Those that observe their similitudes, in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others, are sayd to have a Good Wit; by which, in this occasion, is meant a Good Fancy. But they that observe their differences, and dissimilitudes; which is called Distinguishing, and Discerning, and Judging between thing and thing; in case, such discerning be not easie, are said to have a Good Judgement: and particularly in matter of conversation and businesse; wherein, times, places, and persons are to be discerned, this Vertue is called DISCRETION. The former, that is, Fancy, without the help of Judgement, is not commended as a Vertue: but the later which is Judgement, and Discretion, is commended for it selfe, without the help of Fancy. Besides the Discretion of times, places, and persons, necessary to a good Fancy, there is required also an often application of his thoughts to their End; that is to say, to some use to be made of them. This done; he that hath this Vertue, will be easily fitted with similitudes, that will please, not onely by illustration of his discourse, and adorning it with new and apt metaphors; but also, by the rarity or their invention. But without Steddinesse, and Direction to some End, a great Fancy is one kind of Madnesse; such as they have, that entring into any discourse, are snatched from their purpose, by every thing that comes in their thought, into so many, and so long digressions, and parentheses, that they utterly lose themselves: Which kind of folly, I know no particular name for: but the cause of it is, sometimes want of experience; whereby that seemeth to a man new and rare, which doth not so to others: sometimes Pusillanimity; by which that seems great to him, which other men think a trifle: and whatsoever is new, or great, and therefore thought fit to be told, withdrawes a man by degrees from the intended way of his discourse.\n\nIn a good Poem, whether it be Epique, or Dramatique; as also in Sonnets, Epigrams, and other Pieces, both Judgement and Fancy are required: But the Fancy must be more eminent; because they please for the Extravagancy; but ought not to displease by Indiscretion.\n\nIn a good History, the Judgement must be eminent; because the goodnesse consisteth, in the Method, in the Truth, and in the Choyse of the actions that are most profitable to be known. Fancy has no place, but onely in adorning the stile.\n\nIn Orations of Prayse, and in Invectives, the Fancy is praedominant; because the designe is not truth, but to Honour or Dishonour; which is done by noble, or by vile comparisons. The Judgement does but suggest what circumstances make an action laudable, or culpable.\n\nIn Hortatives, and Pleadings, as Truth, or Disguise serveth best to the Designe in hand; so is the Judgement, or the Fancy most required.\n\nIn Demonstration, in Councell, and all rigourous search of Truth, Judgement does all; except sometimes the understanding have need to be opened by some apt similitude; and then there is so much use of Fancy. But for Metaphors, they are in this case utterly excluded. For seeing they openly professe deceipt; to admit them into Councell, or Reasoning, were manifest folly.\n\nAnd in any Discourse whatsoever, if the defect of Discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the Fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a signe of want of wit; and so will it never when the Discretion is manifest, though the Fancy be never so ordinary.\n\nThe secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, prophane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame, or blame; which verball discourse cannot do, farther than the Judgement shall approve of the Time, Place, and Persons. An Anatomist, or a Physitian may speak, or write his judgement of unclean things; because it is not to please, but profit: but for another man to write his extravagant, and pleasant fancies of the same, is as if a man, from being tumbled into the dirt, should come and present himselfe before good company. And ’tis the want of Discretion that makes the difference. Again, in profest remissnesse of mind, and familiar company, a man may play with the sounds, and aequivocal significations of words; and that many times with encounters of extraordinary Fancy: but in a Sermon, or in publique, or before persons unknown, or whom we ought to reverence, there is no Gingling of words that will not be accounted folly: and the difference is onely in the want of Discretion. So that where Wit is wanting, it is not Fancy that is wanting, but Discretion. Judgement therefore without Fancy is Wit, but Fancy without Judgement not.\n\nWhen the thoughts of a man, that has a designe in hand, running over a multitude of things, observes how they conduce to that designe; or what designe they may conduce into; if his observations be such as are not easie, or usuall, This wit of his is called PRUDENCE; and dependeth on much Experience, and Memory of the like things, and their consequences heretofore. In which there is not so much difference of Men, as there is in their Fancies and Judgements; Because the Experience of men equall in age, is not much unequall, as to the quantity; but lyes in different occasions; every one having his private designes. To govern well a family, and a kingdome, are not different degrees of Prudence; but different sorts of businesse; no more then to draw a picture in little, or as great, or greater then the life, are different degrees of Art. A plain husband-man is more Prudent in affaires of his own house, then a Privy Counseller in the affaires of another man.\n\nTo Prudence, if you adde the use of unjust, or dishonest means, such as usually are prompted to men by Feare, or Want; you have that Crooked Wisdome, which is called CRAFT; which is a signe of Pusillanimity. For Magnanimity is contempt of unjust, or dishonest helps. And that which the Latines Call Versutia, (translated into English, Shifting,) and is a putting off of a present danger or incommodity, by engaging into a greater, as when a man robbs one to pay another, is but a shorter sighted Craft, called Versutia, from Versura, which signifies taking mony at usurie, for the present payment of interest.\n\nAs for Acquired Wit, (I mean acquired by method and instruction,) there is none but Reason; which is grounded on the right use of Speech; and produceth the Sciences. But of Reason and Science, I have already spoken in the fifth and sixth Chapters.\n\nThe causes of this difference of Witts, are in the Passions: and the difference of Passions, proceedeth partly from the different Constitution of the body, and partly from different Education. For if the difference proceeded from the temper of the brain, and the organs of Sense, either exterior or interior, there would be no lesse difference of men in their Sight, Hearing, or other Senses, than in their Fancies, and Discretions. It proceeds therefore from the Passions; which are different, not onely from the difference of mens complexions; but also from their difference of customes, and education.\n\nThe Passions that most of all cause the differences of Wit, are principally, the more or lesse Desire of Power, of Riches, of Knowledge, and of Honour. All which may be reduced to the first, that is Desire of Power. For Riches, Knowledge and Honour are but severall sorts of Power.\n\nAnd therefore, a man who has no great Passion for any of these things; but is as men terme it indifferent; though he may be so farre a good man, as to be free from giving offence; yet he cannot possibly have either a great Fancy, or much Judgement. For the Thoughts, are to the Desires, as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired: All Stedinesse of the minds motion, and all quicknesse of the same, proceeding from thence. For as to have no Desire, is to be Dead: so to have weak Passions, is Dulnesse; and to have Passions indifferently for every thing, GIDDINESSE, and Distraction; and to have stronger, and more vehement Passions for any thing, than is ordinarily seen in others, is that which men call MADNESSE.\n\nWhereof there be almost as many kinds, as of the Passions themselves. Sometimes the extraordinary and extravagant Passion, proceedeth from the evill constitution of the organs of the Body, or harme done them; and sometimes the hurt, and indisposition of the Organs, is caused by the vehemence, or long continuance of the Passion. But in both cases the Madnesse is of one and the same nature.\n\nThe Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madnesse, is either great Vaine-Glory; which is commonly called Pride, and Selfe-Conceipt; or great Dejection of mind.\n\nPride, subjecteth a man to Anger, the excesse whereof, is the Madnesse called RAGE, and FURY. And thus it comes to passe that excessive desire of Revenge, when it becomes habituall, hurteth the organs, and becomes Rage: That excessive love, with jealousie, becomes also Rage: Excessive opinion of a mans own selfe, for divine inspiration, for wisdome, learning, forme, and the like, becomes Distraction, and Giddinesse: the same, joyned with Envy, Rage: Vehement opinion of the truth of any thing, contradicted by others, Rage.\n\nDejection, subjects a man to causelesse fears; which is a Madnesse commonly called MELANCHOLY, apparent also in divers manners; as in haunting of solitudes, and graves; in superstitious behaviour; and in fearing some one, some another particular thing. In summe, all Passions that produce strange and unusuall behaviour, are called by the generall name of Madnesse. But of the severall kinds of Madnesse, he that would take the paines, might enrowle a legion. And if the Excesses be madnesse, there is no doubt but the Passions themselves, when they tend to Evill, are degrees of the same.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VIII, 2\n\n(For example,) Though the effect of folly, in them that are possessed of an opinion of being inspired, be not visible alwayes in one man, by any very extravagant action, that proceedeth from such Passion; yet when many of them conspire together, the Rage of the whole multitude is visible enough. For what argument of Madnesse can there be greater, than to clamour, strike, and throw stones at our best friends? Yet this is somewhat lesse than such a multitude will do. For they will clamour, fight against, and destroy those, by whom all their lifetime before, they have been protected, and secured from injury. And if this be Madnesse in the multitude, it is the same in every particular man. For as in the middest of the sea, though a man perceive no sound of that part of the water next him; yet he is well assured, that part contributes as much, to the Roaring of the Sea, as any other part, of the same quantity: so also, thought wee perceive no great unquietnesse, in one, or two men; yet we may be well assured, that their singular Passions, are parts of the Seditious roaring of a troubled Nation. And if there were nothing else that bewrayed their madnesse; yet that very arrogating such inspiration to themselves, is argument enough. If some man in Bedlam should entertaine you with sober discourse; and you desire in taking leave, to know what he were, that you might another time requite his civility; and he should tell you, he were God the Father; I think you need expect no extravagant action for argument of his Madnesse.\n\nThis opinion of Inspiration, called commonly, Private Spirit, begins very often, from some lucky finding of an Errour generally held by others; and not knowing, or not remembring, by what conduct of reason, they came to so singular a truth, (as they think it, though it be many times an untruth they light on,) they presently admire themselves; as being in the speciall grace of God Almighty, who hath revealed the same to them supernaturally, by his Spirit.\n\nAgain, that Madnesse is nothing else, but too much appearing Passion, may be gathered out of the effects of Wine, which are the same with those of the evill disposition of the organs. For the variety of behaviour in men that have drunk too much, is the same with that of Mad-men: some of them Raging, others Loving, others laughing, all extravagantly, but according to their severall domineering Passions: For the effect of the wine, does but remove Dissimulation; and take from them the sight of the deformity of their Passions. For, (I believe) the most sober men, when they walk alone without care and employment of the mind, would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts at that time should be publiquely seen: which is a confession, that Passions unguided, are for the most part meere Madnesse.\n\nThe opinions of the world, both in antient and later ages, concerning the cause of madnesse, have been two. Some, deriving them from the Passions; some, from Daemons, or Spirits, either good, or bad, which they thought might enter into a man, possesse him, and move his organs is such strange, and uncouth manner, as mad-men use to do. The former sort therefore, called such men, Mad-men: but the Later, called them sometimes Daemoniacks, (that is, possessed with spirits;) sometimes Energumeni, (that is agitated, or moved with spirits;) and now in Italy they are called not onely Pazzi, Mad-men; but also Spiritati, men possest.\n\nThere was once a great conflux of people in Abdera, a City of the Greeks, at the acting of the Tragedy of Andromeda, upon an extream hot day: whereupon, a great many of the spectators falling into Fevers, had this accident from the heat, and from The Tragedy together, that they did nothing but pronounce Iambiques, with the names of Perseus and Andromeda; which together with the Fever, was cured, by the comming on of Winter: And this madnesse was thought to proceed from the Passion imprinted by the Tragedy. Likewise there raigned a fit of madnesse in another Graecian city, which seized onely the young Maidens; and caused many of them to hang themselves. This was by most then thought an act of the Divel. But one that suspected, that contempt of life in them, might proceed from some Passion of the mind, and supposing they did not contemne also their honour, gave counsell to the Magistrates, to strip such as so hang’d themselves, and let them hang out naked. This the story sayes cured that madnesse. But on the other side, the same Graecians, did often ascribe madnesse, to the operation of the Eumenides, or Furyes; and sometimes of Ceres, Phoebus, and other Gods: so much did men attribute to Phantasmes, as to think them aereal living bodies; and generally to call them Spirits. And as the Romans in this, held the same opinion with the Greeks: so also did the Jewes; For they calle mad-men Prophets, or (according as they thought the spirits good or bad) Daemoniacks; and some of them called both Prophets, and Daemoniacks, mad-men; and some called the same man both Daemoniack, and mad-man. But for the Gentiles, ’tis no wonder; because Diseases, and Health; Vices, and Vertues; and many naturall accidents, were with them termed, and worshipped as Daemons. So that a man was to understand by Daemon, as well (sometimes) an Ague, as a Divell. But for the Jewes to have such opinion, is somewhat strange. For neither Moses, nor Abraham pretended to Prophecy by possession of a Spirit; but from the voyce of God; or by a Vision or Dream: Nor is there any thing in his Law, Morall, or Ceremoniall, by which they were taught, there was any such Enthusiasme; or any Possession. When God is sayd, (Numb. 11. 25.) to take from the Spirit that was in Moses, and give it to the 70. Elders, the Spirit of God (taking it for the substance of God) is not divided. The Scriptures by the Spirit of God in man, mean a mans spirit, enclined to Godlinesse. And where it is said (Exod. 28. 3.) “Whom I have filled with the Spirit of wisdome to make garments for Aaron,” is not meant a spirit put into them, that can make garments; but the wisdome of their own spirits in that kind of work. In the like sense, the spirit of man, when it produceth unclean actions, is ordinarily called an unclean spirit; and so other spirits, though not alwayes, yet as often as the vertue or vice so stiled, is extraordinary, and Eminent. Neither did the other Prophets of the old Testament pretend Enthusiasme; or, that God spake in them; but to them by Voyce, Vision, or Dream; and the Burthen Of The Lord was not Possession, but Command. How then could the Jewes fall into this opinion of possession? I can imagine no reason, but that which is common to all men; namely, the want of curiosity to search naturall causes; and their placing Felicity, in the acquisition of the grosse pleasures of the Senses, and the things that most immediately conduce thereto. For they that see any strange, and unusuall ability, or defect in a mans mind; unlesse they see withall, from what cause it may probably proceed, can hardly think it naturall; and if not naturall, they must needs thinke it supernaturall; and then what can it be, but that either God, or the Divell is in him? And hence it came to passe, when our Saviour (Mark 3.21.) was compassed about with the multitude, those of the house doubted he was mad, and went out to hold him: but the Scribes said he had Belzebub, and that was it, by which he cast out divels; as if the greater mad-man had awed the lesser. And that (John 10. 20.) some said, “He hath a Divell, and is mad;” whereas others holding him for a Prophet, sayd, “These are not the words of one that hath a Divell.” So in the old Testament he that came to anoynt Jehu, (2 Kings 9.11.) was a Prophet; but some of the company asked Jehu, “What came that mad-man for?” So that in summe, it is manifest, that whosoever behaved himselfe in extraordinary manner, was thought by the Jewes to be possessed either with a good, or evill spirit; except by the Sadduces, who erred so farre on the other hand, as not to believe there were at all any spirits, (which is very neere to direct Atheisme;) and thereby perhaps the more provoked others, to terme such men Daemoniacks, rather than mad-men.\n\nBut why then does our Saviour proceed in the curing of them, as if they were possest; and not as if they were mad. To which I can give no other kind of answer, but that which is given to those that urge the Scripture in like manner against the opinion of the motion of the Earth. The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdome of God; and to prepare their mindes to become his obedient subjects; leaving the world, and the Philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their naturall Reason. Whether the Earths, or Suns motion make the day, and night; or whether the Exorbitant actions of men, proceed from Passion, or from the Divell, (so we worship him not) it is all one, as to our obedience, and subjection to God Almighty; which is the thing for which the Scripture was written. As for that our Saviour speaketh to the disease, as to a person; it is the usuall phrase of all that cure by words onely, as Christ did, (and Inchanters pretend to do, whether they speak to a Divel or not.) For is not Christ also said (Math. 8.26.) to have rebuked the winds? Is not he said also (Luk. 4. 39.) to rebuke a Fever? Yet this does not argue that a Fever is a Divel. And whereas many of these Divels are said to confesse Christ; it is not necessary to interpret those places otherwise, than that those mad-men confessed him. And whereas our Saviour (Math. 12. 43.) speaketh of an unclean Spirit, that having gone out of a man, wandreth through dry places, seeking rest, and finding none; and returning into the same man, with seven other spirits worse than himselfe; It is manifestly a Parable, alluding to a man, that after a little endeavour to quit his lusts, is vanquished by the strength of them; and becomes seven times worse than he was. So that I see nothing at all in the Scripture, that requireth a beliefe, that Daemoniacks were any other thing but Mad-men.\n\nThere is yet another fault in the Discourses of some men; which may also be numbred amongst the sorts of Madnesse; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before in the fifth chapter, by the Name of Absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others, from intention to deceive by obscurity. And this is incident to none but those, that converse in questions of matters incomprehensible, as the Schoole-men; or in questions of abstruse Philosophy. The common sort of men seldome speak Insignificantly, and are therefore, by those other Egregious persons counted Idiots. But to be assured their words are without any thing correspondent to them in the mind, there would need some Examples; which if any man require, let him take a Schoole-man into his hands, and see if he can translate any one chapter concerning any difficult point; as the Trinity; the Deity; the nature of Christ; Transubstantiation; Free-will. &c. into any of the moderne tongues, so as to make the same intelligible; or into any tolerable Latine, such as they were acquainted withall, that lived when the Latine tongue was Vulgar. What is the meaning of these words. “The first cause does not necessarily inflow any thing into the second, by force of the Essential subordination of the second causes, by which it may help it to worke?” They are the Translation of the Title of the sixth chapter of Suarez first Booke, Of The Concourse, Motion, And Help Of God. When men write whole volumes of such stuffe, are they not Mad, or intend to make others so? And particularly, in the question of Transubstantiation; where after certain words spoken, they that say, the White-nesse, Round-nesse, Magni-tude, Quali-ty, Corruptibili-ty, all which are incorporeall, &c. go out of the Wafer, into the Body of our blessed Saviour, do they not make those Nesses, Tudes and Ties, to be so many spirits possessing his body? For by Spirits, they mean alwayes things, that being incorporeall, are neverthelesse moveable from one place to another. So that this kind of Absurdity, may rightly be numbred amongst the many sorts of Madnesse; and all the time that guided by clear Thoughts of their worldly lust, they forbear disputing, or writing thus, but Lucide Intervals. And thus much of the Vertues and Defects Intellectuall.\n\nCHAPTER IX. OF THE SEVERALL SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE\n\n### Part I, Chapter IX\n\nOF THE SEVERALL SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE\n\nThere are of KNOWLEDGE two kinds; whereof one is Knowledge Of Fact: the other Knowledge Of The Consequence Of One Affirmation To Another. The former is nothing else, but Sense and Memory, and is Absolute Knowledge; as when we see a Fact doing, or remember it done: And this is the Knowledge required in a Witnesse. The later is called Science; and is Conditionall; as when we know, that, If The Figure Showne Be A Circle, Then Any Straight Line Through The Centre Shall Divide It Into Two Equall Parts. And this is the Knowledge required in a Philosopher; that is to say, of him that pretends to Reasoning.\n\nThe Register of Knowledge Of Fact is called History. Whereof there be two sorts: one called Naturall History; which is the History of such Facts, or Effects of Nature, as have no Dependance on Mans Will; Such as are the Histories of Metals, Plants, Animals, Regions, and the like. The other, is Civill History; which is the History of the Voluntary Actions of men in Common-wealths.\n\nThe Registers of Science, are such Books as contain the Demonstrations of Consequences of one Affirmation, to another; and are commonly called Books of Philosophy; whereof the sorts are many, according to the diversity of the Matter; And may be divided in such manner as I have divided them in the following Table.\n\nI. Science, that is, Knowledge of Consequences; which is called also PHILOSOPHY\n\nA.  Consequences from Accidents of Bodies Naturall; which is\n\ncalled NATURALL PHILOSOPHY\n\n1.  Consequences from the Accidents common to all Bodies Naturall;\n\nwhich are Quantity, and Motion.\n\na.  Consequences from Quantity, and Motion Indeterminate;\n\nwhich, being the Principles or first foundation of\n\nPhilosophy, is called Philosophia Prima\n\nPHILOSOPHIA PRIMA\n\nb.  Consequences from Motion, and Quantity Determined\n\n1) Consequences from Quantity, and Motion Determined\n\na) By Figure, By Number\n\n1] Mathematiques,\n\nGEOMETRY\n\nARITHMETIQUE\n\n2) Consequences from the Motion, and Quantity of Bodies in\n\nSpeciall\n\na) Consequences from the Motion, and Quantity of the\n\ngreat parts of the World, as the Earth and Stars,\n\n1] Cosmography\n\nASTRONOMY\n\nGEOGRAPHY\n\nb) Consequences from the Motion of Speciall kinds, and\n\nFigures of Body,\n\n1] Mechaniques, Doctrine of Weight\n\nScience of\n\nENGINEERS\n\nARCHITECTURE\n\nNAVIGATION\n\n2.  PHYSIQUES, or Consequences from Qualities\n\na.  Consequences from the Qualities of Bodies Transient, such\n\nas sometimes appear, sometimes vanish\n\nMETEOROLOGY\n\nb.  Consequences from the Qualities of Bodies Permanent\n\n1) Consequences from the Qualities of the Starres\n\na) Consequences from the Light of the Starres.  Out of\n\nthis, and the Motion of the Sunne, is made the\n\nScience of\n\nSCIOGRAPHY\n\nb) Consequences from the Influence of the Starres,\n\nASTROLOGY\n\n2) Consequences of the Qualities from Liquid Bodies that\n\nfill the space between the Starres; such as are the\n\nAyre, or substance aetherial.\n\n3) Consequences from Qualities of Bodies Terrestrial\n\na) Consequences from parts of the Earth that are\n\nwithout Sense,\n\n1] Consequences from Qualities of Minerals, as\n\nStones, Metals, &c\n\n.                    2] Consequences from the Qualities of Vegetables\n\nb) Consequences from Qualities of Animals\n\n1] Consequences from Qualities of Animals in\n\nGenerall\n\na] Consequences from Vision,\n\nOPTIQUES\n\nb] Consequences from Sounds,\n\nMUSIQUE\n\nc] Consequences from the rest of the senses\n\n2] Consequences from Qualities of Men in Speciall\n\na] Consequences from Passions of Men,\n\nETHIQUES\n\nb] Consequences from Speech,\n\ni) In Magnifying, Vilifying, etc.\n\nPOETRY\n\nii) In Persuading,\n\nRHETORIQUE\n\niii) In Reasoning,\n\nLOGIQUE\n\niv) In Contracting,\n\nThe Science of\n\nJUST and UNJUST\n\nB.  Consequences from the Accidents of Politique Bodies; which is\n\ncalled POLITIQUES, and CIVILL PHILOSOPHY\n\n1.  Of Consequences from the Institution of COMMON-WEALTHS, to\n\nthe Rights, and Duties of the Body Politique, or Soveraign.\n\n2.  Of Consequences from the same, to the Duty and Right of\n\nthe Subjects.\n\nCHAPTER X. OF POWER, WORTH, DIGNITY, HONOUR AND WORTHINESS\n\n### Part I, Chapter X, 1\n\nOF POWER, WORTH, DIGNITY, HONOUR AND WORTHINESS\n\nThe POWER of a Man, (to take it Universally,) is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good. And is either Originall, or Instrumentall.\n\nNaturall Power, is the eminence of the Faculties of Body, or Mind: as extraordinary Strength, Forme, Prudence, Arts, Eloquence, Liberality, Nobility. Instrumentall are those Powers, which acquired by these, or by fortune, are means and Instruments to acquire more: as Riches, Reputation, Friends, and the Secret working of God, which men call Good Luck. For the nature of Power, is in this point, like to Fame, increasing as it proceeds; or like the motion of heavy bodies, which the further they go, make still the more hast.\n\nThe Greatest of humane Powers, is that which is compounded of the Powers of most men, united by consent, in one person, Naturall, or civill, that has the use of all their Powers depending on his will; such as is the Power of a Common-wealth: or depending on the wills of each particular; such as is the Power of a Faction, or of divers factions leagued. Therefore to have servants, is Power; To have Friends, is Power: for they are strengths united.\n\nAlso Riches joyned with liberality, is Power; because it procureth friends, and servants: Without liberality, not so; because in this case they defend not; but expose men to Envy, as a Prey.\n\nReputation of power, is Power; because it draweth with it the adhaerance of those that need protection.\n\nSo is Reputation of love of a mans Country, (called Popularity,) for the same Reason.\n\nAlso, what quality soever maketh a man beloved, or feared of many; or the reputation of such quality, is Power; because it is a means to have the assistance, and service of many.\n\nGood successe is Power; because it maketh reputation of Wisdome, or good fortune; which makes men either feare him, or rely on him.\n\nAffability of men already in power, is encrease of Power; because it gaineth love.\n\nReputation of Prudence in the conduct of Peace or War, is Power; because to prudent men, we commit the government of our selves, more willingly than to others.\n\nNobility is Power, not in all places, but onely in those Common-wealths, where it has Priviledges: for in such priviledges consisteth their Power.\n\nEloquence is Power; because it is seeming Prudence.\n\nForme is Power; because being a promise of Good, it recommendeth men to the favour of women and strangers.\n\nThe Sciences, are small Power; because not eminent; and therefore, not acknowledged in any man; nor are at all, but in a few; and in them, but of a few things. For Science is of that nature, as none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attayned it.\n\nArts of publique use, as Fortification, making of Engines, and other Instruments of War; because they conferre to Defence, and Victory, are Power; And though the true Mother of them, be Science, namely the Mathematiques; yet, because they are brought into the Light, by the hand of the Artificer, they be esteemed (the Midwife passing with the vulgar for the Mother,) as his issue.\n\nThe Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another. An able conductor of Souldiers, is of great Price in time of War present, or imminent; but in Peace not so. A learned and uncorrupt Judge, is much Worth in time of Peace; but not so much in War. And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price. For let a man (as most men do,) rate themselves as the highest Value they can; yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.\n\nThe manifestation of the Value we set on one another, is that which is commonly called Honouring, and Dishonouring. To Value a man at a high rate, is to Honour him; at a low rate, is to Dishonour him. But high, and low, in this case, is to be understood by comparison to the rate that each man setteth on himselfe.\n\nThe publique worth of a man, which is the Value set on him by the Common-wealth, is that which men commonly call DIGNITY. And this Value of him by the Common-wealth, is understood, by offices of Command, Judicature, publike Employment; or by Names and Titles, introduced for distinction of such Value.\n\nTo pray to another, for ayde of any kind, is to HONOUR; because a signe we have an opinion he has power to help; and the more difficult the ayde is, the more is the Honour.\n\nTo obey, is to Honour; because no man obeyes them, whom they think have no power to help, or hurt them. And consequently to disobey, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo give great gifts to a man, is to Honour him; because ’tis buying of Protection, and acknowledging of Power. To give little gifts, is to Dishonour; because it is but Almes, and signifies an opinion of the need of small helps. To be sedulous in promoting anothers good; also to flatter, is to Honour; as a signe we seek his protection or ayde. To neglect, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo give way, or place to another, in any Commodity, is to Honour; being a confession of greater power. To arrogate, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo shew any signe of love, or feare of another, is to Honour; for both to love, and to feare, is to value. To contemne, or lesse to love or feare then he expects, is to Dishonour; for ’tis undervaluing.\n\nTo praise, magnifie, or call happy, is to Honour; because nothing but goodnesse, power, and felicity is valued. To revile, mock, or pitty, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo speak to another with consideration, to appear before him with decency, and humility, is to Honour him; as signes of fear to offend. To speak to him rashly, to do anything before him obscenely, slovenly, impudently, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo believe, to trust, to rely on another, is to Honour him; signe of opinion of his vertue and power. To distrust, or not believe, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo hearken to a mans counsell, or discourse of what kind soever, is to Honour; as a signe we think him wise, or eloquent, or witty. To sleep, or go forth, or talk the while, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo do those things to another, which he takes for signes of Honour, or which the Law or Custome makes so, is to Honour; because in approving the Honour done by others, he acknowledgeth the power which others acknowledge. To refuse to do them, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo agree with in opinion, is to Honour; as being a signe of approving his judgement, and wisdome. To dissent, is Dishonour; and an upbraiding of errour; and (if the dissent be in many things) of folly.\n\nTo imitate, is to Honour; for it is vehemently to approve. To imitate ones Enemy, is to Dishonour.\n\nTo honour those another honours, is to Honour him; as a signe of approbation of his judgement. To honour his Enemies, is to Dishonour him.\n\nTo employ in counsell, or in actions of difficulty, is to Honour; as a signe of opinion of his wisdome, or other power. To deny employment in the same cases, to those that seek it, is to Dishonour.\n\nAll these wayes of Honouring, are naturall; and as well within, as without Common-wealths. But in Common-wealths, where he, or they that have the supreme Authority, can make whatsoever they please, to stand for signes of Honour, there be other Honours.\n\nA Soveraigne doth Honour a Subject, with whatsoever Title, or Office, or Employment, or Action, that he himselfe will have taken for a signe of his will to Honour him.\n\nThe King of Persia, Honoured Mordecay, when he appointed he should be conducted through the streets in the Kings Garment, upon one of the Kings Horses, with a Crown on his head, and a Prince before him, proclayming, “Thus shall it be done to him that the King will honour.” And yet another King of Persia, or the same another time, to one that demanded for some great service, to weare one of the Kings robes, gave him leave so to do; but with his addition, that he should weare it as the Kings foole; and then it was Dishonour. So that of Civill Honour; such as are Magistracy, Offices, Titles; and in some places Coats, and Scutchions painted: and men Honour such as have them, as having so many signes of favour in the Common-wealth; which favour is Power.\n\nHonourable is whatsoever possession, action, or quality, is an argument and signe of Power.\n\nAnd therefore To be Honoured, loved, or feared of many, is Honourable; as arguments of Power. To be Honoured of few or none, Dishonourable.\n\n### Part I, Chapter X, 2\n\nGood fortune (if lasting,) Honourable; as a signe of the favour of God. Ill fortune, and losses, Dishonourable. Riches, are Honourable; for they are Power. Poverty, Dishonourable. Magnanimity, Liberality, Hope, Courage, Confidence, are Honourable; for they proceed from the conscience of Power. Pusillanimity, Parsimony, Fear, Diffidence, are Dishonourable.\n\nTimely Resolution, or determination of what a man is to do, is Honourable; as being the contempt of small difficulties, and dangers. And Irresolution, Dishonourable; as a signe of too much valuing of little impediments, and little advantages: For when a man has weighed things as long as the time permits, and resolves not, the difference of weight is but little; and therefore if he resolve not, he overvalues little things, which is Pusillanimity.\n\nAll Actions, and Speeches, that proceed, or seem to proceed from much Experience, Science, Discretion, or Wit, are Honourable; For all these are Powers. Actions, or Words that proceed from Errour, Ignorance, or Folly, Dishonourable.\n\nGravity, as farre forth as it seems to proceed from a mind employed on some thing else, is Honourable; because employment is a signe of Power. But if it seem to proceed from a purpose to appear grave, it is Dishonourable. For the gravity of the Former, is like the steddinesse of a Ship laden with Merchandise; but of the later, like the steddinesse of a Ship ballasted with Sand, and other trash.\n\nTo be Conspicuous, that is to say, to be known, for Wealth, Office, great Actions, or any eminent Good, is Honourable; as a signe of the power for which he is conspicuous. On the contrary, Obscurity, is Dishonourable.\n\nTo be descended from conspicuous Parents, is Honourable; because they the more easily attain the aydes, and friends of their Ancestors. On the contrary, to be descended from obscure Parentage, is Dishonourable.\n\nActions proceeding from Equity, joyned with losse, are Honourable; as signes of Magnanimity: for Magnanimity is a signe of Power. On the contrary, Craft, Shifting, neglect of Equity, is Dishonourable.\n\nNor does it alter the case of Honour, whether an action (so it be great and difficult, and consequently a signe of much power,) be just or unjust: for Honour consisteth onely in the opinion of Power. Therefore the ancient Heathen did not thinke they Dishonoured, but greatly Honoured the Gods, when they introduced them in their Poems, committing Rapes, Thefts, and other great, but unjust, or unclean acts: In so much as nothing is so much celebrated in Jupiter, as his Adulteries; nor in Mercury, as his Frauds, and Thefts: of whose praises, in a hymne of Homer, the greatest is this, that being born in the morning, he had invented Musique at noon, and before night, stolen away the Cattell of Appollo, from his Herdsmen.\n\nAlso amongst men, till there were constituted great Common-wealths, it was thought no dishonour to be a Pyrate, or a High-way Theefe; but rather a lawfull Trade, not onely amongst the Greeks, but also amongst all other Nations; as is manifest by the Histories of antient time. And at this day, in this part of the world, private Duels are, and alwayes will be Honourable, though unlawfull, till such time as there shall be Honour ordained for them that refuse, and Ignominy for them that make the Challenge. For Duels also are many times effects of Courage; and the ground of Courage is alwayes Strength or Skill, which are Power; though for the most part they be effects of rash speaking, and of the fear of Dishonour, in one, or both the Combatants; who engaged by rashnesse, are driven into the Lists to avoyd disgrace.\n\nScutchions, and coats of Armes haereditary, where they have any eminent Priviledges, are Honourable; otherwise not: for their Power consisteth either in such Priviledges, or in Riches, or some such thing as is equally honoured in other men. This kind of Honour, commonly called Gentry, has been derived from the Antient Germans. For there never was any such thing known, where the German Customes were unknown. Nor is it now any where in use, where the Germans have not inhabited. The antient Greek Commanders, when they went to war, had their Shields painted with such Devises as they pleased; insomuch as an unpainted Buckler was a signe of Poverty, and of a common Souldier: but they transmitted not the Inheritance of them. The Romans transmitted the Marks of their Families: but they were the Images, not the Devises of their Ancestors. Amongst the people of Asia, Afrique, and America, there is not, nor was ever, any such thing. The Germans onely had that custome; from whom it has been derived into England, France, Spain, and Italy, when in great numbers they either ayded the Romans, or made their own Conquests in these Westerne parts of the world.\n\nFor Germany, being antiently, as all other Countries, in their beginnings, divided amongst an infinite number of little Lords, or Masters of Families, that continually had wars one with another; those Masters, or Lords, principally to the end they might, when they were Covered with Arms, be known by their followers; and partly for ornament, both painted their Armor, or their Scutchion, or Coat, with the picture of some Beast, or other thing; and also put some eminent and visible mark upon the Crest of their Helmets. And his ornament both of the Armes, and Crest, descended by inheritance to their Children; to the eldest pure, and to the rest with some note of diversity, such as the Old master, that is to say in Dutch, the Here-alt thought fit. But when many such Families, joyned together, made a greater Monarchy, this duty of the Herealt, to distinguish Scutchions, was made a private Office a part. And the issue of these Lords, is the great and antient Gentry; which for the most part bear living creatures, noted for courage, and rapine; or Castles, Battlements, Belts, Weapons, Bars, Palisadoes, and other notes of War; nothing being then in honour, but vertue military. Afterwards, not onely Kings, but popular Common-wealths, gave divers manners of Scutchions, to such as went forth to the War, or returned from it, for encouragement, or recompence to their service. All which, by an observing Reader, may be found in such ancient Histories, Greek and Latine, as make mention of the German Nation, and Manners, in their times.\n\nTitles of Honour, such as are Duke, Count, Marquis, and Baron, are Honourable; as signifying the value set upon them by the Soveraigne Power of the Common-wealth: Which Titles, were in old time titles of Office, and Command, derived some from the Romans, some from the Germans, and French. Dukes, in Latine Duces, being Generalls in War: Counts, Comites, such as bare the Generall company out of friendship; and were left to govern and defend places conquered, and pacified: Marquises, Marchiones, were Counts that governed the Marches, or bounds of the Empire. Which titles of Duke, Count, and Marquis, came into the Empire, about the time of Constantine the Great, from the customes of the German Militia. But Baron, seems to have been a Title of the Gaules, and signifies a Great man; such as were the Kings, or Princes men, whom they employed in war about their persons; and seems to be derived from Vir, to Ber, and Bar, that signified the same in the Language of the Gaules, that Vir in Latine; and thence to Bero, and Baro: so that such men were called Berones, and after Barones; and (in Spanish) Varones. But he that would know more particularly the originall of Titles of Honour, may find it, as I have done this, in Mr. Seldens most excellent Treatise of that subject. In processe of time these offices of Honour, by occasion of trouble, and for reasons of good and peacable government, were turned into meer Titles; serving for the most part, to distinguish the precedence, place, and order of subjects in the Common-wealth: and men were made Dukes, Counts, Marquises, and Barons of Places, wherein they had neither possession, nor command: and other Titles also, were devised to the same end.\n\nWORTHINESSE, is a thing different from the worth, or value of a man; and also from his merit, or desert; and consisteth in a particular power, or ability for that, whereof he is said to be worthy: which particular ability, is usually named FITNESSE, or Aptitude.\n\nFor he is Worthiest to be a Commander, to be a Judge, or to have any other charge, that is best fitted, with the qualities required to the well discharging of it; and Worthiest of Riches, that has the qualities most requisite for the well using of them: any of which qualities being absent, one may neverthelesse be a Worthy man, and valuable for some thing else. Again, a man may be Worthy of Riches, Office, and Employment, that neverthelesse, can plead no right to have it before another; and therefore cannot be said to merit or deserve it. For Merit, praesupposeth a right, and that the thing deserved is due by promise: Of which I shall say more hereafter, when I shall speak of Contracts.\n\nCHAPTER XI. OF THE DIFFERENCE OF MANNERS\n\n### Part I, Chapter XI\n\nOF THE DIFFERENCE OF MANNERS\n\nBy MANNERS, I mean not here, Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals; But those qualities of man-kind, that concern their living together in Peace, and Unity. To which end we are to consider, that the Felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis Ultimus, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later. The cause whereof is, That the object of mans desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire. And therefore the voluntary actions, and inclinations of all men, tend, not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life; and differ onely in the way: which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions, in divers men; and partly from the difference of the knowledge, or opinion each one has of the causes, which produce the effect desired.\n\nSo that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is, that Kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it a home by Lawes, or abroad by Wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of Fame from new Conquest; in others, of ease and sensuall pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art, or other ability of the mind.\n\nCompetition of Riches, Honour, command, or other power, enclineth to Contention, Enmity, and War: because the way of one Competitor, to the attaining of his desire, is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repell the other. Particularly, competition of praise, enclineth to a reverence of Antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead; to these ascribing more than due, that they may obscure the glory of the other.\n\nDesire of Ease, and sensuall Delight, disposeth men to obey a common Power: because by such Desires, a man doth abandon the protection might be hoped for from his own Industry, and labour.\n\nFear of Death, and Wounds, disposeth to the same; and for the same reason. On the contrary, needy men, and hardy, not contented with their present condition; as also, all men that are ambitious of Military command, are enclined to continue the causes of warre; and to stirre up trouble and sedition: for there is no honour Military but by warre; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle.\n\nDesire of Knowledge, and Arts of Peace, enclineth men to obey a common Power: For such Desire, containeth a desire of leasure; and consequently protection from some other Power than their own.\n\nDesire of Praise, disposeth to laudable actions, such as please them whose judgement they value; for of these men whom we contemn, we contemn also the Praises. Desire of Fame after death does the same. And though after death, there be no sense of the praise given us on Earth, as being joyes, that are either swallowed up in the unspeakable joyes of Heaven, or extinguished in the extreme torments of Hell: yet is not such Fame vain; because men have a present delight therein, from the foresight of it, and of the benefit that may rebound thereby to their posterity: which though they now see not, yet they imagine; and any thing that is pleasure in the sense, the same also is pleasure in the imagination.\n\nTo have received from one, to whom we think our selves equall, greater benefits than there is hope to Requite, disposeth to counterfiet love; but really secret hatred; and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor, that in declining the sight of his creditor, tacitely wishes him there, where he might never see him more. For benefits oblige; and obligation is thraldome; which is to ones equall, hateful. But to have received benefits from one, whom we acknowledge our superiour, enclines to love; because the obligation is no new depession: and cheerfull acceptation, (which men call Gratitude,) is such an honour done to the obliger, as is taken generally for retribution. Also to receive benefits, though from an equall, or inferiour, as long as there is hope of requitall, disposeth to love: for in the intention of the receiver, the obligation is of ayd, and service mutuall; from whence proceedeth an Emulation of who shall exceed in benefiting; the most noble and profitable contention possible; wherein the victor is pleased with his victory, and the other revenged by confessing it.\n\nTo have done more hurt to a man, than he can, or is willing to expiate, enclineth the doer to hate the sufferer. For he must expect revenge, or forgivenesse; both which are hatefull.\n\nFeare of oppression, disposeth a man to anticipate, or to seek ayd by society: for there is no other way by which a man can secure his life and liberty.\n\nMen that distrust their own subtilty, are in tumult, and sedition, better disposed for victory, than they that suppose themselves wise, or crafty. For these love to consult, the other (fearing to be circumvented,) to strike first. And in sedition, men being alwayes in the procincts of Battell, to hold together, and use all advantages of force, is a better stratagem, than any that can proceed from subtilty of Wit.\n\nVain-glorious men, such as without being conscious to themselves of great sufficiency, delight in supposing themselves gallant men, are enclined onely to ostentation; but not to attempt: Because when danger or difficulty appears, they look for nothing but to have their insufficiency discovered.\n\nVain-glorious men, such as estimate their sufficiency by the flattery of other men, or the fortune of some precedent action, without assured ground of hope from the true knowledge of themselves, are enclined to rash engaging; and in the approach of danger, or difficulty, to retire if they can: because not seeing the way of safety, they will rather hazard their honour, which may be salved with an excuse; than their lives, for which no salve is sufficient.\n\nMen that have a strong opinion of their own wisdome in matter of government, are disposed to Ambition. Because without publique Employment in counsell or magistracy, the honour of their wisdome is lost. And therefore Eloquent speakers are enclined to Ambition; for Eloquence seemeth wisdome, both to themselves and others\n\nPusillanimity disposeth men to Irresolution, and consequently to lose the occasions, and fittest opportunities of action. For after men have been in deliberation till the time of action approach, if it be not then manifest what is best to be done, tis a signe, the difference of Motives, the one way and the other, are not great: Therefore not to resolve then, is to lose the occasion by weighing of trifles; which is pusillanimity.\n\nFrugality,(though in poor men a Vertue,) maketh a man unapt to atchieve such actions, as require the strength of many men at once: For it weakeneth their Endeavour, which is to be nourished and kept in vigor by Reward.\n\nConfidence In Others From Ignorance Of The Marks Of Wisdome and Kindnesse Eloquence, with flattery, disposeth men to confide in them that have it; because the former is seeming Wisdome, the later seeming Kindnesse. Adde to them Military reputation, and it disposeth men to adhaere, and subject themselves to those men that have them. The two former, having given them caution against danger from him; the later gives them caution against danger from others.\n\nWant of Science, that is, Ignorance of causes, disposeth, or rather constraineth a man to rely on the advise, and authority of others. For all men whom the truth concernes, if they rely not on their own, must rely on the opinion of some other, whom they think wiser than themselves, and see not why he should deceive them.\n\nIgnorance of the signification of words; which is, want of understanding, disposeth men to take on trust, not onely the truth they know not; but also the errors; and which is more, the non-sense of them they trust: For neither Error, nor non-sense, can without a perfect understanding of words, be detected.\n\nFrom the same it proceedeth, that men give different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has onely a greater tincture of choler.\n\nFrom the same also it proceedeth, that men cannot distinguish, without study and great understanding, between one action of many men, and many actions of one multitude; as for example, between the one action of all the Senators of Rome in killing Catiline, and the many actions of a number of Senators in killing Caesar; and therefore are disposed to take for the action of the people, that which is a multitude of actions done by a multitude of men, led perhaps by the perswasion of one.\n\nAdhaerence To Custome, From Ignorance Of The Nature Of Right And Wrong Ignorance of the causes, and originall constitution of Right, Equity, Law, and Justice, disposeth a man to make Custome and Example the rule of his actions; in such manner, as to think that Unjust which it hath been the custome to punish; and that Just, of the impunity and approbation whereof they can produce an Example, or (as the Lawyers which onely use the false measure of Justice barbarously call it) a Precedent; like little children, that have no other rule of good and evill manners, but the correction they receive from their Parents, and Masters; save that children are constant to their rule, whereas men are not so; because grown strong, and stubborn, they appeale from custome to reason, and from reason to custome, as it serves their turn; receding from custome when their interest requires it, and setting themselves against reason, as oft as reason is against them: Which is the cause, that the doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by the Pen and the Sword: whereas the doctrine of Lines, and Figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no mans ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That The Three Angles Of A Triangle Should Be Equall To Two Angles Of A Square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry, suppressed, as farre as he whom it concerned was able.\n\nAdhaerence To Private Men, From Ignorance Of The Causes Of Peace Ignorance of remote causes, disposeth men to attribute all events, to the causes immediate, and Instrumentall: For these are all the causes they perceive. And hence it comes to passe, that in all places, men that are grieved with payments to the Publique, discharge their anger upon the Publicans, that is to say, Farmers, Collectors, and other Officers of the publique Revenue; and adhaere to such as find fault with the publike Government; and thereby, when they have engaged themselves beyond hope of justification, fall also upon the Supreme Authority, for feare of punishment, or shame of receiving pardon.\n\nIgnorance of naturall causes disposeth a man to Credulity, so as to believe many times impossibilities: for such know nothing to the contrary, but that they may be true; being unable to detect the Impossibility. And Credulity, because men love to be hearkened unto in company, disposeth them to lying: so that Ignorance it selfe without Malice, is able to make a man bothe to believe lyes, and tell them; and sometimes also to invent them.\n\nAnxiety for the future time, disposeth men to enquire into the causes of things: because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able to order the present to their best advantage.\n\nCuriosity, or love of the knowledge of causes, draws a man from consideration of the effect, to seek the cause; and again, the cause of that cause; till of necessity he must come to this thought at last, that there is some cause, whereof there is no former cause, but is eternall; which is it men call God. So that it is impossible to make any profound enquiry into naturall causes, without being enclined thereby to believe there is one God Eternall; though they cannot have any Idea of him in their mind, answerable to his nature. For as a man that is born blind, hearing men talk of warming themselves by the fire, and being brought to warm himself by the same, may easily conceive, and assure himselfe, there is somewhat there, which men call Fire, and is the cause of the heat he feeles; but cannot imagine what it is like; nor have an Idea of it in his mind, such as they have that see it: so also, by the visible things of this world, and their admirable order, a man may conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God; and yet not have an Idea, or Image of him in his mind.\n\nAnd they that make little, or no enquiry into the naturall causes of things, yet from the feare that proceeds from the ignorance it selfe, of what it is that hath the power to do them much good or harm, are enclined to suppose, and feign unto themselves, severall kinds of Powers Invisible; and to stand in awe of their own imaginations; and in time of distresse to invoke them; as also in the time of an expected good successe, to give them thanks; making the creatures of their own fancy, their Gods. By which means it hath come to passe, that from the innumerable variety of Fancy, men have created in the world innumerable sorts of Gods. And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.\n\nAnd this seed of Religion, having been observed by many; some of those that have observed it, have been enclined thereby to nourish, dresse, and forme it into Lawes; and to adde to it of their own invention, any opinion of the causes of future events, by which they thought they should best be able to govern others, and make unto themselves the greatest use of their Powers.\n\nCHAPTER XII. OF RELIGION\n\n### Part I, Chapter XII, 1\n\nOF RELIGION\n\nSeeing there are no signes, nor fruit of Religion, but in Man onely; there is no cause to doubt, but that the seed of Religion, is also onely in Man; and consisteth in some peculiar quality, or at least in some eminent degree thereof, not to be found in other Living creatures.\n\nAnd first, it is peculiar to the nature of Man, to be inquisitive into the Causes of the Events they see, some more, some lesse; but all men so much, as to be curious in the search of the causes of their own good and evill fortune.\n\nSecondly, upon the sight of any thing that hath a Beginning, to think also it had a cause, which determined the same to begin, then when it did, rather than sooner or later.\n\nThirdly, whereas there is no other Felicity of Beasts, but the enjoying of their quotidian Food, Ease, and Lusts; as having little, or no foresight of the time to come, for want of observation, and memory of the order, consequence, and dependance of the things they see; Man observeth how one Event hath been produced by another; and remembreth in them Antecedence and Consequence; And when he cannot assure himselfe of the true causes of things, (for the causes of good and evill fortune for the most part are invisible,) he supposes causes of them, either such as his own fancy suggesteth; or trusteth to the Authority of other men, such as he thinks to be his friends, and wiser than himselfe.\n\nThe Naturall Cause Of Religion, The Anxiety Of The Time To Come The two first, make Anxiety. For being assured that there be causes of all things that have arrived hitherto, or shall arrive hereafter; it is impossible for a man, who continually endeavoureth to secure himselfe against the evill he feares, and procure the good he desireth, not to be in a perpetuall solicitude of the time to come; So that every man, especially those that are over provident, are in an estate like to that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus, (which interpreted, is, The Prudent Man,) was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where, an Eagle feeding on his liver, devoured in the day, as much as was repayred in the night: So that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.\n\nThis perpetuall feare, alwayes accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the Dark, must needs have for object something. And therefore when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good, or evill fortune, but some Power, or Agent Invisible: In which sense perhaps it was, that some of the old Poets said, that the Gods were at first created by humane Feare: which spoken of the Gods, (that is to say, of the many Gods of the Gentiles) is very true. But the acknowledging of one God Eternall, Infinite, and Omnipotent, may more easily be derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of naturall bodies, and their severall vertues, and operations; than from the feare of what was to befall them in time to come. For he that from any effect hee seeth come to passe, should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plonge himselfe profoundly in the pursuit of causes; shall at last come to this, that there must be (as even the Heathen Philosophers confessed) one First Mover; that is, a First, and an Eternall cause of all things; which is that which men mean by the name of God: And all this without thought of their fortune; the solicitude whereof, both enclines to fear, and hinders them from the search of the causes of other things; and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many Gods, as there be men that feigne them.\n\nAnd for the matter, or substance of the Invisible Agents, so fancyed; they could not by naturall cogitation, fall upon any other conceipt, but that it was the same with that of the Soule of man; and that the Soule of man, was of the same substance, with that which appeareth in a Dream, to one that sleepeth; or in a Looking-glasse, to one that is awake; which, men not knowing that such apparitions are nothing else but creatures of the Fancy, think to be reall, and externall Substances; and therefore call them Ghosts; as the Latines called them Imagines, and Umbrae; and thought them Spirits, that is, thin aereall bodies; and those Invisible Agents, which they feared, to bee like them; save that they appear, and vanish when they please. But the opinion that such Spirits were Incorporeall, or Immateriall, could never enter into the mind of any man by nature; because, though men may put together words of contradictory signification, as Spirit, and Incorporeall; yet they can never have the imagination of any thing answering to them: And therefore, men that by their own meditation, arrive to the acknowledgement of one Infinite, Omnipotent, and Eternall God, choose rather to confesse he is Incomprehensible, and above their understanding; than to define his Nature By Spirit Incorporeall, and then Confesse their definition to be unintelligible: or if they give him such a title, it is not Dogmatically, with intention to make the Divine Nature understood; but Piously, to honour him with attributes, of significations, as remote as they can from the grossenesse of Bodies Visible.\n\nThen, for the way by which they think these Invisible Agents wrought their effects; that is to say, what immediate causes they used, in bringing things to passe, men that know not what it is that we call Causing, (that is, almost all men) have no other rule to guesse by, but by observing, and remembring what they have seen to precede the like effect at some other time, or times before, without seeing between the antecedent and subsequent Event, any dependance or connexion at all: And therefore from the like things past, they expect the like things to come; and hope for good or evill luck, superstitiously, from things that have no part at all in the causing of it: As the Athenians did for their war at Lepanto, demand another Phormio; the Pompeian faction for their warre in Afrique, another Scipio; and others have done in divers other occasions since. In like manner they attribute their fortune to a stander by, to a lucky or unlucky place, to words spoken, especially if the name of God be amongst them; as Charming, and Conjuring (the Leiturgy of Witches;) insomuch as to believe, they have power to turn a stone into bread, bread into a man, or any thing, into any thing.\n\nThirdly, for the worship which naturally men exhibite to Powers invisible, it can be no other, but such expressions of their reverence, as they would use towards men; Gifts, Petitions, Thanks, Submission of Body, Considerate Addresses, sober Behaviour, premeditated Words, Swearing (that is, assuring one another of their promises,) by invoking them. Beyond that reason suggesteth nothing; but leaves them either to rest there; or for further ceremonies, to rely on those they believe to be wiser than themselves.\n\nLastly, concerning how these Invisible Powers declare to men the things which shall hereafter come to passe, especially concerning their good or evill fortune in generall, or good or ill successe in any particular undertaking, men are naturally at a stand; save that using to conjecture of the time to come, by the time past, they are very apt, not onely to take casuall things, after one or two encounters, for Prognostiques of the like encounter ever after, but also to believe the like Prognostiques from other men, of whom they have once conceived a good opinion.\n\nAnd in these foure things, Opinion of Ghosts, Ignorance of second causes, Devotion towards what men fear, and Taking of things Casuall for Prognostiques, consisteth the Naturall seed of Religion; which by reason of the different Fancies, Judgements, and Passions of severall men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.\n\nFor these seeds have received culture from two sorts of men. One sort have been they, that have nourished, and ordered them, according to their own invention. The other, have done it, by Gods commandement, and direction: but both sorts have done it, with a purpose to make those men that relyed on them, the more apt to Obedience, Lawes, Peace, Charity, and civill Society. So that the Religion of the former sort, is a part of humane Politiques; and teacheth part of the duty which Earthly Kings require of their Subjects. And the Religion of the later sort is Divine Politiques; and containeth Precepts to those that have yeelded themselves subjects in the Kingdome of God. Of the former sort, were all the Founders of Common-wealths, and the Law-givers of the Gentiles: Of the later sort, were Abraham, Moses, and our Blessed Saviour; by whom have been derived unto us the Lawes of the Kingdome of God.\n\nAnd for that part of Religion, which consisteth in opinions concerning the nature of Powers Invisible, there is almost nothing that has a name, that has not been esteemed amongst the Gentiles, in one place or another, a God, or Divell; or by their Poets feigned to be inanimated, inhabited, or possessed by some Spirit or other.\n\nThe unformed matter of the World, was a God, by the name of Chaos.\n\nThe Heaven, the Ocean, the Planets, the Fire, the Earth, the Winds, were so many Gods.\n\nMen, Women, a Bird, a Crocodile, a Calf, a Dogge, a Snake, an Onion, a Leeke, Deified. Besides, that they filled almost all places, with spirits called Daemons; the plains, with Pan, and Panises, or Satyres; the Woods, with Fawnes, and Nymphs; the Sea, with Tritons, and other Nymphs; every River, and Fountayn, with a Ghost of his name, and with Nymphs; every house, with it Lares, or Familiars; every man, with his Genius; Hell, with Ghosts, and spirituall Officers, as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and in the night time, all places with Larvae, Lemures, Ghosts of men deceased, and a whole kingdome of Fayries, and Bugbears. They have also ascribed Divinity, and built Temples to meer Accidents, and Qualities; such as are Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, Contention, Vertue, Honour, Health, Rust, Fever, and the like; which when they prayed for, or against, they prayed to, as if there were Ghosts of those names hanging over their heads, and letting fall, or withholding that Good, or Evill, for, or against which they prayed. They invoked also their own Wit, by the name of Muses; their own Ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own Lust, by the name of Cupid; their own Rage, by the name Furies; their own privy members by the name of Priapus; and attributed their pollutions, to Incubi, and Succubae: insomuch as there was nothing, which a Poet could introduce as a person in his Poem, which they did not make either a God, or a Divel.\n\nThe same authors of the Religion of the Gentiles, observing the second ground for Religion, which is mens Ignorance of causes; and thereby their aptnesse to attribute their fortune to causes, on which there was no dependence at all apparent, took occasion to obtrude on their ignorance, in stead of second causes, a kind of second and ministeriall Gods; ascribing the cause of Foecundity, to Venus; the cause of Arts, to Apollo; of Subtilty and Craft, to Mercury; of Tempests and stormes, to Aeolus; and of other effects, to other Gods: insomuch as there was amongst the Heathen almost as great variety of Gods, as of businesse.\n\nAnd to the Worship, which naturally men conceived fit to bee used towards their Gods, namely Oblations, Prayers, Thanks, and the rest formerly named; the same Legislators of the Gentiles have added their Images, both in Picture, and Sculpture; that the more ignorant sort, (that is to say, the most part, or generality of the people,) thinking the Gods for whose representation they were made, were really included, and as it were housed within them, might so much the more stand in feare of them: And endowed them with lands, and houses, and officers, and revenues, set apart from all other humane uses; that is, consecrated, and made holy to those their Idols; as Caverns, Groves, Woods, Mountains, and whole Ilands; and have attributed to them, not onely the shapes, some of Men, some of Beasts, some of Monsters; but also the Faculties, and Passions of men and beasts; as Sense, Speech, Sex, Lust, Generation, (and this not onely by mixing one with another, to propagate the kind of Gods; but also by mixing with men, and women, to beget mongrill Gods, and but inmates of Heaven, as Bacchus, Hercules, and others;) besides, Anger, Revenge, and other passions of living creatures, and the actions proceeding from them, as Fraud, Theft, Adultery, Sodomie, and any vice that may be taken for an effect of Power, or a cause of Pleasure; and all such Vices, as amongst men are taken to be against Law, rather than against Honour.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XII, 2\n\nLastly, to the Prognostiques of time to come; which are naturally, but Conjectures upon the Experience of time past; and supernaturall, divine Revelation; the same authors of the Religion of the Gentiles, partly upon pretended Experience, partly upon pretended Revelation, have added innumerable other superstitious wayes of Divination; and made men believe they should find their fortunes, sometimes in the ambiguous or senslesse answers of the priests at Delphi, Delos, Ammon, and other famous Oracles; which answers, were made ambiguous by designe, to own the event both wayes; or absurd by the intoxicating vapour of the place, which is very frequent in sulphurous Cavernes: Sometimes in the leaves of the Sibills; of whose Prophecyes (like those perhaps of Nostradamus; for the fragments now extant seem to be the invention of later times) there were some books in reputation in the time of the Roman Republique: Sometimes in the insignificant Speeches of Mad-men, supposed to be possessed with a divine Spirit; which Possession they called Enthusiasme; and these kinds of foretelling events, were accounted Theomancy, or Prophecy; Sometimes in the aspect of the Starres at their Nativity; which was called Horoscopy, and esteemed a part of judiciary Astrology: Sometimes in their own hopes and feares, called Thumomancy, or Presage: Sometimes in the Prediction of Witches, that pretended conference with the dead; which is called Necromancy, Conjuring, and Witchcraft; and is but juggling and confederate knavery: Sometimes in the Casuall flight, or feeding of birds; called Augury: Sometimes in the Entrayles of a sacrificed beast; which was Aruspicina: Sometimes in Dreams: Sometimes in Croaking of Ravens, or chattering of Birds: Sometimes in the Lineaments of the face; which was called Metoposcopy; or by Palmistry in the lines of the hand; in casuall words, called Omina: Sometimes in Monsters, or unusuall accidents; as Ecclipses, Comets, rare Meteors, Earthquakes, Inundations, uncouth Births, and the like, which they called Portenta and Ostenta, because they thought them to portend, or foreshew some great Calamity to come; Sometimes, in meer Lottery, as Crosse and Pile; counting holes in a sive; dipping of Verses in Homer, and Virgil; and innumerable other such vaine conceipts. So easie are men to be drawn to believe any thing, from such men as have gotten credit with them; and can with gentlenesse, and dexterity, take hold of their fear, and ignorance.\n\nThe Designes Of The Authors Of The Religion Of The Heathen And therefore the first Founders, and Legislators of Common-wealths amongst the Gentiles, whose ends were only to keep the people in obedience, and peace, have in all places taken care; First, to imprint in their minds a beliefe, that those precepts which they gave concerning Religion, might not be thought to proceed from their own device, but from the dictates of some God, or other Spirit; or else that they themselves were of a higher nature than mere mortalls, that their Lawes might the more easily be received: So Numa Pompilius pretended to receive the Ceremonies he instituted amongst the Romans, from the Nymph Egeria: and the first King and founder of the Kingdome of Peru, pretended himselfe and his wife to be the children of the Sunne: and Mahomet, to set up his new Religion, pretended to have conferences with the Holy Ghost, in forme of a Dove. Secondly, they have had a care, to make it believed, that the same things were displeasing to the Gods, which were forbidden by the Lawes. Thirdly, to prescribe Ceremonies, Supplications, Sacrifices, and Festivalls, by which they were to believe, the anger of the Gods might be appeased; and that ill success in War, great contagions of Sicknesse, Earthquakes, and each mans private Misery, came from the Anger of the Gods; and their Anger from the Neglect of their Worship, or the forgetting, or mistaking some point of the Ceremonies required. And though amongst the antient Romans, men were not forbidden to deny, that which in the Poets is written of the paines, and pleasures after this life; which divers of great authority, and gravity in that state have in their Harangues openly derided; yet that beliefe was alwaies more cherished, than the contrary.\n\nAnd by these, and such other Institutions, they obtayned in order to their end, (which was the peace of the Commonwealth,) that the common people in their misfortunes, laying the fault on neglect, or errour in their Ceremonies, or on their own disobedience to the lawes, were the lesse apt to mutiny against their Governors. And being entertained with the pomp, and pastime of Festivalls, and publike Gomes, made in honour of the Gods, needed nothing else but bread, to keep them from discontent, murmuring, and commotion against the State. And therefore the Romans, that had conquered the greatest part of the then known World, made no scruple of tollerating any Religion whatsoever in the City of Rome it selfe; unlesse it had somthing in it, that could not consist with their Civill Government; nor do we read, that any Religion was there forbidden, but that of the Jewes; who (being the peculiar Kingdome of God) thought it unlawfull to acknowledge subjection to any mortall King or State whatsoever. And thus you see how the Religion of the Gentiles was a part of their Policy.\n\nThe True Religion, And The Lawes Of Gods Kingdome The Same But where God himselfe, by supernaturall Revelation, planted Religion; there he also made to himselfe a peculiar Kingdome; and gave Lawes, not only of behaviour towards himselfe; but also towards one another; and thereby in the Kingdome of God, the Policy, and lawes Civill, are a part of Religion; and therefore the distinction of Temporall, and Spirituall Domination, hath there no place. It is true, that God is King of all the Earth: Yet may he be King of a peculiar, and chosen Nation. For there is no more incongruity therein, than that he that hath the generall command of the whole Army, should have withall a peculiar Regiment, or Company of his own. God is King of all the Earth by his Power: but of his chosen people, he is King by Covenant. But to speake more largly of the Kingdome of God, both by Nature, and Covenant, I have in the following discourse assigned an other place.\n\nFrom the propagation of Religion, it is not hard to understand the causes of the resolution of the same into its first seeds, or principles; which are only an opinion of a Deity, and Powers invisible, and supernaturall; that can never be so abolished out of humane nature, but that new Religions may againe be made to spring out of them, by the culture of such men, as for such purpose are in reputation.\n\nFor seeing all formed Religion, is founded at first, upon the faith which a multitude hath in some one person, whom they believe not only to be a wise man, and to labour to procure their happiness, but also to be a holy man, to whom God himselfe vouchsafeth to declare his will supernaturally; It followeth necessarily, when they that have the Goverment of Religion, shall come to have either the wisedome of those men, their sincerity, or their love suspected; or that they shall be unable to shew any probable token of divine Revelation; that the Religion which they desire to uphold, must be suspected likewise; and (without the feare of the Civill Sword) contradicted and rejected.\n\nThat which taketh away the reputation of Wisedome, in him that formeth a Religion, or addeth to it when it is allready formed, is the enjoyning of a beliefe of contradictories: For both parts of a contradiction cannot possibly be true: and therefore to enjoyne the beliefe of them, is an argument of ignorance; which detects the Author in that; and discredits him in all things else he shall propound as from revelation supernaturall: which revelation a man may indeed have of many things above, but of nothing against naturall reason.\n\nThat which taketh away the reputation of Sincerity, is the doing, or saying of such things, as appeare to be signes, that what they require other men to believe, is not believed by themselves; all which doings, or sayings are therefore called Scandalous, because they be stumbling blocks, that make men to fall in the way of Religion: as Injustice, Cruelty, Prophanesse, Avarice, and Luxury. For who can believe, that he that doth ordinarily such actions, as proceed from any of these rootes, believeth there is any such Invisible Power to be feared, as he affrighteth other men withall, for lesser faults?\n\nThat which taketh away the reputation of Love, is the being detected of private ends: as when the beliefe they require of others, conduceth or seemeth to conduce to the acquiring of Dominion, Riches, Dignity, or secure Pleasure, to themselves onely, or specially. For that which men reap benefit by to themselves, they are thought to do for their own sakes, and not for love of others\n\nLastly, the testimony that men can render of divine Calling, can be no other, than the operation of Miracles; or true Prophecy, (which also is a Miracle;) or extraordinary Felicity. And therefore, to those points of Religion, which have been received from them that did such Miracles; those that are added by such, as approve not their Calling by some Miracle, obtain no greater beliefe, than what the Custome, and Lawes of the places, in which they be educated, have wrought into them. For as in naturall things, men of judgement require naturall signes, and arguments; so in supernaturall things, they require signes supernaturall, (which are Miracles,) before they consent inwardly, and from their hearts.\n\nAll which causes of the weakening of mens faith, do manifestly appear in the Examples following. First, we have the Example of the children of Israel; who when Moses, that had approved his Calling to them by Miracles, and by the happy conduct of them out of Egypt, was absent but 40 dayes, revolted from the worship of the true God, recommended to them by him; and setting up (Exod.32 1,2) a Golden Calfe for their God, relapsed into the Idolatry of the Egyptians; from whom they had been so lately delivered. And again, after Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and that generation which had seen the great works of God in Israel, (Judges 2 11) were dead; another generation arose, and served Baal. So that Miracles fayling, Faith also failed.\n\nAgain, when the sons of Samuel, (1 Sam.8.3) being constituted by their father Judges in Bersabee, received bribes, and judged unjustly, the people of Israel refused any more to have God to be their King, in other manner than he was King of other people; and therefore cryed out to Samuel, to choose them a King after the manner of the Nations. So that Justice Fayling, Faith also fayled: Insomuch, as they deposed their God, from reigning over them.\n\nAnd whereas in the planting of Christian Religion, the Oracles ceased in all parts of the Roman Empire, and the number of Christians encreased wonderfully every day, and in every place, by the preaching of the Apostles, and Evangelists; a great part of that successe, may reasonably be attributed, to the contempt, into which the Priests of the Gentiles of that time, had brought themselves, by their uncleannesse, avarice, and jugling between Princes. Also the Religion of the Church of Rome, was partly, for the same cause abolished in England, and many other parts of Christendome; insomuch, as the fayling of Vertue in the Pastors, maketh Faith faile in the People: and partly from bringing of the Philosophy, and doctrine of Aristotle into Religion, by the Schoole-men; from whence there arose so many contradictions, and absurdities, as brought the Clergy into a reputation both of Ignorance, and of Fraudulent intention; and enclined people to revolt from them, either against the will of their own Princes, as in France, and Holland; or with their will, as in England.\n\nLastly, amongst the points by the Church of Rome declared necessary for Salvation, there be so many, manifestly to the advantage of the Pope, and of his spirituall subjects, residing in the territories of other Christian Princes, that were it not for the mutuall emulation of those Princes, they might without warre, or trouble, exclude all forraign Authority, as easily as it has been excluded in England. For who is there that does not see, to whose benefit it conduceth, to have it believed, that a King hath not his Authority from Christ, unlesse a Bishop crown him? That a King, if he be a Priest, cannot Marry? That whether a Prince be born in lawfull Marriage, or not, must be judged by Authority from Rome? That Subjects may be freed from their Alleageance, if by the Court of Rome, the King be judged an Heretique? That a King (as Chilperique of France) may be deposed by a Pope (as Pope Zachary,) for no cause; and his Kingdome given to one of his Subjects? That the Clergy, and Regulars, in what Country soever, shall be exempt from the Jurisdiction of their King, in cases criminall? Or who does not see, to whose profit redound the Fees of private Masses, and Vales of Purgatory; with other signes of private interest, enough to mortifie the most lively Faith, if (as I sayd) the civill Magistrate, and Custome did not more sustain it, than any opinion they have of the Sanctity, Wisdome, or Probity of their Teachers? So that I may attribute all the changes of Religion in the world, to one and the some cause; and that is, unpleasing Priests; and those not onely amongst Catholiques, but even in that Church that hath presumed most of Reformation.\n\nCHAPTER XIII. OF THE NATURALL CONDITION OF MANKIND, AS CONCERNING THEIR FELICITY, AND MISERY\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIII\n\nOF THE NATURALL CONDITION OF MANKIND, AS CONCERNING THEIR FELICITY, AND MISERY\n\nNature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.\n\nAnd as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.\n\nFrom this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other. And from hence it comes to passe, that where an Invader hath no more to feare, than an other mans single power; if one plant, sow, build, or possesse a convenient Seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispossesse, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty. And the Invader again is in the like danger of another.\n\nAnd from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himselfe, so reasonable, as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: And this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over men, being necessary to a mans conservation, it ought to be allowed him.\n\nAgaine, men have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all. For every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he sets upon himselfe: And upon all signes of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as he dares (which amongst them that have no common power, to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other,) to extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommage; and from others, by the example.\n\nSo that in the nature of man, we find three principall causes of quarrel. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.\n\nThe first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. The first use Violence, to make themselves Masters of other mens persons, wives, children, and cattell; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflexion in their Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name.\n\nHereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man. For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.\n\nWhatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.\n\nIt may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there bee Lawes, and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse mans nature in it. The Desires, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin. No more are the Actions, that proceed from those Passions, till they know a Law that forbids them; which till Lawes be made they cannot know: nor can any Law be made, till they have agreed upon the Person that shall make it.\n\nIt may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare; by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, in a civill Warre.\n\nBut though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against another; yet in all times, Kings, and persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War. But because they uphold thereby, the Industry of their Subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the Liberty of particular men.\n\nTo this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities, that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the Passions, partly in his Reason.\n\nThe Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them. And Reason suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement. These Articles, are they, which otherwise are called the Lawes of Nature: whereof I shall speak more particularly, in the two following Chapters.\n\nCHAPTER XIV. OF THE FIRST AND SECOND NATURALL LAWES, AND OF CONTRACTS\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIV, 1\n\nOF THE FIRST AND SECOND NATURALL LAWES, AND OF CONTRACTS\n\nThe RIGHT OF NATURE, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, hee shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.\n\nBy LIBERTY, is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of externall Impediments: which Impediments, may oft take away part of a mans power to do what hee would; but cannot hinder him from using the power left him, according as his judgement, and reason shall dictate to him.\n\nA LAW OF NATURE, (Lex Naturalis,) is a Precept, or generall Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved. For though they that speak of this subject, use to confound Jus, and Lex, Right and Law; yet they ought to be distinguished; because RIGHT, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbeare; Whereas LAW, determineth, and bindeth to one of them: so that Law, and Right, differ as much, as Obligation, and Liberty; which in one and the same matter are inconsistent.\n\nAnd because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against every one; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body. And therefore, as long as this naturall Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, (how strong or wise soever he be,) of living out the time, which Nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.\n\nAnd consequently it is a precept, or generall rule of Reason, “That every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of Warre.” The first branch, of which Rule, containeth the first, and Fundamentall Law of Nature; which is, “To seek Peace, and follow it.” The Second, the summe of the Right of Nature; which is, “By all means we can, to defend our selves.”\n\nFrom this Fundamentall Law of Nature, by which men are commanded to endeavour Peace, is derived this second Law; “That a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himselfe he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himselfe.” For as long as every man holdeth this Right, of doing any thing he liketh; so long are all men in the condition of Warre. But if other men will not lay down their Right, as well as he; then there is no Reason for any one, to devest himselfe of his: For that were to expose himselfe to Prey, (which no man is bound to) rather than to dispose himselfe to Peace. This is that Law of the Gospell; “Whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them.” And that Law of all men, “Quod tibi feiri non vis, alteri ne feceris.”\n\nTo Lay Downe a mans Right to any thing, is to Devest himselfe of the Liberty, of hindring another of the benefit of his own Right to the same. For he that renounceth, or passeth away his Right, giveth not to any other man a Right which he had not before; because there is nothing to which every man had not Right by Nature: but onely standeth out of his way, that he may enjoy his own originall Right, without hindrance from him; not without hindrance from another. So that the effect which redoundeth to one man, by another mans defect of Right, is but so much diminution of impediments to the use of his own Right originall.\n\nRight is layd aside, either by simply Renouncing it; or by Transferring it to another. By Simply RENOUNCING; when he cares not to whom the benefit thereof redoundeth. By TRANSFERRING; when he intendeth the benefit thereof to some certain person, or persons. And when a man hath in either manner abandoned, or granted away his Right; then is he said to be OBLIGED, or BOUND, not to hinder those, to whom such Right is granted, or abandoned, from the benefit of it: and that he Ought, and it his DUTY, not to make voyd that voluntary act of his own: and that such hindrance is INJUSTICE, and INJURY, as being Sine Jure; the Right being before renounced, or transferred. So that Injury, or Injustice, in the controversies of the world, is somewhat like to that, which in the disputations of Scholers is called Absurdity. For as it is there called an Absurdity, to contradict what one maintained in the Beginning: so in the world, it is called Injustice, and Injury, voluntarily to undo that, which from the beginning he had voluntarily done. The way by which a man either simply Renounceth, or Transferreth his Right, is a Declaration, or Signification, by some voluntary and sufficient signe, or signes, that he doth so Renounce, or Transferre; or hath so Renounced, or Transferred the same, to him that accepteth it. And these Signes are either Words onely, or Actions onely; or (as it happeneth most often) both Words and Actions. And the same are the BONDS, by which men are bound, and obliged: Bonds, that have their strength, not from their own Nature, (for nothing is more easily broken then a mans word,) but from Feare of some evill consequence upon the rupture.\n\nWhensoever a man Transferreth his Right, or Renounceth it; it is either in consideration of some Right reciprocally transferred to himselfe; or for some other good he hopeth for thereby. For it is a voluntary act: and of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some Good To Himselfe. And therefore there be some Rights, which no man can be understood by any words, or other signes, to have abandoned, or transferred. As first a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to ayme thereby, at any Good to himselfe. The same may be sayd of Wounds, and Chayns, and Imprisonment; both because there is no benefit consequent to such patience; as there is to the patience of suffering another to be wounded, or imprisoned: as also because a man cannot tell, when he seeth men proceed against him by violence, whether they intend his death or not. And lastly the motive, and end for which this renouncing, and transferring or Right is introduced, is nothing else but the security of a mans person, in his life, and in the means of so preserving life, as not to be weary of it. And therefore if a man by words, or other signes, seem to despoyle himselfe of the End, for which those signes were intended; he is not to be understood as if he meant it, or that it was his will; but that he was ignorant of how such words and actions were to be interpreted.\n\nThe mutuall transferring of Right, is that which men call CONTRACT.\n\nThere is difference, between transferring of Right to the Thing; and transferring, or tradition, that is, delivery of the Thing it selfe. For the Thing may be delivered together with the Translation of the Right; as in buying and selling with ready mony; or exchange of goods, or lands: and it may be delivered some time after.\n\nAgain, one of the Contractors, may deliver the Thing contracted for on his part, and leave the other to perform his part at some determinate time after, and in the mean time be trusted; and then the Contract on his part, is called PACT, or COVENANT: Or both parts may contract now, to performe hereafter: in which cases, he that is to performe in time to come, being trusted, his performance is called Keeping Of Promise, or Faith; and the fayling of performance (if it be voluntary) Violation Of Faith.\n\nWhen the transferring of Right, is not mutuall; but one of the parties transferreth, in hope to gain thereby friendship, or service from another, or from his friends; or in hope to gain the reputation of Charity, or Magnanimity; or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion; or in hope of reward in heaven; This is not Contract, but GIFT, FREEGIFT, GRACE: which words signifie one and the same thing.\n\nSignes of Contract, are either Expresse, or By Inference. Expresse, are words spoken with understanding of what they signifie; And such words are either of the time Present, or Past; as, I Give, I Grant, I Have Given, I Have Granted, I Will That This Be Yours: Or of the future; as, I Will Give, I Will Grant; which words of the future, are called Promise.\n\nSignes by Inference, are sometimes the consequence of Words; sometimes the consequence of Silence; sometimes the consequence of Actions; sometimes the consequence of Forbearing an Action: and generally a signe by Inference, of any Contract, is whatsoever sufficiently argues the will of the Contractor.\n\nWords alone, if they be of the time to come, and contain a bare promise, are an insufficient signe of a Free-gift and therefore not obligatory. For if they be of the time to Come, as, To Morrow I Will Give, they are a signe I have not given yet, and consequently that my right is not transferred, but remaineth till I transferre it by some other Act. But if the words be of the time Present, or Past, as, “I have given, or do give to be delivered to morrow,” then is my to morrows Right given away to day; and that by the vertue of the words, though there were no other argument of my will. And there is a great difference in the signification of these words, Volos Hoc Tuum Esse Cras, and Cros Dabo; that is between “I will that this be thine to morrow,” and, “I will give it to thee to morrow:” For the word I Will, in the former manner of speech, signifies an act of the will Present; but in the later, it signifies a promise of an act of the will to Come: and therefore the former words, being of the Present, transferre a future right; the later, that be of the Future, transferre nothing. But if there be other signes of the Will to transferre a Right, besides Words; then, though the gift be Free, yet may the Right be understood to passe by words of the future: as if a man propound a Prize to him that comes first to the end of a race, The gift is Free; and though the words be of the Future, yet the Right passeth: for if he would not have his words so be understood, he should not have let them runne.\n\nSignes Of Contract Are Words Both Of The Past, Present, and Future In Contracts, the right passeth, not onely where the words are of the time Present, or Past; but also where they are of the Future; because all Contract is mutuall translation, or change of Right; and therefore he that promiseth onely, because he hath already received the benefit for which he promiseth, is to be understood as if he intended the Right should passe: for unlesse he had been content to have his words so understood, the other would not have performed his part first. And for that cause, in buying, and selling, and other acts of Contract, A Promise is equivalent to a Covenant; and therefore obligatory.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIV, 2\n\nHe that performeth first in the case of a Contract, is said to MERIT that which he is to receive by the performance of the other; and he hath it as Due. Also when a Prize is propounded to many, which is to be given to him onely that winneth; or mony is thrown amongst many, to be enjoyed by them that catch it; though this be a Free Gift; yet so to Win, or so to Catch, is to Merit, and to have it as DUE. For the Right is transferred in the Propounding of the Prize, and in throwing down the mony; though it be not determined to whom, but by the Event of the contention. But there is between these two sorts of Merit, this difference, that In Contract, I Merit by vertue of my own power, and the Contractors need; but in this case of Free Gift, I am enabled to Merit onely by the benignity of the Giver; In Contract, I merit at The Contractors hand that hee should depart with his right; In this case of gift, I Merit not that the giver should part with his right; but that when he has parted with it, it should be mine, rather than anothers. And this I think to be the meaning of that distinction of the Schooles, between Meritum Congrui, and Meritum Condigni. For God Almighty, having promised Paradise to those men (hoodwinkt with carnall desires,) that can walk through this world according to the Precepts, and Limits prescribed by him; they say, he that shall so walk, shall Merit Paradise Ex Congruo. But because no man can demand a right to it, by his own Righteousnesse, or any other power in himselfe, but by the Free Grace of God onely; they say, no man can Merit Paradise Ex Condigno. This I say, I think is the meaning of that distinction; but because Disputers do not agree upon the signification of their own termes of Art, longer than it serves their turn; I will not affirme any thing of their meaning: onely this I say; when a gift is given indefinitely, as a prize to be contended for, he that winneth Meriteth, and may claime the Prize as Due.\n\nIf a Covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties performe presently, but trust one another; in the condition of meer Nature, (which is a condition of Warre of every man against every man,) upon any reasonable suspition, it is Voyd; But if there be a common Power set over them bothe, with right and force sufficient to compell performance; it is not Voyd. For he that performeth first, has no assurance the other will performe after; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle mens ambition, avarice, anger, and other Passions, without the feare of some coerceive Power; which in the condition of meer Nature, where all men are equall, and judges of the justnesse of their own fears cannot possibly be supposed. And therefore he which performeth first, does but betray himselfe to his enemy; contrary to the Right (he can never abandon) of defending his life, and means of living.\n\nBut in a civill estate, where there is a Power set up to constrain those that would otherwise violate their faith, that feare is no more reasonable; and for that cause, he which by the Covenant is to perform first, is obliged so to do.\n\nThe cause of Feare, which maketh such a Covenant invalid, must be alwayes something arising after the Covenant made; as some new fact, or other signe of the Will not to performe; else it cannot make the Covenant Voyd. For that which could not hinder a man from promising, ought not to be admitted as a hindrance of performing.\n\nHe that transferreth any Right, transferreth the Means of enjoying it, as farre as lyeth in his power. As he that selleth Land, is understood to transferre the Herbage, and whatsoever growes upon it; Nor can he that sells a Mill turn away the Stream that drives it. And they that give to a man The Right of government in Soveraignty, are understood to give him the right of levying mony to maintain Souldiers; and of appointing Magistrates for the administration of Justice.\n\nTo make Covenant with bruit Beasts, is impossible; because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of Right; nor can translate any Right to another; and without mutuall acceptation, there is no Covenant.\n\nTo make Covenant with God, is impossible, but by Mediation of such as God speaketh to, either by Revelation supernaturall, or by his Lieutenants that govern under him, and in his Name; For otherwise we know not whether our Covenants be accepted, or not. And therefore they that Vow any thing contrary to any law of Nature, Vow in vain; as being a thing unjust to pay such Vow. And if it be a thing commanded by the Law of Nature, it is not the Vow, but the Law that binds them.\n\nThe matter, or subject of a Covenant, is alwayes something that falleth under deliberation; (For to Covenant, is an act of the Will; that is to say an act, and the last act, of deliberation;) and is therefore alwayes understood to be something to come; and which is judged Possible for him that Covenanteth, to performe.\n\nAnd therefore, to promise that which is known to be Impossible, is no Covenant. But if that prove impossible afterwards, which before was thought possible, the Covenant is valid, and bindeth, (though not to the thing it selfe,) yet to the value; or, if that also be impossible, to the unfeigned endeavour of performing as much as is possible; for to more no man can be obliged.\n\nMen are freed of their Covenants two wayes; by Performing; or by being Forgiven. For Performance, is the naturall end of obligation; and Forgivenesse, the restitution of liberty; as being a retransferring of that Right, in which the obligation consisted.\n\nCovenants entred into by fear, in the condition of meer Nature, are obligatory. For example, if I Covenant to pay a ransome, or service for my life, to an enemy; I am bound by it. For it is a Contract, wherein one receiveth the benefit of life; the other is to receive mony, or service for it; and consequently, where no other Law (as in the condition, of meer Nature) forbiddeth the performance, the Covenant is valid. Therefore Prisoners of warre, if trusted with the payment of their Ransome, are obliged to pay it; And if a weaker Prince, make a disadvantageous peace with a stronger, for feare; he is bound to keep it; unlesse (as hath been sayd before) there ariseth some new, and just cause of feare, to renew the war. And even in Common-wealths, if I be forced to redeem my selfe from a Theefe by promising him mony, I am bound to pay it, till the Civill Law discharge me. For whatsoever I may lawfully do without Obligation, the same I may lawfully Covenant to do through feare: and what I lawfully Covenant, I cannot lawfully break.\n\nA former Covenant, makes voyd a later. For a man that hath passed away his Right to one man to day, hath it not to passe to morrow to another: and therefore the later promise passeth no Right, but is null.\n\nA Covenant not to defend my selfe from force, by force, is alwayes voyd. For (as I have shewed before) no man can transferre, or lay down his Right to save himselfe from Death, Wounds, and Imprisonment, (the avoyding whereof is the onely End of laying down any Right,) and therefore the promise of not resisting force, in no Covenant transferreth any right; nor is obliging. For though a man may Covenant thus, “Unlesse I do so, or so, kill me;” he cannot Covenant thus “Unless I do so, or so, I will not resist you, when you come to kill me.” For man by nature chooseth the lesser evill, which is danger of death in resisting; rather than the greater, which is certain and present death in not resisting. And this is granted to be true by all men, in that they lead Criminals to Execution, and Prison, with armed men, notwithstanding that such Criminals have consented to the Law, by which they are condemned.\n\nA Covenant to accuse ones Selfe, without assurance of pardon, is likewise invalide. For in the condition of Nature, where every man is Judge, there is no place for Accusation: and in the Civill State, the Accusation is followed with Punishment; which being Force, a man is not obliged not to resist. The same is also true, of the Accusation of those, by whose Condemnation a man falls into misery; as of a Father, Wife, or Benefactor. For the Testimony of such an Accuser, if it be not willingly given, is praesumed to be corrupted by Nature; and therefore not to be received: and where a mans Testimony is not to be credited, his not bound to give it. Also Accusations upon Torture, are not to be reputed as Testimonies. For Torture is to be used but as means of conjecture, and light, in the further examination, and search of truth; and what is in that case confessed, tendeth to the ease of him that is Tortured; not to the informing of the Torturers: and therefore ought not to have the credit of a sufficient Testimony: for whether he deliver himselfe by true, or false Accusation, he does it by the Right of preserving his own life.\n\nThe force of Words, being (as I have formerly noted) too weak to hold men to the performance of their Covenants; there are in mans nature, but two imaginable helps to strengthen it. And those are either a Feare of the consequence of breaking their word; or a Glory, or Pride in appearing not to need to breake it. This later is a Generosity too rarely found to be presumed on, especially in the pursuers of Wealth, Command, or sensuall Pleasure; which are the greatest part of Mankind. The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear; whereof there be two very generall Objects: one, the Power of Spirits Invisible; the other, the Power of those men they shall therein Offend. Of these two, though the former be the greater Power, yet the feare of the later is commonly the greater Feare. The Feare of the former is in every man, his own Religion: which hath place in the nature of man before Civill Society. The later hath not so; at least not place enough, to keep men to their promises; because in the condition of meer Nature, the inequality of Power is not discerned, but by the event of Battell. So that before the time of Civill Society, or in the interruption thereof by Warre, there is nothing can strengthen a Covenant of Peace agreed on, against the temptations of Avarice, Ambition, Lust, or other strong desire, but the feare of that Invisible Power, which they every one Worship as God; and Feare as a Revenger of their perfidy. All therefore that can be done between two men not subject to Civill Power, is to put one another to swear by the God he feareth: Which Swearing or OATH, is a Forme Of Speech, Added To A Promise; By Which He That Promiseth, Signifieth, That Unlesse He Performe, He Renounceth The Mercy Of His God, Or Calleth To Him For Vengeance On Himselfe. Such was the Heathen Forme, “Let Jupiter kill me else, as I kill this Beast.” So is our Forme, “I shall do thus, and thus, so help me God.” And this, with the Rites and Ceremonies, which every one useth in his own Religion, that the feare of breaking faith might be the greater.\n\nBy this it appears, that an Oath taken according to any other Forme, or Rite, then his, that sweareth, is in vain; and no Oath: And there is no Swearing by any thing which the Swearer thinks not God. For though men have sometimes used to swear by their Kings, for feare, or flattery; yet they would have it thereby understood, they attributed to them Divine honour. And that Swearing unnecessarily by God, is but prophaning of his name: and Swearing by other things, as men do in common discourse, is not Swearing, but an impious Custome, gotten by too much vehemence of talking.\n\nIt appears also, that the Oath addes nothing to the Obligation. For a Covenant, if lawfull, binds in the sight of God, without the Oath, as much as with it; if unlawfull, bindeth not at all; though it be confirmed with an Oath.\n\nCHAPTER XV. OF OTHER LAWES OF NATURE\n\n### Part I, Chapter XV, 1\n\nOF OTHER LAWES OF NATURE\n\nFrom that law of Nature, by which we are obliged to transferre to another, such Rights, as being retained, hinder the peace of Mankind, there followeth a Third; which is this, That Men Performe Their Covenants Made: without which, Covenants are in vain, and but Empty words; and the Right of all men to all things remaining, wee are still in the condition of Warre.\n\nAnd in this law of Nature, consisteth the Fountain and Originall of JUSTICE. For where no Covenant hath preceded, there hath no Right been transferred, and every man has right to every thing; and consequently, no action can be Unjust. But when a Covenant is made, then to break it is Unjust: And the definition of INJUSTICE, is no other than The Not Performance Of Covenant. And whatsoever is not Unjust, is Just.\n\nJustice And Propriety Begin With The Constitution of Common-wealth But because Covenants of mutuall trust, where there is a feare of not performance on either part, (as hath been said in the former Chapter,) are invalid; though the Originall of Justice be the making of Covenants; yet Injustice actually there can be none, till the cause of such feare be taken away; which while men are in the naturall condition of Warre, cannot be done. Therefore before the names of Just, and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power, to compell men equally to the performance of their Covenants, by the terrour of some punishment, greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their Covenant; and to make good that Propriety, which by mutuall Contract men acquire, in recompence of the universall Right they abandon: and such power there is none before the erection of a Common-wealth. And this is also to be gathered out of the ordinary definition of Justice in the Schooles: For they say, that “Justice is the constant Will of giving to every man his own.” And therefore where there is no Own, that is, no Propriety, there is no Injustice; and where there is no coerceive Power erected, that is, where there is no Common-wealth, there is no Propriety; all men having Right to all things: Therefore where there is no Common-wealth, there nothing is Unjust. So that the nature of Justice, consisteth in keeping of valid Covenants: but the Validity of Covenants begins not but with the Constitution of a Civill Power, sufficient to compell men to keep them: And then it is also that Propriety begins.\n\nThe Foole hath sayd in his heart, there is no such thing as Justice; and sometimes also with his tongue; seriously alleaging, that every mans conservation, and contentment, being committed to his own care, there could be no reason, why every man might not do what he thought conduced thereunto; and therefore also to make, or not make; keep, or not keep Covenants, was not against Reason, when it conduced to ones benefit. He does not therein deny, that there be Covenants; and that they are sometimes broken, sometimes kept; and that such breach of them may be called Injustice, and the observance of them Justice: but he questioneth, whether Injustice, taking away the feare of God, (for the same Foole hath said in his heart there is no God,) may not sometimes stand with that Reason, which dictateth to every man his own good; and particularly then, when it conduceth to such a benefit, as shall put a man in a condition, to neglect not onely the dispraise, and revilings, but also the power of other men. The Kingdome of God is gotten by violence; but what if it could be gotten by unjust violence? were it against Reason so to get it, when it is impossible to receive hurt by it? and if it be not against Reason, it is not against Justice; or else Justice is not to be approved for good. From such reasoning as this, Succesfull wickednesse hath obtained the Name of Vertue; and some that in all other things have disallowed the violation of Faith; yet have allowed it, when it is for the getting of a Kingdome. And the Heathen that believed, that Saturn was deposed by his son Jupiter, believed neverthelesse the same Jupiter to be the avenger of Injustice: Somewhat like to a piece of Law in Cokes Commentaries on Litleton; where he sayes, If the right Heire of the Crown be attainted of Treason; yet the Crown shall descend to him, and Eo Instante the Atteynder be voyd; From which instances a man will be very prone to inferre; that when the Heire apparent of a Kingdome, shall kill him that is in possession, though his father; you may call it Injustice, or by what other name you will; yet it can never be against Reason, seeing all the voluntary actions of men tend to the benefit of themselves; and those actions are most Reasonable, that conduce most to their ends. This specious reasoning is nevertheless false.\n\nFor the question is not of promises mutuall, where there is no security of performance on either side; as when there is no Civill Power erected over the parties promising; for such promises are no Covenants: But either where one of the parties has performed already; or where there is a Power to make him performe; there is the question whether it be against reason, that is, against the benefit of the other to performe, or not. And I say it is not against reason. For the manifestation whereof, we are to consider; First, that when a man doth a thing, which notwithstanding any thing can be foreseen, and reckoned on, tendeth to his own destruction, howsoever some accident which he could not expect, arriving may turne it to his benefit; yet such events do not make it reasonably or wisely done. Secondly, that in a condition of Warre, wherein every man to every man, for want of a common Power to keep them all in awe, is an Enemy, there is no man can hope by his own strength, or wit, to defend himselfe from destruction, without the help of Confederates; where every one expects the same defence by the Confederation, that any one else does: and therefore he which declares he thinks it reason to deceive those that help him, can in reason expect no other means of safety, than what can be had from his own single Power. He therefore that breaketh his Covenant, and consequently declareth that he thinks he may with reason do so, cannot be received into any Society, that unite themselves for Peace and defence, but by the errour of them that receive him; nor when he is received, be retayned in it, without seeing the danger of their errour; which errours a man cannot reasonably reckon upon as the means of his security; and therefore if he be left, or cast out of Society, he perisheth; and if he live in Society, it is by the errours of other men, which he could not foresee, nor reckon upon; and consequently against the reason of his preservation; and so, as all men that contribute not to his destruction, forbear him onely out of ignorance of what is good for themselves.\n\nAs for the Instance of gaining the secure and perpetuall felicity of Heaven, by any way; it is frivolous: there being but one way imaginable; and that is not breaking, but keeping of Covenant.\n\nAnd for the other Instance of attaining Soveraignty by Rebellion; it is manifest, that though the event follow, yet because it cannot reasonably be expected, but rather the contrary; and because by gaining it so, others are taught to gain the same in like manner, the attempt thereof is against reason. Justice therefore, that is to say, Keeping of Covenant, is a Rule of Reason, by which we are forbidden to do any thing destructive to our life; and consequently a Law of Nature.\n\nThere be some that proceed further; and will not have the Law of Nature, to be those Rules which conduce to the preservation of mans life on earth; but to the attaining of an eternall felicity after death; to which they think the breach of Covenant may conduce; and consequently be just and reasonable; (such are they that think it a work of merit to kill, or depose, or rebell against, the Soveraigne Power constituted over them by their own consent.) But because there is no naturall knowledge of mans estate after death; much lesse of the reward that is then to be given to breach of Faith; but onely a beliefe grounded upon other mens saying, that they know it supernaturally, or that they know those, that knew them, that knew others, that knew it supernaturally; Breach of Faith cannot be called a Precept of Reason, or Nature.\n\nOthers, that allow for a Law of Nature, the keeping of Faith, do neverthelesse make exception of certain persons; as Heretiques, and such as use not to performe their Covenant to others: And this also is against reason. For if any fault of a man, be sufficient to discharge our Covenant made; the same ought in reason to have been sufficient to have hindred the making of it.\n\nThe names of Just, and Unjust, when they are attributed to Men, signifie one thing; and when they are attributed to Actions, another. When they are attributed to Men, they signifie Conformity, or Inconformity of Manners, to Reason. But when they are attributed to Actions, they signifie the Conformity, or Inconformity to Reason, not of Manners, or manner of life, but of particular Actions. A Just man therefore, is he that taketh all the care he can, that his Actions may be all Just: and an Unjust man, is he that neglecteth it. And such men are more often in our Language stiled by the names of Righteous, and Unrighteous; then Just, and Unjust; though the meaning be the same. Therefore a Righteous man, does not lose that Title, by one, or a few unjust Actions, that proceed from sudden Passion, or mistake of Things, or Persons: nor does an Unrighteous man, lose his character, for such Actions, as he does, of forbeares to do, for feare: because his Will is not framed by the Justice, but by the apparant benefit of what he is to do. That which gives to humane Actions the relish of Justice, is a certain Noblenesse or Gallantnesse of courage, (rarely found,) by which a man scorns to be beholding for the contentment of his life, to fraud, or breach of promise. This Justice of the Manners, is that which is meant, where Justice is called a Vertue; and Injustice a Vice.\n\nBut the Justice of Actions denominates men, not Just, but Guiltlesse; and the Injustice of the same, (which is also called Injury,) gives them but the name of Guilty.\n\nAgain, the Injustice of Manners, is the disposition, or aptitude to do Injurie; and is Injustice before it proceed to Act; and without supposing any individuall person injured. But the Injustice of an Action, (that is to say Injury,) supposeth an individuall person Injured; namely him, to whom the Covenant was made: And therefore many times the injury is received by one man, when the dammage redoundeth to another. As when The Master commandeth his servant to give mony to a stranger; if it be not done, the Injury is done to the Master, whom he had before Covenanted to obey; but the dammage redoundeth to the stranger, to whom he had no Obligation; and therefore could not Injure him. And so also in Common-wealths, private men may remit to one another their debts; but not robberies or other violences, whereby they are endammaged; because the detaining of Debt, is an Injury to themselves; but Robbery and Violence, are Injuries to the Person of the Common-wealth.\n\nWhatsoever is done to a man, conformable to his own Will signified to the doer, is no Injury to him. For if he that doeth it, hath not passed away his originall right to do what he please, by some Antecedent Covenant, there is no breach of Covenant; and therefore no Injury done him. And if he have; then his Will to have it done being signified, is a release of that Covenant; and so again there is no Injury done him.\n\nJustice of Actions, is by Writers divided into Commutative, and Distributive; and the former they say consisteth in proportion Arithmeticall; the later in proportion Geometricall. Commutative therefore, they place in the equality of value of the things contracted for; And Distributive, in the distribution of equall benefit, to men of equall merit. As if it were Injustice to sell dearer than we buy; or to give more to a man than he merits. The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give. And Merit (besides that which is by Covenant, where the performance on one part, meriteth the performance of the other part, and falls under Justice Commutative, not Distributive,) is not due by Justice; but is rewarded of Grace onely. And therefore this distinction, in the sense wherein it useth to be expounded, is not right. To speak properly, Commutative Justice, is the Justice of a Contractor; that is, a Performance of Covenant, in Buying, and Selling; Hiring, and Letting to Hire; Lending, and Borrowing; Exchanging, Bartering, and other acts of Contract.\n\nAnd Distributive Justice, the Justice of an Arbitrator; that is to say, the act of defining what is Just. Wherein, (being trusted by them that make him Arbitrator,) if he performe his Trust, he is said to distribute to every man his own: and his is indeed Just Distribution, and may be called (though improperly) Distributive Justice; but more properly Equity; which also is a Law of Nature, as shall be shewn in due place.\n\nAs Justice dependeth on Antecedent Covenant; so does Gratitude depend on Antecedent Grace; that is to say, Antecedent Free-gift: and is the fourth Law of Nature; which may be conceived in this Forme, “That a man which receiveth Benefit from another of meer Grace, Endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will.” For no man giveth, but with intention of Good to himselfe; because Gift is Voluntary; and of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good; of which if men see they shall be frustrated, there will be no beginning of benevolence, or trust; nor consequently of mutuall help; nor of reconciliation of one man to another; and therefore they are to remain still in the condition of War; which is contrary to the first and Fundamentall Law of Nature, which commandeth men to Seek Peace. The breach of this Law, is called Ingratitude; and hath the same relation to Grace, that Injustice hath to Obligation by Covenant.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XV, 2\n\nA fifth Law of Nature, is COMPLEASANCE; that is to say, “That every man strive to accommodate himselfe to the rest.” For the understanding whereof, we may consider, that there is in mens aptnesse to Society; a diversity of Nature, rising from their diversity of Affections; not unlike to that we see in stones brought together for building of an Aedifice. For as that stone which by the asperity, and irregularity of Figure, takes more room from others, than it selfe fills; and for the hardnesse, cannot be easily made plain, and thereby hindereth the building, is by the builders cast away as unprofitable, and troublesome: so also, a man that by asperity of Nature, will strive to retain those things which to himselfe are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his Passions, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of Society, as combersome thereunto. For seeing every man, not onely by Right, but also by necessity of Nature, is supposed to endeavour all he can, to obtain that which is necessary for his conservation; He that shall oppose himselfe against it, for things superfluous, is guilty of the warre that thereupon is to follow; and therefore doth that, which is contrary to the fundamentall Law of Nature, which commandeth To Seek Peace. The observers of this Law, may be called SOCIABLE, (the Latines call them Commodi;) The contrary, Stubborn, Insociable, Froward, Intractable.\n\nA sixth Law of Nature is this, “That upon caution of the Future time, a man ought to pardon the offences past of them that repenting, desire it.” For PARDON, is nothing but granting of Peace; which though granted to them that persevere in their hostility, be not Peace, but Feare; yet not granted to them that give caution of the Future time, is signe of an aversion to Peace; and therefore contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nA seventh is, “That in Revenges, (that is, retribution of evil for evil,) Men look not at the greatnesse of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow.” Whereby we are forbidden to inflict punishment with any other designe, than for correction of the offender, or direction of others. For this Law is consequent to the next before it, that commandeth Pardon, upon security of the Future Time. Besides, Revenge without respect to the Example, and profit to come, is a triumph, or glorying in the hurt of another, tending to no end; (for the End is alwayes somewhat to Come;) and glorying to no end, is vain-glory, and contrary to reason; and to hurt without reason, tendeth to the introduction of Warre; which is against the Law of Nature; and is commonly stiled by the name of Cruelty.\n\nAnd because all signes of hatred, or contempt, provoke to fight; insomuch as most men choose rather to hazard their life, than not to be revenged; we may in the eighth place, for a Law of Nature set down this Precept, “That no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture, declare Hatred, or Contempt of another.” The breach of which Law, is commonly called Contumely.\n\nThe question who is the better man, has no place in the condition of meer Nature; where, (as has been shewn before,) all men are equall. The inequallity that now is, has been introduced by the Lawes civill. I know that Aristotle in the first booke of his Politiques, for a foundation of his doctrine, maketh men by Nature, some more worthy to Command, meaning the wiser sort (such as he thought himselfe to be for his Philosophy;) others to Serve, (meaning those that had strong bodies, but were not Philosophers as he;) as if Master and Servant were not introduced by consent of men, but by difference of Wit; which is not only against reason; but also against experience. For there are very few so foolish, that had not rather governe themselves, than be governed by others: Nor when the wise in their own conceit, contend by force, with them who distrust their owne wisdome, do they alwaies, or often, or almost at any time, get the Victory. If Nature therefore have made men equall, that equalitie is to be acknowledged; or if Nature have made men unequall; yet because men that think themselves equall, will not enter into conditions of Peace, but upon Equall termes, such equalitie must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth Law of Nature, I put this, “That every man acknowledge other for his Equall by Nature.” The breach of this Precept is Pride.\n\nOn this law, dependeth another, “That at the entrance into conditions of Peace, no man require to reserve to himselfe any Right, which he is not content should be reserved to every one of the rest.” As it is necessary for all men that seek peace, to lay down certaine Rights of Nature; that is to say, not to have libertie to do all they list: so is it necessarie for mans life, to retaine some; as right to governe their owne bodies; enjoy aire, water, motion, waies to go from place to place; and all things else without which a man cannot live, or not live well. If in this case, at the making of Peace, men require for themselves, that which they would not have to be granted to others, they do contrary to the precedent law, that commandeth the acknowledgement of naturall equalitie, and therefore also against the law of Nature. The observers of this law, are those we call Modest, and the breakers Arrogant Men. The Greeks call the violation of this law pleonexia; that is, a desire of more than their share.\n\nAlso “If a man be trusted to judge between man and man,” it is a precept of the Law of Nature, “that he deale Equally between them.” For without that, the Controversies of men cannot be determined but by Warre. He therefore that is partiall in judgment, doth what in him lies, to deterre men from the use of Judges, and Arbitrators; and consequently, (against the fundamentall Lawe of Nature) is the cause of Warre.\n\nThe observance of this law, from the equall distribution to each man, of that which in reason belongeth to him, is called EQUITY, and (as I have sayd before) distributive justice: the violation, Acception Of Persons, Prosopolepsia.\n\nAnd from this followeth another law, “That such things as cannot be divided, be enjoyed in Common, if it can be; and if the quantity of the thing permit, without Stint; otherwise Proportionably to the number of them that have Right.” For otherwise the distribution is Unequall, and contrary to Equitie.\n\nBut some things there be, that can neither be divided, nor enjoyed in common. Then, The Law of Nature, which prescribeth Equity, requireth, “That the Entire Right; or else, (making the use alternate,) the First Possession, be determined by Lot.” For equall distribution, is of the Law of Nature; and other means of equall distribution cannot be imagined.\n\nOf Lots there be two sorts, Arbitrary, and Naturall. Arbitrary, is that which is agreed on by the Competitors; Naturall, is either Primogeniture, (which the Greek calls Kleronomia, which signifies, Given by Lot;) or First Seisure.\n\nAnd therefore those things which cannot be enjoyed in common, nor divided, ought to be adjudged to the First Possessor; and is some cases to the First-Borne, as acquired by Lot.\n\nIt is also a Law of Nature, “That all men that mediate Peace, be allowed safe Conduct.” For the Law that commandeth Peace, as the End, commandeth Intercession, as the Means; and to Intercession the Means is safe Conduct.\n\nAnd because, though men be never so willing to observe these Lawes, there may neverthelesse arise questions concerning a mans action; First, whether it were done, or not done; Secondly (if done) whether against the Law, or not against the Law; the former whereof, is called a question Of Fact; the later a question Of Right; therefore unlesse the parties to the question, Covenant mutually to stand to the sentence of another, they are as farre from Peace as ever. This other, to whose Sentence they submit, is called an ARBITRATOR. And therefore it is of the Law of Nature, “That they that are at controversie, submit their Right to the judgement of an Arbitrator.”\n\nAnd seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause: and if he were never so fit; yet Equity allowing to each party equall benefit, if one be admitted to be Judge, the other is to be admitted also; & so the controversie, that is, the cause of War, remains, against the Law of Nature.\n\nFor the same reason no man in any Cause ought to be received for Arbitrator, to whom greater profit, or honour, or pleasure apparently ariseth out of the victory of one party, than of the other: for he hath taken (though an unavoydable bribe, yet) a bribe; and no man can be obliged to trust him. And thus also the controversie, and the condition of War remaineth, contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nAnd in a controversie of Fact, the Judge being to give no more credit to one, than to the other, (if there be no other Arguments) must give credit to a third; or to a third and fourth; or more: For else the question is undecided, and left to force, contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nThese are the Lawes of Nature, dictating Peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes; and which onely concern the doctrine of Civill Society. There be other things tending to the destruction of particular men; as Drunkenness, and all other parts of Intemperance; which may therefore also be reckoned amongst those things which the Law of Nature hath forbidden; but are not necessary to be mentioned, nor are pertinent enough to this place.\n\nAnd though this may seem too subtile a deduction of the Lawes of Nature, to be taken notice of by all men; whereof the most part are too busie in getting food, and the rest too negligent to understand; yet to leave all men unexcusable, they have been contracted into one easie sum, intelligible even to the meanest capacity; and that is, “Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thy selfe;” which sheweth him, that he has no more to do in learning the Lawes of Nature, but, when weighing the actions of other men with his own, they seem too heavy, to put them into the other part of the ballance, and his own into their place, that his own passions, and selfe-love, may adde nothing to the weight; and then there is none of these Lawes of Nature that will not appear unto him very reasonable.\n\nBut In Effect Then Onely When There Is Security The Lawes of Nature oblige In Foro Interno; that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place: but In Foro Externo; that is, to the putting them in act, not alwayes. For he that should be modest, and tractable, and performe all he promises, in such time, and place, where no man els should do so, should but make himselfe a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruine, contrary to the ground of all Lawes of Nature, which tend to Natures preservation. And again, he that shall observe the same Lawes towards him, observes them not himselfe, seeketh not Peace, but War; & consequently the destruction of his Nature by Violence.\n\nAnd whatsoever Lawes bind In Foro Interno, may be broken, not onely by a fact contrary to the Law but also by a fact according to it, in case a man think it contrary. For though his Action in this case, be according to the Law; which where the Obligation is In Foro Interno, is a breach.\n\nThe Lawes of Nature are Immutable and Eternall, For Injustice, Ingratitude, Arrogance, Pride, Iniquity, Acception of persons, and the rest, can never be made lawfull. For it can never be that Warre shall preserve life, and Peace destroy it.\n\nThe same Lawes, because they oblige onely to a desire, and endeavour, I mean an unfeigned and constant endeavour, are easie to be observed. For in that they require nothing but endeavour; he that endeavoureth their performance, fulfilleth them; and he that fulfilleth the Law, is Just.\n\nAnd the Science of them, is the true and onely Moral Philosophy. For Morall Philosophy is nothing else but the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation, and Society of mankind. Good, and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different: And divers men, differ not onely in their Judgement, on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the tast, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of common life. Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil: From whence arise Disputes, Controversies, and at last War. And therefore so long as man is in the condition of meer Nature, (which is a condition of War,) as private Appetite is the measure of Good, and Evill: and consequently all men agree on this, that Peace is Good, and therefore also the way, or means of Peace, which (as I have shewed before) are Justice, Gratitude, Modesty, Equity, Mercy, & the rest of the Laws of Nature, are good; that is to say, Morall Vertues; and their contrarie Vices, Evill. Now the science of Vertue and Vice, is Morall Philosophie; and therfore the true Doctrine of the Lawes of Nature, is the true Morall Philosophie. But the Writers of Morall Philosophie, though they acknowledge the same Vertues and Vices; Yet not seeing wherein consisted their Goodnesse; nor that they come to be praised, as the meanes of peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living; place them in a mediocrity of passions: as if not the Cause, but the Degree of daring, made Fortitude; or not the Cause, but the Quantity of a gift, made Liberality.\n\nThese dictates of Reason, men use to call by the name of Lawes; but improperly: for they are but Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas Law, properly is the word of him, that by right hath command over others. But yet if we consider the same Theoremes, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things; then are they properly called Lawes.\n\nCHAPTER XVI. OF PERSONS, AUTHORS, AND THINGS PERSONATED\n\n### Part I, Chapter XVI\n\nOF PERSONS, AUTHORS, AND THINGS PERSONATED\n\nA Person What\n\nA PERSON, is he “whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction.”\n\nWhen they are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as representing the words and actions of an other, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall person.\n\nThe word Person is latine: instead whereof the Greeks have Prosopon, which signifies the Face, as Persona in latine signifies the Disguise, or Outward Appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and somtimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himselfe, or an other; and he that acteth another, is said to beare his Person, or act in his name; (in which sence Cicero useth it where he saies, “Unus Sustineo Tres Personas; Mei, Adversarii, & Judicis, I beare three Persons; my own, my Adversaries, and the Judges;”) and is called in diverse occasions, diversly; as a Representer, or Representative, a Lieutenant, a Vicar, an Attorney, a Deputy, a Procurator, an Actor, and the like.\n\nOf Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: In which case the Actor acteth by Authority. For that which in speaking of goods and possessions, is called an Owner, and in latine Dominus, in Greeke Kurios; speaking of Actions, is called Author. And as the Right of possession, is called Dominion; so the Right of doing any Action, is called AUTHORITY. So that by Authority, is alwayes understood a Right of doing any act: and Done By Authority, done by Commission, or Licence from him whose right it is.\n\nFrom hence it followeth, that when the Actor maketh a Covenant by Authority, he bindeth thereby the Author, no lesse than if he had made it himselfe; and no lesse subjecteth him to all the consequences of the same. And therfore all that hath been said formerly, (Chap. 14) of the nature of Covenants between man and man in their naturall capacity, is true also when they are made by their Actors, Representers, or Procurators, that have authority from them, so far-forth as is in their Commission, but no farther.\n\nAnd therefore he that maketh a Covenant with the Actor, or Representer, not knowing the Authority he hath, doth it at his own perill. For no man is obliged by a Covenant, whereof he is not Author; nor consequently by a Covenant made against, or beside the Authority he gave.\n\nWhen the Actor doth any thing against the Law of Nature by command of the Author, if he be obliged by former Covenant to obey him, not he, but the Author breaketh the Law of Nature: for though the Action be against the Law of Nature; yet it is not his: but contrarily; to refuse to do it, is against the Law of Nature, that forbiddeth breach of Covenant.\n\nAnd he that maketh a Covenant with the Author, by mediation of the Actor, not knowing what Authority he hath, but onely takes his word; in case such Authority be not made manifest unto him upon demand, is no longer obliged: For the Covenant made with the Author, is not valid, without his Counter-assurance. But if he that so Covenanteth, knew before hand he was to expect no other assurance, than the Actors word; then is the Covenant valid; because the Actor in this case maketh himselfe the Author. And therefore, as when the Authority is evident, the Covenant obligeth the Author, not the Actor; so when the Authority is feigned, it obligeth the Actor onely; there being no Author but himselfe.\n\nThere are few things, that are uncapable of being represented by Fiction. Inanimate things, as a Church, an Hospital, a Bridge, may be Personated by a Rector, Master, or Overseer. But things Inanimate, cannot be Authors, nor therefore give Authority to their Actors: Yet the Actors may have Authority to procure their maintenance, given them by those that are Owners, or Governours of those things. And therefore, such things cannot be Personated, before there be some state of Civill Government.\n\nLikewise Children, Fooles, and Mad-men that have no use of Reason, may be Personated by Guardians, or Curators; but can be no Authors (during that time) of any action done by them, longer then (when they shall recover the use of Reason) they shall judge the same reasonable. Yet during the Folly, he that hath right of governing them, may give Authority to the Guardian. But this again has no place but in a State Civill, because before such estate, there is no Dominion of Persons.\n\nAn Idol, or meer Figment of the brain, may be Personated; as were the Gods of the Heathen; which by such Officers as the State appointed, were Personated, and held Possessions, and other Goods, and Rights, which men from time to time dedicated, and consecrated unto them. But idols cannot be Authors: for a Idol is nothing. The Authority proceeded from the State: and therefore before introduction of Civill Government, the Gods of the Heathen could not be Personated.\n\nThe true God may be Personated. As he was; first, by Moses; who governed the Israelites, (that were not his, but Gods people,) not in his own name, with Hoc Dicit Moses; but in Gods Name, with Hoc Dicit Dominus. Secondly, by the son of man, his own Son our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, that came to reduce the Jewes, and induce all Nations into the Kingdome of his Father; not as of himselfe, but as sent from his Father. And thirdly, by the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, speaking, and working in the Apostles: which Holy Ghost, was a Comforter that came not of himselfe; but was sent, and proceeded from them both.\n\nA Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude.\n\nAnd because the Multitude naturally is not One, but Many; they cannot be understood for one; but many Authors, of every thing their Representative faith, or doth in their name; Every man giving their common Representer, Authority from himselfe in particular; and owning all the actions the Representer doth, in case they give him Authority without stint: Otherwise, when they limit him in what, and how farre he shall represent them, none of them owneth more, than they gave him commission to Act.\n\nAnd if the Representative consist of many men, the voyce of the greater number, must be considered as the voyce of them all. For if the lesser number pronounce (for example) in the Affirmative, and the greater in the Negative, there will be Negatives more than enough to destroy the Affirmatives; and thereby the excesse of Negatives, standing uncontradicted, are the onely voyce the Representative hath.\n\nAnd a Representative of even number, especially when the number is not great, whereby the contradictory voyces are oftentimes equall, is therefore oftentimes mute, and uncapable of Action. Yet in some cases contradictory voyces equall in number, may determine a question; as in condemning, or absolving, equality of votes, even in that they condemne not, do absolve; but not on the contrary condemne, in that they absolve not. For when a Cause is heard; not to condemne, is to absolve; but on the contrary, to say that not absolving, is condemning, is not true. The like it is in a deliberation of executing presently, or deferring till another time; For when the voyces are equall, the not decreeing Execution, is a decree of Dilation.\n\nOr if the number be odde, as three, or more, (men, or assemblies;) whereof every one has by a Negative Voice, authority to take away the effect of all the Affirmative Voices of the rest, This number is no Representative; because by the diversity of Opinions, and Interests of men, it becomes oftentimes, and in cases of the greatest consequence, a mute Person, and unapt, as for may things else, so for the government of a Multitude, especially in time of Warre.\n\nOf Authors there be two sorts. The first simply so called; which I have before defined to be him, that owneth the Action of another simply. The second is he, that owneth an Action, or Covenant of another conditionally; that is to say, he undertaketh to do it, if the other doth it not, at, or before a certain time. And these Authors conditionall, are generally called SURETYES, in Latine Fidejussores, and Sponsores; and particularly for Debt, Praedes; and for Appearance before a Judge, or Magistrate, Vades.\n\nPART II. OF COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVII\n\nOF THE CAUSES, GENERATION, AND DEFINITION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\nThe finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which wee see them live in Common-wealths,) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent (as hath been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and observation of these Lawes of Nature set down in the fourteenth and fifteenth Chapters.\n\nFor the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe) Doing To Others, As Wee Would Be Done To,) if themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. Therefore notwithstanding the Lawes of Nature, (which every one hath then kept, when he has the will to keep them, when he can do it safely,) if there be no Power erected, or not great enough for our security; every man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art, for caution against all other men. And in all places, where men have lived by small Families, to robbe and spoyle one another, has been a Trade, and so farre from being reputed against the Law of Nature, that the greater spoyles they gained, the greater was their honour; and men observed no other Lawes therein, but the Lawes of Honour; that is, to abstain from cruelty, leaving to men their lives, and instruments of husbandry. And as small Familyes did then; so now do Cities and Kingdomes which are but greater Families (for their own security) enlarge their Dominions, upon all pretences of danger, and fear of Invasion, or assistance that may be given to Invaders, endeavour as much as they can, to subdue, or weaken their neighbours, by open force, and secret arts, for want of other Caution, justly; and are remembred for it in after ages with honour.\n\nNor is it the joyning together of a small number of men, that gives them this security; because in small numbers, small additions on the one side or the other, make the advantage of strength so great, as is sufficient to carry the Victory; and therefore gives encouragement to an Invasion. The Multitude sufficient to confide in for our Security, is not determined by any certain number, but by comparison with the Enemy we feare; and is then sufficient, when the odds of the Enemy is not of so visible and conspicuous moment, to determine the event of warre, as to move him to attempt.\n\nAnd be there never so great a Multitude; yet if their actions be directed according to their particular judgements, and particular appetites, they can expect thereby no defence, nor protection, neither against a Common enemy, nor against the injuries of one another. For being distracted in opinions concerning the best use and application of their strength, they do not help, but hinder one another; and reduce their strength by mutuall opposition to nothing: whereby they are easily, not onely subdued by a very few that agree together; but also when there is no common enemy, they make warre upon each other, for their particular interests. For if we could suppose a great Multitude of men to consent in the observation of Justice, and other Lawes of Nature, without a common Power to keep them all in awe; we might as well suppose all Man-kind to do the same; and then there neither would be nor need to be any Civill Government, or Common-wealth at all; because there would be Peace without subjection.\n\nNor is it enough for the security, which men desire should last all the time of their life, that they be governed, and directed by one judgement, for a limited time; as in one Battell, or one Warre. For though they obtain a Victory by their unanimous endeavour against a forraign enemy; yet afterwards, when either they have no common enemy, or he that by one part is held for an enemy, is by another part held for a friend, they must needs by the difference of their interests dissolve, and fall again into a Warre amongst themselves.\n\nIt is true, that certain living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, live sociably one with another, (which are therefore by Aristotle numbred amongst Politicall creatures;) and yet have no other direction, than their particular judgements and appetites; nor speech, whereby one of them can signifie to another, what he thinks expedient for the common benefit: and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know, why Man-kind cannot do the same. To which I answer,\n\nFirst, that men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity, which these creatures are not; and consequently amongst men there ariseth on that ground, Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre; but amongst these not so.\n\nSecondly, that amongst these creatures, the Common good differeth not from the Private; and being by nature enclined to their private, they procure thereby the common benefit. But man, whose Joy consisteth in comparing himselfe with other men, can relish nothing but what is eminent.\n\nThirdly, that these creatures, having not (as man) the use of reason, do not see, nor think they see any fault, in the administration of their common businesse: whereas amongst men, there are very many, that thinke themselves wiser, and abler to govern the Publique, better than the rest; and these strive to reforme and innovate, one this way, another that way; and thereby bring it into Distraction and Civill warre.\n\nFourthly, that these creatures, though they have some use of voice, in making knowne to one another their desires, and other affections; yet they want that art of words, by which some men can represent to others, that which is Good, in the likenesse of Evill; and Evill, in the likenesse of Good; and augment, or diminish the apparent greatnesse of Good and Evill; discontenting men, and troubling their Peace at their pleasure.\n\nFiftly, irrationall creatures cannot distinguish betweene Injury, and Dammage; and therefore as long as they be at ease, they are not offended with their fellowes: whereas Man is then most troublesome, when he is most at ease: for then it is that he loves to shew his Wisdome, and controule the Actions of them that governe the Common-wealth.\n\nLastly, the agreement of these creatures is Naturall; that of men, is by Covenant only, which is Artificiall: and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required (besides Covenant) to make their Agreement constant and lasting; which is a Common Power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit.\n\nThe only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their owne industrie, and by the fruites of the Earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or Assembly of men, to beare their Person; and every one to owne, and acknowledge himselfe to be Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act, or cause to be Acted, in those things which concerne the Common Peace and Safetie; and therein to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to his Judgment. This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, “I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.” This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortall God, our peace and defence. For by this Authoritie, given him by every particular man in the Common-Wealth, he hath the use of so much Power and Strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to forme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall ayd against their enemies abroad.\n\nAnd in him consisteth the Essence of the Common-wealth; which (to define it,) is “One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the Author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their Peace and Common Defence.”\n\nAnd he that carryeth this Person, as called SOVERAIGNE, and said to have Soveraigne Power; and every one besides, his SUBJECT.\n\nThe attaining to this Soveraigne Power, is by two wayes. One, by Naturall force; as when a man maketh his children, to submit themselves, and their children to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse, or by Warre subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition. The other, is when men agree amongst themselves, to submit to some Man, or Assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others. This later, may be called a Politicall Common-wealth, or Common-wealth by Institution; and the former, a Common-wealth by Acquisition. And first, I shall speak of a Common-wealth by Institution.\n\nCHAPTER XVIII. OF THE RIGHTS OF SOVERAIGNES BY INSTITUTION\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVIII, 1\n\nOF THE RIGHTS OF SOVERAIGNES BY INSTITUTION\n\nA Common-wealth is said to be Instituted, when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, Every One With Every One, that to whatsoever Man, or Assembly Of Men, shall be given by the major part, the Right to Present the Person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative;) every one, as well he that Voted For It, as he that Voted Against It, shall Authorise all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men.\n\nFrom this Institution of a Common-wealth are derived all the Rights, and Facultyes of him, or them, on whom the Soveraigne Power is conferred by the consent of the People assembled.\n\nFirst, because they Covenant, it is to be understood, they are not obliged by former Covenant to any thing repugnant hereunto. And Consequently they that have already Instituted a Common-wealth, being thereby bound by Covenant, to own the Actions, and Judgements of one, cannot lawfully make a new Covenant, amongst themselves, to be obedient to any other, in any thing whatsoever, without his permission. And therefore, they that are subjects to a Monarch, cannot without his leave cast off Monarchy, and return to the confusion of a disunited Multitude; nor transferre their Person from him that beareth it, to another Man, or other Assembly of men: for they are bound, every man to every man, to Own, and be reputed Author of all, that he that already is their Soveraigne, shall do, and judge fit to be done: so that any one man dissenting, all the rest should break their Covenant made to that man, which is injustice: and they have also every man given the Soveraignty to him that beareth their Person; and therefore if they depose him, they take from him that which is his own, and so again it is injustice. Besides, if he that attempteth to depose his Soveraign, be killed, or punished by him for such attempt, he is author of his own punishment, as being by the Institution, Author of all his Soveraign shall do: And because it is injustice for a man to do any thing, for which he may be punished by his own authority, he is also upon that title, unjust. And whereas some men have pretended for their disobedience to their Soveraign, a new Covenant, made, not with men, but with God; this also is unjust: for there is no Covenant with God, but by mediation of some body that representeth Gods Person; which none doth but Gods Lieutenant, who hath the Soveraignty under God. But this pretence of Covenant with God, is so evident a lye, even in the pretenders own consciences, that it is not onely an act of an unjust, but also of a vile, and unmanly disposition.\n\nSecondly, Because the Right of bearing the Person of them all, is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Soveraigne; and consequently none of his Subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed from his Subjection. That he which is made Soveraigne maketh no Covenant with his Subjects beforehand, is manifest; because either he must make it with the whole multitude, as one party to the Covenant; or he must make a severall Covenant with every man. With the whole, as one party, it is impossible; because as yet they are not one Person: and if he make so many severall Covenants as there be men, those Covenants after he hath the Soveraignty are voyd, because what act soever can be pretended by any one of them for breach thereof, is the act both of himselfe, and of all the rest, because done in the Person, and by the Right of every one of them in particular. Besides, if any one, or more of them, pretend a breach of the Covenant made by the Soveraigne at his Institution; and others, or one other of his Subjects, or himselfe alone, pretend there was no such breach, there is in this case, no Judge to decide the controversie: it returns therefore to the Sword again; and every man recovereth the right of Protecting himselfe by his own strength, contrary to the designe they had in the Institution. It is therefore in vain to grant Soveraignty by way of precedent Covenant. The opinion that any Monarch receiveth his Power by Covenant, that is to say on Condition, proceedeth from want of understanding this easie truth, that Covenants being but words, and breath, have no force to oblige, contain, constrain, or protect any man, but what it has from the publique Sword; that is, from the untyed hands of that Man, or Assembly of men that hath the Soveraignty, and whose actions are avouched by them all, and performed by the strength of them all, in him united. But when an Assembly of men is made Soveraigne; then no man imagineth any such Covenant to have past in the Institution; for no man is so dull as to say, for example, the People of Rome, made a Covenant with the Romans, to hold the Soveraignty on such or such conditions; which not performed, the Romans might lawfully depose the Roman People. That men see not the reason to be alike in a Monarchy, and in a Popular Government, proceedeth from the ambition of some, that are kinder to the government of an Assembly, whereof they may hope to participate, than of Monarchy, which they despair to enjoy.\n\nThirdly, because the major part hath by consenting voices declared a Soveraigne; he that dissented must now consent with the rest; that is, be contented to avow all the actions he shall do, or else justly be destroyed by the rest. For if he voluntarily entered into the Congregation of them that were assembled, he sufficiently declared thereby his will (and therefore tacitely covenanted) to stand to what the major part should ordayne: and therefore if he refuse to stand thereto, or make Protestation against any of their Decrees, he does contrary to his Covenant, and therfore unjustly. And whether he be of the Congregation, or not; and whether his consent be asked, or not, he must either submit to their decrees, or be left in the condition of warre he was in before; wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever.\n\nFourthly, because every Subject is by this Institution Author of all the Actions, and Judgements of the Soveraigne Instituted; it followes, that whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his Subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of Injustice. For he that doth any thing by authority from another, doth therein no injury to him by whose authority he acteth: But by this Institution of a Common-wealth, every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his Soveraigne, complaineth of that whereof he himselfe is Author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himselfe; no nor himselfe of injury; because to do injury to ones selfe, is impossible. It is true that they that have Soveraigne power, may commit Iniquity; but not Injustice, or Injury in the proper signification.\n\nFiftly, and consequently to that which was sayd last, no man that hath Soveraigne power can justly be put to death, or otherwise in any manner by his Subjects punished. For seeing every Subject is author of the actions of his Soveraigne; he punisheth another, for the actions committed by himselfe.\n\nAnd because the End of this Institution, is the Peace and Defence of them all; and whosoever has right to the End, has right to the Means; it belongeth of Right, to whatsoever Man, or Assembly that hath the Soveraignty, to be Judge both of the meanes of Peace and Defence; and also of the hindrances, and disturbances of the same; and to do whatsoever he shall think necessary to be done, both beforehand, for the preserving of Peace and Security, by prevention of discord at home and Hostility from abroad; and, when Peace and Security are lost, for the recovery of the same. And therefore,\n\nSixtly, it is annexed to the Soveraignty, to be Judge of what Opinions and Doctrines are averse, and what conducing to Peace; and consequently, on what occasions, how farre, and what, men are to be trusted withall, in speaking to Multitudes of people; and who shall examine the Doctrines of all bookes before they be published. For the Actions of men proceed from their Opinions; and in the wel governing of Opinions, consisteth the well governing of mens Actions, in order to their Peace, and Concord. And though in matter of Doctrine, nothing ought to be regarded but the Truth; yet this is not repugnant to regulating of the same by Peace. For Doctrine Repugnant to Peace, can no more be True, than Peace and Concord can be against the Law of Nature. It is true, that in a Common-wealth, where by the negligence, or unskilfullnesse of Governours, and Teachers, false Doctrines are by time generally received; the contrary Truths may be generally offensive; Yet the most sudden, and rough busling in of a new Truth, that can be, does never breake the Peace, but onely somtimes awake the Warre. For those men that are so remissely governed, that they dare take up Armes, to defend, or introduce an Opinion, are still in Warre; and their condition not Peace, but only a Cessation of Armes for feare of one another; and they live as it were, in the procincts of battaile continually. It belongeth therefore to him that hath the Soveraign Power, to be Judge, or constitute all Judges of Opinions and Doctrines, as a thing necessary to Peace, thereby to prevent Discord and Civill Warre.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVIII, 2\n\nSeventhly, is annexed to the Soveraigntie, the whole power of prescribing the Rules, whereby every man may know, what Goods he may enjoy and what Actions he may doe, without being molested by any of his fellow Subjects: And this is it men Call Propriety. For before constitution of Soveraign Power (as hath already been shewn) all men had right to all things; which necessarily causeth Warre: and therefore this Proprietie, being necessary to Peace, and depending on Soveraign Power, is the Act of the Power, in order to the publique peace. These Rules of Propriety (or Meum and Tuum) and of Good, Evill, Lawfull and Unlawfull in the actions of subjects, are the Civill Lawes, that is to say, the lawes of each Commonwealth in particular; though the name of Civill Law be now restrained to the antient Civill Lawes of the City of Rome; which being the head of a great part of the World, her Lawes at that time were in these parts the Civill Law.\n\nEightly, is annexed to the Soveraigntie, the Right of Judicature; that is to say, of hearing and deciding all Controversies, which may arise concerning Law, either Civill, or naturall, or concerning Fact. For without the decision of Controversies, there is no protection of one Subject, against the injuries of another; the Lawes concerning Meum and Tuum are in vaine; and to every man remaineth, from the naturall and necessary appetite of his own conservation, the right of protecting himselfe by his private strength, which is the condition of Warre; and contrary to the end for which every Common-wealth is instituted.\n\nNinthly, is annexed to the Soveraignty, the Right of making Warre, and Peace with other Nations, and Common-wealths; that is to say, of Judging when it is for the publique good, and how great forces are to be assembled, armed, and payd for that end; and to levy mony upon the Subjects, to defray the expenses thereof. For the Power by which the people are to be defended, consisteth in their Armies; and the strength of an Army, in the union of their strength under one Command; which Command the Soveraign Instituted, therefore hath; because the command of the Militia, without other Institution, maketh him that hath it Soveraign. And therefore whosoever is made Generall of an Army, he that hath the Soveraign Power is alwayes Generallissimo.\n\nTenthly, is annexed to the Soveraignty, the choosing of all Councellours, Ministers, Magistrates, and Officers, both in peace, and War. For seeing the Soveraign is charged with the End, which is the common Peace and Defence; he is understood to have Power to use such Means, as he shall think most fit for his discharge.\n\nEleventhly, to the Soveraign is committed the Power of Rewarding with riches, or honour; and of Punishing with corporall, or pecuniary punishment, or with ignominy every Subject according to the Lawe he hath formerly made; or if there be no Law made, according as he shall judge most to conduce to the encouraging of men to serve the Common-wealth, or deterring of them from doing dis-service to the same.\n\nLastly, considering what values men are naturally apt to set upon themselves; what respect they look for from others; and how little they value other men; from whence continually arise amongst them, Emulation, Quarrells, Factions, and at last Warre, to the destroying of one another, and diminution of their strength against a Common Enemy; It is necessary that there be Lawes of Honour, and a publique rate of the worth of such men as have deserved, or are able to deserve well of the Common-wealth; and that there be force in the hands of some or other, to put those Lawes in execution. But it hath already been shown, that not onely the whole Militia, or forces of the Common-wealth; but also the Judicature of all Controversies, is annexed to the Soveraignty. To the Soveraign therefore it belongeth also to give titles of Honour; and to appoint what Order of place, and dignity, each man shall hold; and what signes of respect, in publique or private meetings, they shall give to one another.\n\nThese are the Rights, which make the Essence of Soveraignty; and which are the markes, whereby a man may discern in what Man, or Assembly of men, the Soveraign Power is placed, and resideth. For these are incommunicable, and inseparable. The Power to coyn Mony; to dispose of the estate and persons of Infant heires; to have praeemption in Markets; and all other Statute Praerogatives, may be transferred by the Soveraign; and yet the Power to protect his Subject be retained. But if he transferre the Militia, he retains the Judicature in vain, for want of execution of the Lawes; Or if he grant away the Power of raising Mony; the Militia is in vain: or if he give away the government of doctrines, men will be frighted into rebellion with the feare of Spirits. And so if we consider any one of the said Rights, we shall presently see, that the holding of all the rest, will produce no effect, in the conservation of Peace and Justice, the end for which all Common-wealths are Instituted. And this division is it, whereof it is said, “A kingdome divided in it selfe cannot stand:” For unlesse this division precede, division into opposite Armies can never happen. If there had not first been an opinion received of the greatest part of England, that these Powers were divided between the King, and the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people had never been divided, and fallen into this Civill Warre; first between those that disagreed in Politiques; and after between the Dissenters about the liberty of Religion; which have so instructed men in this point of Soveraign Right, that there be few now (in England,) that do not see, that these Rights are inseparable, and will be so generally acknowledged, at the next return of Peace; and so continue, till their miseries are forgotten; and no longer, except the vulgar be better taught than they have hetherto been.\n\nAnd because they are essentiall and inseparable Rights, it follows necessarily, that in whatsoever, words any of them seem to be granted away, yet if the Soveraign Power it selfe be not in direct termes renounced, and the name of Soveraign no more given by the Grantees to him that Grants them, the Grant is voyd: for when he has granted all he can, if we grant back the Soveraignty, all is restored, as inseparably annexed thereunto.\n\nThis great Authority being indivisible, and inseparably annexed to the Soveraignty, there is little ground for the opinion of them, that say of Soveraign Kings, though they be Singulis Majores, of greater Power than every one of their Subjects, yet they be Universis Minores, of lesse power than them all together. For if by All Together, they mean not the collective body as one person, then All Together, and Every One, signifie the same; and the speech is absurd. But if by All Together, they understand them as one Person (which person the Soveraign bears,) then the power of all together, is the same with the Soveraigns power; and so again the speech is absurd; which absurdity they see well enough, when the Soveraignty is in an Assembly of the people; but in a Monarch they see it not; and yet the power of Soveraignty is the same in whomsoever it be placed.\n\nAnd as the Power, so also the Honour of the Soveraign, ought to be greater, than that of any, or all the Subjects. For in the Soveraignty is the fountain of Honour. The dignities of Lord, Earle, Duke, and Prince are his Creatures. As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honour at all; So are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign. And though they shine some more, some lesse, when they are out of his sight; yet in his presence, they shine no more than the Starres in presence of the Sun.\n\nBut a man may here object, that the Condition of Subjects is very miserable; as being obnoxious to the lusts, and other irregular passions of him, or them that have so unlimited a Power in their hands. And commonly they that live under a Monarch, think it the fault of Monarchy; and they that live under the government of Democracy, or other Soveraign Assembly, attribute all the inconvenience to that forme of Common-wealth; whereas the Power in all formes, if they be perfect enough to protect them, is the same; not considering that the estate of Man can never be without some incommodity or other; and that the greatest, that in any forme of Government can possibly happen to the people in generall, is scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries, and horrible calamities, that accompany a Civill Warre; or that dissolute condition of masterlesse men, without subjection to Lawes, and a coercive Power to tye their hands from rapine, and revenge: nor considering that the greatest pressure of Soveraign Governours, proceedeth not from any delight, or profit they can expect in the dammage, or weakening of their subjects, in whose vigor, consisteth their own selves, that unwillingly contributing to their own defence, make it necessary for their Governours to draw from them what they can in time of Peace, that they may have means on any emergent occasion, or sudden need, to resist, or take advantage on their Enemies. For all men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses, (that is their Passions and Self-love,) through which, every little payment appeareth a great grievance; but are destitute of those prospective glasses, (namely Morall and Civill Science,) to see a farre off the miseries that hang over them, and cannot without such payments be avoyded.\n\nCHAPTER XIX. OF THE SEVERALL KINDS OF COMMON-WEALTH BY INSTITUTION, AND OF SUCCESSION TO THE SOVERAIGNE POWER\n\n### Part II, Chapter XIX, 1\n\nOF THE SEVERALL KINDS OF COMMON-WEALTH BY INSTITUTION, AND OF SUCCESSION TO THE SOVERAIGNE POWER\n\nThe difference of Common-wealths, consisteth in the difference of the Soveraign, or the Person representative of all and every one of the Multitude. And because the Soveraignty is either in one Man, or in an Assembly of more than one; and into that Assembly either Every man hath right to enter, or not every one, but Certain men distinguished from the rest; it is manifest, there can be but Three kinds of Common-wealth. For the Representative must needs be One man, or More: and if more, then it is the Assembly of All, or but of a Part. When the Representative is One man, then is the Common-wealth a MONARCHY: when an Assembly of All that will come together, then it is a DEMOCRACY, or Popular Common-wealth: when an Assembly of a Part onely, then it is called an ARISTOCRACY. Other kind of Common-wealth there can be none: for either One, or More, or All must have the Soveraign Power (which I have shewn to be indivisible) entire.\n\nThere be other names of Government, in the Histories, and books of Policy; as Tyranny, and Oligarchy: But they are not the names of other Formes of Government, but of the same Formes misliked. For they that are discontented under Monarchy, call it Tyranny; and they that are displeased with Aristocracy, called it Oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a Democracy, call it Anarchy, (which signifies want of Government;) and yet I think no man believes, that want of Government, is any new kind of Government: nor by the same reason ought they to believe, that the Government is of one kind, when they like it, and another, when they mislike it, or are oppressed by the Governours.\n\nIt is manifest, that men who are in absolute liberty, may, if they please, give Authority to One Man, to represent them every one; as well as give such Authority to any Assembly of men whatsoever; and consequently may subject themselves, if they think good, to a Monarch, as absolutely, as to any other Representative. Therefore, where there is already erected a Soveraign Power, there can be no other Representative of the same people, but onely to certain particular ends, by the Soveraign limited. For that were to erect two Soveraigns; and every man to have his person represented by two Actors, that by opposing one another, must needs divide that Power, which (if men will live in Peace) is indivisible, and thereby reduce the Multitude into the condition of Warre, contrary to the end for which all Soveraignty is instituted. And therefore as it is absurd, to think that a Soveraign Assembly, inviting the People of their Dominion, to send up their Deputies, with power to make known their Advise, or Desires, should therefore hold such Deputies, rather than themselves, for the absolute Representative of the people: so it is absurd also, to think the same in a Monarchy. And I know not how this so manifest a truth, should of late be so little observed; that in a Monarchy, he that had the Soveraignty from a descent of 600 years, was alone called Soveraign, had the title of Majesty from every one of his Subjects, and was unquestionably taken by them for their King; was notwithstanding never considered as their Representative; that name without contradiction passing for the title of those men, which at his command were sent up by the people to carry their Petitions, and give him (if he permitted it) their advise. Which may serve as an admonition, for those that are the true, and absolute Representative of a People, to instruct men in the nature of that Office, and to take heed how they admit of any other generall Representation upon any occasion whatsoever, if they mean to discharge the truth committed to them.\n\nThe difference between these three kindes of Common-wealth, consisteth not in the difference of Power; but in the difference of Convenience, or Aptitude to produce the Peace, and Security of the people; for which end they were instituted. And to compare Monarchy with the other two, we may observe; First, that whosoever beareth the Person of the people, or is one of that Assembly that bears it, beareth also his own naturall Person. And though he be carefull in his politique Person to procure the common interest; yet he is more, or no lesse carefull to procure the private good of himselfe, his family, kindred and friends; and for the most part, if the publique interest chance to crosse the private, he preferrs the private: for the Passions of men, are commonly more potent than their Reason. From whence it follows, that where the publique and private interest are most closely united, there is the publique most advanced. Now in Monarchy, the private interest is the same with the publique. The riches, power, and honour of a Monarch arise onely from the riches, strength and reputation of his Subjects. For no King can be rich, nor glorious, nor secure; whose Subjects are either poore, or contemptible, or too weak through want, or dissention, to maintain a war against their enemies: Whereas in a Democracy, or Aristocracy, the publique prosperity conferres not so much to the private fortune of one that is corrupt, or ambitious, as doth many times a perfidious advice, a treacherous action, or a Civill warre.\n\nSecondly, that a Monarch receiveth counsell of whom, when, and where he pleaseth; and consequently may heare the opinion of men versed in the matter about which he deliberates, of what rank or quality soever, and as long before the time of action, and with as much secrecy, as he will. But when a Soveraigne Assembly has need of Counsell, none are admitted but such as have a Right thereto from the beginning; which for the most part are of those who have beene versed more in the acquisition of Wealth than of Knowledge; and are to give their advice in long discourses, which may, and do commonly excite men to action, but not governe them in it. For the Understanding is by the flame of the Passions, never enlightned, but dazled: Nor is there any place, or time, wherein an Assemblie can receive Counsell with secrecie, because of their owne Multitude.\n\nThirdly, that the Resolutions of a Monarch, are subject to no other Inconstancy, than that of Humane Nature; but in Assemblies, besides that of Nature, there ariseth an Inconstancy from the Number. For the absence of a few, that would have the Resolution once taken, continue firme, (which may happen by security, negligence, or private impediments,) or the diligent appearance of a few of the contrary opinion, undoes to day, all that was concluded yesterday.\n\nFourthly, that a Monarch cannot disagree with himselfe, out of envy, or interest; but an Assembly may; and that to such a height, as may produce a Civill Warre.\n\nFifthly, that in Monarchy there is this inconvenience; that any Subject, by the power of one man, for the enriching of a favourite or flatterer, may be deprived of all he possesseth; which I confesse is a great and inevitable inconvenience. But the same may as well happen, where the Soveraigne Power is in an Assembly: for their power is the same; and they are as subject to evill Counsell, and to be seduced by Orators, as a Monarch by Flatterers; and becoming one an others Flatterers, serve one anothers Covetousnesse and Ambition by turnes. And whereas the Favorites of an Assembly, are many; and the Kindred much more numerous, than of any Monarch. Besides, there is no Favourite of a Monarch, which cannot as well succour his friends, as hurt his enemies: But Orators, that is to say, Favourites of Soveraigne Assemblies, though they have great power to hurt, have little to save. For to accuse, requires lesse Eloquence (such is mans Nature) than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution more resembles Justice.\n\nSixtly, that it is an inconvenience in Monarchie, that the Soveraigntie may descend upon an Infant, or one that cannot discerne between Good and Evill: and consisteth in this, that the use of his Power, must be in the hand of another Man, or of some Assembly of men, which are to governe by his right, and in his name; as Curators, and Protectors of his Person, and Authority. But to say there is inconvenience, in putting the use of the Soveraign Power, into the hand of a Man, or an Assembly of men; is to say that all Government is more Inconvenient, than Confusion, and Civill Warre. And therefore all the danger that can be pretended, must arise from the Contention of those, that for an office of so great honour, and profit, may become Competitors. To make it appear, that this inconvenience, proceedeth not from that forme of Government we call Monarchy, we are to consider, that the precedent Monarch, hath appointed who shall have the Tuition of his Infant Successor, either expressely by Testament, or tacitly, by not controlling the Custome in that case received: And then such inconvenience (if it happen) is to be attributed, not to the Monarchy, but to the Ambition, and Injustice of the Subjects; which in all kinds of Government, where the people are not well instructed in their Duty, and the Rights of Soveraignty, is the same. Or else the precedent Monarch, hath not at all taken order for such Tuition; And then the Law of Nature hath provided this sufficient rule, That the Tuition shall be in him, that hath by Nature most interest in the preservation of the Authority of the Infant, and to whom least benefit can accrue by his death, or diminution. For seeing every man by nature seeketh his own benefit, and promotion; to put an Infant into the power of those, that can promote themselves by his destruction, or dammage, is not Tuition, but Trechery. So that sufficient provision being taken, against all just quarrell, about the Government under a Child, if any contention arise to the disturbance of the publique Peace, it is not to be attributed to the forme of Monarchy, but to the ambition of Subjects, and ignorance of their Duty. On the other side, there is no great Common-wealth, the Soveraignty whereof is in a great Assembly, which is not, as to consultations of Peace, and Warre, and making of Lawes, in the same condition, as if the Government were in a Child. For as a Child wants the judgement to dissent from counsell given him, and is thereby necessitated to take the advise of them, or him, to whom he is committed: So an Assembly wanteth the liberty, to dissent from the counsell of the major part, be it good, or bad. And as a Child has need of a Tutor, or Protector, to preserve his Person, and Authority: So also (in great Common-wealths,) the Soveraign Assembly, in all great dangers and troubles, have need of Custodes Libertatis; that is of Dictators, or Protectors of their Authoritie; which are as much as Temporary Monarchs; to whom for a time, they may commit the entire exercise of their Power; and have (at the end of that time) been oftner deprived thereof, than Infant Kings, by their Protectors, Regents, or any other Tutors.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XIX, 2\n\nThough the Kinds of Soveraigntie be, as I have now shewn, but three; that is to say, Monarchie, where one Man has it; or Democracie, where the generall Assembly of Subjects hath it; or Aristocracie, where it is in an Assembly of certain persons nominated, or otherwise distinguished from the rest: Yet he that shall consider the particular Common-wealthes that have been, and are in the world, will not perhaps easily reduce them to three, and may thereby be inclined to think there be other Formes, arising from these mingled together. As for example, Elective Kingdomes; where Kings have the Soveraigne Power put into their hands for a time; of Kingdomes, wherein the King hath a power limited: which Governments, are nevertheless by most Writers called Monarchie. Likewise if a Popular, or Aristocraticall Common-wealth, subdue an Enemies Countrie, and govern the same, by a President, Procurator, or other Magistrate; this may seeme perhaps at first sight, to be a Democraticall, or Aristocraticall Government. But it is not so. For Elective Kings, are not Soveraignes, but Ministers of the Soveraigne; nor limited Kings Soveraignes, but Ministers of them that have the Soveraigne Power: nor are those Provinces which are in subjection to a Democracie, or Aristocracie of another Common-wealth, Democratically, or Aristocratically governed, but Monarchically.\n\nAnd first, concerning an Elective King, whose power is limited to his life, as it is in many places of Christendome at this day; or to certaine Yeares or Moneths, as the Dictators power amongst the Romans; If he have Right to appoint his Successor, he is no more Elective but Hereditary. But if he have no Power to elect his Successor, then there is some other Man, or Assembly known, which after his decease may elect a new, or else the Common-wealth dieth, and dissolveth with him, and returneth to the condition of Warre. If it be known who have the power to give the Soveraigntie after his death, it is known also that the Soveraigntie was in them before: For none have right to give that which they have not right to possesse, and keep to themselves, if they think good. But if there be none that can give the Soveraigntie, after the decease of him that was first elected; then has he power, nay he is obliged by the Law of Nature, to provide, by establishing his Successor, to keep those that had trusted him with the Government, from relapsing into the miserable condition of Civill warre. And consequently he was, when elected, a Soveraign absolute.\n\nSecondly, that King whose power is limited, is not superiour to him, or them that have the power to limit it; and he that is not superiour, is not supreme; that is to say not Soveraign. The Soveraignty therefore was alwaies in that Assembly which had the Right to Limit him; and by consequence the government not Monarchy, but either Democracy, or Aristocracy; as of old time in Sparta; where the Kings had a priviledge to lead their Armies; but the Soveraignty was in the Ephori.\n\nThirdly, whereas heretofore the Roman People, governed the land of Judea (for example) by a President; yet was not Judea therefore a Democracy; because they were not governed by any Assembly, into which, any of them, had right to enter; nor by an Aristocracy; because they were not governed by any Assembly, into which, any man could enter by their Election: but they were governed by one Person, which though as to the people of Rome was an Assembly of the people, or Democracy; yet as to the people of Judea, which had no right at all of participating in the government, was a Monarch. For though where the people are governed by an Assembly, chosen by themselves out of their own number, the government is called a Democracy, or Aristocracy; yet when they are governed by an Assembly, not of their own choosing, ’tis a Monarchy; not of One man, over another man; but of one people, over another people.\n\nOf all these Formes of Government, the matter being mortall, so that not onely Monarchs, but also whole Assemblies dy, it is necessary for the conservation of the peace of men, that as there was order taken for an Artificiall Man, so there be order also taken, for an Artificiall Eternity of life; without which, men that are governed by an Assembly, should return into the condition of Warre in every age; and they that are governed by One man, as soon as their Governour dyeth. This Artificiall Eternity, is that which men call the Right of Succession.\n\nThere is no perfect forme of Government, where the disposing of the Succession is not in the present Soveraign. For if it be in any other particular Man, or private Assembly, it is in a person subject, and may be assumed by the Soveraign at his pleasure; and consequently the Right is in himselfe. And if it be in no particular man, but left to a new choyce; then is the Common-wealth dissolved; and the Right is in him that can get it; contrary to the intention of them that did institute the Common-wealth, for their perpetuall, and not temporary security.\n\nIn a Democracy, the whole Assembly cannot faile, unlesse the Multitude that are to be governed faile. And therefore questions of the right of Succession, have in that forme of Government no place at all.\n\nIn an Aristocracy, when any of the Assembly dyeth, the election of another into his room belongeth to the Assembly, as the Soveraign, to whom belongeth the choosing of all Counsellours, and Officers. For that which the Representative doth, as Actor, every one of the Subjects doth, as Author. And though the Soveraign assembly, may give Power to others, to elect new men, for supply of their Court; yet it is still by their Authority, that the Election is made; and by the same it may (when the publique shall require it) be recalled.\n\nThe Present Monarch Hath Right To Dispose Of The Succession The greatest difficultie about the right of Succession, is in Monarchy: And the difficulty ariseth from this, that at first sight, it is not manifest who is to appoint the Successor; nor many times, who it is whom he hath appointed. For in both these cases, there is required a more exact ratiocination, than every man is accustomed to use. As to the question, who shall appoint the Successor, of a Monarch that hath the Soveraign Authority; that is to say, (for Elective Kings and Princes have not the Soveraign Power in propriety, but in use only,) we are to consider, that either he that is in possession, has right to dispose of the Succession, or else that right is again in the dissolved Multitude. For the death of him that hath the Soveraign power in propriety, leaves the Multitude without any Soveraign at all; that is, without any Representative in whom they should be united, and be capable of doing any one action at all: And therefore they are incapable of Election of any new Monarch; every man having equall right to submit himselfe to such as he thinks best able to protect him, or if he can, protect himselfe by his owne sword; which is a returne to Confusion, and to the condition of a War of every man against every man, contrary to the end for which Monarchy had its first Institution. Therfore it is manifest, that by the Institution of Monarchy, the disposing of the Successor, is alwaies left to the Judgment and Will of the present Possessor.\n\nAnd for the question (which may arise sometimes) who it is that the Monarch in possession, hath designed to the succession and inheritance of his power; it is determined by his expresse Words, and Testament; or by other tacite signes sufficient.\n\nBy expresse Words, or Testament, when it is declared by him in his life time, viva voce, or by Writing; as the first Emperours of Rome declared who should be their Heires. For the word Heire does not of it selfe imply the Children, or nearest Kindred of a man; but whomsoever a man shall any way declare, he would have to succeed him in his Estate. If therefore a Monarch declare expresly, that such a man shall be his Heire, either by Word or Writing, then is that man immediately after the decease of his Predecessor, Invested in the right of being Monarch.\n\nBut where Testament, and expresse Words are wanting, other naturall signes of the Will are to be followed: whereof the one is Custome. And therefore where the Custome is, that the next of Kindred absolutely succeedeth, there also the next of Kindred hath right to the Succession; for that, if the will of him that was in posession had been otherwise, he might easily have declared the same in his life time. And likewise where the Custome is, that the next of the Male Kindred succeedeth, there also the right of Succession is in the next of the Kindred Male, for the same reason. And so it is if the Custome were to advance the Female. For whatsoever Custome a man may by a word controule, and does not, it is a naturall signe he would have that Custome stand.\n\nBut where neither Custome, nor Testament hath preceded, there it is to be understood, First, that a Monarchs will is, that the government remain Monarchicall; because he hath approved that government in himselfe. Secondly, that a Child of his own, Male, or Female, be preferred before any other; because men are presumed to be more enclined by nature, to advance their own children, than the children of other men; and of their own, rather a Male than a Female; because men, are naturally fitter than women, for actions of labour and danger. Thirdly, where his own Issue faileth, rather a Brother than a stranger; and so still the neerer in bloud, rather than the more remote, because it is alwayes presumed that the neerer of kin, is the neerer in affection; and ’tis evident that a man receives alwayes, by reflexion, the most honour from the greatnesse of his neerest kindred.\n\nBut if it be lawfull for a Monarch to dispose of the Succession by words of Contract, or Testament, men may perhaps object a great inconvenience: for he may sell, or give his Right of governing to a stranger; which, because strangers (that is, men not used to live under the same government, not speaking the same language) do commonly undervalue one another, may turn to the oppression of his Subjects; which is indeed a great inconvenience; but it proceedeth not necessarily from the subjection to a strangers government, but from the unskilfulnesse of the Governours, ignorant of the true rules of Politiques. And therefore the Romans when they had subdued many Nations, to make their Government digestible, were wont to take away that grievance, as much as they thought necessary, by giving sometimes to whole Nations, and sometimes to Principall men of every Nation they conquered, not onely the Privileges, but also the Name of Romans; and took many of them into the Senate, and Offices of charge, even in the Roman City. And this was it our most wise King, King James, aymed at, in endeavouring the Union of his two Realms of England and Scotland. Which if he could have obtained, had in all likelihood prevented the Civill warres, which make both those Kingdomes at this present, miserable. It is not therefore any injury to the people, for a Monarch to dispose of the Succession by Will; though by the fault of many Princes, it hath been sometimes found inconvenient. Of the lawfulnesse of it, this also is an argument, that whatsoever inconvenience can arrive by giving a Kingdome to a stranger, may arrive also by so marrying with strangers, as the Right of Succession may descend upon them: yet this by all men is accounted lawfull.\n\nCHAPTER XX. OF DOMINION PATERNALL AND DESPOTICALL\n\n### Part II, Chapter XX, 1\n\nOF DOMINION PATERNALL AND DESPOTICALL\n\nA Common-wealth by Acquisition, is that, where the Soveraign Power is acquired by Force; And it is acquired by force, when men singly, or many together by plurality of voyces, for fear of death, or bonds, do authorise all the actions of that Man, or Assembly, that hath their lives and liberty in his Power.\n\nAnd this kind of Dominion, or Soveraignty, differeth from Soveraignty by Institution, onely in this, That men who choose their Soveraign, do it for fear of one another, and not of him whom they Institute: But in this case, they subject themselves, to him they are afraid of. In both cases they do it for fear: which is to be noted by them, that hold all such Covenants, as proceed from fear of death, or violence, voyd: which if it were true, no man, in any kind of Common-wealth, could be obliged to Obedience. It is true, that in a Common-wealth once Instituted, or acquired, Promises proceeding from fear of death, or violence, are no Covenants, nor obliging, when the thing promised is contrary to the Lawes; But the reason is not, because it was made upon fear, but because he that promiseth, hath no right in the thing promised. Also, when he may lawfully performe, and doth not, it is not the Invalidity of the Covenant, that absolveth him, but the Sentence of the Soveraign. Otherwise, whensoever a man lawfully promiseth, he unlawfully breaketh: But when the Soveraign, who is the Actor, acquitteth him, then he is acquitted by him that exorted the promise, as by the Author of such absolution.\n\nBut the Rights, and Consequences of Soveraignty, are the same in both. His Power cannot, without his consent, be Transferred to another: He cannot Forfeit it: He cannot be Accused by any of his Subjects, of Injury: He cannot be Punished by them: He is Judge of what is necessary for Peace; and Judge of Doctrines: He is Sole Legislator; and Supreme Judge of Controversies; and of the Times, and Occasions of Warre, and Peace: to him it belongeth to choose Magistrates, Counsellours, Commanders, and all other Officers, and Ministers; and to determine of Rewards, and punishments, Honour, and Order. The reasons whereof, are the same which are alledged in the precedent Chapter, for the same Rights, and Consequences of Soveraignty by Institution.\n\nDominion is acquired two wayes; By Generation, and by Conquest. The right of Dominion by Generation, is that, which the Parent hath over his Children; and is called PATERNALL. And is not so derived from the Generation, as if therefore the Parent had Dominion over his Child because he begat him; but from the Childs Consent, either expresse, or by other sufficient arguments declared. For as to the Generation, God hath ordained to man a helper; and there be alwayes two that are equally Parents: the Dominion therefore over the Child, should belong equally to both; and he be equally subject to both, which is impossible; for no man can obey two Masters. And whereas some have attributed the Dominion to the Man onely, as being of the more excellent Sex; they misreckon in it. For there is not always that difference of strength or prudence between the man and the woman, as that the right can be determined without War. In Common-wealths, this controversie is decided by the Civill Law: and for the most part, (but not alwayes) the sentence is in favour of the Father; because for the most part Common-wealths have been erected by the Fathers, not by the Mothers of families. But the question lyeth now in the state of meer Nature; where there are supposed no lawes of Matrimony; no lawes for the Education of Children; but the Law of Nature, and the naturall inclination of the Sexes, one to another, and to their children. In this condition of meer Nature, either the Parents between themselves dispose of the dominion over the Child by Contract; or do not dispose thereof at all. If they dispose thereof, the right passeth according to the Contract. We find in History that the Amazons Contracted with the Men of the neighbouring Countries, to whom they had recourse for issue, that the issue Male should be sent back, but the Female remain with themselves: so that the dominion of the Females was in the Mother.\n\nIf there be no Contract, the Dominion is in the Mother. For in the condition of Meer Nature, where there are no Matrimoniall lawes, it cannot be known who is the Father, unlesse it be declared by the Mother: and therefore the right of Dominion over the Child dependeth on her will, and is consequently hers. Again, seeing the Infant is first in the power of the Mother; so as she may either nourish, or expose it, if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the Mother; and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other; and by consequence the Dominion over it is hers. But if she expose it, and another find, and nourish it, the Dominion is in him that nourisheth it. For it ought to obey him by whom it is preserved; because preservation of life being the end, for which one man becomes subject to another, every man is supposed to promise obedience, to him, in whose power it is to save, or destroy him.\n\nIf the Mother be the Fathers subject, the Child, is in the Fathers power: and if the Father be the Mothers subject, (as when a Soveraign Queen marrieth one of her subjects,) the Child is subject to the Mother; because the Father also is her subject.\n\nIf a man and a woman, Monarches of two severall Kingdomes, have a Child, and contract concerning who shall have the Dominion of him, the Right of the Dominion passeth by the Contract. If they contract not, the Dominion followeth the Dominion of the place of his residence. For the Soveraign of each Country hath Dominion over all that reside therein.\n\nHe that hath the Dominion over the Child, hath Dominion also over their Childrens Children. For he that hath Dominion over the person of a man, hath Dominion over all that is his; without which, Dominion were but a Title, without the effect.\n\nThe Right of Succession to Paternall dominion, proceedeth in the same manner, as doth the Right of Succession to Monarchy; of which I have already sufficiently spoken in the precedent chapter.\n\nDominion acquired by Conquest, or Victory in war, is that which some Writers call DESPOTICALL, from Despotes, which signifieth a Lord, or Master; and is the Dominion of the Master over his Servant. And this Dominion is then acquired to the Victor, when the Vanquished, to avoyd the present stroke of death, covenanteth either in expresse words, or by other sufficient signes of the Will, that so long as his life, and the liberty of his body is allowed him, the Victor shall have the use thereof, at his pleasure. And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a SERVANT, and not before: for by the word Servant (whether it be derived from Servire, to Serve, or from Servare, to Save, which I leave to Grammarians to dispute) is not meant a Captive, which is kept in prison, or bonds, till the owner of him that took him, or bought him of one that did, shall consider what to do with him: (for such men, (commonly called Slaves,) have no obligation at all; but may break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry away captive their Master, justly:) but one, that being taken, hath corporall liberty allowed him; and upon promise not to run away, nor to do violence to his Master, is trusted by him.\n\nIt is not therefore the Victory, that giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own Covenant. Nor is he obliged because he is Conquered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he commeth in, and submitteth to the Victor; Nor is the Victor obliged by an enemies rendring himselfe, (without promise of life,) to spare him for this his yeelding to discretion; which obliges not the Victor longer, than in his own discretion hee shall think fit.\n\nAnd that men do, when they demand (as it is now called) Quarter, (which the Greeks called Zogria, taking alive,) is to evade the present fury of the Victor, by Submission, and to compound for their life, with Ransome, or Service: and therefore he that hath Quarter, hath not his life given, but deferred till farther deliberation; For it is not an yeelding on condition of life, but to discretion. And then onely is his life in security, and his service due, when the Victor hath trusted him with his corporall liberty. For Slaves that work in Prisons, or Fetters, do it not of duty, but to avoyd the cruelty of their task-masters.\n\nThe Master of the Servant, is Master also of all he hath; and may exact the use thereof; that is to say, of his goods, of his labour, of his servants, and of his children, as often as he shall think fit. For he holdeth his life of his Master, by the covenant of obedience; that is, of owning, and authorising whatsoever the Master shall do. And in case the Master, if he refuse, kill him, or cast him into bonds, or otherwise punish him for his disobedience, he is himselfe the author of the same; and cannot accuse him of injury.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XX, 2\n\nIn summe the Rights and Consequences of both Paternall and Despoticall Dominion, are the very same with those of a Soveraign by Institution; and for the same reasons: which reasons are set down in the precedent chapter. So that for a man that is Monarch of divers Nations, whereof he hath, in one the Soveraignty by Institution of the people assembled, and in another by Conquest, that is by the Submission of each particular, to avoyd death or bonds; to demand of one Nation more than of the other, from the title of Conquest, as being a Conquered Nation, is an act of ignorance of the Rights of Soveraignty. For the Soveraign is absolute over both alike; or else there is no Soveraignty at all; and so every man may Lawfully protect himselfe, if he can, with his own sword, which is the condition of war.\n\nBy this it appears, that a great Family if it be not part of some Common-wealth, is of it self, as to the Rights of Soveraignty, a little Monarchy; whether that Family consist of a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children, and servants together: wherein the Father of Master is the Soveraign. But yet a Family is not properly a Common-wealth; unlesse it be of that power by its own number, or by other opportunities, as not to be subdued without the hazard of war. For where a number of men are manifestly too weak to defend themselves united, every one may use his own reason in time of danger, to save his own life, either by flight, or by submission to the enemy, as hee shall think best; in the same manner as a very small company of souldiers, surprised by an army, may cast down their armes, and demand quarter, or run away, rather than be put to the sword. And thus much shall suffice; concerning what I find by speculation, and deduction, of Soveraign Rights, from the nature, need, and designes of men, in erecting of Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Monarchs, or Assemblies, entrusted with power enough for their protection.\n\nLet us now consider what the Scripture teacheth in the same point. To Moses, the children of Israel say thus. (Exod. 20. 19) “Speak thou to us, and we will heare thee; but let not God speak to us, lest we dye.” This is absolute obedience to Moses. Concerning the Right of Kings, God himself by the mouth of Samuel, saith, (1 Sam. 8. 11, 12, &c.) “This shall be the Right of the King you will have to reigne over you. He shall take your sons, and set them to drive his Chariots, and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and gather in his harvest; and to make his engines of War, and Instruments of his chariots; and shall take your daughters to make perfumes, to be his Cookes, and Bakers. He shall take your fields, your vine-yards, and your olive-yards, and give them to his servants. He shall take the tyth of your corne and wine, and give it to the men of his chamber, and to his other servants. He shall take your man-servants, and your maid-servants, and the choice of your youth, and employ them in his businesse. He shall take the tyth of your flocks; and you shall be his servants.” This is absolute power, and summed up in the last words, “you shall be his servants.” Againe, when the people heard what power their King was to have, yet they consented thereto, and say thus, (Verse. 19 &c.) “We will be as all other nations, and our King shall judge our causes, and goe before us, to conduct our wars.” Here is confirmed the Right that Soveraigns have, both to the Militia, and to all Judicature; in which is conteined as absolute power, as one man can possibly transferre to another. Again, the prayer of King Salomon to God, was this. (1 Kings 3. 9) “Give to thy servant understanding, to judge thy people, and to discerne between Good and Evill.” It belongeth therefore to the Soveraigne to bee Judge, and to praescribe the Rules of Discerning Good and Evill; which Rules are Lawes; and therefore in him is the Legislative Power. Saul sought the life of David; yet when it was in his power to slay Saul, and his Servants would have done it, David forbad them, saying (1 Sam. 24. 9) “God forbid I should do such an act against my Lord, the anoynted of God.” For obedience of servants St. Paul saith, (Coll. 3. 20) “Servants obey your masters in All things,” and, (Verse. 22) “Children obey your Parents in All things.” There is simple obedience in those that are subject to Paternall, or Despoticall Dominion. Again, (Math. 23. 2,3) “The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses chayre and therefore All that they shall bid you observe, that observe and do.” There again is simple obedience. And St. Paul, (Tit. 3. 2) “Warn them that they subject themselves to Princes, and to those that are in Authority, & obey them.” This obedience is also simple. Lastly, our Saviour himselfe acknowledges, that men ought to pay such taxes as are by Kings imposed, where he sayes, “Give to Caesar that which is Caesars;” and payed such taxes himselfe. And that the Kings word, is sufficient to take any thing from any subject, when there is need; and that the King is Judge of that need: For he himselfe, as King of the Jewes, commanded his Disciples to take the Asse, and Asses Colt to carry him into Jerusalem, saying, (Mat. 21. 2,3) “Go into the Village over against you, and you shall find a shee Asse tyed, and her Colt with her, unty them, and bring them to me. And if any man ask you, what you mean by it, Say the Lord hath need of them: And they will let them go.” They will not ask whether his necessity be a sufficient title; nor whether he be judge of that necessity; but acquiesce in the will of the Lord.\n\nTo these places may be added also that of Genesis, (Gen. 3. 5) “You shall be as Gods, knowing Good and Evill.” and verse 11. “Who told thee that thou wast naked? hast thou eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee thou shouldest not eat?” For the Cognisance of Judicature of Good and Evill, being forbidden by the name of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, as a triall of Adams obedience; The Divell to enflame the Ambition of the woman, to whom that fruit already seemed beautifull, told her that by tasting it, they should be as Gods, knowing Good and Evill. Whereupon having both eaten, they did indeed take upon them Gods office, which is Judicature of Good and Evill; but acquired no new ability to distinguish between them aright. And whereas it is sayd, that having eaten, they saw they were naked; no man hath so interpreted that place, as if they had formerly blind, as saw not their own skins: the meaning is plain, that it was then they first judged their nakednesse (wherein it was Gods will to create them) to be uncomely; and by being ashamed, did tacitely censure God himselfe. And thereupon God saith, “Hast thou eaten, &c.” as if he should say, doest thou that owest me obedience, take upon thee to judge of my Commandements? Whereby it is cleerly, (though Allegorically,) signified, that the Commands of them that have the right to command, are not by their Subjects to be censured, nor disputed.\n\nSo it appeareth plainly, to my understanding, both from Reason, and Scripture, that the Soveraign Power, whether placed in One Man, as in Monarchy, or in one Assembly of men, as in Popular, and Aristocraticall Common-wealths, is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it. And though of so unlimited a Power, men may fancy many evill consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour, are much worse. The condition of man in this life shall never be without Inconveniences; but there happeneth in no Common-wealth any great Inconvenience, but what proceeds from the Subjects disobedience, and breach of those Covenants, from which the Common-wealth had its being. And whosoever thinking Soveraign Power too great, will seek to make it lesse; must subject himselfe, to the Power, that can limit it; that is to say, to a greater.\n\nThe greatest objection is, that of the Practise; when men ask, where, and when, such Power has by Subjects been acknowledged. But one may ask them again, when, or where has there been a Kingdome long free from Sedition and Civill Warre. In those Nations, whose Common-wealths have been long-lived, and not been destroyed, but by forraign warre, the Subjects never did dispute of the Soveraign Power. But howsoever, an argument for the Practise of men, that have not sifted to the bottom, and with exact reason weighed the causes, and nature of Common-wealths, and suffer daily those miseries, that proceed from the ignorance thereof, is invalid. For though in all places of the world, men should lay the foundation of their houses on the sand, it could not thence be inferred, that so it ought to be. The skill of making, and maintaining Common-wealths, consisteth in certain Rules, as doth Arithmetique and Geometry; not (as Tennis-play) on Practise onely: which Rules, neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had the leisure, have hitherto had the curiosity, or the method to find out.\n\nCHAPTER XXI. OF THE LIBERTY OF SUBJECTS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXI, 1\n\nOF THE LIBERTY OF SUBJECTS\n\nLiberty, or FREEDOME, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition; (by Opposition, I mean externall Impediments of motion;) and may be applyed no lesse to Irrational, and Inanimate creatures, than to Rationall. For whatsoever is so tyed, or environed, as it cannot move, but within a certain space, which space is determined by the opposition of some externall body, we say it hath not Liberty to go further. And so of all living creatures, whilest they are imprisoned, or restrained, with walls, or chayns; and of the water whilest it is kept in by banks, or vessels, that otherwise would spread it selfe into a larger space, we use to say, they are not at Liberty, to move in such manner, as without those externall impediments they would. But when the impediment of motion, is in the constitution of the thing it selfe, we use not to say, it wants the Liberty; but the Power to move; as when a stone lyeth still, or a man is fastned to his bed by sicknesse.\n\nAnd according to this proper, and generally received meaning of the word, A FREE-MAN, is “he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindred to doe what he has a will to.” But when the words Free, and Liberty, are applyed to any thing but Bodies, they are abused; for that which is not subject to Motion, is not subject to Impediment: And therefore, when ’tis said (for example) The way is free, no liberty of the way is signified, but of those that walk in it without stop. And when we say a Guift is free, there is not meant any liberty of the Guift, but of the Giver, that was not bound by any law, or Covenant to give it. So when we Speak Freely, it is not the liberty of voice, or pronunciation, but of the man, whom no law hath obliged to speak otherwise then he did. Lastly, from the use of the word Freewill, no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe.\n\nFeare and Liberty are consistent; as when a man throweth his goods into the Sea for Feare the ship should sink, he doth it neverthelesse very willingly, and may refuse to doe it if he will: It is therefore the action, of one that was Free; so a man sometimes pays his debt, only for Feare of Imprisonment, which because no body hindred him from detaining, was the action of a man at Liberty. And generally all actions which men doe in Common-wealths, for Feare of the law, or actions, which the doers had Liberty to omit.\n\nLiberty and Necessity are Consistent: As in the water, that hath not only Liberty, but a Necessity of descending by the Channel: so likewise in the Actions which men voluntarily doe; which (because they proceed from their will) proceed from Liberty; and yet because every act of mans will, and every desire, and inclination proceedeth from some cause, which causes in a continuall chaine (whose first link in the hand of God the first of all causes) proceed from Necessity. So that to him that could see the connexion of those causes, the Necessity of all mens voluntary actions, would appeare manifest. And therefore God, that seeth, and disposeth all things, seeth also that the Liberty of man in doing what he will, is accompanied with the Necessity of doing that which God will, & no more, nor lesse. For though men may do many things, which God does not command, nor is therefore Author of them; yet they can have no passion, nor appetite to any thing, of which appetite Gods will is not the cause. And did not his will assure the Necessity of mans will, and consequently of all that on mans will dependeth, the Liberty of men would be a contradiction, and impediment to the omnipotence and Liberty of God. And this shall suffice, (as to the matter in hand) of that naturall Liberty, which only is properly called Liberty.\n\nBut as men, for the atteyning of peace, and conservation of themselves thereby, have made an Artificiall Man, which we call a Common-wealth; so also have they made Artificiall Chains, called Civill Lawes, which they themselves, by mutuall covenants, have fastned at one end, to the lips of that Man, or Assembly, to whom they have given the Soveraigne Power; and at the other end to their own Ears. These Bonds in their own nature but weak, may neverthelesse be made to hold, by the danger, though not by the difficulty of breaking them.\n\nIn relation to these Bonds only it is, that I am to speak now, of the Liberty of Subjects. For seeing there is no Common-wealth in the world, for the regulating of all the actions, and words of men, (as being a thing impossible:) it followeth necessarily, that in all kinds of actions, by the laws praetermitted, men have the Liberty, of doing what their own reasons shall suggest, for the most profitable to themselves. For if wee take Liberty in the proper sense, for corporall Liberty; that is to say, freedome from chains, and prison, it were very absurd for men to clamor as they doe, for the Liberty they so manifestly enjoy. Againe, if we take Liberty, for an exemption from Lawes, it is no lesse absurd, for men to demand as they doe, that Liberty, by which all other men may be masters of their lives. And yet as absurd as it is, this is it they demand; not knowing that the Lawes are of no power to protect them, without a Sword in the hands of a man, or men, to cause those laws to be put in execution. The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted; such as is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; & the like.\n\nNeverthelesse we are not to understand, that by such Liberty, the Soveraign Power of life, and death, is either abolished, or limited. For it has been already shewn, that nothing the Soveraign Representative can doe to a Subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called Injustice, or Injury; because every Subject is Author of every act the Soveraign doth; so that he never wanteth Right to any thing, otherwise, than as he himself is the Subject of God, and bound thereby to observe the laws of Nature. And therefore it may, and doth often happen in Common-wealths, that a Subject may be put to death, by the command of the Soveraign Power; and yet neither doe the other wrong: as when Jeptha caused his daughter to be sacrificed: In which, and the like cases, he that so dieth, had Liberty to doe the action, for which he is neverthelesse, without Injury put to death. And the same holdeth also in a Soveraign Prince, that putteth to death an Innocent Subject. For though the action be against the law of Nature, as being contrary to Equitie, (as was the killing of Uriah, by David;) yet it was not an Injurie to Uriah; but to God. Not to Uriah, because the right to doe what he pleased, was given him by Uriah himself; And yet to God, because David was Gods Subject; and prohibited all Iniquitie by the law of Nature. Which distinction, David himself, when he repented the fact, evidently confirmed, saying, “To thee only have I sinned.” In the same manner, the people of Athens, when they banished the most potent of their Common-wealth for ten years, thought they committed no Injustice; and yet they never questioned what crime he had done; but what hurt he would doe: Nay they commanded the banishment of they knew not whom; and every Citizen bringing his Oystershell into the market place, written with the name of him he desired should be banished, without actuall accusing him, sometimes banished an Aristides, for his reputation of Justice; And sometimes a scurrilous Jester, as Hyperbolus, to make a Jest of it. And yet a man cannot say, the Soveraign People of Athens wanted right to banish them; or an Athenian the Libertie to Jest, or to be Just.\n\nThe Libertie, whereof there is so frequent, and honourable mention, in the Histories, and Philosophy of the Antient Greeks, and Romans, and in the writings, and discourse of those that from them have received all their learning in the Politiques, is not the Libertie of Particular men; but the Libertie of the Common-wealth: which is the same with that, which every man then should have, if there were no Civil Laws, nor Common-wealth at all. And the effects of it also be the same. For as amongst masterlesse men, there is perpetuall war, of every man against his neighbour; no inheritance, to transmit to the Son, nor to expect from the Father; no propriety of Goods, or Lands; no security; but a full and absolute Libertie in every Particular man: So in States, and Common-wealths not dependent on one another, every Common-wealth, (not every man) has an absolute Libertie, to doe what it shall judge (that is to say, what that Man, or Assemblie that representeth it, shall judge) most conducing to their benefit. But withall, they live in the condition of a perpetuall war, and upon the confines of battel, with their frontiers armed, and canons planted against their neighbours round about. The Athenians, and Romanes, were free; that is, free Common-wealths: not that any particular men had the Libertie to resist their own Representative; but that their Representative had the Libertie to resist, or invade other people. There is written on the Turrets of the city of Luca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence inferre, that a particular man has more Libertie, or Immunitie from the service of the Commonwealth there, than in Constantinople. Whether a Common-wealth be Monarchicall, or Popular, the Freedome is still the same.\n\nBut it is an easy thing, for men to be deceived, by the specious name of Libertie; and for want of Judgement to distinguish, mistake that for their Private Inheritance, and Birth right, which is the right of the Publique only. And when the same errour is confirmed by the authority of men in reputation for their writings in this subject, it is no wonder if it produce sedition, and change of Government. In these westerne parts of the world, we are made to receive our opinions concerning the Institution, and Rights of Common-wealths, from Aristotle, Cicero, and other men, Greeks and Romanes, that living under Popular States, derived those Rights, not from the Principles of Nature, but transcribed them into their books, out of the Practice of their own Common-wealths, which were Popular; as the Grammarians describe the Rules of Language, out of the Practise of the time; or the Rules of Poetry, out of the Poems of Homer and Virgil. And because the Athenians were taught, (to keep them from desire of changing their Government,) that they were Freemen, and all that lived under Monarchy were slaves; therefore Aristotle puts it down in his Politiques,(lib.6.cap.2) “In democracy, Liberty is to be supposed: for ’tis commonly held, that no man is Free in any other Government.” And as Aristotle; so Cicero, and other Writers have grounded their Civill doctrine, on the opinions of the Romans, who were taught to hate Monarchy, at first, by them that having deposed their Soveraign, shared amongst them the Soveraignty of Rome; and afterwards by their Successors. And by reading of these Greek, and Latine Authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Soveraigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion of so much blood; as I think I may truly say, there was never any thing so deerly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latine tongues.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXI, 2\n\nTo come now to the particulars of the true Liberty of a Subject; that is to say, what are the things, which though commanded by the Soveraign, he may neverthelesse, without Injustice, refuse to do; we are to consider, what Rights we passe away, when we make a Common-wealth; or (which is all one,) what Liberty we deny our selves, by owning all the Actions (without exception) of the Man, or Assembly we make our Soveraign. For in the act of our Submission, consisteth both our Obligation, and our Liberty; which must therefore be inferred by arguments taken from thence; there being no Obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some Act of his own; for all men equally, are by Nature Free. And because such arguments, must either be drawn from the expresse words, “I Authorise all his Actions,” or from the Intention of him that submitteth himselfe to his Power, (which Intention is to be understood by the End for which he so submitteth;) The Obligation, and Liberty of the Subject, is to be derived, either from those Words, (or others equivalent;) or else from the End of the Institution of Soveraignty; namely, the Peace of the Subjects within themselves, and their Defence against a common Enemy.\n\nFirst therefore, seeing Soveraignty by Institution, is by Covenant of every one to every one; and Soveraignty by Acquisition, by Covenants of the Vanquished to the Victor, or Child to the Parent; It is manifest, that every Subject has Liberty in all those things, the right whereof cannot by Covenant be transferred. I have shewn before in the 14. Chapter, that Covenants, not to defend a mans own body, are voyd. Therefore,\n\nIf the Soveraign command a man (though justly condemned,) to kill, wound, or mayme himselfe; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, ayre, medicine, or any other thing, without which he cannot live; yet hath that man the Liberty to disobey.\n\nIf a man be interrogated by the Soveraign, or his Authority, concerning a crime done by himselfe, he is not bound (without assurance of Pardon) to confesse it; because no man (as I have shewn in the same Chapter) can be obliged by Covenant to accuse himselfe.\n\nAgain, the Consent of a Subject to Soveraign Power, is contained in these words, “I Authorise, or take upon me, all his actions;” in which there is no restriction at all, of his own former naturall Liberty: For by allowing him to Kill Me, I am not bound to Kill my selfe when he commands me. “’Tis one thing to say ‘Kill me, or my fellow, if you please;’ another thing to say, ‘I will kill my selfe, or my fellow.’” It followeth therefore, that\n\nNo man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man; And consequently, that the Obligation a man may sometimes have, upon the Command of the Soveraign to execute any dangerous, or dishonourable Office, dependeth not on the Words of our Submission; but on the Intention; which is to be understood by the End thereof. When therefore our refusall to obey, frustrates the End for which the Soveraignty was ordained; then there is no Liberty to refuse: otherwise there is.\n\nUpon this ground, a man that is commanded as a Souldier to fight against the enemy, though his Soveraign have Right enough to punish his refusall with death, may neverthelesse in many cases refuse, without Injustice; as when he substituteth a sufficient Souldier in his place: for in this case he deserteth not the service of the Common-wealth. And there is allowance to be made for naturall timorousnesse, not onely to women, (of whom no such dangerous duty is expected,) but also to men of feminine courage. When Armies fight, there is on one side, or both, a running away; yet when they do it not out of trechery, but fear, they are not esteemed to do it unjustly, but dishonourably. For the same reason, to avoyd battell, is not Injustice, but Cowardise. But he that inrowleth himselfe a Souldier, or taketh imprest mony, taketh away the excuse of a timorous nature; and is obliged, not onely to go to the battell, but also not to run from it, without his Captaines leave. And when the Defence of the Common-wealth, requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear Arms, every one is obliged; because otherwise the Institution of the Common-wealth, which they have not the purpose, or courage to preserve, was in vain.\n\nTo resist the Sword of the Common-wealth, in defence of another man, guilty, or innocent, no man hath Liberty; because such Liberty, takes away from the Soveraign, the means of Protecting us; and is therefore destructive of the very essence of Government. But in case a great many men together, have already resisted the Soveraign Power Unjustly, or committed some Capitall crime, for which every one of them expecteth death, whether have they not the Liberty then to joyn together, and assist, and defend one another? Certainly they have: For they but defend their lives, which the guilty man may as well do, as the Innocent. There was indeed injustice in the first breach of their duty; Their bearing of Arms subsequent to it, though it be to maintain what they have done, is no new unjust act. And if it be onely to defend their persons, it is not unjust at all. But the offer of Pardon taketh from them, to whom it is offered, the plea of self-defence, and maketh their perseverance in assisting, or defending the rest, unlawfull.\n\nAs for other Lyberties, they depend on the silence of the Law. In cases where the Soveraign has prescribed no rule, there the Subject hath the liberty to do, or forbeare, according to his own discretion. And therefore such Liberty is in some places more, and in some lesse; and in some times more, in other times lesse, according as they that have the Soveraignty shall think most convenient. As for Example, there was a time, when in England a man might enter in to his own Land, (and dispossesse such as wrongfully possessed it) by force. But in after-times, that Liberty of Forcible entry, was taken away by a Statute made (by the King) in Parliament. And is some places of the world, men have the Liberty of many wives: in other places, such Liberty is not allowed.\n\nIf a Subject have a controversie with his Soveraigne, of Debt, or of right of possession of lands or goods, or concerning any service required at his hands, or concerning any penalty corporall, or pecuniary, grounded on a precedent Law; He hath the same Liberty to sue for his right, as if it were against a Subject; and before such Judges, as are appointed by the Soveraign. For seeing the Soveraign demandeth by force of a former Law, and not by vertue of his Power; he declareth thereby, that he requireth no more, than shall appear to be due by that Law. The sute therefore is not contrary to the will of the Soveraign; and consequently the Subject hath the Liberty to demand the hearing of his Cause; and sentence, according to that Law. But if he demand, or take any thing by pretence of his Power; there lyeth, in that case, no action of Law: for all that is done by him in Vertue of his Power, is done by the Authority of every subject, and consequently, he that brings an action against the Soveraign, brings it against himselfe.\n\nIf a Monarch, or Soveraign Assembly, grant a Liberty to all, or any of his Subjects; which Grant standing, he is disabled to provide for their safety, the Grant is voyd; unlesse he directly renounce, or transferre the Soveraignty to another. For in that he might openly, (if it had been his will,) and in plain termes, have renounced, or transferred it, and did not; it is to be understood it was not his will; but that the Grant proceeded from ignorance of the repugnancy between such a Liberty and the Soveraign Power; and therefore the Soveraignty is still retayned; and consequently all those Powers, which are necessary to the exercising thereof; such as are the Power of Warre, and Peace, of Judicature, of appointing Officers, and Councellours, of levying Mony, and the rest named in the 18th Chapter.\n\nThe Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-wealth; which once departed from the Body, the members doe no more receive their motion from it. The end of Obedience is Protection; which, wheresoever a man seeth it, either in his own, or in anothers sword, Nature applyeth his obedience to it, and his endeavour to maintaine it. And though Soveraignty, in the intention of them that make it, be immortall; yet is it in its own nature, not only subject to violent death, by forreign war; but also through the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it, from the very institution, many seeds of a naturall mortality, by Intestine Discord.\n\nIf a Subject be taken prisoner in war; or his person, or his means of life be within the Guards of the enemy, and hath his life and corporall Libertie given him, on condition to be Subject to the Victor, he hath Libertie to accept the condition; and having accepted it, is the subject of him that took him; because he had no other way to preserve himselfe. The case is the same, if he be deteined on the same termes, in a forreign country. But if a man be held in prison, or bonds, or is not trusted with the libertie of his bodie; he cannot be understood to be bound by Covenant to subjection; and therefore may, if he can, make his escape by any means whatsoever.\n\nIf a Monarch shall relinquish the Soveraignty, both for himself, and his heires; His Subjects returne to the absolute Libertie of Nature; because, though Nature may declare who are his Sons, and who are the nerest of his Kin; yet it dependeth on his own will, (as hath been said in the precedent chapter,) who shall be his Heyr. If therefore he will have no Heyre, there is no Soveraignty, nor Subjection. The case is the same, if he dye without known Kindred, and without declaration of his Heyre. For then there can no Heire be known, and consequently no Subjection be due.\n\nIf the Soveraign Banish his Subject; during the Banishment, he is not Subject. But he that is sent on a message, or hath leave to travell, is still Subject; but it is, by Contract between Soveraigns, not by vertue of the covenant of Subjection. For whosoever entreth into anothers dominion, is Subject to all the Lawes thereof; unless he have a privilege by the amity of the Soveraigns, or by speciall licence.\n\nIf a Monarch subdued by war, render himself Subject to the Victor; his Subjects are delivered from their former obligation, and become obliged to the Victor. But if he be held prisoner, or have not the liberty of his own Body; he is not understood to have given away the Right of Soveraigntie; and therefore his Subjects are obliged to yield obedience to the Magistrates formerly placed, governing not in their own name, but in his. For, his Right remaining, the question is only of the Administration; that is to say, of the Magistrates and Officers; which, if he have not means to name, he is supposed to approve those, which he himself had formerly appointed.\n\nCHAPTER XXII. OF SYSTEMES SUBJECT, POLITICALL, AND PRIVATE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXII, 1\n\nOF SYSTEMES SUBJECT, POLITICALL, AND PRIVATE\n\nHaving spoken of the Generation, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth, I am in order to speak next of the parts thereof. And first of Systemes, which resemble the similar parts, or Muscles of a Body naturall. By SYSTEMES; I understand any numbers of men joyned in one Interest, or one Businesse. Of which, some are Regular, and some Irregular. Regular are those, where one Man, or Assembly of men, is constituted Representative of the whole number. All other are Irregular.\n\nOf Regular, some are Absolute, and Independent, subject to none but their own Representative: such are only Common-wealths; Of which I have spoken already in the 5. last preceding chapters. Others are Dependent; that is to say, Subordinate to some Soveraign Power, to which every one, as also their Representative is Subject.\n\nOf Systemes subordinate, some are Politicall, and some Private. Politicall (otherwise Called Bodies Politique, and Persons In Law,) are those, which are made by authority from the Soveraign Power of the Common-wealth. Private, are those, which are constituted by Subjects amongst themselves, or by authoritie from a stranger. For no authority derived from forraign power, within the Dominion of another, is Publique there, but Private.\n\nAnd of Private Systemes, some are Lawfull; some Unlawfull: Lawfull, are those which are allowed by the Common-wealth: all other are Unlawfull. Irregular Systemes, are those which having no Representative, consist only in concourse of People; which if not forbidden by the Common-wealth, nor made on evill designe, (such as are conflux of People to markets, or shews, or any other harmelesse end,) are Lawfull. But when the Intention is evill, or (if the number be considerable) unknown, they are Unlawfull.\n\nIn Bodies Politique, the power of the Representative is alwaies Limited: And that which prescribeth the limits thereof, is the Power Soveraign. For Power Unlimited, is absolute Soveraignty. And the Soveraign, in every Commonwealth, is the absolute Representative of all the Subjects; and therefore no other, can be Representative of any part of them, but so far forth, as he shall give leave; And to give leave to a Body Politique of Subjects, to have an absolute Representative to all intents and purposes, were to abandon the Government of so much of the Commonwealth, and to divide the Dominion, contrary to their Peace and Defence, which the Soveraign cannot be understood to doe, by any Grant, that does not plainly, and directly discharge them of their subjection. For consequences of words, are not the signes of his will, when other consequences are signes of the contrary; but rather signes of errour, and misreckoning; to which all mankind is too prone.\n\nThe bounds of that Power, which is given to the Representative of a Bodie Politique, are to be taken notice of, from two things. One is their Writt, or Letters from the Soveraign: the other is the Law of the Common-wealth.\n\nFor though in the Institution or Acquisition of a Common-wealth, which is independent, there needs no Writing, because the Power of the Representative has there no other bounds, but such as are set out by the unwritten Law of Nature; yet in subordinate bodies, there are such diversities of Limitation necessary, concerning their businesses, times, and places, as can neither be remembred without Letters, nor taken notice of, unlesse such Letters be Patent, that they may be read to them, and withall sealed, or testified, with the Seales, or other permanent signes of the Authority Soveraign.\n\nAnd because such Limitation is not alwaies easie, or perhaps possible to be described in writing; the ordinary Lawes, common to all Subjects, must determine, that the Representative may lawfully do, in all Cases, where the Letters themselves are silent. And therefore\n\nIn a Body Politique, if the Representative be one man, whatsoever he does in the Person of the Body, which is not warranted in his Letters, nor by the Lawes, is his own act, and not the act of the Body, nor of any other Member thereof besides himselfe: Because further than his Letters, or the Lawes limit, he representeth no mans person, but his own. But what he does according to these, is the act of every one: For of the Act of the Soveraign every one is Author, because he is their Representative unlimited; and the act of him that recedes not from the Letters of the Soveraign, is the act of the Soveraign, and therefore every member of the Body is Author of it.\n\nBut if the Representative be an Assembly, whatsoever that Assembly shall Decree, not warranted by their Letters, or the Lawes, is the act of the Assembly, or Body Politique, and the act of every one by whose Vote the Decree was made; but not the act of any man that being present Voted to the contrary; nor of any man absent, unlesse he Voted it by procuration. It is the act of the Assembly, because Voted by the major part; and if it be a crime, the Assembly may be punished, as farre-forth as it is capable, as by dissolution, or forfeiture of their Letters (which is to such artificiall, and fictitious Bodies, capitall,) or (if the Assembly have a Common stock, wherein none of the Innocent Members have propriety,) by pecuniary Mulct. For from corporall penalties Nature hath exempted all Bodies Politique. But they that gave not their Vote, are therefore Innocent, because the Assembly cannot Represent any man in things unwarranted by their Letters, and consequently are not involved in their Votes.\n\nWhen The Representative Is One Man, If He Borrow Mony, Or Owe It, By Contract; He Is Lyable Onely, The Members Not If the person of the Body Politique being in one man, borrow mony of a stranger, that is, of one that is not of the same Body, (for no Letters need limit borrowing, seeing it is left to mens own inclinations to limit lending) the debt is the Representatives. For if he should have Authority from his Letters, to make the members pay what he borroweth, he should have by consequence the Soveraignty of them; and therefore the grant were either voyd, as proceeding from Errour, commonly incident to humane Nature, and an unsufficient signe of the will of the Granter; or if it be avowed by him, then is the Representer Soveraign, and falleth not under the present question, which is onely of Bodies subordinate. No member therefore is obliged to pay the debt so borrowed, but the Representative himselfe: because he that lendeth it, being a stranger to the Letters, and to the qualification of the Body, understandeth those onely for his debtors, that are engaged; and seeing the Representer can ingage himselfe, and none else, has him onely for Debtor; who must therefore pay him, out of the common stock (if there be any), or (if there be none) out of his own estate.\n\nIf he come into debt by Contract, or Mulct, the case is the same.\n\nBut when the Representative is an Assembly, and the debt to a stranger; all they, and onely they are responsible for the debt, that gave their votes to the borrowing of it, or to the Contract that made it due, or to the fact for which the Mulct was imposed; because every one of those in voting did engage himselfe for the payment: For he that is author of the borrowing, is obliged to the payment, even of the whole debt, though when payd by any one, he be discharged.\n\nBut if the debt be to one of the Assembly, the Assembly onely is obliged to the payment, out of their common stock (if they have any:) For having liberty of Vote, if he Vote the Mony, shall be borrowed, he Votes it shall be payd; If he Vote it shall not be borrowed, or be absent, yet because in lending, he voteth the borrowing, he contradicteth his former Vote, and is obliged by the later, and becomes both borrower and lender, and consequently cannot demand payment from any particular man, but from the common Treasure onely; which fayling he hath no remedy, nor complaint, but against himselfe, that being privy to the acts of the Assembly, and their means to pay, and not being enforced, did neverthelesse through his own folly lend his mony.\n\nSometimes Lawful; But Against Soveraign Power Never It is manifest by this, that in Bodies Politique subordinate, and subject to a Soveraign Power, it is sometimes not onely lawfull, but expedient, for a particular man to make open protestation against the decrees of the Representative Assembly, and cause their dissent to be Registred, or to take witnesse of it; because otherwise they may be obliged to pay debts contracted, and be responsible for crimes committed by other men: But in a Soveraign Assembly, that liberty is taken away, both because he that protesteth there, denies their Soveraignty; and also because whatsoever is commanded by the Soveraign Power, is as to the Subject (though not so alwayes in the sight of God) justified by the Command; for of such command every Subject is the Author.\n\nThe variety of Bodies Politique, is almost infinite; for they are not onely distinguished by the severall affaires, for which they are constituted, wherein there is an unspeakable diversitie; but also by the times, places, and numbers, subject to many limitations. And as to their affaires, some are ordained for Government; As first, the Government of a Province may be committed to an Assembly of men, wherein all resolutions shall depend on the Votes of the major part; and then this Assembly is a Body Politique, and their power limited by Commission. This word Province signifies a charge, or care of businesse, which he whose businesse it is, committeth to another man, to be administred for, and under him; and therefore when in one Common-wealth there be divers Countries, that have their Lawes distinct one from another, or are farre distant in place, the Administration of the Government being committed to divers persons, those Countries where the Soveraign is not resident, but governs by Commission, are called Provinces. But of the government of a Province, by an Assembly residing in the Province it selfe, there be few examples. The Romans who had the Soveraignty of many Provinces; yet governed them alwaies by Presidents, and Praetors; and not by Assemblies, as they governed the City of Rome, and Territories adjacent. In like manner, when there were Colonies sent from England, to Plant Virginia, and Sommer-Ilands; though the government of them here, were committed to Assemblies in London, yet did those Assemblies never commit the Government under them to any Assembly there; but did to each Plantation send one Governour; For though every man, where he can be present by Nature, desires to participate of government; yet where they cannot be present, they are by Nature also enclined, to commit the Government of their common Interest rather to a Monarchicall, then a Popular form of Government: which is also evident in those men that have great private estates; who when they are unwilling to take the paines of administring the businesse that belongs to them, choose rather to trust one Servant, than a Assembly either of their friends or servants. But howsoever it be in fact, yet we may suppose the Government of a Province, or Colony committed to an Assembly: and when it is, that which in this place I have to say, is this; that whatsoever debt is by that Assembly contracted; or whatsoever unlawfull Act is decreed, is the Act onely of those that assented, and not of any that dissented, or were absent, for the reasons before alledged. Also that an Assembly residing out of the bounds of that Colony whereof they have the government, cannot execute any power over the persons, or goods of any of the Colonie, to seize on them for debt, or other duty, in any place without the Colony it selfe, as having no Jurisdiction, nor Authoritie elsewhere, but are left to the remedie, which the Law of the place alloweth them. And though the Assembly have right, to impose a Mulct upon any of their members, that shall break the Lawes they make; yet out of the Colonie it selfe, they have no right to execute the same. And that which is said here, of the Rights of an Assembly, for the government of a Province, or a Colony, is appliable also to an Assembly for the Government of a Town, or University, or a College, or a Church, or for any other Government over the persons of men.\n\nAnd generally, in all Bodies Politique, if any particular member conceive himself Injured by the Body it self, the Cognisance of his cause belongeth to the Soveraign, and those the Soveraign hath ordained for Judges in such causes, or shall ordaine for that particular cause; and not to the Body it self. For the whole Body is in this case his fellow subject, which in a Soveraign Assembly, is otherwise: for there, if the Soveraign be not Judge, though in his own cause, there can be no Judge at all.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXII, 2\n\nIn a Bodie Politique, for the well ordering of forraigne Traffique, the most commodious Representative is an Assembly of all the members; that is to say, such a one, as every one that adventureth his mony, may be present at all the Deliberations, and Resolutions of the Body, if they will themselves. For proof whereof, we are to consider the end, for which men that are Merchants, and may buy and sell, export, and import their Merchandise, according to their own discretions, doe neverthelesse bind themselves up in one Corporation. It is true, there be few Merchants, that with the Merchandise they buy at home, can fraight a Ship, to export it; or with that they buy abroad, to bring it home; and have therefore need to joyn together in one Society; where every man may either participate of the gaine, according to the proportion of his adventure; or take his own; and sell what he transports, or imports, at such prices as he thinks fit. But this is no Body Politique, there being no Common Representative to oblige them to any other Law, than that which is common to all other subjects. The End of their Incorporating, is to make their gaine the greater; which is done two wayes; by sole buying, and sole selling, both at home, and abroad. So that to grant to a Company of Merchants to be a Corporation, or Body Politique, is to grant them a double Monopoly, whereof one is to be sole buyers; another to be sole sellers. For when there is a Company incorporate for any particular forraign Country, they only export the Commodities vendible in that Country; which is sole buying at home, and sole selling abroad. For at home there is but one buyer, and abroad but one that selleth: both which is gainfull to the Merchant, because thereby they buy at home at lower, and sell abroad at higher rates: And abroad there is but one buyer of forraign Merchandise, and but one that sels them at home; both which againe are gainfull to the adventurers.\n\nOf this double Monopoly one part is disadvantageous to the people at home, the other to forraigners. For at home by their sole exportation they set what price they please on the husbandry and handy-works of the people; and by the sole importation, what price they please on all forraign commodities the people have need of; both which are ill for the people. On the contrary, by the sole selling of the native commodities abroad, and sole buying the forraign commodities upon the place, they raise the price of those, and abate the price of these, to the disadvantage of the forraigner: For where but one selleth, the Merchandise is the dearer; and where but one buyeth the cheaper: Such Corporations therefore are no other then Monopolies; though they would be very profitable for a Common-wealth, if being bound up into one body in forraigne Markets they were at liberty at home, every man to buy, and sell at what price he could.\n\nThe end then of these Bodies of Merchants, being not a Common benefit to the whole Body, (which have in this case no common stock, but what is deducted out of the particular adventures, for building, buying, victualling and manning of Ships,) but the particular gaine of every adventurer, it is reason that every one be acquainted with the employment of his own; that is, that every one be of the Assembly, that shall have the power to order the same; and be acquainted with their accounts. And therefore the Representative of such a Body must be an Assembly, where every member of the Body may be present at the consultations, if he will.\n\nIf a Body Politique of Merchants, contract a debt to a stranger by the act of their Representative Assembly, every Member is lyable by himself for the whole. For a stranger can take no notice of their private Lawes, but considereth them as so many particular men, obliged every one to the whole payment, till payment made by one dischargeth all the rest: But if the debt be to one of the Company, the creditor is debter for the whole to himself, and cannot therefore demand his debt, but only from the common stock, if there be any.\n\nIf the Common-wealth impose a Tax upon the Body, it is understood to be layd upon every member proportionably to his particular adventure in the Company. For there is in this case no other common stock, but what is made of their particular adventures.\n\nIf a Mulct be layd upon the Body for some unlawfull act, they only are lyable by whose votes the act was decreed, or by whose assistance it was executed; for in none of the rest is there any other crime but being of the Body; which if a crime, (because the Body was ordeyned by the authority of the Common-wealth,) is not his.\n\nIf one of the Members be indebted to the Body, he may be sued by the Body; but his goods cannot be taken, nor his person imprisoned by the authority of the Body; but only by Authority of the Common-wealth: for if they can doe it by their own Authority, they can by their own Authority give judgement that the debt is due, which is as much as to be Judge in their own Cause.\n\nThese Bodies made for the government of Men, or of Traffique, be either perpetuall, or for a time prescribed by writing. But there be Bodies also whose times are limited, and that only by the nature of their businesse. For example, if a Soveraign Monarch, or a Soveraign Assembly, shall think fit to give command to the towns, and other severall parts of their territory, to send to him their Deputies, to enforme him of the condition, and necessities of the Subjects, or to advise with him for the making of good Lawes, or for any other cause, as with one Person representing the whole Country, such Deputies, having a place and time of meeting assigned them, are there, and at that time, a Body Politique, representing every Subject of that Dominion; but it is onely for such matters as shall be propounded unto them by that Man, or Assembly, that by the Soveraign Authority sent for them; and when it shall be declared that nothing more shall be propounded, nor debated by them, the Body is dissolved. For if they were the absolute Representative of the people, then were it the Soveraign Assembly; and so there would be two Soveraign Assemblies, or two Soveraigns, over the same people; which cannot consist with their Peace. And therefore where there is once a Soveraignty, there can be no absolute Representation of the people, but by it. And for the limits of how farre such a Body shall represent the whole People, they are set forth in the Writing by which they were sent for. For the People cannot choose their Deputies to other intent, than is in the Writing directed to them from their Soveraign expressed.\n\nPrivate Bodies Regular, and Lawfull, are those that are constituted without Letters, or other written Authority, saving the Lawes common to all other Subjects. And because they be united in one Person Representative, they are held for Regular; such as are all Families, in which the Father, or Master ordereth the whole Family. For he obligeth his Children, and Servants, as farre as the Law permitteth, though not further, because none of them are bound to obedience in those actions, which the Law hath forbidden to be done. In all other actions, during the time they are under domestique government, they are subject to their Fathers, and Masters, as to their immediate Soveraigns. For the Father, and Master being before the Institution of Common-wealth, absolute Soveraigns in their own Families, they lose afterward no more of their Authority, than the Law of the Common-wealth taketh from them.\n\nPrivate Bodies Regular, but Unlawfull, are those that unite themselves into one person Representative, without any publique Authority at all; such as are the Corporations of Beggars, Theeves and Gipsies, the better to order their trade of begging, and stealing; and the Corporations of men, that by Authority from any forraign Person, unite themselves in anothers Dominion, for easier propagation of Doctrines, and for making a party, against the Power of the Common-wealth.\n\nIrregular Systemes, in their nature, but Leagues, or sometimes meer concourse of people, without union to any particular designe, not by obligation of one to another, but proceeding onely from a similitude of wills and inclinations, become Lawfull, or Unlawfull, according to the lawfulnesse, or unlawfulnesse of every particular mans design therein: And his designe is to be understood by the occasion.\n\nThe Leagues of Subjects, (because Leagues are commonly made for mutuall defence,) are in a Common-wealth (which is no more than a League of all the Subjects together) for the most part unnecessary, and savour of unlawfull designe; and are for that cause Unlawfull, and go commonly by the name of factions, or Conspiracies. For a League being a connexion of men by Covenants, if there be no power given to any one Man or Assembly, (as in the condition of meer Nature) to compell them to performance, is so long onely valid, as there ariseth no just cause of distrust: and therefore Leagues between Common-wealths, over whom there is no humane Power established, to keep them all in awe, are not onely lawfull, but also profitable for the time they last. But Leagues of the Subjects of one and the same Common-wealth, where every one may obtain his right by means of the Soveraign Power, are unnecessary to the maintaining of Peace and Justice, and (in case the designe of them be evill, or Unknown to the Common-wealth) unlawfull. For all uniting of strength by private men, is, if for evill intent, unjust; if for intent unknown, dangerous to the Publique, and unjustly concealed.\n\nIf the Soveraign Power be in a great Assembly, and a number of men, part of the Assembly, without authority, consult a part, to contrive the guidance of the rest; This is a Faction, or Conspiracy unlawfull, as being a fraudulent seducing of the Assembly for their particular interest. But if he, whose private interest is to be debated, and judged in the Assembly, make as many friends as he can; in him it is no Injustice; because in this case he is no part of the Assembly. And though he hire such friends with mony, (unlesse there be an expresse Law against it,) yet it is not Injustice. For sometimes, (as mens manners are,) Justice cannot be had without mony; and every man may think his own cause just, till it be heard, and judged.\n\nIn all Common-wealths, if a private man entertain more servants, than the government of his estate, and lawfull employment he has for them requires, it is Faction, and unlawfull. For having the protection of the Common-wealth, he needeth not the defence of private force. And whereas in Nations not throughly civilized, severall numerous Families have lived in continuall hostility, and invaded one another with private force; yet it is evident enough, that they have done unjustly; or else that they had no Common-wealth.\n\nAnd as Factions for Kindred, so also Factions for Government of Religion, as of Papists, Protestants, &c. or of State, as Patricians, and Plebeians of old time in Rome, and of Aristocraticalls and Democraticalls of old time in Greece, are unjust, as being contrary to the peace and safety of the people, and a taking of the Sword out of the hand of the Soveraign.\n\nConcourse of people, is an Irregular Systeme, the lawfulnesse, or unlawfulnesse, whereof dependeth on the occasion, and on the number of them that are assembled. If the occasion be lawfull, and manifest, the Concourse is lawfull; as the usuall meeting of men at Church, or at a publique Shew, in usuall numbers: for if the numbers be extraordinarily great, the occasion is not evident; and consequently he that cannot render a particular and good account of his being amongst them, is to be judged conscious of an unlawfull, and tumultuous designe. It may be lawfull for a thousand men, to joyn in a Petition to be delivered to a Judge, or Magistrate; yet if a thousand men come to present it, it is a tumultuous Assembly; because there needs but one or two for that purpose. But in such cases as these, it is not a set number that makes the Assembly Unlawfull, but such a number, as the present Officers are not able to suppresse, and bring to Justice.\n\nWhen an unusuall number of men, assemble against a man whom they accuse; the Assembly is an Unlawfull tumult; because they may deliver their accusation to the Magistrate by a few, or by one man. Such was the case of St. Paul at Ephesus; where Demetrius, and a great number of other men, brought two of Pauls companions before the Magistrate, saying with one Voyce, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians;” which was their way of demanding Justice against them for teaching the people such doctrine, as was against their Religion, and Trade. The occasion here, considering the Lawes of that People, was just; yet was their Assembly Judged Unlawfull, and the Magistrate reprehended them for it, in these words,(Acts 19. 40) “If Demetrius and the other work-men can accuse any man, of any thing, there be Pleas, and Deputies, let them accuse one another. And if you have any other thing to demand, your case may be judged in an Assembly Lawfully called. For we are in danger to be accused for this dayes sedition, because, there is no cause by which any man can render any reason of this Concourse of People.” Where he calleth an Assembly, whereof men can give no just account, a Sedition, and such as they could not answer for. And this is all I shall say concerning Systemes, and Assemblyes of People, which may be compared (as I said,) to the Similar parts of mans Body; such as be Lawfull, to the Muscles; such as are Unlawfull, to Wens, Biles, and Apostemes, engendred by the unnaturall conflux of evill humours.\n\nCHAPTER XXIII. OF THE PUBLIQUE MINISTERS OF SOVERAIGN POWER\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIII\n\nOF THE PUBLIQUE MINISTERS OF SOVERAIGN POWER\n\nIn the last Chapter I have spoken of the Similar parts of a Common-wealth; In this I shall speak of the parts Organicall, which are Publique Ministers.\n\nA PUBLIQUE MINISTER, is he, that by the Soveraign, (whether a Monarch, or an Assembly,) is employed in any affaires, with Authority to represent in that employment, the Person of the Common-wealth. And whereas every man, or assembly that hath Soveraignty, representeth two Persons, or (as the more common phrase is) has two Capacities, one Naturall, and another Politique, (as a Monarch, hath the person not onely of the Common-wealth, but also of a man; and a Soveraign Assembly hath the Person not onely of the Common-wealth, but also of the Assembly); they that be servants to them in their naturall Capacity, are not Publique Ministers; but those onely that serve them in the Administration of the Publique businesse. And therefore neither Ushers, nor Sergeants, nor other Officers that waite on the Assembly, for no other purpose, but for the commodity of the men assembled, in an Aristocracy, or Democracy; nor Stewards, Chamberlains, Cofferers, or any other Officers of the houshold of a Monarch, are Publique Ministers in a Monarchy.\n\nOf Publique Ministers, some have charge committed to them of a general Administration, either of the whole Dominion, or of a part thereof. Of the whole, as to a Protector, or Regent, may bee committed by the Predecessor of an Infant King, during his minority, the whole Administration of his Kingdome. In which case, every Subject is so far obliged to obedience, as the Ordinances he shall make, and the commands he shall give be in the Kings name, and not inconsistent with his Soveraigne Power. Of a Part, or Province; as when either a Monarch, or a Soveraign Assembly, shall give the generall charge thereof to a Governour, Lieutenant, Praefect, or Vice-Roy: And in this case also, every one of that Province, is obliged to all he shall doe in the name of the Soveraign, and that not incompatible with the Soveraigns Right. For such Protectors, Vice-Roys, and Governours, have no other right, but what depends on the Soveraigns Will; and no Commission that can be given them, can be interpreted for a Declaration of the will to transferre the Soveraignty, without expresse and perspicuous words to that purpose. And this kind of Publique Ministers resembleth the Nerves, and Tendons that move the severall limbs of a body naturall.\n\nOthers have speciall Administration; that is to say, charges of some speciall businesse, either at home, or abroad: As at home, First, for the Oeconomy of a Common-wealth, They that have Authority concerning the Treasure, as Tributes, Impositions, Rents, Fines, or whatsoever publique revenue, to collect, receive, issue, or take the Accounts thereof, are Publique Ministers: Ministers, because they serve the Person Representative, and can doe nothing against his Command, nor without his Authority: Publique, because they serve him in his Politicall Capacity.\n\nSecondly, they that have Authority concerning the Militia; to have the custody of Armes, Forts, Ports; to Levy, Pay, or Conduct Souldiers; or to provide for any necessary thing for the use of war, either by Land or Sea, are publique Ministers. But a Souldier without Command, though he fight for the Common-wealth, does not therefore represent the Person of it; because there is none to represent it to. For every one that hath command, represents it to them only whom he commandeth.\n\nThey also that have authority to teach, or to enable others to teach the people their duty to the Soveraign Power, and instruct them in the knowledge of what is just, and unjust, thereby to render them more apt to live in godlinesse, and in peace among themselves, and resist the publique enemy, are Publique Ministers: Ministers, in that they doe it not by their own Authority, but by anothers; and Publique, because they doe it (or should doe it) by no Authority, but that of the Soveraign. The Monarch, or the Soveraign Assembly only hath immediate Authority from God, to teach and instruct the people; and no man but the Soveraign, receiveth his power Dei Gratia simply; that is to say, from the favour of none but God: All other, receive theirs from the favour and providence of God, and their Soveraigns; as in a Monarchy Dei Gratia & Regis; or Dei Providentia & Voluntate Regis.\n\nThey also to whom Jurisdiction is given, are Publique Ministers. For in their Seats of Justice they represent the person of the Soveraign; and their Sentence, is his Sentence; For (as hath been before declared) all Judicature is essentially annexed to the Soveraignty; and therefore all other Judges are but Ministers of him, or them that have the Soveraign Power. And as Controversies are of two sorts, namely of Fact, and of Law; so are judgements, some of Fact, some of Law: And consequently in the same controversie, there may be two Judges, one of Fact, another of Law.\n\nAnd in both these controversies, there may arise a controversie between the party Judged, and the Judge; which because they be both Subjects to the Soveraign, ought in Equity to be Judged by men agreed on by consent of both; for no man can be Judge in his own cause. But the Soveraign is already agreed on for Judge by them both, and is therefore either to heare the Cause, and determine it himself, or appoint for Judge such as they shall both agree on. And this agreement is then understood to be made between them divers wayes; as first, if the Defendant be allowed to except against such of his Judges, whose interest maketh him suspect them, (for as to the Complaynant he hath already chosen his own Judge,) those which he excepteth not against, are Judges he himself agrees on. Secondly, if he appeale to any other Judge, he can appeale no further; for his appeale is his choice. Thirdly, if he appeale to the Soveraign himself, and he by himself, or by Delegates which the parties shall agree on, give Sentence; that Sentence is finall: for the Defendant is Judged by his own Judges, that is to say, by himself.\n\nThese properties of just and rationall Judicature considered, I cannot forbeare to observe the excellent constitution of the Courts of Justice, established both for Common, and also for Publique Pleas in England. By Common Pleas, I meane those, where both the Complaynant and Defendant are Subjects: and by Publique, (which are also called Pleas of the Crown) those, where the Complaynant is the Soveraign. For whereas there were two orders of men, whereof one was Lords, the other Commons; The Lords had this Priviledge, to have for Judges in all Capitall crimes, none but Lords; and of them, as many as would be present; which being ever acknowledged as a Priviledge of favour, their Judges were none but such as they had themselves desired. And in all controversies, every Subject (as also in civill controversies the Lords) had for Judges, men of the Country where the matter in controversie lay; against which he might make his exceptions, till at last Twelve men without exception being agreed on, they were Judged by those twelve. So that having his own Judges, there could be nothing alledged by the party, why the sentence should not be finall, These publique persons, with Authority from the Soveraign Power, either to Instruct, or Judge the people, are such members of the Common-wealth, as may fitly be compared to the organs of Voice in a Body naturall.\n\nPublique Ministers are also all those, that have Authority from the Soveraign, to procure the Execution of Judgements given; to publish the Soveraigns Commands; to suppresse Tumults; to apprehend, and imprison Malefactors; and other acts tending to the conservation of the Peace. For every act they doe by such Authority, is the act of the Common-wealth; and their service, answerable to that of the Hands, in a Bodie naturall.\n\nPublique Ministers abroad, are those that represent the Person of their own Soveraign, to forraign States. Such are Ambassadors, Messengers, Agents, and Heralds, sent by publique Authoritie, and on publique Businesse.\n\nBut such as are sent by Authoritie only of some private partie of a troubled State, though they be received, are neither Publique, nor Private Ministers of the Common-wealth; because none of their actions have the Common-wealth for Author. Likewise, an Ambassador sent from a Prince, to congratulate, condole, or to assist at a solemnity, though Authority be Publique; yet because the businesse is Private, and belonging to him in his naturall capacity; is a Private person. Also if a man be sent into another Country, secretly to explore their counsels, and strength; though both the Authority, and the Businesse be Publique; yet because there is none to take notice of any Person in him, but his own; he is but a Private Minister; but yet a Minister of the Common-wealth; and may be compared to an Eye in the Body naturall. And those that are appointed to receive the Petitions or other informations of the People, and are as it were the publique Eare, are Publique Ministers, and represent their Soveraign in that office.\n\nNeither a Counsellor, nor a Councell of State, if we consider it with no Authority of Judicature or Command, but only of giving Advice to the Soveraign when it is required, or of offering it when it is not required, is a Publique Person. For the Advice is addressed to the Soveraign only, whose person cannot in his own presence, be represented to him, by another. But a Body of Counsellors, are never without some other Authority, either of Judicature, or of immediate Administration: As in a Monarchy, they represent the Monarch, in delivering his Commands to the Publique Ministers: In a Democracy, the Councell, or Senate propounds the Result of their deliberations to the people, as a Councell; but when they appoint Judges, or heare Causes, or give Audience to Ambassadors, it is in the quality of a Minister of the People: And in an Aristocracy the Councell of State is the Soveraign Assembly it self; and gives counsell to none but themselves.\n\nCHAPTER XXIV. OF THE NUTRITION, AND PROCREATION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIV\n\nOF THE NUTRITION, AND PROCREATION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\nThe Nourishment Of A Common-wealth Consisteth In The Commodities\n\nOf Sea And Land\n\nThe NUTRITION of a Common-wealth consisteth, in the Plenty, and Distribution of Materials conducing to Life: In Concoction, or Preparation; and (when concocted) in the Conveyance of it, by convenient conduits, to the Publique use.\n\nAs for the Plenty of Matter, it is a thing limited by Nature, to those commodities, which from (the two breasts of our common Mother) Land, and Sea, God usually either freely giveth, or for labour selleth to man-kind.\n\nFor the Matter of this Nutriment, consisting in Animals, Vegetals, and Minerals, God hath freely layd them before us, in or neer to the face of the Earth; so as there needeth no more but the labour, and industry of receiving them. Insomuch as Plenty dependeth (next to Gods favour) meerly on the labour and industry of men.\n\nThis Matter, commonly called Commodities, is partly Native, and partly Forraign: Native, that which is to be had within the Territory of the Common-wealth; Forraign, that which is imported from without. And because there is no Territory under the Dominion of one Common-wealth, (except it be of very vast extent,) that produceth all things needfull for the maintenance, and motion of the whole Body; and few that produce not something more than necessary; the superfluous commodities to be had within, become no more superfluous, but supply these wants at home, by importation of that which may be had abroad, either by Exchange, or by just Warre, or by Labour: for a mans Labour also, is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing: And there have been Common-wealths that having no more Territory, than hath served them for habitation, have neverthelesse, not onely maintained, but also encreased their Power, partly by the labour of trading from one place to another, and partly by selling the Manifactures, whereof the Materials were brought in from other places.\n\nThe Distribution of the Materials of this Nourishment, is the constitution of Mine, and Thine, and His, that is to say, in one word Propriety; and belongeth in all kinds of Common-wealth to the Soveraign Power. For where there is no Common-wealth, there is, (as hath been already shewn) a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour; And therefore every thing is his that getteth it, and keepeth it by force; which is neither Propriety nor Community; but Uncertainty. Which is so evident, that even Cicero, (a passionate defender of Liberty,) in a publique pleading, attributeth all Propriety to the Law Civil, “Let the Civill Law,” saith he, “be once abandoned, or but negligently guarded, (not to say oppressed,) and there is nothing, that any man can be sure to receive from his Ancestor, or leave to his Children.” And again; “Take away the Civill Law, and no man knows what is his own, and what another mans.” Seeing therefore the Introduction of Propriety is an effect of Common-wealth; which can do nothing but by the Person that Represents it, it is the act onely of the Soveraign; and consisteth in the Lawes, which none can make that have not the Soveraign Power. And this they well knew of old, who called that Nomos, (that is to say, Distribution,) which we call Law; and defined Justice, by distributing to every man his own.\n\nIn this Distribution, the First Law, is for Division of the Land it selfe: wherein the Soveraign assigneth to every man a portion, according as he, and not according as any Subject, or any number of them, shall judge agreeable to Equity, and the Common Good. The Children of Israel, were a Common-wealth in the Wildernesse; but wanted the commodities of the Earth, till they were masters of the Land of Promise; which afterward was divided amongst them, not by their own discretion, but by the discretion of Eleazar the Priest, and Joshua their Generall: who when there were twelve Tribes, making them thirteen by subdivision of the Tribe of Joseph; made neverthelesse but twelve portions of the Land; and ordained for the Tribe of Levi no land; but assigned them the Tenth part of the whole fruits; which division was therefore Arbitrary. And though a People comming into possession of a land by warre, do not alwaies exterminate the antient Inhabitants, (as did the Jewes,) but leave to many, or most, or all of them their Estates; yet it is manifest they hold them afterwards, as of the Victors distribution; as the people of England held all theirs of William the Conquerour.\n\nFrom whence we may collect, that the Propriety which a subject hath in his lands, consisteth in a right to exclude all other subjects from the use of them; and not to exclude their Soveraign, be it an Assembly, or a Monarch. For seeing the Soveraign, that is to say, the Common-wealth (whose Person he representeth,) is understood to do nothing but in order to the common Peace and Security, this Distribution of lands, is to be understood as done in order to the same: And consequently, whatsoever Distribution he shall make in prejudice thereof, is contrary to the will of every subject, that committed his Peace, and safety to his discretion, and conscience; and therefore by the will of every one of them, is to be reputed voyd. It is true, that a Soveraign Monarch, or the greater part of a Soveraign Assembly, may ordain the doing of many things in pursuit of their Passions, contrary to their own consciences, which is a breach of trust, and of the Law of Nature; but this is not enough to authorise any subject, either to make warre upon, or so much as to accuse of Injustice, or any way to speak evill of their Soveraign; because they have authorised all his actions, and in bestowing the Soveraign Power, made them their own. But in what cases the Commands of Soveraigns are contrary to Equity, and the Law of Nature, is to be considered hereafter in another place.\n\nIn the Distribution of land, the Common-wealth it selfe, may be conceived to have a portion, and possesse, and improve the same by their Representative; and that such portion may be made sufficient, to susteine the whole expence to the common Peace, and defence necessarily required: Which were very true, if there could be any Representative conceived free from humane passions, and infirmities. But the nature of men being as it is, the setting forth of Publique Land, or of any certaine Revenue for the Common-wealth, is in vaine; and tendeth to the dissolution of Government, and to the condition of meere Nature, and War, assoon as ever the Soveraign Power falleth into the hands of a Monarch, or of an Assembly, that are either too negligent of mony, or too hazardous in engaging the publique stock, into a long, or costly war. Common-wealths can endure no Diet: For seeing their expence is not limited by their own appetite, but by externall Accidents, and the appetites of their neighbours, the Publique Riches cannot be limited by other limits, than those which the emergent occasions shall require. And whereas in England, there were by the Conquerour, divers Lands reserved to his own use, (besides Forrests, and Chases, either for his recreation, or for preservation of Woods,) and divers services reserved on the Land he gave his Subjects; yet it seems they were not reserved for his Maintenance in his Publique, but in his Naturall capacity: For he, and his Successors did for all that, lay Arbitrary Taxes on all Subjects land, when they judged it necessary. Or if those publique Lands, and Services, were ordained as a sufficient maintenance of the Common-wealth, it was contrary to the scope of the Institution; being (as it appeared by those ensuing Taxes) insufficient, and (as it appeares by the late Revenue of the Crown) Subject to Alienation, and Diminution. It is therefore in vaine, to assign a portion to the Common-wealth; which may sell, or give it away; and does sell, and give it away when tis done by their Representative.\n\nAs the Distribution of Lands at home; so also to assigne in what places, and for what commodities, the Subject shall traffique abroad, belongeth to the Soveraign. For if it did belong to private persons to use their own discretion therein, some of them would bee drawn for gaine, both to furnish the enemy with means to hurt the Common-wealth, and hurt it themselves, by importing such things, as pleasing mens appetites, be neverthelesse noxious, or at least unprofitable to them. And therefore it belongeth to the Common-wealth, (that is, to the Soveraign only,) to approve, or disapprove both of the places, and matter of forraign Traffique.\n\nFurther, seeing it is not enough to the Sustentation of a Common-wealth, that every man have a propriety in a portion of Land, or in some few commodities, or a naturall property in some usefull art, and there is no art in the world, but is necessary either for the being, or well being almost of every particular man; it is necessary, that men distribute that which they can spare, and transferre their propriety therein, mutually one to another, by exchange, and mutuall contract. And therefore it belongeth to the Common-wealth, (that is to say, to the Soveraign,) to appoint in what manner, all kinds of contract between Subjects, (as buying, selling, exchanging, borrowing, lending, letting, and taking to hire,) are to bee made; and by what words, and signes they shall be understood for valid. And for the Matter, and Distribution of the Nourishment, to the severall Members of the Common-wealth, thus much (considering the modell of the whole worke) is sufficient.\n\nBy Concoction, I understand the reducing of all commodities, which are not presently consumed, but reserved for Nourishment in time to come, to some thing of equal value, and withall so portably, as not to hinder the motion of men from place to place; to the end a man may have in what place soever, such Nourishment as the place affordeth. And this is nothing else but Gold, and Silver, and Mony. For Gold and Silver, being (as it happens) almost in all Countries of the world highly valued, is a commodious measure for the value of all things else between Nations; and Mony (of what matter soever coyned by the Soveraign of a Common-wealth,) is a sufficient measure of the value of all things else, between the Subjects of that Common-wealth. By the means of which measures, all commodities, Moveable, and Immoveable, are made to accompany a man, to all places of his resort, within and without the place of his ordinary residence; and the same passeth from Man to Man, within the Common-wealth; and goes round about, Nourishing (as it passeth) every part thereof; In so much as this Concoction, is as it were the Sanguification of the Common-wealth: For naturall Bloud is in like manner made of the fruits of the Earth; and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member of the Body of Man.\n\nAnd because Silver and Gold, have their value from the matter it self; they have first this priviledge, that the value of them cannot be altered by the power of one, nor of a few Common-wealths; as being a common measure of the commodities of all places. But base Mony, may easily be enhanced, or abased. Secondly, they have the priviledge to make Common-wealths, move, and stretch out their armes, when need is, into forraign Countries; and supply, not only private Subjects that travell, but also whole Armies with provision. But that Coyne, which is not considerable for the Matter, but for the Stamp of the place, being unable to endure change of ayr, hath its effect at home only; where also it is subject to the change of Laws, and thereby to have the value diminished, to the prejudice many times of those that have it.\n\nThe Conduits, and Wayes by which it is conveyed to the Publique use, are of two sorts; One, that Conveyeth it to the Publique Coffers; The other, that Issueth the same out againe for publique payments. Of the first sort, are Collectors, Receivers, and Treasurers; of the second are the Treasurers againe, and the Officers appointed for payment of severall publique or private Ministers. And in this also, the Artificiall Man maintains his resemblance with the Naturall; whose Veins receiving the Bloud from the severall Parts of the Body, carry it to the Heart; where being made Vitall, the Heart by the Arteries sends it out again, to enliven, and enable for motion all the Members of the same.\n\nThe Procreation, or Children of a Common-wealth, are those we call Plantations, or Colonies; which are numbers of men sent out from the Common-wealth, under a Conductor, or Governour, to inhabit a Forraign Country, either formerly voyd of Inhabitants, or made voyd then, by warre. And when a Colony is setled, they are either a Common-wealth of themselves, discharged of their subjection to their Soveraign that sent them, (as hath been done by many Common-wealths of antient time,) in which case the Common-wealth from which they went was called their Metropolis, or Mother, and requires no more of them, then Fathers require of the Children, whom they emancipate, and make free from their domestique government, which is Honour, and Friendship; or else they remain united to their Metropolis, as were the Colonies of the people of Rome; and then they are no Common-wealths themselves, but Provinces, and parts of the Common-wealth that sent them. So that the Right of Colonies (saving Honour, and League with their Metropolis,) dependeth wholly on their Licence, or Letters, by which their Soveraign authorised them to Plant.\n\nCHAPTER XXV. OF COUNSELL\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXV, 1\n\nOF COUNSELL\n\nHow fallacious it is to judge of the nature of things, by the ordinary and inconstant use of words, appeareth in nothing more, than in the confusion of Counsels, and Commands, arising from the Imperative manner of speaking in them both, and in many other occasions besides. For the words “Doe this,” are the words not onely of him that Commandeth; but also of him that giveth Counsell; and of him that Exhorteth; and yet there are but few, that see not, that these are very different things; or that cannot distinguish between them, when they perceive who it is that speaketh, and to whom the Speech is directed, and upon what occasion. But finding those phrases in mens writings, and being not able, or not willing to enter into a consideration of the circumstances, they mistake sometimes the Precepts of Counsellours, for the Precepts of them that command; and sometimes the contrary; according as it best agreeth with the conclusions they would inferre, or the actions they approve. To avoyd which mistakes, and render to those termes of Commanding, Counselling, and Exhorting, their proper and distinct significations, I define them thus.\n\nCOMMAND is, where a man saith, “Doe this,” or “Doe this not,” without expecting other reason than the Will of him that sayes it. From this it followeth manifestly, that he that Commandeth, pretendeth thereby his own Benefit: For the reason of his Command is his own Will onely, and the proper object of every mans Will, is some Good to himselfe.\n\nCOUNSELL, is where a man saith, “Doe” or “Doe not this,” and deduceth his own reasons from the benefit that arriveth by it to him to whom he saith it. And from this it is evident, that he that giveth Counsell, pretendeth onely (whatsoever he intendeth) the good of him, to whom he giveth it.\n\nTherefore between Counsell and Command, one great difference is, that Command is directed to a mans own benefit; and Counsell to the benefit of another man. And from this ariseth another difference, that a man may be obliged to do what he is Commanded; as when he hath covenanted to obey: But he cannot be obliged to do as he is Counselled, because the hurt of not following it, is his own; or if he should covenant to follow it, then is the Counsell turned into the nature of a Command. A third difference between them is, that no man can pretend a right to be of another mans Counsell; because he is not to pretend benefit by it to himselfe; but to demand right to Counsell another, argues a will to know his designes, or to gain some other Good to himselfe; which (as I said before) is of every mans will the proper object.\n\nThis also is incident to the nature of Counsell; that whatsoever it be, he that asketh it, cannot in equity accuse, or punish it: For to ask Counsell of another, is to permit him to give such Counsell as he shall think best; And consequently, he that giveth counsell to his Soveraign, (whether a Monarch, or an Assembly) when he asketh it, cannot in equity be punished for it, whether the same be conformable to the opinion of the most, or not, so it be to the Proposition in debate. For if the sense of the Assembly can be taken notice of, before the Debate be ended, they should neither ask, nor take any further Counsell; For the Sense of the Assembly, is the Resolution of the Debate, and End of all Deliberation. And generally he that demandeth Counsell, is Author of it; and therefore cannot punish it; and what the Soveraign cannot, no man else can. But if one Subject giveth Counsell to another, to do any thing contrary to the Lawes, whether that Counsell proceed from evill intention, or from ignorance onely, it is punishable by the Common-wealth; because ignorance of the Law, is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the Lawes to which he is subject.\n\nEXHORTATION, and DEHORTATION, is Counsell, accompanied with signes in him that giveth it, of vehement desire to have it followed; or to say it more briefly, Counsell Vehemently Pressed. For he that Exhorteth, doth not deduce the consequences of what he adviseth to be done, and tye himselfe therein to the rigour of true reasoning; but encourages him he Counselleth, to Action: As he that Dehorteth, deterreth him from it. And therefore they have in their speeches, a regard to the common Passions, and opinions of men, in deducing their reasons; and make use of Similitudes, Metaphors, Examples, and other tooles of Oratory, to perswade their Hearers of the Utility, Honour, or Justice of following their advise.\n\nFrom whence may be inferred, First, that Exhortation and Dehortation, is directed to the Good of him that giveth the Counsell, not of him that asketh it, which is contrary to the duty of a Counsellour; who (by the definition of Counsell) ought to regard, not his own benefits, but his whom he adviseth. And that he directeth his Counsell to his own benefit, is manifest enough, by the long and vehement urging, or by the artificial giving thereof; which being not required of him, and consequently proceeding from his own occasions, is directed principally to his own benefit, and but accidentarily to the good of him that is Counselled, or not at all.\n\nSecondly, that the use of Exhortation and Dehortation lyeth onely, where a man is to speak to a Multitude; because when the Speech is addressed to one, he may interrupt him, and examine his reasons more rigorously, than can be done in a Multitude; which are too many to enter into Dispute, and Dialogue with him that speaketh indifferently to them all at once. Thirdly, that they that Exhort and Dehort, where they are required to give Counsell, are corrupt Counsellours, and as it were bribed by their own interest. For though the Counsell they give be never so good; yet he that gives it, is no more a good Counsellour, than he that giveth a Just Sentence for a reward, is a just Judge. But where a man may lawfully Command, as a Father in his Family, or a Leader in an Army, his Exhortations and Dehortations, are not onely lawfull, but also necessary, and laudable: But then they are no more Counsells, but Commands; which when they are for Execution of soure labour; sometimes necessity, and alwayes humanity requireth to be sweetned in the delivery, by encouragement, and in the tune and phrase of Counsell, rather then in harsher language of Command.\n\nExamples of the difference between Command and Counsell, we may take from the formes of Speech that expresse them in Holy Scripture. “Have no other Gods but me; Make to thy selfe no graven Image; Take not Gods name in vain; Sanctifie the Sabbath; Honour thy Parents; Kill not; Steale not,” &c. are Commands; because the reason for which we are to obey them, is drawn from the will of God our King, whom we are obliged to obey. But these words, “Sell all thou hast; give it to the poore; and follow me,” are Counsell; because the reason for which we are to do so, is drawn from our own benefit; which is this, that we shall have “Treasure in Heaven.” These words, “Go into the village over against you, and you shall find an Asse tyed, and her Colt; loose her, and bring her to me,” are a Command: for the reason of their fact is drawn from the will of their Master: but these words, “Repent, and be Baptized in the Name of Jesus,” are Counsell; because the reason why we should so do, tendeth not to any benefit of God Almighty, who shall still be King in what manner soever we rebell; but of our selves, who have no other means of avoyding the punishment hanging over us for our sins.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXV, 2\n\nAs the difference of Counsell from Command, hath been now deduced from the nature of Counsell, consisting in a deducing of the benefit, or hurt that may arise to him that is to be Counselled, by the necessary or probable consequences of the action he propoundeth; so may also the differences between apt, and inept counsellours be derived from the same. For Experience, being but Memory of the consequences of like actions formerly observed, and Counsell but the Speech whereby that experience is made known to another; the Vertues, and Defects of Counsell, are the same with the Vertues, and Defects Intellectuall: And to the Person of a Common-wealth, his Counsellours serve him in the place of Memory, and Mentall Discourse. But with this resemblance of the Common-wealth, to a naturall man, there is one dissimilitude joyned, of great importance; which is, that a naturall man receiveth his experience, from the naturall objects of sense, which work upon him without passion, or interest of their own; whereas they that give Counsell to the Representative person of a Common-wealth, may have, and have often their particular ends, and passions, that render their Counsells alwayes suspected, and many times unfaithfull. And therefore we may set down for the first condition of a good Counsellour, That His Ends, And Interest, Be Not Inconsistent With The Ends And Interest Of Him He Counselleth.\n\nSecondly, Because the office of a Counsellour, when an action comes into deliberation, is to make manifest the consequences of it, in such manner, as he that is Counselled may be truly and evidently informed; he ought to propound his advise, in such forme of speech, as may make the truth most evidently appear; that is to say, with as firme ratiocination, as significant and proper language, and as briefly, as the evidence will permit. And therefore Rash, And Unevident Inferences; (such as are fetched onely from Examples, or authority of Books, and are not arguments of what is good, or evill, but witnesses of fact, or of opinion,) Obscure, Confused, And Ambiguous Expressions, Also All Metaphoricall Speeches, Tending To The Stirring Up Of Passion, (because such reasoning, and such expressions, are usefull onely to deceive, or to lead him we Counsell towards other ends than his own) Are Repugnant To The Office Of A Counsellour.\n\nThirdly, Because the Ability of Counselling proceedeth from Experience, and long study; and no man is presumed to have experience in all those things that to the Administration of a great Common-wealth are necessary to be known, No Man Is Presumed To Be A Good Counsellour, But In Such Businesse, As He Hath Not Onely Been Much Versed In, But Hath Also Much Meditated On, And Considered. For seeing the businesse of a Common-wealth is this, to preserve the people at home, and defend them against forraign Invasion, we shall find, it requires great knowledge of the disposition of Man-kind, of the Rights of Government, and of the nature of Equity, Law, Justice, and Honour, not to be attained without study; And of the Strength, Commodities, Places, both of their own Country, and their Neighbours; as also of the inclinations, and designes of all Nations that may any way annoy them. And this is not attained to, without much experience. Of which things, not onely the whole summe, but every one of the particulars requires the age, and observation of a man in years, and of more than ordinary study. The wit required for Counsel, as I have said before is Judgement. And the differences of men in that point come from different education, of some to one kind of study, or businesse, and of others to another. When for the doing of any thing, there be Infallible rules, (as in Engines, and Edifices, the rules of Geometry,) all the experience of the world cannot equall his Counsell, that has learnt, or found out the Rule. And when there is no such Rule, he that hath most experience in that particular kind of businesse, has therein the best Judgement, and is the best Counsellour.\n\nFourthly, to be able to give Counsell to a Common-wealth, in a businesse that hath reference to another Common-wealth, It Is Necessary To Be Acquainted With The Intelligences, And Letters That Come From Thence, And With All The Records Of Treaties, And Other Transactions Of State Between Them; which none can doe, but such as the Representative shall think fit. By which we may see, that they who are not called to Counsell, can have no good Counsell in such cases to obtrude.\n\nFifthly, Supposing the number of Counsellors equall, a man is better Counselled by hearing them apart, then in an Assembly; and that for many causes. First, in hearing them apart, you have the advice of every man; but in an Assembly may of them deliver their advise with I, or No, or with their hands, or feet, not moved by their own sense, but by the eloquence of another, or for feare of displeasing some that have spoken, or the whole Assembly, by contradiction; or for feare of appearing duller in apprehension, than those that have applauded the contrary opinion. Secondly, in an Assembly of many, there cannot choose but be some whose interests are contrary to that of the Publique; and these their Interests make passionate, and Passion eloquent, and Eloquence drawes others into the same advice. For the Passions of men, which asunder are moderate, as the heat of one brand; in Assembly are like many brands, that enflame one another, (especially when they blow one another with Orations) to the setting of the Common-wealth on fire, under pretence of Counselling it. Thirdly, in hearing every man apart, one may examine (when there is need) the truth, or probability of his reasons, and of the grounds of the advise he gives, by frequent interruptions, and objections; which cannot be done in an Assembly, where (in every difficult question) a man is rather astonied, and dazled with the variety of discourse upon it, than informed of the course he ought to take. Besides, there cannot be an Assembly of many, called together for advice, wherein there be not some, that have the ambition to be thought eloquent, and also learned in the Politiques; and give not their advice with care of the businesse propounded, but of the applause of their motly orations, made of the divers colored threds, or shreds of Authors; which is an Impertinence at least, that takes away the time of serious Consultation, and in the secret way of Counselling apart, is easily avoided. Fourthly, in Deliberations that ought to be kept secret, (whereof there be many occasions in Publique Businesse,) the Counsells of many, and especially in Assemblies, are dangerous; And therefore great Assemblies are necessitated to commit such affaires to lesser numbers, and of such persons as are most versed, and in whose fidelity they have most confidence.\n\nTo conclude, who is there that so far approves the taking of Counsell from a great Assembly of Counsellours, that wisheth for, or would accept of their pains, when there is a question of marrying his Children, disposing of his Lands, governing his Household, or managing his private Estate, especially if there be amongst them such as wish not his prosperity? A man that doth his businesse by the help of many and prudent Counsellours, with every one consulting apart in his proper element, does it best, as he that useth able Seconds at Tennis play, placed in their proper stations. He does next best, that useth his own Judgement only; as he that has no Second at all. But he that is carried up and down to his businesse in a framed Counsell, which cannot move but by the plurality of consenting opinions, the execution whereof is commonly (out of envy, or interest) retarded by the part dissenting, does it worst of all, and like one that is carried to the ball, though by good Players, yet in a Wheele-barrough, or other frame, heavy of it self, and retarded also by the inconcurrent judgements, and endeavours of them that drive it; and so much the more, as they be more that set their hands to it; and most of all, when there is one, or more amongst them, that desire to have him lose. And though it be true, that many eys see more then one; yet it is not to be understood of many Counsellours; but then only, when the finall Resolution is in one man. Otherwise, because many eyes see the same thing in divers lines, and are apt to look asquint towards their private benefit; they that desire not to misse their marke, though they look about with two eyes, yet they never ayme but with one; And therefore no great Popular Common-wealth was ever kept up; but either by a forraign Enemy that united them; or by the reputation of some one eminent Man amongst them; or by the secret Counsell of a few; or by the mutuall feare of equall factions; and not by the open Consultations of the Assembly. And as for very little Common-wealths, be they Popular, or Monarchicall, there is no humane wisdome can uphold them, longer then the Jealousy lasteth of their potent Neighbours.\n\nCHAPTER XXVI. OF CIVILL LAWES\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 1\n\nOF CIVILL LAWES\n\nBy CIVILL LAWES, I understand the Lawes, that men are therefore bound to observe, because they are Members, not of this, or that Common-wealth in particular, but of a Common-wealth. For the knowledge of particular Lawes belongeth to them, that professe the study of the Lawes of their severall Countries; but the knowledge of Civill Law in generall, to any man. The antient Law of Rome was called their Civil Law, from the word Civitas, which signifies a Common-wealth; And those Countries, which having been under the Roman Empire, and governed by that Law, retaine still such part thereof as they think fit, call that part the Civill Law, to distinguish it from the rest of their own Civill Lawes. But that is not it I intend to speak of here; my designe being not to shew what is Law here, and there; but what is Law; as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and divers others have done, without taking upon them the profession of the study of the Law.\n\nAnd first it manifest, that Law in generall, is not Counsell, but Command; nor a Command of any man to any man; but only of him, whose Command is addressed to one formerly obliged to obey him. And as for Civill Law, it addeth only the name of the person Commanding, which is Persona Civitatis, the Person of the Common-wealth.\n\nWhich considered, I define Civill Law in this Manner. “CIVILL LAW, Is to every Subject, those Rules, which the Common-wealth hath Commanded him, by Word, Writing, or other sufficient Sign of the Will, to make use of, for the Distinction of Right, and Wrong; that is to say, of what is contrary, and what is not contrary to the Rule.”\n\nIn which definition, there is nothing that is not at first sight evident. For every man seeth, that some Lawes are addressed to all the Subjects in generall; some to particular Provinces; some to particular Vocations; and some to particular Men; and are therefore Lawes, to every of those to whom the Command is directed; and to none else. As also, that Lawes are the Rules of Just, and Unjust; nothing being reputed Unjust, that is not contrary to some Law. Likewise, that none can make Lawes but the Common-wealth; because our Subjection is to the Common-wealth only: and that Commands, are to be signified by sufficient Signs; because a man knows not otherwise how to obey them. And therefore, whatsoever can from this definition by necessary consequence be deduced, ought to be acknowledged for truth. Now I deduce from it this that followeth.\n\n1. The Legislator in all Common-wealths, is only the Soveraign, be he one Man, as in a Monarchy, or one Assembly of men, as in a Democracy, or Aristocracy. For the Legislator, is he that maketh the Law. And the Common-wealth only, praescribes, and commandeth the observation of those rules, which we call Law: Therefore the Common-wealth is the Legislator. But the Common-wealth is no Person, nor has capacity to doe any thing, but by the Representative, (that is, the Soveraign;) and therefore the Soveraign is the sole Legislator. For the same reason, none can abrogate a Law made, but the Soveraign; because a Law is not abrogated, but by another Law, that forbiddeth it to be put in execution.\n\n2. The Soveraign of a Common-wealth, be it an Assembly, or one Man, is not subject to the Civill Lawes. For having power to make, and repeale Lawes, he may when he pleaseth, free himselfe from that subjection, by repealing those Lawes that trouble him, and making of new; and consequently he was free before. For he is free, that can be free when he will: Nor is it possible for any person to be bound to himselfe; because he that can bind, can release; and therefore he that is bound to himselfe onely, is not bound.\n\n3. When long Use obtaineth the authority of a Law, it is not the Length of Time that maketh the Authority, but the Will of the Soveraign signified by his silence, (for Silence is sometimes an argument of Consent;) and it is no longer Law, then the Soveraign shall be silent therein. And therefore if the Soveraign shall have a question of Right grounded, not upon his present Will, but upon the Lawes formerly made; the Length of Time shal bring no prejudice to his Right; but the question shal be judged by Equity. For many unjust Actions, and unjust Sentences, go uncontrolled a longer time, than any man can remember. And our Lawyers account no Customes Law, but such as are reasonable, and that evill Customes are to be abolished; But the Judgement of what is reasonable, and of what is to be abolished, belongeth to him that maketh the Law, which is the Soveraign Assembly, or Monarch.\n\n4. The Law of Nature, and the Civill Law, contain each other, and are of equall extent. For the Lawes of Nature, which consist in Equity, Justice, Gratitude, and other morall Vertues on these depending, in the condition of meer Nature (as I have said before in the end of the 15th Chapter,) are not properly Lawes, but qualities that dispose men to peace, and to obedience. When a Common-wealth is once settled, then are they actually Lawes, and not before; as being then the commands of the Common-wealth; and therefore also Civill Lawes: for it is the Soveraign Power that obliges men to obey them. For in the differences of private men, to declare, what is Equity, what is Justice, and what is morall Vertue, and to make them binding, there is need of the Ordinances of Soveraign Power, and Punishments to be ordained for such as shall break them; which Ordinances are therefore part of the Civill Law. The Law of Nature therefore is a part of the Civill Law in all Common-wealths of the world. Reciprocally also, the Civill Law is a part of the Dictates of Nature. For Justice, that is to say, Performance of Covenant, and giving to every man his own, is a Dictate of the Law of Nature. But every subject in a Common-wealth, hath covenanted to obey the Civill Law, (either one with another, as when they assemble to make a common Representative, or with the Representative it selfe one by one, when subdued by the Sword they promise obedience, that they may receive life;) And therefore Obedience to the Civill Law is part also of the Law of Nature. Civill, and Naturall Law are not different kinds, but different parts of Law; whereof one part being written, is called Civill, the other unwritten, Naturall. But the Right of Nature, that is, the naturall Liberty of man, may by the Civill Law be abridged, and restrained: nay, the end of making Lawes, is no other, but such Restraint; without the which there cannot possibly be any Peace. And Law was brought into the world for nothing else, but to limit the naturall liberty of particular men, in such manner, as they might not hurt, but assist one another, and joyn together against a common Enemy.\n\n5. If the Soveraign of one Common-wealth, subdue a people that have lived under other written Lawes, and afterwards govern them by the same Lawes, by which they were governed before; yet those Lawes are the Civill Lawes of the Victor, and not of the Vanquished Common-wealth, For the Legislator is he, not by whose authority the Lawes were first made, but by whose authority they now continue to be Lawes. And therefore where there be divers Provinces, within the Dominion of a Common-wealth, and in those Provinces diversity of Lawes, which commonly are called the Customes of each severall Province, we are not to understand that such Customes have their Force, onely from Length of Time; but that they were antiently Lawes written, or otherwise made known, for the Constitutions, and Statutes of their Soveraigns; and are now Lawes, not by vertue of the Praescription of time, but by the Constitutions of their present Soveraigns. But if an unwritten Law, in all the Provinces of a Dominion, shall be generally observed, and no iniquity appear in the use thereof; that law can be no other but a Law of Nature, equally obliging all man-kind.\n\n6. Seeing then all Lawes, written, and unwritten, have their Authority, and force, from the Will of the Common-wealth; that is to say, from the Will of the Representative; which in a Monarchy is the Monarch, and in other Common-wealths the Soveraign Assembly; a man may wonder from whence proceed such opinions, as are found in the Books of Lawyers of eminence in severall Common-wealths, directly, or by consequence making the Legislative Power depend on private men, or subordinate Judges. As for example, “That the Common Law, hath no Controuler but the Parlament;” which is true onely where a Parlament has the Soveraign Power, and cannot be assembled, nor dissolved, but by their own discretion. For if there be a right in any else to dissolve them, there is a right also to controule them, and consequently to controule their controulings. And if there be no such right, then the Controuler of Lawes is not Parlamentum, but Rex In Parlamento. And where a Parlament is Soveraign, if it should assemble never so many, or so wise men, from the Countries subject to them, for whatsoever cause; yet there is no man will believe, that such an Assembly hath thereby acquired to themselves a Legislative Power. Item, that the two arms of a Common-wealth, are Force, and Justice; The First Whereof Is In The King; The Other Deposited In The Hands Of The Parlament. As if a Common-wealth could consist, where the Force were in any hand, which Justice had not the Authority to command and govern.\n\n7. That Law can never be against Reason, our Lawyers are agreed; and that not the Letter,(that is, every construction of it,) but that which is according to the Intention of the Legislator, is the Law. And it is true: but the doubt is, of whose Reason it is, that shall be received for Law. It is not meant of any private Reason; for then there would be as much contradiction in the Lawes, as there is in the Schooles; nor yet (as Sr. Ed, Coke makes it (Sir Edward Coke, upon Littleton Lib.2. Ch.6 fol 97.b),) an Artificiall Perfection of Reason, Gotten By Long Study, Observation, And Experience, (as his was.) For it is possible long study may encrease, and confirm erroneous Sentences: and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine; and of those that study, and observe with equall time, and diligence, the reasons and resolutions are, and must remain discordant: and therefore it is not that Juris Prudentia, or wisedome of subordinate Judges; but the Reason of this our Artificiall Man the Common-wealth, and his Command, that maketh Law: And the Common-wealth being in their Representative but one Person, there cannot easily arise any contradiction in the Lawes; and when there doth, the same Reason is able, by interpretation, or alteration, to take it away. In all Courts of Justice, the Soveraign (which is the Person of the Common-wealth,) is he that Judgeth: The subordinate Judge, ought to have regard to the reason, which moved his Soveraign to make such Law, that his Sentence may be according thereunto; which then is his Soveraigns Sentence; otherwise it is his own, and an unjust one.\n\n8. From this, that the Law is a Command, and a Command consisteth in declaration, or manifestation of the will of him that commandeth, by voyce, writing, or some other sufficient argument of the same, we may understand, that the Command of the Common-wealth, is Law onely to those, that have means to take notice of it. Over naturall fooles, children, or mad-men there is no Law, no more than over brute beasts; nor are they capable of the title of just, or unjust; because they had never power to make any covenant, or to understand the consequences thereof; and consequently never took upon them to authorise the actions of any Soveraign, as they must do that make to themselves a Common-wealth. And as those from whom Nature, or Accident hath taken away the notice of all Lawes in generall; so also every man, from whom any accident, not proceeding from his own default, hath taken away the means to take notice of any particular Law, is excused, if he observe it not; And to speak properly, that Law is no Law to him. It is therefore necessary, to consider in this place, what arguments, and signes be sufficient for the knowledge of what is the Law; that is to say, what is the will of the Soveraign, as well in Monarchies, as in other formes of government.\n\nAnd first, if it be a Law that obliges all the Subjects without exception, and is not written, nor otherwise published in such places as they may take notice thereof, it is a Law of Nature. For whatsoever men are to take knowledge of for Law, not upon other mens words, but every one from his own reason, must be such as is agreeable to the reason of all men; which no Law can be, but the Law of Nature. The Lawes of Nature therefore need not any publishing, nor Proclamation; as being contained in this one Sentence, approved by all the world, “Do not that to another, which thou thinkest unreasonable to be done by another to thy selfe.”\n\nSecondly, if it be a Law that obliges only some condition of men, or one particular man and be not written, nor published by word, then also it is a Law of Nature; and known by the same arguments, and signs, that distinguish those in such a condition, from other Subjects. For whatsoever Law is not written, or some way published by him that makes it Law, can be known no way, but by the reason of him that is to obey it; and is therefore also a Law not only Civill, but Naturall. For example, if the Soveraign employ a Publique Minister, without written Instructions what to doe; he is obliged to take for Instructions the Dictates of Reason; As if he make a Judge, The Judge is to take notice, that his Sentence ought to be according to the reason of his Soveraign, which being alwaies understood to be Equity, he is bound to it by the Law of Nature: Or if an Ambassador, he is (in al things not conteined in his written Instructions) to take for Instruction that which Reason dictates to be most conducing to his Soveraigns interest; and so of all other Ministers of the Soveraignty, publique and private. All which Instructions of naturall Reason may be comprehended under one name of Fidelity; which is a branch of naturall Justice.\n\nThe Law of Nature excepted, it belongeth to the essence of all other Lawes, to be made known, to every man that shall be obliged to obey them, either by word, or writing, or some other act, known to proceed from the Soveraign Authority. For the will of another, cannot be understood, but by his own word, or act, or by conjecture taken from his scope and purpose; which in the person of the Common-wealth, is to be supposed alwaies consonant to Equity and Reason. And in antient time, before letters were in common use, the Lawes were many times put into verse; that the rude people taking pleasure in singing, or reciting them, might the more easily reteine them in memory. And for the same reason Solomon adviseth a man, to bind the ten Commandements (Prov. 7. 3) upon his ten fingers. And for the Law which Moses gave to the people of Israel at the renewing of the Covenant, (Deut. 11. 19) he biddeth them to teach it their Children, by discoursing of it both at home, and upon the way; at going to bed, and at rising from bed; and to write it upon the posts, and dores of their houses; and (Deut. 31. 12) to assemble the people, man, woman, and child, to heare it read.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 2\n\nNor is it enough the Law be written, and published; but also that there be manifest signs, that it proceedeth from the will of the Soveraign. For private men, when they have, or think they have force enough to secure their unjust designes, and convoy them safely to their ambitious ends, may publish for Lawes what they please, without, or against the Legislative Authority. There is therefore requisite, not only a Declaration of the Law, but also sufficient signes of the Author, and Authority. The Author, or Legislator is supposed in every Common-wealth to be evident, because he is the Soveraign, who having been Constituted by the consent of every one, is supposed by every one to be sufficiently known. And though the ignorance, and security of men be such, for the most part, as that when the memory of the first Constitution of their Common-wealth is worn out, they doe not consider, by whose power they use to be defended against their enemies, and to have their industry protected, and to be righted when injury is done them; yet because no man that considers, can make question of it, no excuse can be derived from the ignorance of where the Soveraignty is placed. And it is a Dictate of Naturall Reason, and consequently an evident Law of Nature, that no man ought to weaken that power, the protection whereof he hath himself demanded, or wittingly received against others. Therefore of who is Soveraign, no man, but by his own fault, (whatsoever evill men suggest,) can make any doubt. The difficulty consisteth in the evidence of the Authority derived from him; The removing whereof, dependeth on the knowledge of the publique Registers, publique Counsels, publique Ministers, and publique Seales; by which all Lawes are sufficiently verified.\n\nVerifyed, I say, not Authorised: for the Verification, is but the Testimony and Record; not the Authority of the law; which consisteth in the Command of the Soveraign only.\n\nIf therefore a man have a question of Injury, depending on the Law of Nature; that is to say, on common Equity; the Sentence of the Judge, that by Commission hath Authority to take cognisance of such causes, is a sufficient Verification of the Law of Nature in that individuall case. For though the advice of one that professeth the study of the Law, be usefull for the avoyding of contention; yet it is but advice; tis the Judge must tell men what is Law, upon the hearing of the Controversy.\n\nBut when the question is of injury, or crime, upon a written Law; every man by recourse to the Registers, by himself, or others, may (if he will) be sufficiently enformed, before he doe such injury, or commit the crime, whither it be an injury, or not: Nay he ought to doe so: for when a man doubts whether the act he goeth about, be just, or injust; and may informe himself, if he will; the doing is unlawfull. In like manner, he that supposeth himself injured, in a case determined by the written Law, which he may by himself, or others see and consider; if he complaine before he consults with the Law, he does unjustly, and bewrayeth a disposition rather to vex other men, than to demand his own right.\n\nIf the question be of Obedience to a publique Officer; To have seen his Commission, with the Publique Seale, and heard it read; or to have had the means to be informed of it, if a man would, is a sufficient Verification of his Authority. For every man is obliged to doe his best endeavour, to informe himself of all written Lawes, that may concerne his own future actions.\n\nThe Legislator known; and the Lawes, either by writing, or by the light of Nature, sufficiently published; there wanteth yet another very materiall circumstance to make them obligatory. For it is not the Letter, but the Intendment, or Meaning; that is to say, the authentique Interpretation of the Law (which is the sense of the Legislator,) in which the nature of the Law consisteth; And therefore the Interpretation of all Lawes dependeth on the Authority Soveraign; and the Interpreters can be none but those, which the Soveraign, (to whom only the Subject oweth obedience) shall appoint. For else, by the craft of an Interpreter, the Law my be made to beare a sense, contrary to that of the Soveraign; by which means the Interpreter becomes the Legislator.\n\nAll Laws, written, and unwritten, have need of Interpretation. The unwritten Law of Nature, though it be easy to such, as without partiality, and passion, make use of their naturall reason, and therefore leaves the violators thereof without excuse; yet considering there be very few, perhaps none, that in some cases are not blinded by self love, or some other passion, it is now become of all Laws the most obscure; and has consequently the greatest need of able Interpreters. The written Laws, if they be short, are easily mis-interpreted, from the divers significations of a word, or two; if long, they be more obscure by the diverse significations of many words: in so much as no written Law, delivered in few, or many words, can be well understood, without a perfect understanding of the finall causes, for which the Law was made; the knowledge of which finall causes is in the Legislator. To him therefore there can not be any knot in the Law, insoluble; either by finding out the ends, to undoe it by; or else by making what ends he will, (as Alexander did with his sword in the Gordian knot,) by the Legislative power; which no other Interpreter can doe.\n\nThe Interpretation of the Lawes of Nature, in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Morall Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Common-wealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true. That which I have written in this Treatise, concerning the Morall Vertues, and of their necessity, for the procuring, and maintaining peace, though it bee evident Truth, is not therefore presently Law; but because in all Common-wealths in the world, it is part of the Civill Law: For though it be naturally reasonable; yet it is by the Soveraigne Power that it is Law: Otherwise, it were a great errour, to call the Lawes of Nature unwritten Law; whereof wee see so many volumes published, and in them so many contradictions of one another, and of themselves.\n\nThe Interpretation of the Law of Nature, is the Sentence of the Judge constituted by the Soveraign Authority, to heare and determine such controversies, as depend thereon; and consisteth in the application of the Law to the present case. For in the act of Judicature, the Judge doth no more but consider, whither the demand of the party, be consonant to naturall reason, and Equity; and the Sentence he giveth, is therefore the Interpretation of the Law of Nature; which Interpretation is Authentique; not because it is his private Sentence; but because he giveth it by Authority of the Soveraign, whereby it becomes the Soveraigns Sentence; which is Law for that time, to the parties pleading.\n\nBut because there is no Judge Subordinate, nor Soveraign, but may erre in a Judgement of Equity; if afterward in another like case he find it more consonant to Equity to give a contrary Sentence, he is obliged to doe it. No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it. Neither (for the same reason) becomes it a Law to other Judges, though sworn to follow it. For though a wrong Sentence given by authority of the Soveraign, if he know and allow it, in such Lawes as are mutable, be a constitution of a new Law, in cases, in which every little circumstance is the same; yet in Lawes immutable, such as are the Lawes of Nature, they are no Lawes to the same, or other Judges, in the like cases for ever after. Princes succeed one another; and one Judge passeth, another commeth; nay, Heaven and Earth shall passe; but not one title of the Law of Nature shall passe; for it is the Eternall Law of God. Therefore all the Sentences of precedent Judges that have ever been, cannot all together make a Law contrary to naturall Equity: Nor any Examples of former Judges, can warrant an unreasonable Sentence, or discharge the present Judge of the trouble of studying what is Equity (in the case he is to Judge,) from the principles of his own naturall reason. For example sake, ’Tis against the Law of Nature, To Punish The Innocent; and Innocent is he that acquitteth himselfe Judicially, and is acknowledged for Innocent by the Judge. Put the case now, that a man is accused of a capitall crime, and seeing the powers and malice of some enemy, and the frequent corruption and partiality of Judges, runneth away for feare of the event, and afterwards is taken, and brought to a legall triall, and maketh it sufficiently appear, he was not guilty of the crime, and being thereof acquitted, is neverthelesse condemned to lose his goods; this is a manifest condemnation of the Innocent. I say therefore, that there is no place in the world, where this can be an interpretation of a Law of Nature, or be made a Law by the Sentences of precedent Judges, that had done the same. For he that judged it first, judged unjustly; and no Injustice can be a pattern of Judgement to succeeding Judges. A written Law may forbid innocent men to fly, and they may be punished for flying: But that flying for feare of injury, should be taken for presumption of guilt, after a man is already absolved of the crime Judicially, is contrary to the nature of a Presumption, which hath no place after Judgement given. Yet this is set down by a great Lawyer for the common Law of England. “If a man,” saith he, “that is Innocent, be accused of Felony, and for feare flyeth for the same; albeit he judicially acquitteth himselfe of the Felony; yet if it be found that he fled for the Felony, he shall notwithstanding his Innocency, Forfeit all his goods, chattels, debts, and duties. For as to the Forfeiture of them, the Law will admit no proofe against the Presumption in Law, grounded upon his flight.” Here you see, An Innocent Man, Judicially Acquitted, Notwithstanding His Innocency, (when no written Law forbad him to fly) after his acquitall, Upon A Presumption In Law, condemned to lose all the goods he hath. If the Law ground upon his flight a Presumption of the fact, (which was Capitall,) the Sentence ought to have been Capitall: if the presumption were not of the Fact, for what then ought he to lose his goods? This therefore is no Law of England; nor is the condemnation grounded upon a Presumption of Law, but upon the Presumption of the Judges. It is also against Law, to say that no Proofe shall be admitted against a Presumption of Law. For all Judges, Soveraign and subordinate, if they refuse to heare Proofe, refuse to do Justice: for though the Sentence be Just, yet the Judges that condemn without hearing the Proofes offered, are Unjust Judges; and their Presumption is but Prejudice; which no man ought to bring with him to the Seat of Justice, whatsoever precedent judgements, or examples he shall pretend to follow. There be other things of this nature, wherein mens Judgements have been perverted, by trusting to Precedents: but this is enough to shew, that though the Sentence of the Judge, be a Law to the party pleading, yet it is no Law to any Judge, that shall succeed him in that Office.\n\nIn like manner, when question is of the Meaning of written Lawes, he is not the Interpreter of them, that writeth a Commentary upon them. For Commentaries are commonly more subject to cavill, than the Text; and therefore need other Commentaries; and so there will be no end of such Interpretation. And therefore unlesse there be an Interpreter authorised by the Soveraign, from which the subordinate Judges are not to recede, the Interpreter can be no other than the ordinary Judges, in the some manner, as they are in cases of the unwritten Law; and their Sentences are to be taken by them that plead, for Lawes in that particular case; but not to bind other Judges, in like cases to give like judgements. For a Judge may erre in the Interpretation even of written Lawes; but no errour of a subordinate Judge, can change the Law, which is the generall Sentence of the Soveraigne.\n\nIn written Lawes, men use to make a difference between the Letter, and the Sentence of the Law: And when by the Letter, is meant whatsoever can be gathered from the bare words, ’tis well distinguished. For the significations of almost all words, are either in themselves, or in the metaphoricall use of them, ambiguous; and may be drawn in argument, to make many senses; but there is onely one sense of the Law. But if by the Letter, be meant the Literall sense, then the Letter, and the Sentence or intention of the Law, is all one. For the literall sense is that, which the Legislator is alwayes supposed to be Equity: For it were a great contumely for a Judge to think otherwise of the Soveraigne. He ought therefore, if the Word of the Law doe not fully authorise a reasonable Sentence, to supply it with the Law of Nature; or if the case be difficult, to respit Judgement till he have received more ample authority. For Example, a written Law ordaineth, that he which is thrust out of his house by force, shall be restored by force: It happens that a man by negligence leaves his house empty, and returning is kept out by force, in which case there is no speciall Law ordained. It is evident, that this case is contained in the same Law: for else there is no remedy for him at all; which is to be supposed against the Intention of the Legislator. Again, the word of the Law, commandeth to Judge according to the Evidence: A man is accused falsly of a fact, which the Judge saw himself done by another; and not by him that is accused. In this case neither shall the Letter of the Law be followed to the condemnation of the Innocent, nor shall the Judge give Sentence against the evidence of the Witnesses; because the Letter of the Law is to the contrary: but procure of the Soveraign that another be made Judge, and himselfe Witnesse. So that the incommodity that follows the bare words of a written Law, may lead him to the Intention of the Law, whereby to interpret the same the better; though no Incommodity can warrant a Sentence against the Law. For every Judge of Right, and Wrong, is not Judge of what is Commodious, or Incommodious to the Common-wealth.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 3\n\nThe abilities required in a good Interpreter of the Law, that is to say, in a good Judge, are not the same with those of an Advocate; namely the study of the Lawes. For a Judge, as he ought to take notice of the Fact, from none but the Witnesses; so also he ought to take notice of the Law, from nothing but the Statutes, and Constitutions of the Soveraign, alledged in the pleading, or declared to him by some that have authority from the Soveraign Power to declare them; and need not take care before-hand, what hee shall Judge; for it shall bee given him what hee shall say concerning the Fact, by Witnesses; and what hee shall say in point of Law, from those that shall in their pleadings shew it, and by authority interpret it upon the place. The Lords of Parlament in England were Judges, and most difficult causes have been heard and determined by them; yet few of them were much versed in the study of the Lawes, and fewer had made profession of them: and though they consulted with Lawyers, that were appointed to be present there for that purpose; yet they alone had the authority of giving Sentence. In like manner, in the ordinary trialls of Right, Twelve men of the common People, are the Judges, and give Sentence, not onely of the Fact, but of the Right; and pronounce simply for the Complaynant, or for the Defendant; that is to say, are Judges not onely of the Fact, but also of the Right: and in a question of crime, not onely determine whether done, or not done; but also whether it be Murder, Homicide, Felony, Assault, and the like, which are determinations of Law: but because they are not supposed to know the Law of themselves, there is one that hath Authority to enforme them of it, in the particular case they are to Judge of. But yet if they judge not according to that he tells them, they are not subject thereby to any penalty; unlesse it be made appear, they did it against their consciences, or had been corrupted by reward. The things that make a good Judge, or good Interpreter of the Lawes, are, first A Right Understanding of that principall Law of Nature called Equity; which depending not on the reading of other mens Writings, but on the goodnesse of a mans own naturall Reason, and Meditation, is presumed to be in those most, that have had most leisure, and had the most inclination to meditate thereon. Secondly, Contempt Of Unnecessary Riches, and Preferments. Thirdly, To Be Able In Judgement To Devest Himselfe Of All Feare, Anger, Hatred, Love, And Compassion. Fourthly, and lastly, Patience To Heare; Diligent Attention In Hearing; And Memory To Retain, Digest And Apply What He Hath Heard.\n\nThe difference and division of the Lawes, has been made in divers manners, according to the different methods, of those men that have written of them. For it is a thing that dependeth not on Nature, but on the scope of the Writer; and is subservient to every mans proper method. In the Institutions of Justinian, we find seven sorts of Civill Lawes.\n\n1. The Edicts, Constitutions, and Epistles Of The Prince, that is, of the Emperour; because the whole power of the people was in him. Like these, are the Proclamations of the Kings of England.\n\n2. The Decrees Of The Whole People Of Rome (comprehending the Senate,) when they were put to the Question by the Senate. These were Lawes, at first, by the vertue of the Soveraign Power residing in the people; and such of them as by the Emperours were not abrogated, remained Lawes by the Authority Imperiall. For all Lawes that bind, are understood to be Lawes by his authority that has power to repeale them. Somewhat like to these Lawes, are the Acts of Parliament in England.\n\n3. The Decrees Of The Common People (excluding the Senate,) when they were put to the question by the Tribune of the people. For such of them as were not abrogated by the Emperours, remained Lawes by the Authority Imperiall. Like to these, were the Orders of the House of Commons in England.\n\n4. Senatus Consulta, the Orders Of The Senate; because when the people of Rome grew so numerous, as it was inconvenient to assemble them; it was thought fit by the Emperour, that men should Consult the Senate in stead of the people: And these have some resemblance with the Acts of Counsell.\n\n5. The Edicts Of Praetors, and (in some Cases) of the Aediles: such as are the Chiefe Justices in the Courts of England.\n\n6. Responsa Prudentum; which were the Sentences, and Opinions of those Lawyers, to whom the Emperour gave Authority to interpret the Law, and to give answer to such as in matter of Law demanded their advice; which Answers, the Judges in giving Judgement were obliged by the Constitutions of the Emperour to observe; And should be like the Reports of Cases Judged, if other Judges be by the Law of England bound to observe them. For the Judges of the Common Law of England, are not properly Judges, but Juris Consulti; of whom the Judges, who are either the Lords, or Twelve men of the Country, are in point of Law to ask advice.\n\n7. Also, Unwritten Customes, (which in their own nature are an imitation of Law,) by the tacite consent of the Emperour, in case they be not contrary to the Law of Nature, are very Lawes.\n\nAnother division of Lawes, is into Naturall and Positive. Naturall are those which have been Lawes from all Eternity; and are called not onely Naturall, but also Morall Lawes; consisting in the Morall Vertues, as Justice, Equity, and all habits of the mind that conduce to Peace, and Charity; of which I have already spoken in the fourteenth and fifteenth Chapters.\n\nPositive, are those which have not been for Eternity; but have been made Lawes by the Will of those that have had the Soveraign Power over others; and are either written, or made known to men, by some other argument of the Will of their Legislator.\n\nAgain, of Positive Lawes some are Humane, some Divine; And of Humane positive lawes, some are Distributive, some Penal. Distributive are those that determine the Rights of the Subjects, declaring to every man what it is, by which he acquireth and holdeth a propriety in lands, or goods, and a right or liberty of action; and these speak to all the Subjects. Penal are those, which declare, what Penalty shall be inflicted on those that violate the Law; and speak to the Ministers and Officers ordained for execution. For though every one ought to be informed of the Punishments ordained beforehand for their transgression; neverthelesse the Command is not addressed to the Delinquent, (who cannot be supposed will faithfully punish himselfe,) but to publique Ministers appointed to see the Penalty executed. And these Penal Lawes are for the most part written together with the Lawes Distributive; and are sometimes called Judgements. For all Lawes are generall judgements, or Sentences of the Legislator; as also every particular Judgement, is a Law to him, whose case is Judged.\n\nDivine Positive Lawes (for Naturall Lawes being Eternall, and Universall, are all Divine,) are those, which being the Commandements of God, (not from all Eternity, nor universally addressed to all men, but onely to a certain people, or to certain persons,) are declared for such, by those whom God hath authorised to declare them. But this Authority of man to declare what be these Positive Lawes of God, how can it be known? God may command a man by a supernaturall way, to deliver Lawes to other men. But because it is of the essence of Law, that he who is to be obliged, be assured of the Authority of him that declareth it, which we cannot naturally take notice to be from God, How Can A Man Without Supernaturall Revelation Be Assured Of The Revelation Received By The Declarer? and How Can He Be Bound To Obey Them? For the first question, how a man can be assured of the Revelation of another, without a Revelation particularly to himselfe, it is evidently impossible: for though a man may be induced to believe such Revelation, from the Miracles they see him doe, or from seeing the Extraordinary sanctity of his life, or from seeing the Extraordinary wisedome, or Extraordinary felicity of his Actions, all which are marks of Gods extraordinary favour; yet they are not assured evidence of speciall Revelation. Miracles are Marvellous workes: but that which is marvellous to one, may not be so to another. Sanctity may be feigned; and the visible felicities of this world, are most often the work of God by Naturall, and ordinary causes. And therefore no man can infallibly know by naturall reason, that another has had a supernaturall revelation of Gods will; but only a beliefe; every one (as the signs thereof shall appear greater, or lesser) a firmer, or a weaker belief.\n\nBut for the second, how he can be bound to obey them; it is not so hard. For if the Law declared, be not against the Law of Nature (which is undoubtedly Gods Law) and he undertake to obey it, he is bound by his own act; bound I say to obey it, but not bound to believe it: for mens beliefe, and interiour cogitations, are not subject to the commands, but only to the operation of God, ordinary, or extraordinary. Faith of Supernaturall Law, is not a fulfilling, but only an assenting to the same; and not a duty that we exhibite to God, but a gift which God freely giveth to whom he pleaseth; as also Unbelief is not a breach of any of his Lawes; but a rejection of them all, except the Lawes Naturall. But this that I say, will be made yet cleerer, by the Examples, and Testimonies concerning this point in holy Scripture. The Covenant God made with Abraham (in a Supernaturall Manner) was thus, (Gen. 17. 10) “This is the Covenant which thou shalt observe between Me and Thee and thy Seed after thee.” Abrahams Seed had not this revelation, nor were yet in being; yet they are a party to the Covenant, and bound to obey what Abraham should declare to them for Gods Law; which they could not be, but in vertue of the obedience they owed to their Parents; who (if they be Subject to no other earthly power, as here in the case of Abraham) have Soveraign power over their children, and servants. Againe, where God saith to Abraham, “In thee shall all Nations of the earth be blessed: For I know thou wilt command thy children, and thy house after thee to keep the way of the Lord, and to observe Righteousnesse and Judgement,” it is manifest, the obedience of his Family, who had no Revelation, depended on their former obligation to obey their Soveraign. At Mount Sinai Moses only went up to God; the people were forbidden to approach on paine of death; yet were they bound to obey all that Moses declared to them for Gods Law. Upon what ground, but on this submission of their own, “Speak thou to us, and we will heare thee; but let not God speak to us, lest we dye?” By which two places it sufficiently appeareth, that in a Common-wealth, a subject that has no certain and assured Revelation particularly to himself concerning the Will of God, is to obey for such, the Command of the Common-wealth: for if men were at liberty, to take for Gods Commandements, their own dreams, and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men; scarce two men would agree upon what is Gods Commandement; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the Commandements of the Common-wealth. I conclude therefore, that in all things not contrary to the Morall Law, (that is to say, to the Law of Nature,) all Subjects are bound to obey that for divine Law, which is declared to be so, by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. Which also is evident to any mans reason; for whatsoever is not against the Law of Nature, may be made Law in the name of them that have the Soveraign power; and there is no reason men should be the lesse obliged by it, when tis propounded in the name of God. Besides, there is no place in the world where men are permitted to pretend other Commandements of God, than are declared for such by the Common-wealth. Christian States punish those that revolt from Christian Religion, and all other States, those that set up any Religion by them forbidden. For in whatsoever is not regulated by the Common-wealth, tis Equity (which is the Law of Nature, and therefore an eternall Law of God) that every man equally enjoy his liberty.\n\nThere is also another distinction of Laws, into Fundamentall, and Not Fundamentall: but I could never see in any Author, what a Fundamentall Law signifieth. Neverthelesse one may very reasonably distinguish Laws in that manner.\n\nFor a Fundamentall Law in every Common-wealth is that, which being taken away, the Common-wealth faileth, and is utterly dissolved; as a building whose Foundation is destroyed. And therefore a Fundamentall Law is that, by which Subjects are bound to uphold whatsoever power is given to the Soveraign, whether a Monarch, or a Soveraign Assembly, without which the Common-wealth cannot stand, such as is the power of War and Peace, of Judicature, of Election of Officers, and of doing whatsoever he shall think necessary for the Publique good. Not Fundamentall is that the abrogating whereof, draweth not with it the dissolution of the Common-Wealth; such as are the Lawes Concerning Controversies between subject and subject. Thus much of the Division of Lawes.\n\nI find the words Lex Civilis, and Jus Civile, that is to say, Law and Right Civil, promiscuously used for the same thing, even in the most learned Authors; which neverthelesse ought not to be so. For Right is Liberty, namely that Liberty which the Civil Law leaves us: But Civill Law is an Obligation; and takes from us the Liberty which the Law of Nature gave us. Nature gave a Right to every man to secure himselfe by his own strength, and to invade a suspected neighbour, by way of prevention; but the Civill Law takes away that Liberty, in all cases where the protection of the Lawe may be safely stayd for. Insomuch as Lex and Jus, are as different as Obligation and Liberty.\n\nLikewise Lawes and Charters are taken promiscuously for the same thing. Yet Charters are Donations of the Soveraign; and not Lawes, but exemptions from Law. The phrase of a Law is Jubeo, Injungo, I Command, and Enjoyn: the phrase of a Charter is Dedi, Concessi, I Have Given, I Have Granted: but what is given or granted, to a man, is not forced upon him, by a Law. A Law may be made to bind All the Subjects of a Common-wealth: a Liberty, or Charter is only to One man, or some One part of the people. For to say all the people of a Common-wealth, have Liberty in any case whatsoever; is to say, that in such case, there hath been no Law made; or else having been made, is now abrogated.\n\nCHAPTER XXVII. OF CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND EXTENUATIONS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVII, 1\n\nOF CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND EXTENUATIONS\n\nSinne What\n\nA Sinne, is not onely a Transgression of a Law, but also any Contempt of the Legislator. For such Contempt, is a breach of all his Lawes at once. And therefore may consist, not onely in the Commission of a Fact, or in the Speaking of Words by the Lawes forbidden, or in the Omission of what the Law commandeth, but also in the Intention, or purpose to transgresse. For the purpose to breake the Law, is some degree of Contempt of him, to whom it belongeth to see it executed. To be delighted in the Imagination onely, of being possessed of another mans goods, servants, or wife, without any intention to take them from him by force, or fraud, is no breach of the Law, that sayth, “Thou shalt not covet:” nor is the pleasure a man my have in imagining, or dreaming of the death of him, from whose life he expecteth nothing but dammage, and displeasure, a Sinne; but the resolving to put some Act in execution, that tendeth thereto. For to be pleased in the fiction of that, which would please a man if it were reall, is a Passion so adhaerent to the Nature both of a man, and every other living creature, as to make it a Sinne, were to make Sinne of being a man. The consideration of this, has made me think them too severe, both to themselves, and others, that maintain, that the First motions of the mind, (though checked with the fear of God) be Sinnes. But I confesse it is safer to erre on that hand, than on the other.\n\nA Crime, is a sinne, consisting in the Committing (by Deed, or Word) of that which the Law forbiddeth, or the Omission of what it hath commanded. So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime. To intend to steale, or kill, is a sinne, though it never appeare in Word, or Fact: for God that seeth the thoughts of man, can lay it to his charge: but till it appear by some thing done, or said, by which the intention may be Crime; which distinction the Greeks observed in the word amartema, and egklema, or aitia; wherof the former, (which is translated Sinne,) signifieth any swarving from the Law whatsoever; but the two later, (which are translated Crime,) signifie that sinne onely, whereof one man may accuse another. But of Intentions, which never appear by any outward act, there is no place for humane accusation. In like manner the Latines by Peccatum, which is Sinne, signifie all manner of deviation from the Law; but by crimen, (which word they derive from Cerno, which signifies to perceive,) they mean onely such sinnes, as my be made appear before a Judge; and therfore are not meer Intentions.\n\nFrom this relation of Sinne to the Law, and of Crime to the Civill Law, may be inferred, First, that where Law ceaseth, Sinne ceaseth. But because the Law of Nature is eternall, Violation of Covenants, Ingratitude, Arrogance, and all Facts contrary to any Morall vertue, can never cease to be Sinne. Secondly, that the Civill Law ceasing, Crimes cease: for there being no other Law remaining, but that of Nature, there is no place for Accusation; every man being his own Judge, and accused onely by his own Conscience, and cleared by the Uprightnesse of his own Intention. When therefore his Intention is Right, his fact is no Sinne: if otherwise, his fact is Sinne; but not Crime. Thirdly, That when the Soveraign Power ceaseth, Crime also ceaseth: for where there is no such Power, there is no protection to be had from the Law; and therefore every one may protect himself by his own power: for no man in the Institution of Soveraign Power can be supposed to give away the Right of preserving his own body; for the safety whereof all Soveraignty was ordained. But this is to be understood onely of those, that have not themselves contributed to the taking away of the Power that protected them: for that was a Crime from the beginning.\n\nThe source of every Crime, is some defect of the Understanding; or some errour in Reasoning, or some sudden force of the Passions. Defect in the Understanding, is Ignorance; in Reasoning, Erroneous Opinion. Again, ignorance is of three sort; of the Law, and of the Soveraign, and of the Penalty. Ignorance of the Law of Nature Excuseth no man; because every man that hath attained to the use of Reason, is supposed to know, he ought not to do to another, what he would not have done to himselfe. Therefore into what place soever a man shall come, if he do any thing contrary to that Law, it is a Crime. If a man come from the Indies hither, and perswade men here to receive a new Religion, or teach them any thing that tendeth to disobedience of the Lawes of this Country, though he be never so well perswaded of the truth of what he teacheth, he commits a Crime, and may be justly punished for the same, not onely because his doctrine is false, but also because he does that which he would not approve in another, namely, that comming from hence, he should endeavour to alter the Religion there. But ignorance of the Civill Law, shall Excuse a man in a strange Country, till it be declared to him; because, till then no Civill Law is binding.\n\nIn the like manner, if the Civill Law of a mans own Country, be not so sufficiently declared, as he may know it if he will; nor the Action against the Law of Nature; the Ignorance is a good Excuse: In other cases ignorance of the Civill Law, Excuseth not.\n\nIgnorance of the Soveraign Power, in the place of a mans ordinary residence, Excuseth him not; because he ought to take notice of the Power, by which he hath been protected there.\n\nIgnorance of the Penalty, where the Law is declared, Excuseth no man: For in breaking the Law, which without a fear of penalty to follow, were not a Law, but vain words, he undergoeth the penalty, though he know not what it is; because, whosoever voluntarily doth any action, accepteth all the known consequences of it; but Punishment is a known consequence of the violation of the Lawes, in every Common-wealth; which punishment, if it be determined already by the Law, he is subject to that; if not, then is he subject to Arbitrary punishment. For it is reason, that he which does Injury, without other limitation than that of his own Will, should suffer punishment without other limitation, than that of his Will whose Law is thereby violated.\n\nBut when a penalty, is either annexed to the Crime in the Law it selfe, or hath been usually inflicted in the like cases; there the Delinquent is Excused from a greater penalty. For the punishment foreknown, if not great enough to deterre men from the action, is an invitement to it: because when men compare the benefit of their Injustice, with the harm of their punishment, by necessity of Nature they choose that which appeareth best for themselves; and therefore when they are punished more than the Law had formerly determined, or more than others were punished for the same Crime; it the Law that tempted, and deceiveth them.\n\nNo Law, made after a Fact done, can make it a Crime: because if the Fact be against the Law of Nature, the Law was before the Fact; and a Positive Law cannot be taken notice of, before it be made; and therefore cannot be Obligatory. But when the Law that forbiddeth a Fact, is made before the Fact be done; yet he that doth the Fact, is lyable to the Penalty ordained after, in case no lesser Penalty were made known before, neither by Writing, nor by Example, for the reason immediatly before alledged.\n\nFrom defect in Reasoning, (that is to say, from Errour,) men are prone to violate the Lawes, three wayes. First, by Presumption of false Principles; as when men from having observed how in all places, and in all ages, unjust Actions have been authorised, by the force, and victories of those who have committed them; and that potent men, breaking through the Cob-web Lawes of their Country, the weaker sort, and those that have failed in their Enterprises, have been esteemed the onely Criminals; have thereupon taken for Principles, and grounds of their Reasoning, “That Justice is but a vain word: That whatsoever a man can get by his own Industry, and hazard, is his own: That the Practice of all Nations cannot be unjust: That examples of former times are good Arguments of doing the like again;” and many more of that kind: Which being granted, no Act in it selfe can be a Crime, but must be made so (not by the Law, but) by the successe of them that commit it; and the same Fact be vertuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth; so that what Marius makes a Crime, Sylla shall make meritorious, and Caesar (the same Lawes standing) turn again into a Crime, to the perpetuall disturbance of the Peace of the Common-wealth.\n\nTeachers, that either mis-interpret the Law of Nature, making it thereby repugnant to the Law Civill; or by teaching for Lawes, such Doctrines of their own, or Traditions of former times, as are inconsistent with the duty of a Subject.\n\nThirdly, by Erroneous Inferences from True Principles; which happens commonly to men that are hasty, and praecipitate in concluding, and resolving what to do; such as are they, that have both a great opinion of their own understanding, and believe that things of this nature require not time and study, but onely common experience, and a good naturall wit; whereof no man thinks himselfe unprovided: whereas the knowledge, of Right and Wrong, which is no lesse difficult, there is no man will pretend to, without great and long study. And of those defects in Reasoning, there is none that can Excuse (though some of them may Extenuate) a Crime, in any man, that pretendeth to the administration of his own private businesse; much lesse in them that undertake a publique charge; because they pretend to the Reason, upon the want whereof they would ground their Excuse.\n\nOf the Passions that most frequently are the causes of Crime, one, is Vain-glory, or a foolish over-rating of their own worth; as if difference of worth, were an effect of their wit, or riches, or bloud, or some other naturall quality, not depending on the Will of those that have the Soveraign Authority. From whence proceedeth a Presumption that the punishments ordained by the Lawes, and extended generally to all Subjects, ought not to be inflicted on them, with the same rigour they are inflicted on poore, obscure, and simple men, comprehended under the name of the Vulgar.\n\nTherefore it happeneth commonly, that such as value themselves by the greatnesse of their wealth, adventure on Crimes, upon hope of escaping punishment, by corrupting publique Justice, or obtaining Pardon by Mony, or other rewards.\n\nAnd that such as have multitude of Potent Kindred; and popular men, that have gained reputation amongst the Multitude, take courage to violate the Lawes, from a hope of oppressing the Power, to whom it belongeth to put them in execution.\n\nAnd that such as have a great, and false opinion of their own Wisedome, take upon them to reprehend the actions, and call in question the Authority of them that govern, and so to unsettle the Lawes with their publique discourse, as that nothing shall be a Crime, but what their own designes require should be so. It happeneth also to the same men, to be prone to all such Crimes, as consist in Craft, and in deceiving of their Neighbours; because they think their designes are too subtile to be perceived. These I say are effects of a false presumption of their own Wisdome. For of them that are the first movers in the disturbance of Common-wealth, (which can never happen without a Civill Warre,) very few are left alive long enough, to see their new Designes established: so that the benefit of their Crimes, redoundeth to Posterity, and such as would least have wished it: which argues they were not as wise, as they thought they were. And those that deceive upon hope of not being observed, do commonly deceive themselves, (the darknesse in which they believe they lye hidden, being nothing else but their own blindnesse;) and are no wiser than Children, that think all hid, by hiding their own eyes.\n\nAnd generally all vain-glorious men, (unlesse they be withall timorous,) are subject to Anger; as being more prone than others to interpret for contempt, the ordinary liberty of conversation: And there are few Crimes that may not be produced by Anger.\n\nAs for the Passions, of Hate, Lust, Ambition, and Covetousnesse, what Crimes they are apt to produce, is so obvious to every mans experience and understanding, as there needeth nothing to be said of them, saving that they are infirmities, so annexed to the nature, both of man, and all other living creatures, as that their effects cannot be hindred, but by extraordinary use of Reason, or a constant severity in punishing them. For in those things men hate, they find a continuall, and unavoydable molestation; whereby either a mans patience must be everlasting, or he must be eased by removing the power of that which molesteth him; The former is difficult; the later is many times impossible, without some violation of the Law. Ambition, and Covetousnesse are Passions also that are perpetually incumbent, and pressing; whereas Reason is not perpetually present, to resist them: and therefore whensoever the hope of impunity appears, their effects proceed. And for Lust, what it wants in the lasting, it hath in the vehemence, which sufficeth to weigh down the apprehension of all easie, or uncertain punishments.\n\nOf all Passions, that which enclineth men least to break the Lawes, is Fear. Nay, (excepting some generous natures,) it is the onely thing, (when there is apparence of profit, or pleasure by breaking the Lawes,) that makes men keep them. And yet in many cases a Crime may be committed through Feare.\n\nFor not every Fear justifies the Action it produceth, but the fear onely of corporeall hurt, which we call Bodily Fear, and from which a man cannot see how to be delivered, but by the action. A man is assaulted, fears present death, from which he sees not how to escape, but by wounding him that assaulteth him; If he wound him to death, this is no Crime; because no man is supposed at the making of a Common-wealth, to have abandoned the defence of his life, or limbes, where the Law cannot arrive time enough to his assistance. But to kill a man, because from his actions, or his threatnings, I may argue he will kill me when he can, (seeing I have time, and means to demand protection, from the Soveraign Power,) is a Crime. Again, a man receives words of disgrace, or some little injuries (for which they that made the Lawes, had assigned no punishment, nor thought it worthy of a man that hath the use of Reason, to take notice of,) and is afraid, unlesse he revenge it, he shall fall into contempt, and consequently be obnoxious to the like injuries from others; and to avoyd this, breaks the Law, and protects himselfe for the future, by the terrour of his private revenge. This is a Crime; For the hurt is not Corporeall, but Phantasticall, and (though in this corner of the world, made sensible by a custome not many years since begun, amongst young and vain men,) so light, as a gallant man, and one that is assured of his own courage, cannot take notice of. Also a man may stand in fear of Spirits, either through his own superstition, or through too much credit given to other men, that tell him of strange Dreams and visions; and thereby be made believe they will hurt him, for doing, or omitting divers things, which neverthelesse, to do, or omit, is contrary to the Lawes; And that which is so done, or omitted, is not to be Excused by this fear; but is a Crime. For (as I have shewn before in the second Chapter) Dreams be naturally but the fancies remaining in sleep, after the impressions our Senses had formerly received waking; and when men are by any accident unassured they have slept, seem to be reall Visions; and therefore he that presumes to break the Law upon his own, or anothers Dream, or pretended Vision, or upon other Fancy of the power of Invisible Spirits, than is permitted by the Common-wealth, leaveth the Law of Nature, which is a certain offence, and followeth the imagery of his own, or another private mans brain, which he can never know whether it signifieth any thing, or nothing, nor whether he that tells his Dream, say true, or lye; which if every private man should have leave to do, (as they must by the Law of Nature, if any one have it) there could no Law be made to hold, and so all Common-wealth would be dissolved.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVII, 2\n\nFrom these different sources of Crimes, it appeares already, that all Crimes are not (as the Stoicks of old time maintained) of the same allay. There is place, not only for EXCUSE, by which that which seemed a Crime, is proved to be none at all; but also for EXTENUATION, by which the Crime, that seemed great, is made lesse. For though all Crimes doe equally deserve the name of Injustice, as all deviation from a strait line is equally crookednesse, which the Stoicks rightly observed; yet it does not follow that all Crimes are equally unjust, no more than that all crooked lines are equally crooked; which the Stoicks not observing, held it as great a Crime, to kill a Hen, against the Law, as to kill ones Father.\n\nThat which totally Excuseth a Fact, and takes away from it the nature of a Crime, can be none but that, which at the same time, taketh away the obligation of the Law. For the fact committed once against the Law, if he that committed it be obliged to the Law, can be no other than a Crime.\n\nThe want of means to know the Law, totally Excuseth: For the Law whereof a man has no means to enforme himself, is not obligatory. But the want of diligence to enquire, shall not be considered as a want of means; Nor shall any man, that pretendeth to reason enough for the Government of his own affairs, be supposed to want means to know the Lawes of Nature; because they are known by the reason he pretends to: only Children, and Madmen are Excused from offences against the Law Naturall.\n\nWhere a man is captive, or in the power of the enemy, (and he is then in the power of the enemy, when his person, or his means of living, is so,) if it be without his own fault, the Obligation of the Law ceaseth; because he must obey the enemy, or dye; and consequently such obedience is no Crime: for no man is obliged (when the protection of the Law faileth,) not to protect himself, by the best means he can.\n\nIf a man by the terrour of present death, be compelled to doe a fact against the Law, he is totally Excused; because no Law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation. And supposing such a Law were obligatory; yet a man would reason thus, “If I doe it not, I die presently; if I doe it, I die afterwards; therefore by doing it, there is time of life gained;” Nature therefore compells him to the fact.\n\nWhen a man is destitute of food, or other thing necessary for his life, and cannot preserve himselfe any other way, but by some fact against the Law; as if in a great famine he take the food by force, or stealth, which he cannot obtaine for mony nor charity; or in defence of his life, snatch away another mans Sword, he is totally Excused, for the reason next before alledged.\n\nAgain, Facts done against the Law, by the authority of another, are by that authority Excused against the Author; because no man ought to accuse his own fact in another, that is but his instrument: but it is not Excused against a third person thereby injured; because in the violation of the law, bothe the Author, and Actor are Criminalls. From hence it followeth that when that Man, or Assembly, that hath the Soveraign Power, commandeth a man to do that which is contrary to a former Law, the doing of it is totally Excused: For he ought not to condemn it himselfe, because he is the Author; and what cannot justly be condemned by the Soveraign, cannot justly be punished by any other. Besides, when the Soveraign commandeth any thing to be done against his own former Law, the Command, as to that particular fact, is an abrogation of the Law.\n\nIf that Man, or Assembly, that hath the Soveraign Power, disclaime any Right essentiall to the Soveraignty, whereby there accrueth to the Subject, any liberty inconsistent with the Soveraign Power, that is to say, with the very being of a Common-wealth, if the Subject shall refuse to obey the Command in any thing, contrary to the liberty granted, this is neverthelesse a Sinne, and contrary to the duty of the Subject: for he ought to take notice of what is inconsistent with the Soveraignty, because it was erected by his own consent, and for his own defence; and that such liberty as is inconsistent with it, was granted through ignorance of the evill consequence thereof. But if he not onely disobey, but also resist a publique Minister in the execution of it, then it is a Crime; because he might have been righted, (without any breach of the Peace,) upon complaint.\n\nThe Degrees of Crime are taken on divers Scales, and measured, First, by the malignity of the Source, or Cause: Secondly, by the contagion of the Example: Thirdly, by the mischiefe of the Effect; and Fourthly, by the concurrence of Times, Places, and Persons.\n\nThe same Fact done against the Law, if it proceed from Presumption of strength, riches, or friends to resist those that are to execute the Law, is a greater Crime, than if it proceed from hope of not being discovered, or of escape by flight: For Presumption of impunity by force, is a Root, from whence springeth, at all times, and upon all temptations, a contempt of all Lawes; whereas in the later case, the apprehension of danger, that makes a man fly, renders him more obedient for the future. A Crime which we know to be so, is greater than the same Crime proceeding from a false perswasion that it is lawfull: For he that committeth it against his own conscience, presumeth on his force, or other power, which encourages him to commit the same again: but he that doth it by errour, after the errour shewn him, is conformable to the Law.\n\nHee, whose errour proceeds from the authority of a Teacher, or an Interpreter of the Law publiquely authorised, is not so faulty, as he whose errour proceedeth from a peremptory pursute of his own principles, and reasoning: For what is taught by one that teacheth by publique Authority, the Common-wealth teacheth, and hath a resemblance of Law, till the same Authority controuleth it; and in all Crimes that contain not in them a denyall of the Soveraign Power, nor are against an evident Law, Excuseth totally: whereas he that groundeth his actions, on his private Judgement, ought according to the rectitude, or errour thereof, to stand, or fall.\n\nThe same Fact, if it have been constantly punished in other men, as a greater Crime, than if there have been may precedent Examples of impunity. For those Examples, are so many hopes of Impunity given by the Soveraign himselfe: And because he which furnishes a man with such a hope, and presumption of mercy, as encourageth him to offend, hath his part in the offence; he cannot reasonably charge the offender with the whole.\n\nA Crime arising from a sudden Passion, is not so great, as when the same ariseth from long meditation: For in the former case there is a place for Extenuation, in the common infirmity of humane nature: but he that doth it with praemeditation, has used circumspection, and cast his eye, on the Law, on the punishment, and on the consequence thereof to humane society; all which in committing the Crime, hee hath contemned, and postposed to his own appetite. But there is no suddennesse of Passion sufficient for a totall Excuse: For all the time between the first knowing of the Law, and the Commission of the Fact, shall be taken for a time of deliberation; because he ought by meditation of the Law, to rectifie the irregularity of his Passions.\n\nWhere the Law is publiquely, and with assiduity, before all the people read, and interpreted; a fact done against it, is a greater Crime, than where men are left without such instruction, to enquire of it with difficulty, uncertainty, and interruption of their Callings, and be informed by private men: for in this case, part of the fault is discharged upon common infirmity; but in the former there is apparent negligence, which is not without some contempt of the Soveraign Power.\n\nThose facts which the Law expresly condemneth, but the Law-maker by other manifest signes of his will tacitly approveth, are lesse Crimes, than the same facts, condemned both by the Law, and Lawmaker. For seeing the will of the Law-maker is a Law, there appear in this case two contradictory Lawes; which would totally Excuse, if men were bound to take notice of the Soveraigns approbation, by other arguments, than are expressed by his command. But because there are punishments consequent, not onely to the transgression of his Law, but also to the observing of it, he is in part a cause of the transgression, and therefore cannot reasonably impute the whole Crime to the Delinquent. For example, the Law condemneth Duells; the punishment is made capitall: On the contrary part, he that refuseth Duell, is subject to contempt and scorne, without remedy; and sometimes by the Soveraign himselfe thought unworthy to have any charge, or preferment in Warre: If thereupon he accept Duell, considering all men lawfully endeavour to obtain the good opinion of them that have the Soveraign Power, he ought not in reason to be rigorously punished; seeing part of the fault may be discharged on the punisher; which I say, not as wishing liberty of private revenges, or any other kind of disobedience; but a care in Governours, not to countenance any thing obliquely, which directly they forbid. The examples of Princes, to those that see them, are, and ever have been, more potent to govern their actions, than the Lawes themselves. And though it be our duty to do, not what they do, but what they say; yet will that duty never be performed, till it please God to give men an extraordinary, and supernaturall grace to follow that Precept.\n\nAgain, if we compare Crimes by the mischiefe of their Effects, First, the same fact, when it redounds to the dammage of many, is greater, than when it redounds to the hurt of few. And therefore, when a fact hurteth, not onely in the present, but also, (by example) in the future, it is a greater Crime, than if it hurt onely in the present: for the former, is a fertile Crime, and multiplyes to the hurt of many; the later is barren. To maintain doctrines contrary to the Religion established in the Common-wealth, is a greater fault, in an authorised Preacher, than in a private person: So also is it, to live prophanely, incontinently, or do any irreligious act whatsoever. Likewise in a Professor of the Law, to maintain any point, on do any act, that tendeth to the weakning of the Soveraign Power, as a greater Crime, than in another man: Also in a man that hath such reputation for wisedome, as that his counsells are followed, or his actions imitated by many, his fact against the Law, is a greater Crime, than the same fact in another: For such men not onely commit Crime, but teach it for Law to all other men. And generally all Crimes are the greater, by the scandall they give; that is to say, by becoming stumbling-blocks to the weak, that look not so much upon the way they go in, as upon the light that other men carry before them.\n\nAlso Facts of Hostility against the present state of the Common-wealth, are greater Crimes, than the same acts done to private men; For the dammage extends it selfe to all: Such are the betraying of the strengths, or revealing of the secrets of the Common-wealth to an Enemy; also all attempts upon the Representative of the Common-wealth, be it a monarch, or an Assembly; and all endeavours by word, or deed to diminish the Authority of the same, either in the present time, or in succession: which Crimes the Latines understand by Crimina Laesae Majestatis, and consist in designe, or act, contrary to a Fundamentall Law.\n\nLikewise those Crimes, which render Judgements of no effect, are greater Crimes, than Injuries done to one, or a few persons; as to receive mony to give False judgement, or testimony, is a greater Crime, than otherwise to deceive a man of the like, or a greater summe; because not onely he has wrong, that falls by such judgements; but all Judgements are rendered uselesse, and occasion ministred to force, and private revenges.\n\nAlso Robbery, and Depeculation of the Publique treasure, or Revenues, is a greater Crime, than the robbing, or defrauding of a Private man; because to robbe the publique, is to robbe many at once.\n\nAlso the Counterfeit usurpation of publique Ministery, the Counterfeiting of publique Seales, or publique Coine, than counterfeiting of a private mans person, or his seale; because the fraud thereof, extendeth to the dammage of many.\n\nOf facts against the Law, done to private men, the greater Crime, is that, where the dammage in the common opinion of men, is most sensible. And therefore\n\nTo kill against the Law, is a greater Crime, that any other injury, life preserved.\n\nAnd to kill with Torment, greater, than simply to kill.\n\nAnd Mutilation of a limbe, greater, than the spoyling a man of his goods.\n\nAnd the spoyling a man of his goods, by Terrour of death, or wounds, than by clandestine surreption.\n\nAnd by clandestine Surreption, than by consent fraudulently obtained.\n\nAnd the violation of chastity by Force, greater, than by flattery.\n\nAnd of a woman Married, than of a woman not married.\n\nFor all these things are commonly so valued; though some men are more, and some lesse sensible of the same offence. But the Law regardeth not the particular, but the generall inclination of mankind.\n\nAnd therefore the offence men take, from contumely, in words, or gesture, when they produce no other harme, than the present griefe of him that is reproached, hath been neglected in the Lawes of the Greeks, Romans, and other both antient, and moderne Common-wealths; supposing the true cause of such griefe to consist, not in the contumely, (which takes no hold upon men conscious of their own Vertue,) but in the Pusillanimity of him that is offended by it.\n\nAlso a Crime against a private man, is much aggravated by the person, time, and place. For to kill ones Parent, is a greater Crime, than to kill another: for the Parent ought to have the honour of a Soveraign, (though he have surrendred his Power to the Civill Law,) because he had it originally by Nature. And to Robbe a poore man, is a greater Crime, than to robbe a rich man; because ’tis to the poore a more sensible dammage.\n\nAnd a Crime committed in the Time, or Place appointed for Devotion, is greater, than if committed at another time or place: for it proceeds from a greater contempt of the Law.\n\nMany other cases of Aggravation, and Extenuation might be added: but by these I have set down, it is obvious to every man, to take the altitude of any other Crime proposed.\n\nLastly, because in almost all Crimes there is an Injury done, not onely to some Private man, but also to the Common-wealth; the same Crime, when the accusation is in the name of the Common-wealth, is called Publique Crime; and when in the name of a Private man, a Private Crime; And the Pleas according thereunto called Publique, Judicia Publica, Pleas of the Crown; or Private Pleas. As in an Accusation of Murder, if the accuser be a Private man, the plea is a Private plea; if the accuser be the Soveraign, the plea is a Publique plea.\n\nCHAPTER XXVIII. OF PUNISHMENTS, AND REWARDS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVIII, 1\n\nOF PUNISHMENTS, AND REWARDS\n\n“A PUNISHMENT, is an Evill inflicted by publique Authority, on him that hath done, or omitted that which is Judged by the same Authority to be a Transgression of the Law; to the end that the will of men may thereby the better be disposed to obedience.”\n\nBefore I inferre any thing from this definition, there is a question to be answered, of much importance; which is, by what door the Right, or Authority of Punishing in any case, came in. For by that which has been said before, no man is supposed bound by Covenant, not to resist violence; and consequently it cannot be intended, that he gave any right to another to lay violent hands upon his person. In the making of a Common-wealth, every man giveth away the right of defending another; but not of defending himselfe. Also he obligeth himselfe, to assist him that hath the Soveraignty, in the Punishing of another; but of himselfe not. But to covenant to assist the Soveraign, in doing hurt to another, unlesse he that so covenanteth have a right to doe it himselfe, is not to give him a Right to Punish. It is manifest therefore that the Right which the Common-wealth (that is, he, or they that represent it) hath to Punish, is not grounded on any concession, or gift of the Subjects. But I have also shewed formerly, that before the Institution of Common-wealth, every man had a right to every thing, and to do whatsoever he thought necessary to his own preservation; subduing, hurting, or killing any man in order thereunto. And this is the foundation of that right of Punishing, which is exercised in every Common-wealth. For the Subjects did not give the Soveraign that right; but onely in laying down theirs, strengthned him to use his own, as he should think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and to him onely; and (excepting the limits set him by naturall Law) as entire, as in the condition of meer Nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour.\n\nFrom the definition of Punishment, I inferre, First, that neither private revenges, nor injuries of private men, can properly be stiled Punishment; because they proceed not from publique Authority.\n\nSecondly, that to be neglected, and unpreferred by the publique favour, is not a Punishment; because no new evill is thereby on any man Inflicted; he is onely left in the estate he was in before.\n\nThirdly, that the evill inflicted by publique Authority, without precedent publique condemnation, is not to be stiled by the name of Punishment; but of an hostile act; because the fact for which a man is Punished, ought first to be Judged by publique Authority, to be a transgression of the Law.\n\nFourthly, that the evill inflicted by usurped power, and Judges without Authority from the Soveraign, is not Punishment; but an act of hostility; because the acts of power usurped, have not for Author, the person condemned; and therefore are not acts of publique Authority.\n\nFifthly, that all evill which is inflicted without intention, or possibility of disposing the Delinquent, or (by his example) other men, to obey the Lawes, is not Punishment; but an act of hostility; because without such an end, no hurt done is contained under that name.\n\nSixthly, whereas to certain actions, there be annexed by Nature, divers hurtfull consequences; as when a man in assaulting another, is himselfe slain, or wounded; or when he falleth into sicknesse by the doing of some unlawfull act; such hurt, though in respect of God, who is the author of Nature, it may be said to be inflicted, and therefore a Punishment divine; yet it is not contaned in the name of Punishment in respect of men, because it is not inflicted by the Authority of man.\n\nSeventhly, If the harm inflicted be lesse than the benefit, or contentment that naturally followeth the crime committed, that harm is not within the definition; and is rather the Price, or Redemption, than the Punishment of a Crime: Because it is of the nature of Punishment, to have for end, the disposing of men to obey the Law; which end (if it be lesse that the benefit of the transgression) it attaineth not, but worketh a contrary effect.\n\nEighthly, If a Punishment be determined and prescribed in the Law it selfe, and after the crime committed, there be a greater Punishment inflicted, the excesse is not Punishment, but an act of hostility. For seeing the aym of Punishment is not a revenge, but terrour; and the terrour of a great Punishment unknown, is taken away by the declaration of a lesse, the unexpected addition is no part of the Punishment. But where there is no Punishment at all determined by the Law, there whatsoever is inflicted, hath the nature of Punishment. For he that goes about the violation of a Law, wherein no penalty is determined, expecteth an indeterminate, that is to say, an arbitrary Punishment.\n\nNinthly, Harme inflicted for a Fact done before there was a Law that forbad it, is not Punishment, but an act of Hostility: For before the Law, there is no transgression of the Law: But Punishment supposeth a fact judged, to have been a transgression of the Law; Therefore Harme inflicted before the Law made, is not Punishment, but an act of Hostility.\n\nTenthly, Hurt inflicted on the Representative of the Common-wealth, is not Punishment, but an act of Hostility: Because it is of the nature of Punishment, to be inflicted by publique Authority, which is the Authority only of the Representative it self.\n\nLastly, Harme inflicted upon one that is a declared enemy, fals not under the name of Punishment: Because seeing they were either never subject to the Law, and therefore cannot transgresse it; or having been subject to it, and professing to be no longer so, by consequence deny they can transgresse it, all the Harmes that can be done them, must be taken as acts of Hostility. But in declared Hostility, all infliction of evill is lawfull. From whence it followeth, that if a subject shall by fact, or word, wittingly, and deliberatly deny the authority of the Representative of the Common-wealth, (whatsoever penalty hath been formerly ordained for Treason,) he may lawfully be made to suffer whatsoever the Representative will: For in denying subjection, he denyes such Punishment as by the Law hath been ordained; and therefore suffers as an enemy of the Common-wealth; that is, according to the will of the Representative. For the Punishments set down in the Law, are to Subjects, not to Enemies; such as are they, that having been by their own act Subjects, deliberately revolting, deny the Soveraign Power.\n\nThe first, and most generall distribution of Punishments, is into Divine, and Humane. Of the former I shall have occasion, to speak, in a more convenient place hereafter.\n\nHumane, are those Punishments that be inflicted by the Commandement of Man; and are either Corporall, or Pecuniary, or Ignominy, or Imprisonment, or Exile, or mixt of these.\n\nCorporall Punishment is that, which is inflicted on the body directly, and according to the intention of him that inflicteth it: such as are stripes, or wounds, or deprivation of such pleasures of the body, as were before lawfully enjoyed.\n\nAnd of these, some be Capitall, some Lesse than Capitall. Capitall, is the Infliction of Death; and that either simply, or with torment. Lesse than Capitall, are Stripes, Wounds, Chains, and any other corporall Paine, not in its own nature mortall. For if upon the Infliction of a Punishment death follow not in the Intention of the Inflicter, the Punishment is not be bee esteemed Capitall, though the harme prove mortall by an accident not to be foreseen; in which case death is not inflicted, but hastened.\n\nPecuniary Punishment, is that which consisteth not only in the deprivation of a Summe of Mony, but also of Lands, or any other goods which are usually bought and sold for mony. And in case the Law, that ordaineth such a punishment, be made with design to gather mony, from such as shall transgresse the same, it is not properly a Punishment, but the Price of priviledge, and exemption from the Law, which doth not absolutely forbid the fact, but only to those that are not able to pay the mony: except where the Law is Naturall, or part of Religion; for in that case it is not an exemption from the Law, but a transgression of it. As where a Law exacteth a Pecuniary mulct, of them that take the name of God in vaine, the payment of the mulct, is not the price of a dispensation to sweare, but the Punishment of the transgression of a Law undispensable. In like manner if the Law impose a Summe of Mony to be payd, to him that has been Injured; this is but a satisfaction for the hurt done him; and extinguisheth the accusation of the party injured, not the crime of the offender.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVIII, 2\n\nIgnominy, is the infliction of such Evill, as is made Dishonorable; or the deprivation of such Good, as is made Honourable by the Common-wealth. For there be some things Honorable by Nature; as the effects of Courage, Magnanimity, Strength, Wisdome, and other abilities of body and mind: Others made Honorable by the Common-wealth; as Badges, Titles, Offices, or any other singular marke of the Soveraigns favour. The former, (though they may faile by nature, or accident,) cannot be taken away by a Law; and therefore the losse of them is not Punishment. But the later, may be taken away by the publique authority that made them Honorable, and are properly Punishments: Such are degrading men condemned, of their Badges, Titles, and Offices; or declaring them uncapable of the like in time to come.\n\nImprisonment, is when a man is by publique Authority deprived of liberty; and may happen from two divers ends; whereof one is the safe custody of a man accused; the other is the inflicting of paine on a man condemned. The former is not Punishment; because no man is supposed to be Punisht, before he be Judicially heard, and declared guilty. And therefore whatsoever hurt a man is made to suffer by bonds, or restraint, before his cause be heard, over and above that which is necessary to assure his custody, is against the Law of Nature. But the Later is Punishment, because Evill, and inflicted by publique Authority, for somewhat that has by the same Authority been Judged a Transgression of the Law. Under this word Imprisonment, I comprehend all restraint of motion, caused by an externall obstacle, be it a House, which is called by the generall name of a Prison; or an Iland, as when men are said to be confined to it; or a place where men are set to worke, as in old time men have been condemned to Quarries, and in these times to Gallies; or be it a Chaine, or any other such impediment.\n\nExile, (Banishment) is when a man is for a crime, condemned to depart out of the dominion of the Common-wealth, or out of a certaine part thereof; and during a prefixed time, or for ever, not to return into it: and seemeth not in its own nature, without other circumstances, to be a Punishment; but rather an escape, or a publique commandement to avoid Punishment by flight. And Cicero sayes, there was never any such Punishment ordained in the City of Rome; but cals it a refuge of men in danger. For if a man banished, be neverthelesse permitted to enjoy his Goods, and the Revenue of his Lands, the meer change of ayr is no punishment; nor does it tend to that benefit of the Common-wealth, for which all Punishments are ordained, (that is to say, to the forming of mens wils to the observation of the Law;) but many times to the dammage of the Common-wealth. For a Banished man, is a lawfull enemy of the Common-wealth that banished him; as being no more a Member of the same. But if he be withall deprived of his Lands, or Goods, then the Punishment lyeth not in the Exile, but is to be reckoned amongst Punishments Pecuniary.\n\nAll Punishments of Innocent subjects, be they great or little, are against the Law of Nature; For Punishment is only of Transgression of the Law, and therefore there can be no Punishment of the Innocent. It is therefore a violation, First, of that Law of Nature, which forbiddeth all men, in their Revenges, to look at any thing but some future good: For there can arrive no good to the Common-wealth, by Punishing the Innocent. Secondly, of that, which forbiddeth Ingratitude: For seeing all Soveraign Power, is originally given by the consent of every one of the Subjects, to the end they should as long as they are obedient, be protected thereby; the Punishment of the Innocent, is a rendring of Evill for Good. And thirdly, of the Law that commandeth Equity; that is to say, an equall distribution of Justice; which in Punishing the Innocent is not observed.\n\nBut the Infliction of what evill soever, on an Innocent man, that is not a Subject, if it be for the benefit of the Common-wealth, and without violation of any former Covenant, is no breach of the Law of Nature. For all men that are not Subjects, are either Enemies, or else they have ceased from being so, by some precedent covenants. But against Enemies, whom the Common-wealth judgeth capable to do them hurt, it is lawfull by the originall Right of Nature to make warre; wherein the Sword Judgeth not, nor doth the Victor make distinction of Nocent and Innocent, as to the time past; nor has other respect of mercy, than as it conduceth to the good of his own People. And upon this ground it is, that also in Subjects, who deliberatly deny the Authority of the Common-wealth established, the vengeance is lawfully extended, not onely to the Fathers, but also to the third and fourth generation not yet in being, and consequently innocent of the fact, for which they are afflicted: because the nature of this offence, consisteth in the renouncing of subjection; which is a relapse into the condition of warre, commonly called Rebellion; and they that so offend, suffer not as Subjects, but as Enemies. For Rebellion, is but warre renewed.\n\nREWARD, is either of Gift, or by Contract. When by Contract, it is called Salary, and Wages; which is benefit due for service performed, or promised. When of Gift, it is benefit proceeding from the Grace of them that bestow it, to encourage, or enable men to do them service. And therefore when the Soveraign of a Common-wealth appointeth a Salary to any publique Office, he that receiveth it, is bound in Justice to performe his office; otherwise, he is bound onely in honour, to acknowledgement, and an endeavour of requitall. For though men have no lawfull remedy, when they be commanded to quit their private businesse, to serve the publique, without Reward, or Salary; yet they are not bound thereto, by the Law of Nature, nor by the institution of the Common-wealth, unlesse the service cannot otherwise be done; because it is supposed the Soveraign may make use of all their means, insomuch as the most common Souldier, may demand the wages of his warrefare, as a debt.\n\nThe benefits which a Soveraign bestoweth on a Subject, for fear of some power, and ability he hath to do hurt to the Common-wealth, are not properly Rewards; for they are not Salaryes; because there is in this case no contract supposed, every man being obliged already not to do the Common-wealth disservice: nor are they Graces; because they be extorted by feare, which ought not to be incident to the Soveraign Power: but are rather Sacrifices, which the Soveraign (considered in his naturall person, and not in the person of the Common-wealth) makes, for the appeasing the discontent of him he thinks more potent than himselfe; and encourage not to obedience, but on the contrary, to the continuance, and increasing of further extortion.\n\nAnd whereas some Salaries are certain, and proceed from the publique Treasure; and others uncertain, and casuall, proceeding from the execution of the Office for which the Salary is ordained; the later is in some cases hurtfull to the Common-wealth; as in the case of Judicature. For where the benefit of the Judges, and Ministers of a Court of Justice, ariseth for the multitude of Causes that are brought to their cognisance, there must needs follow two Inconveniences: One, is the nourishing of sutes; for the more sutes, the greater benefit: and another that depends on that, which is contention about Jurisdiction; each Court drawing to it selfe, as many Causes as it can. But in offices of Execution there are not those Inconveniences; because their employment cannot be encreased by any endeavour of their own. And thus much shall suffice for the nature of Punishment, and Reward; which are, as it were, the Nerves and Tendons, that move the limbes and joynts of a Common-wealth.\n\nHitherto I have set forth the nature of Man, (whose Pride and other Passions have compelled him to submit himselfe to Government;) together with the great power of his Governour, whom I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one and fortieth of Job; where God having set forth the great power of Leviathan, called him King of the Proud. “There is nothing,” saith he, “on earth, to be compared with him. He is made so as not be afraid. Hee seeth every high thing below him; and is King of all the children of pride.” But because he is mortall, and subject to decay, as all other Earthly creatures are; and because there is that in heaven, (though not on earth) that he should stand in fear of, and whose Lawes he ought to obey; I shall in the next following Chapters speak of his Diseases, and the causes of his Mortality; and of what Lawes of Nature he is bound to obey.\n\nCHAPTER XXIX. OF THOSE THINGS THAT WEAKEN, OR TEND TO THE DISSOLUTION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIX, 1\n\nOF THOSE THINGS THAT WEAKEN, OR TEND TO THE DISSOLUTION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\nDissolution Of Common-wealths Proceedeth From Imperfect Institution\n\nThough nothing can be immortall, which mortals make; yet, if men had the use of reason they pretend to, their Common-wealths might be secured, at least, from perishing by internall diseases. For by the nature of their Institution, they are designed to live, as long as Man-kind, or as the Lawes of Nature, or as Justice it selfe, which gives them life. Therefore when they come to be dissolved, not by externall violence, but intestine disorder, the fault is not in men, as they are the Matter; but as they are the Makers, and orderers of them. For men, as they become at last weary of irregular justling, and hewing one another, and desire with all their hearts, to conforme themselves into one firme and lasting edifice; so for want, both of the art of making fit Laws, to square their actions by, and also of humility, and patience, to suffer the rude and combersome points of their present greatnesse to be taken off, they cannot without the help of a very able Architect, be compiled, into any other than a crasie building, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity.\n\nAmongst the Infirmities therefore of a Common-wealth, I will reckon in the first place, those that arise from an Imperfect Institution, and resemble the diseases of a naturall body, which proceed from a Defectuous Procreation.\n\nOf which, this is one, “That a man to obtain a Kingdome, is sometimes content with lesse Power, than to the Peace, and defence of the Common-wealth is necessarily required.” From whence it commeth to passe, that when the exercise of the Power layd by, is for the publique safety to be resumed, it hath the resemblance of as unjust act; which disposeth great numbers of men (when occasion is presented) to rebell; In the same manner as the bodies of children, gotten by diseased parents, are subject either to untimely death, or to purge the ill quality, derived from their vicious conception, by breaking out into biles and scabbs. And when Kings deny themselves some such necessary Power, it is not alwayes (though sometimes) out of ignorance of what is necessary to the office they undertake; but many times out of a hope to recover the same again at their pleasure: Wherein they reason not well; because such as will hold them to their promises, shall be maintained against them by forraign Common-wealths; who in order to the good of their own Subjects let slip few occasions to Weaken the estate of their Neighbours. So was Thomas Beckett Archbishop of Canterbury, supported against Henry the Second, by the Pope; the subjection of Ecclesiastiques to the Common-wealth, having been dispensed with by William the Conqueror at his reception, when he took an Oath, not to infringe the liberty of the Church. And so were the Barons, whose power was by William Rufus (to have their help in transferring the Succession from his Elder brother, to himselfe,) encreased to a degree, inconsistent with the Soveraign Power, maintained in their Rebellion against King John, by the French. Nor does this happen in Monarchy onely. For whereas the stile of the antient Roman Common-wealth, was, The Senate, and People of Rome; neither Senate, nor People pretended to the whole Power; which first caused the seditions, of Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Gracchus, Lucius Saturnius, and others; and afterwards the warres between the Senate and the People, under Marius and Sylla; and again under Pompey and Caesar, to the Extinction of their Democraty, and the setting up of Monarchy.\n\nThe people of Athens bound themselves but from one onely Action; which was, that no man on pain of death should propound the renewing of the warre for the Island of Salamis; And yet thereby, if Solon had not caused to be given out he was mad, and afterwards in gesture and habit of a mad-man, and in verse, propounded it to the People that flocked about him, they had had an enemy perpetually in readinesse, even at the gates of their Citie; such dammage, or shifts, are all Common-wealths forced to, that have their Power never so little limited.\n\nIn the second place, I observe the Diseases of a Common-wealth, that proceed from the poyson of seditious doctrines; whereof one is, “That every private man is Judge of Good and Evill actions.” This is true in the condition of meer Nature, where there are no Civill Lawes; and also under Civill Government, in such cases as are not determined by the Law. But otherwise, it is manifest, that the measure of Good and Evill actions, is the Civill Law; and the Judge the Legislator, who is alwayes Representative of the Common-wealth. From this false doctrine, men are disposed to debate with themselves, and dispute the commands of the Common-wealth; and afterwards to obey, or disobey them, as in their private judgements they shall think fit. Whereby the Common-wealth is distracted and Weakened.\n\nAnother doctrine repugnant to Civill Society, is, that “Whatsoever a man does against his Conscience, is Sinne;” and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of Good and Evill. For a mans Conscience, and his Judgement is the same thing; and as the Judgement, so also the Conscience may be erroneous. Therefore, though he that is subject to no Civill Law, sinneth in all he does against his Conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his own reason; yet it is not so with him that lives in a Common-wealth; because the Law is the publique Conscience, by which he hath already undertaken to be guided. Otherwise in such diversity, as there is of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the Common-wealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Soveraign Power, farther than it shall seem good in his own eyes.\n\nIt hath been also commonly taught, “That Faith and Sanctity, are not to be attained by Study and Reason, but by supernaturall Inspiration, or Infusion,” which granted, I see not why any man should render a reason of his Faith; or why every Christian should not be also a Prophet; or why any man should take the Law of his Country, rather than his own Inspiration, for the rule of his action. And thus wee fall again into the fault of taking upon us to Judge of Good and Evill; or to make Judges of it, such private men as pretend to be supernaturally Inspired, to the Dissolution of all Civill Government. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by those accidents, which guide us into the presence of them that speak to us; which accidents are all contrived by God Almighty; and yet are not supernaturall, but onely, for the great number of them that concurre to every effect, unobservable. Faith, and Sanctity, are indeed not very frequent; but yet they are not Miracles, but brought to passe by education, discipline, correction, and other naturall wayes, by which God worketh them in his elect, as such time as he thinketh fit. And these three opinions, pernicious to Peace and Government, have in this part of the world, proceeded chiefly from the tongues, and pens of unlearned Divines; who joyning the words of Holy Scripture together, otherwise than is agreeable to reason, do what they can, to make men think, that Sanctity and Naturall Reason, cannot stand together.\n\nA fourth opinion, repugnant to the nature of a Common-wealth, is this, “That he that hath the Soveraign Power, is subject to the Civill Lawes.” It is true, that Soveraigns are all subjects to the Lawes of Nature; because such lawes be Divine, and cannot by any man, or Common-wealth be abrogated. But to those Lawes which the Soveraign himselfe, that is, which the Common-wealth maketh, he is not subject. For to be subject to Lawes, is to be subject to the Common-wealth, that is to the Soveraign Representative, that is to himselfe; which is not subjection, but freedome from the Lawes. Which errour, because it setteth the Lawes above the Soveraign, setteth also a Judge above him, and a Power to punish him; which is to make a new Soveraign; and again for the same reason a third, to punish the second; and so continually without end, to the Confusion, and Dissolution of the Common-wealth.\n\nA Fifth doctrine, that tendeth to the Dissolution of a Common-wealth, is, “That every private man has an absolute Propriety in his Goods; such, as excludeth the Right of the Soveraign.” Every man has indeed a Propriety that excludes the Right of every other Subject: And he has it onely from the Soveraign Power; without the protection whereof, every other man should have equall Right to the same. But if the Right of the Soveraign also be excluded, he cannot performe the office they have put him into; which is, to defend them both from forraign enemies, and from the injuries of one another; and consequently there is no longer a Common-wealth.\n\nAnd if the Propriety of Subjects, exclude not the Right of the Soveraign Representative to their Goods; much lesse to their offices of Judicature, or Execution, in which they Represent the Soveraign himselfe.\n\nThere is a Sixth doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth; and ’tis this, “That the Soveraign Power may be divided.” For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth, but to Dissolve it; for Powers divided mutually destroy each other. And for these doctrines, men are chiefly beholding to some of those, that making profession of the Lawes, endeavour to make them depend upon their own learning, and not upon the Legislative Power.\n\nAnd as False Doctrine, so also often-times the Example of different Government in a neighbouring Nation, disposeth men to alteration of the forme already setled. So the people of the Jewes were stirred up to reject God, and to call upon the Prophet Samuel, for a King after the manner of the Nations; So also the lesser Cities of Greece, were continually disturbed, with seditions of the Aristocraticall, and Democraticall factions; one part of almost every Common-wealth, desiring to imitate the Lacedaemonians; the other, the Athenians. And I doubt not, but many men, have been contented to see the late troubles in England, out of an imitation of the Low Countries; supposing there needed no more to grow rich, than to change, as they had done, the forme of their Government. For the constitution of mans nature, is of it selfe subject to desire novelty: When therefore they are provoked to the same, by the neighbourhood also of those that have been enriched by it, it is almost impossible for them, not to be content with those that solicite them to change; and love the first beginnings, though they be grieved with the continuance of disorder; like hot blouds, that having gotten the itch, tear themselves with their own nayles, till they can endure the smart no longer.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIX, 2\n\nAnd as to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans; from which, young men, and all others that are unprovided of the Antidote of solid Reason, receiving a strong, and delightfull impression, of the great exploits of warre, atchieved by the Conductors of their Armies, receive withall a pleasing Idea, of all they have done besides; and imagine their great prosperity, not to have proceeded from the aemulation of particular men, but from the vertue of their popular form of government: Not considering the frequent Seditions, and Civill Warres, produced by the imperfection of their Policy. From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latine writers, in their books, and discourses of Policy, make it lawfull, and laudable, for any man so to do; provided before he do it, he call him Tyrant. For they say not Regicide, that is, killing of a King, but Tyrannicide, that is, killing of a Tyrant is lawfull. From the same books, they that live under a Monarch conceive an opinion, that the Subjects in a Popular Common-wealth enjoy Liberty; but that in a Monarchy they are all Slaves. I say, they that live under a Monarchy conceive such an opinion; not they that live under a Popular Government; for they find no such matter. In summe, I cannot imagine, how anything can be more prejudiciall to a Monarchy, than the allowing of such books to be publikely read, without present applying such correctives of discreet Masters, as are fit to take away their Venime; Which Venime I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad Dogge, which is a disease the Physicians call Hydrophobia, or Fear Of Water. For as he that is so bitten, has a continuall torment of thirst, and yet abhorreth water; and is in such an estate, as if the poyson endeavoured to convert him into a Dogge: So when a Monarchy is once bitten to the quick, by those Democraticall writers, that continually snarle at that estate; it wanteth nothing more than a strong Monarch, which neverthelesse out of a certain Tyrannophobia, or feare of being strongly governed, when they have him, they abhorre.\n\nAs here have been Doctors, that hold there be three Soules in a man; so there be also that think there may be more Soules, (that is, more Soveraigns,) than one, in a Common-wealth; and set up a Supremacy against the Soveraignty; Canons against Lawes; and a Ghostly Authority against the Civill; working on mens minds, with words and distinctions, that of themselves signifie nothing, but bewray (by their obscurity) that there walketh (as some think invisibly) another Kingdome, as it were a Kingdome of Fayries, in the dark. Now seeing it is manifest, that the Civill Power, and the Power of the Common-wealth is the same thing; and that Supremacy, and the Power of making Canons, and granting Faculties, implyeth a Common-wealth; it followeth, that where one is Soveraign, another Supreme; where one can make Lawes, and another make Canons; there must needs be two Common-wealths, of one & the same Subjects; which is a Kingdome divided in it selfe, and cannot stand. For notwithstanding the insignificant distinction of Temporall, and Ghostly, they are still two Kingdomes, and every Subject is subject to two Masters. For seeing the Ghostly Power challengeth the Right to declare what is Sinne it challengeth by consequence to declare what is Law, (Sinne being nothing but the transgression of the Law;) and again, the Civill Power challenging to declare what is Law, every Subject must obey two Masters, who bothe will have their Commands be observed as Law; which is impossible. Or, if it be but one Kingdome, either the Civill, which is the Power of the Common-wealth, must be subordinate to the Ghostly; or the Ghostly must be subordinate to the Temporall and then there is no Supremacy but the Temporall. When therefore these two Powers oppose one another, the Common-wealth cannot but be in great danger of Civill warre, and Dissolution. For the Civill Authority being more visible, and standing in the cleerer light of naturall reason cannot choose but draw to it in all times a very considerable part of the people: And the Spirituall, though it stand in the darknesse of Schoole distinctions, and hard words; yet because the fear of Darknesse, and Ghosts, is greater than other fears, cannot want a party sufficient to Trouble, and sometimes to Destroy a Common-wealth. And this is a Disease which not unfitly may be compared to the Epilepsie, or Falling-sicknesse (which the Jewes took to be one kind of possession by Spirits) in the Body Naturall. For as in this Disease, there is an unnaturall spirit, or wind in the head that obstructeth the roots of the Nerves, and moving them violently, taketh away the motion which naturally they should have from the power of the Soule in the Brain, and thereby causeth violent, and irregular motions (which men call Convulsions) in the parts; insomuch as he that is seized therewith, falleth down sometimes into the water, and sometimes into the fire, as a man deprived of his senses; so also in the Body Politique, when the Spirituall power, moveth the Members of a Common-wealth, by the terrour of punishments, and hope of rewards (which are the Nerves of it,) otherwise than by the Civill Power (which is the Soule of the Common-wealth) they ought to be moved; and by strange, and hard words suffocates the people, and either Overwhelm the Common-wealth with Oppression, or cast it into the Fire of a Civill warre.\n\nSometimes also in the meerly Civill government, there be more than one Soule: As when the Power of levying mony, (which is the Nutritive faculty,) has depended on a generall Assembly; the Power of conduct and command, (which is the Motive Faculty,) on one man; and the Power of making Lawes, (which is the Rationall faculty,) on the accidentall consent, not onely of those two, but also of a third; This endangereth the Common-wealth, somtimes for want of consent to good Lawes; but most often for want of such Nourishment, as is necessary to Life, and Motion. For although few perceive, that such government, is not government, but division of the Common-wealth into three Factions, and call it mixt Monarchy; yet the truth is, that it is not one independent Common-wealth, but three independent Factions; nor one Representative Person, but three. In the Kingdome of God, there may be three Persons independent, without breach of unity in God that Reigneth; but where men Reigne, that be subject to diversity of opinions, it cannot be so. And therefore if the King bear the person of the People, and the generall Assembly bear also the person of the People, and another assembly bear the person of a Part of the people, they are not one Person, nor one Soveraign, but three Persons, and three Soveraigns.\n\nTo what Disease in the Naturall Body of man, I may exactly compare this irregularity of a Common-wealth, I know not. But I have seen a man, that had another man growing out of his side, with an head, armes, breast, and stomach, of his own: If he had had another man growing out of his other side, the comparison might then have been exact.\n\nHitherto I have named such Diseases of a Common-wealth, as are of the greatest, and most present danger. There be other, not so great; which neverthelesse are not unfit to be observed. As first, the difficulty of raising Mony, for the necessary uses of the Common-wealth; especially in the approach of warre. This difficulty ariseth from the opinion, that every Subject hath of a Propriety in his lands and goods, exclusive of the Soveraigns Right to the use of the same. From whence it commeth to passe, that the Soveraign Power, which foreseeth the necessities and dangers of the Common-wealth, (finding the passage of mony to the publique Treasure obstructed, by the tenacity of the people,) whereas it ought to extend it selfe, to encounter, and prevent such dangers in their beginnings, contracteth it selfe as long as it can, and when it cannot longer, struggles with the people by strategems of Law, to obtain little summes, which not sufficing, he is fain at last violently to open the way for present supply, or Perish; and being put often to these extremities, at last reduceth the people to their due temper; or else the Common-wealth must perish. Insomuch as we may compare this Distemper very aptly to an Ague; wherein, the fleshy parts being congealed, or by venomous matter obstructed; the Veins which by their naturall course empty themselves into the Heart, are not (as they ought to be) supplyed from the Arteries, whereby there succeedeth at first a cold contraction, and trembling of the limbes; and afterwards a hot, and strong endeavour of the Heart, to force a passage for the Bloud; and before it can do that, contenteth it selfe with the small refreshments of such things as coole of a time, till (if Nature be strong enough) it break at last the contumacy of the parts obstructed, and dissipateth the venome into sweat; or (if Nature be too weak) the Patient dyeth.\n\nAgain, there is sometimes in a Common-wealth, a Disease, which resembleth the Pleurisie; and that is, when the Treasure of the Common-wealth, flowing out of its due course, is gathered together in too much abundance, in one, or a few private men, by Monopolies, or by Farmes of the Publique Revenues; in the same manner as the Blood in a Pleurisie, getting into the Membrane of the breast, breedeth there an Inflammation, accompanied with a Fever, and painfull stitches.\n\nAlso, the Popularity of a potent Subject, (unlesse the Common-wealth have very good caution of his fidelity,) is a dangerous Disease; because the people (which should receive their motion from the Authority of the Soveraign,) by the flattery, and by the reputation of an ambitious man, are drawn away from their obedience to the Lawes, to follow a man, of whose vertues, and designes they have no knowledge. And this is commonly of more danger in a Popular Government, than in a Monarchy; as it may easily be made believe, they are the People. By this means it was, that Julius Caesar, who was set up by the People against the Senate, having won to himselfe the affections of his Army, made himselfe Master, both of Senate and People. And this proceeding of popular, and ambitious men, is plain Rebellion; and may be resembled to the effects of Witchcraft.\n\nAnother infirmity of a Common-wealth, is the immoderate greatnesse of a Town, when it is able to furnish out of its own Circuit, the number, and expence of a great Army: As also the great number of Corporations; which are as it were many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man.\n\nTo which may be added, the Liberty of Disputing against absolute Power, by pretenders to Politicall Prudence; which though bred for the most part in the Lees of the people; yet animated by False Doctrines, are perpetually medling with the Fundamentall Lawes, to the molestation of the Common-wealth; like the little Wormes, which Physicians call Ascarides.\n\nWe may further adde, the insatiable appetite, or Bulimia, of enlarging Dominion; with the incurable Wounds thereby many times received from the enemy; And the Wens, of ununited conquests, which are many times a burthen, and with lesse danger lost, than kept; As also the Lethargy of Ease, and Consumption of Riot and Vain Expence.\n\nLastly, when in a warre (forraign, or intestine,) the enemies got a final Victory; so as (the forces of the Common-wealth keeping the field no longer) there is no farther protection of Subjects in their loyalty; then is the Common-wealth DISSOLVED, and every man at liberty to protect himselfe by such courses as his own discretion shall suggest unto him. For the Soveraign, is the publique Soule, giving Life and Motion to the Common-wealth; which expiring, the Members are governed by it no more, than the Carcasse of a man, by his departed (though Immortal) Soule. For though the Right of a Soveraign Monarch cannot be extinguished by the act of another; yet the Obligation of the members may. For he that wants protection, may seek it anywhere; and when he hath it, is obliged (without fraudulent pretence of having submitted himselfe out of fear,) to protect his Protection as long as he is able. But when the Power of an Assembly is once suppressed, the Right of the same perisheth utterly; because the Assembly it selfe is extinct; and consequently, there is no possibility for the Soveraignty to re-enter.\n\nCHAPTER XXX. OF THE OFFICE OF THE SOVERAIGN REPRESENTATIVE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 1\n\nOF THE OFFICE OF THE SOVERAIGN REPRESENTATIVE\n\nThe OFFICE of the Soveraign, (be it a Monarch, or an Assembly,) consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the Soveraign Power, namely the procuration of the Safety Of The People; to which he is obliged by the Law of Nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of that Law, and to none but him. But by Safety here, is not meant a bare Preservation, but also all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawfull Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Common-wealth, shall acquire to himselfe.\n\nAnd this is intended should be done, not by care applyed to Individualls, further than their protection from injuries, when they shall complain; but by a generall Providence, contained in publique Instruction, both of Doctrine, and Example; and in the making, and executing of good Lawes, to which individuall persons may apply their own cases.\n\nAnd because, if the essentiall Rights of Soveraignty (specified before in the eighteenth Chapter) be taken away, the Common-wealth is thereby dissolved, and every man returneth into the condition, and calamity of a warre with every other man, (which is the greatest evill that can happen in this life;) it is the Office of the Soveraign, to maintain those Rights entire; and consequently against his duty, First, to transferre to another, or to lay from himselfe any of them. For he that deserteth the Means, deserteth the Ends; and he deserteth the Means, that being the Soveraign, acknowledgeth himselfe subject to the Civill Lawes; and renounceth the Power of Supreme Judicature; or of making Warre, or Peace by his own Authority; or of Judging of the Necessities of the Common-wealth; or of levying Mony, and Souldiers, when, and as much as in his own conscience he shall judge necessary; or of making Officers, and Ministers both of Warre, and Peace; or of appointing Teachers, and examining what Doctrines are conformable, or contrary to the Defence, Peace, and Good of the people. Secondly, it is against his duty, to let the people be ignorant, or mis-in-formed of the grounds, and reasons of those his essentiall Rights; because thereby men are easie to be seduced, and drawn to resist him, when the Common-wealth shall require their use and exercise.\n\nAnd the grounds of these Rights, have the rather need to be diligently, and truly taught; because they cannot be maintained by any Civill Law, or terrour of legal punishment. For a Civill Law, that shall forbid Rebellion, (and such is all resistance to the essentiall Rights of Soveraignty,) is not (as a Civill Law) any obligation, but by vertue onely of the Law of Nature, that forbiddeth the violation of Faith; which naturall obligation if men know not, they cannot know the Right of any Law the Soveraign maketh. And for the Punishment, they take it but for an act of Hostility; which when they think they have strength enough, they will endeavour by acts of Hostility, to avoyd.\n\nAs I have heard some say, that Justice is but a word, without substance; and that whatsoever a man can by force, or art, acquire to himselfe, (not onely in the condition of warre, but also in a Common-wealth,) is his own, which I have already shewed to be false: So there be also that maintain, that there are no grounds, nor Principles of Reason, to sustain those essentiall Rights, which make Soveraignty absolute. For if there were, they would have been found out in some place, or other; whereas we see, there has not hitherto been any Common-wealth, where those Rights have been acknowledged, or challenged. Wherein they argue as ill, as if the Savage people of America, should deny there were any grounds, or Principles of Reason, so to build a house, as to last as long as the materials, because they never yet saw any so well built. Time, and Industry, produce every day new knowledge. And as the art of well building, is derived from Principles of Reason, observed by industrious men, that had long studied the nature of materials, and the divers effects of figure, and proportion, long after mankind began (though poorly) to build: So, long time after men have begun to constitute Common-wealths, imperfect, and apt to relapse into disorder, there may, Principles of Reason be found out, by industrious meditation, to make use of them, or be neglected by them, or not, concerneth my particular interest, at this day, very little. But supposing that these of mine are not such Principles of Reason; yet I am sure they are Principles from Authority of Scripture; as I shall make it appear, when I shall come to speak of the Kingdome of God, (administred by Moses,) over the Jewes, his peculiar people by Covenant.\n\nBut they say again, that though the Principles be right, yet Common people are not of capacity enough to be made to understand them. I should be glad, that the Rich, and Potent Subjects of a Kingdome, or those that are accounted the most Learned, were no lesse incapable than they. But all men know, that the obstructions to this kind of doctrine, proceed not so much from the difficulty of the matter, as from the interest of them that are to learn. Potent men, digest hardly any thing that setteth up a Power to bridle their affections; and Learned men, any thing that discovereth their errours, and thereby lesseneth their Authority: whereas the Common-peoples minds, unlesse they be tainted with dependance on the Potent, or scribbled over with the opinions of their Doctors, are like clean paper, fit to receive whatsoever by Publique Authority shall be imprinted in them. Shall whole Nations be brought to Acquiesce in the great Mysteries of Christian Religion, which are above Reason; and millions of men be made believe, that the same Body may be in innumerable places, at one and the same time, which is against Reason; and shall not men be able, by their teaching, and preaching, protected by the Law, to make that received, which is so consonant to Reason, that any unprejudicated man, needs no more to learn it, than to hear it? I conclude therefore, that in the instruction of the people in the Essentiall Rights (which are the Naturall, and Fundamentall Lawes) of Soveraignty, there is no difficulty, (whilest a Soveraign has his Power entire,) but what proceeds from his own fault, or the fault of those whom he trusteth in the administration of the Common-wealth; and consequently, it is his Duty, to cause them so to be instructed; and not onely his Duty, but his Benefit also, and Security, against the danger that may arrive to himselfe in his naturall Person, from Rebellion.\n\nAnd (to descend to particulars) the People are to be taught, First, that they ought not to be in love with any forme of Government they see in their neighbour Nations, more than with their own, nor (whatsoever present prosperity they behold in Nations that are otherwise governed than they,) to desire change. For the prosperity of a People ruled by an Aristocraticall, or Democraticall assembly, commeth not from Aristocracy, nor from Democracy, but from the Obedience, and Concord of the Subjects; nor do the people flourish in a Monarchy, because one man has the right to rule them, but because they obey him. Take away in any kind of State, the Obedience, (and consequently the Concord of the People,) and they shall not onely not flourish, but in short time be dissolved. And they that go about by disobedience, to doe no more than reforme the Common-wealth, shall find they do thereby destroy it; like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable;) which desiring to renew the youth of their decrepit Father, did by the Counsell of Medea, cut him in pieces, and boyle him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new man. This desire of change, is like the breach of the first of Gods Commandements: For there God says, Non Habebis Deos Alienos; Thou shalt not have the Gods of other Nations; and in another place concerning Kings, that they are Gods.\n\nSecondly, they are to be taught, that they ought not to be led with admiration of the vertue of any of their fellow Subjects, how high soever he stand, nor how conspicuously soever he shine in the Common-wealth; nor of any Assembly, (except the Soveraign Assembly,) so as to deferre to them any obedience, or honour, appropriate to the Soveraign onely, whom (in their particular stations) they represent; nor to receive any influence from them, but such as is conveighed by them from the Soveraign Authority. For that Soveraign, cannot be imagined to love his People as he ought, that is not Jealous of them, but suffers them by the flattery of Popular men, to be seduced from their loyalty, as they have often been, not onely secretly, but openly, so as to proclaime Marriage with them In Facie Ecclesiae by Preachers; and by publishing the same in the open streets: which may fitly be compared to the violation of the second of the ten Commandements.\n\nNor To Dispute The Soveraign Power\n\nThirdly, in consequence to this, they ought to be informed, how great fault it is, to speak evill of the Soveraign Representative, (whether One man, or an Assembly of men;) or to argue and dispute his Power, or any way to use his Name irreverently, whereby he may be brought into Contempt with his People, and their Obedience (in which the safety of the Common-wealth consisteth) slackened. Which doctrine the third Commandement by resemblance pointeth to.\n\nFourthly, seeing people cannot be taught this, nor when ’tis taught, remember it, nor after one generation past, so much as know in whom the Soveraign Power is placed, without setting a part from their ordinary labour, some certain times, in which they may attend those that are appointed to instruct them; It is necessary that some such times be determined, wherein they may assemble together, and (after prayers and praises given to God, the Soveraign of Soveraigns) hear those their Duties told them, and the Positive Lawes, such as generally concern them all, read and expounded, and be put in mind of the Authority that maketh them Lawes. To this end had the Jewes every seventh day, a Sabbath, in which the Law was read and expounded; and in the solemnity whereof they were put in mind, that their King was God; that having created the world in six days, he rested the seventh day; and by their resting on it from their labour, that that God was their King, which redeemed them from their servile, and painfull labour in Egypt, and gave them a time, after they had rejoyced in God, to take joy also in themselves, by lawfull recreation. So that the first Table of the Commandements, is spent all, in setting down the summe of Gods absolute Power; not onely as God, but as King by pact, (in peculiar) of the Jewes; and may therefore give light, to those that have the Soveraign Power conferred on them by the consent of men, to see what doctrine they Ought to teach their Subjects.\n\nAnd because the first instruction of Children, dependeth on the care of their Parents; it is necessary that they should be obedient to them, whilest they are under their tuition; and not onely so, but that also afterwards (as gratitude requireth,) they acknowledge the benefit of their education, by externall signes of honour. To which end they are to be taught, that originally the Father of every man was also his Soveraign Lord, with power over him of life and death; and that the Fathers of families, when by instituting a Common-wealth, they resigned that absolute Power, yet it was never intended, they should lose the honour due unto them for their education. For to relinquish such right, was not necessary to the Institution of Soveraign Power; nor would there be any reason, why any man should desire to have children, or take the care to nourish, and instruct them, if they were afterwards to have no other benefit from them, than from other men. And this accordeth with the fifth Commandement.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 2\n\nAgain, every Soveraign Ought to cause Justice to be taught, which (consisting in taking from no man what is his) is as much as to say, to cause men to be taught not to deprive their Neighbour, by violence, or fraud, of any thing which by the Soveraign Authority is theirs. Of things held in propriety, those that are dearest to a man are his own life, & limbs; and in the next degree, (in most men,) those that concern conjugall affection; and after them riches and means of living. Therefore the People are to be taught, to abstain from violence to one anothers person, by private revenges; from violation of conjugall honour; and from forcibly rapine, and fraudulent surreption of one anothers goods. For which purpose also it is necessary they be shewed the evill consequences of false Judgement, by corruption either of Judges or Witnesses, whereby the distinction of propriety is taken away, and Justice becomes of no effect: all which things are intimated in the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth Commandements.\n\nLastly, they are to be taught, that not onely the unjust facts, but the designes and intentions to do them, (though by accident hindred,) are Injustice; which consisteth in the pravity of the will, as well as in the irregularity of the act. And this is the intention of the tenth Commandement, and the summe of the Second Table; which is reduced all to this one Commandement of mutuall Charity, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy selfe:” as the summe of the first Table is reduced to “the love of God;” whom they had then newly received as their King.\n\nAs for the Means, and Conduits, by which the people may receive this Instruction, wee are to search, by what means so may Opinions, contrary to the peace of Man-kind, upon weak and false Principles, have neverthelesse been so deeply rooted in them. I mean those, which I have in the precedent Chapter specified: as That men shall Judge of what is lawfull and unlawfull, not by the Law it selfe, but by their own private Judgements; That Subjects sinne in obeying the Commands of the Common-wealth, unlesse they themselves have first judged them to be lawfull: That their Propriety in their riches is such, as to exclude the Dominion, which the Common-wealth hath over the same: That it is lawfull for Subjects to kill such, as they call Tyrants: That the Soveraign Power may be divided, and the like; which come to be instilled into the People by this means. They whom necessity, or covetousnesse keepeth attent on their trades, and labour; and they, on the other side, whom superfluity, or sloth carrieth after their sensuall pleasures, (which two sorts of men take up the greatest part of Man-kind,) being diverted from the deep meditation, which the learning of truth, not onely in the matter of Naturall Justice, but also of all other Sciences necessarily requireth, receive the Notions of their duty, chiefly from Divines in the Pulpit, and partly from such of their Neighbours, or familiar acquaintance, as having the Faculty of discoursing readily, and plausibly, seem wiser and better learned in cases of Law, and Conscience, than themselves. And the Divines, and such others as make shew of Learning, derive their knowledge from the Universities, and from the Schooles of Law, or from the Books, which by men eminent in those Schooles, and Universities have been published. It is therefore manifest, that the Instruction of the people, dependeth wholly, on the right teaching of Youth in the Universities. But are not (may some men say) the Universities of England learned enough already to do that? or is it you will undertake to teach the Universities? Hard questions. Yet to the first, I doubt not to answer; that till towards the later end of Henry the Eighth, the Power of the Pope, was alwayes upheld against the Power of the Common-wealth, principally by the Universities; and that the doctrines maintained by so many Preachers, against the Soveraign Power of the King, and by so many Lawyers, and others, that had their education there, is a sufficient argument, that though the Universities were not authors of those false doctrines, yet they knew not how to plant the true. For in such a contradiction of Opinions, it is most certain, that they have not been sufficiently instructed; and ’tis no wonder, if they yet retain a relish of that subtile liquor, wherewith they were first seasoned, against the Civill Authority. But to the later question, it is not fit, nor needfull for me to say either I, or No: for any man that sees what I am doing, may easily perceive what I think.\n\nThe safety of the People, requireth further, from him, or them that have the Soveraign Power, that Justice be equally administred to all degrees of People; that is, that as well the rich, and mighty, as poor and obscure persons, may be righted of the injuries done them; so as the great, may have no greater hope of impunity, when they doe violence, dishonour, or any Injury to the meaner sort, than when one of these, does the like to one of them: For in this consisteth Equity; to which, as being a Precept of the Law of Nature, a Soveraign is as much subject, as any of the meanest of his People. All breaches of the Law, are offences against the Common-wealth: but there be some, that are also against private Persons. Those that concern the Common-wealth onely, may without breach of Equity be pardoned; for every man may pardon what is done against himselfe, according to his own discretion. But an offence against a private man, cannot in Equity be pardoned, without the consent of him that is injured; or reasonable satisfaction.\n\nThe Inequality of Subjects, proceedeth from the Acts of Soveraign Power; and therefore has no more place in the presence of the Soveraign; that is to say, in a Court of Justice, then the Inequality between Kings, and their Subjects, in the presence of the King of Kings. The honour of great Persons, is to be valued for their beneficence, and the aydes they give to men of inferiour rank, or not at all. And the violences, oppressions, and injuries they do, are not extenuated, but aggravated by the greatnesse of their persons; because they have least need to commit them. The consequences of this partiality towards the great, proceed in this manner. Impunity maketh Insolence; Insolence Hatred; and Hatred, an Endeavour to pull down all oppressing and contumelious greatnesse, though with the ruine of the Common-wealth.\n\nTo Equall Justice, appertaineth also the Equall imposition of Taxes; the equality whereof dependeth not on the Equality of riches, but on the Equality of the debt, that every man oweth to the Common-wealth for his defence. It is not enough, for a man to labour for the maintenance of his life; but also to fight, (if need be,) for the securing of his labour. They must either do as the Jewes did after their return from captivity, in re-edifying the Temple, build with one hand, and hold the Sword in the other; or else they must hire others to fight for them. For the Impositions that are layd on the People by the Soveraign Power, are nothing else but the Wages, due to them that hold the publique Sword, to defend private men in the exercise of severall Trades, and Callings. Seeing then the benefit that every one receiveth thereby, is the enjoyment of life, which is equally dear to poor, and rich; the debt which a poor man oweth them that defend his life, is the same which a rich man oweth for the defence of his; saving that the rich, who have the service of the poor, may be debtors not onely for their own persons, but for many more. Which considered, the Equality of Imposition, consisteth rather in the Equality of that which is consumed, than of the riches of the persons that consume the same. For what reason is there, that he which laboureth much, and sparing the fruits of his labour, consumeth little, should be more charged, then he that living idlely, getteth little, and spendeth all he gets; seeing the one hath no more protection from the Common-wealth, then the other? But when the Impositions, are layd upon those things which men consume, every man payeth Equally for what he useth: Nor is the Common-wealth defrauded, by the luxurious waste of private men.\n\nAnd whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Uncharitablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity.\n\nBut for such as have strong bodies, the case is otherwise: they are to be forced to work; and to avoyd the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be such Lawes, as may encourage all manner of Arts; as Navigation, Agriculture, Fishing, and all manner of Manifacture that requires labour. The multitude of poor, and yet strong people still encreasing, they are to be transplanted into Countries not sufficiently inhabited: where neverthelesse, they are not to exterminate those they find there; but constrain them to inhabit closer together, and not range a great deal of ground, to snatch what they find; but to court each little Plot with art and labour, to give them their sustenance in due season. And when all the world is overchargd with Inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is Warre; which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death.\n\nTo the care of the Soveraign, belongeth the making of Good Lawes. But what is a good Law? By a Good Law, I mean not a Just Law: for no Law can be Unjust. The Law is made by the Soveraign Power, and all that is done by such Power, is warranted, and owned by every one of the people; and that which every man will have so, no man can say is unjust. It is in the Lawes of a Common-wealth, as in the Lawes of Gaming: whatsoever the Gamesters all agree on, is Injustice to none of them. A good Law is that, which is Needfull, for the Good Of The People, and withall Perspicuous.\n\nFor the use of Lawes, (which are but Rules Authorised) is not to bind the People from all Voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashnesse, or indiscretion, as Hedges are set, not to stop Travellers, but to keep them in the way. And therefore a Law that is not Needfull, having not the true End of a Law, is not Good. A Law may be conceived to be Good, when it is for the benefit of the Soveraign; though it be not Necessary for the People; but it is not so. For the good of the Soveraign and People, cannot be separated. It is a weak Soveraign, that has weak Subjects; and a weak People, whose Soveraign wanteth Power to rule them at his will. Unnecessary Lawes are not good Lawes; but trapps for Mony: which where the right of Soveraign Power is acknowledged, are superfluous; and where it is not acknowledged, unsufficient to defend the People.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 3\n\nThe Perspicuity, consisteth not so much in the words of the Law it selfe, as in a Declaration of the Causes, and Motives, for which it was made. That is it, that shewes us the meaning of the Legislator, and the meaning of the Legislator known, the Law is more easily understood by few, than many words. For all words, are subject to ambiguity; and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the Law, is multiplication of ambiguity: Besides it seems to imply, (by too much diligence,) that whosoever can evade the words, is without the compasse of the Law. And this is a cause of many unnecessary Processes. For when I consider how short were the Lawes of antient times; and how they grew by degrees still longer; me thinks I see a contention between the Penners, and Pleaders of the Law; the former seeking to circumscribe the later; and the later to evade their circumscriptions; and that the Pleaders have got the Victory. It belongeth therefore to the Office of a Legislator, (such as is in all Common-wealths the Supreme Representative, be it one Man, or an Assembly,) to make the reason Perspicuous, why the Law was made; and the Body of the Law it selfe, as short, but in as proper, and significant termes, as may be.\n\nIt belongeth also to the Office of the Soveraign, to make a right application of Punishments, and Rewards. And seeing the end of punishing is not revenge, and discharge of choler; but correction, either of the offender, or of others by his example; the severest Punishments are to be inflicted for those Crimes, that are of most Danger to the Publique; such as are those which proceed from malice to the Government established; those that spring from contempt of Justice; those that provoke Indignation in the Multitude; and those, which unpunished, seem Authorised, as when they are committed by Sonnes, Servants, or Favorites of men in Authority: For Indignation carrieth men, not onely against the Actors, and Authors of Injustice; but against all Power that is likely to protect them; as in the case of Tarquin; when for the Insolent act of one of his Sonnes, he was driven out of Rome, and the Monarchy it selfe dissolved. But Crimes of Infirmity; such as are those which proceed from great provocation, from great fear, great need, or from ignorance whether the Fact be a great Crime, or not, there is place many times for Lenity, without prejudice to the Common-wealth; and Lenity when there is such place for it, is required by the Law of Nature. The Punishment of the Leaders, and teachers in a Commotion; not the poore seduced People, when they are punished, can profit the Common-wealth by their example. To be severe to the People, is to punish that ignorance, which may in great part be imputed to the Soveraign, whose fault it was, they were no better instructed.\n\nIn like manner it belongeth to the Office, and Duty of the Soveraign, to apply his Rewards alwayes so, as there may arise from them benefit to the Common-wealth: wherein consisteth their Use, and End; and is then done, when they that have well served the Common-wealth, are with as little expence of the Common Treasure, as is possible, so well recompenced, as others thereby may be encouraged, both to serve the same as faithfully as they can, and to study the arts by which they may be enabled to do it better. To buy with Mony, or Preferment, from a Popular ambitious Subject, to be quiet, and desist from making ill impressions in the mindes of the People, has nothing of the nature of Reward; (which is ordained not for disservice, but for service past;) nor a signe of Gratitude, but of Fear: nor does it tend to the Benefit, but to the Dammage of the Publique. It is a contention with Ambition, like that of Hercules with the Monster Hydra, which having many heads, for every one that was vanquished, there grew up three. For in like manner, when the stubbornnesse of one Popular man, is overcome with Reward, there arise many more (by the Example) that do the same Mischiefe, in hope of like Benefit: and as all sorts of Manifacture, so also Malice encreaseth by being vendible. And though sometimes a Civill warre, may be differred, by such wayes as that, yet the danger growes still the greater, and the Publique ruine more assured. It is therefore against the Duty of the Soveraign, to whom the Publique Safety is committed, to Reward those that aspire to greatnesse by disturbing the Peace of their Country, and not rather to oppose the beginnings of such men, with a little danger, than after a longer time with greater.\n\nAnother Businesse of the Soveraign, is to choose good Counsellours; I mean such, whose advice he is to take in the Government of the Common-wealth. For this word Counsell, Consilium, corrupted from Considium, is a large signification, and comprehendeth all Assemblies of men that sit together, not onely to deliberate what is to be done hereafter, but also to judge of Facts past, and of Law for the present. I take it here in the first sense onely: And in this sense, there is no choyce of Counsell, neither in a Democracy, nor Aristocracy; because the persons Counselling are members of the person Counselled. The choyce of Counsellours therefore is to Monarchy; In which, the Soveraign that endeavoureth not to make choyce of those, that in every kind are the most able, dischargeth not his Office as he ought to do. The most able Counsellours, are they that have least hope of benefit by giving evill Counsell, and most knowledge of those things that conduce to the Peace, and Defence of the Common-wealth. It is a hard matter to know who expecteth benefit from publique troubles; but the signes that guide to a just suspicion, is the soothing of the people in their unreasonable, or irremediable grievances, by men whose estates are not sufficient to discharge their accustomed expences, and may easily be observed by any one whom it concerns to know it. But to know, who has most knowledge of the Publique affaires, is yet harder; and they that know them, need them a great deale the lesse. For to know, who knowes the Rules almost of any Art, is a great degree of the knowledge of the same Art; because no man can be assured of the truth of anothers Rules, but he that is first taught to understand them. But the best signes of Knowledge of any Art, are, much conversing in it, and constant good effects of it. Good Counsell comes not by Lot, nor by Inheritance; and therefore there is no more reason to expect good Advice from the rich, or noble, in matter of State, than in delineating the dimensions of a fortresse; unlesse we shall think there needs no method in the study of the Politiques, (as there does in the study of Geometry,) but onely to be lookers on; which is not so. For the Politiques is the harder study of the two. Whereas in these parts of Europe, it hath been taken for a Right of certain persons, to have place in the highest Councell of State by Inheritance; it is derived from the Conquests of the antient Germans; wherein many absolute Lords joyning together to conquer other Nations, would not enter in to the Confederacy, without such Priviledges, as might be marks of difference in time following, between their Posterity, and the posterity of their Subjects; which Priviledges being inconsistent with the Soveraign Power, by the favour of the Soveraign, they may seem to keep; but contending for them as their Right, they must needs by degrees let them go, and have at last no further honour, than adhaereth naturally to their abilities.\n\nAnd how able soever be the Counsellours in any affaire, the benefit of their Counsell is greater, when they give every one his Advice, and reasons of it apart, than when they do it in an Assembly, by way of Orations; and when they have praemeditated, than when they speak on the sudden; both because they have more time, to survey the consequences of action; and are lesse subject to be carried away to contradiction, through Envy, Emulation, or other Passions arising from the difference of opinion.\n\nThe best Counsell, in those things that concern not other Nations, but onely the ease, and benefit the Subjects may enjoy, by Lawes that look onely inward, is to be taken from the generall informations, and complaints of the people of each Province, who are best acquainted with their own wants, and ought therefore, when they demand nothing in derogation of the essentiall Rights of Soveraignty, to be diligently taken notice of. For without those Essentiall Rights, (as I have often before said,) the Common-wealth cannot at all subsist.\n\nA Commander of an Army in chiefe, if he be not Popular, shall not be beloved, nor feared as he ought to be by his Army; and consequently cannot performe that office with good successe. He must therefore be Industrious, Valiant, Affable, Liberall and Fortunate, that he may gain an opinion both of sufficiency, and of loving his Souldiers. This is Popularity, and breeds in the Souldiers both desire, and courage, to recommend themselves to his favour; and protects the severity of the Generall, in punishing (when need is) the Mutinous, or negligent Souldiers. But this love of Souldiers, (if caution be not given of the Commanders fidelity,) is a dangerous thing to Soveraign Power; especially when it is in the hands of an Assembly not popular. It belongeth therefore to the safety of the People, both that they be good Conductors, and faithfull subjects, to whom the Soveraign Commits his Armies.\n\nBut when the Soveraign himselfe is Popular, that is, reverenced and beloved of his People, there is no danger at all from the Popularity of a Subject. For Souldiers are never so generally unjust, as to side with their Captain; though they love him, against their Soveraign, when they love not onely his Person, but also his Cause. And therefore those, who by violence have at any time suppressed the Power of their Lawfull Soveraign, before they could settle themselves in his place, have been alwayes put to the trouble of contriving their Titles, to save the People from the shame of receiving them. To have a known Right to Soveraign Power, is so popular a quality, as he that has it needs no more, for his own part, to turn the hearts of his Subjects to him, but that they see him able absolutely to govern his own Family: Nor, on the part of his enemies, but a disbanding of their Armies. For the greatest and most active part of Mankind, has never hetherto been well contented with the present.\n\nConcerning the Offices of one Soveraign to another, which are comprehended in that Law, which is commonly called the Law of Nations, I need not say any thing in this place; because the Law of Nations, and the Law of Nature, is the same thing. And every Soveraign hath the same Right, in procuring the safety of his People, that any particular man can have, in procuring the safety of his own Body. And the same Law, that dictateth to men that have no Civil Government, what they ought to do, and what to avoyd in regard of one another, dictateth the same to Common-wealths, that is, to the Consciences of Soveraign Princes, and Soveraign Assemblies; there being no Court of Naturall Justice, but in the Conscience onely; where not Man, but God raigneth; whose Lawes, (such of them as oblige all Mankind,) in respect of God, as he is the Author of Nature, are Naturall; and in respect of the same God, as he is King of Kings, are Lawes. But of the Kingdome of God, as King of Kings, and as King also of a peculiar People, I shall speak in the rest of this discourse.\n\nCHAPTER XXXI. OF THE KINGDOME OF GOD BY NATURE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXXI, 1\n\nOF THE KINGDOME OF GOD BY NATURE\n\nThat the condition of meer Nature, that is to say, of absolute Liberty, such as is theirs, that neither are Soveraigns, nor Subjects, is Anarchy, and the condition of Warre: That the Praecepts, by which men are guided to avoyd that condition, are the Lawes of Nature: That a Common-wealth, without Soveraign Power, is but a word, without substance, and cannot stand: That Subjects owe to Soveraigns, simple Obedience, in all things, wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the Lawes of God, I have sufficiently proved, in that which I have already written. There wants onely, for the entire knowledge of Civill duty, to know what are those Lawes of God. For without that, a man knows not, when he is commanded any thing by the Civill Power, whether it be contrary to the Law of God, or not: and so, either by too much civill obedience, offends the Divine Majesty, or through feare of offending God, transgresses the commandements of the Common-wealth. To avoyd both these Rocks, it is necessary to know what are the Lawes Divine. And seeing the knowledge of all Law, dependeth on the knowledge of the Soveraign Power; I shall say something in that which followeth, of the KINGDOME OF GOD.\n\n“God is King, let the Earth rejoice,” saith the Psalmist. (Psal. 96. 1). And again, “God is King though the Nations be angry; and he that sitteth on the Cherubins, though the earth be moved.” (Psal. 98. 1). Whether men will or not, they must be subject alwayes to the Divine Power. By denying the Existence, or Providence of God, men may shake off their Ease, but not their Yoke. But to call this Power of God, which extendeth it selfe not onely to Man, but also to Beasts, and Plants, and Bodies inanimate, by the name of Kingdome, is but a metaphoricall use of the word. For he onely is properly said to Raigne, that governs his Subjects, by his Word, and by promise of Rewards to those that obey it, and by threatning them with Punishment that obey it not. Subjects therefore in the Kingdome of God, are not Bodies Inanimate, nor creatures Irrationall; because they understand no Precepts as his: Nor Atheists; nor they that believe not that God has any care of the actions of mankind; because they acknowledge no Word for his, nor have hope of his rewards, or fear of his threatnings. They therefore that believe there is a God that governeth the world, and hath given Praecepts, and propounded Rewards, and Punishments to Mankind, are Gods Subjects; all the rest, are to be understood as Enemies.\n\nTo rule by Words, requires that such Words be manifestly made known; for else they are no Lawes: For to the nature of Lawes belongeth a sufficient, and clear Promulgation, such as may take away the excuse of Ignorance; which in the Lawes of men is but of one onely kind, and that is, Proclamation, or Promulgation by the voyce of man. But God declareth his Lawes three wayes; by the Dictates of Naturall Reason, By Revelation, and by the Voyce of some Man, to whom by the operation of Miracles, he procureth credit with the rest. From hence there ariseth a triple Word of God, Rational, Sensible, and Prophetique: to which Correspondeth a triple Hearing; Right Reason, Sense Supernaturall, and Faith. As for Sense Supernaturall, which consisteth in Revelation, or Inspiration, there have not been any Universall Lawes so given, because God speaketh not in that manner, but to particular persons, and to divers men divers things.\n\nA Twofold Kingdome Of God, Naturall And Prophetique From the difference between the other two kinds of Gods Word, Rationall, and Prophetique, there may be attributed to God, a two-fold Kingdome, Naturall, and Prophetique: Naturall, wherein he governeth as many of Mankind as acknowledge his Providence, by the naturall Dictates of Right Reason; And Prophetique, wherein having chosen out one peculiar Nation (the Jewes) for his Subjects, he governed them, and none but them, not onely by naturall Reason, but by Positive Lawes, which he gave them by the mouths of his holy Prophets. Of the Naturall Kingdome of God I intend to speak in this Chapter.\n\nThe Right Of Gods Soveraignty Is Derived From His Omnipotence The Right of Nature, whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth those that break his Lawes, is to be derived, not from his Creating them, as if he required obedience, as of Gratitude for his benefits; but from his Irresistible Power. I have formerly shewn, how the Soveraign Right ariseth from Pact: To shew how the same Right may arise from Nature, requires no more, but to shew in what case it is never taken away. Seeing all men by Nature had Right to All things, they had Right every one to reigne over all the rest. But because this Right could not be obtained by force, it concerned the safety of every one, laying by that Right, to set up men (with Soveraign Authority) by common consent, to rule and defend them: whereas if there had been any man of Power Irresistible; there had been no reason, why he should not by that Power have ruled, and defended both himselfe, and them, according to his own discretion. To those therefore whose Power is irresistible, the dominion of all men adhaereth naturally by their excellence of Power; and consequently it is from that Power, that the Kingdome over men, and the Right of afflicting men at his pleasure, belongeth Naturally to God Almighty; not as Creator, and Gracious; but as Omnipotent. And though Punishment be due for Sinne onely, because by that word is understood Affliction for Sinne; yet the Right of Afflicting, is not alwayes derived from mens Sinne, but from Gods Power.\n\nThis question, “Why Evill men often Prosper, and Good men suffer Adversity,” has been much disputed by the Antient, and is the same with this of ours, “By what Right God dispenseth the Prosperities and Adversities of this life;” and is of that difficulty, as it hath shaken the faith, not onely of the Vulgar, but of Philosophers, and which is more, of the Saints, concerning the Divine Providence. “How Good,” saith David, “is the God of Israel to those that are Upright in Heart; and yet my feet were almost gone, my treadings had well-nigh slipt; for I was grieved at the Wicked, when I saw the Ungodly in such Prosperity.” And Job, how earnestly does he expostulate with God, for the many Afflictions he suffered, notwithstanding his Righteousnesse? This question in the case of Job, is decided by God himselfe, not by arguments derived from Job’s Sinne, but his own Power. For whereas the friends of Job drew their arguments from his Affliction to his Sinne, and he defended himselfe by the conscience of his Innocence, God himselfe taketh up the matter, and having justified the Affliction by arguments drawn from his Power, such as this “Where was thou when I layd the foundations of the earth,” and the like, both approved Job’s Innocence, and reproved the Erroneous doctrine of his friends. Conformable to this doctrine is the sentence of our Saviour, concerning the man that was born Blind, in these words, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his fathers; but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” And though it be said “That Death entred into the world by sinne,” (by which is meant that if Adam had never sinned, he had never dyed, that is, never suffered any separation of his soule from his body,) it follows not thence, that God could not justly have Afflicted him, though he had not Sinned, as well as he afflicteth other living creatures, that cannot sinne.\n\nHaving spoken of the Right of Gods Soveraignty, as grounded onely on Nature; we are to consider next, what are the Divine Lawes, or Dictates of Naturall Reason; which Lawes concern either the naturall Duties of one man to another, or the Honour naturally due to our Divine Soveraign. The first are the same Lawes of Nature, of which I have spoken already in the 14. and 15. Chapters of this Treatise; namely, Equity, Justice, Mercy, Humility, and the rest of the Morall Vertues. It remaineth therefore that we consider, what Praecepts are dictated to men, by their Naturall Reason onely, without other word of God, touching the Honour and Worship of the Divine Majesty.\n\nHonour consisteth in the inward thought, and opinion of the Power, and Goodnesse of another: and therefore to Honour God, is to think as Highly of his Power and Goodnesse, as is possible. And of that opinion, the externall signes appearing in the Words, and Actions of men, are called Worship; which is one part of that which the Latines understand by the word Cultus: For Cultus signifieth properly, and constantly, that labour which a man bestowes on any thing, with a purpose to make benefit by it. Now those things whereof we make benefit, are either subject to us, and the profit they yeeld, followeth the labour we bestow upon them, as a naturall effect; or they are not subject to us, but answer our labour, according to their own Wills. In the first sense the labour bestowed on the Earth, is called Culture; and the education of Children a Culture of their mindes. In the second sense, where mens wills are to be wrought to our purpose, not by Force, but by Compleasance, it signifieth as much as Courting, that is, a winning of favour by good offices; as by praises, by acknowledging their Power, and by whatsoever is pleasing to them from whom we look for any benefit. And this is properly Worship: in which sense Publicola, is understood for a Worshipper of the People, and Cultus Dei, for the Worship of God.\n\nFrom internall Honour, consisting in the opinion of Power and Goodnesse, arise three Passions; Love, which hath reference to Goodnesse; and Hope, and Fear, that relate to Power: And three parts of externall worship; Praise, Magnifying, and Blessing: The subject of Praise, being Goodnesse; the subject of Magnifying, and Blessing, being Power, and the effect thereof Felicity. Praise, and Magnifying are significant both by Words, and Actions: By Words, when we say a man is Good, or Great: By Actions, when we thank him for his Bounty, and obey his Power. The opinion of the Happinesse of another, can onely be expressed by words.\n\nThere be some signes of Honour, (both in Attributes and Actions,) that be Naturally so; as amongst Attributes, Good, Just, Liberall, and the like; and amongst Actions, Prayers, Thanks, and Obedience. Others are so by Institution, or Custome of men; and in some times and places are Honourable; in others Dishonourable; in others Indifferent: such as are the Gestures in Salutation, Prayer, and Thanksgiving, in different times and places, differently used. The former is Naturall; the later Arbitrary Worship.\n\nAnd of Arbitrary Worship, there bee two differences: For sometimes it is a Commanded, sometimes Voluntary Worship: Commanded, when it is such as hee requireth, who is Worshipped: Free, when it is such as the Worshipper thinks fit. When it is Commanded, not the words, or gestures, but the obedience is the Worship. But when Free, the Worship consists in the opinion of the beholders: for if to them the words, or actions by which we intend honour, seem ridiculous, and tending to contumely; they are not Worship; because a signe is not a signe to him that giveth it, but to him to whom it is made; that is, to the spectator.\n\nAgain, there is a Publique, and a Private Worship. Publique, is the Worship that a Common-wealth performeth, as one Person. Private, is that which a Private person exhibiteth. Publique, in respect of the whole Common-wealth, is Free; but in respect of Particular men it is not so. Private, is in secret Free; but in the sight of the multitude, it is never without some Restraint, either from the Lawes, or from the Opinion of men; which is contrary to the nature of Liberty.\n\nThe End of Worship amongst men, is Power. For where a man seeth another worshipped he supposeth him powerfull, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his Power greater. But God has no Ends: the worship we do him, proceeds from our duty, and is directed according to our capacity, by those rules of Honour, that Reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of dammage, or in thankfulnesse for good already received from them.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXXI, 2\n\nThat we may know what worship of God is taught us by the light of Nature, I will begin with his Attributes. Where, First, it is manifest, we ought to attribute to him Existence: For no man can have the will to honour that, which he thinks not to have any Beeing.\n\nSecondly, that those Philosophers, who sayd the World, or the Soule of the World was God, spake unworthily of him; and denyed his Existence: For by God, is understood the cause of the World; and to say the World is God, is to say there is no cause of it, that is, no God.\n\nThirdly, to say the World was not Created, but Eternall, (seeing that which is Eternall has no cause,) is to deny there is a God.\n\nFourthly, that they who attributing (as they think) Ease to God, take from him the care of Mankind; take from him his Honour: for it takes away mens love, and fear of him; which is the root of Honour.\n\nFifthly, in those things that signifie Greatnesse, and Power; to say he is Finite, is not to Honour him: For it is not a signe of the Will to Honour God, to attribute to him lesse than we can; and Finite, is lesse than we can; because to Finite, it is easie to adde more.\n\nTherefore to attribute Figure to him, is not Honour; for all Figure is Finite:\n\nNor to say we conceive, and imagine, or have an Idea of him, in our mind: for whatsoever we conceive is Finite:\n\nNot to attribute to him Parts, or Totality; which are the Attributes onely of things Finite:\n\nNor to say he is this, or that Place: for whatsoever is in Place, is bounded, and Finite:\n\nNor that he is Moved, or Resteth: for both these Attributes ascribe to him Place:\n\nNor that there be more Gods than one; because it implies them all Finite: for there cannot be more than one Infinite: Nor to ascribe to him (unlesse Metaphorically, meaning not the Passion, but the Effect) Passions that partake of Griefe; as Repentance, Anger, Mercy: or of Want; as Appetite, Hope, Desire; or of any Passive faculty: For Passion, is Power limited by somewhat else.\n\nAnd therefore when we ascribe to God a Will, it is not to be understood, as that of Man, for a Rationall Appetite; but as the Power, by which he effecteth every thing.\n\nLikewise when we attribute to him Sight, and other acts of Sense; as also Knowledge, and Understanding; which in us is nothing else, but a tumult of the mind, raised by externall things that presse the organicall parts of mans body: For there is no such thing in God; and being things that depend on naturall causes, cannot be attributed to him.\n\nHee that will attribute to God, nothing but what is warranted by naturall Reason, must either use such Negative Attributes, as Infinite, Eternall, Incomprehensible; or Superlatives, as Most High, Most Great, and the like; or Indefinite, as Good, Just, Holy, Creator; and in such sense, as if he meant not to declare what he is, (for that were to circumscribe him within the limits of our Fancy,) but how much wee admire him, and how ready we would be to obey him; which is a signe of Humility, and of a Will to honour him as much as we can: For there is but one Name to signifie our Conception of his Nature, and that is, I AM: and but one Name of his Relation to us, and that is God; in which is contained Father, King, and Lord.\n\nConcerning the actions of Divine Worship, it is a most generall Precept of Reason, that they be signes of the Intention to Honour God; such as are, First, Prayers: For not the Carvers, when they made Images, were thought to make them Gods; but the People that Prayed to them.\n\nSecondly, Thanksgiving; which differeth from Prayer in Divine Worship, no otherwise, than that Prayers precede, and Thanks succeed the benefit; the end both of the one, and the other, being to acknowledge God, for Author of all benefits, as well past, as future.\n\nThirdly, Gifts; that is to say, Sacrifices, and Oblations, (if they be of the best,) are signes of Honour: for they are Thanksgivings.\n\nFourthly, Not to swear by any but God, is naturally a signe of Honour: for it is a confession that God onely knoweth the heart; and that no mans wit, or strength can protect a man against Gods vengence on the perjured.\n\nFifthly, it is a part of Rationall Worship, to speak Considerately of God; for it argues a Fear of him, and Fear, is a confession of his Power. Hence followeth, That the name of God is not to be used rashly, and to no purpose; for that is as much, as in Vain: And it is to no purpose; unlesse it be by way of Oath, and by order of the Common-wealth, to make Judgements certain; or between Common-wealths, to avoyd Warre. And that disputing of Gods nature is contrary to his Honour: For it is supposed, that in this naturall Kingdome of God, there is no other way to know any thing, but by naturall Reason; that is, from the Principles of naturall Science; which are so farre from teaching us any thing of Gods nature, as they cannot teach us our own nature, nor the nature of the smallest creature living. And therefore, when men out of the Principles of naturall Reason, dispute of the Attributes of God, they but dishonour him: For in the Attributes which we give to God, we are not to consider the signification of Philosophicall Truth; but the signification of Pious Intention, to do him the greatest Honour we are able. From the want of which consideration, have proceeded the volumes of disputation about the Nature of God, that tend not to his Honour, but to the honour of our own wits, and learning; and are nothing else but inconsiderate, and vain abuses of his Sacred Name.\n\nSixthly, in Prayers, Thanksgivings, Offerings and Sacrifices, it is a Dictate of naturall Reason, that they be every one in his kind the best, and most significant of Honour. As for example, that Prayers, and Thanksgiving, be made in Words and Phrases, not sudden, nor light, nor Plebeian; but beautifull and well composed; For else we do not God as much honour as we can. And therefore the Heathens did absurdly, to worship Images for Gods: But their doing it in Verse, and with Musick, both of Voyce, and Instruments, was reasonable. Also that the Beasts they offered in sacrifice, and the Gifts they offered, and their actions in Worshipping, were full of submission, and commemorative of benefits received, was according to reason, as proceeding from an intention to honour him.\n\nSeventhly, Reason directeth not onely to worship God in Secret; but also, and especially, in Publique, and in the sight of men: For without that, (that which in honour is most acceptable) the procuring others to honour him, is lost.\n\nLastly, Obedience to his Lawes (that is, in this case to the Lawes of Nature,) is the greatest worship of all. For as Obedience is more acceptable to God than sacrifice; so also to set light by his Commandements, is the greatest of all contumelies. And these are the Lawes of that Divine Worship, which naturall Reason dictateth to private men.\n\nBut seeing a Common-wealth is but one Person, it ought also to exhibite to God but one Worship; which then it doth, when it commandeth it to be exhibited by Private men, Publiquely. And this is Publique Worship; the property whereof, is to be Uniforme: For those actions that are done differently, by different men, cannot be said to be a Publique Worship. And therefore, where many sorts of Worship be allowed, proceeding from the different Religions of Private men, it cannot be said there is any Publique Worship, nor that the Common-wealth is of any Religion at all.\n\nAnd because words (and consequently the Attributes of God) have their signification by agreement, and constitution of men; those Attributes are to be held significative of Honour, that men intend shall so be; and whatsoever may be done by the wills of particular men, where there is no Law but Reason, may be done by the will of the Common-wealth, by Lawes Civill. And because a Common-wealth hath no Will, nor makes no Lawes, but those that are made by the Will of him, or them that have the Soveraign Power; it followeth, that those Attributes which the Soveraign ordaineth, in the Worship of God, for signes of Honour, ought to be taken and used for such, by private men in their publique Worship.\n\nBut because not all Actions are signes by Constitution; but some are Naturally signes of Honour, others of Contumely, these later (which are those that men are ashamed to do in the sight of them they reverence) cannot be made by humane power a part of Divine worship; nor the former (such as are decent, modest, humble Behaviour) ever be separated from it. But whereas there be an infinite number of Actions, and Gestures, of an indifferent nature; such of them as the Common-wealth shall ordain to be Publiquely and Universally in use, as signes of Honour, and part of Gods Worship, are to be taken and used for such by the Subjects. And that which is said in the Scripture, “It is better to obey God than men,” hath place in the kingdome of God by Pact, and not by Nature.\n\nHaving thus briefly spoken of the Naturall Kingdome of God, and his Naturall Lawes, I will adde onely to this Chapter a short declaration of his Naturall Punishments. There is no action of man in this life, that is not the beginning of so long a chayn of Consequences, as no humane Providence, is high enough, to give a man a prospect to the end. And in this Chayn, there are linked together both pleasing and unpleasing events; in such manner, as he that will do any thing for his pleasure, must engage himselfe to suffer all the pains annexed to it; and these pains, are the Naturall Punishments of those actions, which are the beginning of more Harme that Good. And hereby it comes to passe, that Intemperance, is naturally punished with Diseases; Rashnesse, with Mischances; Injustice, with the Violence of Enemies; Pride, with Ruine; Cowardise, with Oppression; Negligent government of Princes, with Rebellion; and Rebellion, with Slaughter. For seeing Punishments are consequent to the breach of Lawes; Naturall Punishments must be naturally consequent to the breach of the Lawes of Nature; and therfore follow them as their naturall, not arbitrary effects.\n\nAnd thus farre concerning the Constitution, Nature, and Right of Soveraigns; and concerning the Duty of Subjects, derived from the Principles of Naturall Reason. And now, considering how different this Doctrine is, from the Practise of the greatest part of the world, especially of these Western parts, that have received their Morall learning from Rome, and Athens; and how much depth of Morall Philosophy is required, in them that have the Administration of the Soveraign Power; I am at the point of believing this my labour, as uselesse, and the Common-wealth of Plato; For he also is of opinion that it is impossible for the disorders of State, and change of Governments by Civill Warre, ever to be taken away, till Soveraigns be Philosophers. But when I consider again, that the Science of Naturall Justice, is the onely Science necessary for Soveraigns, and their principall Ministers; and that they need not be charged with the Sciences Mathematicall, (as by Plato they are,) further, than by good Lawes to encourage men to the study of them; and that neither Plato, nor any other Philosopher hitherto, hath put into order, and sufficiently, or probably proved all the Theoremes of Morall doctrine, that men may learn thereby, both how to govern, and how to obey; I recover some hope, that one time or other, this writing of mine, may fall into the hands of a Soveraign, who will consider it himselfe, (for it is short, and I think clear,) without the help of any interested, or envious Interpreter; and by the exercise of entire Soveraignty, in protecting the Publique teaching of it, convert this Truth of Speculation, into the Utility of Practice.\n\nPART III. OF A CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXII\n\nOF THE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN POLITIQUES\n\nThe Word Of God Delivered By Prophets Is The Main Principle\n\nOf Christian Politiques\n\nI have derived the Rights of Soveraigne Power, and the duty of Subjects hitherto, from the Principles of Nature onely; such as Experience has found true, or Consent (concerning the use of words) has made so; that is to say, from the nature of Men, known to us by Experience, and from Definitions (of such words as are Essentiall to all Politicall reasoning) universally agreed on. But in that I am next to handle, which is the Nature and Rights of a CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH, whereof there dependeth much upon Supernaturall Revelations of the Will of God; the ground of my Discourse must be, not only the Naturall Word of God, but also the Propheticall.\n\nNeverthelesse, we are not to renounce our Senses, and Experience; nor (that which is the undoubted Word of God) our naturall Reason. For they are the talents which he hath put into our hands to negotiate, till the coming again of our blessed Saviour; and therefore not to be folded up in the Napkin of an Implicate Faith, but employed in the purchase of Justice, Peace, and true Religion, For though there be many things in Gods Word above Reason; that is to say, which cannot by naturall reason be either demonstrated, or confuted; yet there is nothing contrary to it; but when it seemeth so, the fault is either in our unskilfull Interpretation, or erroneous Ratiocination.\n\nTherefore, when any thing therein written is too hard for our examination, wee are bidden to captivate our understanding to the Words; and not to labour in sifting out a Philosophicall truth by Logick, of such mysteries as are not comprehensible, nor fall under any rule of naturall science. For it is with the mysteries of our Religion, as with wholsome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the vertue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.\n\nBut by the Captivity of our Understanding, is not meant a Submission of the Intellectual faculty, to the Opinion of any other man; but of the Will to Obedience, where obedience is due. For Sense, Memory, Understanding, Reason, and Opinion are not in our power to change; but alwaies, and necessarily such, as the things we see, hear, and consider suggest unto us; and therefore are not effects of our Will, but our Will of them. We then Captivate our Understanding and Reason, when we forbear contradiction; when we so speak, as (by lawfull Authority) we are commanded; and when we live accordingly; which in sum, is Trust, and Faith reposed in him that speaketh, though the mind be incapable of any Notion at all from the words spoken.\n\nWhen God speaketh to man, it must be either immediately; or by mediation of another man, to whom he had formerly spoken by himself immediately. How God speaketh to a man immediately, may be understood by those well enough, to whom he hath so spoken; but how the same should be understood by another, is hard, if not impossible to know. For if a man pretend to me, that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce, to oblige me to beleeve it. It is true, that if he be my Soveraign, he may oblige me to obedience, so, as not by act or word to declare I beleeve him not; but not to think any otherwise then my reason perswades me. But if one that hath not such authority over me, shall pretend the same, there is nothing that exacteth either beleefe, or obedience.\n\nFor to say that God hath spoken to him in the Holy Scripture, is not to say God hath spoken to him immediately, but by mediation of the Prophets, or of the Apostles, or of the Church, in such manner as he speaks to all other Christian men. To say he hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win beleef from any man, that knows dreams are for the most part naturall, and may proceed from former thoughts; and such dreams as that, from selfe conceit, and foolish arrogance, and false opinion of a mans own godlinesse, or other vertue, by which he thinks he hath merited the favour of extraordinary Revelation. To say he hath seen a Vision, or heard a Voice, is to say, that he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking: for in such manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering. To say he speaks by supernaturall Inspiration, is to say he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong opinion of himself, for which he can alledge no naturall and sufficient reason. So that though God Almighty can speak to a man, by Dreams, Visions, Voice, and Inspiration; yet he obliges no man to beleeve he hath so done to him that pretends it; who (being a man), may erre, and (which is more) may lie.\n\nHow then can he, to whom God hath never revealed his Wil immediately (saving by the way of natural reason) know when he is to obey, or not to obey his Word, delivered by him, that sayes he is a Prophet? (1 Kings 22) Of 400 Prophets, of whom the K. of Israel asked counsel, concerning the warre he made against Ramoth Gilead, only Micaiah was a true one.(1 Kings 13) The Prophet that was sent to prophecy against the Altar set up by Jeroboam, though a true Prophet, and that by two miracles done in his presence appears to be a Prophet sent from God, was yet deceived by another old Prophet, that perswaded him as from the mouth of God, to eat and drink with him. If one Prophet deceive another, what certainty is there of knowing the will of God, by other way than that of Reason? To which I answer out of the Holy Scripture, that there be two marks, by which together, not asunder, a true Prophet is to be known. One is the doing of miracles; the other is the not teaching any other Religion than that which is already established. Asunder (I say) neither of these is sufficient. (Deut. 13 v. 1,2,3,4,5 ) “If a Prophet rise amongst you, or a Dreamer of dreams, and shall pretend the doing of a miracle, and the miracle come to passe; if he say, Let us follow strange Gods, which thou hast not known, thou shalt not hearken to him, &c. But that Prophet and Dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he hath spoken to you to Revolt from the Lord your God.” In which words two things are to be observed, First, that God wil not have miracles alone serve for arguments, to approve the Prophets calling; but (as it is in the third verse) for an experiment of the constancy of our adherence to himself. For the works of the Egyptian Sorcerers, though not so great as those of Moses, yet were great miracles. Secondly, that how great soever the miracle be, yet if it tend to stir up revolt against the King, or him that governeth by the Kings authority, he that doth such miracle, is not to be considered otherwise than as sent to make triall of their allegiance. For these words, “revolt from the Lord your God,” are in this place equivalent to “revolt from your King.” For they had made God their King by pact at the foot of Mount Sinai; who ruled them by Moses only; for he only spake with God, and from time to time declared Gods Commandements to the people. In like manner, after our Saviour Christ had made his Disciples acknowledge him for the Messiah, (that is to say, for Gods anointed, whom the nation of the Jews daily expected for their King, but refused when he came,) he omitted not to advertise them of the danger of miracles. “There shall arise,” (saith he) “false Christs, and false Prophets, and shall doe great wonders and miracles, even to the seducing (if it were possible) of the very Elect.” (Mat. 24. 24) By which it appears, that false Prophets may have the power of miracles; yet are wee not to take their doctrin for Gods Word. St. Paul says further to the Galatians, that “if himself, or an Angell from heaven preach another Gospel to them, than he had preached, let him be accursed.” (Gal. 1. 8) That Gospel was, that Christ was King; so that all preaching against the power of the King received, in consequence to these words, is by St. Paul accursed. For his speech is addressed to those, who by his preaching had already received Jesus for the Christ, that is to say, for King of the Jews.\n\nAnd as Miracles, without preaching that Doctrine which God hath established; so preaching the true Doctrine, without the doing of Miracles, is an unsufficient argument of immediate Revelation. For if a man that teacheth not false Doctrine, should pretend to bee a Prophet without shewing any Miracle, he is never the more to bee regarded for his pretence, as is evident by Deut. 18. v. 21, 22. “If thou say in thy heart, How shall we know that the Word (of the Prophet) is not that which the Lord hath spoken. When the Prophet shall have spoken in the name of the Lord, that which shall not come to passe, that’s the word which the Lord hath not spoken, but the Prophet has spoken it out of the pride of his own heart, fear him not.” But a man may here again ask, When the Prophet hath foretold a thing, how shal we know whether it will come to passe or not? For he may foretel it as a thing to arrive after a certain long time, longer then the time of mans life; or indefinitely, that it will come to passe one time or other: in which case this mark of a Prophet is unusefull; and therefore the miracles that oblige us to beleeve a Prophet, ought to be confirmed by an immediate, or a not long deferr’d event. So that it is manifest, that the teaching of the Religion which God hath established, and the showing of a present Miracle, joined together, were the only marks whereby the Scripture would have a true Prophet, that is to say immediate Revelation to be acknowledged; neither of them being singly sufficient to oblige any other man to regard what he saith.\n\nSeeing therefore Miracles now cease, we have no sign left, whereby to acknowledge the pretended Revelations, or Inspirations of any private man; nor obligation to give ear to any Doctrine, farther than it is conformable to the Holy Scriptures, which since the time of our Saviour, supply the want of all other Prophecy; and from which, by wise and careful ratiocination, all rules and precepts necessary to the knowledge of our duty both to God and man, without Enthusiasme, or supernaturall Inspiration, may easily be deduced. And this Scripture is it, out of which I am to take the Principles of my Discourse, concerning the Rights of those that are the Supream Govenors on earth, of Christian Common-wealths; and of the duty of Christian Subjects towards their Soveraigns. And to that end, I shall speak in the next Chapter, or the Books, Writers, Scope and Authority of the Bible.\n\nCHAPTER XXXIII. OF THE NUMBER, ANTIQUITY, SCOPE, AUTHORITY, AND INTERPRETERS OF THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIII, 1\n\nOF THE NUMBER, ANTIQUITY, SCOPE, AUTHORITY, AND INTERPRETERS OF THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\nBy the Books of Holy SCRIPTURE, are understood those, which ought to be the Canon, that is to say, the Rules of Christian life. And because all Rules of life, which men are in conscience bound to observe, are Laws; the question of the Scripture, is the question of what is Law throughout all Christendome, both Naturall, and Civill. For though it be not determined in Scripture, what Laws every Christian King shall constitute in his own Dominions; yet it is determined what laws he shall not constitute. Seeing therefore I have already proved, that Soveraigns in their own Dominions are the sole Legislators; those Books only are Canonicall, that is, Law, in every nation, which are established for such by the Soveraign Authority. It is true, that God is the Soveraign of all Soveraigns; and therefore, when he speaks to any Subject, he ought to be obeyed, whatsoever any earthly Potentate command to the contrary. But the question is not of obedience to God, but of When, and What God hath said; which to Subjects that have no supernaturall revelation, cannot be known, but by that naturall reason, which guided them, for the obtaining of Peace and Justice, to obey the authority of their severall Common-wealths; that is to say, of their lawfull Soveraigns. According to this obligation, I can acknowledge no other Books of the Old Testament, to be Holy Scripture, but those which have been commanded to be acknowledged for such, by the Authority of the Church of England. What Books these are, is sufficiently known, without a Catalogue of them here; and they are the same that are acknowledged by St. Jerome, who holdeth the rest, namely, the Wisdome of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobias, the first and second of Maccabees, (though he had seen the first in Hebrew) and the third and fourth of Esdras, for Apocrypha. Of the Canonicall, Josephus a learned Jew, that wrote in the time of the Emperor Domitian, reckoneth Twenty Two, making the number agree with the Hebrew Alphabet. St. Jerome does the same, though they reckon them in different manner. For Josephus numbers Five Books of Moses, Thirteen of Prophets, that writ the History of their own times (which how it agrees with the Prophets writings contained in the Bible wee shall see hereafter), and Four of Hymnes and Morall Precepts. But St. Jerome reckons Five Books of Moses, Eight of Prophets, and Nine of other Holy writ, which he calls of Hagiographa. The Septuagint, who were 70. learned men of the Jews, sent for by Ptolemy King of Egypt, to translate the Jewish Law, out of the Hebrew into the Greek, have left us no other for holy Scripture in the Greek tongue, but the same that are received in the Church of England.\n\nAs for the Books of the New Testament, they are equally acknowledged for Canon by all Christian Churches, and by all sects of Christians, that admit any Books at all for Canonicall.\n\nWho were the originall writers of the severall Books of Holy Scripture, has not been made evident by any sufficient testimony of other History, (which is the only proof of matter of fact); nor can be by any arguments of naturall Reason; for Reason serves only to convince the truth (not of fact, but) of consequence. The light therefore that must guide us in this question, must be that which is held out unto us from the Bookes themselves: And this light, though it show us not the writer of every book, yet it is not unusefull to give us knowledge of the time, wherein they were written.\n\nAnd first, for the Pentateuch, it is not argument enough that they were written by Moses, because they are called the five Books of Moses; no more than these titles, The Book of Joshua, the Book of Judges, The Book of Ruth, and the Books of the Kings, are arguments sufficient to prove, that they were written by Joshua, by the Judges, by Ruth, and by the Kings. For in titles of Books, the subject is marked, as often as the writer. The History Of Livy, denotes the Writer; but the History Of Scanderbeg, is denominated from the subject. We read in the last Chapter of Deuteronomie, Ver. 6. concerning the sepulcher of Moses, “that no man knoweth of his sepulcher to this day,” that is, to the day wherein those words were written. It is therefore manifest, that those words were written after his interrement. For it were a strange interpretation, to say Moses spake of his own sepulcher (though by Prophecy), that it was not found to that day, wherein he was yet living. But it may perhaps be alledged, that the last Chapter only, not the whole Pentateuch, was written by some other man, but the rest not: Let us therefore consider that which we find in the Book of Genesis, Chap. 12. Ver. 6 “And Abraham passed through the land to the place of Sichem, unto the plain of Moreh, and the Canaanite was then in the land;” which must needs bee the words of one that wrote when the Canaanite was not in the land; and consequently, not of Moses, who dyed before he came into it. Likewise Numbers 21. Ver. 14. the Writer citeth another more ancient Book, Entituled, The Book of the Warres of the Lord, wherein were registred the Acts of Moses, at the Red-sea, and at the brook of Arnon. It is therefore sufficiently evident, that the five Books of Moses were written after his time, though how long after it be not so manifest.\n\nBut though Moses did not compile those Books entirely, and in the form we have them; yet he wrote all that which hee is there said to have written: as for example, the Volume of the Law, which is contained, as it seemeth in the 11 of Deuteronomie, and the following Chapters to the 27. which was also commanded to be written on stones, in their entry into the land of Canaan. (Deut. 31. 9) And this did Moses himself write, and deliver to the Priests and Elders of Israel, to be read every seventh year to all Israel, at their assembling in the feast of Tabernacles. And this is that Law which God commanded, that their Kings (when they should have established that form of Government) should take a copy of from the Priests and Levites to lay in the side of the Arke; (Deut. 31. 26) and the same which having been lost, was long time after found again by Hilkiah, and sent to King Josias, who causing it to be read to the People, renewed the Covenant between God and them. (2 King. 22. 8 & 23. 1,2,3)\n\nThat the Book of Joshua was also written long after the time of Joshua, may be gathered out of many places of the Book it self. Joshua had set up twelve stones in the middest of Jordan, for a monument of their passage; (Josh 4. 9) of which the Writer saith thus, “They are there unto this day;” (Josh 5. 9) for “unto this day”, is a phrase that signifieth a time past, beyond the memory of man. In like manner, upon the saying of the Lord, that he had rolled off from the people the Reproach of Egypt, the Writer saith, “The place is called Gilgal unto this day;” which to have said in the time of Joshua had been improper. So also the name of the Valley of Achor, from the trouble that Achan raised in the Camp, (Josh. 7. 26) the Writer saith, “remaineth unto this day;” which must needs bee therefore long after the time of Joshua. Arguments of this kind there be many other; as Josh. 8. 29. 13. 13. 14. 14. 15. 63.\n\nThe same is manifest by like arguments of the Book of Judges, chap. 1. 21,26 6.24 10.4 15.19 17.6 and Ruth 1. 1. but especially Judg. 18. 30. where it is said, that Jonathan “and his sonnes were Priests to the Tribe of Dan, untill the day of the captivity of the land.”\n\nThat the Books of Samuel were also written after his own time, there are the like arguments, 1 Sam. 5.5. 7.13,15. 27.6. & 30.25. where, after David had adjudged equall part of the spoiles, to them that guarded the Ammunition, with them that fought, the Writer saith, “He made it a Statute and an Ordinance to Israel to this day.” (2. Sam. 6.4.) Again, when David (displeased, that the Lord had slain Uzzah, for putting out his hand to sustain the Ark,) called the place Perez-Uzzah, the Writer saith, it is called so “to this day”: the time therefore of the writing of that Book, must be long after the time of the fact; that is, long after the time of David.\n\nAs for the two Books of the Kings, and the two books of the Chronicles, besides the places which mention such monuments, as the Writer saith, remained till his own days; such as are 1 Kings 9.13. 9.21. 10. 12. 12.19. 2 Kings 2.22. 8.22. 10.27. 14.7. 16.6. 17.23. 17.34. 17.41. 1 Chron. 4.41. 5.26. It is argument sufficient they were written after the captivity in Babylon, that the History of them is continued till that time. For the Facts Registred are alwaies more ancient than such Books as make mention of, and quote the Register; as these Books doe in divers places, referring the Reader to the Chronicles of the Kings of Juda, to the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, to the Books of the Prophet Samuel, or the Prophet Nathan, of the Prophet Ahijah; to the Vision of Jehdo, to the Books of the Prophet Serveiah, and of the Prophet Addo.\n\nThe Books of Esdras and Nehemiah were written certainly after their return from captivity; because their return, the re-edification of the walls and houses of Jerusalem, the renovation of the Covenant, and ordination of their policy are therein contained.\n\nThe History of Queen Esther is of the time of the Captivity; and therefore the Writer must have been of the same time, or after it.\n\nThe Book of Job hath no mark in it of the time wherein it was written: and though it appear sufficiently (Exekiel 14.14, and James 5.11.) that he was no fained person; yet the Book it self seemeth not to be a History, but a Treatise concerning a question in ancient time much disputed, “why wicked men have often prospered in this world, and good men have been afflicted;” and it is the most probably, because from the beginning, to the third verse of the third chapter, where the complaint of Job beginneth, the Hebrew is (as St. Jerome testifies) in prose; and from thence to the sixt verse of the last chapter in Hexameter Verses; and the rest of that chapter again in prose. So that the dispute is all in verse; and the prose is added, but as a Preface in the beginning, and an Epilogue in the end. But Verse is no usuall stile of such, as either are themselves in great pain, as Job; or of such as come to comfort them, as his friends; but in Philosophy, especially morall Philosophy, in ancient time frequent.\n\nThe Psalmes were written the most part by David, for the use of the Quire. To these are added some songs of Moses, and other holy men; and some of them after the return from the Captivity; as the 137. and the 126. whereby it is manifest that the Psalter was compiled, and put into the form it now hath, after the return of the Jews from Babylon.\n\nThe Proverbs, being a Collection of wise and godly Sayings, partly of Solomon, partly of Agur the son of Jakeh; and partly of the Mother of King Lemuel, cannot probably be thought to have been collected by Solomon, rather then by Agur, or the Mother of Lemues; and that, though the sentences be theirs, yet the collection or compiling them into this one Book, was the work of some other godly man, that lived after them all.\n\nThe Books of Ecclesiastes and the Canticles have nothing that was not Solomons, except it be the Titles, or Inscriptions. For “The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King in Jerusalem;” and, “the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s,” seem to have been made for distinctions sake, then, when the Books of Scripture were gathered into one body of the Law; to the end, that not the Doctrine only, but the Authors also might be extant.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIII, 2\n\nOf the Prophets, the most ancient, are Sophoniah, Jonas, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Michaiah, who lived in the time of Amaziah, and Azariah, otherwise Ozias, Kings of Judah. But the Book of Jonas is not properly a Register of his Prophecy, (for that is contained in these few words, “Fourty dayes and Ninivy shall be destroyed,”) but a History or Narration of his frowardenesse and disputing Gods commandements; so that there is small probability he should be the Author, seeing he is the subject of it. But the Book of Amos is his Prophecy.\n\nJeremiah, Abdias, Nahum, and Habakkuk prophecyed in the time of Josiah.\n\nEzekiel, Daniel, Aggeus, and Zacharias, in the Captivity.\n\nWhen Joel and Malachi prophecyed, is not evident by their Writings. But considering the Inscriptions, or Titles of their Books, it is manifest enough, that the whole Scripture of the Old Testament, was set forth in the form we have it, after the return of the Jews from their Captivity in Babylon, and before the time of Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, that caused it to bee translated into Greek by seventy men, which were sent him out of Judea for that purpose. And if the Books of Apocrypha (which are recommended to us by the Church, though not for Canonicall, yet for profitable Books for our instruction) may in this point be credited, the Scripture was set forth in the form wee have it in, by Esdras; as may appear by that which he himself saith, in the second book, chapt. 14. verse 21, 22, &c. where speaking to God, he saith thus, “Thy law is burnt; therefore no man knoweth the things which thou has done, or the works that are to begin. But if I have found Grace before thee, send down the holy Spirit into me, and I shall write all that hath been done in the world, since the beginning, which were written in thy Law, that men may find thy path, and that they which will live in the later days, may live.” And verse 45. “And it came to passe when the forty dayes were fulfilled, that the Highest spake, saying, ‘The first that thou hast written, publish openly, that the worthy and unworthy may read it; but keep the seventy last, that thou mayst deliver them onely to such as be wise among the people.’” And thus much concerning the time of the writing of the Bookes of the Old Testament.\n\nThe Writers of the New Testament lived all in lesse then an age after Christs Ascension, and had all of them seen our Saviour, or been his Disciples, except St. Paul, and St. Luke; and consequently whatsoever was written by them, is as ancient as the time of the Apostles. But the time wherein the Books of the New Testament were received, and acknowledged by the Church to be of their writing, is not altogether so ancient. For, as the Bookes of the Old Testament are derived to us, from no higher time then that of Esdras, who by the direction of Gods Spirit retrived them, when they were lost: Those of the New Testament, of which the copies were not many, nor could easily be all in any one private mans hand, cannot bee derived from a higher time, that that wherein the Governours of the Church collected, approved, and recommended them to us, as the writings of those Apostles and Disciples; under whose names they go. The first enumeration of all the Bookes, both of the Old, and New Testament, is in the Canons of the Apostles, supposed to be collected by Clement the first (after St. Peter) Bishop of Rome. But because that is but supposed, and by many questioned, the Councell of Laodicea is the first we know, that recommended the Bible to the then Christian Churches, for the Writings of the Prophets and Apostles: and this Councell was held in the 364. yeer after Christ. At which time, though ambition had so far prevailed on the great Doctors of the Church, as no more to esteem Emperours, though Christian, for the Shepherds of the people, but for Sheep; and Emperours not Christian, for Wolves; and endeavoured to passe their Doctrine, not for Counsell, and Information, as Preachers; but for Laws, as absolute Governours; and thought such frauds as tended to make the people the more obedient to Christian Doctrine, to be pious; yet I am perswaded they did not therefore falsifie the Scriptures, though the copies of the Books of the New Testament, were in the hands only of the Ecclesiasticks; because if they had had an intention so to doe, they would surely have made them more favorable to their power over Christian Princes, and Civill Soveraignty, than they are. I see not therefore any reason to doubt, but that the Old, and New Testament, as we have them now, are the true Registers of those things, which were done and said by the Prophets, and Apostles. And so perhaps are some of those Books which are called Apocrypha, if left out of the Canon, not for inconformity of Doctrine with the rest, but only because they are not found in the Hebrew. For after the conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great, there were few learned Jews, that were not perfect in the Greek tongue. For the seventy Interpreters that converted the Bible into Greek, were all of them Hebrews; and we have extant the works of Philo and Josephus both Jews, written by them eloquently in Greek. But it is not the Writer, but the authority of the Church, that maketh a Book Canonicall.\n\nAnd although these Books were written by divers men, yet it is manifest the Writers were all indued with one and the same Spirit, in that they conspire to one and the same end, which is the setting forth of the Rights of the Kingdome of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. For the Book of Genesis, deriveth the Genealogy of Gods people, from the creation of the World, to the going into Egypt: the other four Books of Moses, contain the Election of God for their King, and the Laws which hee prescribed for their Government: The Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Samuel, to the time of Saul, describe the acts of Gods people, till the time they cast off Gods yoke, and called for a King, after the manner of their neighbour nations; The rest of the History of the Old Testament, derives the succession of the line of David, to the Captivity, out of which line was to spring the restorer of the Kingdome of God, even our blessed Saviour God the Son, whose coming was foretold in the Bookes of the Prophets, after whom the Evangelists writt his life, and actions, and his claim to the Kingdome, whilst he lived one earth: and lastly, the Acts, and Epistles of the Apostles, declare the coming of God, the Holy Ghost, and the Authority he left with them, and their successors, for the direction of the Jews, and for the invitation of the Gentiles. In summe, the Histories and the Prophecies of the old Testament, and the Gospels, and Epistles of the New Testament, have had one and the same scope, to convert men to the obedience of God; 1. in Moses, and the Priests; 2. in the man Christ; and 3. in the Apostles and the successors to Apostolicall power. For these three at several times did represent the person of God: Moses, and his successors the High Priests, and Kings of Judah, in the Old Testament: Christ himself, in the time he lived on earth: and the Apostles, and their successors, from the day of Pentecost (when the Holy Ghost descended on them) to this day.\n\nIt is a question much disputed between the divers sects of Christian Religion, From Whence The Scriptures Derive Their Authority; which question is also propounded sometimes in other terms, as, How Wee Know Them To Be The Word Of God, or, Why We Beleeve Them To Be So: and the difficulty of resolving it, ariseth chiefly from the impropernesse of the words wherein the question it self is couched. For it is beleeved on all hands, that the first and originall Author of them is God; and consequently the question disputed, is not that. Again, it is manifest, that none can know they are Gods Word, (though all true Christians beleeve it,) but those to whom God himself hath revealed it supernaturally; and therefore the question is not rightly moved, of our Knowledge of it. Lastly, when the question is propounded of our Beleefe; because some are moved to beleeve for one, and others for other reasons, there can be rendred no one generall answer for them all. The question truly stated is, By What Authority They Are Made Law.\n\nAs far as they differ not from the Laws of Nature, there is no doubt, but they are the Law of God, and carry their Authority with them, legible to all men that have the use of naturall reason: but this is no other Authority, then that of all other Morall Doctrine consonant to Reason; the Dictates whereof are Laws, not Made, but Eternall.\n\nIf they be made Law by God himselfe, they are of the nature of written Law, which are Laws to them only to whom God hath so sufficiently published them, as no man can excuse himself, by saying, he know not they were his.\n\nHe therefore, to whom God hath not supernaturally revealed, that they are his, nor that those that published them, were sent by him, is not obliged to obey them, by any Authority, but his, whose Commands have already the force of Laws; that is to say, by any other Authority, then that of the Common-wealth, residing in the Soveraign, who only has the Legislative power. Again, if it be not the Legislative Authority of the Common-wealth, that giveth them the force of Laws, it must bee some other Authority derived from God, either private, or publique: if private, it obliges onely him, to whom in particular God hath been pleased to reveale it. For if every man should be obliged, to take for Gods Law, what particular men, on pretence of private Inspiration, or Revelation, should obtrude upon him, (in such a number of men, that out of pride, and ignorance, take their own Dreams, and extravagant Fancies, and Madnesse, for testimonies of Gods Spirit; or out of ambition, pretend to such Divine testimonies, falsely, and contrary to their own consciences,) it were impossible that any Divine Law should be acknowledged. If publique, it is the Authority of the Common-wealth, or of the Church. But the Church, if it be one person, is the same thing with a Common-wealth of Christians; called a Common-wealth, because it consisteth of men united in one person, their Soveraign; and a Church, because it consisteth in Christian men, united in one Christian Soveraign. But if the Church be not one person, then it hath no authority at all; it can neither command, nor doe any action at all; nor is capable of having any power, or right to any thing; nor has any Will, Reason, nor Voice; for all these qualities are personall. Now if the whole number of Christians be not contained in one Common-wealth, they are not one person; nor is there an Universall Church that hath any authority over them; and therefore the Scriptures are not made Laws, by the Universall Church: or if it bee one Common-wealth, then all Christian Monarchs, and States are private persons, and subject to bee judged, deposed, and punished by an Universall Soveraigne of all Christendome. So that the question of the Authority of the Scriptures is reduced to this, “Whether Christian Kings, and the Soveraigne Assemblies in Christian Common-wealths, be absolute in their own Territories, immediately under God; or subject to one Vicar of Christ, constituted over the Universall Church; to bee judged, condemned, deposed, and put to death, as hee shall think expedient, or necessary for the common good.”\n\nWhich question cannot bee resolved, without a more particular consideration of the Kingdome of God; from whence also, wee are to judge of the Authority of Interpreting the Scripture. For, whosoever hath a lawfull power over any Writing, to make it Law, hath the power also to approve, or disapprove the interpretation of the same.\n\nCHAPTER XXXIV. OF THE SIGNIFICATION OF SPIRIT, ANGEL, AND INSPIRATION IN THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIV, 1\n\nOF THE SIGNIFICATION OF SPIRIT, ANGEL, AND INSPIRATION IN THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\nSeeing the foundation of all true Ratiocination, is the constant Signification of words; which in the Doctrine following, dependeth not (as in naturall science) on the Will of the Writer, nor (as in common conversation) on vulgar use, but on the sense they carry in the Scripture; It is necessary, before I proceed any further, to determine, out of the Bible, the meaning of such words, as by their ambiguity, may render what I am to inferre upon them, obscure, or disputable. I will begin with the words BODY, and SPIRIT, which in the language of the Schools are termed, Substances, Corporeall, and Incorporeall.\n\nThe Word Body, in the most generall acceptation, signifieth that which filleth, or occupyeth some certain room, or imagined place; and dependeth not on the imagination, but is a reall part of that we call the Universe. For the Universe, being the Aggregate of all Bodies, there is no reall part thereof that is not also Body; nor any thing properly a Body, that is not also part of (that Aggregate of all Bodies) the Universe. The same also, because Bodies are subject to change, that is to say, to variety of apparence to the sense of living creatures, is called Substance, that is to say, Subject, to various accidents, as sometimes to be Moved, sometimes to stand Still; and to seem to our senses sometimes Hot, sometimes Cold, sometimes of one Colour, Smel, Tast, or Sound, somtimes of another. And this diversity of Seeming, (produced by the diversity of the operation of bodies, on the organs of our sense) we attribute to alterations of the Bodies that operate, & call them Accidents of those Bodies. And according to this acceptation of the word, Substance and Body, signifie the same thing; and therefore Substance Incorporeall are words, which when they are joined together, destroy one another, as if a man should say, an Incorporeall Body.\n\nBut in the sense of common people, not all the Universe is called Body, but only such parts thereof as they can discern by the sense of Feeling, to resist their force, or by the sense of their Eyes, to hinder them from a farther prospect. Therefore in the common language of men, Aire, and Aeriall Substances, use not to be taken for Bodies, but (as often as men are sensible of their effects) are called Wind, or Breath, or (because the some are called in the Latine Spiritus) Spirits; as when they call that aeriall substance, which in the body of any living creature, gives it life and motion, Vitall and Animall Spirits. But for those Idols of the brain, which represent Bodies to us, where they are not, as in a Looking-glasse, in a Dream, or to a Distempered brain waking, they are (as the Apostle saith generally of all Idols) nothing; Nothing at all, I say, there where they seem to bee; and in the brain it self, nothing but tumult, proceeding either from the action of the objects, or from the disorderly agitation of the Organs of our Sense. And men, that are otherwise imployed, then to search into their causes, know not of themselves, what to call them; and may therefore easily be perswaded, by those whose knowledge they much reverence, some to call them Bodies, and think them made of aire compacted by a power supernaturall, because the sight judges them corporeall; and some to call them Spirits, because the sense of Touch discerneth nothing in the place where they appear, to resist their fingers: So that the proper signification of Spirit in common speech, is either a subtile, fluid, and invisible Body, or a Ghost, or other Idol or Phantasme of the Imagination. But for metaphoricall significations, there be many: for sometimes it is taken for Disposition or Inclination of the mind; as when for the disposition to controwl the sayings of other men, we say, A Spirit Contradiction; For A Disposition to Uncleannesse, An Unclean Spirit; for Perversenesse, A Froward Spirit; for Sullennesse, A Dumb Spirit, and for Inclination To Godlinesse, And Gods Service, the Spirit of God: sometimes for any eminent ability, or extraordinary passion, or disease of the mind, as when Great Wisdome is called the Spirit Of Wisdome; and Mad Men are said to be Possessed With A Spirit.\n\nOther signification of Spirit I find no where any; and where none of these can satisfie the sense of that word in Scripture, the place falleth not under humane Understanding; and our Faith therein consisteth not in our Opinion, but in our Submission; as in all places where God is said to be a Spirit; or where by the Spirit of God, is meant God himselfe. For the nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of What He Is, but only That He Is; and therefore the Attributes we give him, are not to tell one another, What He Is, Nor to signifie our opinion of his Nature, but our desire to honor him with such names as we conceive most honorable amongst our selves.\n\nGen. 1. 2. “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters.” Here if by the Spirit of God be meant God himself, then is Motion attributed to God, and consequently Place, which are intelligible only of Bodies, and not of substances incorporeall; and so the place is above our understanding, that can conceive nothing moved that changes not place, or that has not dimension; and whatsoever has dimension, is Body. But the meaning of those words is best understood by the like place, Gen. 8. 1. Where when the earth was covered with Waters, as in the beginning, God intending to abate them, and again to discover the dry land, useth like words, “I will bring my Spirit upon the Earth, and the waters shall be diminished:” in which place by Spirit is understood a Wind, (that is an Aire or Spirit Moved,) which might be called (as in the former place) the Spirit of God, because it was Gods Work.\n\nGen. 41. 38. Pharaoh calleth the Wisdome of Joseph, the Spirit of God. For Joseph having advised him to look out a wise and discreet man, and to set him over the land of Egypt, he saith thus, “Can we find such a man as this is, in whom is the Spirit of God?” and Exod. 28.3. “Thou shalt speak (saith God) to all that are wise hearted, whom I have filled with the Spirit of Wisdome, to make Aaron Garments, to consecrate him.” Where extraordinary Understanding, though but in making Garments, as being the Gift of God, is called the Spirit of God. The same is found again, Exod. 31.3,4,5,6. and 35.31. And Isaiah 11.2,3. where the Prophet speaking of the Messiah, saith, “The Spirit of the Lord shall abide upon him, the Spirit of wisdome and understanding, the Spirit of counsell, and fortitude; and the Spirit of the fear of the Lord.” Where manifestly is meant, not so many Ghosts, but so many eminent Graces that God would give him.\n\nIn the Book of Judges, an extraordinary Zeal, and Courage in the defence of Gods people, is called the Spirit of God; as when it excited Othoniel, Gideon, Jeptha, and Samson to deliver them from servitude, Judg. 3.10. 6.34. 11.29. 13.25. 14.6,19. And of Saul, upon the newes of the insolence of the Ammonites towards the men of Jabeth Gilead, it is said (1 Sam.11.6.) that “The Spirit of God came upon Saul, and his Anger (or, as it is in the Latine, His Fury) was kindled greatly.” Where it is not probable was meant a Ghost, but an extraordinary Zeal to punish the cruelty of the Ammonites. In like manner by the Spirit of God, that came upon Saul, when hee was amongst the Prophets that praised God in Songs, and Musick (1 Sam.19.20.) is to be understood, not a Ghost, but an unexpected and sudden Zeal to join with them in their devotions.\n\nThe false Prophet Zedekiah, saith to Micaiah (1 Kings 22.24.) “Which way went the Spirit of the Lord from me to speak to thee?” Which cannot be understood of a Ghost; for Micaiah declared before the Kings of Israel and Judah, the event of the battle, as from a Vision, and not as from a Spirit, speaking in him.\n\nIn the same manner it appeareth, in the Books of the Prophets, that though they spake by the Spirit of God, that is to say, by a speciall grace of Prediction; yet their knowledge of the future, was not by a Ghost within them, but by some supernaturall Dream or Vision.\n\nGen. 2.7. It is said, “God made man of the dust of the Earth, and breathed into his nostrills (spiraculum vitae) the breath of life, and man was made a living soul.” There the Breath of Life inspired by God, signifies no more, but that God gave him life; And (Job 27.3.) “as long as the Spirit of God is in my nostrils;” is no more then to say, “as long as I live.” So in Ezek. 1.20. “the Spirit of life was in the wheels,” is equivalent to, “the wheels were alive.” And (Ezek. 2.30.) “the spirit entred into me, and set me on my feet,” that is, “I recovered my vitall strength;” not that any Ghost, or incorporeal substance entred into, and possessed his body.\n\nIn the 11 chap. of Numbers. verse 17. “I will take (saith God) of the Spirit, which is upon thee, and will put it upon them, and they shall bear the burthen of the people with thee;” that is, upon the seventy Elders: whereupon two of the seventy are said to prophecy in the campe; of whom some complained, and Joshua desired Moses to forbid them; which Moses would not doe. Whereby it appears; that Joshua knew not they had received authority so to do, and prophecyed according to the mind of Moses, that is to say, by a Spirit, or Authority subordinate to his own.\n\nIn the like sense we read (Deut. 34.9.) that “Joshua was full of the Spirit of wisdome,” because Moses had laid his hands upon him: that is, because he was Ordained by Moses, to prosecute the work hee had himselfe begun, (namely, the bringing of Gods people into the promised land), but prevented by death, could not finish.\n\nIn the like sense it is said, (Rom. 8.9.) “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his:” not meaning thereby the Ghost of Christ, but a Submission to his Doctrine. As also (1 John 4.2.) “Hereby you shall know the Spirit of God; Every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God;” by which is meant the Spirit of unfained Christianity, or Submission to that main Article of Christian faith, that Jesus is the Christ; which cannot be interpreted of a Ghost.\n\nLikewise these words (Luke 4.1.) “And Jesus full of the Holy Ghost” (that is, as it is exprest, Mat. 4.1. and Mar. 1.12. “of the Holy Spirit”,) may be understood, for Zeal to doe the work for which hee was sent by God the Father: but to interpret it of a Ghost, is to say, that God himselfe (for so our Saviour was,) was filled with God; which is very unproper, and unsignificant. How we came to translate Spirits, by the word Ghosts, which signifieth nothing, neither in heaven, nor earth, but the Imaginary inhabitants of mans brain, I examine not: but this I say, the word Spirit in the text signifieth no such thing; but either properly a reall Substance, or Metaphorically, some extraordinary Ability of Affection of the Mind, or of the Body.\n\nThe Disciples of Christ, seeing him walking upon the sea, (Mat. 14.26. and Marke 6.49.) supposed him to be a Spirit, meaning thereby an Aeriall Body, and not a Phantasme: for it is said, they all saw him; which cannot be understood of the delusions of the brain, (which are not common to many at once, as visible Bodies are; but singular, because of the differences of Fancies), but of Bodies only. In like manner, where he was taken for a Spirit, by the same Apostles (Luke 24.3,7.): So also (Acts 12.15) when St. Peter was delivered out of Prison, it would not be beleeved; but when the Maid said he was at the dore, they said it was his Angel; by which must be meant a corporeall substance, or we must say, the Disciples themselves did follow the common opinion of both Jews and Gentiles, that some such apparitions were not Imaginary, but Reall; and such as needed not the fancy of man for their Existence: These the Jews called Spirits, and Angels, Good or Bad; as the Greeks called the same by the name of Daemons. And some such apparitions may be reall, and substantiall; that is to say, subtile Bodies, which God can form by the same power, by which he formed all things, and make use of, as of Ministers, and Messengers (that is to say, Angels) to declare his will, and execute the same when he pleaseth, in extraordinary and supernaturall manner. But when hee hath so formed them they are Substances, endued with dimensions, and take up roome, and can be moved from place to place, which is peculiar to Bodies; and therefore are not Ghosts Incorporeall, that is to say, Ghosts that are in No Place; that is to say, that are No Where; that is to say, that seeming to be Somewhat, are Nothing. But if corporeall be taken in the most vulgar manner, for such Substances as are perceptible by our externall Senses; then is Substance Incorporeall, a thing not Imaginary, but Reall; namely, a thin Substance Invisible, but that hath the same dimensions that are in grosser Bodies.\n\nBy the name of ANGEL, is signified generally, a Messenger; and most often, a Messenger of God: And by a Messenger of God, is signified, any thing that makes known his extraordinary Presence; that is to say, the extraordinary manifestation of his power, especially by a Dream, or Vision.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIV, 2\n\nConcerning the creation of Angels, there is nothing delivered in the Scriptures. That they are Spirits, is often repeated: but by the name of Spirit, is signified both in Scripture, and vulgarly, both amongst Jews, and Gentiles, sometimes thin Bodies; as the Aire, the Wind, the Spirits Vitall, and Animall, of living creatures; and sometimes the Images that rise in the fancy in Dreams, and Visions; which are not reall Substances, but accidents of the brain; yet when God raiseth them supernaturally, to signifie his Will, they are not unproperly termed Gods Messengers, that is to say, his Angels.\n\nAnd as the Gentiles did vulgarly conceive the Imagery of the brain, for things really subsistent without them, and not dependent on the fancy; and out of them framed their opinions of Daemons, Good and Evill; which because they seemed to subsist really, they called Substances; and because they could not feel them with their hands, Incorporeall: so also the Jews upon the same ground, without any thing in the Old Testament that constrained them thereunto, had generally an opinion, (except the sect of the Sadduces,) that those apparitions (which it pleased God sometimes to produce in the fancie of men, for his own service, and therefore called them his Angels) were substances, not dependent on the fancy, but permanent creatures of God; whereof those which they thought were good to them, they esteemed the Angels of God, and those they thought would hurt them, they called Evill Angels, or Evill Spirits; such as was the Spirit of Python, and the Spirits of Mad-men, of Lunatiques, and Epileptiques: For they esteemed such as were troubled with such diseases, Daemoniaques.\n\nBut if we consider the places of the Old Testament where Angels are mentioned, we shall find, that in most of them, there can nothing else be understood by the word Angel, but some image raised (supernaturally) in the fancy, to signifie the presence of God in the execution of some supernaturall work; and therefore in the rest, where their nature is not exprest, it may be understood in the same manner.\n\nFor we read Gen. 16. that the same apparition is called, not onely an Angel, but God; where that which (verse 7.) is called the Angel of the Lord, in the tenth verse, saith to Agar, “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly;” that is, speaketh in the person of God. Neither was this apparition a Fancy figured, but a Voice. By which it is manifest, that Angel signifieth there, nothing but God himself, that caused Agar supernaturally to apprehend a voice supernaturall, testifying Gods speciall presence there. Why therefore may not the Angels that appeared to Lot, and are called Gen. 19.13. Men; and to whom, though they were but two, Lot speaketh (ver. 18.) as but one, and that one, as God, (for the words are, “Lot said unto them, Oh not so my Lord”) be understood of images of men, supernaturally formed in the Fancy; as well as before by Angel was understood a fancyed Voice? When the Angel called to Abraham out of heaven, to stay his hand (Gen. 22.11.) from slaying Isaac, there was no Apparition, but a Voice; which neverthelesse was called properly enough a Messenger, or Angel of God, because it declared Gods will supernaturally, and saves the labour of supposing any permanent Ghosts. The Angels which Jacob saw on the Ladder of Heaven (Gen. 28.12.) were a Vision of his sleep; therefore onely Fancy, and a Dream; yet being supernaturall, and signs of Gods Speciall presence, those apparitions are not improperly called Angels. The same is to be understood (Gen.31.11.) where Jacob saith thus, “The Angel of the Lord appeared to mee in my sleep.” For an apparition made to a man in his sleep, is that which all men call a Dreame, whether such Dreame be naturall, or supernaturall: and that which there Jacob calleth an Angel, was God himselfe; for the same Angel saith (verse 13.) “I am the God of Bethel.”\n\nAlso (Exod.14.9.) the Angel that went before the Army of Israel to the Red Sea, and then came behind it, is (verse 19.) the Lord himself; and he appeared not in the form of a beautifull man, but in form (by day) of a Pillar Of Cloud and (by night) in form of a Pillar Of Fire; and yet this Pillar was all the apparition, and Angel promised to Moses (Exod. 14.9.) for the Armies guide: For this cloudy pillar, is said, to have descended, and stood at the dore of the Tabernacle, and to have talked with Moses.\n\nThere you see Motion, and Speech, which are commonly attributed to Angels, attributed to a Cloud, because the Cloud served as a sign of Gods presence; and was no lesse an Angel, then if it had had the form of a Man, or Child of never so great beauty; or Wings, as usually they are painted, for the false instruction of common people. For it is not the shape; but their use, that makes them Angels. But their use is to be significations of Gods presence in supernaturall operations; As when Moses (Exod. 33.14.) had desired God to goe along with the Campe, (as he had done alwaies before the making of the Golden Calfe,) God did not answer, “I will goe,” nor “I will send an Angel in my stead;” but thus, “my presence shall goe with thee.”\n\nTo mention all the places of the Old Testament where the name of Angel is found, would be too long. Therefore to comprehend them all at once, I say, there is no text in that part of the Old Testament, which the Church of England holdeth for Canonicall, from which we can conclude, there is, or hath been created, any permanent thing (understood by the name of Spirit or Angel,) that hath not quantity; and that may not be, by the understanding divided; that is to say, considered by parts; so as one part may bee in one place, and the next part in the next place to it; and, in summe, which is not (taking Body for that, which is some what, or some where) Corporeall; but in every place, the sense will bear the interpretation of Angel, for Messenger; as John Baptist is called an Angel, and Christ the Angel of the Covenant; and as (according to the same Analogy) the Dove, and the Fiery Tongues, in that they were signes of Gods speciall presence, might also be called Angels. Though we find in Daniel two names of Angels, Gabriel, and Michael; yet is cleer out of the text it selfe, (Dan. 12.1) that by Michael is meant Christ, not as an Angel, but as a Prince: and that Gabriel (as the like apparitions made to other holy men in their sleep) was nothing but a supernaturall phantasme, by which it seemed to Daniel, in his dream, that two Saints being in talke, one of them said to the other, “Gabriel, let us make this man understand his Vision:” For God needeth not, to distinguish his Celestiall servants by names, which are usefull onely to the short memories of Mortalls. Nor in the New Testament is there any place, out of which it can be proved, that Angels (except when they are put for such men, as God hath made the Messengers, and Ministers of his word, or works) are things permanent, and withall incorporeall. That they are permanent, may bee gathered from the words of our Saviour himselfe, (Mat. 25.41.) where he saith, it shall be said to the wicked in the last day, “Go ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his Angels:” which place is manifest for the permanence of Evill Angels, (unlesse wee might think the name of Devill and his Angels may be understood of the Churches Adversaries and their Ministers;) but then it is repugnant to their Immateriality; because Everlasting fire is no punishment to impatible substances, such as are all things Incorporeall. Angels therefore are not thence proved to be Incorporeall. In like manner where St. Paul sayes (1 Cor. 6.3.) “Knew ye not that wee shall judge the Angels?” And (2 Pet. 2.4.) “For if God spared not the Angels that sinned, but cast them down into Hell.” And (Jude 1,6.) “And the Angels that kept not their first estate, but left their owne habitation, hee hath reserved in everlasting chaines under darknesse unto the Judgement of the last day;” though it prove the Permanence of Angelicall nature, it confirmeth also their Materiality. And (Mat. 22.30.) In the resurrection men doe neither marry, nor give in marriage, but are as the Angels of God in heaven:” but in the resurrection men shall be Permanent, and not Incorporeall; so therefore also are the Angels.\n\nThere be divers other places out of which may be drawn the like conclusion. To men that understand the signification of these words, Substance, and Incorporeall; as Incorporeall is taken not for subtile body, but for Not Body, they imply a contradiction: insomuch as to say, an Angel, or Spirit is (in that sense) an Incorporeall Substance, is to say in effect, there is no Angel nor Spirit at all. Considering therefore the signification of the word Angel in the Old Testament, and the nature of Dreams and Visions that happen to men by the ordinary way of Nature; I was enclined to this opinion, that Angels were nothing but supernaturall apparitions of the Fancy, raised by the speciall and extraordinary operation of God, thereby to make his presence and commandements known to mankind, and chiefly to his own people. But the many places of the New Testament, and our Saviours own words, and in such texts, wherein is no suspicion of corruption of the Scripture, have extorted from my feeble Reason, an acknowledgement, and beleef, that there be also Angels substantiall, and permanent. But to beleeve they be in no place, that is to say, no where, that is to say, nothing, as they (though indirectly) say, that will have them Incorporeall, cannot by Scripture bee evinced.\n\nOn the signification of the word Spirit, dependeth that of the word INSPIRATION; which must either be taken properly; and then it is nothing but the blowing into a man some thin and subtile aire, or wind, in such manner as a man filleth a bladder with his breath; or if Spirits be not corporeal, but have their existence only in the fancy, it is nothing but the blowing in of a Phantasme; which is improper to say, and impossible; for Phantasmes are not, but only seem to be somewhat. That word therefore is used in the Scripture metaphorically onely: As (Gen. 2.7.) where it is said, that God Inspired into man the breath of life, no more is meant, then that God gave unto him vitall motion. For we are not to think that God made first a living breath, and then blew it into Adam after he was made, whether that breath were reall, or seeming; but only as it is (Acts 17.25.) “that he gave him life and breath;” that is, made him a living creature. And where it is said (2 Tim. 3.16.) “all Scripture is given by Inspiration from God,” speaking there of the Scripture of the Old Testament, it is an easie metaphor, to signifie, that God enclined the spirit or mind of those Writers, to write that which should be usefull, in teaching, reproving, correcting, and instructing men in the way of righteous living. But where St. Peter (2 Pet. 1.21.) saith, that “Prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but the holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit,” by the Holy Spirit, is meant the voice of God in a Dream, or Vision supernaturall, which is not Inspiration; Nor when our Saviour breathing on his Disciples, said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” was that Breath the Spirit, but a sign of the spirituall graces he gave unto them. And though it be said of many, and of our Saviour himself, that he was full of the Holy Spirit; yet that Fulnesse is not to be understood for Infusion of the substance of God, but for accumulation of his gifts, such as are the gift of sanctity of life, of tongues, and the like, whether attained supernaturally, or by study and industry; for in all cases they are the gifts of God. So likewise where God sayes (Joel 2.28.) “I will powre out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your Sons and your Daughters shall prophecy, your Old men shall dream Dreams, and your Young men shall see Visions,” wee are not to understand it in the proper sense, as if his Spirit were like water, subject to effusion, or infusion; but as if God had promised to give them Propheticall Dreams, and Visions. For the proper use of the word Infused, in speaking of the graces of God, is an abuse of it; for those graces are Vertues, not Bodies to be carryed hither and thither, and to be powred into men, as into barrels.\n\nIn the same manner, to take Inspiration in the proper sense, or to say that Good Spirits entred into men to make them prophecy, or Evill Spirits into those that became Phrenetique, Lunatique, or Epileptique, is not to take the word in the sense of the Scripture; for the Spirit there is taken for the power of God, working by causes to us unknown. As also (Acts 2.2.) the wind, that is there said to fill the house wherein the Apostles were assembled on the day of Pentecost, is not to be understood for the Holy Spirit, which is the Deity it self; but for an Externall sign of Gods speciall working on their hearts, to effect in them the internall graces, and holy vertues hee thought requisite for the performance of their Apostleship.\n\nCHAPTER XXXV. OF THE SIGNIFICATION IN SCRIPTURE OF KINGDOME OF GOD, OF HOLY, SACRED, AND SACRAMENT\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXV, 1\n\nOF THE SIGNIFICATION IN SCRIPTURE OF KINGDOME OF GOD, OF HOLY, SACRED, AND SACRAMENT\n\nThe Kingdome of God in the Writings of Divines, and specially in Sermons, and Treatises of Devotion, is taken most commonly for Eternall Felicity, after this life, in the Highest Heaven, which they also call the Kingdome of Glory; and sometimes for (the earnest of that felicity) Sanctification, which they terme the Kingdome of Grace, but never for the Monarchy, that is to say, the Soveraign Power of God over any Subjects acquired by their own consent, which is the proper signification of Kingdome.\n\nTo the contrary, I find the KINGDOME OF GOD, to signifie in most places of Scripture, a Kingdome Properly So Named, constituted by the Votes of the People of Israel in peculiar manner; wherein they chose God for their King by Covenant made with him, upon Gods promising them the possession of the land of Canaan; and but seldom metaphorically; and then it is taken for Dominion Over Sinne; (and only in the New Testament;) because such a Dominion as that, every Subject shall have in the Kingdome of God, and without prejudice to the Soveraign.\n\nFrom the very Creation, God not only reigned over all men Naturally by his might; but also had Peculiar Subjects, whom he commanded by a Voice, as one man speaketh to another. In which manner he Reigned over Adam, and gave him commandement to abstaine from the tree of cognizance of Good and Evill; which when he obeyed not, but tasting thereof, took upon him to be as God, judging between Good and Evill, not by his Creators commandement, but by his own sense, his punishment was a privation of the estate of Eternall life, wherein God had at first created him: And afterwards God punished his posterity, for their vices, all but eight persons, with an universall deluge; And in these eight did consist the then Kingdome Of God.\n\nAfter this, it pleased God to speak to Abraham, and (Gen. 17.7,8.) to make a Covenant with him in these words, “I will establish my Covenant between me, and thee, and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an everlasting Covenant, to be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee; And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.” And for a memoriall, and a token of this Covenant, he ordaineth (verse 11.) the Sacrament of Circumcision. This is it which is called the Old Covenant, or Testament; and containeth a Contract between God and Abraham; by which Abraham obligeth himself, and his posterity, in a peculiar manner to be subject to Gods positive Law; for to the Law Morall he was obliged before, as by an Oath of Allegiance. And though the name of King be not yet given to God, nor of Kingdome to Abraham and his seed; yet the thing is the same; namely, an Institution by pact, of Gods peculiar Soveraignty over the seed of Abraham; which in the renewing of the same Covenant by Moses, at Mount Sinai, is expressely called a peculiar Kingdome of God over the Jews: and it is of Abraham (not of Moses) St. Paul saith (Rom. 4.11.) that he is the “Father of the Faithfull,” that is, of those that are loyall, and doe not violate their Allegiance sworn to God, then by Circumcision, and afterwards in the New Covenant by Baptisme.\n\nThis Covenant, at the Foot of Mount Sinai, was renewed by Moses (Exod. 19.5.) where the Lord commandeth Moses to speak to the people in this manner, “If you will obey my voice indeed, and keep my Covenant, then yee shall be a peculiar people to me, for all the Earth is mine; and yee shall be unto me a Sacerdotall Kingdome, and an holy Nation.” For a “Peculiar people” the vulgar Latine hath, Peculium De Cunctis Populis: the English translation made in the beginning of the Reign of King James, hath, a “Peculiar treasure unto me above all Nations;” and the Geneva French, “the most precious Jewel of all Nations.” But the truest Translation is the first, because it is confirmed by St. Paul himself (Tit. 2.14.) where he saith, alluding to that place, that our blessed Saviour “gave himself for us, that he might purifie us to himself, a peculiar (that is, an extraordinary) people:” for the word is in the Greek periousios, which is opposed commonly to the word epiousios: and as this signifieth Ordinary, Quotidian, or (as in the Lords Prayer) Of Daily Use; so the other signifieth that which is Overplus, and Stored Up, and Enjoyed In A Speciall Manner; which the Latines call Peculium; and this meaning of the place is confirmed by the reason God rendereth of it, which followeth immediately, in that he addeth, “For all the Earth is mine,” as if he should say, “All the Nations of the world are mine;” but it is not so that you are mine, but in a Speciall Manner: For they are all mine, by reason of my Power; but you shall be mine, by your own Consent, and Covenant; which is an addition to his ordinary title, to all nations.\n\nThe same is again confirmed in expresse words in the same Text, “Yee shall be to me a Sacerdotall Kingdome, and an holy Nation.” The Vulgar Latine hath it, Regnum Sacerdotale, to which agreeth the Translation of that place (1 Pet. 2.9.) Sacerdotium Regale, A Regal Priesthood; as also the Institution it self, by which no man might enter into the Sanctum Sanctorum, that is to say, no man might enquire Gods will immediately of God himselfe, but onely the High Priest. The English Translation before mentioned, following that of Geneva, has, “a Kingdome of Priests;” which is either meant of the succession of one High Priest after another, or else it accordeth not with St. Peter, nor with the exercise of the High Priesthood; For there was never any but the High Priest onely, that was to informe the People of Gods Will; nor any Convocation of Priests ever allowed to enter into the Sanctum Sanctorum.\n\nAgain, the title of a Holy Nation confirmes the same: For Holy signifies, that which is Gods by speciall, not by generall Right. All the Earth (as is said in the text) is Gods; but all the Earth is not called Holy, but that onely which is set apart for his especiall service, as was the Nation of the Jews. It is therefore manifest enough by this one place, that by the Kingdome of God, is properly meant a Common-wealth, instituted (by the consent of those which were to be subject thereto) for their Civill Government, and the regulating of their behaviour, not onely towards God their King, but also towards one another in point of justice, and towards other Nations both in peace and warre; which properly was a Kingdome, wherein God was King, and the High priest was to be (after the death of Moses) his sole Viceroy, or Lieutenant.\n\nBut there be many other places that clearly prove the same. As first (1 Sam. 8.7.) when the Elders of Israel (grieved with the corruption of the Sons of Samuel) demanded a King, Samuel displeased therewith, prayed unto the Lord; and the Lord answering said unto him, “Hearken unto the voice of the People, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Out of which it is evident, that God himself was then their King; and Samuel did not command the people, but only delivered to them that which God from time to time appointed him.\n\nAgain, (1 Sam. 12.12.) where Samuel saith to the People, “When yee saw that Nahash King of the Children of Ammon came against you, ye said unto me, Nay, but a King shall reign over us, when the Lord your God was your King:” It is manifest that God was their King, and governed the Civill State of their Common-wealth.\n\nAnd after the Israelites had rejected God, the Prophets did foretell his restitution; as (Isaiah 24.23.) “Then the Moon shall be confounded, and the Sun ashamed when the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion, and in Jerusalem;” where he speaketh expressely of his Reign in Zion, and Jerusalem; that is, on Earth. And (Micah 4.7.) “And the Lord shall reign over them in Mount Zion:” This Mount Zion is in Jerusalem upon the Earth. And (Ezek. 20.33.) “As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand, and a stretched out arme, and with fury powred out, I wil rule over you; and (verse 37.) I will cause you to passe under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the Covenant;” that is, I will reign over you, and make you to stand to that Covenant which you made with me by Moses, and brake in your rebellion against me in the days of Samuel, and in your election of another King.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXV, 2\n\nAnd in the New testament, the Angel Gabriel saith of our Saviour (Luke 1.32,33) “He shall be great, and be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord shall give him the throne of his Father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his Kingdome there shall be no end.” This is also a Kingdome upon Earth; for the claim whereof, as an enemy to Caesar, he was put to death; the title of his crosse, was, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews; hee was crowned in scorn with a crown of Thornes; and for the proclaiming of him, it is said of the Disciples (Acts 17.7.) “That they did all of them contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there was another King, one Jesus. The Kingdome therefore of God, is a reall, not a metaphoricall Kingdome; and so taken, not onely in the Old Testament, but the New; when we say, “For thine is the Kingdome, the Power, and Glory,” it is to be understood of Gods Kingdome, by force of our Covenant, not by the Right of Gods Power; for such a Kingdome God alwaies hath; so that it were superfluous to say in our prayer, “Thy Kingdome come,” unlesse it be meant of the Restauration of that Kingdome of God by Christ, which by revolt of the Israelites had been interrupted in the election of Saul. Nor had it been proper to say, “The Kingdome of Heaven is at hand,” or to pray, “Thy Kingdome come,” if it had still continued.\n\nThere be so many other places that confirm this interpretation, that it were a wonder there is no greater notice taken of it, but that it gives too much light to Christian Kings to see their right of Ecclesiastical Government. This they have observed, that in stead of a Sacerdotall Kingdome, translate, a Kingdome of Priests: for they may as well translate a Royall Priesthood, (as it is in St. Peter) into a Priesthood of Kings. And whereas, for a Peculiar People, they put a Pretious Jewel, or Treasure, a man might as well call the speciall Regiment, or Company of a Generall, the Generalls pretious Jewel, or his Treasure.\n\nIn short, the Kingdome of God is a Civill Kingdome; which consisted, first in the obligation of the people of Israel to those Laws, which Moses should bring unto them from Mount Sinai; and which afterwards the High Priest of the time being, should deliver to them from before the Cherubins in the Sanctum Sanctorum; and which kingdome having been cast off, in the election of Saul, the Prophets foretold, should be restored by Christ; and the Restauration whereof we daily pray for, when we say in the Lords Prayer, “Thy Kingdome come;” and the Right whereof we acknowledge, when we adde, “For thine is the Kingdome, the Power, and Glory, for ever and ever, Amen;” and the Proclaiming whereof, was the Preaching of the Apostles; and to which men are prepared, by the Teachers of the Gospel; to embrace which Gospel, (that is to say, to promise obedience to Gods government) is, to bee in the Kingdome of Grace, because God hath gratis given to such the power to bee the subjects (that is, Children) of God hereafter, when Christ shall come in Majesty to judge the world, and actually to govern his owne people, which is called the Kingdome of Glory. If the Kingdome of God (called also the Kingdome of Heaven, from the gloriousnesse, and admirable height of that throne) were not a Kingdome which God by his Lieutenant, or Vicars, who deliver his Commandements to the people, did exercise on Earth; there would not have been so much contention, and warre, about who it is, by whom God speaketh to us; neither would many Priests have troubled themselves with Spirituall Jurisdiction, nor any King have denied it them.\n\nOut of this literall interpretation of the Kingdome of God, ariseth also the true interpretation of the word HOLY. For it is a word, which in Gods Kingdome answereth to that, which men in their Kingdomes use to call Publique, or the Kings.\n\nThe King of any Countrey is the Publique Person, or Representative of all his own Subjects. And God the King of Israel was the Holy One of Israel. The Nation which is subject to one earthly Soveraign, is the Nation of that Soveraign, that is, of the Publique Person. So the Jews, who were Gods Nation, were called (Exod. 19.6.) “a Holy Nation.” For by Holy, is alwaies understood, either God himselfe, or that which is Gods in propriety; as by Publique is alwaies meant, either the Person of the Common-wealth it self, or something that is so the Common-wealths, as no private person can claim any propriety therein.\n\nTherefore the Sabbath (Gods day) is a Holy Day; the Temple, (Gods house) a Holy House; Sacrifices, Tithes, and Offerings (Gods tribute) Holy Duties; Priests, Prophets, and anointed Kings, under Christ (Gods ministers) Holy Men; The Coelestiall ministring Spirits (Gods Messengers) Holy Angels; and the like: and wheresoever the word Holy is taken properly, there is still something signified of Propriety, gotten by consent. In saying “Hallowed be thy name,” we do but pray to God for grace to keep the first Commandement, of “having no other Gods but Him.” Mankind is Gods Nation in propriety: but the Jews only were a Holy Nation. Why, but because they became his Propriety by covenant.\n\nAnd the word Profane, is usually taken in the Scripture for the same with Common; and consequently their contraries, Holy, and Proper, in the Kingdome of God must be the same also. But figuratively, those men also are called Holy, that led such godly lives, as if they had forsaken all worldly designes, and wholly devoted, and given themselves to God. In the proper sense, that which is made Holy by Gods appropriating or separating it to his own use, is said to be Sanctified by God, as the Seventh day in the fourth Commandement; and as the Elect in the New Testament were said to bee Sanctified, when they were endued with the Spirit of godlinesse. And that which is made Holy by the dedication of men, and given to God, so as to be used onely in his publique service, is called also SACRED, and said to be consecrated, as Temples, and other Houses of Publique Prayer, and their Utensils, Priests, and Ministers, Victimes, Offerings, and the externall matter of Sacraments.\n\nOf Holinesse there be degrees: for of those things that are set apart for the service of God, there may bee some set apart again, for a neerer and more especial service. The whole Nation of the Israelites were a people Holy to God; yet the tribe of Levi was amongst the Israelites a Holy tribe; and amongst the Levites, the Priests were yet more Holy; and amongst the Priests, the High Priest was the most Holy. So the Land of Judea was the Holy Land; but the Holy City wherein God was to be worshipped, was more Holy; and again, the Temples more Holy than the City; and the Sanctum Sanctorum more Holy than the rest of the Temple.\n\nA SACRAMENT, is a separation of some visible thing from common use; and a consecration of it to Gods service, for a sign, either of our admission into the Kingdome of God, to be of the number of his peculiar people, or for a Commemoration of the same. In the Old Testament, the sign of Admission was Circumcision; in the New Testament, Baptisme. The Commemoration of it in the Old Testament, was the Eating (at a certain time, which was Anniversary) of the Paschall Lamb; by which they were put in mind of the night wherein they were delivered out of their bondage in Egypt; and in the New Testament, the celebrating of the Lords Supper; by which, we are put in mind, of our deliverance from the bondage of sin, by our Blessed Saviours death upon the crosse. The Sacraments of Admission, are but once to be used, because there needs but one Admission; but because we have need of being often put in mind of our deliverance, and of our Allegeance, The Sacraments of Commemoration have need to be reiterated. And these are the principall Sacraments, and as it were the solemne oathes we make of our Alleageance. There be also other Consecrations, that may be called Sacraments, as the word implyeth onely Consecration to Gods service; but as it implies an oath, or promise of Alleageance to God, there were no other in the Old Testament, but Circumcision, and the Passover; nor are there any other in the New Testament, but Baptisme, and the Lords Supper.\n\nCHAPTER XXXVI. OF THE WORD OF GOD, AND OF PROPHETS\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 1\n\nOF THE WORD OF GOD, AND OF PROPHETS\n\nWhen there is mention of the Word of God, or of Man, it doth not signifie a part of Speech, such as Grammarians call a Nown, or a Verb, or any simple voice, without a contexture with other words to make it significative; but a perfect Speech or Discourse, whereby the speaker Affirmeth, Denieth, Commandeth, Promiseth, Threateneth, Wisheth, or Interrogateth. In which sense it is not Vocabulum, that signifies a Word; but Sermo, (in Greek Logos) that is some Speech, Discourse, or Saying.\n\nAgain, if we say the Word of God, or of Man, it may bee understood sometimes of the Speaker, (as the words that God hath spoken, or that a Man hath spoken): In which sense, when we say, the Gospel of St. Matthew, we understand St. Matthew to be the Writer of it: and sometimes of the Subject: In which sense, when we read in the Bible, “The words of the days of the Kings of Israel, or Judah,” ’tis meant, that the acts that were done in those days, were the Subject of those Words; And in the Greek, which (in the Scripture) retaineth many Hebraismes, by the Word of God is oftentimes meant, not that which is spoken by God, but concerning God, and his government; that is to say, the Doctrine of Religion: Insomuch, as it is all one, to say Logos Theou, and Theologia; which is, that Doctrine which wee usually call Divinity, as is manifest by the places following (Acts 13.46.) “Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the Word of God should first have been spoken to you, but seeing you put it from you, and judge your selves unworthy of everlasting life, loe, we turn to the Gentiles.” That which is here called the Word of god, was the Doctrine of Christian Religion; as it appears evidently by that which goes before. And (Acts 5.20.) where it is said to the Apostles by an Angel, “Go stand and speak in the Temple, all the Words of this life;” by the Words of this life, is meant, the Doctrine of the Gospel; as is evident by what they did in the Temple, and is expressed in the last verse of the same Chap. “Daily in the Temple, and in every house they ceased not to teach and preach Christ Jesus:” In which place it is manifest, that Jesus Christ was the subject of this Word of Life; or (which is all one) the subject of the Words of this Life Eternall, that our saviour offered them. So (Acts 15.7.) the Word of God, is called the Word of the Gospel, because it containeth the Doctrine of the Kingdome of Christ; and the same Word (Rom. 10.8,9.) is called the Word of Faith; that is, as is there expressed, the Doctrine of Christ come, and raised from the dead. Also (Mat. 13. 19.) “When any one heareth the Word of the Kingdome;” that is, the Doctrine of the Kingdome taught by Christ. Again, the same Word, is said (Acts 12. 24.) “to grow and to be multiplied;” which to understand of the Evangelicall Doctrine is easie, but of the Voice, or Speech of God, hard and strange. In the same sense the Doctrine of Devils, signifieth not the Words of any Devill, but the Doctrine of Heathen men concerning Daemons, and those Phantasms which they worshipped as Gods. (1 Tim. 4.1.)\n\nConsidering these two significations of the WORD OF GOD, as it is taken in Scripture, it is manifest in this later sense (where it is taken for the Doctrine of the Christian Religion,) that the whole scripture is the Word of God: but in the former sense not so. For example, though these words, “I am the Lord thy God, &c.” to the end of the Ten Commandements, were spoken by God to Moses; yet the Preface, “God spake these words and said,” is to be understood for the Words of him that wrote the holy History. The Word of God, as it is taken for that which he hath spoken, is understood sometimes Properly, sometimes Metaphorically. Properly, as the words, he hath spoken to his Prophets; Metaphorically, for his Wisdome, Power, and eternall Decree, in making the world; in which sense, those Fiats, “Let there be light,” “Let there be a firmament,” “Let us make man,” &c. (Gen. 1.) are the Word of God. And in the same sense it is said (John 1.3.) “All things were made by it, and without it was nothing made that was made; And (Heb. 1.3.) “He upholdeth all things by the word of his Power;” that is, by the Power of his Word; that is, by his Power; and (Heb. 11.3.) “The worlds were framed by the Word of God;” and many other places to the same sense: As also amongst the Latines, the name of Fate, which signifieth properly The Word Spoken, is taken in the same sense.\n\nSecondly, for the effect of his Word; that is to say, for the thing it self, which by his Word is Affirmed, Commanded, Threatned, or Promised; as (Psalm 105.19.) where Joseph is said to have been kept in prison, “till his Word was come;” that is, till that was come to passe which he had (Gen. 40.13.) foretold to Pharaohs Butler, concerning his being restored to his office: for there by His Word Was Come, is meant, the thing it self was come to passe. So also (1 King. 18.36.) Elijah saith to God, “I have done all these thy Words,” in stead of “I have done all these things at thy Word,” or commandement: and (Jer. 17.15.) “Where is the Word of the Lord,” is put for, “Where is the Evill he threatened:” And (Ezek. 12.28.) “There shall none of my Words be prolonged any more:” by “Words” are understood those Things, which God promised to his people. And in the New Testament (Mat. 24.35.) “heaven and earth shal pass away, but my Words shall not pass away;” that is, there is nothing that I have promised or foretold, that shall not come to passe. And in this sense it is, that St. John the Evangelist, and, I think, St. John onely calleth our Saviour himself as in the flesh “the Word of God (as Joh. 1.14.) the Word was made Flesh;” that is to say, the Word, or Promise that Christ should come into the world, “who in the beginning was with God;” that is to say, it was in the purpose of God the Father, to send God the Son into the world, to enlighten men in the way of Eternall life, but it was not till then put in execution, and actually incarnate; So that our Saviour is there called “the Word,” not because he was the promise, but the thing promised. They that taking occasion from this place, doe commonly call him the Verbe of God, do but render the text more obscure. They might as well term him the Nown of God: for as by Nown, so also by Verbe, men understand nothing but a part of speech, a voice, a sound, that neither affirms, nor denies, nor commands, nor promiseth, nor is any substance corporeall, or spirituall; and therefore it cannot be said to bee either God, or Man; whereas our Saviour is both. And this Word which St. John in his Gospel saith was with God, is (in his 1 Epistle, verse 1.) called “the Word of Life;” and (verse 2.) “The eternall life, which was with the Father:” so that he can be in no other sense called the Word, then in that, wherein he is called Eternall life; that is, “he that hath procured us Eternall life,” by his comming in the flesh. So also (Apocalypse 19.13.) the Apostle speaking of Christ, clothed in a garment dipt in bloud, saith; his name is “the Word of God;” which is to be understood, as if he had said his name had been, “He that was come according to the purpose of God from the beginning, and according to his Word and promises delivered by the Prophets.” So that there is nothing here of the Incarnation of a Word, but of the Incarnation of God the Son, therefore called the Word, because his Incarnation was the Performance of the Promise; In like manner as the Holy Ghost is called The Promise. (Acts 1.4. Luke 24.49.)\n\nThere are also places of the Scripture, where, by the Word of God, is signified such Words as are consonant to reason, and equity, though spoken sometimes neither by prophet, nor by a holy man. For Pharaoh Necho was an Idolator; yet his Words to the good King Josiah, in which he advised him by Messengers, not to oppose him in his march against Carchemish, are said to have proceeded from the mouth of God; and that Josiah not hearkning to them, was slain in the battle; as is to be read 2 Chron. 35. vers. 21,22,23. It is true, that as the same History is related in the first book of Esdras, not Pharaoh, but Jeremiah spake these words to Josiah, from the mouth of the Lord. But wee are to give credit to the Canonicall Scripture, whatsoever be written in the Apocrypha.\n\nThe Word of God, is then also to be taken for the Dictates of reason, and equity, when the same is said in the Scriptures to bee written in mans heart; as Psalm 36.31. Jerem. 31.33. Deut.30.11, 14. and many other like places.\n\nThe name of PROPHET, signifieth in Scripture sometimes Prolocutor; that is, he that speaketh from God to Man, or from man to God: And sometimes Praedictor, or a foreteller of things to come; And sometimes one that speaketh incoherently, as men that are distracted. It is most frequently used in the sense of speaking from God to the People. So Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others were Prophets. And in this sense the High Priest was a Prophet, for he only went into the Sanctum Sanctorum, to enquire of God; and was to declare his answer to the people. And therefore when Caiphas said, it was expedient that one man should die for the people, St. John saith (chap. 11.51.) that “He spake not this of himselfe, but being High Priest that year, he prophesied that one man should dye for the nation.” Also they that in Christian Congregations taught the people, (1 Cor. 14.3.) are said to Prophecy. In the like sense it is, that God saith to Moses (Exod. 4.16.) concerning Aaron, “He shall be thy Spokes-man to the People; and he shall be to thee a mouth, and thou shalt be to him in stead of God;” that which here is Spokesman, is (chap.7.1.) interpreted Prophet; “See (saith God) I have made thee a God to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy Brother shall be thy Prophet.” In the sense of speaking from man to God, Abraham is called a Prophet (Genes. 20.7.) where God in a Dream speaketh to Abimelech in this manner, “Now therefore restore the man his wife, for he is a Prophet, and shall pray for thee;” whereby may be also gathered, that the name of Prophet may be given, not unproperly to them that in Christian Churches, have a Calling to say publique prayers for the Congregation. In the same sense, the Prophets that came down from the High place (or Hill of God) with a Psaltery, and a Tabret, and a Pipe, and a Harp (1 Sam. 10.5,6.) and (vers. 10.) Saul amongst them, are said to Prophecy, in that they praised God, in that manner publiquely. In the like sense, is Miriam (Exod. 15.20.) called a Prophetesse. So is it also to be taken (1 Cor. 11.4,5.) where St. Paul saith, “Every man that prayeth or prophecyeth with his head covered, &c. and every woman that prayeth or prophecyeth with her head uncovered: For Prophecy in that place, signifieth no more, but praising God in Psalmes, and Holy Songs; which women might doe in the Church, though it were not lawfull for them to speak to the Congregation. And in this signification it is, that the Poets of the Heathen, that composed Hymnes and other sorts of Poems in the honor of their Gods, were called Vates (Prophets) as is well enough known by all that are versed in the Books of the Gentiles, and as is evident (Tit. 1.12.) where St. Paul saith of the Cretians, that a Prophet of their owne said, they were Liars; not that St. Paul held their Poets for Prophets, but acknowledgeth that the word Prophet was commonly used to signifie them that celebrated the honour of God in Verse\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 2\n\nWhen by Prophecy is meant Praediction, or foretelling of future Contingents; not only they were Prophets, who were Gods Spokesmen, and foretold those things to others, which God had foretold to them; but also all those Imposters, that pretend by the helpe of familiar spirits, or by superstitious divination of events past, from false causes, to foretell the like events in time to come: of which (as I have declared already in the 12. chapter of this Discourse) there be many kinds, who gain in the opinion of the common sort of men, a greater reputation of Prophecy, by one casuall event that may bee but wrested to their purpose, than can be lost again by never so many failings. Prophecy is not an art, nor (when it is taken for Praediction) a constant Vocation; but an extraordinary, and temporary Employment from God, most often of Good men, but sometimes also of the Wicked. The woman of Endor, who is said to have had a familiar spirit, and thereby to have raised a Phantasme of Samuel, and foretold Saul his death, was not therefore a Prophetesse; for neither had she any science, whereby she could raise such a Phantasme; nor does it appear that God commanded the raising of it; but onely guided that Imposture to be a means of Sauls terror and discouragement; and by consequent, of the discomfiture, by which he fell. And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapour from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for the time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima. In the Scripture I find it also so taken (1 Sam. 18. 10.) in these words, “And the Evill spirit came upon Saul, and he Prophecyed in the midst of the house.”\n\nAnd although there be so many significations in Scripture of the word Prophet; yet is that the most frequent, in which it is taken for him, to whom God speaketh immediately, that which the Prophet is to say from him, to some other man, or to the people. And hereupon a question may be asked, in what manner God speaketh to such a Prophet. Can it (may some say) be properly said, that God hath voice and language, when it cannot be properly said, he hath a tongue, or other organs, as a man? The Prophet David argueth thus, “Shall he that made the eye, not see? or he that made the ear, not hear?” But this may be spoken, not (as usually) to signifie Gods nature, but to signifie our intention to honor him. For to See, and Hear, are Honorable Attributes, and may be given to God, to declare (as far as our capacity can conceive) his Almighty power. But if it were to be taken in the strict, and proper sense, one might argue from his making of all parts of mans body, that he had also the same use of them which we have; which would be many of them so uncomely, as it would be the greatest contumely in the world to ascribe them to him. Therefore we are to interpret Gods speaking to men immediately, for that way (whatsoever it be), by which God makes them understand his will: And the wayes whereby he doth this, are many; and to be sought onely in the Holy Scripture: where though many times it be said, that God spake to this, and that person, without declaring in what manner; yet there be again many places, that deliver also the signes by which they were to acknowledge his presence, and commandement; and by these may be understood, how he spake to many of the rest.\n\nIn what manner God spake to Adam, and Eve, and Cain, and Noah, is not expressed; nor how he spake to Abraham, till such time as he came out of his own countrey to Sichem in the land of Canaan; and then (Gen. 12.7.) God is said to have Appeared to him. So there is one way, whereby God made his presence manifest; that is, by an Apparition, or Vision. And again, (Gen. 15.1.) The Word of the Lord came to Abraham in a Vision; that is to say, somewhat, as a sign of Gods presence, appeared as Gods Messenger, to speak to him. Again, the Lord appeared to Abraham (Gen. 18. 1.) by an apparition of three Angels; and to Abimelech (Gen. 20. 3.) in a dream: To Lot (Gen. 19. 1.) by an apparition of Two Angels: And to Hagar (Gen. 21. 17.) by the apparition of one Angel: And to Abraham again (Gen. 22. 11.) by the apparition of a voice from heaven: And (Gen. 26. 24.) to Isaac in the night; (that is, in his sleep, or by dream): And to Jacob (Gen. 18. 12.) in a dream; that is to say (as are the words of the text) “Jacob dreamed that he saw a ladder, &c.” And (Gen. 32. 1.) in a Vision of Angels: And to Moses (Exod. 3.2.) in the apparition of a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: And after the time of Moses, (where the manner how God spake immediately to man in the Old Testament, is expressed) hee spake alwaies by a Vision, or by a Dream; as to Gideon, Samuel, Eliah, Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the rest of the Prophets; and often in the New Testament, as to Joseph, to St. Peter, to St. Paul, and to St. John the Evangelist in the Apocalypse.\n\nOnely to Moses hee spake in a more extraordinary manner in Mount Sinai, and in the Tabernacle; and to the High Priest in the Tabernacle, and in the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Temple. But Moses, and after him the High Priests were Prophets of a more eminent place, and degree in Gods favour; And God himself in express words declareth, that to other Prophets hee spake in Dreams and Visions, but to his servant Moses, in such manner as a man speaketh to his friend. The words are these (Numb. 12. 6,7,8.) “If there be a Prophet among you, I the Lord will make my self known to him in a Vision, and will speak unto him in a Dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithfull in all my house; with him I will speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold.” And (Exod. 33. 11.) “The Lord spake to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.” And yet this speaking of God to Moses, was by mediation of an Angel, or Angels, as appears expressely, Acts 7. ver. 35. and 53. and Gal. 3. 19. and was therefore a Vision, though a more cleer Vision than was given to other Prophets. And conformable hereunto, where God saith (Deut. 13. 1.) “If there arise amongst you a Prophet, or Dreamer of Dreams,” the later word is but the interpretation of the former. And (Joel 2. 28.) “Your sons and your daughters shall Prophecy; your old men shall dream Dreams, and your young men shall see Visions:” where again, the word Prophecy is expounded by Dream, and Vision. And in the same manner it was, that God spake to Solomon, promising him Wisdome, Riches, and Honor; for the text saith, (1 Kings 3. 15.) “And Solomon awoak, and behold it was a Dream:” So that generally the Prophets extraordinary in the old Testament took notice of the Word of God no otherwise, than from their Dreams, or Visions, that is to say, from the imaginations which they had in their sleep, or in an Extasie; which imaginations in every true Prophet were supernaturall; but in false Prophets were either naturall, or feigned.\n\nThe same Prophets were neverthelesse said to speak by the Spirit; as (Zach. 7. 12.) where the Prophet speaking of the Jewes, saith, “They made their hearths hard as Adamant, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of Hosts hath sent in his Spirit by the former Prophets.” By which it is manifest, that speaking by the Spirit, or Inspiration, was not a particular manner of Gods speaking, different from Vision, when they that were said to speak by the Spirit, were extraordinary Prophets, such as for every new message, were to have a particular Commission, or (which is all one) a new Dream, or Vision.\n\nTo Prophets Of Perpetuall Calling, And Supreme, God Spake In The Old Testament From The Mercy Seat, In A Manner Not Expressed In The Scripture. Of Prophets, that were so by a perpetuall Calling in the Old Testament, some were Supreme, and some Subordinate: Supreme were first Moses; and after him the High Priest, every one for his time, as long as the Priesthood was Royall; and after the people of the Jews, had rejected God, that he should no more reign over them, those Kings which submitted themselves to Gods government, were also his chief Prophets; and the High Priests office became Ministeriall. And when God was to be consulted, they put on the holy vestments, and enquired of the Lord, as the King commanded them, and were deprived of their office, when the King thought fit. For King Saul (1 Sam. 13. 9.) commanded the burnt offering to be brought, and (1 Sam. 14. 18.) he commands the Priest to bring the Ark neer him; and (ver. 19.) again to let it alone, because he saw an advantage upon his enemies. And in the same chapter Saul asketh counsell of God. In like manner King David, after his being anointed, though before he had possession of the Kingdome, is said to “enquire of the Lord” (1 Sam. 23. 2.) whether he should fight against the Philistines at Keilah; and (verse 10.) David commandeth the Priest to bring him the Ephod, to enquire whether he should stay in Keilah, or not. And King Solomon (1 Kings 2. 27.) took the Priesthood from Abiathar, and gave it (verse 35.) to Zadoc. Therefore Moses, and the High Priests, and the pious Kings, who enquired of God on all extraordinary occasions, how they were to carry themselves, or what event they were to have, were all Soveraign Prophets. But in what manner God spake unto them, is not manifest. To say that when Moses went up to God in Mount Sinai, it was a Dream, or Vision, such as other Prophets had, is contrary to that distinction which God made between Moses, and other Prophets, Numb. 12. 6,7,8. To say God spake or appeared as he is in his own nature, is to deny his Infinitenesse, Invisibility, Incomprehensibility. To say he spake by Inspiration, or Infusion of the Holy Spirit, as the Holy Spirit signifieth the Deity, is to make Moses equall with Christ, in whom onely the Godhead (as St. Paul speaketh Col. 2.9.) dwelleth bodily. And lastly, to say he spake by the Holy Spirit, as it signifieth the graces, or gifts of the Holy Spirit, is to attribute nothing to him supernaturall. For God disposeth men to Piety, Justice, Mercy, Truth, Faith, and all manner of Vertue, both Morall, and Intellectuall, by doctrine, example, and by severall occasions, naturall, and ordinary.\n\nAnd as these ways cannot be applyed to God, in his speaking to Moses, at Mount Sinai; so also, they cannot be applyed to him, in his speaking to the High Priests, from the Mercy-Seat. Therefore in what manner God spake to those Soveraign Prophets of the Old Testament, whose office it was to enquire of him, is not intelligible. In the time of the New Testament, there was no Soveraign Prophet, but our Saviour; who was both God that spake, and the Prophet to whom he spake.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 3\n\nTo Prophets Of Perpetuall Calling, But Subordinate, God Spake By The Spirit. To subordinate Prophets of perpetuall Calling, I find not any place that proveth God spake to them supernaturally; but onely in such manner, as naturally he inclineth men to Piety, to Beleef, to Righteousnesse, and to other vertues all other Christian Men. Which way, though it consist in Constitution, Instruction, Education, and the occasions and invitements men have to Christian vertues; yet it is truly attributed to the operation of the Spirit of God, or Holy Spirit (which we in our language call the Holy Ghost): For there is no good inclination, that is not of the operation of God. But these operations are not alwaies supernaturall. When therefore a Prophet is said to speak in the Spirit, or by the Spirit of God, we are to understand no more, but that he speaks according to Gods will, declared by the supreme Prophet. For the most common acceptation of the word Spirit, is in the signification of a mans intention, mind, or disposition.\n\nIn the time of Moses, there were seventy men besides himself, that Prophecyed in the Campe of the Israelites. In what manner God spake to them, is declared in the 11 of Numbers, verse 25. “The Lord came down in a cloud, and spake unto Moses, and took of the Spirit that was upon him, and gave it to the seventy Elders. And it came to passe, when the Spirit rested upon them, they Prophecyed, and did not cease,” By which it is manifest, first, that their Prophecying to the people, was subservient, and subordinate to the Prophecying of Moses; for that God took of the Spirit of Moses, to put upon them; so that they Prophecyed as Moses would have them: otherwise they had not been suffered to Prophecy at all. For there was (verse 27.) a complaint made against them to Moses; and Joshua would have Moses to have forbidden them; which he did not, but said to Joshua, Bee not jealous in my behalf. Secondly, that the Spirit of God in that place, signifieth nothing but the Mind and Disposition to obey, and assist Moses in the administration of the Government. For if it were meant they had the substantial Spirit of God; that is, the Divine nature, inspired into them, then they had it in no lesse manner than Christ himself, in whom onely the Spirit of God dwelt bodily. It is meant therefore of the Gift and Grace of God, that guided them to co-operate with Moses; from whom their Spirit was derived. And it appeareth (verse 16.) that, they were such as Moses himself should appoint for Elders and Officers of the People: For the words are, “Gather unto me seventy men, whom thou knowest to be Elders and Officers of the people:” where, “thou knowest,” is the same with “thou appointest,” or “hast appointed to be such.” For we are told before (Exod. 18.) that Moses following the counsell of Jethro his Father-in-law, did appoint Judges, and Officers over the people, such as feared God; and of these, were those Seventy, whom God by putting upon them Moses spirit, inclined to aid Moses in the Administration of the Kingdome: and in this sense the Spirit of God is said (1 Sam. 16. 13, 14.) presently upon the anointing of David, to have come upon David, and left Saul; God giving his graces to him he chose to govern his people, and taking them away from him, he rejected. So that by the Spirit is meant Inclination to Gods service; and not any supernaturall Revelation.\n\nGod spake also many times by the event of Lots; which were ordered by such as he had put in Authority over his people. So wee read that God manifested by the Lots which Saul caused to be drawn (1 Sam. 14. 43.) the fault that Jonathan had committed, in eating a honey-comb, contrary to the oath taken by the people. And (Josh. 18. 10.) God divided the land of Canaan amongst the Israelite, by the “lots that Joshua did cast before the Lord in Shiloh.” In the same manner it seemeth to be, that God discovered (Joshua 7.16., &c.) the crime of Achan. And these are the wayes whereby God declared his Will in the Old Testament.\n\nAll which ways he used also in the New Testament. To the Virgin Mary, by a Vision of an Angel: To Joseph in a Dream: again to Paul in the way to Damascus in a Vision of our Saviour: and to Peter in the Vision of a sheet let down from heaven, with divers sorts of flesh, of clean and unclean, beasts; and in prison, by Vision of an Angel: And to all the Apostles, and Writers of the New Testament, by the graces of his Spirit; and to the Apostles again (at the choosing of Matthias in the place of Judas Iscariot) by lot.\n\nSeeing then all Prophecy supposeth Vision, or Dream, (which two, when they be naturall, are the same,) or some especiall gift of God, so rarely observed in mankind, as to be admired where observed; and seeing as well such gifts, as the most extraordinary Dreams, and Visions, may proceed from God, not onely by his supernaturall, and immediate, but also by his naturall operation, and by mediation of second causes; there is need of Reason and Judgement to discern between naturall, and supernaturall Gifts, and between naturall, and supernaturall Visions, or Dreams. And consequently men had need to be very circumspect, and wary, in obeying the voice of man, that pretending himself to be a Prophet, requires us to obey God in that way, which he in Gods name telleth us to be the way to happinesse. For he that pretends to teach men the way of so great felicity, pretends to govern them; that is to say, to rule, and reign over them; which is a thing, that all men naturally desire, and is therefore worthy to be suspected of Ambition and Imposture; and consequently, ought to be examined, and tryed by every man, before hee yeeld them obedience; unlesse he have yeelded it them already, in the institution of a Common-wealth; as when the Prophet is the Civill Soveraign, or by the Civil Soveraign Authorized. And if this examination of Prophets, and Spirits, were not allowed to every one of the people, it had been to no purpose, to set out the marks, by which every man might be able, to distinguish between those, whom they ought, and those whom they ought not to follow. Seeing therefore such marks are set out (Deut. 13. 1,&c.) to know a Prophet by; and (1 John 4.1.&C) to know a Spirit by: and seeing there is so much Prophecying in the Old Testament; and so much Preaching in the New Testament against Prophets; and so much greater a number ordinarily of false Prophets, then of true; every one is to beware of obeying their directions, at their own perill. And first, that there were many more false than true Prophets, appears by this, that when Ahab (1 Kings 12.) consulted four hundred Prophets, they were all false Imposters, but onely one Michaiah. And a little before the time of the Captivity, the Prophets were generally lyars. “The Prophets” (saith the Lord by Jerem. cha. 14. verse 14.) “prophecy Lies in my name. I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, nor spake unto them, they prophecy to you a false Vision, a thing of naught; and the deceit of their heart.” In so much as God commanded the People by the mouth of the Prophet Jeremiah (chap. 23. 16.) not to obey them. “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, hearken not unto the words of the Prophets, that prophecy to you. They make you vain, they speak a Vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord.”\n\nSeeing then there was in the time of the Old Testament, such quarrells amongst the Visionary Prophets, one contesting with another, and asking When departed the Spirit from me, to go to thee? as between Michaiah, and the rest of the four hundred; and such giving of the Lye to one another, (as in Jerem. 14.14.) and such controversies in the New Testament at this day, amongst the Spirituall Prophets: Every man then was, and now is bound to make use of his Naturall Reason, to apply to all Prophecy those Rules which God hath given us, to discern the true from the false. Of which rules, in the Old Testament, one was, conformable doctrine to that which Moses the Soveraign Prophet had taught them; and the other the miraculous power of foretelling what God would bring to passe, as I have already shown out of Deut. 13. 1. &c. and in the New Testament there was but one onely mark; and that was the preaching of this Doctrine, That Jesus Is The Christ, that is, the King of the Jews, promised in the Old Testament. Whosoever denyed that Article, he was a false Prophet, whatsoever miracles he might seem to work; and he that taught it was a true Prophet. For St. John (1 Epist, 4. 2, &c) speaking expressely of the means to examine Spirits, whether they be of God, or not; after he hath told them that there would arise false Prophets, saith thus, “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God. Every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God;” that is, is approved and allowed as a Prophet of God: not that he is a godly man, or one of the Elect, for this, that he confesseth, professeth, or preacheth Jesus to be the Christ; but for that he is a Prophet avowed. For God sometimes speaketh by Prophets, whose persons he hath not accepted; as he did by Baalam; and as he foretold Saul of his death, by the Witch of Endor. Again in the next verse, “Every Spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the Flesh, is not of Christ. And this is the Spirit of Antichrist.” So that the rule is perfect on both sides; that he is a true Prophet, which preacheth the Messiah already come, in the person of Jesus; and he a false one that denyeth him come, and looketh for him in some future Imposter, that shall take upon him that honour falsely, whom the Apostle there properly calleth Antichrist. Every man therefore ought to consider who is the Soveraign Prophet; that is to say, who it is, that is Gods Viceregent on earth; and hath next under God, the Authority of Governing Christian men; and to observe for a Rule, that Doctrine, which in the name of God, hee commanded to bee taught; and thereby to examine and try out the truth of those Doctrines, which pretended Prophets with miracles, or without, shall at any time advance: and if they find it contrary to that Rule, to doe as they did, that came to Moses, and complained that there were some that Prophecyed in the Campe, whose Authority so to doe they doubted of; and leave to the Soveraign, as they did to Moses to uphold, or to forbid them, as hee should see cause; and if hee disavow them, then no more to obey their voice; or if he approve them, then to obey them, as men to whom God hath given a part of the Spirit of their Soveraigne. For when Christian men, take not their Christian Soveraign, for Gods Prophet; they must either take their owne Dreams, for the prophecy they mean to bee governed by, and the tumour of their own hearts for the Spirit of God; or they must suffer themselves to bee lead by some strange Prince; or by some of their fellow subjects, that can bewitch them, by slander of the government, into rebellion, without other miracle to confirm their calling, then sometimes an extraordinary successe, and Impunity; and by this means destroying all laws, both divine, and humane, reduce all Order, Government, and Society, to the first Chaos of Violence, and Civill warre.\n\nCHAPTER XXXVII. OF MIRACLES, AND THEIR USE\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVII, 1\n\nOF MIRACLES, AND THEIR USE\n\nBy Miracles are signified the Admirable works of God: & therefore they are also called Wonders. And because they are for the most part, done, for a signification of his commandement, in such occasions, as without them, men are apt to doubt, (following their private naturall reasoning,) what he hath commanded, and what not, they are commonly in Holy Scripture, called Signes, in the same sense, as they are called by the Latines, Ostenta, and Portenta, from shewing, and fore-signifying that, which the Almighty is about to bring to passe.\n\nTo understand therefore what is a Miracle, we must first understand what works they are, which men wonder at, and call Admirable. And there be but two things which make men wonder at any event: The one is, if it be strange, that is to say, such, as the like of it hath never, or very rarely been produced: The other is, if when it is produced, we cannot imagine it to have been done by naturall means, but onely by the immediate hand of God. But when wee see some possible, naturall cause of it, how rarely soever the like has been done; or if the like have been often done, how impossible soever it be to imagine a naturall means thereof, we no more wonder, nor esteem it for a Miracle.\n\nTherefore, if a Horse, or Cow should speak, it were a Miracle; because both the thing is strange, & the Naturall cause difficult to imagin: So also were it, to see a strange deviation of nature, in the production of some new shape of a living creature. But when a man, or other Animal, engenders his like, though we know no more how this is done, than the other; yet because ’tis usuall, it is no Miracle. In like manner, if a man be metamorphosed into a stone, or into a pillar, it is a Miracle; because strange: but if a peece of wood be so changed; because we see it often, it is no Miracle: and yet we know no more, by what operation of God, the one is brought to passe, than the other.\n\nThe first Rainbow that was seen in the world, was a Miracle, because the first; and consequently strange; and served for a sign from God, placed in heaven, to assure his people, there should be no more an universall destruction of the world by Water. But at this day, because they are frequent, they are not Miracles, neither to them that know their naturall causes, nor to them who know them not. Again, there be many rare works produced by the Art of man: yet when we know they are done; because thereby wee know also the means how they are done, we count them not for Miracles, because not wrought by the immediate hand of God, but by mediation of humane Industry.\n\nFurthermore, seeing Admiration and Wonder, is consequent to the knowledge and experience, wherewith men are endued, some more, some lesse; it followeth, that the same thing, may be a Miracle to one, and not to another. And thence it is, that ignorant, and superstitious men make great Wonders of those works, which other men, knowing to proceed from Nature, (which is not the immediate, but the ordinary work of God,) admire not at all: As when Ecclipses of the Sun and Moon have been taken for supernaturall works, by the common people; when neverthelesse, there were others, could from their naturall causes, have foretold the very hour they should arrive: Or, as when a man, by confederacy, and secret intelligence, getting knowledge of the private actions of an ignorant, unwary man, thereby tells him, what he has done in former time; it seems to him a Miraculous thing; but amongst wise, and cautelous men, such Miracles as those, cannot easily be done.\n\nAgain, it belongeth to the nature of a Miracle, that it be wrought for the procuring of credit to Gods Messengers, Ministers, and Prophets, that thereby men may know, they are called, sent, and employed by God, and thereby be the better inclined to obey them. And therefore, though the creation of the world, and after that the destruction of all living creatures in the universall deluge, were admirable works; yet because they were not done to procure credit to any Prophet, or other Minister of God, they use not to be called Miracles. For how admirable soever any work be, the Admiration consisteth not in that it could be done, because men naturally beleeve the Almighty can doe all things, but because he does it at the Prayer, or Word of a man. But the works of God in Egypt, by the hand of Moses, were properly Miracles; because they were done with intention to make the people of Israel beleeve, that Moses came unto them, not out of any design of his owne interest, but as sent from God. Therefore after God had commanded him to deliver the Israelites from the Egyptian bondage, when he said (Exod 4.1. &c.) “They will not beleeve me, but will say, the Lord hath not appeared unto me,” God gave him power, to turn the Rod he had in his hand into a Serpent, and again to return it into a Rod; and by putting his hand into his bosome, to make it leprous; and again by pulling it out to make it whole, to make the Children of Israel beleeve (as it is verse 5.) that the God of their Fathers had appeared unto him; And if that were not enough, he gave him power to turn their waters into bloud. And when hee had done these Miracles before the people, it is said (verse 41.) that “they beleeved him.” Neverthelesse, for fear of Pharaoh, they durst not yet obey him. Therefore the other works which were done to plague Pharaoh and the Egyptians, tended all to make the Israelites beleeve in Moses, and were properly Miracles. In like manner if we consider all the Miracles done by the hand of Moses, and all the rest of the Prophets, till the Captivity; and those of our Saviour, and his Apostles afterward; we shall find, their end was alwaies to beget, or confirm beleefe, that they came not of their own motion, but were sent by God. Wee may further observe in Scripture, that the end of Miracles, was to beget beleef, not universally in all men, elect, and reprobate; but in the elect only; that is to say, is such as God had determined should become his Subjects. For those miraculous plagues of Egypt, had not for end, the conversion of Pharaoh; For God had told Moses before, that he would harden the heart of Pharaoh, that he should not let the people goe: And when he let them goe at last, not the Miracles perswaded him, but the plagues forced him to it. So also of our Saviour, it is written, (Mat. 13. 58.) that he wrought not many Miracles in his own countrey, because of their unbeleef; and (in Marke 6.5.) in stead of, “he wrought not many,” it is, “he could work none.” It was not because he wanted power; which to say, were blasphemy against God; nor that the end of Miracles was not to convert incredulous men to Christ; for the end of all the Miracles of Moses, of Prophets, of our Saviour, and of his Apostles was to adde men to the Church; but it was, because the end of their Miracles, was to adde to the Church (not all men, but) such as should be saved; that is to say, such as God had elected. Seeing therefore our Saviour sent from his Father, hee could not use his power in the conversion of those, whom his Father had rejected. They that expounding this place of St. Marke, say, that his word, “Hee could not,” is put for, “He would not,” do it without example in the Greek tongue, (where Would Not, is put sometimes for Could Not, in things inanimate, that have no will; but Could Not, for Would Not, never,) and thereby lay a stumbling block before weak Christians; as if Christ could doe no Miracles, but amongst the credulous.\n\nFrom that which I have here set down, of the nature, and use of a Miracle, we may define it thus, “A MIRACLE, is a work of God, (besides his operation by the way of Nature, ordained in the Creation,) done for the making manifest to his elect, the mission of an extraordinary Minister for their salvation.”\n\nAnd from this definition, we may inferre; First, that in all Miracles, the work done, is not the effect of any vertue in the Prophet; because it is the effect of the immediate hand of God; that is to say God hath done it, without using the Prophet therein, as a subordinate cause.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVII, 2\n\nSecondly, that no Devil, Angel, or other created Spirit, can do a Miracle. For it must either be by vertue of some naturall science, or by Incantation, that is, vertue of words. For if the Inchanters do it by their own power independent, there is some power that proceedeth not from God; which all men deny: and if they doe it by power given them, then is the work not from the immediate hand of God, but naturall, and consequently no Miracle.\n\nThere be some texts of Scripture, that seem to attribute the power of working wonders (equall to some of those immediate Miracles, wrought by God himself,) to certain Arts of Magick, and Incantation. As for example, when we read that after the Rod of Moses being cast on the ground became a Serpent, (Exod. 7. 11.) “the Magicians of Egypt did the like by their Enchantments;” and that after Moses had turned the waters of the Egyptian Streams, Rivers, Ponds, and Pooles of water into blood, (Exod. 7. 22.) “the Magicians of Egypt did so likewise, with their Enchantments;” and that after Moses had by the power of God brought frogs upon the land, (Exod. 8. 7.) “the Magicians also did so with their Enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt;” will not a man be apt to attribute Miracles to Enchantments; that is to say, to the efficacy of the sound of Words; and think the same very well proved out of this, and other such places? and yet there is no place of Scripture, that telleth us what on Enchantment is. If therefore Enchantment be not, as many think it, a working of strange effects by spells, and words; but Imposture, and delusion, wrought by ordinary means; and so far from supernaturall, as the Impostors need not the study so much as of naturall causes, but the ordinary ignorance, stupidity, and superstition of mankind, to doe them; those texts that seem to countenance the power of Magick, Witchcraft, and Enchantment, must needs have another sense, than at first sight they seem to bear.\n\nFor it is evident enough, that Words have no effect, but on those that understand them; and then they have no other, but to signifie the intentions, or passions of them that speak; and thereby produce, hope, fear, or other passions, or conceptions in the hearer. Therefore when a Rod seemeth a Serpent, or the Water Bloud, or any other Miracle seemeth done by Enchantment; if it be not to the edification of Gods people, not the Rod, nor the Water, nor any other thing is enchanted; that is to say, wrought upon by the Words, but the Spectator. So that all the Miracle consisteth in this, that the Enchanter has deceived a man; which is no Miracle, but a very easie matter to doe.\n\nFor such is the ignorance, and aptitude to error generally of all men, but especially of them that have not much knowledge of naturall causes, and of the nature, and interests of men; as by innumerable and easie tricks to be abused. What opinion of miraculous power, before it was known there was a Science of the course of the Stars, might a man have gained, that should have told the people, This hour, or day the Sun should be darkned? A juggler by the handling of his goblets, and other trinkets, if it were not now ordinarily practised, would be thought to do his wonders by the power at least of the Devil. A man that hath practised to speak by drawing in of his breath, (which kind of men in antient time were called Ventriloqui,) and so make the weaknesse of his voice seem to proceed, not from the weak impulsion of the organs of Speech, but from distance of place, is able to make very many men beleeve it is a voice from Heaven, whatsoever he please to tell them. And for a crafty man, that hath enquired into the secrets, and familiar confessions that one man ordinarily maketh to another of his actions and adventures past, to tell them him again is no hard matter; and yet there be many, that by such means as that, obtain the reputation of being Conjurers. But it is too long a businesse, to reckon up the severall sorts of those men, which the Greeks called Thaumaturgi, that is to say, workers of things wonderfull; and yet these do all they do, by their own single dexterity. But if we looke upon the Impostures wrought by Confederacy, there is nothing how impossible soever to be done, that is impossible to bee beleeved. For two men conspiring, one to seem lame, the other to cure him with a charme, will deceive many: but many conspiring, one to seem lame, another so to cure him, and all the rest to bear witnesse; will deceive many more.\n\nIn this aptitude of mankind, to give too hasty beleefe to pretended Miracles, there can be no better, nor I think any other caution, than that which God hath prescribed, first by Moses, (as I have said before in the precedent chapter,) in the beginning of the 13. and end of the 18. of Deuteronomy; That wee take not any for Prophets, that teach any other Religion, then that which Gods Lieutenant, (which at that time was Moses,) hath established; nor any, (though he teach the same Religion,) whose Praediction we doe not see come to passe. Moses therefore in his time, and Aaron, and his successors in their times, and the Soveraign Governour of Gods people, next under God himself, that is to say, the Head of the Church in all times, are to be consulted, what doctrine he hath established, before wee give credit to a pretended Miracle, or Prophet. And when that is done, the thing they pretend to be a Miracle, we must both see it done, and use all means possible to consider, whether it be really done; and not onely so, but whether it be such, as no man can do the like by his naturall power, but that it requires the immediate hand of God. And in this also we must have recourse to Gods Lieutenant; to whom in all doubtfull cases, wee have submitted our private judgments. For Example; if a man pretend, that after certain words spoken over a peece of bread, that presently God hath made it not bread, but a God, or a man, or both, and neverthelesse it looketh still as like bread as ever it did; there is no reason for any man to think it really done; nor consequently to fear him, till he enquire of God, by his Vicar, or Lieutenant, whether it be done, or not. If he say not, then followeth that which Moses saith, (Deut. 18. 22.) “he hath spoken it presumptuously, thou shalt not fear him.” If he say ’tis done, then he is not to contradict it. So also if wee see not, but onely hear tell of a Miracle, we are to consult the Lawful Church; that is to say, the lawful Head thereof, how far we are to give credit to the relators of it. And this is chiefly the case of men, that in these days live under Christian Soveraigns. For in these times, I do not know one man, that ever saw any such wondrous work, done by the charm, or at the word, or prayer of a man, that a man endued but with a mediocrity of reason, would think supernaturall: and the question is no more, whether what wee see done, be a Miracle; whether the Miracle we hear, or read of, were a reall work, and not the Act of a tongue, or pen; but in plain terms, whether the report be true, or a lye. In which question we are not every one, to make our own private Reason, or Conscience, but the Publique Reason, that is, the reason of Gods Supreme Lieutenant, Judge; and indeed we have made him Judge already, if wee have given him a Soveraign power, to doe all that is necessary for our peace and defence. A private man has alwaies the liberty, (because thought is free,) to beleeve, or not beleeve in his heart, those acts that have been given out for Miracles, according as he shall see, what benefit can accrew by mens belief, to those that pretend, or countenance them, and thereby conjecture, whether they be Miracles, or Lies. But when it comes to confession of that faith, the Private Reason must submit to the Publique; that is to say, to Gods Lieutenant. But who is this Lieutenant of God, and Head of the Church, shall be considered in its proper place thereafter.\n\nCHAPTER XXXVIII. OF THE SIGNIFICATION IN SCRIPTURE OF ETERNALL LIFE, HELL, SALVATION, THE WORLD TO COME, AND REDEMPTION\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 1\n\nOF THE SIGNIFICATION IN SCRIPTURE OF ETERNALL LIFE, HELL, SALVATION, THE WORLD TO COME, AND REDEMPTION\n\nThe maintenance of Civill Society, depending on Justice; and Justice on the power of Life and Death, and other lesse Rewards and Punishments, residing in them that have the Soveraignty of the Common-wealth; It is impossible a Common-wealth should stand, where any other than the Soveraign, hath a power of giving greater rewards than Life; and of inflicting greater punishments than Death. Now seeing Eternall Life is a greater reward, than the Life Present; and Eternall Torment a greater punishment than the Death of Nature; It is a thing worthy to be well considered, of all men that desire (by obeying Authority) to avoid the calamities of Confusion, and Civill war, what is meant in Holy Scripture, by Life Eternall, and Torment Eternall; and for what offences, against whom committed, men are to be Eternally Tormented; and for what actions, they are to obtain Eternall Life.\n\nAnd first we find, that Adam was created in such a condition of life, as had he not broken the commandement of God, he had enjoyed it in the Paradise of Eden Everlastingly. For there was the Tree of Life; whereof he was so long allowed to eat, as he should forbear to eat of the tree of Knowledge of Good an Evill; which was not allowed him. And therefore as soon as he had eaten of it, God thrust him out of Paradise, “lest he should put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and live for ever.” (Gen. 3. 22.) By which it seemeth to me, (with submission neverthelesse both in this, and in all questions, whereof the determination dependeth on the Scriptures, to the interpretation of the Bible authorized by the Common-wealth, whose Subject I am,) that Adam if he had not sinned, had had an Eternall Life on Earth: and that Mortality entred upon himself, and his posterity, by his first Sin. Not that actuall Death then entred; for Adam then could never have had children; whereas he lived long after, and saw a numerous posterity ere he dyed. But where it is said, “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die,” it must needs bee meant of his Mortality, and certitude of death. Seeing then Eternall life was lost by Adams forfeiture, in committing sin, he that should cancell that forfeiture was to recover thereby, that Life again. Now Jesus Christ hath satisfied for the sins of all that beleeve in him; and therefore recovered to all beleevers, that ETERNALL LIFE, which was lost by the sin of Adam. And in this sense it is, that the comparison of St. Paul holdeth (Rom. 5.18, 19.) “As by the offence of one, Judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousnesse of one, the free gift came upon all men to Justification of Life.” Which is again (1 Cor. 15.21,22) more perspicuously delivered in these words, “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”\n\nConcerning the place wherein men shall enjoy that Eternall Life, which Christ hath obtained for them, the texts next before alledged seem to make it on Earth. For if as in Adam, all die, that is, have forfeited Paradise, and Eternall Life on Earth; even so in Christ all shall be made alive; then all men shall be made to live on Earth; for else the comparison were not proper. Hereunto seemeth to agree that of the Psalmist, (Psal. 133.3.) “Upon Zion God commanded the blessing, even Life for evermore;” for Zion, is in Jerusalem, upon Earth: as also that of S. Joh. (Rev. 2.7.) “To him that overcommeth I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.” This was the tree of Adams Eternall life; but his life was to have been on Earth. The same seemeth to be confirmed again by St. Joh. (Rev. 21.2.) where he saith, “I John saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a Bride adorned for her husband:” and again v. 10. to the same effect: As if he should say, the new Jerusalem, the Paradise of God, at the coming again of Christ, should come down to Gods people from Heaven, and not they goe up to it from Earth. And this differs nothing from that, which the two men in white clothing (that is, the two Angels) said to the Apostles, that were looking upon Christ ascending (Acts 1.11.) “This same Jesus, who is taken up from you into Heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him go up into Heaven.” Which soundeth as if they had said, he should come down to govern them under his Father, Eternally here; and not take them up to govern them in Heaven; and is conformable to the Restauration of the Kingdom of God, instituted under Moses; which was a Political government of the Jews on Earth. Again, that saying of our Saviour (Mat. 22.30.) “that in the Resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the Angels of God in heaven,” is a description of an Eternall Life, resembling that which we lost in Adam in the point of Marriage. For seeing Adam, and Eve, if they had not sinned, had lived on Earth Eternally, in their individuall persons; it is manifest, they should not continually have procreated their kind. For if Immortals should have generated, as Mankind doth now; the Earth in a small time, would not have been able to afford them a place to stand on. The Jews that asked our Saviour the question, whose wife the woman that had married many brothers, should be, in the resurrection, knew not what were the consequences of Immortality; that there shal be no Generation, and consequently no marriage, no more than there is Marriage, or generation among the Angels. The comparison between that Eternall life which Adam lost, and our Saviour by his Victory over death hath recovered; holdeth also in this, that as Adam lost Eternall Life by his sin, and yet lived after it for a time; so the faithful Christian hath recovered Eternal Life by Christs passion, though he die a natural death, and remaine dead for a time; namely, till the Resurrection. For as Death is reckoned from the Condemnation of Adam, not from the Execution; so life is reckoned from the Absolution, not from the Resurrection of them that are elected in Christ.\n\nThat the place wherein men are to live Eternally, after the Resurrection, is the Heavens, meaning by Heaven, those parts of the world, which are the most remote from Earth, as where the stars are, or above the stars, in another Higher Heaven, called Caelum Empyreum, (whereof there is no mention in Scripture, nor ground in Reason) is not easily to be drawn from any text that I can find. By the Kingdome of Heaven, is meant the Kingdome of the King that dwelleth in Heaven; and his Kingdome was the people of Israel, whom he ruled by the Prophets his Lieutenants, first Moses, and after him Eleazar, and the Soveraign Priests, till in the days of Samuel they rebelled, and would have a mortall man for their King, after the manner of other Nations. And when our Saviour Christ, by the preaching of his Ministers, shall have perswaded the Jews to return, and called the Gentiles to his obedience, then shall there be a new Kingdome of Heaven, because our King shall then be God, whose Throne is Heaven; without any necessity evident in the Scripture, that man shall ascend to his happinesse any higher than Gods Footstool the Earth. On the contrary, we find written (Joh. 3.13.) that “no man hath ascended into Heaven, but he that came down from Heaven, even the Son of man, that is in Heaven.” Where I observe by the way, that these words are not, as those which go immediately before, the words of our Saviour, but of St. John himself; for Christ was then not in Heaven, but upon the Earth. The like is said of David (Acts 2.34.) where St. Peter, to prove the Ascension of Christ, using the words of the Psalmist, (Psal. 16.10.) “Thou wilt not leave my soule in Hell, nor suffer thine Holy one to see corruption,” saith, they were spoken (not of David, but) of Christ; and to prove it, addeth this Reason, “For David is not ascended into Heaven.” But to this a man may easily answer, and say, that though their bodies were not to ascend till the generall day of Judgment, yet their souls were in Heaven as soon as they were departed from their bodies; which also seemeth to be confirmed by the words of our Saviour (Luke 20.37,38.) who proving the Resurrection out of the word of Moses, saith thus, “That the dead are raised, even Moses shewed, at the bush, when he calleth the Lord, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the Dead, but of the Living; for they all live to him.” But if these words be to be understood only of the Immortality of the Soul, they prove not at all that which our Saviour intended to prove, which was the Resurrection of the Body, that is to say, the Immortality of the Man. Therefore our Saviour meaneth, that those Patriarchs were Immortall; not by a property consequent to the essence, and nature of mankind, but by the will of God, that was pleased of his mere grace, to bestow Eternall Life upon the faithfull. And though at that time the Patriarchs and many other faithfull men were Dead, yet as it is in the text, they Lived To God; that is, they were written in the Book of Life with them that were absolved of their sinnes, and ordained to Life eternall at the Resurrection. That the Soul of man is in its own nature Eternall, and a living Creature independent on the Body; or that any meer man is Immortall, otherwise than by the Resurrection in the last day, (except Enos and Elias,) is a doctrine not apparent in Scripture. The whole 14. Chapter of Job, which is the speech not of his friends, but of himselfe, is a complaint of this Mortality of Nature; and yet no contradiction of the Immortality at the Resurrection. “There is hope of a tree,” (saith hee verse 7.) “if it be cast down, Though the root thereof wax old, and the stock thereof die in the ground, yet when it scenteth the water it will bud, and bring forth boughes like a Plant. But man dyeth, and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the Ghost, and where is he?” and (verse 12.) “man lyeth down, and riseth not, till the heavens be no more.” But when is it, that the heavens shall be no more? St. Peter tells us, that it is at the generall Resurrection. For in his 2. Epistle, 3. Chapter, and 7. verse, he saith, that “the Heavens and the Earth that are now, are reserved unto fire against the day of Judgment, and perdition of ungodly men,” and (verse 12.) “looking for, and hasting to the comming of God, wherein the Heavens shall be on fire, and shall be dissolved, and the Elements shall melt with fervent heat. Neverthelesse, we according to the promise look for new Heavens, and a new Earth, wherein dwelleth righteousnesse.” Therefore where Job saith, man riseth not till the Heavens be no more; it is all one, as if he had said, the Immortall Life (and Soule and Life in the Scripture, do usually signifie the same thing) beginneth not in man, till the Resurrection, and day of Judgment; and hath for cause, not his specificall nature, and generation; but the Promise. For St. Peter saies not, “Wee look for new heavens, and a new earth, (from Nature) but from Promise.”\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 2\n\nLastly, seeing it hath been already proved out of divers evident places of Scripture, in the 35. chapter of this book, that the Kingdom of God is a Civil Common-wealth, where God himself is Soveraign, by vertue first of the Old, and since of the New Covenant, wherein he reigneth by his Vicar, or Lieutenant; the same places do therefore also prove, that after the comming again of our Saviour in his Majesty, and glory, to reign actually, and Eternally; the Kingdom of God is to be on Earth. But because this doctrine (though proved out of places of Scripture not few, nor obscure) will appear to most men a novelty; I doe but propound it; maintaining nothing in this, or any other paradox of Religion; but attending the end of that dispute of the sword, concerning the Authority, (not yet amongst my Countrey-men decided,) by which all sorts of doctrine are to bee approved, or rejected; and whose commands, both in speech, and writing, (whatsoever be the opinions of private men) must by all men, that mean to be protected by their Laws, be obeyed. For the points of doctrine concerning the Kingdome (of) God, have so great influence on the Kingdome of Man, as not to be determined, but by them, that under God have the Soveraign Power.\n\nAs the Kingdome of God, and Eternall Life, so also Gods Enemies, and their Torments after Judgment, appear by the Scripture, to have their place on Earth. The name of the place, where all men remain till the Resurrection, that were either buryed, or swallowed up of the Earth, is usually called in Scripture, by words that signifie Under Ground; which the Latines read generally Infernus, and Inferni, and the Greeks Hades; that is to say, a place where men cannot see; and containeth as well the Grave, as any other deeper place. But for the place of the damned after the Resurrection, it is not determined, neither in the Old, nor New Testament, by any note of situation; but onely by the company: as that it shall bee, where such wicked men were, as God in former times in extraordinary, and miraculous manner, had destroyed from off the face of the Earth: As for Example, that they are in Inferno, in Tartarus, or in the bottomelesse pit; because Corah, Dathan, and Abirom, were swallowed up alive into the earth. Not that the Writers of the Scripture would have us beleeve, there could be in the globe of the Earth, which is not only finite, but also (compared to the height of the Stars) of no considerable magnitude, a pit without a bottome; that is, a hole of infinite depth, such as the Greeks in their Daemonologie (that is to say, in their doctrine concerning Daemons,) and after them, the Romans called Tartarus; of which Virgill sayes,\n\nBis patet in præceps, tantem tendítque sub umbras,\n\nQuantus ad æthereum cœli suspectus Olympum:\n\nfor that is a thing the proportion of Earth to Heaven cannot bear: but that wee should beleeve them there, indefinitely, where those men are, on whom God inflicted that Exemplary punnishment.\n\nAgain, because those mighty men of the Earth, that lived in the time of Noah, before the floud, (which the Greeks called Heroes, and the Scripture Giants, and both say, were begotten, by copulation of the children of God, with the children of men,) were for their wicked life destroyed by the generall deluge; the place of the Damned, is therefore also sometimes marked out, by the company of those deceased Giants; as Proverbs 21.16. “The man that wandreth out of the way of understanding, shall remain in the congregation of the Giants,” and Job 26.5. “Behold the Giants groan under water, and they that dwell with them.” Here the place of the Damned, is under the water. And Isaiah 14.9. “Hell is troubled how to meet thee,” (that is, the King of Babylon) “and will displace the Giants for thee:” and here again the place of the Damned, (if the sense be literall,) is to be under water.\n\nThirdly, because the Cities of Sodom, and Gomorrah, by the extraordinary wrath of God, were consumed for their wickednesse with Fire and Brimstone, and together with them the countrey about made a stinking bituminous Lake; the place of the Damned is sometimes expressed by Fire, and a Fiery Lake: as in the Apocalypse ch.21.8. “But the timorous, incredulous, and abominable, and Murderers, and Whoremongers, and Sorcerers, and Idolators, and all Lyars, shall have their part in the Lake that burneth with Fire, and Brimstone; which is the second Death.” So that it is manifest, that Hell Fire, which is here expressed by Metaphor, from the reall Fire of Sodome, signifieth not any certain kind, or place of Torment; but is to be taken indefinitely, for Destruction, as it is in the 20. Chapter, at the 14. verse; where it is said, that “Death and Hell were cast into the Lake of Fire;” that is to say, were abolished, and destroyed; as if after the day of Judgment, there shall be no more Dying, nor no more going into Hell; that is, no more going to Hades (from which word perhaps our word Hell is derived,) which is the same with no more Dying.\n\nFourthly, from the Plague of Darknesse inflicted on the Egyptians, of which it is written (Exod. 10.23.) “They saw not one another, neither rose any man from his place for three days; but all the Children of Israel had light in their dwellings;” the place of the wicked after Judgment, is called Utter Darknesse, or (as it is in the originall) Darknesse Without. And so it is expressed (Mat. 22.13.) where the King commandeth his Servants, “to bind hand and foot the man that had not on his Wedding garment, and to cast him out,” Eis To Skotos To Exoteron, Externall Darknesse, or Darknesse Without: which though translated Utter Darknesse, does not signifie How Great, but Where that darknesse is to be; namely, Without The Habitation of Gods Elect.\n\nLastly, whereas there was a place neer Jerusalem, called the Valley of the Children of Hinnon; in a part whereof, called Tophet, the Jews had committed most grievous Idolatry, sacrificing their children to the Idol Moloch; and wherein also God had afflicted his enemies with most grievous punishments; and wherein Josias had burnt the Priests of Moloch upon their own Altars, as appeareth at large in the 2 of Kings chap. 23. the place served afterwards, to receive the filth, and garbage which was carried thither, out of the City; and there used to be fires made, from time to time, to purifie the aire, and take away the stench of Carrion. From this abominable place, the Jews used ever after to call the place of the Damned, by the name of Gehenna, or Valley of Hinnon. And this Gehenna, is that word, which is usually now translated HELL; and from the fires from time to time there burning, we have the notion of Everlasting, and Unquenchable Fire.\n\nSeeing now there is none, that so interprets the Scripture, as that after the day of Judgment, the wicked are all Eternally to be punished in the Valley of Hinnon; or that they shall so rise again, as to be ever after under ground, or under water; or that after the Resurrection, they shall no more see one another; nor stir from one place to another; it followeth, me thinks, very necessarily, that that which is thus said concerning Hell Fire, is spoken metaphorically; and that therefore there is a proper sense to bee enquired after, (for of all Metaphors there is some reall ground, that may be expressed in proper words) both of the Place of Hell, and the nature of Hellish Torment, and Tormenters.\n\nAnd first for the Tormenters, wee have their nature, and properties, exactly and properly delivered by the names of, The Enemy, or Satan; The Accuser, or Diabolus; The Destroyer, or Abbadon. Which significant names, Satan, Devill, Abbadon, set not forth to us any Individuall person, as proper names use to doe; but onely an office, or quality; and are therefore Appellatives; which ought not to have been left untranslated, as they are, in the Latine, and Modern Bibles; because thereby they seem to be the proper names of Daemons; and men are the more easily seduced to beleeve the doctrine of Devills; which at that time was the Religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to that of Moses, and of Christ.\n\nAnd because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant, the Enemy of them that shall be in the Kingdome of God; therefore if the Kingdome of God after the Resurrection, bee upon the Earth, (as in the former Chapter I have shewn by Scripture it seems to be,) The Enemy, and his Kingdome must be on Earth also. For so also was it, in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For Gods Kingdome was in Palestine; and the Nations round about, were the Kingdomes of the Enemy; and consequently by Satan, is meant any Earthly Enemy of the Church.\n\nThe Torments of Hell, are expressed sometimes, by “weeping, and gnashing of teeth,” as Mat. 8.12. Sometimes, by “the worm of Conscience;” as Isa.66.24. and Mark 9.44, 46, 48; sometimes, by Fire, as in the place now quoted, “where the worm dyeth not, and the fire is not quenched,” and many places beside: sometimes by “Shame, and contempt,” as Dan. 12.2. “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the Earth, shall awake; some to Everlasting life; and some to shame, and everlasting contempt.” All which places design metaphorically a grief, and discontent of mind, from the sight of that Eternall felicity in others, which they themselves through their own incredulity, and disobedience have lost. And because such felicity in others, is not sensible but by comparison with their own actuall miseries; it followeth that they are to suffer such bodily paines, and calamities, as are incident to those, who not onely live under evill and cruell Governours, but have also for Enemy, the Eternall King of the Saints, God Almighty. And amongst these bodily paines, is to be reckoned also to every one of the wicked a second Death. For though the Scripture bee clear for an universall Resurrection; yet wee do not read, that to any of the Reprobate is promised an Eternall life. For whereas St. Paul (1 Cor. 15.42, 43.) to the question concerning what bodies men shall rise with again, saith, that “the body is sown in corruption, and is raised in incorruption; It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weaknesse, it is raised in power;” Glory and Power cannot be applyed to the bodies of the wicked: Nor can the name of Second Death, bee applyed to those that can never die but once: And although in Metaphoricall speech, a Calamitous life Everlasting, may bee called an Everlasting Death yet it cannot well be understood of a Second Death. The fire prepared for the wicked, is an Everlasting Fire: that is to say, the estate wherein no man can be without torture, both of body and mind, after the Resurrection, shall endure for ever; and in that sense the Fire shall be unquenchable, and the torments Everlasting: but it cannot thence be inferred, that hee who shall be cast into that fire, or be tormented with those torments, shall endure, and resist them so, as to be eternally burnt, and tortured, and yet never be destroyed, nor die. And though there be many places that affirm Everlasting Fire, and Torments (into which men may be cast successively one after another for ever;) yet I find none that affirm there shall bee an Eternall Life therein of any individuall person; but on the contrary, an Everlasting Death, which is the Second Death: (Apoc. 20. 13,14.) “For after Death, and the Grave shall have delivered up the dead which were in them, and every man be judged according to his works; Death and the Grave shall also be cast into the Lake of Fire. This is the Second Death.” Whereby it is evident, that there is to bee a Second Death of every one that shall bee condemned at the day of Judgement, after which hee shall die no more.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 3\n\nThe joyes of Life Eternall, are in Scripture comprehended all under the name of SALVATION, or Being Saved. To be saved, is to be secured, either respectively, against speciall Evills, or absolutely against all Evill, comprehending Want, Sicknesse, and Death it self. And because man was created in a condition Immortall, not subject to corruption, and consequently to nothing that tendeth to the dissolution of his nature; and fell from that happinesse by the sin of Adam; it followeth, that to be Saved From Sin, is to be saved from all the Evill, and Calamities that Sinne hath brought upon us. And therefore in the Holy Scripture, Remission of Sinne, and Salvation from Death and Misery, is the same thing, as it appears by the words of our Saviour, who having cured a man sick of the Palsey, by saying, (Mat. 9.2.) “Son be of good cheer, thy Sins be forgiven thee;” and knowing that the Scribes took for blasphemy, that a man should pretend to forgive Sins, asked them (v.5.) “whether it were easier to say, Thy Sinnes be forgiven thee, or, Arise and walk;” signifying thereby, that it was all one, as to the saving of the sick, to say, “Thy Sins are forgiven,” and “Arise and walk;” and that he used that form of speech, onely to shew he had power to forgive Sins. And it is besides evident in reason, that since Death and Misery, were the punishments of Sin, the discharge of Sinne, must also be a discharge of Death and Misery; that is to say, Salvation absolute, such as the faithfull are to enjoy after the day of Judgment, by the power, and favour of Jesus Christ, who for that cause is called our SAVIOUR.\n\nConcerning Particular Salvations, such as are understood, 1 Sam. 14.39. “as the Lord liveth that saveth Israel,” that is, from their temporary enemies, and 2 Sam. 22.4. “Thou art my Saviour, thou savest me from violence;” and 2 Kings 13.5. “God gave the Israelites a Saviour, and so they were delivered from the hand of the Assyrians,” and the like, I need say nothing; there being neither difficulty, nor interest, to corrupt the interpretation of texts of that kind.\n\nBut concerning the Generall Salvation, because it must be in the Kingdome of Heaven, there is great difficulty concerning the Place. On one side, by Kingdome (which is an estate ordained by men for their perpetuall security against enemies, and want) it seemeth that this Salvation should be on Earth. For by Salvation is set forth unto us, a glorious Reign of our King, by Conquest; not a safety by Escape: and therefore there where we look for Salvation, we must look also for Triumph; and before Triumph, for Victory; and before Victory, for Battell; which cannot well be supposed, shall be in Heaven. But how good soever this reason may be, I will not trust to it, without very evident places of Scripture. The state of Salvation is described at large, Isaiah, 33. ver. 20,21,22,23,24.\n\n“Look upon Zion, the City of our solemnities, thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken.\n\nBut there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers, and streams; wherein shall goe no Gally with oares; neither shall gallant ship passe thereby.\n\nFor the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King, he will save us.\n\nThy tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast; they could not spread the sail: then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey.\n\nAnd the Inhabitant shall not say, I am sicke; the people that shall dwell therein shall be forgiven their Iniquity.”\n\nIn which words wee have the place from whence Salvation is to proceed, “Jerusalem, a quiet habitation;” the Eternity of it, “a tabernacle that shall not be taken down,” &c. The Saviour of it, “the Lord, their Judge, their Lawgiver, their King, he will save us;” the Salvation, “the Lord shall be to them as a broad mote of swift waters,” &c. the condition of their Enemies, “their tacklings are loose, their masts weake, the lame shal take the spoil of them.” The condition of the Saved, “The Inhabitants shall not say, I am sick:” And lastly, all this is comprehended in Forgivenesse of sin, “The people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity.” By which it is evident, that Salvation shall be on Earth, then, when God shall reign, (at the coming again of Christ) in Jerusalem; and from Jerusalem shall proceed the Salvation of the Gentiles that shall be received into Gods Kingdome; as is also more expressely declared by the same Prophet, Chap. 66.20, 21. “And they,” (that is, the Gentiles who had any Jew in bondage) “shall bring all your brethren, for an offering to the Lord, out of all nations, upon horses, and in charets, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain, Jerusalem, saith the Lord, as the Children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessell into the House of the Lord. And I will also take of them for Priests and for Levites, saith the Lord:” Whereby it is manifest, that the chief seat of Gods Kingdome (which is the Place, from whence the Salvation of us that were Gentiles, shall proceed) shall be Jerusalem; And the same is also confirmed by our Saviour, in his discourse with the woman of Samaria, concerning the place of Gods worship; to whom he saith, John 4.22. that the Samaritans worshipped they know not what, but the Jews worship what they knew, “For Salvation is of the Jews (Ex Judais, that is, begins at the Jews): as if he should say, you worship God, but know not by whom he wil save you, as we doe, that know it shall be one of the tribe of Judah, a Jew, not a Samaritan. And therefore also the woman not impertinently answered him again, “We know the Messias shall come.” So that which our saviour saith, “Salvation is from the Jews,” is the same that Paul sayes (Rom. 1.16,17.) “The Gospel is the power of God to Salvation to every one that beleeveth; To the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousnesse of God revealed from faith to faith;” from the faith of the Jew, to the faith of the Gentile. In the like sense the Prophet Joel describing the day of Judgment, (chap. 2.30,31.) that God would “shew wonders in heaven, and in earth, bloud, and fire, and pillars of smoak. The Sun should be turned to darknesse, and the Moon into bloud, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come,” he addeth verse 32. “and it shall come to passe, that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord, shall be saved. For in Mount Zion, and in Jerusalem shall be Salvation.” And Obadiah verse 17 saith the same, “Upon Mount Zion shall be Deliverance; and there shall be holinesse, and the house of Jacob shall possesse their possessions,” that is, the possessions of the Heathen, which possessions he expresseth more particularly in the following verses, by the Mount of Esau, the Land of the Philistines, the Fields of Ephraim, of Samaria, Gilead, and the Cities of the South, and concludes with these words, “the Kingdom shall be the Lords.” All these places are for Salvation, and the Kingdome of God (after the day of Judgement) upon Earth. On the other side, I have not found any text that can probably be drawn, to prove any Ascension of the Saints into Heaven; that is to say, into any Coelum Empyreum, or other aetheriall Region; saving that it is called the Kingdome of Heaven; which name it may have, because God, that was King of the Jews, governed them by his commands, sent to Moses by Angels from Heaven, to reduce them to their obedience; and shall send him thence again, to rule both them, and all other faithfull men, from the day of Judgment, Everlastingly: or from that, that the Throne of this our Great King is in Heaven; whereas the Earth is but his Footstoole. But that the Subjects of God should have any place as high as his throne, or higher than his Footstoole, it seemeth not sutable to the dignity of a King, nor can I find any evident text for it in holy Scripture.\n\nFrom this that hath been said of the Kingdom of God, and of Salvation, it is not hard to interpret, what is meant by the WORLD TO COME. There are three worlds mentioned in Scripture, the Old World, the Present World, and the World to Come. Of the first, St. Peter speaks, (2 Pet. 2.5.) “If God spared not the Old World, but saved Noah the eighth person, a Preacher of righteousnesse, bringing the flood upon the world of the ungodly,” &c. So the First World, was from Adam to the generall Flood. Of the present World, our Saviour speaks (John 18.36.) “My Kingdome is not of this World.” For he came onely to teach men the way of Salvation, and to renew the Kingdome of his Father, by his doctrine. Of the World to come, St. Peter speaks, (2 Pet. 3. 13.) “Neverthelesse we according to his promise look for new Heavens, and a new Earth.” This is that WORLD, wherein Christ coming down from Heaven, in the clouds, with great power, and glory, shall send his Angels, and shall gather together his elect, from the four winds, and from the uttermost parts of the Earth, and thence forth reign over them, (under his Father) Everlastingly.\n\nSalvation of a sinner, supposeth a precedent REDEMPTION; for he that is once guilty of Sin, is obnoxious to the Penalty of the same; and must pay (or some other for him) such Ransome, as he that is offended, and has him in his power, shall require. And seeing the person offended, is Almighty God, in whose power are all things; such Ransome is to be paid before Salvation can be acquired, as God hath been pleased to require. By this Ransome, is not intended a satisfaction for Sin, equivalent to the Offence, which no sinner for himselfe, nor righteous man can ever be able to make for another; The dammage a man does to another, he may make amends for by restitution, or recompence, but sin cannot be taken away by recompence; for that were to make the liberty to sin, a thing vendible. But sins may bee pardoned to the repentant, either Gratis, or upon such penalty, as God is pleased to accept. That which God usually accepted in the Old Testament, was some Sacrifice, or Oblation. To forgive sin is not an act of Injustice, though the punishment have been threatned. Even amongst men, though the promise of Good, bind the promiser; yet threats, that is to say, promises, of Evill, bind them not; much lesse shall they bind God, who is infinitely more mercifull then men. Our Saviour Christ therefore to Redeem us, did not in that sense satisfie for the Sins of men, as that his Death, of its own vertue, could make it unjust in God to punish sinners with Eternall death; but did make that Sacrifice, and Oblation of himself, at his first coming, which God was pleased to require, for the Salvation at his second coming, of such as in the mean time should repent, and beleeve in him. And though this act of our Redemption, be not alwaies in Scripture called a Sacrifice, and Oblation, but sometimes a Price, yet by Price we are not to understand any thing, by the value whereof, he could claim right to a pardon for us, from his offended Father, but that Price which God the Father was pleased in mercy to demand.\n\nCHAPTER XXXIX. OF THE SIGNIFICATION IN SCRIPTURE OF THE WORD CHURCH\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIX\n\nOF THE SIGNIFICATION IN SCRIPTURE OF THE WORD CHURCH\n\nThe word Church, (Ecclesia) signifieth in the Books of Holy Scripture divers things. Sometimes (though not often) it is taken for Gods House, that is to say, for a Temple, wherein Christians assemble to perform holy duties publiquely; as, 1 Cor. 14. ver. 34. “Let your women keep silence in the Churches:” but this is Metaphorically put, for the Congregation there assembled; and hath been since used for the Edifice it self, to distinguish between the Temples of Christians, and Idolaters. The Temple of Jerusalem was Gods House, and the House of Prayer; and so is any Edifice dedicated by Christians to the worship of Christ, Christs House: and therefore the Greek Fathers call it Kuriake, The Lords House; and thence, in our language it came to be called Kyrke, and Church.\n\nChurch (when not taken for a House) signifieth the same that Ecclesia signified in the Grecian Common-wealths; that is to say, a Congregation, or an Assembly of Citizens, called forth, to hear the Magistrate speak unto them; and which in the Common-wealth of Rome was called Concio, as he that spake was called Ecclesiastes, and Concionator. And when they were called forth by lawfull Authority, (Acts 19.39.) it was Ecclesia Legitima, a Lawfull Church, Ennomos Ecclesia. But when they were excited by tumultuous, and seditious clamor, then it was a confused Church, Ecclesia Sugkechumene.\n\nIt is taken also sometimes for the men that have right to be of the Congregation, though not actually assembled; that is to say, for the whole multitude of Christian men, how far soever they be dispersed: as (Act. 8.3.) where it is said, that “Saul made havock of the Church:” And in this sense is Christ said to be Head of the Church. And sometimes for a certain part of Christians, as (Col. 4.15.) “Salute the Church that is in his house.” Sometimes also for the Elect onely; as (Ephes. 5.27.) “A Glorious Church, without spot, or wrinkle, holy, and without blemish;” which is meant of the Church Triumphant, or, Church To Come. Sometimes, for a Congregation assembled, of professors of Christianity, whether their profession be true, or counterfeit, as it is understood, Mat. 18.17. where it is said, “Tell it to the Church, and if hee neglect to hear the Church, let him be to thee as a Gentile, or Publican.”\n\nAnd in this last sense only it is that the Church can be taken for one Person; that is to say, that it can be said to have power to will, to pronounce, to command, to be obeyed, to make laws, or to doe any other action whatsoever; For without authority from a lawfull Congregation, whatsoever act be done in a concourse of people, it is the particular act of every one of those that were present, and gave their aid to the performance of it; and not the act of them all in grosse, as of one body; much lesse that act of them that were absent, or that being present, were not willing it should be done. According to this sense, I define a CHURCH to be, “A company of men professing Christian Religion, united in the person of one Soveraign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.” And because in all Common-wealths, that Assembly, which is without warrant from the Civil Soveraign, is unlawful; that Church also, which is assembled in any Common-wealth, that hath forbidden them to assemble, is an unlawfull Assembly.\n\nIt followeth also, that there is on Earth, no such universall Church as all Christians are bound to obey; because there is no power on Earth, to which all other Common-wealths are subject: There are Christians, in the Dominions of severall Princes and States; but every one of them is subject to that Common-wealth, whereof he is himself a member; and consequently, cannot be subject to the commands of any other Person. And therefore a Church, such as one as is capable to Command, to Judge, Absolve, Condemn, or do any other act, is the same thing with a Civil Common-wealth, consisting of Christian men; and is called a Civill State, for that the subjects of it are Men; and a Church, for that the subjects thereof are Christians. Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign. It is true, that the bodies of the faithfull, after the Resurrection shall be not onely Spirituall, but Eternall; but in this life they are grosse, and corruptible. There is therefore no other Government in this life, neither of State, nor Religion, but Temporall; nor teaching of any doctrine, lawfull to any Subject, which the Governour both of the State, and of the Religion, forbiddeth to be taught: And that Governor must be one; or else there must needs follow Faction, and Civil war in the Common-wealth, between the Church and State; between Spiritualists, and Temporalists; between the Sword Of Justice, and the Shield Of Faith; and (which is more) in every Christian mans own brest, between the Christian, and the Man. The Doctors of the Church, are called Pastors; so also are Civill Soveraignes: But if Pastors be not subordinate one to another, so as that there may bee one chief Pastor, men will be taught contrary Doctrines, whereof both may be, and one must be false. Who that one chief Pastor is, according to the law of Nature, hath been already shewn; namely, that it is the Civill Soveraign; And to whom the Scripture hath assigned that Office, we shall see in the Chapters following.\n\nCHAPTER XL. OF THE RIGHTS OF THE KINGDOME OF GOD, IN ABRAHAM, MOSES, HIGH PRIESTS, AND THE KINGS OF JUDAH\n\n### Part III, Chapter XL, 1\n\nOF THE RIGHTS OF THE KINGDOME OF GOD, IN ABRAHAM, MOSES, HIGH PRIESTS, AND THE KINGS OF JUDAH\n\nThe Father of the Faithfull, and first in the Kingdome of God by Covenant, was Abraham. For with him was the Covenant first made; wherein he obliged himself, and his seed after him, to acknowledge and obey the commands of God; not onely such, as he could take notice of, (as Morall Laws,) by the light of Nature; but also such, as God should in speciall manner deliver to him by Dreams and Visions. For as to the Morall law, they were already obliged, and needed not have been contracted withall, by promise of the Land of Canaan. Nor was there any Contract, that could adde to, or strengthen the Obligation, by which both they, and all men else were bound naturally to obey God Almighty: And therefore the Covenant which Abraham made with God, was to take for the Commandement of God, that which in the name of God was commanded him, in a Dream, or Vision, and to deliver it to his family, and cause them to observe the same.\n\nIn this Contract of God with Abraham, wee may observe three points of important consequence in the government of Gods people. First, that at the making of this Covenant, God spake onely to Abraham; and therefore contracted not with any of his family, or seed, otherwise then as their wills (which make the essence of all Covenants) were before the Contract involved in the will of Abraham; who was therefore supposed to have had a lawfull power, to make them perform all that he covenanted for them. According whereunto (Gen 18.18, 19.) God saith, “All the Nations of the Earth shall be blessed in him, For I know him that he will command his children and his houshold after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord.” From whence may be concluded this first point, that they to whom God hath not spoken immediately, are to receive the positive commandements of God, from their Soveraign; as the family and seed of Abraham did from Abraham their Father, and Lord, and Civill Soveraign. And Consequently in every Common-wealth, they who have no supernaturall Revelation to the contrary, ought to obey the laws of their own Soveraign, in the externall acts and profession of Religion. As for the inward Thought, and beleef of men, which humane Governours can take no notice of, (for God onely knoweth the heart) they are not voluntary, nor the effect of the laws, but of the unrevealed will, and of the power of God; and consequently fall not under obligation.\n\nFrom whence proceedeth another point, that it was not unlawfull for Abraham, when any of his Subjects should pretend Private Vision, or Spirit, or other Revelation from God, for the countenancing of any doctrine which Abraham should forbid, or when they followed, or adhered to any such pretender, to punish them; and consequently that it is lawfull now for the Soveraign to punish any man that shall oppose his Private Spirit against the Laws: For hee hath the same place in the Common-wealth, that Abraham had in his own Family.\n\nThere ariseth also from the same, a third point; that as none but Abraham in his family, so none but the Soveraign in a Christian Common-wealth, can take notice what is, or what is not the Word of God. For God spake onely to Abraham; and it was he onely, that was able to know what God said, and to interpret the same to his family: And therefore also, they that have the place of Abraham in a Common-wealth, are the onely Interpreters of what God hath spoken.\n\nThe same Covenant was renewed with Isaac; and afterwards with Jacob; but afterwards no more, till the Israelites were freed from the Egyptians, and arrived at the Foot of Mount Sinai: and then it was renewed by Moses (as I have said before, chap. 35.) in such manner, as they became from that time forward the Peculiar Kingdome of God; whose Lieutenant was Moses, for his owne time; and the succession to that office was setled upon Aaron, and his heirs after him, to bee to God a Sacerdotall Kingdome for ever.\n\nBy this constitution, a Kingdome is acquired to God. But seeing Moses had no authority to govern the Israelites, as a successor to the right of Abraham, because he could not claim it by inheritance; it appeareth not as yet, that the people were obliged to take him for Gods Lieutenant, longer than they beleeved that God spake unto him. And therefore his authority (notwithstanding the Covenant they made with God) depended yet merely upon the opinion they had of his Sanctity, and of the reality of his Conferences with God, and the verity of his Miracles; which opinion coming to change, they were no more obliged to take any thing for the law of God, which he propounded to them in Gods name. We are therefore to consider, what other ground there was, of their obligation to obey him. For it could not be the commandement of God that could oblige them; because God spake not to them immediately, but by the mediation of Moses Himself; And our Saviour saith of himself, (John 5. 31.) “If I bear witnesse of my self, my witnesse is not true,” much lesse if Moses bear witnesse of himselfe, (especially in a claim of Kingly power over Gods people) ought his testimony to be received. His authority therefore, as the authority of all other Princes, must be grounded on the Consent of the People, and their Promise to obey him. And so it was: for “the people” (Exod. 20.18.) “when they saw the Thunderings, and the Lightnings, and the noyse of the Trumpet, and the mountaine smoaking, removed, and stood a far off. And they said unto Moses, speak thou with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we die.” Here was their promise of obedience; and by this it was they obliged themselves to obey whatsoever he should deliver unto them for the Commandement of God.\n\nAnd notwithstanding the Covenant constituted a Sacerdotall Kingdome, that is to say, a Kingdome hereditary to Aaron; yet that is to be understood of the succession, after Moses should bee dead. For whosoever ordereth, and establisheth the Policy, as first founder of a Common-wealth (be it Monarchy, Aristocracy, or Democracy) must needs have Soveraign Power over the people all the while he is doing of it. And that Moses had that power all his own time, is evidently affirmed in the Scripture. First, in the text last before cited, because the people promised obedience, not to Aaron but to him. Secondly, (Exod. 24.1, 2.) “And God said unto Moses, Come up unto the Lord, thou, and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the Elders of Israel. And Moses alone shall come neer the Lord, but they shall not come nigh, neither shall the people goe up with him.” By which it is plain, that Moses who was alone called up to God, (and not Aaron, nor the other Priests, nor the Seventy Elders, nor the People who were forbidden to come up) was alone he, that represented to the Israelites the Person of God; that is to say, was their sole Soveraign under God. And though afterwards it be said (verse 9.) “Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the Elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet, as it were a paved work of a saphire stone,” &c. yet this was not till after Moses had been with God before, and had brought to the people the words which God had said to him. He onely went for the businesse of the people; the others, as the Nobles of his retinue, were admitted for honour to that speciall grace, which was not allowed to the people; which was, (as in the verse after appeareth) to see God and live. “God laid not his hand upon them, they saw God and did eat and drink” (that is, did live), but did not carry any commandement from him to the people. Again, it is every where said, “The Lord spake unto Moses,” as in all other occasions of Government; so also in the ordering of the Ceremonies of Religion, contained in the 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31 Chapters of Exodus, and throughout Leviticus: to Aaron seldome. The Calfe that Aaron made, Moses threw into the fire. Lastly, the question of the Authority of Aaron, by occasion of his and Miriams mutiny against Moses, was (Numbers 12.) judged by God himself for Moses. So also in the question between Moses, and the People, when Corah, Dathan, and Abiram, and two hundred and fifty Princes of the Assembly “gathered themselves together” (Numbers 16. 3) “against Moses, and against Aaron, and said unto them, ‘Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are Holy, every one of them, and the Lord is amongst them, why lift you up your selves above the congregation of the Lord?’” God caused the Earth to swallow Corah, Dathan, and Abiram with their wives and children alive, and consumed those two hundred and fifty Princes with fire. Therefore neither Aaron, nor the People, nor any Aristocracy of the chief Princes of the People, but Moses alone had next under God the Soveraignty over the Israelites: And that not onely in causes of Civill Policy, but also of Religion; For Moses onely spake with God, and therefore onely could tell the People, what it was that God required at their hands. No man upon pain of death might be so presumptuous as to approach the Mountain where God talked with Moses. “Thou shalt set bounds” (saith the Lord, Exod 19. 12.) “to the people round about, and say, Take heed to your selves that you goe not up into the Mount, or touch the border of it; whosoever toucheth the Mount shall surely be put to death.” and again (verse 21.) “Get down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze.” Out of which we may conclude, that whosoever in a Christian Common-wealth holdeth the place of Moses, is the sole Messenger of God, and Interpreter of his Commandements. And according hereunto, no man ought in the interpretation of the Scripture to proceed further then the bounds which are set by their severall Soveraigns. For the Scriptures since God now speaketh in them, are the Mount Sinai; the bounds whereof are the Laws of them that represent Gods Person on Earth. To look upon them and therein to behold the wondrous works of God, and learn to fear him is allowed; but to interpret them; that is, to pry into what God saith to him whom he appointeth to govern under him, and make themselves Judges whether he govern as God commandeth him, or not, is to transgresse the bounds God hath set us, and to gaze upon God irreverently.\n\nThere was no Prophet in the time of Moses, nor pretender to the Spirit of God, but such as Moses had approved, and Authorized. For there were in his time but Seventy men, that are said to Prophecy by the Spirit of God, and these were of all Moses his election; concerning whom God saith to Moses (Numb. 11.16.) “Gather to mee Seventy of the Elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the Elders of the People.” To these God imparted his Spirit; but it was not a different Spirit from that of Moses; for it is said (verse 25.) “God came down in a cloud, and took of the Spirit that was upon Moses, and gave it to the Seventy Elders.” But as I have shewn before (chap. 36.) by Spirit, is understood the Mind; so that the sense of the place is no other than this, that God endued them with a mind conformable, and subordinate to that of Moses, that they might Prophecy, that is to say, speak to the people in Gods name, in such manner, as to set forward (as Ministers of Moses, and by his authority) such doctrine as was agreeable to Moses his doctrine. For they were but Ministers; and when two of them Prophecyed in the Camp, it was thought a new and unlawfull thing; and as it is in the 27. and 28. verses of the same Chapter, they were accused of it, and Joshua advised Moses to forbid them, as not knowing that it was by Moses his Spirit that they Prophecyed. By which it is manifest, that no Subject ought to pretend to Prophecy, or to the Spirit, in opposition to the doctrine established by him, whom God hath set in the place of Moses.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XL, 2\n\nAaron being dead, and after him also Moses, the Kingdome, as being a Sacerdotall Kingdome, descended by vertue of the Covenant, to Aarons Son, Eleazar the High Priest: And God declared him (next under himself) for Soveraign, at the same time that he appointed Joshua for the Generall of their Army. For thus God saith expressely (Numb. 27.21.) concerning Joshua; “He shall stand before Eleazar the Priest, who shall ask counsell for him, before the Lord, at his word shall they goe out, and at his word they shall come in, both he, and all the Children of Israel with him:” Therefore the Supreme Power of making War and Peace, was in the Priest. The Supreme Power of Judicature belonged also to the High Priest: For the Book of the Law was in their keeping; and the Priests and Levites onely were the subordinate Judges in causes Civill, as appears in Deut. 17.8, 9, 10. And for the manner of Gods worship, there was never doubt made, but that the High Priest till the time of Saul, had the Supreme Authority. Therefore the Civill and Ecclesiasticall Power were both joined together in one and the same person, the High Priest; and ought to bee so, in whosoever governeth by Divine Right; that is, by Authority immediate from God.\n\nAfter the death of Joshua, till the time of Saul, the time between is noted frequently in the Book of Judges, “that there was in those dayes no King in Israel;” and sometimes with this addition, that “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” By which is to bee understood, that where it is said, “there was no King,” is meant, “there was no Soveraign Power” in Israel. And so it was, if we consider the Act, and Exercise of such power. For after the death of Joshua, & Eleazar, “there arose another generation” (Judges 2.10.) “that knew not the Lord, nor the works which he had done for Israel, but did evill in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim.” And the Jews had that quality which St. Paul noteth, “to look for a sign,” not onely before they would submit themselves to the government of Moses, but also after they had obliged themselves by their submission. Whereas Signs, and Miracles had for End to procure Faith, not to keep men from violating it, when they have once given it; for to that men are obliged by the law of Nature. But if we consider not the Exercise, but the Right of governing, the Soveraign power was still in the High Priest. Therefore whatsoever obedience was yeelded to any of the Judges, (who were men chosen by God extraordinarily, to save his rebellious subjects out of the hands of the enemy,) it cannot bee drawn into argument against the Right the High Priest had to the Soveraign Power, in all matters, both of Policy and Religion. And neither the Judges, nor Samuel himselfe had an ordinary, but extraordinary calling to the Government; and were obeyed by the Israelites, not out of duty, but out of reverence to their favour with God, appearing in their wisdome, courage, or felicity. Hitherto therefore the Right of Regulating both the Policy, and the Religion, were inseparable.\n\nTo the Judges, succeeded Kings; And whereas before, all authority, both in Religion, and Policy, was in the High Priest; so now it was all in the King. For the Soveraignty over the people, which was before, not onely by vertue of the Divine Power, but also by a particular pact of the Israelites in God, and next under him, in the High Priest, as his Viceregent on earth, was cast off by the People, with the consent of God himselfe. For when they said to Samuel (1 Sam. 8.5.) “make us a King to judge us, like all the Nations,” they signified that they would no more bee governed by the commands that should bee laid upon them by the Priest, in the name of God; but by one that should command them in the same manner that all other nations were commanded; and consequently in deposing the High Priest of Royall authority, they deposed that peculiar Government of God. And yet God consented to it, saying to Samuel (verse 7.) “Hearken unto the voice of the People, in all that they shall say unto thee; for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected mee, that I should not reign over them.” Having therefore rejected God, in whose Right the Priests governed, there was no authority left to the Priests, but such as the King was pleased to allow them; which was more, or lesse, according as the Kings were good, or evill. And for the Government of Civill affaires, it is manifest, it was all in the hands of the King. For in the same Chapter, verse 20. They say they will be like all the Nations; that their King shall be their Judge, and goe before them, and fight their battells; that is, he shall have the whole authority, both in Peace and War. In which is contained also the ordering of Religion; for there was no other Word of God in that time, by which to regulate Religion, but the Law of Moses, which was their Civill Law. Besides, we read (1 Kings 2.27.) that Solomon “thrust out Abiathar from being Priest before the Lord:” He had therefore authority over the High Priest, as over any other Subject; which is a great mark of Supremacy in Religion. And we read also (1 Kings 8.) that hee dedicated the Temple; that he blessed the People; and that he himselfe in person made that excellent prayer, used in the Consecrations of all Churches, and houses of Prayer; which is another great mark of Supremacy in Religion. Again, we read (2 Kings 22.) that when there was question concerning the Book of the Law found in the Temple, the same was not decided by the High Priest, but Josiah sent both him, and others to enquire concerning it, of Hulda, the Prophetesse; which is another mark of the Supremacy in Religion. Lastly, wee read (1 Chro. 26.30.) that David made Hashabiah and his brethren, Hebronites, Officers of Israel among them Westward, “in all businesse of the Lord, and in the service of the King.” Likewise (verse 32.) that hee made other Hebronites, “rulers over the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the halfe tribe of Manasseh” (these were the rest of Israel that dwelt beyond Jordan) “for every matter pertaining to God, and affairs of the King.” Is not this full Power, both Temporall and Spirituall, as they call it, that would divide it? To conclude; from the first institution of Gods Kingdome, to the Captivity, the Supremacy of Religion, was in the same hand with that of the Civill Soveraignty; and the Priests office after the election of Saul, was not Magisteriall, but Ministeriall.\n\nNotwithstanding the government both in Policy and Religion, were joined, first in the High Priests, and afterwards in the Kings, so far forth as concerned the Right; yet it appeareth by the same Holy History, that the people understood it not; but there being amongst them a great part, and probably the greatest part, that no longer than they saw great miracles, or (which is equivalent to a miracle) great abilities, or great felicity in the enterprises of their Governours, gave sufficient credit, either to the fame of Moses, or to the Colloquies between God and the Priests; they took occasion as oft as their Governours displeased them, by blaming sometimes the Policy, sometimes the Religion, to change the Government, or revolt from their Obedience at their pleasure: And from thence proceeded from time to time the civill troubles, divisions, and calamities of the Nation. As for example, after the death of Eleazar and Joshua, the next generation which had not seen the wonders of God, but were left to their own weak reason, not knowing themselves obliged by the Covenant of a Sacerdotall Kingdome, regarded no more the Commandement of the Priest, nor any law of Moses, but did every man that which was right in his own eyes; and obeyed in Civill affairs, such men, as from time to time they thought able to deliver them from the neighbour Nations that oppressed them; and consulted not with God (as they ought to doe,) but with such men, or women, as they guessed to bee Prophets by their Praedictions of things to come; and thought they had an Idol in their Chappel, yet if they had a Levite for their Chaplain, they made account they worshipped the God of Israel.\n\nAnd afterwards when they demanded a King, after the manner of the nations; yet it was not with a design to depart from the worship of God their King; but despairing of the justice of the sons of Samuel, they would have a King to judg them in Civill actions; but not that they would allow their King to change the Religion which they thought was recommended to them by Moses. So that they alwaies kept in store a pretext, either of Justice, or Religion, to discharge themselves of their obedience, whensoever they had hope to prevaile. Samuel was displeased with the people, for that they desired a King, (for God was their King already, and Samuel had but an authority under him); yet did Samuel, when Saul observed not his counsell, in destroying Agag as God had commanded, anoint another King, namely David, to take the succession from his heirs. Rehoboam was no Idolater; but when the people thought him an Oppressor; that Civil pretence carried from him ten Tribes to Jeroboam an Idolater. And generally through the whole History of the Kings, as well of Judah, as of Israel, there were Prophets that alwaies controlled the Kings, for transgressing the Religion; and sometimes also for Errours of State; (2 Chro. 19. 2.) as Jehosaphat was reproved by the Prophet Jehu, for aiding the King of Israel against the Syrians; and Hezekiah, by Isaiah, for shewing his treasures to the Ambassadors of Babylon. By all which it appeareth, that though the power both of State and Religion were in the Kings; yet none of them were uncontrolled in the use of it, but such as were gracious for their own naturall abilities, or felicities. So that from the practise of those times, there can no argument be drawn, that the right of Supremacy in Religion was not in the Kings, unlesse we place it in the Prophets; and conclude, that because Hezekiah praying to the Lord before the Cherubins, was not answered from thence, nor then, but afterwards by the Prophet Isaiah, therefore Isaiah was supreme Head of the Church; or because Josiah consulted Hulda the Prophetesse, concerning the Book of the Law, that therefore neither he, nor the High Priest, but Hulda the Prophetesse had the Supreme authority in matter of Religion; which I thinke is not the opinion of any Doctor.\n\nDuring the Captivity, the Jews had no Common-wealth at all: And after their return, though they renewed their Covenant with God, yet there was no promise made of obedience, neither to Esdras, nor to any other; And presently after they became subjects to the Greeks (from whose Customes, and Daemonology, and from the doctrine of the Cabalists, their Religion became much corrupted): In such sort as nothing can be gathered from their confusion, both in State and Religion, concerning the Supremacy in either. And therefore so far forth as concerneth the Old Testament, we may conclude, that whosoever had the Soveraignty of the Common-wealth amongst the Jews, the same had also the Supreme Authority in matter of Gods externall worship; and represented Gods Person; that is the person of God the Father; though he were not called by the name of Father, till such time as he sent into the world his Son Jesus Christ, to redeem mankind from their sins, and bring them into his Everlasting Kingdome, to be saved for evermore. Of which we are to speak in the Chapter following.\n\nCHAPTER XLI. OF THE OFFICE OF OUR BLESSED SAVIOUR\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLI, 1\n\nOF THE OFFICE OF OUR BLESSED SAVIOUR\n\nWe find in Holy Scripture three parts of the Office of the Messiah: the first of a Redeemer, or Saviour: The second of a Pastor, Counsellour, or Teacher, that is, of a Prophet sent from God, to convert such as God hath elected to Salvation; The third of a King, and Eternall King, but under his Father, as Moses and the High Priests were in their severall times. And to these three parts are corespondent three times. For our Redemption he wrought at his first coming, by the Sacrifice, wherein he offered up himself for our sinnes upon the Crosse: our conversion he wrought partly then in his own Person; and partly worketh now by his Ministers; and will continue to work till his coming again. And after his coming again, shall begin that his glorious Reign over his elect, which is to last eternally.\n\nTo the Office of a Redeemer, that is, of one that payeth the Ransome of Sin, (which Ransome is Death,) it appertaineth, that he was Sacrificed, and thereby bare upon his own head, and carryed away from us our iniquities, in such sort as God had required. Not that the death of one man, though without sinne, can satisfie for the offences of all men, in the rigour of Justice, but in the Mercy of God, that ordained such Sacrifices for sin, as he was pleased in his mercy to accept. In the old Law (as we may read, Leviticus the 16.) the Lord required, that there should every year once, bee made an Atonement for the Sins of all Israel, both Priests, and others; for the doing whereof, Aaron alone was to sacrifice for himself and the Priests a young Bullock; and for the rest of the people, he was to receive from them two young Goates, of which he was to Sacrifice one; but as for the other, which was the Scape Goat, he was to lay his hands on the head thereof, and by a confession of the iniquities of the people, to lay them all on that head, and then by some opportune man, to cause the Goat to be led into the wildernesse, and there to Escape, and carry away with him the iniquities of the people. As the Sacrifice of the one Goat was a sufficient (because an acceptable) price for the Ransome of all Israel; so the death of the Messiah, is a sufficient price, for the Sins of all mankind, because there was no more required. Our Saviour Christs sufferings seem to be here figured, as cleerly, as in the oblation of Isaac, or in any other type of him in the Old Testament: He was both the sacrificed Goat, and the Scape Goat; “Hee was oppressed, and he was afflicted (Isa. 53.7.); he opened not his mouth; he brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep is dumbe before the shearer, so opened he not his mouth:” Here he is the Sacrificed Goat. “He hath born our Griefs, (ver.4.) and carried our sorrows;” And again, (ver. 6.) “the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquities of us all:” And so he is the Scape Goat. “He was cut off from the land of the living (ver. 8.) for the transgression of my People:” There again he is the Sacrificed Goat. And again (ver. 11.) “he shall bear their sins:” Hee is the Scape Goat. Thus is the Lamb of God equivalent to both those Goates; sacrificed, in that he dyed; and escaping, in his Resurrection; being raised opportunely by his Father, and removed from the habitation of men in his Ascension.\n\nFor as much therefore, as he that Redeemeth, hath no title to the Thing Redeemed, before the Redemption, and Ransome paid; and this Ransome was the Death of the Redeemer; it is manifest, that our Saviour (as man) was not King of those that he Redeemed, before hee suffered death; that is, during that time hee conversed bodily on the Earth. I say, he was not then King in present, by vertue of the Pact, which the faithfull make with him in Baptisme; Neverthelesse, by the renewing of their Pact with God in Baptisme, they were obliged to obey him for King, (under his Father) whensoever he should be pleased to take the Kingdome upon him. According whereunto, our Saviour himself expressely saith, (John 18.36.) “My Kingdome is not of this world.” Now seeing the Scripture maketh mention but of two worlds; this that is now, and shall remain to the day of Judgment, (which is therefore also called, The Last Day;) and that which shall bee a new Heaven, and a new Earth; the Kingdome of Christ is not to begin till the general Resurrection. And that is it which our Saviour saith, (Mat. 16.27.) “The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his Angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.” To reward every man according to his works, is to execute the Office of a King; and this is not to be till he come in the glory of his Father, with his Angells. When our Saviour saith, (Mat. 23.2.) “The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses seat; All therefore whatsoever they bid you doe, that observe and doe;” hee declareth plainly, that hee ascribeth Kingly Power, for that time, not to himselfe, but to them. And so hee hath also, where he saith, (Luke 12.14.) “Who made mee a Judge, or Divider over you?” And (John 12.47.) “I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” And yet our Saviour came into this world that hee might bee a King, and a Judge in the world to come: For hee was the Messiah, that is, the Christ, that is, the Anointed Priest, and the Soveraign Prophet of God; that is to say, he was to have all the power that was in Moses the Prophet, in the High Priests that succeeded Moses, and in the Kings that succeeded the Priests. And St. John saies expressely (chap. 5. ver. 22.) “The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son.” And this is not repugnant to that other place, “I came not to judge the world:” for this is spoken of the world present, the other of the world to come; as also where it is said, that at the second coming of Christ, (Mat. 19. 28.) “Yee that have followed me in the Regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his Glory, yee shall also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”\n\nIf then Christ while hee was on Earth, had no Kingdome in this World, to what end was his first coming? It was to restore unto God, by a new Covenant, the Kingdome, which being his by the Old Covenant, had been cut off by the rebellion of the Israelites in the election of Saul. Which to doe, he was to preach unto them, that he was the Messiah, that is, the King promised to them by the Prophets; and to offer himselfe in sacrifice for the sinnes of them that should by faith submit themselves thereto; and in case the nation generally should refuse him, to call to his obedience such as should beleeve in him amongst the Gentiles. So that there are two parts of our Saviours Office during his aboad upon the Earth; One to Proclaim himself the Christ; and another by Teaching, and by working of Miracles, to perswade, and prepare men to live so, as to be worthy of the Immortality Beleevers were to enjoy, at such time as he should come in majesty, to take possession of his Fathers Kingdome. And therefore it is, that the time of his preaching, is often by himself called the Regeneration; which is not properly a Kingdome, and thereby a warrant to deny obedience to the Magistrates that then were, (for hee commanded to obey those that sate then in Moses chaire, and to pay tribute to Caesar;) but onely an earnest of the Kingdome of God that was to come, to those to whom God had given the grace to be his disciples, and to beleeve in him; For which cause the Godly are said to bee already in the Kingdome of Grace, as naturalized in that heavenly Kingdome.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLI, 2\n\nHitherto therefore there is nothing done, or taught by Christ, that tendeth to the diminution of the Civill Right of the Jewes, or of Caesar. For as touching the Common-wealth which then was amongst the Jews, both they that bare rule amongst them, that they that were governed, did all expect the Messiah, and Kingdome of God; which they could not have done if their Laws had forbidden him (when he came) to manifest, and declare himself. Seeing therefore he did nothing, but by Preaching, and Miracles go about to prove himselfe to be that Messiah, hee did therein nothing against their laws. The Kingdome hee claimed was to bee in another world; He taught all men to obey in the mean time them that sate in Moses seat: he allowed them to give Caesar his tribute, and refused to take upon himselfe to be a Judg. How then could his words, or actions bee seditious, or tend to the overthrow of their then Civill Government? But God having determined his sacrifice, for the reduction of his elect to their former covenanted obedience, for the means, whereby he would bring the same to effect, made use of their malice, and ingratitude. Nor was it contrary to the laws of Caesar. For though Pilate himself (to gratifie the Jews) delivered him to be crucified; yet before he did so, he pronounced openly, that he found no fault in him: And put for title of his condemnation, not as the Jews required, “that he pretended to be King;” but simply, “That hee was King of the Jews;” and notwithstanding their clamour, refused to alter it; saying, “What I have written, I have written.”\n\nAs for the third part of his Office, which was to be King, I have already shewn that his Kingdome was not to begin till the Resurrection. But then he shall be King, not onely as God, in which sense he is King already, and ever shall be, of all the Earth, in vertue of his omnipotence; but also peculiarly of his own Elect, by vertue of the pact they make with him in their Baptisme. And therefore it is, that our Saviour saith (Mat. 19.28.) that his Apostles should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, “When the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory;” whereby he signified that he should reign then in his humane nature; and (Mat. 16.27.) “The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his Angels, and then he shall reward every man according to his works.” The same we may read, Marke 13..26. and 14.26. and more expressely for the time, Luke 22.29, 30. “I appoint unto you a Kingdome, as my Father hath appointed to mee, that you may eat and drink at my table in my Kingdome, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” By which it is manifest that the Kingdome of Christ appointed to him by his Father, is not to be before the Son of Man shall come in Glory, and make his Apostles Judges of the twelve tribes of Israel. But a man may here ask, seeing there is no marriage in the Kingdome of Heaven, whether men shall then eat, and drink; what eating therefore is meant in this place? This is expounded by our Saviour (John 6.27.) where he saith, “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give you.” So that by eating at Christs table, is meant the eating of the Tree of Life; that is to say, the enjoying of Immortality, in the Kingdome of the Son of Man. By which places, and many more, it is evident, that our Saviours Kingdome is to bee exercised by him in his humane nature.\n\nAgain, he is to be King then, no otherwise than as subordinate, or Viceregent of God the Father, as Moses was in the wildernesse; and as the High Priests were before the reign of Saul; and as the Kings were after it. For it is one of the Prophecies concerning Christ, that he should be like (in Office) to Moses; “I will raise them up a Prophet (saith the Lord, Deut. 18.18.) from amongst their Brethren like unto thee, and will put my words into his mouth,” and this similitude with Moses, is also apparent in the actions of our Saviour himself, whilest he was conversant on Earth. For as Moses chose twelve Princes of the tribes, to govern under him; so did our Saviour choose twelve Apostles, who shall sit on twelve thrones, and judge the twelve tribes of Israel; And as Moses authorized Seventy Elders, to receive the Spirit of God, and to Prophecy to the people, that is, (as I have said before,) to speak unto them in the name of God; so our Saviour also ordained seventy Disciples, to preach his Kingdome, and Salvation to all Nations. And as when a complaint was made to Moses, against those of the Seventy that prophecyed in the camp of Israel, he justified them in it, as being subservient therein to his government; so also our Saviour, when St. John complained to him of a certain man that cast out Devills in his name, justified him therein, saying, (Luke 9.50.) “Forbid him not, for hee that is not against us, is on our part.”\n\nAgain, our Saviour resembled Moses in the institution of Sacraments, both of Admission into the Kingdome of God, and of Commemoration of his deliverance of his Elect from their miserable condition. As the Children of Israel had for Sacrament of their Reception into the Kingdome of God, before the time of Moses, the rite of Circumcision, which rite having been omitted in the Wildernesse, was again restored as soon as they came into the land of Promise; so also the Jews, before the coming of our Saviour, had a rite of Baptizing, that is, of washing with water all those that being Gentiles, embraced the God of Israel. This rite St. John the Baptist used in the reception of all them that gave their names to the Christ, whom hee preached to bee already come into the world; and our Saviour instituted the same for a Sacrament to be taken by all that beleeved in him. From what cause the rite of Baptisme first proceeded, is not expressed formally in the Scripture; but it may be probably thought to be an imitation of the law of Moses, concerning Leprousie; wherein the Leprous man was commanded to be kept out of the campe of Israel for a certain time; after which time being judged by the Priest to be clean, hee was admitted into the campe after a solemne Washing. And this may therefore bee a type of the Washing in Baptisme; wherein such men as are cleansed of the Leprousie of Sin by Faith, are received into the Church with the solemnity of Baptisme. There is another conjecture drawn from the Ceremonies of the Gentiles, in a certain case that rarely happens; and that is, when a man that was thought dead, chanced to recover, other men made scruple to converse with him, as they would doe to converse with a Ghost, unlesse hee were received again into the number of men, by Washing, as Children new born were washed from the uncleannesse of their nativity, which was a kind of new birth. This ceremony of the Greeks, in the time that Judaea was under the Dominion of Alexander, and the Greeks his successors, may probably enough have crept into the Religion of the Jews. But seeing it is not likely our Saviour would countenance a Heathen rite, it is most likely it proceeded from the Legall Ceremony of Washing after Leprosie. And for the other Sacraments, of eating the Paschall Lambe, it is manifestly imitated in the Sacrament of the Lords Supper; in which the Breaking of the Bread, and the pouring out of the Wine, do keep in memory our deliverance from the Misery of Sin, by Christs Passion, as the eating of the Paschall Lambe, kept in memory the deliverance of the Jewes out of the Bondage of Egypt. Seeing therefore the authority of Moses was but subordinate, and hee but a Lieutenant to God; it followeth, that Christ, whose authority, as man, was to bee like that of Moses, was no more but subordinate to the authority of his Father. The same is more expressely signified, by that that hee teacheth us to pray, “Our Father, Let thy Kingdome come;” and, “For thine is the Kingdome, the power and the Glory;” and by that it is said, that “Hee shall come in the Glory of his Father;” and by that which St. Paul saith, (1 Cor. 15.24.) “then commeth the end, when hee shall have delivered up the Kingdome to God, even the Father;” and by many other most expresse places.\n\nOur Saviour therefore, both in Teaching, and Reigning, representeth (as Moses Did) the Person of God; which God from that time forward, but not before, is called the Father; and being still one and the same substance, is one Person as represented by Moses, and another Person as represented by his Sonne the Christ. For Person being a relative to a Representer, it is consequent to plurality of Representers, that there bee a plurality of Persons, though of one and the same Substance.\n\nCHAPTER XLII. OF POWER ECCLESIASTICALL\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 1\n\nOF POWER ECCLESIASTICALL\n\nFor the understanding of POWER ECCLESIASTICALL, what, and in whom it is, we are to distinguish the time from the Ascension of our Saviour, into two parts; one before the Conversion of Kings, and men endued with Soveraign Civill Power; the other after their Conversion. For it was long after the Ascension, before any King, or Civill Soveraign embraced, and publiquely allowed the teaching of Christian Religion.\n\nAnd for the time between, it is manifest, that the Power Ecclesiasticall, was in the Apostles; and after them in such as were by them ordained to Preach the Gospell, and to convert men to Christianity, and to direct them that were converted in the way of Salvation; and after these the Power was delivered again to others by these ordained, and this was done by Imposition of hands upon such as were ordained; by which was signified the giving of the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of God, to those whom they ordained Ministers of God, to advance his Kingdome. So that Imposition of hands, was nothing else but the Seal of their Commission to Preach Christ, and teach his Doctrine; and the giving of the Holy Ghost by that ceremony of Imposition of hands, was an imitation of that which Moses did. For Moses used the same ceremony to his Minister Joshua, as wee read Deuteronomy 34. ver. 9. “And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the Spirit of Wisdome; for Moses had laid his hands upon him.” Our Saviour therefore between his Resurrection, and Ascension, gave his Spirit to the Apostles; first, by “Breathing on them, and saying,” (John 20.22.) “Receive yee the Holy Spirit;” and after his Ascension (Acts 2.2, 3.) by sending down upon them, a “mighty wind, and Cloven tongues of fire;” and not by Imposition of hands; as neither did God lay his hands on Moses; and his Apostles afterward, transmitted the same Spirit by Imposition of hands, as Moses did to Joshua. So that it is manifest hereby, in whom the Power Ecclesiasticall continually remained, in those first times, where there was not any Christian Common-wealth; namely, in them that received the same from the Apostles, by successive laying on of hands.\n\nHere wee have the Person of God born now the third time. For as Moses, and the High Priests, were Gods Representative in the Old Testament; and our Saviour himselfe as Man, during his abode on earth: So the Holy Ghost, that is to say, the Apostles, and their successors, in the Office of Preaching, and Teaching, that had received the Holy Spirit, have Represented him ever since. But a Person, (as I have shewn before, [chapt. 16.].) is he that is Represented, as often as hee is Represented; and therefore God, who has been Represented (that is, Personated) thrice, may properly enough be said to be three Persons; though neither the word Person, nor Trinity be ascribed to him in the Bible. St. John indeed (1 Epist. 5.7.) saith, “There be three that bear witnesse in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these Three are One:” But this disagreeth not, but accordeth fitly with three Persons in the proper signification of Persons; which is, that which is Represented by another. For so God the Father, as Represented by Moses, is one Person; and as Represented by his Sonne, another Person, and as Represented by the Apostles, and by the Doctors that taught by authority from them derived, is a third Person; and yet every Person here, is the Person of one and the same God. But a man may here ask, what it was whereof these three bare witnesse. St. John therefore tells us (verse 11.) that they bear witnesse, that “God hath given us eternall life in his Son.” Again, if it should be asked, wherein that testimony appeareth, the Answer is easie; for he hath testified the same by the miracles he wrought, first by Moses; secondly, by his Son himself; and lastly by his Apostles, that had received the Holy Spirit; all which in their times Represented the Person of God; and either prophecyed, or preached Jesus Christ. And as for the Apostles, it was the character of the Apostleship, in the twelve first and great Apostles, to bear Witnesse of his Resurrection; as appeareth expressely (Acts 1. ver. 21,22.) where St Peter, when a new Apostle was to be chosen in the place of Judas Iscariot, useth these words, “Of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out amongst us, beginning at the Baptisme of John, unto that same day that hee was taken up from us, must one bee ordained to be a Witnesse with us of his Resurrection:” which words interpret the Bearing of Witnesse, mentioned by St. John. There is in the same place mentioned another Trinity of Witnesses in Earth. For (ver. 8.) he saith, “there are three that bear Witnesse in Earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Bloud; and these three agree in one:” that is to say, the graces of Gods Spirit, and the two Sacraments, Baptisme, and the Lords Supper, which all agree in one Testimony, to assure the consciences of beleevers, of eternall life; of which Testimony he saith (verse 10.) “He that beleeveth on the Son of man hath the Witnesse in himselfe.” In this Trinity on Earth the Unity is not of the thing; for the Spirit, the Water, and the Bloud, are not the same substance, though they give the same testimony: But in the Trinity of Heaven, the Persons are the persons of one and the same God, though Represented in three different times and occasions. To conclude, the doctrine of the Trinity, as far as can be gathered directly from the Scripture, is in substance this; that God who is alwaies One and the same, was the Person Represented by Moses; the Person Represented by his Son Incarnate; and the Person Represented by the Apostles. As Represented by the Apostles, the Holy Spirit by which they spake, is God; As Represented by his Son (that was God and Man), the Son is that God; As represented by Moses, and the High Priests, the Father, that is to say, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is that God: From whence we may gather the reason why those names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the signification of the Godhead, are never used in the Old Testament: For they are Persons, that is, they have their names from Representing; which could not be, till divers men had Represented Gods Person in ruling, or in directing under him.\n\nThus wee see how the Power Ecclesiasticall was left by our Saviour to the Apostles; and how they were (to the end they might the better exercise that Power,) endued with the Holy Spirit, which is therefore called sometime in the New Testament Paracletus which signifieth an Assister, or one called to for helpe, though it bee commonly translated a Comforter. Let us now consider the Power it selfe, what it was, and over whom.\n\nCardinall Bellarmine in his third generall Controversie, hath handled a great many questions concerning the Ecclesiasticall Power of the Pope of Rome; and begins with this, Whether it ought to be Monarchicall, Aristocraticall, or Democraticall. All which sorts of Power, are Soveraign, and Coercive. If now it should appear, that there is no Coercive Power left them by our Saviour; but onely a Power to proclaim the Kingdom of Christ, and to perswade men to submit themselves thereunto; and by precepts and good counsell, to teach them that have submitted, what they are to do, that they may be received into the Kingdom of God when it comes; and that the Apostles, and other Ministers of the Gospel, are our Schoolemasters, and not our Commanders, and their Precepts not Laws, but wholesome Counsells then were all that dispute in vain.\n\nI have shewn already (in the last Chapter,) that the Kingdome of Christ is not of this world: therefore neither can his Ministers (unlesse they be Kings,) require obedience in his name. For if the Supreme King, have not his Regall Power in this world; by what authority can obedience be required to his Officers? As my Father sent me, (so saith our Saviour) I send you. But our Saviour was sent to perswade the Jews to return to, and to invite the Gentiles, to receive the Kingdome of his Father, and not to reign in Majesty, no not, as his Fathers Lieutenant, till the day of Judgment.\n\nThe time between the Ascension, and the generall Resurrection, is called, not a Reigning, but a Regeneration; that is, a Preparation of men for the second and glorious coming of Christ, at the day of Judgment; as appeareth by the words of our Saviour, Mat. 19.28. “You that have followed me in the Regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, you shall also sit upon twelve Thrones;” And of St. Paul (Ephes. 6.15.) “Having your feet shod with the Preparation of the Gospell of Peace.”\n\nAnd is compared by our Saviour, to Fishing; that is, to winning men to obedience, not by Coercion, and Punishing; but by Perswasion: and therefore he said not to his Apostles, hee would make them so many Nimrods, Hunters Of Men; But Fishers Of Men. It is compared also to Leaven; to Sowing of Seed, and to the Multiplication of a grain of Mustard-seed; by all which Compulsion is excluded; and consequently there can in that time be no actual Reigning. The work of Christs Ministers, is Evangelization; that is, a Proclamation of Christ, and a preparation for his second comming; as the Evangelization of John Baptist, was a preparation to his first coming.\n\nAgain, the Office of Christs Ministers in this world, is to make men Beleeve, and have Faith in Christ: But Faith hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon Compulsion, or Commandement; but onely upon certainty, or probability of Arguments drawn from Reason, or from something men beleeve already. Therefore the Ministers of Christ in this world, have no Power by that title, to Punish any man for not Beleeving, or for Contradicting what they say; they have I say no Power by that title of Christs Ministers, to Punish such: but if they have Soveraign Civill Power, by politick institution, then they may indeed lawfully Punish any Contradiction to their laws whatsoever: And St. Paul, of himselfe and other then Preachers of the Gospell saith in expresse words, (2 Cor. 1.24.) “Wee have no Dominion over your Faith, but are Helpers of your Joy.”\n\nAnother Argument, that the Ministers of Christ in this present world have no right of Commanding, may be drawn from the lawfull Authority which Christ hath left to all Princes, as well Christians, as Infidels. St. Paul saith (Col. 3.20.) “Children obey your Parents in all things; for this is well pleasing to the Lord.” And ver. 22. “Servants obey in all things your Masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in singlenesse of heart, as fearing the Lord;” This is spoken to them whose Masters were Infidells; and yet they are bidden to obey them In All Things. And again, concerning obedience to Princes. (Rom. 13. the first 6. verses) exhorting to “be subject to the Higher Powers,” he saith, “that all Power is ordained of God;” and “that we ought to be subject to them, not onely for” fear of incurring their “wrath, but also for conscience sake.” And St. Peter, (1 Epist. chap. 2e ver. 13, 14, 15.) “Submit your selves to every Ordinance of Man, for the Lords sake, whether it bee to the King, as Supreme, or unto Governours, as to them that be sent by him for the punishment of evill doers, and for the praise of them that doe well; for so is the will of God.” And again St. Paul (Tit. 3.1.) “Put men in mind to be subject to Principalities, and Powers, and to obey Magistrates.” These Princes, and Powers, whereof St. Peter, and St. Paul here speak, were all Infidels; much more therefore we are to obey those Christians, whom God hath ordained to have Soveraign Power over us. How then can wee be obliged to doe any thing contrary to the Command of the King, or other Soveraign Representant of the Common-wealth, whereof we are members, and by whom we look to be protected? It is therefore manifest, that Christ hath not left to his Ministers in this world, unlesse they be also endued with Civill Authority, any authority to Command other men.\n\nBut what (may some object) if a King, or a Senate, or other Soveraign Person forbid us to beleeve in Christ? To this I answer, that such forbidding is of no effect, because Beleef, and Unbeleef never follow mens Commands. Faith is a gift of God, which Man can neither give, nor take away by promise of rewards, or menaces of torture. And if it be further asked, What if wee bee commanded by our lawfull Prince, to say with our tongue, wee beleeve not; must we obey such command? Profession with the tongue is but an externall thing, and no more then any other gesture whereby we signifie our obedience; and wherein a Christian, holding firmely in his heart the Faith of Christ, hath the same liberty which the Prophet Elisha allowed to Naaman the Syrian. Naaman was converted in his heart to the God of Israel; For hee saith (2 Kings 5.17.) “Thy servant will henceforth offer neither burnt offering, nor sacrifice unto other Gods but unto the Lord. In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant, that when my Master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow my selfe in the house of Rimmon; when I bow my selfe in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing.” This the Prophet approved, and bid him “Goe in peace.” Here Naaman beleeved in his heart; but by bowing before the Idol Rimmon, he denyed the true God in effect, as much as if he had done it with his lips. But then what shall we answer to our Saviours saying, “Whosoever denyeth me before men, I will deny him before my Father which is in Heaven?” This we may say, that whatsoever a Subject, as Naaman was, is compelled to in obedience to his Soveraign, and doth it not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws of his country, that action is not his, but his Soveraigns; nor is it he that in this case denyeth Christ before men, but his Governour, and the law of his countrey. If any man shall accuse this doctrine, as repugnant to true, and unfeigned Christianity; I ask him, in case there should be a subject in any Christian Common-wealth, that should be inwardly in his heart of the Mahometan Religion, whether if his Soveraign Command him to bee present at the divine service of the Christian Church, and that on pain of death, he think that Mamometan obliged in conscience to suffer death for that cause, rather than to obey that command of his lawful Prince. If he say, he ought rather to suffer death, then he authorizeth all private men, to disobey their Princes, in maintenance of their Religion, true, or false; if he say, he ought to bee obedient, then he alloweth to himself, that which hee denyeth to another, contrary to the words of our Saviour, “Whatsoever you would that men should doe unto you, that doe yee unto them;” and contrary to the Law of Nature, (which is the indubitable everlasting Law of God) “Do not to another, that which thou wouldest not he should doe unto thee.”\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 2\n\nBut what then shall we say of all those Martyrs we read of in the History of the Church, that they have needlessely cast away their lives? For answer hereunto, we are to distinguish the persons that have been for that cause put to death; whereof some have received a Calling to preach, and professe the Kingdome of Christ openly; others have had no such Calling, nor more has been required of them than their owne faith. The former sort, if they have been put to death, for bearing witnesse to this point, that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, were true Martyrs; For a Martyr is, (to give the true definition of the word) a Witnesse of the Resurrection of Jesus the Messiah; which none can be but those that conversed with him on earth, and saw him after he was risen: For a Witnesse must have seen what he testifieth, or else his testimony is not good. And that none but such, can properly be called Martyrs of Christ, is manifest out of the words of St. Peter, Act. 1.21, 22. “Wherefore of these men which have companyed with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out amongst us, beginning from the Baptisme of John unto that same day hee was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a Martyr (that is a Witnesse) with us of his Resurrection:” Where we may observe, that he which is to bee a Witnesse of the truth of the Resurrection of Christ, that is to say, of the truth of this fundamentall article of Christian Religion, that Jesus was the Christ, must be some Disciple that conversed with him, and saw him before, and after his Resurrection; and consequently must be one of his originall Disciples: whereas they which were not so, can Witnesse no more, but that their antecessors said it, and are therefore but Witnesses of other mens testimony; and are but second Martyrs, or Martyrs of Christs Witnesses.\n\nHe, that to maintain every doctrine which he himself draweth out of the History of our Saviours life, and of the Acts, or Epistles of the Apostles; or which he beleeveth upon the authority of a private man, wil oppose the Laws and Authority of the Civill State, is very far from being a Martyr of Christ, or a Martyr of his Martyrs. ’Tis one Article onely, which to die for, meriteth so honorable a name; and that Article is this, that Jesus Is The Christ; that is to say, He that hath redeemed us, and shall come again to give us salvation, and eternall life in his glorious Kingdome. To die for every tenet that serveth the ambition, or profit of the Clergy, is not required; nor is it the Death of the Witnesse, but the Testimony it self that makes the Martyr: for the word signifieth nothing else, but the man that beareth Witnesse, whether he be put to death for his testimony, or not.\n\nAlso he that is not sent to preach this fundamentall article, but taketh it upon him of his private authority, though he be a Witnesse, and consequently a Martyr, either primary of Christ, or secondary of his Apostles, Disciples, or their Successors; yet is he not obliged to suffer death for that cause; because being not called thereto, tis not required at his hands; nor ought hee to complain, if he loseth the reward he expecteth from those that never set him on work. None therefore can be a Martyr, neither of the first, nor second degree, that have not a warrant to preach Christ come in the flesh; that is to say, none, but such as are sent to the conversion of Infidels. For no man is a Witnesse to him that already beleeveth, and therefore needs no Witnesse; but to them that deny, or doubt, or have not heard it. Christ sent his Apostles, and his Seventy Disciples, with authority to preach; he sent not all that beleeved: And he sent them to unbeleevers; “I send you (saith he) as sheep amongst wolves;” not as sheep to other sheep.\n\nLastly the points of their Commission, as they are expressely set down in the Gospel, contain none of them any authority over the Congregation.\n\nWe have first (Mat. 10.) that the twelve Apostles were sent “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and commanded to Preach, “that the Kingdome of God was at hand.” Now Preaching in the originall, is that act, which a Crier, Herald, or other Officer useth to doe publiquely in Proclaiming of a King. But a Crier hath not right to Command any man. And (Luke 10.2.) the seventy Disciples are sent out, “as Labourers, not as Lords of the Harvest;” and are bidden (verse 9.) to say, “The Kingdome of God is come nigh unto you;” and by Kingdome here is meant, not the Kingdome of Grace, but the Kingdome of Glory; for they are bidden to denounce it (ver. 11.) to those Cities which shall not receive them, as a threatning, that it shall be more tolerable in that day for Sodome, than for such a City. And (Mat. 20.28.) our Saviour telleth his Disciples, that sought Priority of place, their Office was to minister, even as the Son of man came, not to be ministred unto, but to minister. Preachers therefore have not Magisteriall, but Ministeriall power: “Bee not called Masters, (saith our Saviour, Mat. 23.10) for one is your Master, even Christ.”\n\nAnother point of their Commission, is, to Teach All Nations; as it is in Mat. 28.19. or as in St. Mark 16.15 “Goe into all the world, and Preach the Gospel to every creature.” Teaching therefore, and Preaching is the same thing. For they that Proclaim the comming of a King, must withall make known by what right he commeth, if they mean men shall submit themselves unto him: As St. Paul did to the Jews of Thessalonica, when “three Sabbath days he reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening, and alledging that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus is Christ.” But to teach out of the Old Testament that Jesus was Christ, (that is to say, King,) and risen from the dead, is not to say, that men are bound after they beleeve it, to obey those that tell them so, against the laws, and commands of their Soveraigns; but that they shall doe wisely, to expect the coming of Christ hereafter, in Patience, and Faith, with Obedience to their present Magistrates.\n\nAnother point of their Commission, is to Baptize, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” What is Baptisme? Dipping into water. But what is it to Dip a man into the water in the name of any thing? The meaning of these words of Baptisme is this. He that is Baptized, is Dipped or Washed, as a sign of becomming a new man, and a loyall subject to that God, whose Person was represented in old time by Moses, and the High Priests, when he reigned over the Jews; and to Jesus Christ, his Sonne, God, and Man, that hath redeemed us, and shall in his humane nature Represent his Fathers Person in his eternall Kingdome after the Resurrection; and to acknowledge the Doctrine of the Apostles, who assisted by the Spirit of the Father, and of the Son, were left for guides to bring us into that Kingdome, to be the onely, and assured way thereunto. This, being our promise in Baptisme; and the Authority of Earthly Soveraigns being not to be put down till the day of Judgment; (for that is expressely affirmed by S. Paul 1 Cor. 15. 22, 23, 24. where he saith, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive. But every man in his owne order, Christ the first fruits, afterward they that are Christs, at his comming; Then Commeth the end, when he shall have delivered up the Kingdome of God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all Rule, and all Authority and Power”) it is manifest, that we do not in Baptisme constitute over us another authority, by which our externall actions are to be governed in this life; but promise to take the doctrine of the Apostles for our direction in the way to life eternall.\n\nThe Power of Remission, And Retention Of Sinnes, called also the Power of Loosing, and Binding, and sometimes the Keyes Of The Kingdome Of Heaven, is a consequence of the Authority to Baptize, or refuse to Baptize. For Baptisme is the Sacrament of Allegeance, of them that are to be received into the Kingdome of God; that is to say, into Eternall life; that is to say, to Remission of Sin: For as Eternall life was lost by the Committing, so it is recovered by the Remitting of mens Sins. The end of Baptisme is Remission of Sins: and therefore St. Peter, when they that were converted by his Sermon on the day of Pentecost, asked what they were to doe, advised them to “repent, and be Baptized in the name of Jesus, for the Remission of Sins.” And therefore seeing to Baptize is to declare the Reception of men into Gods Kingdome; and to refuse to Baptize is to declare their Exclusion; it followeth, that the Power to declare them Cast out, or Retained in it, was given to the same Apostles, and their Substitutes, and Successors. And therefore after our Saviour had breathed upon them, saying, (John 20.22.) “Receive the Holy Ghost,” hee addeth in the next verse, “Whose soever Sins ye Remit, they are Remitted unto them; and whose soever Sins ye Retain, they are Retained.” By which words, is not granted an Authority to Forgive, or Retain Sins, simply and absolutely, as God Forgiveth or Retaineth them, who knoweth the Heart of man, and truth of his Penitence and Conversion; but conditionally, to the Penitent: And this Forgivenesse, or Absolution, in case the absolved have but a feigned Repentance, is thereby without other act, or sentence of the Absolvent, made void, and hath no effect at all to Salvation, but on the contrary, to the Aggravation of his Sin. Therefore the Apostles, and their Successors, are to follow but the outward marks of Repentance; which appearing, they have no Authority to deny Absolution; and if they appeare not, they have no authority to Absolve. The same also is to be observed in Baptisme: for to a converted Jew, or Gentile, the Apostles had not the Power to deny Baptisme; nor to grant it to the Un-penitent. But seeing no man is able to discern the truth of another mans Repentance, further than by externall marks, taken from his words, and actions, which are subject to hypocrisie; another question will arise, Who it is that is constituted Judge of those marks. And this question is decided by our Saviour himself; (Mat. 18. 15, 16, 17.) “If thy Brother (saith he) shall trespasse against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee, and him alone; if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy Brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one, or two more. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the Church, let him be unto thee as an Heathen man, and a Publican.” By which it is manifest, that the Judgment concerning the truth of Repentance, belonged not to any one Man, but to the Church, that is, to the Assembly of the Faithfull, or to them that have authority to bee their Representant. But besides the Judgment, there is necessary also the pronouncing of Sentence: And this belonged alwaies to the Apostle, or some Pastor of the Church, as Prolocutor; and of this our Saviour speaketh in the 18 verse, “Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven.” And comformable hereunto was the practise of St. Paul (1 Cor. 5.3, 4, & 5.) where he saith, “For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have determined already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed; In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, To deliver such a one to Satan;” that is to say, to cast him out of the Church, as a man whose Sins are not Forgiven. Paul here pronounceth the Sentence; but the Assembly was first to hear the Cause, (for St. Paul was absent;) and by consequence to condemn him. But in the same chapter (ver. 11, 12.) the Judgment in such a case is more expressely attributed to the Assembly: “But now I have written unto you, not to keep company, if any man that is called a Brother be a Fornicator, &c. with such a one no not to eat. For what have I to do to judg them that are without? Do not ye judg them that are within?” The Sentence therefore by which a man was put out of the Church, was pronounced by the Apostle, or Pastor; but the Judgment concerning the merit of the cause, was in the Church; that is to say, (as the times were before the conversion of Kings, and men that had Soveraign Authority in the Common-wealth,) the Assembly of the Christians dwelling in the same City; as in Corinth, in the Assembly of the Christians of Corinth.\n\nThis part of the Power of the Keyes, by which men were thrust out from the Kingdome of God, is that which is called Excommunication; and to excommunicate, is in the Originall, Aposunagogon Poiein, To Cast Out Of The Synagogue; that is, out of the place of Divine service; a word drawn from the custom of the Jews, to cast out of their Synagogues, such as they thought in manners, or doctrine, contagious, as Lepers were by the Law of Moses separated from the congregation of Israel, till such time as they should be by the Priest pronounced clean.\n\nThe Use and Effect of Excommunication, whilest it was not yet strengthened with the Civill Power, was no more, than that they, who were not Excommunicate, were to avoid the company of them that were. It was not enough to repute them as Heathen, that never had been Christians; for with such they might eate, and drink; which with Excommunicate persons they might not do; as appeareth by the words of St. Paul, (1 Cor. 5. ver. 9, 10, &c.) where he telleth them, he had formerly forbidden them to “company with Fornicators;” but (because that could not bee without going out of the world,) he restraineth it to such Fornicators, and otherwise vicious persons, as were of the brethren; “with such a one” (he saith) they ought not to keep company, “no, not to eat.” And this is no more than our Saviour saith (Mat. 18.17.) “Let him be to thee as a Heathen, and as a Publican.” For Publicans (which signifieth Farmers, and Receivers of the revenue of the Common-wealth) were so hated, and detested by the Jews that were to pay for it, as that Publican and Sinner were taken amongst them for the same thing: Insomuch, as when our Saviour accepted the invitation of Zacchaeus a Publican; though it were to Convert him, yet it was objected to him as a Crime. And therefore, when our Saviour, to Heathen, added Publican, he did forbid them to eat with a man Excommunicate.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 3\n\nAs for keeping them out of their Synagogues, or places of Assembly, they had no Power to do it, but that of the owner of the place, whether he were Christian, or Heathen. And because all places are by right, in the Dominion of the Common-wealth; as well hee that was Excommunicated, as hee that never was Baptized, might enter into them by Commission from the Civill Magistrate; as Paul before his conversion entred into their Synagogues at Damascus, (Acts 9.2.) to apprehend Christians, men and women, and to carry them bound to Jerusalem, by Commission from the High Priest.\n\nBy which it appears, that upon a Christian, that should become an Apostate, in a place where the Civill Power did persecute, or not assist the Church, the effect of Excommunication had nothing in it, neither of dammage in this world, nor of terrour: Not of terrour, because of their unbeleef; nor of dammage, because they returned thereby into the favour of the world; and in the world to come, were to be in no worse estate, then they which never had beleeved. The dammage redounded rather to the Church, by provocation of them they cast out, to a freer execution of their malice.\n\nExcommunication therefore had its effect onely upon those, that beleeved that Jesus Christ was to come again in Glory, to reign over, and to judge both the quick, and the dead, and should therefore refuse entrance into his Kingdom, to those whose Sins were Retained; that is, to those that were Excommunicated by the Church. And thence it is that St. Paul calleth Excommunication, a delivery of the Excommunicate person to Satan. For without the Kingdom of Christ, all other Kingdomes after Judgment, are comprehended in the Kingdome of Satan. This is it that the faithfull stood in fear of, as long as they stood Excommunicate, that is to say, in an estate wherein their sins were not Forgiven. Whereby wee may understand, that Excommunication in the time that Christian Religion was not authorized by the Civill Power, was used onely for a correction of manners, not of errours in opinion: for it is a punishment, whereof none could be sensible but such as beleeved, and expected the coming again of our Saviour to judge the world; and they who so beleeved, needed no other opinion, but onely uprightnesse of life, to be saved.\n\nThere Lyeth Excommunication for Injustice; as (Mat. 18.) If thy Brother offend thee, tell it him privately; then with Witnesses; lastly, tell the Church; and then if he obey not, “Let him be to thee as an Heathen man, and a Publican.” And there lyeth Excommunication for a Scandalous Life, as (1 Cor. 5. 11.) “If any man that is called a Brother, be a Fornicator, or Covetous, or an Idolater, or a Drunkard, or an Extortioner, with such a one yee are not to eat.” But to Excommunicate a man that held this foundation, that Jesus Was The Christ, for difference of opinion in other points, by which that Foundation was not destroyed, there appeareth no authority in the Scripture, nor example in the Apostles. There is indeed in St. Paul (Titus 3.10.) a text that seemeth to be to the contrary. “A man that is an Haeretique, after the first and second admonition, reject.” For an Haeretique, is he, that being a member of the Church, teacheth neverthelesse some private opinion, which the Church has forbidden: and such a one, S. Paul adviseth Titus, after the first, and second admonition, to Reject. But to Reject (in this place) is not to Excommunicate the Man; But to Give Over Admonishing Him, To Let Him Alone, To Set By Disputing With Him, as one that is to be convinced onely by himselfe. The same Apostle saith (2 Tim. 2.23.) “Foolish and unlearned questions avoid;” The word Avoid in this place, and Reject in the former, is the same in the Originall, paraitou: but Foolish questions may bee set by without Excommunication. And again, (Tit. 3.93) “Avoid Foolish questions,” where the Originall, periistaso, (set them by) is equivalent to the former word Reject. There is no other place that can so much as colourably be drawn, to countenance the Casting out of the Church faithfull men, such as beleeved the foundation, onely for a singular superstructure of their own, proceeding perhaps from a good & pious conscience. But on the contrary, all such places as command avoiding such disputes, are written for a Lesson to Pastors, (such as Timothy and Titus were) not to make new Articles of Faith, by determining every small controversie, which oblige men to a needlesse burthen of Conscience, or provoke them to break the union of the Church. Which Lesson the Apostles themselves observed well. S. Peter and S. Paul, though their controversie were great, (as we may read in Gal. 2.11.) yet they did not cast one another out of the Church. Neverthelesse, during the Apostles time, there were other Pastors that observed it not; As Diotrephes (3 John 9. &c.) who cast out of the Church, such as S. John himself thought fit to be received into it, out of a pride he took in Praeeminence; so early it was, that Vainglory, and Ambition had found entrance into the Church of Christ.\n\nThat a man be liable to Excommunication, there be many conditions requisite; as First, that he be a member of some Commonalty, that is to say, of some lawfull Assembly, that is to say, of some Christian Church, that hath power to judge of the cause for which hee is to bee Excommunicated. For where there is no community, there can bee no Excommunication; nor where there is no power to Judge, can there bee any power to give Sentence. From hence it followeth, that one Church cannot be Excommunicated by another: For either they have equall power to Excommunicate each other, in which case Excommunication is not Discipline, nor an act of Authority, but Schisme, and Dissolution of charity; or one is so subordinate to the other, as that they both have but one voice, and then they be but one Church; and the part Excommunicated, is no more a Church, but a dissolute number of individuall persons.\n\nAnd because the sentence of Excommunication, importeth an advice, not to keep company, nor so much as to eat with him that is Excommunicate, if a Soveraign Prince, or Assembly bee Excommunicate, the sentence is of no effect. For all Subjects are bound to be in the company and presence of their own Soveraign (when he requireth it) by the law of Nature; nor can they lawfully either expell him from any place of his own Dominion, whether profane or holy; nor go out of his Dominion, without his leave; much lesse (if he call them to that honour,) refuse to eat with him. And as to other Princes and States, because they are not parts of one and the same congregation, they need not any other sentence to keep them from keeping company with the State Excommunicate: for the very Institution, as it uniteth many men into one Community; so it dissociateth one Community from another: so that Excommunication is not needfull for keeping Kings and States asunder; nor has any further effect then is in the nature of Policy it selfe; unlesse it be to instigate Princes to warre upon one another.\n\nNor is the Excommunication of a Christian Subject, that obeyeth the laws of his own Soveraign, whether Christian, or Heathen, of any effect. For if he beleeve that “Jesus is the Christ, he hath the Spirit of God” (1 Joh. 4.1.) “and God dwelleth in him, and he in God,” (1 Joh. 4.15.) But hee that hath the Spirit of God; hee that dwelleth in God; hee in whom God dwelleth, can receive no harm by the Excommunication of men. Therefore, he that beleeveth Jesus to be the Christ, is free from all the dangers threatned to persons Excommunicate. He that beleeveth it not, is no Christian. Therefore a true and unfeigned Christian is not liable to Excommunication; Nor he also that is a professed Christian, till his Hypocrisy appear in his Manners, that is, till his behaviour bee contrary to the law of his Soveraign, which is the rule of Manners, and which Christ and his Apostles have commanded us to be subject to. For the Church cannot judge of Manners but by externall Actions, which Actions can never bee unlawfull, but when they are against the Law of the Common-wealth.\n\nIf a mans Father, or Mother, or Master bee Excommunicate, yet are not the Children forbidden to keep them Company, nor to Eat with them; for that were (for the most part) to oblige them not to eat at all, for want of means to get food; and to authorise them to disobey their Parents, and Masters, contrary to the Precept of the Apostles.\n\nIn summe, the Power of Excommunication cannot be extended further than to the end for which the Apostles and Pastors of the Church have their Commission from our Saviour; which is not to rule by Command and Coaction, but by Teaching and Direction of men in the way of Salvation in the world to come. And as a Master in any Science, may abandon his Scholar, when hee obstinately neglecteth the practise of his rules; but not accuse him of Injustice, because he was never bound to obey him: so a Teacher of Christian doctrine may abandon his Disciples that obstinately continue in an unchristian life; but he cannot say, they doe him wrong, because they are not obliged to obey him: For to a Teacher that shall so complain, may be applyed the Answer of God to Samuel in the like place, (1 Sam. 8.) “They have not rejected thee, but mee.” Excommunication therefore when it wanteth the assistance of the Civill Power, as it doth, when a Christian State, or Prince is Excommunicate by a forain Authority, is without effect; and consequently ought to be without terrour. The name of Fulmen Excommunicationis (that is, the Thunderbolt Of Excommunication) proceeded from an imagination of the Bishop of Rome, which first used it, that he was King of Kings, as the Heathen made Jupiter King of the Gods; and assigned him in their Poems, and Pictures, a Thunderbolt, wherewith to subdue, and punish the Giants, that should dare to deny his power: Which imagination was grounded on two errours; one, that the Kingdome of Christ is of this world, contrary to our Saviours owne words, “My Kingdome is not of this world;” the other, that hee is Christs Vicar, not onely over his owne Subjects, but over all the Christians of the World; whereof there is no ground in Scripture, and the contrary shall bee proved in its due place.\n\nSt. Paul coming to Thessalonica, where was a Synagogue of the Jews, (Acts 17.2, 3.) “As his manner was, went in unto them, and three Sabbath dayes reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, Opening and alledging, that Christ must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus whom he preached was the Christ.” The Scriptures here mentioned were the Scriptures of the Jews, that is, the Old Testament. The men, to whom he was to prove that Jesus was the Christ, and risen again from the dead, were also Jews, and did beleeve already, that they were the Word of God. Hereupon (as it is verse 4.) some of them beleeved, and (as it is in the 5. ver.) some beleeved not. What was the reason, when they all beleeved the Scripture, that they did not all beleeve alike; but that some approved, others disapproved the Interpretation of St. Paul that cited them; and every one Interpreted them to himself? It was this; S. Paul came to them without any Legall Commission, and in the manner of one that would not Command, but Perswade; which he must needs do, either by Miracles, as Moses did to the Israelites in Egypt, that they might see his Authority in Gods works; or by Reasoning from the already received Scripture, that they might see the truth of his doctrine in Gods Word. But whosoever perswadeth by reasoning from principles written, maketh him to whom hee speaketh Judge, both of the meaning of those principles, and also of the force of his inferences upon them. If these Jews of Thessalonica were not, who else was the Judge of what S. Paul alledged out of Scripture? If S. Paul, what needed he to quote any places to prove his doctrine? It had been enough to have said, I find it so in Scripture, that is to say, in your Laws, of which I am Interpreter, as sent by Christ. The Interpreter therefore of the Scripture, to whose Interpretation the Jews of Thessalonica were bound to stand, could be none: every one might beleeve, or not beleeve, according as the Allegations seemed to himselfe to be agreeable, or not agreeable to the meaning of the places alledged. And generally in all cases of the world, hee that pretendeth any proofe, maketh Judge of his proofe him to whom he addresseth his speech. And as to the case of the Jews in particular, they were bound by expresse words (Deut. 17.) to receive the determination of all hard questions, from the Priests and Judges of Israel for the time being. But this is to bee understood of the Jews that were yet unconverted.\n\nFor the Conversion of the Gentiles, there was no use of alledging the Scriptures, which they beleeved not. The Apostles therefore laboured by Reason to confute their Idolatry; and that done, to perswade them to the faith of Christ, by their testimony of his Life, and Resurrection. So that there could not yet bee any controversie concerning the authority to Interpret Scripture; seeing no man was obliged during his infidelity, to follow any mans Interpretation of any Scripture, except his Soveraigns Interpretation of the Laws of his countrey.\n\nLet us now consider the Conversion it self, and see what there was therein, that could be cause of such an obligation. Men were converted to no other thing then to the Beleef of that which the Apostles preached: And the Apostles preached nothing, but that Jesus was the Christ, that is to say, the King that was to save them, and reign over them eternally in the world to come; and consequently that hee was not dead, but risen again from the dead, and gone up into Heaven, and should come again one day to judg the world, (which also should rise again to be judged,) and reward every man according to his works. None of them preached that himselfe, or any other Apostle was such an Interpreter of the Scripture, as all that became Christians, ought to take their Interpretation for Law. For to Interpret the Laws, is part of the Administration of a present Kingdome; which the Apostles had not. They prayed then, and all other Pastors ever since, “Let thy Kingdome come;” and exhorted their Converts to obey their then Ethnique Princes. The New Testament was not yet published in one Body. Every of the Evangelists was Interpreter of his own Gospel; and every Apostle of his own Epistle; And of the Old Testament, our Saviour himselfe saith to the Jews (John 5. 39.) “Search the Scriptures; for in them yee thinke to have eternall life, and they are they that testifie of me.” If hee had not meant they should Interpret them, hee would not have bidden them take thence the proof of his being the Christ; he would either have Interpreted them himselfe, or referred them to the Interpretation of the Priests.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 4\n\nWhen a difficulty arose, the Apostles and Elders of the Church assembled themselves together, and determined what should bee preached, and taught, and how they should Interpret the Scriptures to the People; but took not from the People the liberty to read, and Interpret them to themselves. The Apostles sent divers Letters to the Churches, and other Writings for their instruction; which had been in vain, if they had not allowed them to Interpret, that is, to consider the meaning of them. And as it was in the Apostles time, it must be till such time as there should be Pastors, that could authorise an Interpreter, whose Interpretation should generally be stood to: But that could not be till Kings were Pastors, or Pastors Kings.\n\nThere be two senses, wherein a Writing may be said to be Canonicall; for Canon, signifieth a Rule; and a Rule is a Precept, by which a man is guided, and directed in any action whatsoever. Such Precepts, though given by a Teacher to his Disciple, or a Counsellor to his friend, without power to Compell him to observe them, are neverthelesse Canons; because they are Rules: But when they are given by one, whom he that receiveth them is bound to obey, then are those Canons, not onely Rules, but Laws: The question therefore here, is of the Power to make the Scriptures (which are the Rules of Christian Faith) Laws.\n\nThat part of the Scripture, which was first Law, was the Ten Commandements, written in two Tables of Stone, and delivered by God himselfe to Moses; and by Moses made known to the people. Before that time there was no written Law of God, who as yet having not chosen any people to bee his peculiar Kingdome, had given no Law to men, but the Law of Nature, that is to say, the Precepts of Naturall Reason, written in every mans own heart. Of these two Tables, the first containeth the law of Soveraignty; 1. That they should not obey, nor honour the Gods of other Nations, in these words, “Non habebis Deos alienos coram me,” that is, “Thou shalt not have for Gods, the Gods that other Nations worship; but onely me:” whereby they were forbidden to obey, or honor, as their King and Governour, any other God, than him that spake unto them then by Moses, and afterwards by the High Priest. 2. That they “should not make any Image to represent him;” that is to say, they were not to choose to themselves, neither in heaven, nor in earth, any Representative of their own fancying, but obey Moses and Aaron, whom he had appointed to that office. 3. That “they should not take the Name of God in vain;” that is, they should not speak rashly of their King, nor dispute his Right, nor the commissions of Moses and Aaron, his Lieutenants. 4. That “they should every Seventh day abstain from their ordinary labour,” and employ that time in doing him Publique Honor. The second Table containeth the Duty of one man towards another, as “To honor Parents; Not to kill; Not to Commit Adultery; Not to steale; Not to corrupt Judgment by false witnesse;” and finally, “Not so much as to designe in their heart the doing of any injury one to another.” The question now is, Who it was that gave to these written Tables the obligatory force of Lawes. There is no doubt but that they were made Laws by God himselfe: But because a Law obliges not, nor is Law to any, but to them that acknowledge it to be the act of the Soveraign, how could the people of Israel that were forbidden to approach the Mountain to hear what God said to Moses, be obliged to obedience to all those laws which Moses propounded to them? Some of them were indeed the Laws of Nature, as all the Second Table; and therefore to be acknowledged for Gods Laws; not to the Israelites alone, but to all people: But of those that were peculiar to the Israelites, as those of the first Table, the question remains; saving that they had obliged themselves, presently after the propounding of them, to obey Moses, in these words (Exod. 20.19.) “Speak them thou to us, and we will hear thee; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.” It was therefore onely Moses then, and after him the High Priest, whom (by Moses) God declared should administer this his peculiar Kingdome, that had on Earth, the power to make this short Scripture of the Decalogue to bee Law in the Common-wealth of Israel. But Moses, and Aaron, and the succeeding High Priests were the Civill Soveraigns. Therefore hitherto, the Canonizing, or making of the Scripture Law, belonged to the Civill Soveraigne.\n\nThe Judiciall Law, that is to say, the Laws that God prescribed to the Magistrates of Israel, for the rule of their administration of Justice, and of the Sentences, or Judgments they should pronounce, in Pleas between man and man; and the Leviticall Law, that is to say, the rule that God prescribed touching the Rites and Ceremonies of the Priests and Levites, were all delivered to them by Moses onely; and therefore also became Lawes, by vertue of the same promise of obedience to Moses. Whether these laws were then written, or not written, but dictated to the People by Moses (after his forty dayes being with God in the Mount) by word of mouth, is not expressed in the Text; but they were all positive Laws, and equivalent to holy Scripture, and made Canonicall by Moses the Civill Soveraign.\n\nAfter the Israelites were come into the Plains of Moab over against Jericho, and ready to enter into the land of Promise, Moses to the former Laws added divers others; which therefore are called Deuteronomy: that is, Second Laws. And are (as it is written, Deut. 29.1.) “The words of a Covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Children of Israel, besides the Covenant which he made with them in Horeb.” For having explained those former Laws, in the beginning of the Book of Deuteronomy, he addeth others, that begin at the 12. Cha. and continue to the end of the 26. of the same Book. This Law (Deut. 27.1.) they were commanded to write upon great stones playstered over, at their passing over Jordan: This Law also was written by Moses himself in a Book; and delivered into the hands of the “Priests, and to the Elders of Israel,” (Deut. 31.9.) and commanded (ve. 26.) “to be put in the side of the Arke;” for in the Ark it selfe was nothing but the Ten Commandements. This was the Law, which Moses (Deuteronomy 17.18.) commanded the Kings of Israel should keep a copie of: And this is the Law, which having been long time lost, was found again in the Temple in the time of Josiah, and by his authority received for the Law of God. But both Moses at the writing, and Josiah at the recovery thereof, had both of them the Civill Soveraignty. Hitherto therefore the Power of making Scripture Canonicall, was in the Civill Soveraign.\n\nBesides this Book of the Law, there was no other Book, from the time of Moses, till after the Captivity, received amongst the Jews for the Law of God. For the Prophets (except a few) lived in the time of the Captivity it selfe; and the rest lived but a little before it; and were so far from having their Prophecies generally received for Laws, as that their persons were persecuted, partly by false Prophets, and partly by the Kings which were seduced by them. And this Book it self, which was confirmed by Josiah for the Law of God, and with it all the History of the Works of God, was lost in the Captivity, and sack of the City of Jerusalem, as appears by that of 2 Esdras 14.21. “Thy Law is burnt; therefor no man knoweth the things that are done of thee, of the works that shall begin.” And before the Captivity, between the time when the Law was lost, (which is not mentioned in the Scripture, but may probably be thought to be the time of Rehoboam, when Shishak King of Egypt took the spoils of the Temple,(1 Kings 14.26.)) and the time of Josiah, when it was found againe, they had no written Word of God, but ruled according to their own discretion, or by the direction of such, as each of them esteemed Prophets.\n\nFrom whence we may inferre, that the Scriptures of the Old Testament, which we have at this day, were not Canonicall, nor a Law unto the Jews, till the renovation of their Covenant with God at their return from the Captivity, and restauration of their Common-wealth under Esdras. But from that time forward they were accounted the Law of the Jews, and for such translated into Greek by Seventy Elders of Judaea, and put into the Library of Ptolemy at Alexandria, and approved for the Word of God. Now seeing Esdras was the High Priest, and the High Priest was their Civill Soveraigne, it is manifest, that the Scriptures were never made Laws, but by the Soveraign Civill Power.\n\nThe New Testament Began To Be Canonicall Under Christian Soveraigns By the Writings of the Fathers that lived in the time before that Christian Religion was received, and authorised by Constantine the Emperour, we may find, that the Books wee now have of the New Testament, were held by the Christians of that time (except a few, in respect of whose paucity the rest were called the Catholique Church, and others Haeretiques) for the dictates of the Holy Ghost; and consequently for the Canon, or Rule of Faith: such was the reverence and opinion they had of their Teachers; as generally the reverence that the Disciples bear to their first Masters, in all manner of doctrine they receive from them, is not small. Therefore there is no doubt, but when S. Paul wrote to the Churches he had converted; or any other Apostle, or Disciple of Christ, to those which had then embraced Christ, they received those their Writings for the true Christian Doctrine. But in that time, when not the Power and Authority of the Teacher, but the Faith of the Hearer caused them to receive it, it was not the Apostles that made their own Writings Canonicall, but every Convert made them so to himself.\n\nBut the question here, is not what any Christian made a Law, or Canon to himself, (which he might again reject, by the same right he received it;) but what was so made a Canon to them, as without injustice they could not doe any thing contrary thereunto. That the New Testament should in this sense be Canonicall, that is to say, a Law in any place where the Law of the Common-wealth had not made it so, is contrary to the nature of a Law. For a Law, (as hath been already shewn) is the Commandement of that Man, or Assembly, to whom we have given Soveraign Authority, to make such Rules for the direction of our actions, as hee shall think fit; and to punish us, when we doe any thing contrary to the same. When therefore any other man shall offer unto us any other Rules, which the Soveraign Ruler hath not prescribed, they are but Counsell, and Advice; which, whether good, or bad, hee that is counselled, may without injustice refuse to observe, and when contrary to the Laws already established, without injustice cannot observe, how good soever he conceiveth it to be. I say, he cannot in this case observe the same in his actions, nor in his discourse with other men; though he may without blame beleeve the his private Teachers, and wish he had the liberty to practise their advice; and that it were publiquely received for Law. For internall faith is in its own nature invisible, and consequently exempted from all humane jurisdiction; whereas the words, and actions that proceed from it, as breaches of our Civil obedience, are injustice both before God and Man. Seeing then our Saviour hath denyed his Kingdome to be in this world, seeing he hath said, he came not to judge, but to save the world, he hath not subjected us to other Laws than those of the Common-wealth; that is, the Jews to the Law of Moses, (which he saith (Mat. 5.) he came not to destroy, but to fulfill,) and other Nations to the Laws of their severall Soveraigns, and all men to the Laws of Nature; the observing whereof, both he himselfe, and his Apostles have in their teaching recommended to us, as a necessary condition of being admitted by him in the last day into his eternall Kingdome, wherein shall be Protection, and Life everlasting. Seeing then our Saviour, and his Apostles, left not new Laws to oblige us in this world, but new Doctrine to prepare us for the next; the Books of the New Testament, which containe that Doctrine, untill obedience to them was commanded, by them that God hath given power to on earth to be Legislators, were not obligatory Canons, that is, Laws, but onely good, and safe advice, for the direction of sinners in the way to salvation, which every man might take, and refuse at his owne perill, without injustice.\n\nAgain, our Saviour Christs Commission to his Apostles, and Disciples, was to Proclaim his Kingdome (not present, but) to come; and to Teach all Nations; and to Baptize them that should beleeve; and to enter into the houses of them that should receive them; and where they were not received, to shake off the dust of their feet against them; but not to call for fire from heaven to destroy them, nor to compell them to obedience by the Sword. In all which there is nothing of Power, but of Perswasion. He sent them out as Sheep unto Wolves, not as Kings to their Subjects. They had not in Commission to make Laws; but to obey, and teach obedience to Laws made; and consequently they could not make their Writings obligatory Canons, without the help of the Soveraign Civill Power. And therefore the Scripture of the New Testament is there only Law, where the lawfull Civill Power hath made it so. And there also the King, or Soveraign, maketh it a Law to himself; by which he subjecteth himselfe, not to the Doctor, or Apostle, that converted him, but to God himself, and his Son Jesus Christ, as immediately as did the Apostles themselves.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 5\n\nThat which may seem to give the New Testament, in respect of those that have embraced Christian Doctrine, the force of Laws, in the times, and places of persecution, is the decrees they made amongst themselves in their Synods. For we read (Acts 15.28.) the stile of the Councell of the Apostles, the Elders, and the whole Church, in this manner, “It seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burthen than these necessary things, &C.” which is a stile that signifieth a Power to lay a burthen on them that had received their Doctrine. Now “to lay a burthen on another,” seemeth the same that “to oblige;” and therefore the Acts of that Councell were Laws to the then Christians. Neverthelesse, they were no more Laws than are these other Precepts, “Repent, Be Baptized; Keep the Commandements; Beleeve the Gospel; Come unto me; Sell all that thou hast; Give it to the poor;” and “Follow me;” which are not Commands, but Invitations, and Callings of men to Christianity, like that of Esay 55.1. “Ho, every man that thirsteth, come yee to the waters, come, and buy wine and milke without money.” For first, the Apostles power was no other than that of our Saviour, to invite men to embrace the Kingdome of God; which they themselves acknowledged for a Kingdome (not present, but) to come; and they that have no Kingdome, can make no Laws. And secondly, if their Acts of Councell, were Laws, they could not without sin be disobeyed. But we read not any where, that they who received not the Doctrine of Christ, did therein sin; but that they died in their sins; that is, that their sins against the Laws to which they owed obedience, were not pardoned. And those Laws were the Laws of Nature, and the Civill Laws of the State, whereto every Christian man had by pact submitted himself. And therefore by the Burthen, which the Apostles might lay on such as they had converted, are not to be understood Laws, but Conditions, proposed to those that sought Salvation; which they might accept, or refuse at their own perill, without a new sin, though not without the hazard of being condemned, and excluded out of the Kingdome of God for their sins past. And therefore of Infidels, S. John saith not, the wrath of God shall “come” upon them, but “the wrath of God remaineth upon them;” and not that they shall be condemned; but that “they are condemned already.”(John 3.36, 3.18) Nor can it be conceived, that the benefit of Faith, “is Remission of sins” unlesse we conceive withall, that the dammage of Infidelity, is “the Retention of the same sins.”\n\nBut to what end is it (may some man aske), that the Apostles, and other Pastors of the Church, after their time, should meet together, to agree upon what Doctrine should be taught, both for Faith and Manners, if no man were obliged to observe their Decrees? To this may be answered, that the Apostles, and Elders of that Councell, were obliged even by their entrance into it, to teach the Doctrine therein concluded, and decreed to be taught, so far forth, as no precedent Law, to which they were obliged to yeeld obedience, was to the contrary; but not that all other Christians should be obliged to observe, what they taught. For though they might deliberate what each of them should teach; yet they could not deliberate what others should do, unless their Assembly had had a Legislative Power; which none could have but Civill Soveraigns. For though God be the Soveraign of all the world, we are not bound to take for his Law, whatsoever is propounded by every man in his name; nor any thing contrary to the Civill Law, which God hath expressely commanded us to obey.\n\nSeeing then the Acts of Councell of the Apostles, were then no Laws, but Councells; much lesse are Laws the Acts of any other Doctors, or Councells since, if assembled without the Authority of the Civill Soveraign. And consequently, the Books of the New Testament, though most perfect Rules of Christian Doctrine, could not be made Laws by any other authority then that of Kings, or Soveraign Assemblies.\n\nThe first Councell, that made the Scriptures we now have, Canon, is not extant: For that Collection the first Bishop of Rome after S. Peter, is subject to question: For though the Canonicall books bee there reckoned up; yet these words, “Sint vobis omnibus Clericis & Laicis Libris venerandi, &c.” containe a distinction of Clergy, and Laity, that was not in use so neer St. Peters time. The first Councell for setling the Canonicall Scripture, that is extant, is that of Laodicea, Can. 59. which forbids the reading of other Books then those in the Churches; which is a Mandate that is not addressed to every Christian, but to those onely that had authority to read any publiquely in the Church; that is, to Ecclesiastiques onely.\n\nOf Ecclesiastical Officers in the time of the Apostles, some were Magisteriall, some Ministeriall. Magisteriall were the Offices of preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to Infidels; of administring the Sacraments, and Divine Service; and of teaching the Rules of Faith and Manners to those that were converted. Ministeriall was the Office of Deacons, that is, of them that were appointed to the administration of the secular necessities of the Church, at such time as they lived upon a common stock of mony, raised out of the voluntary contributions of the faithfull.\n\nAmongst the Officers Magisteriall, the first, and principall were the Apostles; whereof there were at first but twelve; and these were chosen and constituted by our Saviour himselfe; and their Office was not onely to Preach, Teach, and Baptize, but also to be Martyrs, (Witnesses of our Saviours Resurrection.) This Testimony, was the specificall, and essentiall mark; whereby the Apostleship was distinguished from other Magistracy Ecclesiasticall; as being necessary for an Apostle, either to have seen our Saviour after his Resurrection, or to have conversed with him before, and seen his works, and other arguments of his Divinity, whereby they might be taken for sufficient Witnesses. And therefore at the election of a new Apostle in the place of Judas Iscariot, S. Peter saith (Acts 1.21,22.) “Of these men that have companyed with us, all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the Baptisme of John unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a Witnesse with us of his Resurrection:” where, by this word Must, is implyed a necessary property of an Apostle, to have companyed with the first and prime Apostles in the time that our Saviour manifested himself in the flesh.\n\nMatthias Made Apostle By The Congregation.\n\nThe first Apostle, of those which were not constituted by Christ in the time he was upon the Earth, was Matthias, chosen in this manner: There were assembled together in Jerusalem about 120 Christians (Acts 1.15.) These appointed two, Joseph the Just, and Matthias (ver. 23.) and caused lots to be drawn; “and (ver. 26.) the Lot fell on Matthias and he was numbred with the Apostles.” So that here we see the ordination of this Apostle, was the act of the Congregation, and not of St. Peter, nor of the eleven, otherwise then as Members of the Assembly.\n\nAfter him there was never any other Apostle ordained, but Paul and Barnabas, which was done (as we read Acts 13.1,2,3.) in this manner. “There were in the Church that was at Antioch, certaine Prophets, and Teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen; which had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. As they ministred unto the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, ‘Separate mee Barnabas, and Saul for the worke whereunto I have called them.’ And when they had fasted, and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.”\n\nBy which it is manifest, that though they were called by the Holy Ghost, their Calling was declared unto them, and their Mission authorized by the particular Church of Antioch. And that this their calling was to the Apostleship, is apparent by that, that they are both called (Acts 14.14.) Apostles: And that it was by vertue of this act of the Church of Antioch, that they were Apostles, S. Paul declareth plainly (Rom. 1.1.) in that hee useth the word, which the Holy Ghost used at his calling: For he stileth himself, “An Apostle separated unto the Gospel of God;” alluding to the words of the Holy Ghost, “Separate me Barnabas and Saul, &c.” But seeing the work of an Apostle, was to be a Witnesse of the Resurrection of Christ, and man may here aske, how S. Paul that conversed not with our Saviour before his passion, could know he was risen. To which it is easily answered, that our Saviour himself appeared to him in the way to Damascus, from Heaven, after his Ascension; “and chose him for a vessell to bear his name before the Gentiles, and Kings, and Children of Israel;” and consequently (having seen the Lord after his passion) was a competent Witnesse of his Resurrection: And as for Barnabas, he was a Disciple before the Passion. It is therefore evident that Paul, and Barnabas were Apostles; and yet chosen, and authorized (not by the first Apostles alone, but) by the Church of Antioch; as Matthias was chosen, and authorized by the Church of Jerusalem.\n\nBishop, a word formed in our language, out of the Greek Episcopus, signifieth an overseer, or Superintendent of any businesse, and particularly a Pastor or Shepherd; and thence by metaphor was taken, not only amongst the Jews that were originally Shepherds, but also amongst the Heathen, to signifie the Office of a King, or any other Ruler, or Guide of People, whether he ruled by Laws, or Doctrine. And so the Apostles were the first Christian Bishops, instituted by Christ himselfe: in which sense the Apostleship of Judas is called (Acts 1.20.) his Bishoprick. And afterwards, when there were constituted Elders in the Christian Churches, with charge to guide Christs flock by their doctrine, and advice; these Elders were also called Bishops. Timothy was an Elder (which word Elder, in the New Testament is a name of Office, as well as of Age;) yet he was also a Bishop. And Bishops were then content with the Title of Elders. Nay S. John himselfe, the Apostle beloved of our Lord, beginneth his Second Epistle with these words, “The Elder to the Elect Lady.” By which it is evident, that Bishop, Pastor, Elder, Doctor, that is to say, Teacher, were but so many divers names of the same Office in the time of the Apostles. For there was then no government by Coercion, but only by Doctrine, and Perswading. The Kingdome of God was yet to come, in a new world; so that there could be no authority to compell in any Church, till the Common-wealth had embraced the Christian Faith; and consequently no diversity of Authority, though there were diversity of Employments.\n\nBesides these Magisteriall employments in the Church, namely Apostles, Bishops, Elders, Pastors, and Doctors, whose calling was to proclaim Christ to the Jews, and Infidels, and to direct, and teach those that beleeved we read in the New Testament of no other. For by the names of Evangelists and Prophets, is not signified any Office, but severall Gifts, by which severall men were profitable to the Church: as Evangelists, by writing the life and acts of our Saviour; such as were S. Matthew and S. John Apostles, and S. Marke and S. Luke Disciples, and whosoever else wrote of that subject, (as S. Thomas, and S. Barnabas are said to have done, though the Church have not received the Books that have gone under their names:) and as Prophets, by the gift of interpreting the Old Testament; and sometimes by declaring their speciall Revelations to the Church. For neither these gifts, nor the gifts of Languages, nor the gift of Casting out Devils, or of Curing other diseases, nor any thing else did make an Officer in the Church, save onely the due calling and election to the charge of Teaching.\n\nAs the Apostles, Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas, were not made by our Saviour himself, but were elected by the Church, that is, by the Assembly of Christians; namely, Matthias by the Church of Jerusalem, and Paul, and Barnabas by the Church of Antioch; so were also the Presbyters, and Pastors in other Cities, elected by the Churches of those Cities. For proof whereof, let us consider, first, how S. Paul proceeded in the Ordination of Presbyters, in the Cities where he had converted men to the Christian Faith, immediately after he and Barnabas had received their Apostleship. We read (Acts 14.23.) that “they ordained Elders in every Church;” which at first sight may be taken for an Argument, that they themselves chose, and gave them their authority: But if we consider the Originall text, it will be manifest, that they were authorized, and chosen by the Assembly of the Christians of each City. For the words there are, “cheirotonesantes autoispresbuterous kat ekklesian,” that is, “When they had Ordained them Elders by the Holding up of Hands in every Congregation.” Now it is well enough known, that in all those Cities, the manner of choosing Magistrates, and Officers, was by plurality of suffrages; and (because the ordinary way of distinguishing the Affirmative Votes from the Negatives, was by Holding up of Hands) to ordain an Officer in any of the Cities, was no more but to bring the people together, to elect them by plurality of Votes, whether it were by plurality of elevated hands, or by plurality of voices, or plurality of balls, or beans, or small stones, of which every man cast in one, into a vessell marked for the Affirmative, or Negative; for divers Cities had divers customes in that point. It was therefore the Assembly that elected their own Elders: the Apostles were onely Presidents of the Assembly to call them together for such Election, and to pronounce them Elected, and to give them the benediction, which now is called Consecration. And for this cause they that were Presidents of the Assemblies, as (in the absence of the Apostles) the Elders were, were called proestotes, and in Latin Antistities; which words signifie the Principall Person of the Assembly, whose office was to number the Votes, and to declare thereby who was chosen; and where the Votes were equall, to decide the matter in question, by adding his own; which is the Office of a President in Councell. And (because all the Churches had their Presbyters ordained in the same manner,) where the word is Constitute, (as Titus 1.5.) “ina katasteses kata polin presbuterous,” “For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest constitute Elders in every City,” we are to understand the same thing; namely, that hee should call the faithfull together, and ordain them Presbyters by plurality of suffrages. It had been a strange thing, if in a Town, where men perhaps had never seen any Magistrate otherwise chosen then by an Assembly, those of the Town becomming Christians, should so much as have thought on any other way of Election of their Teachers, and Guides, that is to say, of their Presbyters, (otherwise called Bishops,) then this of plurality of suffrages, intimated by S. Paul (Acts 14.23.) in the word Cheirotonesantes: Nor was there ever any choosing of Bishops, (before the Emperors found it necessary to regulate them in order to the keeping of the peace amongst them,) but by the Assemblies of the Christians in every severall Town.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 6\n\nThe same is also confirmed by the continuall practise even to this day, in the Election of the Bishops of Rome. For if the Bishop of any place, had the right of choosing another, to the succession of the Pastorall Office, in any City, at such time as he went from thence, to plant the same in another place; much more had he had the Right, to appoint his successour in that place, in which he last resided and dyed: And we find not, that ever any Bishop of Rome appointed his successor. For they were a long time chosen by the People, as we may see by the sedition raised about the Election, between Damascus, and Ursinicus; which Ammianus Marcellinus saith was so great, that Juventius the Praefect, unable to keep the peace between them, was forced to goe out of the City; and that there were above an hundred men found dead upon that occasion in the Church it self. And though they afterwards were chosen, first, by the whole Clergy of Rome, and afterwards by the Cardinalls; yet never any was appointed to the succession by his predecessor. If therefore they pretended no right to appoint their successors, I think I may reasonably conclude, they had no right to appoint the new power; which none could take from the Church to bestow on them, but such as had a lawfull authority, not onely to Teach, but to Command the Church; which none could doe, but the Civill Soveraign.\n\nThe word Minister in the Originall Diakonos signifieth one that voluntarily doth the businesse of another man; and differeth from a Servant onely in this, that Servants are obliged by their condition, to what is commanded them; whereas Ministers are obliged onely by their undertaking, and bound therefore to no more than that they have undertaken: So that both they that teach the Word of God, and they that administer the secular affairs of the Church, are both Ministers, but they are Ministers of different Persons. For the Pastors of the Church, called (Acts 6.4.) “The Ministers of the Word,” are Ministers of Christ, whose Word it is: But the Ministery of a Deacon, which is called (verse 2. of the same Chapter) “Serving of Tables,” is a service done to the Church, or Congregation: So that neither any one man, nor the whole Church, could ever of their Pastor say, he was their Minister; but of a Deacon, whether the charge he undertook were to serve tables, or distribute maintenance to the Christians, when they lived in each City on a common stock, or upon collections, as in the first times, or to take a care of the House of Prayer, or of the Revenue, or other worldly businesse of the Church, the whole Congregation might properly call him their Minister.\n\nFor their employment, as Deacons, was to serve the Congregation; though upon occasion they omitted not to preach the Gospel, and maintain the Doctrine of Christ, every one according to his gifts, as S. Steven did; and both to Preach, and Baptize, as Philip did: For that Philip, which (Act. 8. 5.) Preached the Gospel at Samaria, and (verse 38.) Baptized the Eunuch, was Philip the Deacon, not Philip the Apostle. For it is manifest (verse 1.) that when Philip preached in Samaria, the Apostles were at Jerusalem, and (verse 14.) “When they heard that Samaria had received the Word of God, sent Peter and John to them;” by imposition of whose hands, they that were Baptized (verse 15.) received (which before by the Baptisme of Philip they had not received) the Holy Ghost. For it was necessary for the conferring of the Holy Ghost, that their Baptisme should be administred, or confirmed by a Minister of the Word, not by a Minister of the Church. And therefore to confirm the Baptisme of those that Philip the Deacon had Baptized, the Apostles sent out of their own number from Jerusalem to Samaria, Peter, and John; who conferred on them that before were but Baptized, those graces that were signs of the Holy Spirit, which at that time did accompany all true Beleevers; which what they were may be understood by that which S. Marke saith (chap. 16.17.) “These signs follow them that beleeve in my Name; they shall cast out Devills; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up Serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” This to doe, was it that Philip could not give; but the Apostles could, and (as appears by this place) effectually did to every man that truly beleeved, and was by a Minister of Christ himself Baptized: which power either Christs Ministers in this age cannot conferre, or else there are very few true Beleevers, or Christ hath very few Ministers.\n\nThat the first Deacons were chosen, not by the Apostles, but by a Congregation of the Disciples; that is, of Christian men of all sorts, is manifest out of Acts 6. where we read that the Twelve, after the number of Disciples was multiplyed, called them together, and having told them, that it was not fit that the Apostles should leave the Word of God, and serve tables, said unto them (verse 3.) “Brethren looke you out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost, and of Wisdome, whom we may appoint over this businesse.” Here it is manifest, that though the Apostles declared them elected; yet the Congregation chose them; which also, (verse the fift) is more expressely said, where it is written, that “the saying pleased the multitude, and they chose seven, &c.”\n\nUnder the Old Testament, the Tribe of Levi were onely capable of the Priesthood, and other inferiour Offices of the Church. The land was divided amongst the other Tribes (Levi excepted,) which by the subdivision of the Tribe of Joseph, into Ephraim and Manasses, were still twelve. To the Tribe of Levi were assigned certain Cities for their habitation, with the suburbs for their cattell: but for their portion, they were to have the tenth of the fruits of the land of their Brethren. Again, the Priests for their maintenance had the tenth of that tenth, together with part of the oblations, and sacrifices. For God had said to Aaron (Numb. 18. 20.) “Thou shalt have no inheritance in their land, neither shalt thou have any part amongst them, I am thy part, and thine inheritance amongst the Children of Israel.” For God being then King, and having constituted the Tribe of Levi to be his Publique Ministers, he allowed them for their maintenance, the Publique revenue, that is to say, the part that God had reserved to himself; which were Tythes, and Offerings: and that it is which is meant, where God saith, I am thine inheritance. And therefore to the Levites might not unfitly be attributed the name of Clergy from Kleros, which signifieth Lot, or Inheritance; not that they were heirs of the Kingdome of God, more than other; but that Gods inheritance, was their maintenance. Now seeing in this time God himself was their King, and Moses, Aaron, and the succeeding High Priests were his Lieutenants; it is manifest, that the Right of Tythes, and Offerings was constituted by the Civill Power.\n\nAfter their rejection of God in the demand of a King, they enjoyed still the same revenue; but the Right thereof was derived from that, that the Kings did never take it from them: for the Publique Revenue was at the disposing of him that was the Publique Person; and that (till the Captivity) was the King. And again, after the return from the Captivity, they paid their Tythes as before to the Priest. Hitherto therefore Church Livings were determined by the Civill Soveraign.\n\nOf the maintenance of our Saviour, and his Apostles, we read onely they had a Purse, (which was carried by Judas Iscariot;) and, that of the Apostles, such as were Fisher-men, did sometimes use their trade; and that when our Saviour sent the Twelve Apostles to Preach, he forbad them “to carry Gold, and Silver, and Brasse in their purses, for that the workman is worthy of his hire:” (Mat. 10. 9,10.) By which it is probable, their ordinary maintenance was not unsuitable to their employment; for their employment was (ver. 8.) “freely to give, because they had freely received;” and their maintenance was the Free Gift of those that beleeved the good tyding they carryed about of the coming of the Messiah their Saviour. To which we may adde, that which was contributed out of gratitude, by such as our Saviour had healed of diseases; of which are mentioned “Certain women (Luke 8. 2,3.) which had been healed of evill spirits and infirmities; Mary Magdalen, out of whom went seven Devills; and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herods Steward; and Susanna, and many others, which ministred unto him of their substance.\n\nAfter our Saviours Ascension, the Christians of every City lived in Common, (Acts 4. 34.) upon the mony which was made of the sale of their lands and possessions, and laid down at the feet of the Apostles, of good will, not of duty; for “whilest the Land remained (saith S. Peter to Ananias Acts 5.4.) was it not thine? and after it was sold, was it not in thy power?” which sheweth he needed not to have saved his land, nor his money by lying, as not being bound to contribute any thing at all, unlesse he had pleased. And as in the time of the Apostles, so also all the time downward, till after Constantine the Great, we shall find, that the maintenance of the Bishops, and Pastors of the Christian Church, was nothing but the voluntary contribution of them that had embraced their Doctrine. There was yet no mention of Tythes: but such was in the time of Constantine, and his Sons, the affection of Christians to their Pastors, as Ammianus Marcellinus saith (describing the sedition of Damasus and Ursinicus about the Bishopricke,) that it was worth their contention, in that the Bishops of those times by the liberality of their flock, and especially of Matrons, lived splendidly, were carryed in Coaches, and sumptuous in their fare and apparell.\n\nThe Ministers Of The Gospel Lived On The Benevolence Of Their Flocks But here may some ask, whether the Pastor were then bound to live upon voluntary contribution, as upon almes, “For who (saith S. Paul 1 Cor. 9. 7.) goeth to war at his own charges? or who feedeth a flock, and eatheth not of the milke of the flock?” And again, (1 Cor. 9. 13.) “Doe ye not know that they which minister about holy things, live of the things of the Temple; and they which wait at the Altar, partake with the Altar;” that is to say, have part of that which is offered at the Altar for their maintenance? And then he concludeth, “Even so hath the Lord appointed, that they which preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel. From which place may be inferred indeed, that the Pastors of the Church ought to be maintained by their flocks; but not that the Pastors were to determine, either the quantity, or the kind of their own allowance, and be (as it were) their own Carvers. Their allowance must needs therefore be determined, either by the gratitude, and liberality of every particular man of their flock, or by the whole Congregation. By the whole Congregation it could not be, because their Acts were then no Laws: Therefore the maintenance of Pastors, before Emperours and Civill Soveraigns had made Laws to settle it, was nothing but Benevolence. They that served at the Altar lived on what was offered. In what court should they sue for it, who had no Tribunalls? Or if they had Arbitrators amongst themselves, who should execute their Judgments, when they had no power to arme their Officers? It remaineth therefore, that there could be no certaine maintenance assigned to any Pastors of the Church, but by the whole Congregation; and then onely, when their Decrees should have the force (not onely of Canons, but also) of Laws; which Laws could not be made, but by Emperours, Kings, or other Civill Soveraignes. The Right of Tythes in Moses Law, could not be applyed to the then Ministers of the Gospell; because Moses and the High Priests were the Civill Soveraigns of the people under God, whose Kingdom amongst the Jews was present; whereas the Kingdome of God by Christ is yet to come.\n\nHitherto hath been shewn what the Pastors of the Church are; what are the points of their Commission (as that they were to Preach, to Teach, to Baptize, to be Presidents in their severall Congregations;) what is Ecclesiasticall Censure, viz. Excommunication, that is to say, in those places where Christianity was forbidden by the Civill Laws, a putting of themselves out of the company of the Excommunicate, and where Christianity was by the Civill Law commanded, a putting the Excommunicate out of the Congregations of Christians; who elected the Pastors and Ministers of the Church, (that it was, the Congregation); who consecrated and blessed them, (that it was the Pastor); what was their due revenue, (that it was none but their own possessions, and their own labour, and the voluntary contributions of devout and gratefull Christians). We are to consider now, what Office those persons have, who being Civill Soveraignes, have embraced also the Christian Faith.\n\nAnd first, we are to remember, that the Right of Judging what Doctrines are fit for Peace, and to be taught the Subjects, is in all Common-wealths inseparably annexed (as hath been already proved cha. 18.) to the Soveraign Power Civill, whether it be in one Man, or in one Assembly of men. For it is evident to the meanest capacity, that mens actions are derived from the opinions they have of the Good, or Evill, which from those actions redound unto themselves; and consequently, men that are once possessed of an opinion, that their obedience to the Soveraign Power, will bee more hurtfull to them, than their disobedience, will disobey the Laws, and thereby overthrow the Common-wealth, and introduce confusion, and Civill war; for the avoiding whereof, all Civill Government was ordained. And therefore in all Common-wealths of the Heathen, the Soveraigns have had the name of Pastors of the People, because there was no Subject that could lawfully Teach the people, but by their permission and authority.\n\nThis Right of the Heathen Kings, cannot bee thought taken from them by their conversion to the Faith of Christ; who never ordained, that Kings for beleeving in him, should be deposed, that is, subjected to any but himself, or (which is all one) be deprived of the power necessary for the conservation of Peace amongst their Subjects, and for their defence against foraign Enemies. And therefore Christian Kings are still the Supreme Pastors of their people, and have power to ordain what Pastors they please, to teach the Church, that is, to teach the People committed to their charge.\n\nAgain, let the right of choosing them be (as before the conversion of Kings) in the Church, for so it was in the time of the Apostles themselves (as hath been shewn already in this chapter); even so also the Right will be in the Civill Soveraign, Christian. For in that he is a Christian, he allowes the Teaching; and in that he is the Soveraign (which is as much as to say, the Church by Representation,) the Teachers hee elects, are elected by the Church. And when an Assembly of Christians choose their Pastor in a Christian Common-wealth, it is the Soveraign that electeth him, because tis done by his Authority; In the same manner, as when a Town choose their Maior, it is the act of him that hath the Soveraign Power: For every act done, is the act of him, without whose consent it is invalid. And therefore whatsoever examples may be drawn out of History, concerning the Election of Pastors, by the People, or by the Clergy, they are no arguments against the Right of any Civill Soveraign, because they that elected them did it by his Authority.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 7\n\nSeeing then in every Christian Common-wealth, the Civill Soveraign is the Supreme Pastor, to whose charge the whole flock of his Subjects is committed, and consequently that it is by his authority, that all other Pastors are made, and have power to teach, and performe all other Pastorall offices; it followeth also, that it is from the Civill Soveraign, that all other Pastors derive their right of Teaching, Preaching, and other functions pertaining to that Office; and that they are but his Ministers; in the same manner as the Magistrates of Towns, Judges in Courts of Justice, and Commanders of Armies, are all but Ministers of him that is the Magistrate of the whole Common-wealth, Judge of all Causes, and Commander of the whole Militia, which is alwayes the Civill Soveraign. And the reason hereof, is not because they that Teach, but because they that are to Learn, are his Subjects. For let it be supposed, that a Christian King commit the Authority of Ordaining Pastors in his Dominions to another King, (as divers Christian Kings allow that power to the Pope;) he doth not thereby constitute a Pastor over himself, nor a Soveraign Pastor over his People; for that were to deprive himself of the Civill Power; which depending on the opinion men have of their Duty to him, and the fear they have of Punishment in another world, would depend also on the skill, and loyalty of Doctors, who are no lesse subject, not only to Ambition, but also to Ignorance, than any other sort of men. So that where a stranger hath authority to appoint Teachers, it is given him by the Soveraign in whose Dominions he teacheth. Christian Doctors are our Schoolmasters to Christianity; But Kings are Fathers of Families, and may receive Schoolmasters for their Subjects from the recommendation of a stranger, but not from the command; especially when the ill teaching them shall redound to the great and manifest profit of him that recommends them: nor can they be obliged to retain them, longer than it is for the Publique good; the care of which they stand so long charged withall, as they retain any other essentiall Right of the Soveraignty.\n\nIf a man therefore should ask a Pastor, in the execution of his Office, as the chief Priests and Elders of the people (Mat. 21.23.) asked our Saviour, “By what authority dost thou these things, and who gave thee this authority:” he can make no other just Answer, but that he doth it by the Authority of the Common-wealth, given him by the King, or Assembly that representeth it. All Pastors, except the Supreme, execute their charges in the Right, that is by the Authority of the Civill Soveraign, that is, Jure Civili. But the King, and every other Soveraign executeth his Office of Supreme Pastor, by immediate Authority from God, that is to say, In Gods Right, or Jure Divino. And therefore none but Kings can put into their Titles (a mark of their submission to God onely ) Dei Gratia Rex, &c. Bishops ought to say in the beginning of their Mandates, “By the favour of the Kings Majesty, Bishop of such a Diocesse;” or as Civill Ministers, “In his Majesties Name.” For in saying, Divina Providentia, which is the same with Dei Gratia, though disguised, they deny to have received their authority from the Civill State; and sliely slip off the Collar of their Civill Subjection, contrary to the unity and defence of the Common-wealth.\n\nBut if every Christian Soveraign be the Supreme Pastor of his own Subjects, it seemeth that he hath also the Authority, not only to Preach (which perhaps no man will deny;) but also to Baptize, and to Administer the Sacrament of the Lords Supper; and to Consecrate both Temples, and Pastors to Gods service; which most men deny; partly because they use not to do it; and partly because the Administration of Sacraments, and Consecration of Persons, and Places to holy uses, requireth the Imposition of such mens hands, as by the like Imposition successively from the time of the Apostles have been ordained to the like Ministery. For proof therefore that Christian Kings have power to Baptize, and to Consecrate, I am to render a reason, both why they use not to doe it, and how, without the ordinary ceremony of Imposition of hands, they are made capable of doing it, when they will.\n\nThere is no doubt but any King, in case he were skilfull in the Sciences, might by the same Right of his Office, read Lectures of them himself, by which he authorizeth others to read them in the Universities. Neverthelesse, because the care of the summe of the businesse of the Common-wealth taketh up his whole time, it were not convenient for him to apply himself in Person to that particular. A King may also if he please, sit in Judgment, to hear and determine all manner of Causes, as well as give others authority to doe it in his name; but that the charge that lyeth upon him of Command and Government, constrain him to bee continually at the Helm, and to commit the Ministeriall Offices to others under him. In the like manner our Saviour (who surely had power to Baptize) Baptized none himselfe, but sent his Apostles and Disciples to Baptize. (John 4.2.) So also S. Paul, by the necessity of Preaching in divers and far distant places, Baptized few: Amongst all the Corinthians he Baptized only Crispus, Cajus, and Stephanus; (1 Cor.1.14,16.) and the reason was, because his principall Charge was to Preach. (1 Cor. 1.17.) Whereby it is manifest, that the greater Charge, (such as is the Government of the Church,) is a dispensation for the lesse. The reason therefore why Christian Kings use not to Baptize, is evident, and the same, for which at this day there are few Baptized by Bishops, and by the Pope fewer.\n\nAnd as concerning Imposition of Hands, whether it be needfull, for the authorizing of a King to Baptize, and Consecrate, we may consider thus.\n\nImposition of Hands, was a most ancient publique ceremony amongst the Jews, by which was designed, and made certain, the person, or other thing intended in a mans prayer, blessing, sacrifice, consecration, condemnation, or other speech. So Jacob in blessing the children of Joseph (Gen. 48.14.) “Laid his right Hand on Ephraim the younger, and his left Hand on Manasseh the first born;” and this he did Wittingly (though they were so presented to him by Joseph, as he was forced in doing it to stretch out his arms acrosse) to design to whom he intended the greater blessing. So also in the sacrificing of the Burnt offering, Aaron is commanded (Exod. 29.10.) “to Lay his Hands on the head of the bullock;” and (ver. 15.) “to Lay his Hand on the head of the ramme.” The same is also said again, Levit. 1.4. & 8.14. Likewise Moses when he ordained Joshua to be Captain of the Israelites, that is, consecrated him to Gods service, (Numb. 27.23.) “Laid his hands upon him, and gave him his Charge,” designing and rendring certain, who it was they were to obey in war. And in the consecration of the Levites (Numb. 8.10.) God commanded that “the Children of Israel should Put their Hands upon the Levites.” And in the condemnation of him that had blasphemed the Lord (Levit. 24.14.) God commanded that “all that heard him should Lay their Hands on his head, and that all the Congregation should stone him.” And why should they only that heard him, Lay their Hands upon him, and not rather a Priest, Levite, or other Minister of Justice, but that none else were able to design, and demonstrate to the eyes of the Congregation, who it was that had blasphemed, and ought to die? And to design a man, or any other thing, by the Hand to the Eye is lesse subject to mistake, than when it is done to the Eare by a Name.\n\nAnd so much was this ceremony observed, that in blessing the whole Congregation at once, which cannot be done by Laying on of Hands, yet “Aaron (Levit. 9.22.) did lift up his Hand towards the people when he blessed them.” And we read also of the like ceremony of Consecration of Temples amongst the Heathen, as that the Priest laid his Hands on some post of the Temple, all the while he was uttering the words of Consecration. So naturall it is to design any individuall thing, rather by the Hand, to assure the Eyes, than by Words to inform the Eare in matters of Gods Publique service.\n\nThis ceremony was not therefore new in our Saviours time. For Jairus (Mark 5.23.) whose daughter was sick, besought our Saviour (not to heal her, but) “to Lay his Hands upon her, that shee might bee healed.” And (Matth. 19.13.) “they brought unto him little children, that hee should Put his Hands on them, and Pray.”\n\nAccording to this ancient Rite, the Apostles, and Presbyters, and the Presbytery it self, Laid Hands on them whom they ordained Pastors, and withall prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Ghost; and that not only once, but sometimes oftner, when a new occasion was presented: but the end was still the same, namely a punctuall, and religious designation of the person, ordained either to the Pastorall Charge in general, or to a particular Mission: so (Act. 6.6.) “The Apostles Prayed, and Laid their Hands” on the seven Deacons; which was done, not to give them the Holy Ghost, (for they were full of the Holy Ghost before thy were chosen, as appeareth immediately before, verse 3.) but to design them to that Office. And after Philip the Deacon had converted certain persons in Samaria, Peter and John went down (Act. 8.17.)” and laid their Hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost.” And not only an Apostle, but a Presbyter had this power: For S. Paul adviseth Timothy (1 Tim. 5.22.) “Lay Hands suddenly on no man;” that is, designe no man rashly to the Office of a Pastor. The whole Presbytery Laid their Hands on Timothy, as we read 1 Tim. 4.14. but this is to be understood, as that some did it by the appointment of the Presbytery, and most likely their Proestos, or Prolocutor, which it may be was St. Paul himself. For in his 2 Epist. to Tim. ver. 6. he saith to him, “Stirre up the gift of God which is in thee, by the Laying on of my Hands:” where note by the way, that by the Holy ghost, is not meant the third Person in the Trinity, but the Gifts necessary to the Pastorall Office. We read also, that St. Paul had Imposition of Hands twice; once from Ananias at Damascus (Acts 9.17,18.) at the time of his Baptisme; and again (Acts 13.3.) at Antioch, when he was first sent out to Preach. The use then of this ceremony considered in the Ordination of Pastors, was to design the Person to whom they gave such Power. But if there had been then any Christian, that had had the Power of Teaching before; the Baptizing of him, that is the making of him a Christian, had given him no new Power, but had onely caused him to preach true Doctrine, that is, to use his Power aright; and therefore the Imposition of Hands had been unnecessary; Baptisme it selfe had been sufficient. But every Soveraign, before Christianity, had the power of Teaching, and Ordaining Teachers; and therefore Christianity gave them no new Right, but only directed them in the way of teaching truth; and consequently they needed no Imposition of Hands (besides that which is done in Baptisme) to authorize them to exercise any part of the Pastorall Function, as namely, to Baptize, and Consecrate. And in the Old Testament, though the Priest only had right to Consecrate, during the time that the Soveraignty was in the High Priest; yet it was not so when the Soveraignty was in the King: For we read (1 Kings 8.) That Solomon Blessed the People, Consecrated the Temple, and pronounced that Publique Prayer, which is the pattern now for Consecration of all Christian Churches, and Chappels: whereby it appears, he had not only the right of Ecclesiasticall Government; but also of exercising Ecclesiasticall Functions.\n\nFrom this consolidation of the Right Politique, and Ecclesiastique in Christian Soveraigns, it is evident, they have all manner of Power over their Subjects, that can be given to man, for the government of mens externall actions, both in Policy, and Religion; and may make such Laws, as themselves shall judge fittest, for the government of their own Subjects, both as they are the Common-wealth, and as they are the Church: for both State, and Church are the same men.\n\nIf they please therefore, they may (as many Christian Kings now doe) commit the government of their Subjects in matters of Religion to the Pope; but then the Pope is in that point Subordinate to them, and exerciseth that Charge in anothers Dominion Jure Civili, in the Right of the Civill Soveraign; not Jure Divino, in Gods Right; and may therefore be discharged of that Office, when the Soveraign for the good of his Subjects shall think it necessary. They may also if they please, commit the care of Religion to one Supreme Pastor, or to an Assembly of Pastors; and give them what power over the Church, or one over another, they think most convenient; and what titles of honor, as of Bishops, Archbishops, Priests, or Presbyters, they will; and make such Laws for their maintenance, either by Tithes, or otherwise, as they please, so they doe it out of a sincere conscience, of which God onely is the Judge. It is the Civill Soveraign, that is to appoint Judges, and Interpreters of the Canonicall Scriptures; for it is he that maketh them Laws. It is he also that giveth strength to Excommunications; which but for such Laws and Punishments, as may humble obstinate Libertines, and reduce them to union with the rest of the Church, would bee contemned. In summe, he hath the Supreme Power in all causes, as well Ecclesiasticall, as Civill, as far as concerneth actions, and words, for these onely are known, and may be accused; and of that which cannot be accused, there is no Judg at all, but God, that knoweth the heart. And these Rights are incident to all Soveraigns, whether Monarchs, or Assemblies: for they that are the Representants of a Christian People, are Representants of the Church: for a Church, and a Common-wealth of Christian People, are the same thing.\n\nThough this that I have here said, and in other places of this Book, seem cleer enough for the asserting of the Supreme Ecclesiasticall Power to Christian Soveraigns; yet because the Pope of Romes challenge to that Power universally, hath been maintained chiefly, and I think as strongly as is possible, by Cardinall Bellarmine, in his Controversie De Summo Pontifice; I have thought it necessary, as briefly as I can, to examine the grounds, and strength of his Discourse.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 8\n\nOf five Books he hath written of this subject, the first containeth three Questions: One, Which is simply the best government, Monarchy, Aristocracy, or Democracy; and concludeth for neither, but for a government mixt of all there: Another, which of these is the best Government of the Church; and concludeth for the mixt, but which should most participate of Monarchy: the third, whether in this mixt Monarchy, St. Peter had the place of Monarch. Concerning his first Conclusion, I have already sufficiently proved (chapt. 18.) that all Governments which men are bound to obey, are Simple, and Absolute. In Monarchy there is but One Man Supreme; and all other men that have any kind of Power in the State, have it by his Commission, during his pleasure; and execute it in his name: And in Aristocracy, and Democracy, but One Supreme Assembly, with the same Power that in Monarchy belongeth to the Monarch, which is not a Mixt, but an Absolute Soveraignty. And of the three sorts, which is the best, is not to be disputed, where any one of them is already established; but the present ought alwaies to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best; because it is against both the Law of Nature, and the Divine positive Law, to doe any thing tending to the subversion thereof. Besides, it maketh nothing to the Power of any Pastor, (unlesse he have the Civill Soveraignty,) what kind of Government is the best; because their Calling is not to govern men by Commandement, but to teach them, and perswade them by Arguments, and leave it to them to consider, whether they shall embrace, or reject the Doctrine taught. For Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, do mark out unto us three sorts of Soveraigns, not of Pastors; or, as we may say, three sorts of Masters of Families, not three sorts of Schoolmasters for their children.\n\nAnd therefore the second Conclusion, concerning the best form of Government of the Church, is nothing to the question of the Popes Power without his own Dominions: For in all other Common-wealths his Power (if hee have any at all) is that of the Schoolmaster onely, and not of the Master of the Family.\n\nFor the third Conclusion, which is, that St. Peter was Monarch of the Church, he bringeth for his chiefe argument the place of S. Matth. (chap. 16.18, 19.) “Thou art Peter, And upon this rock I will build my Church, &c. And I will give thee the keyes of Heaven; whatsoever thou shalt bind on Earth, shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on Earth, shall be loosed in Heaven.” Which place well considered, proveth no more, but that the Church of Christ hath for foundation one onely Article; namely, that which Peter in the name of all the Apostles professing, gave occasion to our Saviour to speak the words here cited; which that wee may cleerly understand, we are to consider, that our Saviour preached by himself, by John Baptist, and by his Apostles, nothing but this Article of Faith, “that he was the Christ;” all other Articles requiring faith no otherwise, than as founded on that. John began first, (Mat. 3.2.) preaching only this, “The Kingdome of God is at hand.” Then our Saviour himself (Mat. 4.17.) preached the same: And to his Twelve Apostles, when he gave them their Commission (Mat. 10.7.) there is no mention of preaching any other Article but that. This was the fundamentall Article, that is the Foundation of the Churches Faith. Afterwards the Apostles being returned to him, he asketh them all, (Mat. 16.13) not Peter onely, “Who men said he was;” and they answered, that “some said he was John the Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremias, or one of the Prophets:” Then (ver. 15.) he asked them all again, (not Peter onely) “Whom say yee that I am?” Therefore Peter answered (for them all) “Thou art Christ, the Son of the Living God;” which I said is the Foundation of the Faith of the whole Church; from which our Saviour takes the occasion of saying, “Upon this stone I will build my Church;” By which it is manifest, that by the Foundation-Stone of the Church, was meant the Fundamentall Article of the Churches Faith. But why then (will some object) doth our Saviour interpose these words, “Thou art Peter”? If the originall of this text had been rigidly translated, the reason would easily have appeared: We are therefore to consider, that the Apostle Simon, was surnamed Stone, (which is the signification of the Syriacke word Cephas, and of the Greek word Petrus). Our Saviour therefore after the confession of that Fundamentall Article, alluding to his name, said (as if it were in English) thus, Thou art “Stone,” and upon this Stone I will build my Church: which is as much as to say, this Article, that “I am the Christ,” is the Foundation of all the Faith I require in those that are to bee members of my Church: Neither is this allusion to a name, an unusuall thing in common speech: But it had been a strange, and obscure speech, if our Saviour intending to build his Church on the Person of St. Peter, had said, “thou art a Stone, and upon this Stone I will build my Church,” when it was so obvious without ambiguity to have said, “I will build my Church on thee; and yet there had been still the same allusion to his name.\n\nAnd for the following words, “I will give thee the Keyes of Heaven, &c.” it is no more than what our Saviour gave also to all the rest of his Disciples (Matth. 18.18.) “Whatsoever yee shall bind on Earth, shall be bound in Heaven. And whatsoever ye shall loose on Earth, shall be loosed in Heaven.” But howsoever this be interpreted, there is no doubt but the Power here granted belongs to all Supreme Pastors; such as are all Christian Civill Soveraignes in their own Dominions. In so much, as if St. Peter, or our Saviour himself had converted any of them to beleeve him, and to acknowledge his Kingdome; yet because his Kingdome is not of this world, he had left the supreme care of converting his subjects to none but him; or else hee must have deprived him of the Soveraignty, to which the Right of Teaching is inseparably annexed. And thus much in refutation of his first Book, wherein hee would prove St. Peter to have been the Monarch Universall of the Church, that is to say, of all the Christians in the world.\n\nThe second Book hath two Conclusions: One, that S. Peter was Bishop of Rome, and there dyed: The other, that the Popes of Rome are his Successors. Both which have been disputed by others. But supposing them to be true; yet if by Bishop of Rome bee understood either the Monarch of the Church, or the Supreme Pastor of it; not Silvester, but Constantine (who was the first Christian Emperour) was that Bishop; and as Constantine, so all other Christian Emperors were of Right supreme Bishops of the Roman Empire; I say of the Roman Empire, not of all Christendome: For other Christian Soveraigns had the same Right in their severall Territories, as to an Office essentially adhaerent to their Soveraignty. Which shall serve for answer to his second Book.\n\nIn the third Book, he handleth the question whether the Pope be Antichrist. For my part, I see no argument that proves he is so, in that sense that Scripture useth the name: nor will I take any argument from the quality of Antichrist, to contradict the Authority he exerciseth, or hath heretofore exercised in the Dominions of any other Prince, or State.\n\nIt is evident that the Prophets of the Old Testament foretold, and the Jews expected a Messiah, that is, a Christ, that should re-establish amongst them the kingdom of God, which had been rejected by them in the time of Samuel, when they required a King after the manner of other Nations. This expectation of theirs, made them obnoxious to the Imposture of all such, as had both the ambition to attempt the attaining of the Kingdome, and the art to deceive the People by counterfeit miracles, by hypocriticall life, or by orations and doctrine plausible. Our Saviour therefore, and his Apostles forewarned men of False Prophets, and of False Christs. False Christs, are such as pretend to be the Christ, but are not, and are called properly Antichrists, in such sense, as when there happeneth a Schisme in the Church by the election of two Popes, the one calleth the other Antipapa, or the false Pope. And therefore Antichrist in the proper signification hath two essentiall marks; One, that he denyeth Jesus to be Christ; and another that he professeth himselfe to bee Christ. The first Mark is set down by S. John in his 1 Epist. 4. ch. 3. ver. “Every Spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God; And this is the Spirit of Antichrist.” The other Mark is expressed in the words of our Saviour, (Mat. 24.5.) “Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ;” and again, “If any man shall say unto you, Loe, here is Christ, there is Christ beleeve it not.” And therefore Antichrist must be a False Christ, that is, some one of them that shall pretend themselves to be Christ. And out of these two Marks, “to deny Jesus to be the Christ,” and to “affirm himselfe to be the Christ,” it followeth, that he must also be an “Adversary of the true Christ,” which is another usuall signification of the word Antichrist. But of these many Antichrists, there is one speciall one, O Antichristos, The Antichrist, or Antichrist definitely, as one certaine person; not indefinitely An Antichrist. Now seeing the Pope of Rome, neither pretendeth himself, nor denyeth Jesus to be the Christ, I perceive not how he can be called Antichrist; by which word is not meant, one that falsely pretendeth to be His Lieutenant, or Vicar Generall, but to be Hee. There is also some Mark of the time of this speciall Antichrist, as (Mat. 24.15.) when that abominable Destroyer, spoken of by Daniel, (Dan. 9. 27.) shall stand in the Holy place, and such tribulation as was not since the beginning of the world, nor ever shall be again, insomuch as if it were to last long, (ver. 22.) “no flesh could be saved; but for the elects sake those days shall be shortened” (made fewer). But that tribulation is not yet come; for it is to be followed immediately (ver. 29.) by a darkening of the Sun and Moon, a falling of the Stars, a concussion of the Heavens, and the glorious coming again of our Saviour, in the cloudes. And therefore The Antichrist is not yet come; whereas, many Popes are both come and gone. It is true, the Pope in taking upon him to give Laws to all Christian Kings, and Nations, usurpeth a Kingdome in this world, which Christ took not on him: but he doth it not As Christ, but as For Christ, wherein there is nothing of the Antichrist.\n\nIn the fourth Book, to prove the Pope to be the supreme Judg in all questions of Faith and Manners, (which is as much as to be the absolute Monarch of all Christians in the world,) be bringeth three Propositions: The first, that his Judgments are Infallible: The second, that he can make very Laws, and punish those that observe them not: The third, that our Saviour conferred all Jurisdiction Ecclesiasticall on the Pope of Rome.\n\nFor the Infallibility of his Judgments, he alledgeth the Scriptures: and first, that of Luke 22.31. “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired you that hee may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith faile not; and when thou art converted, strengthen thy Brethren.” This, according to Bellarmines exposition, is, that Christ gave here to Simon Peter two priviledges: one, that neither his Faith should fail, neither he, nor any of his successors should ever define any point concerning Faith, or Manners erroneously, or contrary to the definition of a former Pope: Which is a strange, and very much strained interpretation. But he that with attention readeth that chapter, shall find there is no place in the whole Scripture, that maketh more against the Popes Authority, than this very place. The Priests and Scribes seeking to kill our Saviour at the Passeover, and Judas possessed with a resolution to betray him, and the day of killing the Passeover being come, our Saviour celebrated the same with his Apostles, which he said, till the Kingdome of God was come hee would doe no more; and withall told them, that one of them was to betray him: Hereupon they questioned, which of them it should be; and withall (seeing the next Passeover their Master would celebrate should be when he was King) entred into a contention, who should then be the greater man. Our Saviour therefore told them, that the Kings of the Nations had Dominion over their Subjects, and are called by a name (in Hebrew) that signifies Bountifull; but I cannot be so to you, you must endeavour to serve one another; I ordain you a Kingdome, but it is such as my Father hath ordained mee; a Kingdome that I am now to purchase with my blood, and not to possesse till my second coming; then yee shall eat and drink at my Table, and sit on Thrones, judging the twelve Tribes of Israel: And then addressing himself to St. Peter, he saith, Simon, Simon, Satan seeks by suggesting a present domination, to weaken your faith of the future; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith shall not fail; Thou therefore (Note this,) being converted, and understanding my Kingdome as of another world, confirm the same faith in thy Brethren: To which S. Peter answered (as one that no more expected any authority in this world) “Lord I am ready to goe with thee, not onely to Prison, but to Death.” Whereby it is manifest, S. Peter had not onely no jurisdiction given him in this world, but a charge to teach all the other Apostles, that they also should have none. And for the Infallibility of St. Peters sentence definitive in matter of Faith, there is no more to be attributed to it out of this Text, than that Peter should continue in the beleef of this point, namely, that Christ should come again, and possesse the Kingdome at the day of Judgement; which was not given by the Text to all his Successors; for wee see they claim it in the World that now is.\n\nThe second place is that of Matth. 16. “Thou art Peter, and upon this rocke I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” By which (as I have already shewn in this chapter) is proved no more, than that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against the confession of Peter, which gave occasion to that speech; namely this, That Jesus Is Christ The Sonne Of God.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 9\n\nThe third text is John 21. ver. 16,17. “Feed my sheep;” which contains no more but a Commission of Teaching: And if we grant the rest of the Apostles to be contained in that name of Sheep; then it is the supreme Power of Teaching: but it was onely for the time that there were no Christian Soveraigns already possessed of that Supremacy. But I have already proved, that Christian Soveraignes are in their owne Dominions the supreme Pastors, and instituted thereto, by vertue of their being Baptized, though without other Imposition of Hands. For such imposition being a Ceremony of designing the person, is needlesse, when hee is already designed to the Power of Teaching what Doctrine he will, by his institution to an Absolute Power over his Subjects. For as I have proved before, Soveraigns are supreme Teachers (in generall) by their Office and therefore oblige themselves (by their Baptisme) to teach the Doctrine of Christ: And when they suffer others to teach their people, they doe it at the perill of their own souls; for it is at the hands of the Heads of Families that God will require the account of the instruction of his Children and Servants. It is of Abraham himself, not of a hireling, that God saith (Gen. 18.19) “I know him that he will command his Children, and his houshold after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, and do justice and judgement.\n\nThe fourth place is that of Exod. 28.30. “Thou shalt put in the Breastplate of Judgment, the Urim and the Thummin:” which hee saith is interpreted by the Septuagint, delosin kai aletheian, that is, Evidence and Truth: And thence concludeth, God had given Evidence, and Truth, (which is almost infallibility,) to the High Priest. But be it Evidence and Truth it selfe that was given; or be it but Admonition to the Priest to endeavour to inform himself cleerly, and give judgment uprightly; yet in that it was given to the High Priest, it was given to the Civill Soveraign: For next under God was the High Priest in the Common-wealth of Israel; and is an argument for Evidence and Truth, that is, for the Ecclesiasticall Supremacy of Civill Soveraigns over their own Subjects, against the pretended Power of the Pope. These are all the Texts hee bringeth for the Infallibility of the Judgement of the Pope, in point of Faith.\n\nFor the Infallibility of his Judgment concerning Manners, hee bringeth one Text, which is that of John 16.13. “When the Spirit of truth is come, hee will lead you into all truth” where (saith he) by All Truth, is meant, at least, All Truth Necessary To Salvation. But with this mitigation, he attributeth no more Infallibility to the Pope, than to any man that professeth Christianity, and is not to be damned: For if any man erre in any point, wherein not to erre is necessary to Salvation, it is impossible he should be saved; for that onely is necessary to Salvation, without which to be saved is impossible. What points these are, I shall declare out of the Scripture in the Chapter following. In this place I say no more, but that though it were granted, the Pope could not possibly teach any error at all, yet doth not this entitle him to any Jurisdiction in the Dominions of another Prince, unlesse we shall also say, a man is obliged in conscience to set on work upon all occasions the best workman, even then also when he hath formerly promised his work to another.\n\nBesides the Text, he argueth from Reason, thus, If the Pope could erre in necessaries, then Christ hath not sufficiently provided for the Churches Salvation; because he hath commanded her to follow the Popes directions. But this Reason is invalid, unlesse he shew when, and where Christ commanded that, or took at all any notice of a Pope: Nay granting whatsoever was given to S. Peter was given to the Pope; yet seeing there is in the Scripture no command to any man to obey St. Peter, no man can bee just, that obeyeth him, when his commands are contrary to those of his lawfull Soveraign.\n\nLastly, it hath not been declared by the Church, nor by the Pope himselfe, that he is the Civill Soveraign of all the Christians in the world; and therefore all Christians are not bound to acknowledge his Jurisdiction in point of Manners. For the Civill Soveraignty, and supreme Judicature in controversies of Manners, are the same thing: And the Makers of Civill Laws, are not onely Declarers, but also Makers of the justice, and injustice of actions; there being nothing in mens Manners that makes them righteous, or unrighteous, but their conformity with the Law of the Soveraign. And therefore when the Pope challengeth Supremacy in controversies of Manners, hee teacheth men to disobey the Civill Soveraign; which is an erroneous Doctrine, contrary to the many precepts of our Saviour and his Apostles, delivered to us in the Scripture.\n\nTo prove the Pope has Power to make Laws, he alledgeth many places; as first, Deut. 17.12. “The man that will doe presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the Priest, (that standeth to Minister there before the Lord thy God, or unto the Judge,) even that man shall die, and thou shalt put away the evill from Israel.” For answer whereunto, we are to remember that the High Priest (next and immediately under God) was the Civill Soveraign; and all Judges were to be constituted by him. The words alledged sound therefore thus. “The man that will presume to disobey the Civill Soveraign for the time being, or any of his Officers in the execution of their places, that man shall die, &c.” which is cleerly for the Civill Soveraignty, against the Universall power of the Pope.\n\nSecondly, he alledgeth that of Matth. 16. “Whatsoever yee shall bind, &c.” and interpreteth it for such Binding as is attributed (Matth. 23.4.) to the Scribes and Pharisees, “They bind heavy burthens, and grievous to be born, and lay them on mens shoulders;” by which is meant (he sayes) Making of Laws; and concludes thence, the Pope can make Laws. But this also maketh onely for the Legislative power of Civill Soveraigns: For the Scribes, and Pharisees sat in Moses Chaire, but Moses next under God was Soveraign of the People of Israel: and therefore our Saviour commanded them to doe all that they should say, but not all that they should do. That is, to obey their Laws, but not follow their Example.\n\nThe third place, is John 21.16. “Feed my sheep;” which is not a Power to make Laws, but a command to Teach. Making Laws belongs to the Lord of the Family; who by his owne discretion chooseth his Chaplain, as also a Schoolmaster to Teach his children.\n\nThe fourth place John 20.21. is against him. The words are, “As my Father sent me, so send I you.” But our Saviour was sent to Redeem (by his Death) such as should Beleeve; and by his own, and his Apostles preaching to prepare them for their entrance into his Kingdome; which he himself saith, is not of this world, and hath taught us to pray for the coming of it hereafter, though hee refused (Acts 1.6,7.) to tell his Apostles when it should come; and in which, when it comes, the twelve Apostles shall sit on twelve Thrones (every one perhaps as high as that of St. Peter) to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. Seeing then God the Father sent not our Saviour to make Laws in this present world, wee may conclude from the Text, that neither did our Saviour send S. Peter to make Laws here, but to perswade men to expect his second comming with a stedfast faith; and in the mean time, if Subjects, to obey their Princes; and if Princes, both to beleeve it themselves, and to do their best to make their Subjects doe the same; which is the Office of a Bishop. Therefore this place maketh most strongly for the joining of the Ecclesiasticall Supremacy to the Civill Soveraignty, contrary to that which Cardinall Bellarmine alledgeth it for.\n\nThe fift place is Acts 15.28. “It hath seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden, than these necessary things, that yee abstaine from meats offered to Idols, and from bloud, and from things strangled, and from fornication.” Here hee notes the word Laying Of Burdens for the Legislative Power. But who is there, that reading this Text, can say, this stile of the Apostles may not as properly be used in giving Counsell, as in making Laws? The stile of a Law is, We Command: But, We Think Good, is the ordinary stile of them, that but give Advice; and they lay a Burthen that give Advice, though it bee conditionall, that is, if they to whom they give it, will attain their ends: And such is the Burthen, of abstaining from things strangled, and from bloud; not absolute, but in case they will not erre. I have shewn before (chap. 25.) that Law, is distinguished from Counsell, in this, that the reason of a Law, is taken from the designe, and benefit of him that prescribeth it; but the reason of a Counsell, from the designe, and benefit of him, to whom the Counsell is given. But here, the Apostles aime onely at the benefit of the converted Gentiles, namely their Salvation; not at their own benefit; for having done their endeavour, they shall have their reward, whether they be obeyed, or not. And therefore the Acts of this Councell, were not Laws, but Counsells.\n\nThe sixt place is that of Rom. 13. “Let every Soul be subject to the Higher Powers, for there is no Power but of God;” which is meant, he saith not onely of Secular, but also of Ecclesiasticall Princes. To which I answer, first, that there are no Ecclesiasticall Princes but those that are also Civill Soveraignes; and their Principalities exceed not the compasse of their Civill Soveraignty; without those bounds though they may be received for Doctors, they cannot be acknowledged for Princes. For if the Apostle had meant, we should be subject both to our own Princes, and also to the Pope, he had taught us a doctrine, which Christ himself hath told us is impossible, namely, “to serve two Masters.” And though the Apostle say in another place, “I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpnesse, according to the Power which the Lord hath given me;” it is not, that he challenged a Power either to put to death, imprison, banish, whip, or fine any of them, which are Punishments; but onely to Excommunicate, which (without the Civill Power) is no more but a leaving of their company, and having no more to doe with them, than with a Heathen man, or a Publican; which in many occasions might be a greater pain to the Excommunicant, than to the Excommunicate.\n\nThe seventh place is 1 Cor. 4.21. “Shall I come unto you with a Rod, or in love, and the spirit of lenity?” But here again, it is not the Power of a Magistrate to punish offenders, that is meant by a Rod; but onely the Power of Excommunication, which is not in its owne nature a Punishment, but onely a Denouncing of punishment, that Christ shall inflict, when he shall be in possession of his Kingdome, at the day of Judgment. Nor then also shall it bee properly a Punishment, as upon a Subject that hath broken the Law; but a Revenge, as upon an Enemy, or Revolter, that denyeth the Right of our Saviour to the Kingdome: And therefore this proveth not the Legislative Power of any Bishop, that has not also the Civill Power.\n\nThe eighth place is, Timothy 3.2. “A Bishop must be the husband but of one wife, vigilant, sober, &c.” which he saith was a Law. I thought that none could make a Law in the Church, but the Monarch of the Church, St. Peter. But suppose this Precept made by the authority of St. Peter; yet I see no reason why to call it a Law, rather than an Advice, seeing Timothy was not a Subject, but a Disciple of St. Paul; nor the flock under the charge of Timothy, his Subjects in the Kingdome, but his Scholars in the Schoole of Christ: If all the Precepts he giveth Timothy, be Laws, why is not this also a Law, “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy healths sake”? And why are not also the Precepts of good Physitians, so many Laws? but that it is not the Imperative manner of speaking, but an absolute Subjection to a Person, that maketh his Precept Laws.\n\nIn like manner, the ninth place, 1 Tim. 5. 19. “Against an Elder receive not an accusation, but before two or three Witnesses,” is a wise Precept, but not a Law.\n\nThe tenth place is, Luke 10.16. “He that heareth you, heareth mee; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me.” And there is no doubt, but he that despiseth the Counsell of those that are sent by Christ, despiseth the Counsell of Christ himself. But who are those now that are sent by Christ, but such as are ordained Pastors by lawfull Authority? and who are lawfully ordained, that are not ordained by the Soveraign Pastor? and who is ordained by the Soveraign Pastor in a Christian Common-wealth, that is not ordained by the authority of the Soveraign thereof? Out of this place therefore it followeth, that he which heareth his Soveraign being a Christian, heareth Christ; and hee that despiseth the Doctrine which his King being a Christian, authorizeth, despiseth the Doctrine of Christ (which is not that which Bellarmine intendeth here to prove, but the contrary). But all this is nothing to a Law. Nay more, a Christian King, as a Pastor, and Teacher of his Subjects, makes not thereby his Doctrines Laws. He cannot oblige men to beleeve; though as a Civill Soveraign he may make Laws suitable to his Doctrine, which may oblige men to certain actions, and sometimes to such as they would not otherwise do, and which he ought not to command; and yet when they are commanded, they are Laws; and the externall actions done in obedience to them, without the inward approbation, are the actions of the Soveraign, and not of the Subject, which is in that case but as an instrument, without any motion of his owne at all; because God hath commanded to obey them.\n\nThe eleventh, is every place, where the Apostle for Counsell, putteth some word, by which men use to signifie Command; or calleth the following of his Counsell, by the name of Obedience. And therefore they are alledged out of 1 Cor. 11.2. “I commend you for keeping my Precepts as I delivered them to you.” The Greek is, “I commend you for keeping those things I delivered to you, as I delivered them.” Which is far from signifying that they were Laws, or any thing else, but good Counsell. And that of 1 Thess. 4.2. “You know what commandements we gave you:” where the Greek word is paraggelias edokamen, equivalent to paredokamen, what wee delivered to you, as in the place next before alledged, which does not prove the Traditions of the Apostles, to be any more than Counsells; though as is said in the 8th verse, “he that despiseth them, despiseth not man, but God”: For our Saviour himself came not to Judge, that is, to be King in this world; but to Sacrifice himself for Sinners, and leave Doctors in his Church, to lead, not to drive men to Christ, who never accepteth forced actions, (which is all the Law produceth,) but the inward conversion of the heart; which is not the work of Laws, but of Counsell, and Doctrine.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 10\n\nAnd that of 2 Thess. 3.14. “If any man Obey not our word by this Epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may bee ashamed”: where from the word Obey, he would inferre, that this Epistle was a Law to the Thessalonians. The Epistles of the Emperours were indeed Laws. If therefore the Epistle of S. Paul were also a Law, they were to obey two Masters. But the word Obey, as it is in the Greek upakouei, signifieth Hearkening To, or Putting In Practice, not onely that which is Commanded by him that has right to punish, but also that which is delivered in a way of Counsell for our good; and therefore St. Paul does not bid kill him that disobeys, nor beat, nor imprison, nor amerce him, which Legislators may all do; but avoid his company, that he may bee ashamed: whereby it is evident, it was not the Empire of an Apostle, but his Reputation amongst the Faithfull, which the Christians stood in awe of.\n\nThe last place is that of Heb. 13.17. “Obey your Leaders, and submit your selves to them, for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account:” And here also is intended by Obedience, a following of their Counsell: For the reason of our Obedience, is not drawn from the will and command of our Pastors, but from our own benefit, as being the Salvation of our Souls they watch for, and not for the Exaltation of their own Power, and Authority. If it were meant here, that all they teach were Laws, then not onely the Pope, but every Pastor in his Parish should have Legislative Power. Again, they that are bound to obey, their Pastors, have no power to examine their commands. What then shall wee say to St. John who bids us (1 Epist. chap. 4. ver. 1.) “Not to beleeve every Spirit, but to try the Spirits whether they are of God, because many false Prophets are gone out into the world”? It is therefore manifest, that wee may dispute the Doctrine of our Pastors; but no man can dispute a Law. The Commands of Civill Soveraigns are on all sides granted to be Laws: if any else can make a Law besides himselfe, all Common-wealth, and consequently all Peace, and Justice must cease; which is contrary to all Laws, both Divine and Humane. Nothing therefore can be drawn from these, or any other places of Scripture, to prove the Decrees of the Pope, where he has not also the Civill Soveraignty, to be Laws.\n\nOf The Popes Temporall Power\n\nThe Question Of Superiority Between The Pope And Other Bishops The last point hee would prove, is this, “That our Saviour Christ has committed Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction immediately to none but the Pope.” Wherein he handleth not the Question of Supremacy between the Pope and Christian Kings, but between the Pope and other Bishops. And first, he sayes it is agreed, that the Jurisdiction of Bishops, is at least in the generall De Jure Divino, that is, in the Right of God; for which he alledges S. Paul, Ephes. 4.11. where hee sayes, that Christ after his Ascension into heaven, “gave gifts to men, some Apostles, some Prophets, and some Evangelists, and some Pastors, and some Teachers:” And thence inferres, they have indeed their Jurisdiction in Gods Right; but will not grant they have it immediately from God, but derived through the Pope. But if a man may be said to have his Jurisdiction De Jure Divino, and yet not immediately; what lawfull Jurisdiction, though but Civill, is there in a Christian Common-wealth, that is not also De Jure Divino? For Christian Kings have their Civill Power from God immediately; and the Magistrates under him exercise their severall charges in vertue of his Commission; wherein that which they doe, is no lesse De Jure Divino Mediato, than that which the Bishops doe, in vertue of the Popes Ordination. All lawfull Power is of God, immediately in the Supreme Governour, and mediately in those that have Authority under him: So that either hee must grant every Constable in the State, to hold his Office in the Right of God; or he must not hold that any Bishop holds his so, besides the Pope himselfe.\n\nBut this whole Dispute, whether Christ left the Jurisdiction to the Pope onely, or to other Bishops also, if considered out of these places where the Pope has the Civill Soveraignty, is a contention De Lana Caprina: For none of them (where they are not Soveraigns) has any Jurisdiction at all. For Jurisdiction is the Power of hearing and determining Causes between man and man; and can belong to none, but him that hath the Power to prescribe the Rules of Right and Wrong; that is, to make Laws; and with the Sword of Justice to compell men to obey his Decisions, pronounced either by himself, or by the Judges he ordaineth thereunto; which none can lawfully do, but the Civill Soveraign.\n\nTherefore when he alledgeth out of the 6 of Luke, that our Saviour called his Disciples together, and chose twelve of them which he named Apostles, he proveth that he Elected them (all, except Matthias, Paul and Barnabas,) and gave them Power and Command to Preach, but not to Judge of Causes between man and man: for that is a Power which he refused to take upon himselfe, saying, “Who made me a Judge, or a Divider, amongst you?” and in another place, “My Kingdome is not of this world.” But hee that hath not the Power to hear, and determine Causes between man and man, cannot be said to have any Jurisdiction at all. And yet this hinders not, but that our Saviour gave them Power to Preach and Baptize in all parts of the world, supposing they were not by their own lawfull Soveraign forbidden: For to our own Soveraigns Christ himself, and his Apostles have in sundry places expressely commanded us in all things to be obedient.\n\nThe arguments by which he would prove, that Bishops receive their Jurisdiction from the Pope (seeing the Pope in the Dominions of other Princes hath no Jurisdiction himself,) are all in vain. Yet because they prove, on the contrary, that all Bishops receive Jurisdiction when they have it from their Civill Soveraigns, I will not omit the recitall of them.\n\nThe first, is from Numbers 11. where Moses not being able alone to undergoe the whole burthen of administring the affairs of the People of Israel, God commanded him to choose Seventy Elders, and took part of the spirit of Moses, to put it upon those Seventy Elders: by which it is understood, not that God weakened the spirit of Moses, for that had not eased him at all; but that they had all of them their authority from him; wherein he doth truly, and ingenuously interpret that place. But seeing Moses had the entire Soveraignty in the Common-wealth of the Jews, it is manifest, that it is thereby signified, that they had their Authority from the Civill Soveraign: and therefore that place proveth, that Bishops in every Christian Common-wealth have their Authority from the Civill Soveraign; and from the Pope in his own Territories only, and not in the Territories of any other State.\n\nThe second argument, is from the nature of Monarchy; wherein all Authority is in one Man, and in others by derivation from him: But the Government of the Church, he says, is Monarchicall. This also makes for Christian Monarchs. For they are really Monarchs of their own people; that is, of their own Church (for the Church is the same thing with a Christian people;) whereas the Power of the Pope, though hee were S. Peter, is neither Monarchy, nor hath any thing of Archicall, nor Craticall, but onely of Didacticall; For God accepteth not a forced, but a willing obedience.\n\nThe third, is, from that the Sea of S. Peter is called by S. Cyprian, the Head, the Source, the Roote, the Sun, from whence the Authority of Bishops is derived. But by the Law of Nature (which is a better Principle of Right and Wrong, than the word of any Doctor that is but a man) the Civill Soveraign in every Common-wealth, is the Head, the Source, the Root, and the Sun, from which all Jurisdiction is derived. And therefore, the Jurisdiction of Bishops, is derived from the Civill Soveraign.\n\nThe fourth, is taken from the Inequality of their Jurisdictions: For if God (saith he) had given it them immediately, he had given aswell Equality of Jurisdiction, as of Order: But wee see, some are Bishops but of own Town, some of a hundred Towns, and some of many whole Provinces; which differences were not determined by the command of God; their Jurisdiction therefore is not of God, but of Man; and one has a greater, another a lesse, as it pleaseth the Prince of the Church. Which argument, if he had proved before, that the Pope had had an Universall Jurisdiction over all Christians, had been for his purpose. But seeing that hath not been proved, and that it is notoriously known, the large Jurisdiction of the Pope was given him by those that had it, that is, by the Emperours of Rome, (for the Patriarch of Constantinople, upon the same title, namely, of being Bishop of the Capitall City of the Empire, and Seat of the Emperour, claimed to be equal to him,) it followeth, that all other Bishops have their Jurisdiction from the Soveraigns of the place wherein they exercise the same: And as for that cause they have not their Authority De Jure Divino; so neither hath the Pope his De Jure Divino, except onely where hee is also the Civill Soveraign.\n\nHis fift argument is this, “If Bishops have their Jurisdiction immediately from God, the Pope could not take it from them, for he can doe nothing contrary to Gods ordination;” And this consequence is good, and well proved. “But, (saith he) the Pope can do this, and has done it.” This also is granted, so he doe it in his own Dominions, or in the Dominions of any other Prince that hath given him that Power; but not universally, in Right of the Popedome: For that power belongeth to every Christian Soveraign, within the bounds of his owne Empire, and is inseparable from the Soveraignty. Before the People of Israel had (by the commandment of God to Samuel) set over themselves a King, after the manner of other Nations, the High Priest had the Civill Government; and none but he could make, nor depose an inferiour Priest: But that Power was afterwards in the King, as may be proved by this same argument of Bellarmine; For if the Priest (be he the High Priest or any other) had his Jurisdiction immediately from God, then the King could not take it from him; “for he could do nothing contrary to Gods ordinance: But it is certain, that King Solomon (1 Kings 2.26.) deprived Abiathar the High Priest of his office, and placed Zadok (verse 35.) in his room. Kings therefore may in the like manner Ordaine, and Deprive Bishops, as they shall thinke fit, for the well governing of their Subjects.\n\nHis sixth argument is this, If Bishops have their Jurisdiction De Jure Divino (that is, immediately from God,) they that maintaine it, should bring some Word of God to prove it: But they can bring none. The argument is good; I have therefore nothing to say against it. But it is an argument no lesse good, to prove the Pope himself to have no Jurisdiction in the Dominion of any other Prince.\n\nLastly, hee bringeth for argument, the testimony of two Popes, Innocent, and Leo; and I doubt not but hee might have alledged, with as good reason, the testimonies of all the Popes almost since S. Peter: For considering the love of Power naturally implanted in mankind, whosoever were made Pope, he would be tempted to uphold the same opinion. Neverthelesse, they should therein but doe, as Innocent, and Leo did, bear witnesse of themselves, and therefore their witness should not be good.\n\nIn the fift Book he hath four Conclusions. The first is, “That the Pope in not Lord of all the world:” the second, “that the Pope is not Lord of all the Christian world:” The third, “That the Pope (without his owne Territory) has not any Temporall Jurisdiction DIRECTLY:” These three Conclusions are easily granted. The fourth is, “That the Pope has (in the Dominions of other Princes) the Supreme Temporall Power INDIRECTLY:” which is denyed; unlesse he mean by Indirectly, that he has gotten it by Indirect means; then is that also granted. But I understand, that when he saith he hath it Indirectly, he means, that such Temporall Jurisdiction belongeth to him of Right, but that this Right is but a Consequence of his Pastorall Authority, the which he could not exercise, unlesse he have the other with it: And therefore to the Pastorall Power (which he calls Spirituall) the Supreme Power Civill is necessarily annexed; and that thereby hee hath a Right to change Kingdomes, giving them to one, and taking them from another, when he shall think it conduces to the Salvation of Souls.\n\nBefore I come to consider the Arguments by which hee would prove this doctrine, it will not bee amisse to lay open the Consequences of it; that Princes, and States, that have the Civill Soveraignty in their severall Common-wealths, may bethink themselves, whether it bee convenient for them, and conducing to the good of their Subjects, of whom they are to give an account at the day of Judgment, to admit the same.\n\nWhen it is said, the Pope hath not (in the Territories of other States) the Supreme Civill Power Directly; we are to understand, he doth not challenge it, as other Civill Soveraigns doe, from the originall submission thereto of those that are to be governed. For it is evident, and has already been sufficiently in this Treatise demonstrated, that the Right of all Soveraigns, is derived originally from the consent of every one of those that are to bee governed; whether they that choose him, doe it for their common defence against an Enemy, as when they agree amongst themselves to appoint a Man, or an Assembly of men to protect them; or whether they doe it, to save their lives, by submission to a conquering Enemy. The Pope therefore, when he disclaimeth the Supreme Civill Power over other States Directly, denyeth no more, but that his Right cometh to him by that way; He ceaseth not for all that, to claime it another way; and that is, (without the consent of them that are to be governed) by a Right given him by God, (which hee calleth Indirectly,) in his Assumption to the Papacy. But by what way soever he pretend, the Power is the same; and he may (if it bee granted to be his Right) depose Princes and States, as often as it is for the Salvation of Soules, that is, as often as he will; for he claimeth also the Sole Power to Judge, whether it be to the salvation of mens Souls, or not. And this is the Doctrine, not onely that Bellarmine here, and many other Doctors teach in their Sermons and Books, but also that some Councells have decreed, and the Popes have decreed, and the Popes have accordingly, when the occasion hath served them, put in practise. For the fourth Councell of Lateran held under Pope Innocent the third, (in the third Chap. De Haereticis,) hath this Canon. “If a King at the Popes admonition, doe not purge his Kingdome of Haeretiques, and being Excommunicate for the same, make not satisfaction within a year, his subjects are absolved of their Obedience.” And the practise hereof hath been seen on divers occasions; as in the Deposing of Chilperique, King of France; in the Translation of the Roman Empire to Charlemaine; in the Oppression of John King of England; in Transferring the Kingdome of Navarre; and of late years, in the League against Henry the third of France, and in many more occurrences. I think there be few Princes that consider not this as Injust, and Inconvenient; but I wish they would all resolve to be Kings, or Subjects. Men cannot serve two Masters: They ought therefore to ease them, either by holding the Reins of Government wholly in their own hands; or by wholly delivering them into the hands of the Pope; that such men as are willing to be obedient, may be protected in their obedience. For this distinction of Temporall, and Spirituall Power is but words. Power is as really divided, and as dangerously to all purposes, by sharing with another Indirect Power, as with a Direct one. But to come now to his Arguments.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 11\n\nThe first is this, “The Civill Power is subject to the Spirituall: Therefore he that hath the Supreme Power Spirituall, hath right to command Temporall Princes, and dispose of their Temporalls in order to the Spirituall. As for the distinction of Temporall, and Spirituall, let us consider in what sense it may be said intelligibly, that the Temporall, or Civill Power is subject to the Spirituall. There be but two ways that those words can be made sense. For when wee say, one Power is subject to another Power, the meaning either is, that he which hath the one, is subject to him that hath the other; or that the one Power is to the other, as the means to the end. For wee cannot understand, that one Power hath Power over another Power; and that one Power can have Right or Command over another: For Subjection, Command, Right, and Power are accidents, not of Powers, but of Persons: One Power may be subordinate to another, as the art of a Sadler, to the art of a Rider. If then it be granted, that the Civill Government be ordained as a means to bring us to a Spirituall felicity; yet it does not follow, that if a King have the Civill Power, and the Pope the Spirituall, that therefore the King is bound to obey the Pope, more then every Sadler is bound to obey every Rider. Therefore as from Subordination of an Art, cannot be inferred the Subjection of the Professor; so from the Subordination of a Government, cannot be inferred the Subjection of the Governor. When therefore he saith, the Civill Power is Subject to the Spirituall, his meaning is, that the Civill Soveraign, is Subject to the Spirituall Soveraign. And the Argument stands thus, “The Civil Soveraign, is subject to the Spirituall; Therefore the Spirituall Prince may command Temporall Princes.” Where the conclusion is the same, with the Antecedent he should have proved. But to prove it, he alledgeth first, this reason, “Kings and Popes, Clergy and Laity make but one Common-wealth; that is to say, but one Church: And in all Bodies the Members depend one upon another: But things Spirituall depend not of things Temporall: Therefore, Temporall depend on Spirituall. And therefore are Subject to them.” In which Argumentation there be two grosse errours: one is, that all Christian Kings, Popes, Clergy, and all other Christian men, make but one Common-wealth: For it is evident that France is one Common-wealth, Spain another, and Venice a third, &c. And these consist of Christians; and therefore also are severall Bodies of Christians; that is to say, severall Churches: And their severall Soveraigns Represent them, whereby they are capable of commanding and obeying, of doing and suffering, as a natural man; which no Generall or Universall Church is, till it have a Representant; which it hath not on Earth: for if it had, there is no doubt but that all Christendome were one Common-wealth, whose Soveraign were that Representant, both in things Spirituall and Temporall: And the Pope, to make himself this Representant, wanteth three things that our Saviour hath not given him, to Command, and to Judge, and to Punish, otherwise than (by Excommunication) to run from those that will not Learn of him: For though the Pope were Christs onely Vicar, yet he cannot exercise his government, till our Saviours second coming: And then also it is not the Pope, but St. Peter himselfe, with the other Apostles, that are to be Judges of the world.\n\nThe other errour in this his first Argument is, that he sayes, the Members of every Common-wealth, as of a naturall Body, depend one of another: It is true, they cohaere together; but they depend onely on the Soveraign, which is the Soul of the Common-wealth; which failing, the Common-wealth is dissolved into a Civill war, no one man so much as cohaering to another, for want of a common Dependance on a known Soveraign; Just as the Members of the naturall Body dissolve into Earth, for want of a Soul to hold them together. Therefore there is nothing in this similitude, from whence to inferre a dependance of the Laity on the Clergy, or of the Temporall Officers on the Spirituall; but of both on the Civill Soveraign; which ought indeed to direct his Civill commands to the Salvation of Souls; but is not therefore subject to any but God himselfe. And thus you see the laboured fallacy of the first Argument, to deceive such men as distinguish not between the Subordination of Actions in the way to the End; and the Subjection of Persons one to another in the administration of the Means. For to every End, the Means are determined by Nature, or by God himselfe supernaturally: but the Power to make men use the Means, is in every nation resigned (by the Law of Nature, which forbiddeth men to violate their Faith given) to the Civill Soveraign.\n\nHis second Argument is this, “Every Common-wealth, (because it is supposed to be perfect and sufficient in it self,) may command any other Common-wealth, not subject to it, and force it to change the administration of the Government, nay depose the Prince, and set another in his room, if it cannot otherwise defend it selfe against the injuries he goes about to doe them: much more may a Spirituall Common-wealth command a Temporall one to change the administration of their Government, and may depose Princes, and institute others, when they cannot otherwise defend the Spirituall Good.”\n\nThat a Common-wealth, to defend it selfe against injuries, may lawfully doe all that he hath here said, is very true; and hath already in that which hath gone before been sufficiently demonstrated. And if it were also true, that there is now in this world a Spirituall Common-wealth, distinct from a Civill Common-wealth, then might the Prince thereof, upon injury done him, or upon want of caution that injury be not done him in time to come, repaire, and secure himself by Warre; which is in summe, deposing, killing, or subduing, or doing any act of Hostility. But by the same reason, it would be no lesse lawfull for a Civill Soveraign, upon the like injuries done, or feared, to make warre upon the Spirituall Soveraign; which I beleeve is more than Cardinall Bellarmine would have inferred from his own proposition.\n\nBut Spirituall Common-wealth there is none in this world: for it is the same thing with the Kingdome of Christ; which he himselfe saith, is not of this world; but shall be in the next world, at the Resurrection, when they that have lived justly, and beleeved that he was the Christ, shall (though they died Naturall bodies) rise Spirituall bodies; and then it is, that our Saviour shall judge the world, and conquer his Adversaries, and make a Spirituall Common-wealth. In the mean time, seeing there are no men on earth, whose bodies are Spirituall; there can be no Spirituall Common-wealth amongst men that are yet in the flesh; unlesse wee call Preachers, that have Commission to Teach, and prepare men for their reception into the Kingdome of Christ at the Resurrection, a Common-wealth; which I have proved to bee none.\n\nThe third Argument is this; “It is not lawfull for Christians to tolerate an Infidel, or Haereticall King, in case he endeavour to draw them to his Haeresie, or Infidelity. But to judge whether a King draw his subjects to Haeresie, or not, belongeth to the Pope. Therefore hath the Pope Right, to determine whether the Prince be to be deposed, or not deposed.”\n\nTo this I answer, that both these assertions are false. For Christians, (or men of what Religion soever,) if they tolerate not their King, whatsoever law hee maketh, though it bee concerning Religion, doe violate their faith, contrary to the Divine Law, both Naturall and Positive: Nor is there any Judge of Haeresie amongst Subjects, but their own Civill Soveraign; for “Haeresie is nothing else, but a private opinion, obstinately maintained, contrary to the opinion which the Publique Person (that is to say, the Representant of the Common-wealth) hath commanded to bee taught.” By which it is manifest, that an opinion publiquely appointed to bee taught, cannot be Haeresie; nor the Soveraign Princes that authorize them, Haeretiques. For Haeretiques are none but private men, that stubbornly defend some Doctrine, prohibited by their lawful Soveraigns.\n\nBut to prove that Christians are not to tolerate Infidell, or Haereticall Kings, he alledgeth a place in Deut. 17. where God forbiddeth the Jews, when they shall set a King over themselves, to choose a stranger; And from thence inferreth, that it is unlawfull for a Christian, to choose a King, that is not a Christian. And ’tis true, that he that is a Christian, that is, hee that hath already obliged himself to receive our Saviour when he shall come, for his King, shal tempt God too much in choosing for King in this world, one that hee knoweth will endeavour, both by terrour, and perswasion to make him violate his faith. But, it is (saith hee) the same danger, to choose one that is not a Christian, for King, and not to depose him, when hee is chosen. To this I say, the question is not of the danger of not deposing; but of the Justice of deposing him. To choose him, may in some cases bee unjust; but to depose him, when he is chosen, is in no case Just. For it is alwaies violation of faith, and consequently against the Law of Nature, which is the eternal Law of God. Nor doe wee read, that any such Doctrine was accounted Christian in the time of the Apostles; nor in the time of the Romane Emperours, till the Popes had the Civill Soveraignty of Rome. But to this he hath replyed, that the Christians of old, deposed not Nero, nor Diocletian, nor Julian, nor Valens an Arrian, for this cause onely, that they wanted Temporall forces. Perhaps so. But did our Saviour, who for calling for, might have had twelve Legions of immortall, invulnerable Angels to assist him, want forces to depose Caesar, or at least Pilate, that unjustly, without finding fault in him, delivered him to the Jews to bee crucified? Or if the Apostles wanted Temporall forces to depose Nero, was it therefore necessary for them in their Epistles to the new made Christians, to teach them, (as they did) to obey the Powers constituted over them, (whereof Nero in that time was one,) and that they ought to obey them, not for fear of their wrath, but for conscience sake? Shall we say they did not onely obey, but also teach what they meant not, for want of strength? It is not therefore for want of strength, but for conscience sake, that Christians are to tolerate their Heathen Princes, or Princes (for I cannot call any one whose Doctrine is the Publique Doctrine, an Haeretique) that authorize the teaching of an Errour. And whereas for the Temporall Power of the Pope, he alledgeth further, that St. Paul (1 Cor. 6.) appointed Judges under the Heathen Princes of those times, such as were not ordained by those Princes; it is not true. For St. Paul does but advise them, to take some of their Brethren to compound their differences, as Arbitrators, rather than to goe to law one with another before the Heathen Judges; which is a wholsome Precept, and full of Charity, fit to bee practised also in the Best Christian Common-wealths. And for the danger that may arise to Religion, by the Subjects tolerating of an Heathen, or an Erring Prince, it is a point, of which a Subject is no competent Judge; or if hee bee, the Popes Temporall Subjects may judge also of the Popes Doctrine. For every Christian Prince, as I have formerly proved, is no lesse Supreme Pastor of his own Subjects, than the Pope of his.\n\nThe fourth Argument, is taken from the Baptisme of Kings; wherein, that they may be made Christians they submit their Scepters to Christ; and promise to keep, and defend the Christian Faith. This is true; for Christian Kings are no more but Christs Subjects: but they may, for all that, bee the Popes Fellowes; for they are Supreme Pastors of their own Subjects; and the Pope is no more but King, and Pastor, even in Rome it selfe.\n\nThe fifth Argument, is drawn from the words spoken by our Saviour, Feed My Sheep; by which was give all Power necessary for a Pastor; as the Power to chase away Wolves, such as are Haeretiques; the Power to shut up Rammes, if they be mad, or push at the other Sheep with their Hornes, such as are Evill (though Christian) Kings; and Power to give the Flock convenient food: From whence hee inferreth, that St. Peter had these three Powers given him by Christ. To which I answer, that the last of these Powers, is no more than the Power, or rather Command to Teach. For the first, which is to chase away Wolves, that is, Haeretiques, the place hee quoteth is (Matth. 7.15.) “Beware of false Prophets which come to you in Sheeps clothing, but inwardly are ravening Wolves.” But neither are Haeretiques false Prophets, or at all Prophets: nor (admitting Haeretiques for the Wolves there meant,) were the Apostles commanded to kill them, or if they were Kings, to depose them; but to beware of, fly, and avoid them: nor was it to St. Peter, nor to any of the Apostles, but to the multitude of the Jews that followed him into the mountain, men for the most part not yet converted, that hee gave this Counsell, to Beware of false Prophets: which therefore if it conferre a Power of chasing away Kings, was given, not onely to private men; but to men that were not at all Christians. And as to the Power of Separating, and Shutting up of furious Rammes, (by which hee meaneth Christian Kings that refuse to submit themselves to the Roman Pastor,) our Saviour refused to take upon him that Power in this world himself, but advised to let the Corn and Tares grow up together till the day of Judgment: much lesse did hee give it to St. Peter, or can S. Peter give it to the Popes. St. Peter, and all other Pastors, are bidden to esteem those Christians that disobey the Church, that is, (that disobey the Christian Soveraigne) as Heathen men, and as Publicans. Seeing then men challenge to the Pope no authority over Heathen Princes, they ought to challenge none over those that are to bee esteemed as Heathen.\n\nBut from the Power to Teach onely, hee inferreth also a Coercive Power in the Pope, over Kings. The Pastor (saith he) must give his flock convenient food: Therefore the Pope may, and ought to compell Kings to doe their duty. Out of which it followeth, that the Pope, as Pastor of Christian men, is King of Kings: which all Christian Kings ought indeed either to Confesse, or else they ought to take upon themselves the Supreme Pastorall Charge, every one in his own Dominion.\n\nHis sixth, and last Argument, is from Examples. To which I answer, first, that Examples prove nothing; Secondly, that the Examples he alledgeth make not so much as a probability of Right. The fact of Jehoiada, in Killing Athaliah (2 Kings 11.) was either by the Authority of King Joash, or it was a horrible Crime in the High Priest, which (ever after the election of King Saul) was a mere Subject. The fact of St. Ambrose, in Excommunicating Theodosius the Emperour, (if it were true hee did so,) was a Capitall Crime. And for the Popes, Gregory 1. Greg. 2. Zachary, and Leo 3. their Judgments are void, as given in their own Cause; and the Acts done by them conformably to this Doctrine, are the greatest Crimes (especially that of Zachary) that are incident to Humane Nature. And thus much of Power Ecclesiasticall; wherein I had been more briefe, forbearing to examine these Arguments of Bellarmine, if they had been his, as a Private man, and not as the Champion of the Papacy, against all other Christian Princes, and States.\n\nCHAPTER XLIII. OF WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR A MANS RECEPTION INTO THE KINGDOME OF HEAVEN\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 1\n\nOF WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR A MANS RECEPTION INTO THE KINGDOME OF HEAVEN\n\nThe most frequent praetext of Sedition, and Civill Warre, in Christian Common-wealths hath a long time proceeded from a difficulty, not yet sufficiently resolved, of obeying at once, both God, and Man, then when their Commandements are one contrary to the other. It is manifest enough, that when a man receiveth two contrary Commands, and knows that one of them is Gods, he ought to obey that, and not the other, though it be the command even of his lawfull Soveraign (whether a Monarch, or a Soveraign Assembly,) or the command of his Father. The difficulty therefore consisteth in this, that men when they are commanded in the name of God, know not in divers Cases, whether the command be from God, or whether he that commandeth, doe but abuse Gods name for some private ends of his own. For as there ware in the Church of the Jews, many false Prophets, that sought reputation with the people, by feigned Dreams, and Visions; so there have been in all times in the Church of Christ, false Teachers, that seek reputation with the people, by phantasticall and false Doctrines; and by such reputation (as is the nature of Ambition,) to govern them for their private benefit.\n\nBut this difficulty of obeying both God, and the Civill Soveraign on earth, to those that can distinguish between what is Necessary, and what is not Necessary for their Reception into the Kingdome of God, is of no moment. For if the command of the Civill Soveraign bee such, as that it may be obeyed, without the forfeiture of life Eternall; not to obey it is unjust; and the precept of the Apostle takes place; “Servants obey your Masters in all things;” and, “Children obey your Parents in all things;” and the precept of our Saviour, “The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses Chaire, All therefore they shall say, that observe, and doe.” But if the command be such, as cannot be obeyed, without being damned to Eternall Death, then it were madnesse to obey it, and the Counsell of our Saviour takes place, (Mat. 10. 28.) “Fear not those that kill the body, but cannot kill the soule.” All men therefore that would avoid, both the punishments that are to be in this world inflicted, for disobedience to their earthly Soveraign, and those that shall be inflicted in the world to come for disobedience to God, have need be taught to distinguish well between what is, and what is not Necessary to Eternall Salvation.\n\nAll that is NECESSARY to Salvation, is contained in two Vertues, Faith in Christ, and Obedience to Laws. The latter of these, if it were perfect, were enough to us. But because wee are all guilty of disobedience to Gods Law, not onely originally in Adam, but also actually by our own transgressions, there is required at our hands now, not onely Obedience for the rest of our time, but also a Remission of sins for the time past; which Remission is the reward of our Faith in Christ. That nothing else is Necessarily required to Salvation, is manifest from this, that the Kingdome of Heaven, is shut to none but to Sinners; that is to say, to the disobedient, or transgressors of the Law; nor to them, in case they Repent, and Beleeve all the Articles of Christian Faith, Necessary to Salvation.\n\nThe Obedience required at our hands by God, that accepteth in all our actions the Will for the Deed, is a serious Endeavour to Obey him; and is called also by all such names as signifie that Endeavour. And therefore Obedience, is sometimes called by the names of Charity, and Love, because they imply a Will to Obey; and our Saviour himself maketh our Love to God, and to one another, a Fulfilling of the whole Law: and sometimes by the name of Righteousnesse; for Righteousnesse is but the will to give to every one his owne, that is to say, the will to obey the Laws: and sometimes by the name of Repentance; because to Repent, implyeth a turning away from sinne, which is the same, with the return of the will to Obedience. Whosoever therefore unfeignedly desireth to fulfill the Commandements of God, or repenteth him truely of his transgressions, or that loveth God with all his heart, and his neighbor as himself, hath all the Obedience Necessary to his Reception into the Kingdome of God: For if God should require perfect Innocence, there could no flesh be saved.\n\nBut what Commandements are those that God hath given us? Are all those Laws which were given to the Jews by the hand of Moses, the Commandements of God? If they bee, why are not Christians taught to obey them? If they be not, what others are so, besides the Law of Nature? For our Saviour Christ hath not given us new Laws, but Counsell to observe those wee are subject to; that is to say, the Laws of Nature, and the Laws of our severall Soveraigns: Nor did he make any new Law to the Jews in his Sermon on the Mount, but onely expounded the Laws of Moses, to which they were subject before. The Laws of God therefore are none but the Laws of Nature, whereof the principall is, that we should not violate our Faith, that is, a commandement to obey our Civill Soveraigns, which wee constituted over us, by mutuall pact one with another. And this Law of God, that commandeth Obedience to the Law Civill, commandeth by consequence Obedience to all the Precepts of the Bible, which (as I have proved in the precedent Chapter) is there onely Law, where the Civill Soveraign hath made it so; and in other places but Counsell; which a man at his own perill, may without injustice refuse to obey.\n\nKnowing now what is the Obedience Necessary to Salvation, and to whom it is due; we are to consider next concerning Faith, whom, and why we beleeve; and what are the Articles, or Points necessarily to be beleeved by them that shall be saved. And first, for the Person whom we beleeve, because it is impossible to beleeve any Person, before we know what he saith, it is necessary he be one that wee have heard speak. The Person therefore, whom Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the Prophets beleeved, was God himself, that spake unto them supernaturally: And the Person, whom the Apostles and Disciples that conversed with Christ beleeved, was our Saviour himself. But of them, to whom neither God the Father, nor our Saviour ever spake, it cannot be said, that the Person whom they beleeved, was God. They beleeved the Apostles, and after them the Pastors and Doctors of the Church, that recommended to their faith the History of the Old and New Testament: so that the Faith of Christians ever since our Saviours time, hath had for foundation, first, the reputation of their Pastors, and afterward, the authority of those that made the Old and New Testament to be received for the Rule of Faith; which none could do but Christian Soveraignes; who are therefore the Supreme Pastors, and the onely Persons, whom Christians now hear speak from God; except such as God speaketh to, in these days supernaturally. But because there be many false Prophets “gone out into the world,” other men are to examine such Spirits (as St. John advised us, 1 Epistle, Chap. 4. ver.1.) “whether they be of God, or not.” And therefore, seeing the Examination of Doctrines belongeth to the Supreme Pastor, the Person which all they that have no speciall revelation are to beleeve, is (in every Common-wealth) the Supreme Pastor, that is to say, the Civill Soveraigne.\n\nThe causes why men beleeve any Christian Doctrine, are various; For Faith is the gift of God; and he worketh it in each severall man, by such wayes, as it seemeth good unto himself. The most ordinary immediate cause of our beleef, concerning any point of Christian Faith, is, that wee beleeve the Bible to be the Word of God. But why wee beleeve the Bible to be the Word of God, is much disputed, as all questions must needs bee, that are not well stated. For they make not the question to be, “Why we Beleeve it,” but “How wee Know it;” as if Beleeving and Knowing were all one. And thence while one side ground their Knowledge upon the Infallibility of the Church, and the other side, on the Testimony of the Private Spirit, neither side concludeth what it pretends. For how shall a man know the Infallibility of the Church, but by knowing first the Infallibility of the Scripture? Or how shall a man know his own Private spirit to be other than a beleef, grounded upon the Authority, and Arguments of his Teachers; or upon a Presumption of his own Gifts? Besides, there is nothing in the Scripture, from which can be inferred the Infallibility of the Church; much lesse, of any particular Church; and least of all, the Infallibility of any particular man.\n\nIt is manifest, therefore, that Christian men doe not know, but onely beleeve the Scripture to be the Word of God; and that the means of making them beleeve which God is pleased to afford men ordinarily, is according to the way of Nature, that is to say, from their Teachers. It is the Doctrine of St. Paul concerning Christian Faith in generall, (Rom. 10.17.) “Faith cometh by Hearing,” that is, by Hearing our lawfull Pastors. He saith also (ver. 14,15. of the same Chapter) “How shall they beleeve in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a Preacher? and how shall they Preach, except they be sent?” Whereby it is evident, that the ordinary cause of beleeving that the Scriptures are the Word of God, is the same with the cause of the beleeving of all other Articles of our Faith, namely, the Hearing of those that are by the Law allowed and appointed to Teach us, as our Parents in their Houses, and our Pastors in the Churches: Which also is made more manifest by experience. For what other cause can there bee assigned, why in Christian Common-wealths all men either beleeve, or at least professe the Scripture to bee the Word of God, and in other Common-wealths scarce any; but that in Christian Common-wealths they are taught it from their infancy; and in other places they are taught otherwise?\n\nBut if Teaching be the cause of Faith, why doe not all beleeve? It is certain therefore that Faith is the gift of God, and hee giveth it to whom he will. Neverthelesse, because of them to whom he giveth it, he giveth it by the means of Teachers, the immediate cause of Faith is Hearing. In a School where many are taught, and some profit, others profit not, the cause of learning in them that profit, is the Master; yet it cannot be thence inferred, that learning is not the gift of God. All good things proceed from God; yet cannot all that have them, say they are Inspired; for that implies a gift supernaturall, and the immediate hand of God; which he that pretends to, pretends to be a Prophet, and is subject to the examination of the Church.\n\nBut whether men Know, or Beleeve, or Grant the Scriptures to be the Word of God; if out of such places of them, as are without obscurity, I shall shew what Articles of Faith are necessary, and onely necessary for Salvation, those men must needs Know, Beleeve, or Grant the same.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 2\n\nThe Onely Necessary Article Of Christian Faith, The (Unum Necessarium) Onely Article of Faith, which the Scripture maketh simply Necessary to Salvation, is this, that JESUS IS THE CHRIST. By the name of Christ, is understood the King, which God had before promised by the Prophets of the Old Testament, to send into the world, to reign (over the Jews, and over such of other nations as should beleeve in him) under himself eternally; and to give them that eternall life, which was lost by the sin of Adam. Which when I have proved out of Scripture, I will further shew when, and in what sense some other Articles may bee also called Necessary.\n\nFor Proof that the Beleef of this Article, Jesus Is The Christ, is all the Faith required to Salvation, my first Argument shall bee from the Scope of the Evangelists; which was by the description of the life of our Saviour, to establish that one Article, Jesus Is The Christ. The summe of St. Matthews Gospell is this, That Jesus was of the stock of David; Born of a Virgin; which are the Marks of the true Christ: That the Magi came to worship him as King of the Jews: That Herod for the same cause sought to kill him: That John Baptist proclaimed him: That he preached by himselfe, and his Apostles that he was that King; That he taught the Law, not as a Scribe, but as a man of Authority: That he cured diseases by his Word onely, and did many other Miracles, which were foretold the Christ should doe: That he was saluted King when he entered into Jerusalem: That he fore-warned them to beware of all others that should pretend to be Christ: That he was taken, accused, and put to death, for saying, hee was King: That the cause of his condemnation written on the Crosse, was JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWES. All which tend to no other end than this, that men should beleeve, that Jesus Is The Christ. Such therefore was the Scope of St. Matthews Gospel. But the Scope of all the Evangelists (as may appear by reading them) was the same. Therefore the Scope of the whole Gospell, was the establishing of that onely Article. And St. John expressely makes it his conclusion, John 20. 31. “These things are written, that you may know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.”\n\nMy second Argument is taken from the Subject of the Sermons of the Apostles, both whilest our Saviour lived on earth, and after his Ascension. The Apostles in our Saviours time were sent, Luke 9.2. to Preach the Kingdome of God: For neither there, nor Mat. 10.7. giveth he any Commission to them, other than this, “As ye go, Preach, saying, the Kingdome of Heaven is at hand;” that is, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the King which was to come. That their Preaching also after his ascension was the same, is manifest out of Acts 17.6. “They drew (saith St. Luke) Jason and certain Brethren unto the Rulers of the City, crying, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also, whom Jason hath received. And these all do contrary to the Decrees of Caesar, saying, that there is another King, one Jesus:” And out of the 2.&3. verses of the same Chapter, where it is said, that St. Paul “as his manner was, went in unto them; and three Sabbath dayes reasoned with them out of the Scriptures; opening and alledging, that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen againe from the dead, and that this Jesus (whom he preached) is Christ.”\n\nThe third Argument is, from those places of Scripture, by which all the Faith required to Salvation is declared to be Easie. For if an inward assent of the mind to all the Doctrines concerning Christian Faith now taught, (whereof the greatest part are disputed,) were necessary to Salvation, there would be nothing in the world so hard, as to be a Christian. The Thief upon the Crosse though repenting, could not have been saved for saying, “Lord remember me when thou commest into thy Kingdome;” by which he testified no beleefe of any other Article, but this, That Jesus Was The King. Nor could it bee said (as it is Mat. 11. 30.) that “Christs yoke is Easy, and his burthen Light:” Nor that “Little Children beleeve in him,” as it is Matth. 18.6. Nor could St. Paul have said (1 Cor. 1. 21.) “It pleased God by the Foolishnesse of preaching, to save them that beleeve:” Nor could St. Paul himself have been saved, much lesse have been so great a Doctor of the Church so suddenly, that never perhaps thought of Transsubstantiation, nor Purgatory, nor many other Articles now obtruded.\n\nThe fourth Argument is taken from places expresse, and such as receive no controversie of Interpretation; as first, John 5. 39. “Search the Scriptures, for in them yee thinke yee have eternall life; and they are they that testifie of mee.” Our Saviour here speaketh of the Scriptures onely of the Old Testament; for the Jews at that time could not search the Scriptures of the New Testament, which were not written. But the Old Testament hath nothing of Christ, but the Markes by which men might know him when hee came; as that he should descend from David, be born at Bethlehem, and of a Virgin; doe great Miracles, and the like. Therefore to beleeve that this Jesus was He, was sufficient to eternall life: but more than sufficient is not Necessary; and consequently no other Article is required. Again, (John 11. 26.) “Whosoever liveth and beleeveth in mee, shall not die eternally,” Therefore to beleeve in Christ, is faith sufficient to eternall life; and consequently no more faith than that is Necessary, But to beleeve in Jesus, and to beleeve that Jesus is the Christ, is all one, as appeareth in the verses immediately following. For when our Saviour (verse 26.) had said to Martha, “Beleevest thou this?” she answereth (verse 27.) “Yea Lord, I beleeve that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world;” Therefore this Article alone is faith sufficient to life eternall; and more than sufficient is not Necessary. Thirdly, John 20. 31. “These things are written that yee might beleeve, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that beleeving yee might have life through his name.” There, to beleeve that Jesus Is The Christ, is faith sufficient to the obtaining of life; and therefore no other Article is Necessary. Fourthly, 1 John 4. 2. “Every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God.” And 1 Joh. 5. 1. “whosoever beleeveth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God.” And verse 5. “Who is hee that overcommeth the world, but he that beleeveth that Jesus is the Son of God?” Fiftly, Act. 8. ver. 36, 37. “See (saith the Eunuch) here is water, what doth hinder me to be baptized? And Philip said, If thou beleevest with all thy heart thou mayst. And hee answered and said, I beleeve that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” Therefore this Article beleeved, Jesus Is The Christ, is sufficient to Baptisme, that is to say, to our Reception into the Kingdome of God, and by consequence, onely Necessary. And generally in all places where our Saviour saith to any man, “Thy faith hath saved thee,” the cause he saith it, is some Confession, which directly, or by consequence, implyeth a beleef, that Jesus Is The Christ.\n\nThe last Argument is from the places, where this Article is made the Foundation of Faith: For he that holdeth the Foundation shall bee saved. Which places are first, Mat. 24.23. “If any man shall say unto you, Loe, here is Christ, or there, beleeve it not, for there shall arise false Christs, and false Prophets, and shall shew great signes and wonders, &c.” Here wee see, this Article Jesus Is The Christ, must bee held, though hee that shall teach the contrary should doe great miracles. The second place is Gal. 1. 8. “Though we, or an Angell from Heaven preach any other Gospell unto you, than that wee have preached unto you, let him bee accursed.” But the Gospell which Paul, and the other Apostles, preached, was onely this Article, that Jesus Is The Christ; Therefore for the Beleef of this Article, we are to reject the Authority of an Angell from heaven; much more of any mortall man, if he teach the contrary. This is therefore the Fundamentall Article of Christian Faith. A third place is, 1 Joh. 4.1. “Beloved, beleeve not every spirit. Hereby yee shall know the Spirit of God; every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God.” By which it is evident, that this Article, is the measure, and rule, by which to estimate, and examine all other Articles; and is therefore onely Fundamentall. A fourth is, Matt. 16.18. where after St. Peter had professed this Article, saying to our Saviour, “Thou art Christ the Son of the living God,” Our Saviour answered, “Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church:” from whence I inferre, that this Article is that, on which all other Doctrines of the Church are built, as on their Foundation. A fift is (1 Cor. 3. ver. 11, 12, &c.) “Other Foundation can no man lay, than that which is laid, Jesus is the Christ. Now if any man build upon this Foundation, Gold, Silver, pretious Stones, Wood, Hay, Stubble; Every mans work shall be made manifest; For the Day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every mans work, of what sort it is. If any mans work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward: If any mans work shall bee burnt, he shall suffer losse; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” Which words, being partly plain and easie to understand, and partly allegoricall and difficult; out of that which is plain, may be inferred, that Pastors that teach this Foundation, that Jesus Is The Christ, though they draw from it false consequences, (which all men are sometimes subject to,) they may neverthelesse bee saved; much more that they may bee saved, who being no Pastors, but Hearers, beleeve that which is by their lawfull Pastors taught them. Therefore the beleef of this Article is sufficient; and by consequence there is no other Article of Faith Necessarily required to Salvation.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 3\n\nNow for the part which is Allegoricall, as “That the fire shall try every mans work,” and that “They shall be saved, but so as by fire,” or “through fire,” (for the originall is dia puros,) it maketh nothing against this conclusion which I have drawn from the other words, that are plain. Neverthelesse, because upon this place there hath been an argument taken, to prove the fire of Purgatory, I will also here offer you my conjecture concerning the meaning of this triall of Doctrines, and saving of men as by Fire. The Apostle here seemeth to allude to the words of the Prophet Zachary, Ch. 13. 8,9. who speaking of the Restauration of the Kingdome of God, saith thus, “Two parts therein shall be cut off, and die, but the third shall be left therein; and I will bring the third part through the Fire, and will refine them as Silver is refined, and will try them as Gold is tryed; they shall call on the name of the Lord, and I will hear them.” The day of Judgment, is the day of the Restauration of the Kingdome of God; and at that day it is, that St. Peter tells us (2 Pet. 3. v.7, 10, 12.) shall be the Conflagration of the world, wherein the wicked shall perish; but the remnant which God will save, shall passe through that Fire, unhurt, and be therein (as Silver and Gold are refined by the fire from their drosse) tryed, and refined from their Idolatry, and be made to call upon the name of the true God. Alluding whereto St. Paul here saith, that The Day (that is, the Day of Judgment, the Great Day of our Saviours comming to restore the Kingdome of God in Israel) shall try every mans doctrine, by Judging, which are Gold, Silver, Pretious Stones, Wood, Hay, Stubble; And then they that have built false Consequences on the true Foundation, shall see their Doctrines condemned; neverthelesse they themselves shall be saved, and passe unhurt through this universall Fire, and live eternally, to call upon the name of the true and onely God. In which sense there is nothing that accordeth not with the rest of Holy Scripture, or any glimpse of the fire of Purgatory.\n\nBut a man may here aske, whether it bee not as necessary to Salvation, to beleeve, that God is Omnipotent; Creator of the world; that Jesus Christ is risen; and that all men else shall rise again from the dead at the last day; as to beleeve, that Jesus Is The Christ. To which I answer, they are; and so are many more Articles: but they are such, as are contained in this one, and may be deduced from it, with more, or lesse difficulty. For who is there that does not see, that they who beleeve Jesus to be the Son of the God of Israel, and that the Israelites had for God the Omnipotent Creator of all things, doe therein also beleeve, that God is the Omnipotent Creator of all things? Or how can a man beleeve, that Jesus is the King that shall reign eternally, unlesse hee beleeve him also risen again from the dead? For a dead man cannot exercise the Office of a King. In summe, he that holdeth this Foundation, Jesus Is The Christ, holdeth Expressely all that hee seeth rightly deduced from it, and Implicitely all that is consequent thereunto, though he have not skill enough to discern the consequence. And therefore it holdeth still good, that the beleef of this one Article is sufficient faith to obtaine remission of sinnes to the Penitent, and consequently to bring them into the Kingdome of Heaven.\n\nNow that I have shewn, that all the Obedience required to Salvation, consisteth in the will to obey the Law of God, that is to say, in Repentance; and all the Faith required to the same, is comprehended in the beleef of this Article, Jesus Is The Christ; I will further alledge those places of the Gospell, that prove, that all that is Necessary to Salvation is contained in both these joined together. The men to whom St. Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, next after the Ascension of our Saviour, asked him, and the rest of the Apostles, saying, (Act. 2.37.) “Men and Brethren what shall we doe?” to whom St. Peter answered (in the next verse) “Repent, and be Baptized every one of you, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Therefore Repentance, and Baptisme, that is, beleeving that Jesus Is The Christ, is all that is Necessary to Salvation. Again, our Saviour being asked by a certain Ruler, (Luke 18.18.) “What shall I doe to inherit eternall life?” Answered (verse 20) “Thou knowest the Commandements, Doe not commit Adultery, Doe not Kill, Doe not Steal, Doe not bear false witnesse, Honor thy Father, and thy Mother;” which when he said he had observed, our Saviour added, “Sell all thou hast, give it to the Poor, and come and follow me:” which was as much as to say, Relye on me that am the King: Therefore to fulfill the Law, and to beleeve that Jesus is the King, is all that is required to bring a man to eternall life. Thirdly, St. Paul saith (Rom. 1.17.) “The Just shall live by Faith;” not every one, but the Just; therefore Faith and Justice (that is, the Will To Be Just, or Repentance) are all that is Necessary to life eternall. And (Mark 1.15.) our Saviour preached, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand, Repent and Beleeve the Evangile,” that is, the Good news that the Christ was come. Therefore to Repent, and to Beleeve that Jesus is the Christ, is all that is required to Salvation.\n\nSeeing then it is Necessary that Faith, and Obedience (implyed in the word Repentance) do both concurre to our Salvation; the question by which of the two we are Justified, is impertinently disputed. Neverthelesse, it will not be impertinent, to make manifest in what manner each of them contributes thereunto; and in what sense it is said, that we are to be Justified by the one, and by the other. And first, if by Righteousnesse be understood the Justice of the Works themselves, there is no man that can be saved; for there is none that hath not transgressed the Law of God. And therefore when wee are said to be Justified by Works, it is to be understood of the Will, which God doth alwaies accept for the Work it selfe, as well in good, as in evill men. And in this sense onely it is, that a man is called Just, or Unjust; and that his Justice Justifies him, that is, gives him the title, in Gods acceptation, of Just; and renders him capable of Living By His Faith, which before he was not. So that Justice Justifies in that that sense, in which to Justifie, is the same that to Denominate A Man Just; and not in the signification of discharging the Law; whereby the punishment of his sins should be unjust.\n\nBut a man is then also said to be Justified, when his Plea, though in it selfe unsufficient, is accepted; as when we Plead our Will, our Endeavour to fulfill the Law, and Repent us of our failings, and God accepteth it for the Performance it selfe: And because God accepteth not the Will for the Deed, but onely in the Faithfull; it is therefore Faith that makes good our Plea; and in this sense it is, that Faith onely Justifies: So that Faith and Obedience are both Necessary to Salvation; yet in severall senses each of them is said to Justifie.\n\nWhether Christian, Having thus shewn what is Necessary to Salvation; it is not hard to reconcile our Obedience to the Civill Soveraign; who is either Christian, or Infidel. If he bee a Christian, he alloweth the beleefe of this Article, that Jesus Is The Christ; and of all the Articles that are contained in, or are evident consequence deduced from it: which is all the Faith Necessary to Salvation. And because he is a Soveraign, he requireth Obedience to all his owne, that is, to all the Civill Laws; in which also are contained all the Laws of Nature, that is, all the Laws of God: for besides the Laws of Nature, and the Laws of the Church, which are part of the Civill Law, (for the Church that can make Laws is the Common-wealth,) there bee no other Laws Divine. Whosoever therefore obeyeth his Christian Soveraign, is not thereby hindred, neither from beleeving, nor from obeying God. But suppose that a Christian King should from this Foundation, Jesus Is The Christ, draw some false consequences, that is to say, make some superstructions of Hay, or Stubble, and command the teaching of the same; yet seeing St. Paul says, he shal be saved; much more shall he be saved, that teacheth them by his command; and much more yet, he that teaches not, but onely beleeves his lawfull Teacher. And in case a Subject be forbidden by the Civill Soveraign to professe some of those his opinions, upon what grounds can he disobey? Christian Kings may erre in deducing a Consequence, but who shall Judge? Shall a private man Judge, when the question is of his own obedience? or shall any man Judg but he that is appointed thereto by the Church, that is, by the Civill Soveraign that representeth it? or if the Pope, or an Apostle Judge, may he not erre in deducing of a consequence? did not one of the two, St. Peter, or St. Paul erre in a superstructure, when St. Paul withstood St. Peter to his face? There can therefore be no contradiction between the Laws of God, and the Laws of a Christian Common-wealth.\n\nAnd when the Civill Soveraign is an Infidel, every one of his own Subjects that resisteth him, sinneth against the Laws of God (for such as are the Laws of Nature,) and rejecteth the counsell of the Apostles, that admonisheth all Christians to obey their Princes, and all Children and Servants to obey they Parents, and Masters, in all things. And for their Faith, it is internall, and invisible; They have the licence that Naaman had, and need not put themselves into danger for it. But if they do, they ought to expect their reward in Heaven, and not complain of their Lawfull Soveraign; much lesse make warre upon him. For he that is not glad of any just occasion of Martyrdome, has not the faith be professeth, but pretends it onely, to set some colour upon his own contumacy. But what Infidel King is so unreasonable, as knowing he has a Subject, that waiteth for the second comming of Christ, after the present world shall be burnt, and intendeth then to obey him (which is the intent of beleeving that Jesus is the Christ,) and in the mean time thinketh himself bound to obey the Laws of that Infidel King, (which all Christians are obliged in conscience to doe,) to put to death, or to persecute such a Subject?\n\nAnd thus much shall suffice, concerning the Kingdome of God, and Policy Ecclesiasticall. Wherein I pretend not to advance any Position of my own, but onely to shew what are the Consequences that seem to me deducible from the Principles of Christian Politiques, (which are the holy Scriptures,) in confirmation of the Power of Civill Soveraigns, and the Duty of their Subjects. And in the allegation of Scripture, I have endeavoured to avoid such Texts as are of obscure, or controverted Interpretation; and to alledge none, but is such sense as is most plain, and agreeable to the harmony and scope of the whole Bible; which was written for the re-establishment of the Kingdome of God in Christ. For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth the true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them cleerly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make every thing more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those that seek not the truth, but their own advantage.\n\nPART IV. OF THE KINDOME OF DARKNESSE\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 1\n\nOF SPIRITUALL DARKNESSE FROM MISINTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE\n\nBesides these Soveraign Powers, Divine, and Humane, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another Power, namely, (Eph. 6. 12.), that of “the Rulers of the Darknesse of this world,” (Mat. 12. 26.), “the Kingdome of Satan,” and, (Mat. 9. 34.), “the Principality of Beelzebub over Daemons,” that is to say, over Phantasmes that appear in the Air: For which cause Satan is also called (Eph. 2. 2.) “the Prince of the Power of the Air;” and (because he ruleth in the darknesse of this world) (Joh. 16. 11.) “The Prince of this world;” And in consequence hereunto, they who are under his Dominion, in opposition to the faithfull (who are the Children Of The Light) are called the Children Of Darknesse. For seeing Beelzebub is Prince of Phantasmes, Inhabitants of his Dominion of Air and Darknesse, the Children of Darknesse, and these Daemons, Phantasmes, or Spirits of Illusion, signifie allegorically the same thing. This considered, the Kingdome of Darknesse, as it is set forth in these, and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a “Confederacy of Deceivers, that to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour by dark, and erroneous Doctrines, to extinguish in them the Light, both of Nature, and of the Gospell; and so to dis-prepare them for the Kingdome of God to come.”\n\nAs men that are utterly deprived from their Nativity, of the light of the bodily Eye, have no Idea at all, of any such light; and no man conceives in his imagination any greater light, than he hath at some time, or other perceived by his outward Senses: so also is it of the light of the Gospel, and of the light of the Understanding, that no man can conceive there is any greater degree of it, than that which he hath already attained unto. And from hence it comes to passe, that men have no other means to acknowledge their owne Darknesse, but onely by reasoning from the un-forseen mischances, that befall them in their ways; The Darkest part of the Kingdome of Satan, is that which is without the Church of God; that is to say, amongst them that beleeve not in Jesus Christ. But we cannot say, that therefore the Church enjoyeth (as the land of Goshen) all the light, which to the performance of the work enjoined us by God, is necessary. Whence comes it, that in Christendome there has been, almost from the time of the Apostles, such justling of one another out of their places, both by forraign, and Civill war? such stumbling at every little asperity of their own fortune, and every little eminence of that of other men? and such diversity of ways in running to the same mark, Felicity, if it be not Night amongst us, or at least a Mist? wee are therefore yet in the Dark.\n\nThe Enemy has been here in the Night of our naturall Ignorance, and sown the tares of Spirituall Errors; and that, First, by abusing, and putting out the light of the Scriptures: For we erre, not knowing the Scriptures. Secondly, by introducing the Daemonology of the Heathen Poets, that is to say, their fabulous Doctrine concerning Daemons, which are but Idols, or Phantasms of the braine, without any reall nature of their own, distinct from humane fancy; such as are dead mens Ghosts, and Fairies, and other matter of old Wives tales. Thirdly, by mixing with the Scripture divers reliques of the Religion, and much of the vain and erroneous Philosophy of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle. Fourthly, by mingling with both these, false, or uncertain Traditions, and fained, or uncertain History. And so we come to erre, by “giving heed to seducing Spirits,” and the Daemonology of such “as speak lies in Hypocrisie,” (or as it is in the Originall, 1 Tim. 4.1,2. “of those that play the part of lyars”) “with a seared conscience,” that is, contrary to their own knowledge. Concerning the first of these, which is the Seducing of men by abuse of Scripture, I intend to speak briefly in this Chapter.\n\nThe greatest, and main abuse of Scripture, and to which almost all the rest are either consequent, or subservient, is the wresting of it, to prove that the Kingdome of God, mentioned so often in the Scripture, is the present Church, or multitude of Christian men now living, or that being dead, are to rise again at the last day: whereas the Kingdome of God was first instituted by the Ministery of Moses, over the Jews onely; who were therefore called his Peculiar People; and ceased afterward, in the election of Saul, when they refused to be governed by God any more, and demanded a King after the manner of the nations; which God himself consented unto, as I have more at large proved before, in the 35. Chapter. After that time, there was no other Kingdome of God in the world, by any Pact, or otherwise, than he ever was, is, and shall be King, of all men, and of all creatures, as governing according to his Will, by his infinite Power. Neverthelesse, he promised by his Prophets to restore this his Government to them again, when the time he hath in his secret counsell appointed for it shall bee fully come, and when they shall turn unto him by repentance, and amendment of life; and not onely so, but he invited also the Gentiles to come in, and enjoy the happinesse of his Reign, on the same conditions of conversion and repentance; and hee promised also to send his Son into the world, to expiate the sins of them all by his death, and to prepare them by his Doctrine, to receive him at his second coming: Which second coming not yet being, the Kingdome of God is not yet come, and wee are not now under any other Kings by Pact, but our Civill Soveraigns; saving onely, that Christian men are already in the Kingdome of Grace, in as much as they have already the Promise of being received at his comming againe.\n\nConsequent to this Errour, that the present Church is Christs Kingdome, there ought to be some one Man, or Assembly, by whose mouth our Saviour (now in heaven) speaketh, giveth law, and which representeth his person to all Christians, or divers Men, or divers Assemblies that doe the same to divers parts of Christendome. This power Regal under Christ, being challenged, universally by that Pope, and in particular Common-wealths by Assemblies of the Pastors of the place, (when the Scripture gives it to none but to Civill Soveraigns,) comes to be so passionately disputed, that it putteth out the Light of Nature, and causeth so great a Darknesse in mens understanding, that they see not who it is to whom they have engaged their obedience.\n\nConsequent to this claim of the Pope to Vicar Generall of Christ in the present Church, (supposed to be that Kingdom of his, to which we are addressed in the Gospel,) is the Doctrine, that it is necessary for a Christian King, to receive his Crown by a Bishop; as if it were from that Ceremony, that he derives the clause of Dei Gratia in his title; and that then onely he is made King by the favour of God, when he is crowned by the authority of Gods universall Viceregent on earth; and that every Bishop whosoever be his Soveraign, taketh at his Consecration an oath of absolute Obedience to the Pope, Consequent to the same, is the Doctrine of the fourth Councell of Lateran, held under Pope Innocent the third, (Chap. 3. De Haereticis.) “That if a King at the Popes admonition, doe not purge his Kingdome of Haeresies, and being excommunicate for the same, doe not give satisfaction within a year, his Subjects are absolved of the bond of their obedience.” Where, by Haeresies are understood all opinions which the Church of Rome hath forbidden to be maintained. And by this means, as often as there is any repugnancy between the Politicall designes of the Pope, and other Christian Princes, as there is very often, there ariseth such a Mist amongst their Subjects, that they know not a stranger that thrusteth himself into the throne of their lawfull Prince, from him whom they had themselves placed there; and in this Darknesse of mind, are made to fight one against another, without discerning their enemies from their friends, under the conduct of another mans ambition.\n\nFrom the same opinion, that the present Church is the Kingdome of God, it proceeds that Pastours, Deacons, and all other Ministers of the Church, take the name to themselves of the Clergy, giving to other Christians the name of Laity, that is, simply People. For Clergy signifies those, whose maintenance is that Revenue, which God having reserved to himselfe during his Reigne over the Israelites, assigned to the tribe of Levi (who were to be his publique Ministers, and had no portion of land set them out to live on, as their brethren) to be their inheritance. The Pope therefore, (pretending the present Church to be, as the Realme of Israel, the Kingdome of God) challenging to himselfe and his subordinate Ministers, the like revenue, as the Inheritance of God, the name of Clergy was sutable to that claime. And thence it is, that Tithes, or other tributes paid to the Levites, as Gods Right, amongst the Israelites, have a long time been demanded, and taken of Christians, by Ecclesiastiques, Jure Divino, that is, in Gods Right. By which meanes, the people every where were obliged to a double tribute; one to the State, another to the Clergy; whereof, that to the Clergy, being the tenth of their revenue, is double to that which a King of Athens (and esteemed a Tyrant) exacted of his subjects for the defraying of all publique charges: For he demanded no more but the twentieth part; and yet abundantly maintained therewith the Commonwealth. And in the Kingdome of the Jewes, during the Sacerdotall Reigne of God, the Tithes and Offerings were the whole Publique Revenue.\n\nFrom the same mistaking of the present Church for the Kingdom of God, came in the distinction betweene the Civill and the Canon Laws: The civil Law being the acts of Soveraigns in their own Dominions, and the Canon Law being the Acts of the Pope in the same Dominions. Which Canons, though they were but Canons, that is, Rules Propounded, and but voluntarily received by Christian Princes, till the translation of the Empire to Charlemain; yet afterwards, as the power of the Pope encreased, became Rules Commanded, and the Emperours themselves (to avoyd greater mischiefes, which the people blinded might be led into) were forced to let them passe for Laws.\n\nFrom hence it is, that in all Dominions, where the Popes Ecclesiasticall power is entirely received, Jewes, Turkes, and Gentiles, are in the Roman Church tolerated in their Religion, as farre forth, as in the exercise and profession thereof they offend not against the civill power: whereas in a Christian, though a stranger, not to be of the Roman Religion, is Capitall; because the Pope pretendeth that all Christians are his Subjects. For otherwise it were as much against the law of Nations, to persecute a Christian stranger, for professing the Religion of his owne country, as an Infidell; or rather more, in as much as they that are not against Christ, are with him.\n\nFrom the same it is, that in every Christian State there are certaine men, that are exempt, by Ecclesiasticall liberty, from the tributes, and from the tribunals of the Civil State; for so are the secular Clergy, besides Monks and Friars, which in many places, bear so great a proportion to the common people, as if need were, there might be raised out of them alone, an Army, sufficient for any warre the Church militant should imploy them in, against their owne, or other Princes.\n\nA second generall abuse of Scripture, is the turning of Consecration into Conjuration, or Enchantment. To Consecrate, is in Scripture, to Offer, Give, or Dedicate, in pious and decent language and gesture, a man, or any other thing to God, by separating of it from common use; that is to say, to Sanctifie, or make it Gods, and to be used only by those, whom God hath appointed to be his Publike Ministers, (as I have already proved at large in the 35. Chapter;) and thereby to change, not the thing Consecrated, but onely the use of it, from being Profane and common, to be Holy, and peculiar to Gods service. But when by such words, the nature of qualitie of the thing it selfe, is pretended to be changed, it is not Consecration, but either an extraordinary worke of God, or a vaine and impious Conjuration. But seeing (for the frequency of pretending the change of Nature in their Consecrations,) it cannot be esteemed a work extraordinary, it is no other than a Conjuration or Incantation, whereby they would have men to beleeve an alteration of Nature that is not, contrary to the testimony of mans Sight, and of all the rest of his Senses. As for example, when the Priest, in stead of Consecrating Bread and Wine to Gods peculiar service in the Sacrament of the Lords Supper, (which is but a separation of it from the common use, to signifie, that is, to put men in mind of their Redemption, by the Passion of Christ, whose body was broken, and blood shed upon the Crosse for our transgressions,) pretends, that by saying of the words of our Saviour, “This is my Body,” and “This is my Blood,” the nature of Bread is no more there, but his very Body; notwithstanding there appeared not to the Sight, or other Sense of the Receiver, any thing that appeareth not before the Consecration. The Egyptian Conjurers, that are said to have turned their Rods to Serpents, and the Water into Bloud, are thought but to have deluded the senses of the Spectators by a false shew of things, yet are esteemed Enchanters: But what should wee have thought of them, if there had appeared in their Rods nothing like a Serpent, and in the Water enchanted, nothing like Bloud, nor like any thing else but Water, but that they had faced down the King, that they were Serpents that looked like Rods, and that it was Bloud that seemed Water? That had been both Enchantment, and Lying. And yet in this daily act of the Priest, they doe the very same, by turning the holy words into the manner of a Charme, which produceth nothing now to the Sense; but they face us down, that it hath turned the Bread into a Man; nay more, into a God; and require men to worship it, as if it were our Saviour himself present God and Man, and thereby to commit most grosse Idolatry. For if it bee enough to excuse it of Idolatry, to say it is no more Bread, but God; why should not the same excuse serve the Egyptians, in case they had the faces to say, the Leeks, and Onyons they worshipped, were not very Leeks, and Onyons, but a Divinity under their Species, or likenesse. The words, “This is my Body,” are aequivalent to these, “This signifies, or represents my Body;” and it is an ordinary figure of Speech: but to take it literally, is an abuse; nor though so taken, can it extend any further, than to the Bread which Christ himself with his own hands Consecrated. For hee never said, that of what Bread soever, any Priest whatsoever, should say, “This is my Body,” or, “This is Christs Body,” the same should presently be transubstantiated. Nor did the Church of Rome ever establish this Transubstantiation, till the time of Innocent the third; which was not above 500. years agoe, when the Power of Popes was at the Highest, and the Darknesse of the time grown so great, as men discerned not the Bread that was given them to eat, especially when it was stamped with the figure of Christ upon the Crosse, as if they would have men beleeve it were Transubstantiated, not onely into the Body of Christ, but also into the Wood of his Crosse, and that they did eat both together in the Sacrament.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 2\n\nThe like incantation, in stead of Consecration, is used also in the Sacrament of Baptisme: Where the abuse of Gods name in each severall Person, and in the whole Trinity, with the sign of the Crosse at each name, maketh up the Charm: As first, when they make the Holy water, the Priest saith, “I Conjure thee, thou Creature of Water, in the name of God the Father Almighty, and in the name of Jesus Christ his onely Son our Lord, and in vertue of the Holy Ghost, that thou become Conjured water, to drive away all the Powers of the Enemy, and to eradicate, and supplant the Enemy, &c.” And the same in the Benediction of the Salt to be mingled with it; “That thou become Conjured Salt, that all Phantasmes, and Knavery of the Devills fraud may fly and depart from the place wherein thou art sprinkled; and every unclean Spirit bee Conjured by Him that shall come to judge the quicke and the dead.” The same in the Benediction of the Oyle. “That all the Power of the Enemy, all the Host of the Devill, all Assaults and Phantasmes of Satan, may be driven away by this Creature of Oyle.” And for the Infant that is to be Baptized, he is subject to many Charms; First, at the Church dore the Priest blows thrice in the Childs face, and sayes, “Goe out of him unclean Spirit, and give place to the Holy Ghost the Comforter.” As if all Children, till blown on by the Priest were Daemoniaques: Again, before his entrance into the Church, he saith as before, “I Conjure thee, &c. to goe out, and depart from this Servant of God:” And again the same Exorcisme is repeated once more before he be Baptized. These, and some other Incantations, and Consecrations, in administration of the Sacraments of Baptisme, and the Lords Supper; wherein every thing that serveth to those holy men (except the unhallowed Spittle of the Priest) hath some set form of Exorcisme.\n\nNor are the other rites, as of Marriage, of Extreme Unction, of Visitation of the Sick, of Consecrating Churches, and Church-yards, and the like, exempt from Charms; in as much as there is in them the use of Enchanted Oyle, and Water, with the abuse of the Crosse, and of the holy word of David, “Asperges me Domine Hyssopo,” as things of efficacy to drive away Phantasmes, and Imaginery Spirits.\n\nAnother generall Error, is from the Misinterpretation of the words Eternall Life, Everlasting Death, and the Second Death. For though we read plainly in Holy Scripture, that God created Adam in an estate of Living for Ever, which was conditionall, that is to say, if he disobeyed not his Commandement; which was not essentiall to Humane Nature, but consequent to the vertue of the Tree of Life; whereof hee had liberty to eat, as long as hee had not sinned; and that hee was thrust out of Paradise after he had sinned, lest hee should eate thereof, and live for ever; and that Christs Passion is a Discharge of sin to all that beleeve on him; and by consequence, a restitution of Eternall Life, to all the Faithfull, and to them onely: yet the Doctrine is now, and hath been a long time far otherwise; namely, that every man hath Eternity of Life by Nature, in as much as his Soul is Immortall: So that the flaming Sword at the entrance of Paradise, though it hinder a man from coming to the Tree of Life, hinders him not from the Immortality which God took from him for his Sin; nor makes him to need the sacrificing of Christ, for the recovering of the same; and consequently, not onely the faithfull and righteous, but also the wicked, and the Heathen, shall enjoy Eternall Life, without any Death at all; much lesse a Second, and Everlasting Death. To salve this, it is said, that by Second, and Everlasting Death, is meant a Second, and Everlasting Life, but in Torments; a Figure never used, but in this very Case.\n\nAll which Doctrine is founded onely on some of the obscurer places of the New Testament; which neverthelesse, the whole scope of the Scripture considered, are cleer enough in a different sense, and unnecessary to the Christian Faith. For supposing that when a man dies, there remaineth nothing of him but his carkasse; cannot God that raised inanimated dust and clay into a living creature by his Word, as easily raise a dead carkasse to life again, and continue him alive for Ever, or make him die again, by another Word? The Soule in Scripture, signifieth alwaies, either the Life, or the Living Creature; and the Body and Soule jointly, the Body Alive. In the fift day of the Creation, God said, Let the water produce Reptile Animae Viventis, the creeping thing that hath in it a Living Soule; the English translate it, “that hath Life:” And again, God created Whales, “& omnem animam viventem;” which in the English is, “every living Creature:” And likewise of Man, God made him of the dust of the earth, and breathed in his face the breath of Life, “& factus est Homo in animam viventem,” that is, “and Man was made a Living Creature;” And after Noah came out of the Arke, God saith, hee will no more smite “omnem animam viventem,” that is “every Living Creature;” And Deut. 12.23. “Eate not the Bloud, for the Bloud is the Soule;” that is “the Life.” From which places, if by Soule were meant a Substance Incorporeall, with an existence separated from the Body, it might as well be inferred of any other living Creature, as of Man. But that the Souls of the Faithfull, are not of their own Nature, but by Gods speciall Grace, to remaine in their bodies, from the Resurrection to all Eternity, I have already I think sufficiently proved out of the Scriptures, in the 38. Chapter. And for the places of the New Testament, where it is said that any man shall be cast Body and Soul into Hell fire, it is no more than Body and Life; that is to say, they shall be cast alive into the perpetuall fire of Gehenna.\n\nThis window it is, that gives entrance to the Dark Doctrine, first, of Eternall Torments; and afterwards of Purgatory, and consequently of the walking abroad, especially in places Consecrated, Solitary, or Dark, of the Ghosts of men deceased; and thereby to the pretences of Exorcisme and Conjuration of Phantasmes; as also of Invocation of men dead; and to the Doctrine of Indulgences; that is to say, of exemption for a time, or for ever, from the fire of Purgatory, wherein these Incorporeall Substances are pretended by burning to be cleansed, and made fit for Heaven. For men being generally possessed before the time of our Saviour, by contagion of the Daemonology of the Greeks, of an opinion, that the Souls of men were substances distinct from their Bodies, and therefore that when the Body was dead, the Soule of every man, whether godly, or wicked, must subsist somewhere by vertue of its own nature, without acknowledging therein any supernaturall gift of Gods; the Doctors of the Church doubted a long time, what was the place, which they were to abide in, till they should be re-united to their Bodies in the Resurrection; supposing for a while, they lay under the Altars: but afterward the Church of Rome found it more profitable, to build for them this place of Purgatory; which by some other Churches in this later age, has been demolished.\n\nLet us now consider, what texts of Scripture seem most to confirm these three generall Errors, I have here touched. As for those which Cardinall Bellarmine hath alledged, for the present Kingdome of God administred by the Pope, (than which there are none that make a better show of proof,) I have already answered them; and made it evident, that the Kingdome of God, instituted by Moses, ended in the election of Saul: After which time the Priest of his own authority never deposed any King. That which the High Priest did to Athaliah, was not done in his own right, but in the right of the young King Joash her Son: But Solomon in his own right deposed the High Priest Abiathar, and set up another in his place. The most difficult place to answer, of all those than can be brought, to prove the Kingdome of God by Christ is already in this world, is alledged, not by Bellarmine, nor any other of the Church of Rome; but by Beza; that will have it to begin from the Resurrection of Christ. But whether hee intend thereby, to entitle the Presbytery to the Supreme Power Ecclesiasticall in the Common-wealth of Geneva, (and consequently to every Presbytery in every other Common-wealth,) or to Princes, and other Civill Soveraignes, I doe not know. For the Presbytery hath challenged the power to Excommunicate their owne Kings, and to bee the Supreme Moderators in Religion, in the places where they have that form of Church government, no lesse then the Pope challengeth it universally.\n\nThat The Kingdome Of Christ Began At The Resurrection The words are (Marke 9.1.) “Verily, I say unto you, that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not tast of death, till they have seene the Kingdome of God come with power.” Which words, if taken grammatically, make it certaine, that either some of those men that stood by Christ at that time, are yet alive; or else, that the Kingdome of God must be now in this present world. And then there is another place more difficult: For when the Apostles after our Saviours Resurrection, and immediately before his Ascension, asked our Saviour, saying, (Acts.1.6.) “Wilt thou at this time restore again the Kingdome to Israel,” he answered them, “It is not for you to know the times and the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power; But ye shall receive power by the comming of the Holy Ghost upon you, and yee shall be my (Martyrs) witnesses both in Jerusalem, & in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the Earth:” Which is as much as to say, My Kingdome is not yet come, nor shall you foreknow when it shall come, for it shall come as a theefe in the night; But I will send you the Holy Ghost, and by him you shall have power to beare witnesse to all the world (by your preaching) of my Resurrection, and the workes I have done, and the doctrine I have taught, that they may beleeve in me, and expect eternall life, at my comming againe: How does this agree with the comming of Christs Kingdome at the Resurrection? And that which St. Paul saies (1 Thessal. 1.9, 10.) “That they turned from Idols, to serve the living and true God, and to waite for his Sonne from Heaven:” Where to waite for his Sonne from Heaven, is to wait for his comming to be King in power; which were not necessary, if this Kingdome had beene then present. Againe, if the Kingdome of God began (as Beza on that place (Mark 9.1.) would have it) at the Resurrection; what reason is there for Christians ever since the Resurrection to say in their prayers, “Let thy Kingdome Come”? It is therefore manifest, that the words of St. Mark are not so to be interpreted. There be some of them that stand here (saith our Saviour) that shall not tast of death till they have seen the Kingdome of God come in power. If then this Kingdome were to come at the Resurrection of Christ, why is it said, “some of them” rather than all? For they all lived till after Christ was risen.\n\nBut they that require an exact interpretation of this text, let them interpret first the like words of our Saviour to St. Peter concerning St. John, (chap. 21.22.) “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” upon which was grounded a report that hee should not dye: Neverthelesse the truth of that report was neither confirmed, as well grounded; nor refuted, as ill grounded on those words; but left as a saying not understood. The same difficulty is also in the place of St. Marke. And if it be lawfull to conjecture at their meaning, by that which immediately followes, both here, and in St. Luke, where the same is againe repeated, it is not unprobable, to say they have relation to the Transfiguration, which is described in the verses immediately following; where it is said, that “After six dayes Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John (not all, but some of his Disciples) and leadeth them up into an high mountaine apart by themselves, and was transfigured before them. And his rayment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no Fuller on earth can white them. And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus, &c.” So that they saw Christ in Glory and Majestie, as he is to come; insomuch as “They were sore afraid.” And thus the promise of our Saviour was accomplished by way of Vision: For it was a Vision, as may probably bee inferred out of St. Luke, that reciteth the same story (ch. 9. ve. 28.) and saith, that Peter and they that were with him, were heavy with sleep; But most certainly out of Matth. 17.9. (where the same is again related;) for our Saviour charged them, saying, “Tell no man the Vision untill the Son of man be Risen from the dead.” Howsoever it be, yet there can from thence be taken no argument, to prove that the Kingdome of God taketh beginning till the day of Judgement.\n\nAs for some other texts, to prove the Popes Power over civill Soveraignes (besides those of Bellarmine;) as that the two Swords that Christ and his Apostles had amongst them, were the Spirituall and the Temporall Sword, which they say St. Peter had given him by Christ: And, that of the two Luminaries, the greater signifies the Pope, and the lesser the King; One might as well inferre out of the first verse of the Bible, that by Heaven is meant the Pope, and by Earth the King: Which is not arguing from Scripture, but a wanton insulting over Princes, that came in fashion after the time the Popes were growne so secure of their greatnesse, as to contemne all Christian Kings; and Treading on the necks of Emperours, to mocke both them, and the Scripture, in the words of the 91. Psalm, “Thou shalt Tread upon the Lion and the Adder, the young Lion and the Dragon thou shalt Trample under thy feet.”\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 3\n\nAs for the rites of Consecration, though they depend for the most part upon the discretion and judgement of the governors of the Church, and not upon the Scriptures; yet those governors are obliged to such direction, as the nature of the action it selfe requireth; as that the ceremonies, words, and gestures, be both decent, and significant, or at least conformable to the action. When Moses consecrated the Tabernacle, the Altar, and the Vessels belonging to them (Exod. 40.) he anointed them with the Oyle which God had commanded to bee made for that purpose; and they were holy; There was nothing Exorcised, to drive away Phantasmes. The same Moses (the civill Soveraigne of Israel) when he consecrated Aaron (the High Priest,) and his Sons, did wash them with Water, (not Exorcised water,) put their Garments upon them, and anointed them with Oyle; and they were sanctified, to minister unto the Lord in the Priests office; which was a simple and decent cleansing, and adorning them, before hee presented them to God, to be his servants. When King Solomon, (the civill Soveraigne of Israel) consecrated the Temple hee had built, (2 Kings 8.) he stood before all the Congregation of Israel; and having blessed them, he gave thanks to God, for putting into the heart of his father, to build it; and for giving to himselfe the grace to accomplish the same; and then prayed unto him, first, to accept that House, though it were not sutable to his infinite Greatnesse; and to hear the prayers of his Servants that should pray therein, or (if they were absent) towards it; and lastly, he offered a sacrifice of Peace-offering, and the House was dedicated. Here was no Procession; the King stood still in his first place; no Exorcised Water; no Asperges Me, nor other impertinent application of words spoken upon another occasion; but a decent, and rationall speech, and such as in making to God a present of his new built House, was most conformable to the occasion. We read not that St. John did Exorcise the Water of Jordan; nor Philip the Water of the river wherein he baptized the Eunuch; nor that any Pastor in the time of the Apostles, did take his spittle, and put it to the nose of the person to be Baptized, and say, “In odorem suavitatis,” that is, “for a sweet savour unto the Lord;” wherein neither the Ceremony of Spittle, for the uncleannesse; nor the application of that Scripture for the levity, can by any authority of man be justified.\n\nTo prove that the Soule separated from the Body liveth eternally, not onely the Soules of the Elect, by especiall grace, and restauration of the Eternall Life which Adam lost by Sinne, and our Saviour restored by the Sacrifice of himself, to the Faithfull, but also the Soules of Reprobates, as a property naturally consequent to the essence of mankind, without other grace of God, but that which is universally given to all mankind; there are divers places, which at the first sight seem sufficiently to serve the turn: but such, as when I compare them with that which I have before (Chapter 38.) alledged out of the 14 of Job, seem to mee much more subject to a divers interpretation, than the words of Job.\n\nAnd first there are the words of Solomon (Ecclesiastes 12.7.) “Then shall the Dust return to Dust, as it was, and the Spirit shall return to God that gave it.” Which may bear well enough (if there be no other text directly against it) this interpretation, that God onely knows, (but Man not,) what becomes of a mans spirit, when he expireth; and the same Solomon, in the same Book, (Chap. 3. ver. 20,21.) delivereth in the same sentence in the sense I have given it: His words are, “All goe, (man and beast) to the same place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again; who knoweth that the spirit of Man goeth upward, and the spirit of the Beast goeth downward to the earth?” That is, none knows but God; Nor is it an unusuall phrase to say of things we understand not, “God knows what,” and “God knows where.” That of Gen. 5.24. “Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him;” which is expounded Heb. 13.5. “He was translated, that he should not die; and was not found, because God had translated him. For before his Translation, he had this testimony, that he pleased God,” making as much for the Immortality of the Body, as of the Soule, proveth, that this his translation was peculiar to them that please God; not common to them with the wicked; and depending on Grace, not on Nature. But on the contrary, what interpretation shall we give, besides the literall sense of the words of Solomon (Eccles. 3.19.) “That which befalleth the Sons of Men, befalleth Beasts, even one thing befalleth them; as the one dyeth, so doth the other; yea, they have all one breath (one spirit;) so that a Man hath no praeeminence above a Beast, for all is vanity.” By the literall sense, here is no Naturall Immortality of the Soule; nor yet any repugnancy with the Life Eternall, which the Elect shall enjoy by Grace. And (chap. 4. ver.3.) “Better is he that hath not yet been, than both they;” that is, than they that live, or have lived; which, if the Soule of all them that have lived, were Immortall, were a hard saying; for then to have an Immortall Soule, were worse than to have no Soule at all. And againe,(Chapt. 9.5.) “The living know they shall die, but the dead know not any thing;” that is, Naturally, and before the resurrection of the body.\n\nAnother place which seems to make for a Naturall Immortality of the Soule, is that, where our Saviour saith, that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living: but this is spoken of the promise of God, and of their certitude to rise again, not of a Life then actuall; and in the same sense that God said to Adam, that on the day hee should eate of the forbidden fruit, he should certainly die; from that time forward he was a dead man by sentence; but not by execution, till almost a thousand years after. So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alive by promise, then, when Christ spake; but are not actually till the Resurrection. And the History of Dives and Lazarus, make nothing against this, if wee take it (as it is) for a Parable.\n\nBut there be other places of the New Testament, where an Immortality seemeth to be directly attributed to the wicked. For it is evident, that they shall all rise to Judgement. And it is said besides in many places, that they shall goe into “Everlasting fire, Everlasting torments, Everlasting punishments; and that the worm of conscience never dyeth;” and all this is comprehended in the word Everlasting Death, which is ordinarily interpreted Everlasting Life In Torments: And yet I can find no where that any man shall live in torments Everlastingly. Also, it seemeth hard, to say, that God who is the Father of Mercies, that doth in Heaven and Earth all that hee will; that hath the hearts of all men in his disposing; that worketh in men both to doe, and to will; and without whose free gift a man hath neither inclination to good, nor repentance of evill, should punish mens transgressions without any end of time, and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine, and more. We are therefore to consider, what the meaning is, of Everlasting Fire, and other the like phrases of Scripture.\n\nI have shewed already, that the Kingdome of God by Christ beginneth at the day of Judgment: That in that day, the Faithfull shall rise again, with glorious, and spirituall Bodies, and bee his Subjects in that his Kingdome, which shall be Eternall; That they shall neither marry, nor be given in marriage, nor eate and drink, as they did in their naturall bodies; but live for ever in their individuall persons, without the specificall eternity of generation: And that the Reprobates also shall rise again, to receive punishments for their sins: As also, that those of the Elect, which shall be alive in their earthly bodies at that day, shall have their bodies suddenly changed, and made spirituall, and Immortall. But that the bodies of the Reprobate, who make the Kingdome of Satan, shall also be glorious, or spirituall bodies, or that they shall bee as the Angels of God, neither eating, nor drinking, nor engendring; or that their life shall be Eternall in their individuall persons, as the life of every faithfull man is, or as the life of Adam had been if hee had not sinned, there is no place of Scripture to prove it; save onely these places concerning Eternall Torments; which may otherwise be interpreted.\n\nFrom whence may be inferred, that as the Elect after the Resurrection shall be restored to the estate, wherein Adam was before he had sinned; so the Reprobate shall be in the estate, that Adam, and his posterity were in after the sin committed; saving that God promised a Redeemer to Adam, and such of his seed as should trust in him, and repent; but not to them that should die in their sins, as do the Reprobate.\n\nThese things considered, the texts that mention Eternall Fire, Eternal Torments, or the Word That Never Dieth, contradict not the Doctrine of a Second, and Everlasting Death, in the proper and naturall sense of the word Death. The Fire, or Torments prepared for the wicked in Gehenna, Tophet, or in what place soever, may continue for ever; and there may never want wicked men to be tormented in them; though not every, nor any one Eternally. For the wicked being left in the estate they were in after Adams sin, may at the Resurrection live as they did, marry, and give in marriage, and have grosse and corruptible bodies, as all mankind now have; and consequently may engender perpetually, after the Resurrection, as they did before: For there is no place of Scripture to the contrary. For St. Paul, speaking of the Resurrection (1 Cor. 15.) understandeth it onely of the Resurrection to Life Eternall; and not the Resurrection to Punishment. And of the first, he saith that the Body is “Sown in Corruption, raised in Incorruption; sown in Dishonour, raised in Honour; sown in Weaknesse, raised in Power; sown a Naturall body, raised a Spirituall body:” There is no such thing can be said of the bodies of them that rise to Punishment. The text is Luke 20. Verses 34,35,36. a fertile text. “The Children of this world marry, and are given in marriage; but they that shall be counted worthy to obtaine that world, and the Resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more; for they are equall to the Angells, and are the Children of God, being the Children of the Resurrection:” The Children of this world, that are in the estate which Adam left them in, shall marry, and be given in marriage; that is corrupt, and generate successively; which is an Immortality of the Kind, but not of the Persons of men: They are not worthy to be counted amongst them that shall obtain the next world, and an absolute Resurrection from the dead; but onely a short time, as inmates of that world; and to the end onely to receive condign punishment for their contumacy. The Elect are the onely children of the Resurrection; that is to say the sole heirs of Eternall Life: they only can die no more; it is they that are equall to the Angels, and that are the children of God; and not the Reprobate. To the Reprobate there remaineth after the Resurrection, a Second, and Eternall Death: between which Resurrection, and their Second, and Eternall death, is but a time of Punishment and Torment; and to last by succession of sinners thereunto, as long as the kind of Man by propagation shall endure, which is Eternally.\n\nUpon this Doctrine of the Naturall Eternity of separated Soules, is founded (as I said) the Doctrine of Purgatory. For supposing Eternall Life by Grace onely, there is no Life, but the Life of the Body; and no Immortality till the Resurrection. The texts for Purgatory alledged by Bellarmine out of the Canonicall Scripture of the old Testament, are first, the Fasting of David for Saul and Jonathan, mentioned (2 Kings, 1. 12.); and againe, (2 Sam. 3. 35.) for the death of Abner. This Fasting of David, he saith, was for the obtaining of something for them at Gods hands, after their death; because after he had Fasted to procure the recovery of his owne child, assoone as he know it was dead, he called for meate. Seeing then the Soule hath an existence separate from the Body, and nothing can be obtained by mens Fasting for the Soules that are already either in Heaven, or Hell, it followeth that there be some Soules of dead men, what are neither in Heaven, nor in Hell; and therefore they must bee in some third place, which must be Purgatory. And thus with hard straining, hee has wrested those places to the proofe of a Purgatory; whereas it is manifest, that the ceremonies of Mourning, and Fasting, when they are used for the death of men, whose life was not profitable to the Mourners, they are used for honours sake to their persons; and when tis done for the death of them by whose life the Mourners had benefit, it proceeds from their particular dammage: And so David honoured Saul, and Abner, with his Fasting; and in the death of his owne child, recomforted himselfe, by receiving his ordinary food.\n\nIn the other places, which he alledgeth out of the old Testament, there is not so much as any shew, or colour of proofe. He brings in every text wherein there is the word Anger, or Fire, or Burning, or Purging, or Clensing, in case any of the Fathers have but in a Sermon rhetorically applied it to the Doctrine of Purgatory, already beleeved. The first verse of Psalme, 37. “O Lord rebuke me not in thy wrath, nor chasten me in thy hot displeasure:” What were this to Purgatory, if Augustine had not applied the Wrath to the fire of Hell, and the Displeasure, to that of Purgatory? And what is it to Purgatory, that of Psalme, 66. 12. “Wee went through fire and water, and thou broughtest us to a moist place;” and other the like texts, (with which the Doctors of those times entended to adorne, or extend their Sermons, or Commentaries) haled to their purposes by force of wit?\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 4\n\nBut he alledgeth other places of the New Testament, that are not so easie to be answered: And first that of Matth. 12.32. “Whosoever speaketh a word against the Sonne of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not bee forgiven him neither in this world, nor in the world to come:” Where he will have Purgatory to be the World to come, wherein some sinnes may be forgiven, which in this World were not forgiven: notwithstanding that it is manifest, there are but three Worlds; one from the Creation to the Flood, which was destroyed by Water, and is called in Scripture the Old World; another from the Flood to the day of Judgement, which is the Present World, and shall bee destroyed by Fire; and the third, which shall bee from the day of Judgement forward, everlasting, which is called the World To Come; and in which it is agreed by all, there shall be no Purgatory; And therefore the World to come, and Purgatory, are inconsistent. But what then can bee the meaning of those our Saviours words? I confesse they are very hardly to bee reconciled with all the Doctrines now unanimously received: Nor is it any shame, to confesse the profoundnesse of the Scripture, to bee too great to be sounded by the shortnesse of humane understanding. Neverthelesse, I may propound such things to the consideration of more learned Divines, as the text it selfe suggesteth. And first, seeing to speake against the Holy Ghost, as being the third Person of the Trinity, is to speake against the Church, in which the Holy Ghost resideth; it seemeth the comparison is made, betweene the Easinesse of our Saviour, in bearing with offences done to him while he was on earth, and the Severity of the Pastors after him, against those which should deny their authority, which was from the Holy Ghost: As if he should say, You that deny my Power; nay you that shall crucifie me, shall be pardoned by mee, as often as you turne unto mee by Repentance: But if you deny the Power of them that teach you hereafter, by vertue of the Holy Ghost, they shall be inexorable, and shall not forgive you, but persecute you in this World, and leave you without absolution, (though you turn to me, unlesse you turn also to them,) to the punishments (as much as lies in them) of the World to come: And so the words may be taken as a Prophecy, or Praediction concerning the times, as they have along been in the Christian Church: Or if this be not the meaning, (for I am not peremptory in such difficult places,) perhaps there may be place left after the Resurrection for the Repentance of some sinners: And there is also another place, that seemeth to agree therewith. For considering the words of St. Paul (1 Cor. 15. 29.) “What shall they doe which are Baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why also are they Baptized for the dead?” a man may probably inferre, as some have done, that in St. Pauls time, there was a custome by receiving Baptisme for the dead, (as men that now beleeve, are Sureties and Undertakers for the Faith of Infants, that are not capable of beleeving,) to undertake for the persons of their deceased friends, that they should be ready to obey, and receive our Saviour for their King, at his coming again; and then the forgivenesse of sins in the world to come, has no need of a Purgatory. But in both these interpretations, there is so much of paradox, that I trust not to them; but propound them to those that are throughly versed in the Scripture, to inquire if there be no clearer place that contradicts them. Onely of thus much, I see evident Scripture, to perswade men, that there is neither the word, nor the thing of Purgatory, neither in this, nor any other text; nor any thing that can prove a necessity of a place for the Soule without the Body; neither for the Soule of Lazarus during the four days he was dead; nor for the Soules of them which the Romane Church pretend to be tormented now in Purgatory. For God, that could give a life to a peece of clay, hath the same power to give life again to a dead man, and renew his inanimate, and rotten Carkasse, into a glorious, spirituall, and immortall Body.\n\nAnother place is that of 1 Cor. 3. where it is said that they which built Stubble, Hay, &c. on the true Foundation, their work shall perish; but “they themselves shall be saved; but as through Fire:” This Fire, he will have to be the Fire of Purgatory. The words, as I have said before, are an allusion to those of Zach. 13. 9. where he saith, “I will bring the third part through the Fire, and refine them as Silver is refined, and will try them as Gold is tryed;” Which is spoken of the comming of the Messiah in Power and Glory; that is, at the day of Judgment, and Conflagration of the present world; wherein the Elect shall not be consumed, but be refined; that is, depose their erroneous Doctrines, and Traditions, and have them as it were sindged off; and shall afterwards call upon the name of the true God. In like manner, the Apostle saith of them, that holding this Foundation Jesus Is The Christ, shall build thereon some other Doctrines that be erroneous, that they shall not be consumed in that fire which reneweth the world, but shall passe through it to Salvation; but so, as to see, and relinquish their former Errours. The Builders, are the Pastors; the Foundation, that Jesus Is The Christ; the Stubble and Hay, False Consequences Drawn From It Through Ignorance, Or Frailty; the Gold, Silver, and pretious Stones, are their True Doctrines; and their Refining or Purging, the Relinquishing Of Their Errors. In all which there is no colour at all for the burning of Incorporeall, that is to say, Impatible Souls.\n\nA third place is that of 1 Cor. 15. before mentioned, concerning Baptisme for the Dead: out of which he concludeth, first, that Prayers for the Dead are not unprofitable; and out of that, that there is a Fire of Purgatory: But neither of them rightly. For of many interpretations of the word Baptisme, he approveth this in the first place, that by Baptisme is meant (metaphorically) a Baptisme of Penance; and that men are in this sense Baptized, when they Fast, and Pray, and give Almes: And so Baptisme for the Dead, and Prayer of the Dead, is the same thing. But this is a Metaphor, of which there is no example, neither in the Scripture, nor in any other use of language; and which is also discordant to the harmony, and scope of the Scripture. The word Baptisme is used (Mar. 10. 38. & Luk. 12. 59.) for being Dipped in ones own bloud, as Christ was upon the Cross, and as most of the Apostles were, for giving testimony of him. But it is hard to say, that Prayer, Fasting, and Almes, have any similitude with Dipping. The same is used also Mat. 3. 11. (which seemeth to make somewhat for Purgatory) for a Purging with Fire. But it is evident the Fire and Purging here mentioned, is the same whereof the Prophet Zachary speaketh (chap. 13. v. 9.) “I will bring the third part through the Fire, and will Refine them, &c.” And St. Peter after him (1 Epist. 1. 7.) “That the triall of your Faith, which is much more precious than of Gold that perisheth, though it be tryed with fire, might be found unto praise, and honour, and glory at the Appearing of Jesus Christ;” And St. Paul (1 Cor. 3. 13.) The Fire shall trie every mans work of what sort it is.” But St. Peter, and St. Paul speak of the Fire that shall be at the Second Appearing of Christ; and the Prophet Zachary of the Day of Judgment: And therefore this place of S. Mat. may be interpreted of the same; and then there will be no necessity of the Fire of Purgatory.\n\nAnother interpretation of Baptisme for the Dead, is that which I have before mentioned, which he preferreth to the second place of probability; And thence also he inferreth the utility of Prayer for the Dead. For if after the Resurrection, such as have not heard of Christ, or not beleeved in him, may be received into Christs Kingdome; it is not in vain, after their death, that their friends should pray for them, till they should be risen. But granting that God, at the prayers of the faithfull, may convert unto him some of those that have not heard Christ preached, and consequently cannot have rejected Christ, and that the charity of men in that point, cannot be blamed; yet this concludeth nothing for Purgatory, because to rise from Death to Life, is one thing; to rise from Purgatory to Life is another; and being a rising from Life to Life, from a Life in torments to a Life in joy.\n\nA fourth place is that of Mat. 5. 25. “Agree with thine Adversary quickly, whilest thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the Adversary deliver thee to the Officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou has paid the uttermost farthing.” In which Allegory, the Offender is the Sinner; both the Adversary and the Judge is God; the Way is this Life; the Prison is the Grave; the Officer, Death; from which, the sinner shall not rise again to life eternall, but to a second Death, till he have paid the utmost farthing, or Christ pay it for him by his Passion, which is a full Ransome for all manner of sin, as well lesser sins, as greater crimes; both being made by the passion of Christ equally veniall.\n\nThe fift place, is that of Matth. 5. 22. “Whosoever is angry with his Brother without a cause, shall be guilty in Judgment. And whosoever shall say to his Brother, RACHA, shall be guilty in the Councel. But whosoever shall say, Thou Foole, shall be guilty to hell fire.” From which words he inferreth three sorts of Sins, and three sorts of Punishments; and that none of those sins, but the last, shall be punished with hell fire; and consequently, that after this life, there is punishment of lesser sins in Purgatory. Of which inference, there is no colour in any interpretation that hath yet been given to them: Shall there be a distinction after this life of Courts of Justice, as there was amongst the Jews in our Saviours time, to hear, and determine divers sorts of Crimes; as the Judges, and the Councell? Shall not all Judicature appertain to Christ, and his Apostles? To understand therefore this text, we are not to consider it solitarily, but jointly with the words precedent, and subsequent. Our Saviour in this Chapter interpreteth the Law of Moses; which the Jews thought was then fulfilled, when they had not transgressed the Grammaticall sense thereof, howsoever they had transgressed against the sentence, or meaning of the Legislator. Therefore whereas they thought the Sixth Commandement was not broken, but by Killing a man; nor the Seventh, but when a man lay with a woman, not his wife; our Saviour tells them, the inward Anger of a man against his brother, if it be without just cause, is Homicide: You have heard (saith hee) the Law of Moses, “Thou shalt not Kill,” and that “Whosoever shall Kill, shall be condemned before the Judges,” or before the Session of the Seventy: But I say unto you, to be Angry with ones Brother without cause; or to say unto him Racha, or Foole, is Homicide, and shall be punished at the day of Judgment, and Session of Christ, and his Apostles, with Hell fire: so that those words were not used to distinguish between divers Crimes, and divers Courts of Justice, and divers Punishments; but to taxe the distinction between sin, and sin, which the Jews drew not from the difference of the Will in Obeying God, but from the difference of their Temporall Courts of Justice; and to shew them that he that had the Will to hurt his Brother, though the effect appear but in Reviling, or not at all, shall be cast into hell fire, by the Judges, and by the Session, which shall be the same, not different Courts at the day of Judgment. This Considered, what can be drawn from this text, to maintain Purgatory, I cannot imagine.\n\nThe sixth place is Luke 16. 9. “Make yee friends of the unrighteous Mammon, that when yee faile, they may receive you into Everlasting Tabernacles.” This he alledges to prove Invocation of Saints departed. But the sense is plain, That we should make friends with our Riches, of the Poore, and thereby obtain their Prayers whilest they live. “He that giveth to the Poore, lendeth to the Lord. “The seventh is Luke 23. 42. “Lord remember me when thou commest into thy Kingdome:” Therefore, saith hee, there is Remission of sins after this life. But the consequence is not good. Our Saviour then forgave him; and at his comming againe in Glory, will remember to raise him againe to Life Eternall.\n\nThe Eight is Acts 2. 24. where St. Peter saith of Christ, “that God had raised him up, and loosed the Paines of Death, because it was not possible he should be holden of it;” Which hee interprets to bee a descent of Christ into Purgatory, to loose some Soules there from their torments; whereas it is manifest, that it was Christ that was loosed; it was hee that could not bee holden of Death, or the Grave; and not the Souls in Purgatory. But if that which Beza sayes in his notes on this place be well observed, there is none that will not see, that in stead of Paynes, it should be Bands; and then there is no further cause to seek for Purgatory in this Text.\n\nCHAPTER XLV. OF DAEMONOLOGY, AND OTHER RELIQUES OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 1\n\nOF DAEMONOLOGY, AND OTHER RELIQUES OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES\n\nThe impression made on the organs of Sight, by lucide Bodies, either in one direct line, or in many lines, reflected from Opaque, or refracted in the passage through Diaphanous Bodies, produceth in living Creatures, in whom God hath placed such Organs, an Imagination of the Object, from whence the Impression proceedeth; which Imagination is called Sight; and seemeth not to bee a meer Imagination, but the Body it selfe without us; in the same manner, as when a man violently presseth his eye, there appears to him a light without, and before him, which no man perceiveth but himselfe; because there is indeed no such thing without him, but onely a motion in the interiour organs, pressing by resistance outward, that makes him think so. And the motion made by this pressure, continuing after the object which caused it is removed, is that we call Imagination, and Memory, and (in sleep, and sometimes in great distemper of the organs by Sicknesse, or Violence) a Dream: of which things I have already spoken briefly, in the second and third Chapters.\n\nThis nature of Sight having never been discovered by the ancient pretenders to Naturall Knowledge; much lesse by those that consider not things so remote (as that Knowledge is) from their present use; it was hard for men to conceive of those Images in the Fancy, and in the Sense, otherwise, than of things really without us: Which some (because they vanish away, they know not whither, nor how,) will have to be absolutely Incorporeall, that is to say Immateriall, of Formes without Matter; Colour and Figure, without any coloured or figured Body; and that they can put on Aiery bodies (as a garment) to make them Visible when they will to our bodily Eyes; and others say, are Bodies, and living Creatures, but made of Air, or other more subtile and aethereall Matter, which is, then, when they will be seen, condensed. But Both of them agree on one generall appellation of them, DAEMONS. As if the Dead of whom they Dreamed, were not Inhabitants of their own Brain, but of the Air, or of Heaven, or Hell; not Phantasmes, but Ghosts; with just as much reason, as if one should say, he saw his own Ghost in a Looking-Glasse, or the Ghosts of the Stars in a River; or call the ordinary apparition of the Sun, of the quantity of about a foot, the Daemon, or Ghost of that great Sun that enlighteneth the whole visible world: And by that means have feared them, as things of an unknown, that is, of an unlimited power to doe them good, or harme; and consequently, given occasion to the Governours of the Heathen Common-wealths to regulate this their fear, by establishing that DAEMONOLOGY (in which the Poets, as Principal Priests of the Heathen Religion, were specially employed, or reverenced) to the Publique Peace, and to the Obedience of Subjects necessary thereunto; and to make some of them Good Daemons, and others Evill; the one as a Spurre to the Observance, the other, as Reines to withhold them from Violation of the Laws.\n\nWhat kind of things they were, to whom they attributed the name of Daemons, appeareth partly in the Genealogie of their Gods, written by Hesiod, one of the most ancient Poets of the Graecians; and partly in other Histories; of which I have observed some few before, in the 12. Chapter of this discourse.\n\nThe Graecians, by their Colonies and Conquests, communicated their Language and Writings into Asia, Egypt, and Italy; and therein, by necessary consequence their Daemonology, or (as St. Paul calles it) “their Doctrines of Devils;” And by that meanes, the contagion was derived also to the Jewes, both of Judaea, and Alexandria, and other parts, whereinto they were dispersed. But the name of Daemon they did not (as the Graecians) attribute to Spirits both Good, and Evill; but to the Evill onely: And to the Good Daemons they gave the name of the Spirit of God; and esteemed those into whose bodies they entred to be Prophets. In summe, all singularity if Good, they attributed to the Spirit of God; and if Evill, to some Daemon, but a kakodaimen, an Evill Daemon, that is, a Devill. And therefore, they called Daemoniaques, that is, possessed by the Devill, such as we call Madmen or Lunatiques; or such as had the Falling Sicknesse; or that spoke any thing, which they for want of understanding, thought absurd: As also of an Unclean person in a notorious degree, they used to say he had an Unclean Spirit; of a Dumbe man, that he had a Dumbe Devill; and of John Baptist (Math. 11. 18.) for the singularity of his fasting, that he had a Devill; and of our Saviour, because he said, hee that keepeth his sayings should not see Death In Aeternum, (John 8. 52.) “Now we know thou hast a Devill; Abraham is dead, and the Prophets are dead:” And again, because he said (John 7. 20.) “They went about to kill him,” the people answered, “Thou hast a Devill, who goeth about to kill thee?” Whereby it is manifest, that the Jewes had the same opinions concerning Phantasmes, namely, that they were not Phantasmes that is, Idols of the braine, but things reall, and independent on the Fancy.\n\nWhich doctrine if it be not true, why (may some say) did not our Saviour contradict it, and teach the Contrary? nay why does he use on diverse occasions, such forms of speech as seem to confirm it? To this I answer, that first, where Christ saith, “A Spirit hath not flesh and bone,” though hee shew that there be Spirits, yet he denies not that they are Bodies: And where St. Paul sais, “We shall rise Spirituall Bodies,” he acknowledgeth the nature of Spirits, but that they are Bodily Spirits; which is not difficult to understand. For Air and many other things are Bodies, though not Flesh and Bone, or any other grosse body, to bee discerned by the eye. But when our Saviour speaketh to the Devill, and commandeth him to go out of a man, if by the Devill, be meant a Disease, as Phrenesy, or Lunacy, or a corporeal Spirit, is not the speech improper? can Diseases heare? or can there be a corporeall Spirit in a Body of Flesh and Bone, full already of vitall and animall Spirits? Are there not therefore Spirits, that neither have Bodies, nor are meer Imaginations? To the first I answer, that the addressing of our Saviours command to the Madnesse, or Lunacy he cureth, is no more improper, then was his rebuking of the Fever, or of the Wind, and Sea; for neither do these hear: Or than was the command of God, to the Light, to the Firmament, to the Sunne, and Starres, when he commanded them to bee; for they could not heare before they had a beeing. But those speeches are not improper, because they signifie the power of Gods Word: no more therefore is it improper, to command Madnesse, or Lunacy (under the appellation of Devils, by which they were then commonly understood,) to depart out of a mans body. To the second, concerning their being Incorporeall, I have not yet observed any place of Scripture, from whence it can be gathered, that any man was ever possessed with any other Corporeal Spirit, but that of his owne, by which his body is naturally moved.\n\nOur Saviour, immediately after the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a Dove, is said by St. Matthew (Chapt. 4. 1.) to have been “led up by the Spirit into the Wildernesse;” and the same is recited (Luke 4. 1.) in these words, “Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the Wildernesse;” Whereby it is evident, that by Spirit there, is meant the Holy Ghost. This cannot be interpreted for a Possession: For Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are but one and the same substance; which is no possession of one substance, or body, by another. And whereas in the verses following, he is said “to have been taken up by the Devill into the Holy City, and set upon a pinnacle of the Temple,” shall we conclude thence that hee was possessed of the Devill, or carryed thither by violence? And again, “carryed thence by the Devill into an exceeding high mountain, who shewed him them thence all the Kingdomes of the world:” herein, wee are not to beleeve he was either possessed, or forced by the Devill; nor that any Mountaine is high enough, (according to the literall sense,) to shew him one whole Hemisphere. What then can be the meaning of this place, other than that he went of himself into the Wildernesse; and that this carrying of him up and down, from the Wildernesse to the City, and from thence into a Mountain, was a Vision? Conformable whereunto, is also the phrase of St. Luke, that hee was led into the Wildernesse, not By, but In the Spirit: whereas concerning His being Taken up into the Mountaine, and unto the Pinnacle of the Temple, hee speaketh as St. Matthew doth. Which suiteth with the nature of a Vision.\n\nAgain, where St. Luke sayes of Judas Iscariot, that “Satan entred into him, and thereupon that he went and communed with the Chief Priests, and Captaines, how he might betray Christ unto them:” it may be answered, that by the Entring of Satan (that is the Enemy) into him, is meant, the hostile and traiterous intention of selling his Lord and Master. For as by the Holy Ghost, is frequently in Scripture understood, the Graces and good Inclinations given by the Holy Ghost; so by the Entring of Satan, may bee understood the wicked Cogitations, and Designes of the Adversaries of Christ, and his Disciples. For as it is hard to say, that the Devill was entred into Judas, before he had any such hostile designe; so it is impertinent to say, he was first Christs Enemy in his heart, and that the Devill entred into him afterwards. Therefore the Entring of Satan, and his Wicked Purpose, was one and the same thing.\n\nBut if there be no Immateriall Spirit, nor any Possession of mens bodies by any Spirit Corporeall, it may again be asked, why our Saviour and his Apostles did not teach the People so; and in such cleer words, as they might no more doubt thereof. But such questions as these, are more curious, than necessary for a Christian mans Salvation. Men may as well aske, why Christ that could have given to all men Faith, Piety, and all manner of morall Vertues, gave it to some onely, and not to all: and why he left the search of naturall Causes, and Sciences, to the naturall Reason and Industry of men, and did not reveal it to all, or any man supernaturally; and many other such questions: Of which neverthelesse there may be alledged probable and pious reasons. For as God, when he brought the Israelites into the Land of Promise, did not secure them therein, by subduing all the Nations round about them; but left many of them, as thornes in their sides, to awaken from time to time their Piety and Industry: so our Saviour, in conducting us toward his heavenly Kingdome, did not destroy all the difficulties of Naturall Questions; but left them to exercise our Industry, and Reason; the Scope of his preaching, being onely to shew us this plain and direct way to Salvation, namely, the beleef of this Article, “that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himselfe for our Sins, and at his comming again, gloriously to reign over his Elect, and to save them from their Enemies eternally:” To which, the opinion of Possession by Spirits, or Phantasmes, are no impediment in the way; though it be to some an occasion of going out of the way, and to follow their own Inventions. If wee require of the Scripture an account of all questions, which may be raised to trouble us in the performance of Gods commands; we may as well complaine of Moses for not having set downe the time of the creation of such Spirits, as well as of the Creation of the Earth, and Sea, and of Men, and Beasts. To conclude, I find in Scripture that there be Angels, and Spirits, good and evill; but not that they are Incorporeall, as are the Apparitions men see in the Dark, or in a Dream, or Vision; which the Latines call Spectra, and took for Daemons. And I find that there are Spirits Corporeal, (though subtile and Invisible;) but not that any mans body was possessed, or inhabited by them; And that the Bodies of the Saints shall be such, namely, Spirituall Bodies, as St. Paul calls them.\n\nNeverthelesse, the contrary Doctrine, namely, that there be Incorporeall Spirits, hath hitherto so prevailed in the Church, that the use of Exorcisme, (that is to say, of ejection of Devills by Conjuration) is thereupon built; and (though rarely and faintly practised) is not yet totally given over. That there were many Daemoniaques in the Primitive Church, and few Mad-men, and other such singular diseases; whereas in these times we hear of, and see many Mad-men, and few Daemoniaques, proceeds not from the change of Nature; but of Names. But how it comes to passe, that whereas heretofore the Apostles, and after them for a time, the Pastors of the Church, did cure those singular Diseases, which now they are not seen to doe; as likewise, why it is not in the power of every true Beleever now, to doe all that the Faithfull did then, that is to say, as we read (Mark 16. 17.) “In Christs name to cast out Devills, to speak with new Tongues, to take up Serpents, to drink deadly Poison without harm taking, and to cure the Sick by the laying on of their hands,” and all this without other words, but “in the Name of Jesus,” is another question. And it is probable, that those extraordinary gifts were given to the Church, for no longer a time, than men trusted wholly to Christ, and looked for their felicity onely in his Kingdome to come; and consequently, that when they sought Authority, and Riches, and trusted to their own Subtilty for a Kingdome of this world, these supernaturall gifts of God were again taken from them.\n\nAnother relique of Gentilisme, is the Worship of Images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the generall Religion of the Gentiles, to worship for Gods, those Apparences that remain in the Brain from the impression of externall Bodies upon the organs of their Senses, which are commonly called Ideas, Idols, Phantasmes, Conceits, as being Representations of those externall Bodies, which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a Dream: And this is the reason why St. Paul says, “Wee know that an Idol is Nothing:” Not that he thought that an Image of Metall, Stone, or Wood, was nothing; but that the thing which they honored, or feared in the Image, and held for a God, was a meer Figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the Brain. And the worship of these with Divine Honour, is that which is in the Scripture called Idolatry, and Rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and his Lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the High Priest; if the people had been permitted to worship, and pray to Images, (which are Representations of their own Fancies,) they had had no farther dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on his prime Ministers, Moses, and the High Priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Common-wealth, and their own destruction for want of Union. And therefore the first Law of God was, “They should not take for Gods, ALIENOS DEOS, that is, the Gods of other nations, but that onely true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions, for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies.” And the second was, that “they should not make to themselves any Image to Worship, of their own Invention.” For it is the same deposing of a King, to submit to another King, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation, or by our selves.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 2\n\nThe places of Scripture pretended to countenance the setting up of Images, to worship them; or to set them up at all in the places where God is worshipped, are First, two Examples; one of the Cherubins over the Ark of God; the other of the Brazen Serpent: Secondly, some texts whereby we are commanded to worship certain Creatures for their relation to God; as to worship his Footstool: And lastly, some other texts, by which is authorized, a religious honoring of Holy things. But before I examine the force of those places, to prove that which is pretended, I must first explain what is to be understood by Worshipping, and what by Images, and Idols.\n\nI have already shewn in the 20 Chapter of this Discourse, that to Honor, is to value highly the Power of any person: and that such value is measured, by our comparing him with others. But because there is nothing to be compared with God in Power; we Honor him not but Dishonour him by any Value lesse than Infinite. And thus Honor is properly of its own nature, secret, and internall in the heart. But the inward thoughts of men, which appeare outwardly in their words and actions, are the signes of our Honoring, and these goe by the name of WORSHIP, in Latine, CULTUS. Therefore, to Pray to, to Swear by, to Obey, to bee Diligent, and Officious in Serving: in summe, all words and actions that betoken Fear to Offend, or Desire to Please, is Worship, whether those words and actions be sincere, or feigned: and because they appear as signes of Honoring, are ordinarily also called Honor.\n\nThe Worship we exhibite to those we esteem to be but men, as to Kings, and men in Authority, is Civill Worship: But the worship we exhibite to that which we think to bee God, whatsoever the words, ceremonies, gestures, or other actions be, is Divine Worship. To fall prostrate before a King, in him that thinks him but a Man, is but Civill Worship: And he that but putteth off his hat in the Church, for this cause, that he thinketh it the House of God, worshippeth with Divine Worship. They that seek the distinction of Divine and Civill Worship, not in the intention of the Worshipper, but in the Words douleia, and latreia, deceive themselves. For whereas there be two sorts of Servants; that sort, which is of those that are absolutely in the power of their Masters, as Slaves taken in war, and their Issue, whose bodies are not in their own power, (their lives depending on the Will of their Masters, in such manner as to forfeit them upon the least disobedience,) and that are bought and sold as Beasts, were called Douloi, that is properly, Slaves, and their Service, Douleia: The other, which is of those that serve (for hire, or in hope of benefit from their Masters) voluntarily; are called Thetes; that is, Domestique Servants; to whose service the Masters have no further right, than is contained in the Covenants made betwixt them. These two kinds of Servants have thus much common to them both, that their labour is appointed them by another, whether, as a Slave, or a voluntary Servant: And the word Latris, is the general name of both, signifying him that worketh for another, whether, as a Slave, or a voluntary Servant: So that Latreia signifieth generally all Service; but Douleia the service of Bondmen onely, and the condition of Slavery: And both are used in Scripture (to signifie our Service of God) promiscuously. Douleia, because we are Gods Slaves; Latreia, because wee Serve him: and in all kinds of Service is contained, not onely Obedience, but also Worship, that is, such actions, gestures, and words, as signifie Honor.\n\nAn IMAGE (in the most strict signification of the word) is the Resemblance of some thing visible: In which sense the Phantasticall Formes, Apparitions, or Seemings of Visible Bodies to the Sight, are onely Images; such as are the Shew of a man, or other thing in the Water, by Reflexion, or Refraction; or of the Sun, or Stars by Direct Vision in the Air; which are nothing reall in the things seen, nor in the place where thy seem to bee; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object; but changeable, by the variation of the organs of Sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our Imagination, and in our Dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend onely upon the Fancy. And these are the Images which are originally and most properly called Ideas, and IDOLS, and derived from the language of the Graecians, with whom the word Eido signifieth to See. They are also called PHANTASMES, which is in the same language, Apparitions. And from these Images it is that one of the faculties of mans Nature, is called the Imagination. And from hence it is manifest, that there neither is, nor can bee any Image made of a thing Invisible.\n\nIt is also evident, that there can be no Image of a thing Infinite: for all the Images, and Phantasmes that are made by the Impression of things visible, are figured: but Figure is a quantity every way determined: And therefore there can bee no Image of God: nor of the Soule of Man; nor of Spirits, but onely of Bodies Visible, that is, Bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.\n\nAnd whereas a man can fancy Shapes he never saw; making up a Figure out of the parts of divers creatures; as the Poets make their Centaures, Chimaeras, and other Monsters never seen: So can he also give Matter to those Shapes, and make them in Wood, Clay or Metall. And these are also called Images, not for the resemblance of any corporeall thing, but for the resemblance of some Phantasticall Inhabitants of the Brain of the Maker. But in these Idols, as they are originally in the Brain, and as they are painted, carved, moulded, or moulten in matter, there is a similitude of the one to the other, for which the Materiall Body made by Art, may be said to be the Image of the Phantasticall Idoll made by Nature.\n\nBut in a larger use of the word Image, is contained also, any Representation of one thing by another. So an earthly Soveraign may be called the Image of God: And an inferiour Magistrate the Image of an earthly Soveraign. And many times in the Idolatry of the Gentiles there was little regard to the similitude of their Materiall Idoll to the Idol in their fancy, and yet it was called the Image of it. For a Stone unhewn has been set up for Neptune, and divers other shapes far different from the shapes they conceived of their Gods. And at this day we see many Images of the Virgin Mary, and other Saints, unlike one another, and without correspondence to any one mans Fancy; and yet serve well enough for the purpose they were erected for; which was no more but by the Names onely, to represent the Persons mentioned in the History; to which every man applyeth a Mentall Image of his owne making, or none at all. And thus an Image in the largest sense, is either the Resemblance, or the Representation of some thing Visible; or both together, as it happeneth for the most part.\n\nBut the name of Idoll is extended yet further in Scripture, to signifie also the Sunne, or a Starre, or any other Creature, visible or invisible, when they are worshipped for Gods.\n\nHaving shewn what is Worship, and what an Image; I will now put them together, and examine what that IDOLATRY is, which is forbidden in the Second Commandement, and other places of the Scripture.\n\nTo worship an Image, is voluntarily to doe those externall acts, which are signes of honoring either the matter of the Image, which is Wood, Stone, or Metall, or some other visible creature; or the Phantasme of the brain, for the resemblance, or representation whereof, the matter was formed and figured; or both together, as one animate Body, composed of the Matter and the Phantasme, as of a Body and Soule.\n\nTo be uncovered, before a man of Power and Authority, or before the Throne of a Prince, or in such other places as hee ordaineth to that purpose in his absence, is to Worship that man, or Prince with Civill Worship; as being a signe, not of honoring the stoole, or place, but the Person; and is not Idolatry. But if hee that doth it, should suppose the Soule of the Prince to be in the Stool, or should present a Petition to the Stool, it were Divine Worship, and Idolatry.\n\nTo pray to a King for such things, as hee is able to doe for us, though we prostrate our selves before him, is but Civill Worship; because we acknowledge no other power in him, but humane: But voluntarily to pray unto him for fair weather, or for any thing which God onely can doe for us, is Divine Worship, and Idolatry. On the other side, if a King compell a man to it by the terrour of Death, or other great corporall punishment, it is not Idolatry: For the Worship which the Soveraign commandeth to bee done unto himself by the terrour of his Laws, is not a sign that he that obeyeth him, does inwardly honour him as a God, but that he is desirous to save himselfe from death, or from a miserable life; and that which is not a sign of internall honor, is no Worship; and therefore no Idolatry. Neither can it bee said, that hee that does it, scandalizeth, or layeth any stumbling block before his Brother; because how wise, or learned soever he be that worshippeth in that manner, another man cannot from thence argue, that he approveth it; but that he doth it for fear; and that it is not his act, but the act of the Soveraign.\n\nTo worship God, in some peculiar Place, or turning a mans face towards an Image, or determinate Place, is not to worship, or honor the Place, or Image; but to acknowledge it Holy, that is to say, to acknowledge the Image, or the Place to be set apart from common use: for that is the meaning of the word Holy; which implies no new quality in the Place, or Image; but onely a new Relation by Appropriation to God; and therefore is not Idolatry; no more than it was Idolatry to worship God before the Brazen Serpent; or for the Jews when they were out of their owne countrey, to turn their faces (when they prayed) toward the Temple of Jerusalem; or for Moses to put off his Shoes when he was before the Flaming Bush, the ground appertaining to Mount Sinai; which place God had chosen to appear in, and to give his Laws to the People of Israel, and was therefore Holy ground, not by inhaerent sanctity, but by separation to Gods use; or for Christians to worship in the Churches, which are once solemnly dedicated to God for that purpose, by the Authority of the King, or other true Representant of the Church. But to worship God, is inanimating, or inhibiting, such Image, or place; that is to say, an infinite substance in a finite place, is Idolatry: for such finite Gods, are but Idols of the brain, nothing reall; and are commonly called in the Scripture by the names of Vanity, and Lyes, and Nothing. Also to worship God, not as inanimating, or present in the place, or Image; but to the end to be put in mind of him, or of some works of his, in case the Place, or Image be dedicated, or set up by private authority, and not by the authority of them that are our Soveraign Pastors, is Idolatry. For the Commandement is, “Thou shalt not make to thy selfe any graven image.” God commanded Moses to set up the Brazen Serpent; hee did not make it to himselfe; it was not therefore against the Commandement. But the making of the Golden Calfe by Aaron, and the People, as being done without authority from God, was Idolatry; not onely because they held it for God, but also because they made it for a Religious use, without warrant either from God their Soveraign, or from Moses, that was his Lieutenant.\n\nThe Gentiles worshipped for Gods, Jupiter, and others; that living, were men perhaps that had done great and glorious Acts; and for the Children of God, divers men and women, supposing them gotten between an Immortall Deity, and a mortall man. This was Idolatry, because they made them so to themselves, having no authority from God, neither in his eternall Law of Reason, nor in his positive and revealed Will. But though our Saviour was a man, whom wee also beleeve to bee God Immortall, and the Son of God; yet this is no Idolatry; because wee build not that beleef upon our own fancy, or judgment, but upon the Word of God revealed in the Scriptures. And for the adoration of the Eucharist, if the words of Christ, “This is my Body,” signifie, “that he himselfe, and the seeming bread in his hand; and not onely so, but that all the seeming morsells of bread that have ever since been, and any time hereafter shall bee consecrated by Priests, bee so many Christs bodies, and yet all of them but one body,” then is that no Idolatry, because it is authorized by our Saviour: but if that text doe not signifie that, (for there is no other that can be alledged for it,) then, because it is a worship of humane institution, it is Idolatry. For it is not enough to say, God can transubstantiate the Bread into Christs Body: For the Gentiles also held God to be Omnipotent; and might upon that ground no lesse excuse their Idolatry, by pretending, as well as others, as transubstantiation of their Wood, and Stone into God Almighty.\n\nWhereas there be, that pretend Divine Inspiration, to be a supernaturall entring of the Holy Ghost into a man, and not an acquisition of Gods grace, by doctrine, and study; I think they are in a very dangerous Dilemma. For if they worship not the men whom they beleeve to be so inspired, they fall into Impiety; as not adoring Gods supernaturall Presence. And again, if they worship them, they commit Idolatry; for the Apostles would never permit themselves to be so worshipped. Therefore the safest way is to beleeve, that by the Descending of the Dove upon the Apostles; and by Christs Breathing on them, when hee gave them the Holy Ghost; and by the giving of it by Imposition of Hands, are understood the signes which God hath been pleased to use, or ordain to be used, of his promise to assist those persons in their study to Preach his Kingdome, and in their Conversation, that it might not be Scandalous, but Edifying to others.\n\nBesides the Idolatrous Worship of Images, there is also a Scandalous Worship of them; which is also a sin; but not Idolatry. For Idolatry is to worship by signes of an internall, and reall honour: but Scandalous Worship, is but Seeming Worship; and may sometimes bee joined with an inward, and hearty detestation, both of the Image, and of the Phantasticall Daemon, or Idol, to which it is dedicated; and proceed onely from the fear of death, or other grievous punishment; and is neverthelesse a sin in them that so worship, in case they be men whose actions are looked at by others, as lights to guide them by; because following their ways, they cannot but stumble, and fall in the way of Religion: Whereas the example of those we regard not, works not on us at all, but leaves us to our own diligence and caution; and consequently are no causes of our falling.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 3\n\nIf therefore a Pastor lawfully called to teach and direct others, or any other, of whose knowledge there is a great opinion, doe externall honor to an Idol for fear; unlesse he make his feare, and unwillingnesse to it, as evident as the worship; he Scandalizeth his Brother, by seeming to approve Idolatry. For his Brother, arguing from the action of his teacher, or of him whose knowledge he esteemeth great, concludes it to bee lawfull in it selfe. And this Scandall, is Sin, and a Scandall given. But if one being no Pastor, nor of eminent reputation for knowledge in Christian Doctrine, doe the same, and another follow him; this is no Scandall given; for he had no cause to follow such example: but is a pretence of Scandall which hee taketh of himselfe for an excuse before men: For an unlearned man, that is in the power of an idolatrous King, or State, if commanded on pain of death to worship before an Idoll, hee detesteth the Idoll in his heart, hee doth well; though if he had the fortitude to suffer death, rather than worship it, he should doe better. But if a Pastor, who as Christs Messenger, has undertaken to teach Christs Doctrine to all nations, should doe the same, it were not onely a sinfull Scandall, in respect of other Christian mens consciences, but a perfidious forsaking of his charge.\n\nThe summe of that which I have said hitherto, concerning the Worship of Images, is that, that he that worshippeth in an Image, or any Creature, either the Matter thereof, or any Fancy of his own, which he thinketh to dwell in it; or both together; or beleeveth that such things hear his Prayers, or see his Devotions, without Ears, or Eyes, committeth Idolatry: and he that counterfeiteth such Worship for fear of punishment, if he bee a man whose example hath power amongst his Brethren, committeth a sin: But he that worshippeth the Creator of the world before such an Image, or in such a place as he hath not made, or chosen of himselfe, but taken from the commandement of Gods Word, as the Jewes did in worshipping God before the Cherubins, and before the Brazen Serpent for a time, and in, or towards the Temple of Jerusalem, which was also but for a time, committeth not Idolatry.\n\nNow for the Worship of Saints, and Images, and Reliques, and other things at this day practised in the Church of Rome, I say they are not allowed by the Word of God, not brought into the Church of Rome, from the Doctrine there taught; but partly left in it at the first conversion of the Gentiles; and afterwards countenanced, and confirmed, and augmented by the Bishops of Rome.\n\nAs for the proofs alledged out of Scripture, namely, those examples of Images appointed by God to bee set up; They were not set up for the people, or any man to worship; but that they should worship God himselfe before them: as before the Cherubins over the Ark, and the Brazen Serpent. For we read not, that the Priest, or any other did worship the Cherubins; but contrarily wee read (2 Kings 18.4.) that Hezekiah brake in pieces the Brazen Serpent which Moses had set up, because the People burnt incense to it. Besides, those examples are not put for our Imitation, that we also should set up Images, under pretence of worshipping God before them; because the words of the second Commandement, “Thou shalt not make to thy selfe any graven Image, &c.” distinguish between the Images that God commanded to be set up, and those which wee set up to our selves. And therefore from the Cherubins, or Brazen Serpent, to the Images of mans devising; and from the Worship commanded by God, to the Will-Worship of men, the argument is not good. This also is to bee considered, that as Hezekiah brake in pieces the Brazen Serpent, because the Jews did worship it, to the end they should doe so no more; so also Christian Soveraigns ought to break down the Images which their Subjects have been accustomed to worship; that there be no more occasion of such Idolatry. For at this day, the ignorant People, where Images are worshipped, doe really beleeve there is a Divine Power in the Images; and are told by their Pastors, that some of them have spoken; and have bled; and that miracles have been done by them; which they apprehend as done by the Saint, which they think either is the Image it self, or in it. The Israelites, when they worshipped the Calfe, did think they worshipped the God that brought them out of Egypt; and yet it was Idolatry, because they thought the Calfe either was that God, or had him in his belly. And though some man may think it impossible for people to be so stupid, as to think the Image to be God, or a Saint; or to worship it in that notion; yet it is manifest in Scripture to the contrary; where when the Golden Calfe was made, the people said, (Exod. 32. 2.) “These are thy Gods O Israel;” and where the Images of Laban (Gen. 31.30.) are called his Gods. And wee see daily by experience in all sorts of People, that such men as study nothing but their food and ease, are content to beleeve any absurdity, rather than to trouble themselves to examine it; holding their faith as it were by entaile unalienable, except by an expresse and new Law.\n\nBut they inferre from some other places, that it is lawfull to paint Angels, and also God himselfe: as from Gods walking in the Garden; from Jacobs seeing God at the top of the ladder; and from other Visions, and Dreams. But Visions, and Dreams whether naturall, or supernaturall, are but Phantasmes: and he that painteth an Image of any of them, maketh not an Image of God, but of his own Phantasm, which is, making of an Idol. I say not, that to draw a Picture after a fancy, is a Sin; but when it is drawn, to hold it for a Representation of God, is against the second Commandement; and can be of no use, but to worship. And the same may be said of the Images of Angels, and of men dead; unlesse as Monuments of friends, or of men worthy remembrance: For such use of an Image, is not Worship of the Image; but a civill honoring of the Person, not that is, but that was: But when it is done to the Image which we make of a Saint, for no other reason, but that we think he heareth our prayers, and is pleased with the honour wee doe him, when dead, and without sense, wee attribute to him more than humane power; and therefore it is Idolatry.\n\nSeeing therefore there is no authority, neither in the Law of Moses, nor in the Gospel, for the religious Worship of Images, or other Representations of God, which men set up to themselves; or for the Worship of the Image of any Creature in Heaven, or Earth, or under the Earth: And whereas Christian Kings, who are living Representants of God, are not to be worshipped by their Subjects, by any act, that signifieth a greater esteem of his power, than the nature of mortall man is capable of; It cannot be imagined, that the Religious Worship now in use, was brought into the Church, by misunderstanding of the Scripture. It resteth therefore, that it was left in it, by not destroying the Images themselves, in the conversion of the Gentiles that worshipped them.\n\nThe cause whereof, was the immoderate esteem, and prices set upon the workmanship of them, which made the owners (though converted, from worshipping them as they had done Religiously for Daemons) to retain them still in their houses, upon pretence of doing it in the honor of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and of the Apostles, and other the Pastors of the Primitive Church; as being easie, by giving them new names, to make that an Image of the Virgin Mary, and of her Sonne our Saviour, which before perhaps was called the Image of Venus, and Cupid; and so of a Jupiter to make a Barnabas, and of Mercury a Paul, and the like. And as worldly ambition creeping by degrees into the Pastors, drew them to an endeavour of pleasing the new made Christians; and also to a liking of this kind of honour, which they also might hope for after their decease, as well as those that had already gained it: so the worshipping of the Images of Christ and his Apostles, grow more and more Idolatrous; save that somewhat after the time of Constantine, divers Emperors, and Bishops, and generall Councells observed, and opposed the unlawfulnesse thereof; but too late, or too weakly.\n\nThe Canonizing of Saints, is another Relique of Gentilisme: It is neither a misunderstanding of Scripture, nor a new invention of the Roman Church, but a custome as ancient as the Common-wealth of Rome it self. The first that ever was canonized at Rome, was Romulus, and that upon the narration of Julius Proculus, that swore before the Senate, he spake with him after his death, and was assured by him, he dwelt in Heaven, and was there called Quirinius, and would be propitious to the State of their new City: And thereupon the Senate gave Publique Testimony of his Sanctity. Julius Caesar, and other Emperors after him, had the like Testimony; that is, were Canonized for Saints; now defined; and is the same with the Apotheosis of the Heathen.\n\nIt is also from the Roman Heathen, that the Popes have received the name, and power of PONTIFEX MAXIMUS. This was the name of him that in the ancient Common-wealth of Rome, had the Supreme Authority under the Senate and People, of regulating all Ceremonies, and Doctrines concerning their Religion: And when Augustus Caesar changed the State into a Monarchy, he took to himselfe no more but this office, and that of Tribune of the People, (than is to say, the Supreme Power both in State, and Religion;) and the succeeding Emperors enjoyed the same. But when the Emperour Constantine lived, who was the first that professed and authorized Christian Religion, it was consonant to his profession, to cause Religion to be regulated (under his authority) by the Bishop of Rome: Though it doe not appear they had so soon the name of Pontifex; but rather, that the succeeding Bishops took it of themselves, to countenance the power they exercised over the Bishops of the Roman Provinces. For it is not any Priviledge of St. Peter, but the Priviledge of the City of Rome, which the Emperors were alwaies willing to uphold; that gave them such authority over other Bishops; as may be evidently seen by that, that the Bishop of Constantinople, when the Emperour made that City the Seat of the Empire, pretended to bee equall to the Bishop of Rome; though at last, not without contention, the Pope carryed it, and became the Pontifex Maximus; but in right onely of the Emperour; and not without the bounds of the Empire; nor any where, after the Emperour had lost his power in Rome; though it were the Pope himself that took his power from him. From whence wee may by the way observe, that there is no place for the superiority of the Pope over other Bishops, except in the territories whereof he is himself the Civill Soveraign; and where the Emperour having Soveraign Power Civill, hath expressely chosen the Pope for the chief Pastor under himselfe, of his Christian Subjects.\n\nThe carrying about of Images in Procession, is another Relique of the Religion of the Greeks, and Romans: For they also carried their Idols from place to place, in a kind of Chariot, which was peculiarly dedicated to that use, which the Latines called Thensa, and Vehiculum Deorum; and the Image was placed in a frame, or Shrine, which they called Ferculum: And that which they called Pompa, is the same that now is named Procession: According whereunto, amongst the Divine Honors which were given to Julius Caesar by the Senate, this was one, that in the Pompe (or Procession) at the Circaean games, he should have Thensam & Ferculum, a sacred Chariot, and a Shrine; which was as much, as to be carried up and down as a God: Just as at this day the Popes are carried by Switzers under a Canopie.\n\nTo these Processions also belonged the bearing of burning Torches, and Candles, before the Images of the Gods, both amongst the Greeks, and Romans. For afterwards the Emperors of Rome received the same honor; as we read of Caligula, that at his reception to the Empire, he was carried from Misenum to Rome, in the midst of a throng of People, the wayes beset with Altars, and Beasts for Sacrifice, and burning Torches: And of Caracalla that was received into Alexandria with Incense, and with casting of Flowers, and Dadouchiais, that is, with Torches; for Dadochoi were they that amongst the Greeks carried Torches lighted in the Processions of their Gods: And in processe of time, the devout, but ignorant People, did many times honor their Bishops with the like pompe of Wax Candles, and the Images of our Saviour, and the Saints, constantly, in the Church it self. And thus came in the use of Wax Candles; and was also established by some of the ancient Councells.\n\nThe Heathens had also their Aqua Lustralis, that is to say, Holy Water. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their Holy Dayes. They had their Bacchanalia; and we have our Wakes, answering to them: They their Saturnalia, and we our Carnevalls, and Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants: They their Procession of Priapus; wee our fetching in, erection, and dancing about May-poles; and Dancing is one kind of Worship: They had their Procession called Ambarvalia; and we our Procession about the fields in the Rogation Week. Nor do I think that these are all the Ceremonies that have been left in the Church, from the first conversion of the Gentiles: but they are all that I can for the present call to mind; and if a man would wel observe that which is delivered in the Histories, concerning the Religious Rites of the Greeks and Romanes, I doubt not but he might find many more of these old empty Bottles of Gentilisme, which the Doctors of the Romane Church, either by Negligence, or Ambition, have filled up again with the new Wine of Christianity, that will not faile in time to break them.\n\nCHAPTER XLVI. OF DARKNESSE FROM VAIN PHILOSOPHY, AND FABULOUS TRADITIONS\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 1\n\nOF DARKNESSE FROM VAIN PHILOSOPHY, AND FABULOUS TRADITIONS\n\nBy Philosophy is understood “the Knowledge acquired by Reasoning, from the Manner of the Generation of any thing, to the Properties; or from the Properties, to some possible Way of Generation of the same; to the end to bee able to produce, as far as matter, and humane force permit, such Effects, as humane life requireth.” So the Geometrician, from the Construction of Figures, findeth out many Properties thereof; and from the Properties, new Ways of their Construction, by Reasoning; to the end to be able to measure Land and Water; and for infinite other uses. So the Astronomer, from the Rising, Setting, and Moving of the Sun, and Starres, in divers parts of the Heavens, findeth out the Causes of Day, and Night, and of the different Seasons of the Year; whereby he keepeth an account of Time: And the like of other Sciences.\n\nBy which Definition it is evident, that we are not to account as any part thereof, that originall knowledge called Experience, in which consisteth Prudence: Because it is not attained by Reasoning, but found as well in Brute Beasts, as in Man; and is but a Memory of successions of events in times past, wherein the omission of every little circumstance altering the effect, frustrateth the expectation of the most Prudent: whereas nothing is produced by Reasoning aright, but generall, eternall, and immutable Truth.\n\nNor are we therefore to give that name to any false Conclusions: For he that Reasoneth aright in words he understandeth, can never conclude an Error:\n\nNo More Is Revelation Supernaturall\n\nNor to that which any man knows by supernaturall Revelation; because it is not acquired by Reasoning:\n\nNor that which is gotten by Reasoning from the Authority of Books; because it is not by Reasoning from the Cause to the Effect, nor from the Effect to the Cause; and is not Knowledge, but Faith.\n\nThe faculty of Reasoning being consequent to the use of Speech, it was not possible, but that there should have been some generall Truthes found out by Reasoning, as ancient almost as Language it selfe. The Savages of America, are not without some good Morall Sentences; also they have a little Arithmetick, to adde, and divide in Numbers not too great: but they are not therefore Philosophers. For as there were Plants of Corn and Wine in small quantity dispersed in the Fields and Woods, before men knew their vertue, or made use of them for their nourishment, or planted them apart in Fields, and Vineyards; in which time they fed on Akorns, and drank Water: so also there have been divers true, generall, and profitable Speculations from the beginning; as being the naturall plants of humane Reason: But they were at first but few in number; men lived upon grosse Experience; there was no Method; that is to say, no Sowing, nor Planting of Knowledge by it self, apart from the Weeds, and common Plants of Errour and Conjecture: And the cause of it being the want of leasure from procuring the necessities of life, and defending themselves against their neighbours, it was impossible, till the erecting of great Common-wealths, it should be otherwise. Leasure is the mother of Philosophy; and Common-wealth, the mother of Peace, and Leasure: Where first were great and flourishing Cities, there was first the study of Philosophy. The Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the Priests of Chaldea and Egypt, are counted the most ancient Philosophers; and those Countreys were the most ancient of Kingdomes. Philosophy was not risen to the Graecians, and other people of the West, whose Common-wealths (no greater perhaps then Lucca, or Geneva) had never Peace, but when their fears of one another were equall; nor the Leasure to observe any thing but one another. At length, when Warre had united many of these Graecian lesser Cities, into fewer, and greater; then began Seven Men, of severall parts of Greece, to get the reputation of being Wise; some of them for Morall and Politique Sentences; and others for the learning of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, which was Astronomy, and Geometry. But we hear not yet of any Schools of Philosophy.\n\nAfter the Athenians by the overthrow of the Persian Armies, had gotten the Dominion of the Sea; and thereby, of all the Islands, and Maritime Cities of the Archipelago, as well of Asia as Europe; and were grown wealthy; they that had no employment, neither at home, nor abroad, had little else to employ themselves in, but either (as St. Luke says, Acts 17.21.) “in telling and hearing news,” or in discoursing of Philosophy publiquely to the youth of the City. Every Master took some place for that purpose. Plato in certaine publique Walks called Academia, from one Academus: Aristotle in the Walk of the Temple of Pan, called Lycaeum: others in the Stoa, or covered Walk, wherein the Merchants Goods were brought to land: others in other places; where they spent the time of their Leasure, in teaching or in disputing of their Opinions: and some in any place, where they could get the youth of the City together to hear them talk. And this was it which Carneades also did at Rome, when he was Ambassadour: which caused Cato to advise the Senate to dispatch him quickly, for feare of corrupting the manners of the young men that delighted to hear him speak (as they thought) fine things.\n\nFrom this it was, that the place where any of them taught, and disputed, was called Schola, which in their Tongue signifieth Leasure; and their Disputations, Diatribae, that is to say, Passing of The Time. Also the Philosophers themselves had the name of their Sects, some of them from these their Schools: For they that followed Plato’s Doctrine, were called Academiques; The followers of Aristotle, Peripatetiques, from the Walk hee taught in; and those that Zeno taught, Stoiques, from the Stoa: as if we should denominate men from More-fields, from Pauls-Church, and from the Exchange, because they meet there often, to prate and loyter.\n\nNeverthelesse, men were so much taken with this custome, that in time it spread it selfe over all Europe, and the best part of Afrique; so as there were Schools publiquely erected, and maintained for Lectures, and Disputations, almost in every Common-wealth.\n\nThere were also Schools, anciently, both before, and after the time of our Saviour, amongst the Jews: but they were Schools of their Law. For though they were called Synagogues, that is to say, Congregations of the People; yet in as much as the Law was every Sabbath day read, expounded, and disputed in them, they differed not in nature, but in name onely from Publique Schools; and were not onely in Jerusalem, but in every City of the Gentiles, where the Jews inhabited. There was such a Schoole at Damascus, whereinto Paul entred, to persecute. There were others at Antioch, Iconium and Thessalonica, whereinto he entred, to dispute: And such was the Synagogue of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and those of Asia; that is to say, the Schoole of Libertines, and of Jewes, that were strangers in Jerusalem: And of this Schoole they were that disputed with Saint Steven.\n\nBut what has been the Utility of those Schools? what Science is there at this day acquired by their Readings and Disputings? That wee have of Geometry, which is the Mother of all Naturall Science, wee are not indebted for it to the Schools. Plato that was the best Philosopher of the Greeks, forbad entrance into his Schoole, to all that were not already in some measure Geometricians. There were many that studied that Science to the great advantage of mankind: but there is no mention of their Schools; nor was there any Sect of Geometricians; nor did they then passe under the name of Philosophers. The naturall Philosophy of those Schools, was rather a Dream than Science, and set forth in senselesse and insignificant Language; which cannot be avoided by those that will teach Philosophy, without having first attained great knowledge in Geometry: For Nature worketh by Motion; the Wayes, and Degrees whereof cannot be known, without the knowledge of the Proportions and Properties of Lines, and Figures. Their Morall Philosophy is but a description of their own Passions. For the rule of Manners, without Civill Government, is the Law of Nature; and in it, the Law Civill; that determineth what is Honest, and Dishonest; what is Just, and Unjust; and generally what is Good, and Evill: whereas they make the Rules of Good, and Bad, by their own Liking, and Disliking: By which means, in so great diversity of taste, there is nothing generally agreed on; but every one doth (as far as he dares) whatsoever seemeth good in his own eyes, to the subversion of Common-wealth. Their Logique which should bee the Method of Reasoning, is nothing else but Captions of Words, and Inventions how to puzzle such as should goe about to pose them. To conclude there is nothing so absurd, that the old Philosophers (as Cicero saith, who was one of them) have not some of them maintained. And I beleeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which now is called Aristotles Metaphysiques, nor more repugnant to Government, than much of that hee hath said in his Politiques; nor more ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethiques.\n\nThe Schoole of the Jews, was originally a Schoole of the Law of Moses; who commanded (Deut. 31.10.) that at the end of every seventh year, at the Feast of the Tabernacles, it should be read to all the people, that they might hear, and learn it: Therefore the reading of the Law (which was in use after the Captivity) every Sabbath day, ought to have had no other end, but the acquainting of the people with the Commandements which they were to obey, and to expound unto them the writings of the Prophets. But it is manifest, by the many reprehensions of them by our Saviour, that they corrupted the Text of the Law with their false Commentaries, and vain Traditions; and so little understood the Prophets, that they did neither acknowledge Christ, nor the works he did; for which the Prophets prophecyed. So that by their Lectures and Disputations in their Synagogues, they turned the Doctrine of their Law into a Phantasticall kind of Philosophy, concerning the incomprehensible nature of God, and of Spirits; which they compounded of the Vain Philosophy and Theology of the Graecians, mingled with their own fancies, drawn from the obscurer places of the Scripture, and which might most easily bee wrested to their purpose; and from the Fabulous Traditions of their Ancestors.\n\nThat which is now called an University, is a Joyning together, and an Incorporation under one Government of many Publique Schools, in one and the same Town or City. In which, the principal Schools were ordained for the three Professions, that is to say, of the Romane Religion, of the Romane Law, and of the Art of Medicine. And for the study of Philosophy it hath no otherwise place, then as a handmaid to the Romane Religion: And since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current there, that study is not properly Philosophy, (the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity. And for Geometry, till of very late times it had no place at all; as being subservient to nothing but rigide Truth. And if any man by the ingenuity of his owne nature, had attained to any degree of perfection therein, hee was commonly thought a Magician, and his Art Diabolicall.\n\nNow to descend to the particular Tenets of Vain Philosophy, derived to the Universities, and thence into the Church, partly from Aristotle, partly from Blindnesse of understanding; I shall first consider their Principles. There is a certain Philosophia Prima, on which all other Philosophy ought to depend; and consisteth principally, in right limiting of the significations of such Appellations, or Names, as are of all others the most Universall: Which Limitations serve to avoid ambiguity, and aequivocation in Reasoning; and are commonly called Definitions; such as are the Definitions of Body, Time, Place, Matter, Forme, Essence, Subject, Substance, Accident, Power, Act, Finite, Infinite, Quantity, Quality, Motion, Action, Passion, and divers others, necessary to the explaining of a mans Conceptions concerning the Nature and Generation of Bodies. The Explication (that is, the setling of the meaning) of which, and the like Terms, is commonly in the Schools called Metaphysiques; as being a part of the Philosophy of Aristotle, which hath that for title: but it is in another sense; for there it signifieth as much, as “Books written, or placed after his naturall Philosophy:” But the Schools take them for Books Of Supernaturall Philosophy: for the word Metaphysiques will bear both these senses. And indeed that which is there written, is for the most part so far from the possibility of being understood, and so repugnant to naturall Reason, that whosoever thinketh there is any thing to bee understood by it, must needs think it supernaturall.\n\nFrom these Metaphysiques, which are mingled with the Scripture to make Schoole Divinity, wee are told, there be in the world certaine Essences separated from Bodies, which they call Abstract Essences, and Substantiall Formes: For the Interpreting of which Jargon, there is need of somewhat more than ordinary attention in this place. Also I ask pardon of those that are not used to this kind of Discourse, for applying my selfe to those that are. The World, (I mean not the Earth onely, that denominates the Lovers of it Worldly Men, but the Universe, that is, the whole masse of all things that are) is Corporeall, that is to say, Body; and hath the dimensions of Magnitude, namely, Length, Bredth, and Depth: also every part of Body, is likewise Body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the Universe, is Body, and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is all, that which is no part of it, is Nothing; and consequently No Where. Nor does it follow from hence, that Spirits are Nothing: for they have dimensions, and are therefore really Bodies; though that name in common Speech be given to such Bodies onely, as are visible, or palpable; that is, that have some degree of Opacity: But for Spirits, they call them Incorporeall; which is a name of more honour, and may therefore with more piety bee attributed to God himselfe; in whom wee consider not what Attribute expresseth best his Nature, which is Incomprehensible; but what best expresseth our desire to honour him.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 2\n\nTo know now upon what grounds they say there be Essences Abstract, or Substantiall Formes, wee are to consider what those words do properly signifie. The use of Words, is to register to our selves, and make manifest to others the Thoughts and Conceptions of our Minds. Of which Words, some are the names of the Things conceived; as the names of all sorts of Bodies, that work upon the Senses, and leave an Impression in the Imagination: Others are the names of the Imaginations themselves; that is to say, of those Ideas, or mentall Images we have of all things wee see, or remember: And others againe are names of Names; or of different sorts of Speech: As Universall, Plurall, Singular, Negation, True, False, Syllogisme, Interrogation, Promise, Covenant, are the names of certain Forms of Speech. Others serve to shew the Consequence, or Repugnance of one name to another; as when one saith, “A Man is a Body,” hee intendeth that the name of Body is necessarily consequent to the name of Man; as being but severall names of the same thing, Man; which Consequence is signified by coupling them together with the word Is. And as wee use the Verbe Is; so the Latines use their Verbe Est, and the Greeks their Esti through all its Declinations. Whether all other Nations of the world have in their severall languages a word that answereth to it, or not, I cannot tell; but I am sure they have not need of it: For the placing of two names in order may serve to signifie their Consequence, if it were the custome, (for Custome is it, that give words their force,) as well as the words Is, or Bee, or Are, and the like.\n\nAnd if it were so, that there were a Language without any Verb answerable to Est, or Is, or Bee; yet the men that used it would bee not a jot the lesse capable of Inferring, Concluding, and of all kind of Reasoning, than were the Greeks, and Latines. But what then would become of these Terms, of Entity, Essence, Essentiall, Essentially, that are derived from it, and of many more that depend on these, applyed as most commonly they are? They are therefore no Names of Things; but Signes, by which wee make known, that wee conceive the Consequence of one name or Attribute to another: as when we say, “a Man, is, a living Body,” wee mean not that the Man is one thing, the Living Body another, and the Is, or Beeing a third: but that the Man, and the Living Body, is the same thing: because the Consequence, “If hee bee a Man, hee is a living Body,” is a true Consequence, signified by that word Is. Therefore, to bee a Body, to Walke, to bee Speaking, to Live, to See, and the like Infinitives; also Corporeity, Walking, Speaking, Life, Sight, and the like, that signifie just the same, are the names of Nothing; as I have elsewhere more amply expressed.\n\nBut to what purpose (may some man say) is such subtilty in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of Government and Obedience? It is to this purpose, that men may no longer suffer themselves to be abused, by them, that by this doctrine of Separated Essences, built on the Vain Philosophy of Aristotle, would fright them from Obeying the Laws of their Countrey, with empty names; as men fright Birds from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick. For it is upon this ground, that when a Man is dead and buried, they say his Soule (that is his Life) can walk separated from his Body, and is seen by night amongst the graves. Upon the same ground they say, that the Figure, and Colour, and Tast of a peece of Bread, has a being, there, where they say there is no Bread: And upon the same ground they say, that Faith, and Wisdome, and other Vertues are sometimes powred into a man, sometimes blown into him from Heaven; as if the Vertuous, and their Vertues could be asunder; and a great many other things that serve to lessen the dependance of Subjects on the Soveraign Power of their Countrey. For who will endeavour to obey the Laws, if he expect Obedience to be Powred or Blown into him? Or who will not obey a Priest, that can make God, rather than his Soveraign; nay than God himselfe? Or who, that is in fear of Ghosts, will not bear great respect to those that can make the Holy Water, that drives them from him? And this shall suffice for an example of the Errors, which are brought into the Church, from the Entities, and Essences of Aristotle: which it may be he knew to be false Philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of their Religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates.\n\nBeing once fallen into this Error of Separated Essences, they are thereby necessarily involved in many other absurdities that follow it. For seeing they will have these Forms to be reall, they are obliged to assign them some place. But because they hold them Incorporeall, without all dimension of Quantity, and all men know that Place is Dimension, and not to be filled, but by that which is Corporeall; they are driven to uphold their credit with a distinction, that they are not indeed any where Circumscriptive, but Definitive: Which Terms being meer Words, and in this occasion insignificant, passe onely in Latine, that the vanity of them may bee concealed. For the Circumscription of a thing, is nothing else but the Determination, or Defining of its Place; and so both the Terms of the Distinction are the same. And in particular, of the Essence of a Man, which (they say) is his Soule, they affirm it, to be All of it in his little Finger, and All of it in every other Part (how small soever) of his Body; and yet no more Soule in the Whole Body, than in any one of those Parts. Can any man think that God is served with such absurdities? And yet all this is necessary to beleeve, to those that will beleeve the Existence of an Incorporeall Soule, Separated from the Body.\n\nAnd when they come to give account, how an Incorporeall Substance can be capable of Pain, and be tormented in the fire of Hell, or Purgatory, they have nothing at all to answer, but that it cannot be known how fire can burn Soules.\n\nAgain, whereas Motion is change of Place, and Incorporeall Substances are not capable of Place, they are troubled to make it seem possible, how a Soule can goe hence, without the Body to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory; and how the Ghosts of men (and I may adde of their clothes which they appear in) can walk by night in Churches, Church-yards, and other places of Sepulture. To which I know not what they can answer, unlesse they will say, they walke Definitive, not Circumscriptive, or Spiritually, not Temporally: for such egregious distinctions are equally applicable to any difficulty whatsoever.\n\nFor the meaning of Eternity, they will not have it to be an Endlesse Succession of Time; for then they should not be able to render a reason how Gods Will, and Praeordaining of things to come, should not be before his Praescience of the same, as the Efficient Cause before the Effect, or Agent before the Action; nor of many other their bold opinions concerning the Incomprehensible Nature of God. But they will teach us, that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the Schools call it;) which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatnesse of Place.\n\nAnd whereas men divide a Body in their thought, by numbring parts of it, and in numbring those parts, number also the parts of the Place it filled; it cannot be, but in making many parts, wee make also many places of those parts; whereby there cannot bee conceived in the mind of any man, more, or fewer parts, than there are places for: yet they will have us beleeve, that by the Almighty power of God, one body may be at one and the same time in many places; and many bodies at one and the same time in one place; as if it were an acknowledgment of the Divine Power, to say, that which is, is not; or that which has been, has not been. And these are but a small part of the Incongruities they are forced to, from their disputing Philosophically, in stead of admiring, and adoring of the Divine and Incomprehensible Nature; whose Attributes cannot signifie what he is, but ought to signifie our desire to honour him, with the best Appellations we can think on. But they that venture to reason of his Nature, from these Attributes of Honour, losing their understanding in the very first attempt, fall from one Inconvenience into another, without end, and without number; in the same manner, as when a man ignorant of the Ceremonies of Court, comming into the presence of a greater Person than he is used to speak to, and stumbling at his entrance, to save himselfe from falling, lets slip his Cloake; to recover his Cloake, lets fall his Hat; and with one disorder after another, discovers his astonishment and rusticity.\n\nThen for Physiques, that is, the knowledge of the subordinate, and secundary causes of naturall events; they render none at all, but empty words. If you desire to know why some kind of bodies sink naturally downwards toward the Earth, and others goe naturally from it; The Schools will tell you out of Aristotle, that the bodies that sink downwards, are Heavy; and that this Heavinesse is it that causes them to descend: But if you ask what they mean by Heavinesse, they will define it to bee an endeavour to goe to the center of the Earth: so that the cause why things sink downward, is an Endeavour to be below: which is as much as to say, that bodies descend, or ascend, because they doe. Or they will tell you the center of the Earth is the place of Rest, and Conservation for Heavy things; and therefore they endeavour to be there: As if Stones, and Metalls had a desire, or could discern the place they would bee at, as Man does; or loved Rest, as Man does not; or that a peece of Glasse were lesse safe in the Window, than falling into the Street.\n\nIf we would know why the same Body seems greater (without adding to it) one time, than another; they say, when it seems lesse, it is Condensed; when greater, Rarefied. What is that Condensed, and Rarefied? Condensed, is when there is in the very same Matter, lesse Quantity than before; and Rarefied, when more. As if there could be Matter, that had not some determined Quantity; when Quantity is nothing else but the Determination of Matter; that is to say of Body, by which we say one Body is greater, or lesser than another, by thus, or thus much. Or as if a Body were made without any Quantity at all, and that afterwards more, or lesse were put into it, according as it is intended the Body should be more, or lesse Dense.\n\nFor the cause of the Soule of Man, they say, Creatur Infundendo, and Creando Infunditur: that is, “It is Created by Powring it in,” and “Powred in by Creation.”\n\nFor the Cause of Sense, an ubiquity of Species; that is, of the Shews or Apparitions of objects; which when they be Apparitions to the Eye, is Sight; when to the Eare, Hearing; to the Palate, Tast; to the Nostrill, Smelling; and to the rest of the Body, Feeling.\n\nFor cause of the Will, to doe any particular action, which is called Volitio, they assign the Faculty, that is to say, the Capacity in generall, that men have, to will sometimes one thing, sometimes another, which is called Voluntas; making the Power the cause of the Act: As if one should assign for cause of the good or evill Acts of men, their Ability to doe them.\n\nAnd in many occasions they put for cause of Naturall events, their own Ignorance, but disguised in other words: As when they say, Fortune is the cause of things contingent; that is, of things whereof they know no cause: And as when they attribute many Effects to Occult Qualities; that is, qualities not known to them; and therefore also (as they thinke) to no Man else. And to Sympathy, Antipathy, Antiperistasis, Specificall Qualities, and other like Termes, which signifie neither the Agent that produceth them, nor the Operation by which they are produced.\n\nIf such Metaphysiques, and Physiques as this, be not Vain Philosophy, there was never any; nor needed St. Paul to give us warning to avoid it.\n\nAnd for their Morall, and Civill Philosophy, it hath the same, or greater absurdities. If a man doe an action of Injustice, that is to say, an action contrary to the Law, God they say is the prime cause of the Law, and also the prime cause of that, and all other Actions; but no cause at all of the Injustice; which is the Inconformity of the Action to the Law. This is Vain Philosophy. A man might as well say, that one man maketh both a streight line, and a crooked, and another maketh their Incongruity. And such is the Philosophy of all men that resolve of their Conclusions, before they know their Premises; pretending to comprehend, that which is Incomprehensible; and of Attributes of Honour to make Attributes of Nature; as this distinction was made to maintain the Doctrine of Free-Will, that is, of a Will of man, not subject to the Will of God.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 3\n\nAristotle, and other Heathen Philosophers define Good, and Evill, by the Appetite of men; and well enough, as long as we consider them governed every one by his own Law: For in the condition of men that have no other Law but their own Appetites, there can be no generall Rule of Good, and Evill Actions. But in a Common-wealth this measure is false: Not the Appetite of Private men, but the Law, which is the Will and Appetite of the State is the measure. And yet is this Doctrine still practised; and men judge the Goodnesse, or Wickednesse of their own, and of other mens actions, and of the actions of the Common-wealth it selfe, by their own Passions; and no man calleth Good or Evill, but that which is so in his own eyes, without any regard at all to the Publique Laws; except onely Monks, and Friers, that are bound by Vow to that simple obedience to their Superiour, to which every Subject ought to think himself bound by the Law of Nature to the Civill Soveraign. And this private measure of Good, is a Doctrine, not onely Vain, but also Pernicious to the Publique State.\n\nIt is also Vain and false Philosophy, to say the work of Marriage is repugnant to Chastity, or Continence, and by consequence to make them Morall Vices; as they doe, that pretend Chastity, and Continence, for the ground of denying Marriage to the Clergy. For they confesse it is no more, but a Constitution of the Church, that requireth in those holy Orders that continually attend the Altar, and administration of the Eucharist, a continuall Abstinence from women, under the name of continuall Chastity, Continence, and Purity. Therefore they call the lawfull use of Wives, want of Chastity, and Continence; and so make Marriage a Sin, or at least a thing so impure, and unclean, as to render a man unfit for the Altar. If the Law were made because the use of Wives is Incontinence, and contrary to Chastity, then all marriage is vice; If because it is a thing too impure, and unclean for a man consecrated to God; much more should other naturall, necessary, and daily works which all men doe, render men unworthy to bee Priests, because they are more unclean.\n\nBut the secret foundation of this prohibition of Marriage of Priests, is not likely to have been laid so slightly, as upon such errours in Morall Philosophy; nor yet upon the preference of single life, to the estate of Matrimony; which proceeded from the wisdome of St. Paul, who perceived how inconvenient a thing it was, for those that in those times of persecution were Preachers of the Gospel, and forced to fly from one countrey to another, to be clogged with the care of wife and children; but upon the design of the Popes, and Priests of after times, to make themselves the Clergy, that is to say, sole Heirs of the Kingdome of God in this world; to which it was necessary to take from them the use of Marriage, because our Saviour saith, that at the coming of his Kingdome the Children of God shall “neither Marry, nor bee given in Marriage, but shall bee as the Angels in heaven;” that is to say, Spirituall. Seeing then they had taken on them the name of Spirituall, to have allowed themselves (when there was no need) the propriety of Wives, had been an Incongruity.\n\nFrom Aristotles Civill Philosophy, they have learned, to call all manner of Common-wealths but the Popular, (such as was at that time the state of Athens,) Tyranny. All Kings they called Tyrants; and the Aristocracy of the thirty Governours set up there by the Lacedemonians that subdued them, the thirty Tyrants: As also to call the condition of the people under the Democracy, Liberty. A Tyrant originally signified no more simply, but a Monarch: But when afterwards in most parts of Greece that kind of government was abolished, the name began to signifie, not onely the thing it did before, but with it, the hatred which the Popular States bare towards it: As also the name of King became odious after the deposing of the Kings in Rome, as being a thing naturall to all men, to conceive some great Fault to be signified in any Attribute, that is given in despight, and to a great Enemy. And when the same men shall be displeased with those that have the administration of the Democracy, or Aristocracy, they are not to seek for disgraceful names to expresse their anger in; but call readily the one Anarchy, and the other Oligarchy, or the Tyranny Of A Few. And that which offendeth the People, is no other thing, but that they are governed, not as every one of them would himselfe, but as the Publique Representant, be it one Man, or an Assembly of men thinks fit; that is, by an Arbitrary government: for which they give evill names to their Superiors; never knowing (till perhaps a little after a Civill warre) that without such Arbitrary government, such Warre must be perpetuall; and that it is Men, and Arms, not Words, and Promises, that make the Force and Power of the Laws.\n\nAnd therefore this is another Errour of Aristotles Politiques, that in a wel ordered Common-wealth, not Men should govern, but the Laws. What man, that has his naturall Senses, though he can neither write nor read, does not find himself governed by them he fears, and beleeves can kill or hurt him when he obeyeth not? or that beleeves the Law can hurt him; that is, Words, and Paper, without the Hands, and Swords of men? And this is of the number of pernicious Errors: for they induce men, as oft as they like not their Governours, to adhaere to those that call them Tyrants, and to think it lawfull to raise warre against them: And yet they are many times cherished from the Pulpit, by the Clergy.\n\nThere is another Errour in their Civill Philosophy (which they never learned of Aristotle, nor Cicero, nor any other of the Heathen,) to extend the power of the Law, which is the Rule of Actions onely, to the very Thoughts, and Consciences of men, by Examination, and Inquisition of what they Hold, notwithstanding the Conformity of their Speech and Actions: By which, men are either punished for answering the truth of their thoughts, or constrained to answer an untruth for fear of punishment. It is true, that the Civill Magistrate, intending to employ a Minister in the charge of Teaching, may enquire of him, if hee bee content to Preach such, and such Doctrines; and in case of refusall, may deny him the employment: But to force him to accuse himselfe of Opinions, when his Actions are not by Law forbidden, is against the Law of Nature; and especially in them, who teach, that a man shall bee damned to Eternall and extream torments, if he die in a false opinion concerning an Article of the Christian Faith. For who is there, that knowing there is so great danger in an error, when the naturall care of himself, compelleth not to hazard his Soule upon his own judgement, rather than that of any other man that is unconcerned in his damnation?\n\nFor a Private man, without the Authority of the Common-wealth, that is to say, without permission from the Representant thereof, to Interpret the Law by his own Spirit, is another Error in the Politiques; but not drawn from Aristotle, nor from any other of the Heathen Philosophers. For none of them deny, but that in the Power of making Laws, is comprehended also the Power of Explaining them when there is need. And are not the Scriptures, in all places where they are Law, made Law by the Authority of the Common-wealth, and consequently, a part of the Civill Law?\n\nOf the same kind it is also, when any but the Soveraign restraineth in any man that power which the Common-wealth hath not restrained: as they do, that impropriate the Preaching of the Gospell to one certain Order of men, where the Laws have left it free. If the State give me leave to preach, or teach; that is, if it forbid me not, no man can forbid me. If I find my selfe amongst the Idolaters of America, shall I that am a Christian, though not in Orders, think it a sin to preach Jesus Christ, till I have received Orders from Rome? or when I have preached, shall not I answer their doubts, and expound the Scriptures to them; that is shall I not Teach? But for this may some say, as also for administring to them the Sacraments, the necessity shall be esteemed for a sufficient Mission; which is true: But this is true also, that for whatsoever, a dispensation is due for the necessity, for the same there needs no dispensation, when there is no Law that forbids it. Therefore to deny these Functions to those, to whom the Civill Soveraigne hath not denyed them, is a taking away of a lawfull Liberty, which is contrary to the Doctrine of Civill Government.\n\nMore examples of Vain Philosophy, brought into Religion by the Doctors of Schoole-Divinity, might be produced; but other men may if they please observe them of themselves. I shall onely adde this, that the Writings of Schoole-Divines, are nothing else for the most part, but insignificant Traines of strange and barbarous words, or words otherwise used, then in the common use of the Latine tongue; such as would pose Cicero, and Varro, and all the Grammarians of ancient Rome. Which if any man would see proved, let him (as I have said once before) see whether he can translate any Schoole-Divine into any of the Modern tongues, as French, English, or any other copious language: for that which cannot in most of these be made Intelligible, is no Intelligible in the Latine. Which Insignificancy of language, though I cannot note it for false Philosophy; yet it hath a quality, not onely to hide the Truth, but also to make men think they have it, and desist from further search.\n\nLastly, for the errors brought in from false, or uncertain History, what is all the Legend of fictitious Miracles, in the lives of the Saints; and all the Histories of Apparitions, and Ghosts, alledged by the Doctors of the Romane Church, to make good their Doctrines of Hell, and purgatory, the power of Exorcisme, and other Doctrines which have no warrant, neither in Reason, nor Scripture; as also all those Traditions which they call the unwritten Word of God; but old Wives Fables? Whereof, though they find dispersed somewhat in the Writings of the ancient Fathers; yet those Fathers were men, that might too easily beleeve false reports; and the producing of their opinions for testimony of the truth of what they beleeved, hath no other force with them that (according to the Counsell of St. John 1 Epist. chap. 4. verse 1.) examine Spirits, than in all things that concern the power of the Romane Church, (the abuse whereof either they suspected not, or had benefit by it,) to discredit their testimony, in respect of too rash beleef of reports; which the most sincere men, without great knowledge of naturall causes, (such as the Fathers were) are commonly the most subject to: For naturally, the best men are the least suspicious of fraudulent purposes. Gregory the Pope, and S. Bernard have somewhat of Apparitions of Ghosts, that said they were in Purgatory; and so has our Beda: but no where, I beleeve, but by report from others. But if they, or any other, relate any such stories of their own knowledge, they shall not thereby confirm the more such vain reports; but discover their own Infirmity, or Fraud.\n\nWith the Introduction of False, we may joyn also the suppression of True Philosophy, by such men, as neither by lawfull authority, nor sufficient study, are competent Judges of the truth. Our own Navigations make manifest, and all men learned in humane Sciences, now acknowledge there are Antipodes: And every day it appeareth more and more, that Years, and Dayes are determined by Motions of the Earth. Neverthelesse, men that have in their Writings but supposed such Doctrine, as an occasion to lay open the reasons for, and against it, have been punished for it by Authority Ecclesiasticall. But what reason is there for it? Is it because such opinions are contrary to true Religion? that cannot be, if they be true. Let therefore the truth be first examined by competent Judges, or confuted by them that pretend to know the contrary. Is it because they be contrary to the Religion established? Let them be silenced by the Laws of those, to whom the Teachers of them are subject; that is, by the Laws Civill: For disobedience may lawfully be punished in them, that against the Laws teach even true Philosophy. Is it because they tend to disorder in Government, as countenancing Rebellion, or Sedition? then let them be silenced, and the Teachers punished by vertue of his power to whom the care of the Publique quiet is committed; which is the Authority Civill. For whatsoever Power Ecclesiastiques take upon themselves (in any place where they are subject to the State) in their own Right, though they call it Gods Right, is but Usurpation.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVII, 1\n\nOF THE BENEFIT THAT PROCEEDETH FROM SUCH DARKNESSE, AND TO WHOM IT ACCREWETH\n\nCicero maketh honorable mention of one of the Cassii, a severe Judge amongst the Romans, for a custome he had, in Criminal causes, (when the testimony of the witnesses was not sufficient,) to ask the Accusers, Cui Bono; that is to say, what Profit, Honor, or other Contentment, the accused obtained, or expected by the Fact. For amongst Praesumptions, there is none that so evidently declareth the Author, as doth the BENEFIT of the Action. By the same rule I intend in this place to examine, who they may be, that have possessed the People so long in this part of Christendome, with these Doctrines, contrary to the Peaceable Societies of Mankind.\n\nAnd first, to this Error, That The Present Church Now Militant On Earth, Is The Kingdome Of God, (that is, the Kingdome of Glory, or the Land of Promise; not the Kingdome of Grace, which is but a Promise of the Land,) are annexed these worldly Benefits, First, that the Pastors, and Teachers of the Church, are entitled thereby, as Gods Publique Ministers, to a Right of Governing the Church; and consequently (because the Church, and Common-wealth are the same Persons) to be Rectors, and Governours of the Common-wealth. By this title it is, that the Pope prevailed with the subjects of all Christian Princes, to beleeve, that to disobey him, was to disobey Christ himselfe; and in all differences between him and other Princes, (charmed with the word Power Spirituall,) to abandon their lawfull Soveraigns; which is in effect an universall Monarchy over all Christendome. For though they were first invested in the right of being Supreme Teachers of Christian Doctrine, by, and under Christian Emperors, within the limits of the Romane Empire (as is acknowledged by themselves) by the title of Pontifex Maximus, who was an Officer subject to the Civill State; yet after the Empire was divided, and dissolved, it was not hard to obtrude upon the people already subject to them, another Title, namely, the Right of St. Peter; not onely to save entire their pretended Power; but also to extend the same over the same Christian Provinces, though no more united in the Empire of Rome. This Benefit of an Universall Monarchy, (considering the desire of men to bear Rule) is a sufficient Presumption, that the popes that pretended to it, and for a long time enjoyed it, were the Authors of the Doctrine, by which it was obtained; namely, that the Church now on Earth, is the Kingdome of Christ. For that granted, it must be understood, that Christ hath some Lieutenant amongst us, by whom we are to be told what are his Commandements.\n\nAfter that certain Churches had renounced this universall Power of the Pope, one would expect in reason, that the Civill Soveraigns in all those Churches, should have recovered so much of it, as (before they had unadvisedly let it goe) was their own Right, and in their own hands. And in England it was so in effect; saving that they, by whom the Kings administred the Government of Religion, by maintaining their imployment to be in Gods Right, seemed to usurp, if not a Supremacy, yet an Independency on the Civill Power: and they but seemed to usurp it, in as much as they acknowledged a Right in the King, to deprive them of the Exercise of their Functions at his pleasure.\n\nBut in those places where the Presbytery took that Office, though many other Doctrines of the Church of Rome were forbidden to be taught; yet this Doctrine, that the Kingdome of Christ is already come, and that it began at the Resurrection of our Saviour, was still retained. But Cui Bono? What Profit did they expect from it? The same which the Popes expected: to have a Soveraign Power over the People. For what is it for men to excommunicate their lawful King, but to keep him from all places of Gods publique Service in his own Kingdom? and with force to resist him, when he with force endeavoureth to correct them? Or what is it, without Authority from the Civill Soveraign, to excommunicate any person, but to take from him his Lawfull Liberty, that is, to usurpe an unlawfull Power over their Brethren? The Authors therefore of this Darknesse in Religion, are the Romane, and the Presbyterian Clergy.\n\nTo this head, I referre also all those Doctrines, that serve them to keep the possession of this spirituall Soveraignty after it is gotten. As first, that the Pope In His Publique Capacity Cannot Erre. For who is there, that beleeving this to be true, will not readily obey him in whatsoever he commands?\n\nSecondly, that all other Bishops, in what Common-wealth soever, have not their Right, neither immediately from God, nor mediately from their Civill Soveraigns, but from the Pope, is a Doctrine, by which there comes to be in every Christian Common-wealth many potent men, (for so are Bishops,) that have their dependance on the Pope, and owe obedience to him, though he be a forraign Prince; by which means he is able, (as he hath done many times) to raise a Civill War against the State that submits not it self to be governed according to his pleasure and Interest.\n\nThirdly, the exemption of these, and of all other Priests, and of all Monkes, and Fryers, from the Power of the Civill Laws. For by this means, there is a great part of every Common-wealth, that enjoy the benefit of the Laws, and are protected by the Power of the Civill State, which neverthelesse pay no part of the Publique expence; nor are lyable to the penalties, as other Subjects, due to their crimes; and consequently, stand not in fear of any man, but the Pope; and adhere to him onely, to uphold his universall Monarchy.\n\nFourthly, the giving to their Priests (which is no more in the New Testament but Presbyters, that is, Elders) the name of Sacerdotes, that is, Sacrificers, which was the title of the Civill Soveraign, and his publique Ministers, amongst the Jews, whilest God was their King. Also, the making the Lords Supper a Sacrifice, serveth to make the People beleeve the Pope hath the same power over all Christian, that Moses and Aaron had over the Jews; that is to say, all power, both Civill and Ecclesiasticall, as the High Priest then had.\n\nFiftly, the teaching that Matrimony is a Sacrament, giveth to the Clergy the Judging of the lawfulnesse of Marriages; and thereby, of what Children are Legitimate; and consequently, of the Right of Succession to haereditary Kingdomes.\n\nSixtly, the Deniall of Marriage to Priests, serveth to assure this Power of the pope over Kings. For if a King be a Priest, he cannot Marry, and transmit his Kingdome to his Posterity; If he be not a Priest then the Pope pretendeth this Authority Ecclesiasticall over him, and over his people.\n\nSeventhly, from Auricular Confession, they obtain, for the assurance of their Power, better intelligence of the designs of Princes, and great persons in the Civill State, than these can have of the designs of the State Ecclesiasticall.\n\nEighthly, by the Canonization of Saints, and declaring who are Martyrs, they assure their Power, in that they induce simple men into an obstinacy against the Laws and Commands of their Civill Soveraigns even to death, if by the Popes excommunication, they be declared Heretiques or Enemies to the Church; that is, (as they interpret it,) to the Pope.\n\nNinthly, they assure the same, by the Power they ascribe to every Priest, of making Christ; and by the Power of ordaining Pennance; and of Remitting, and Retaining of sins.\n\nTenthly, by the Doctrine of Purgatory, of Justification by externall works, and of Indulgences, the Clergy is enriched.\n\nEleventhly, by their Daemonology, and the use of Exorcisme, and other things appertaining thereto, they keep (or thinke they keep) the People more in awe of their Power.\n\nLastly, the Metaphysiques, Ethiques, and Politiques of Aristotle, the frivolous Distinctions, barbarous Terms, and obscure Language of the Schoolmen, taught in the Universities, (which have been all erected and regulated by the Popes Authority,) serve them to keep these Errors from being detected, and to make men mistake the Ignis Fatuus of Vain Philosophy, for the Light of the Gospell.\n\nTo these, if they sufficed not, might be added other of their dark Doctrines, the profit whereof redoundeth manifestly, to the setting up of an unlawfull Power over the lawfull Soveraigns of Christian People; or for the sustaining of the same, when it is set up; or to the worldly Riches, Honour, and Authority of those that sustain it. And therefore by the aforesaid rule, of Cui Bono, we may justly pronounce for the Authors of all this Spirituall Darknesse, the Pope, and Roman Clergy, and all those besides that endeavour to settle in the mindes of men this erroneous Doctrine, that the Church now on Earth, is that Kingdome of God mentioned in the Old and New Testament.\n\nBut the Emperours, and other Christian Soveraigns, under whose Government these Errours, and the like encroachments of Ecclesiastiques upon their Office, at first crept in, to the disturbance of their possessions, and of the tranquillity of their Subjects, though they suffered the same for want of foresight of the Sequel, and of insight into the designs of their Teachers, may neverthelesse bee esteemed accessories to their own, and the Publique dammage; For without their Authority there could at first no seditious Doctrine have been publiquely preached. I say they might have hindred the same in the beginning: But when the people were once possessed by those spirituall men, there was no humane remedy to be applyed, that any man could invent: And for the remedies that God should provide, who never faileth in his good time to destroy all the Machinations of men against the Truth, wee are to attend his good pleasure, that suffereth many times the prosperity of his enemies, together with their ambition, to grow to such a height, as the violence thereof openeth the eyes, which the warinesse of their predecessours had before sealed up, and makes men by too much grasping let goe all, as Peters net was broken, by the struggling of too great a multitude of Fishes; whereas the Impatience of those, that strive to resist such encroachment, before their Subjects eyes were opened, did but encrease the power they resisted. I doe not therefore blame the Emperour Frederick for holding the stirrop to our countryman Pope Adrian; for such was the disposition of his subjects then, as if hee had not doe it, hee was not likely to have succeeded in the Empire: But I blame those, that in the beginning, when their power was entire, by suffering such Doctrines to be forged in the Universities of their own Dominions, have holden the Stirrop to all the succeeding Popes, whilest they mounted into the Thrones of all Christian Soveraigns, to ride, and tire, both them, and their people, at their pleasure.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVII, 2\n\nBut as the Inventions of men are woven, so also are they ravelled out; the way is the same, but the order is inverted: The web begins at the first Elements of Power, which are Wisdom, Humility, Sincerity, and other vertues of the Apostles, whom the people converted, obeyed, out of Reverence, not by Obligation: Their Consciences were free, and their Words and Actions subject to none but the Civill Power. Afterwards the Presbyters (as the Flocks of Christ encreased) assembling to consider what they should teach, and thereby obliging themselves to teach nothing against the Decrees of their Assemblies, made it to be thought the people were thereby obliged to follow their Doctrine, and when they refused, refused to keep them company, (that was then called Excommunication,) not as being Infidels, but as being disobedient: And this was the first knot upon their Liberty. And the number of Presbyters encreasing, the Presbyters of the chief City or Province, got themselves an authority over the parochiall Presbyters, and appropriated to themselves the names of Bishops: And this was a second knot on Christian Liberty. Lastly, the Bishop of Rome, in regard of the Imperiall City, took upon him an Authority (partly by the wills of the Emperours themselves, and by the title of Pontifex Maximus, and at last when the Emperours were grown weak, by the priviledges of St. Peter) over all other Bishops of the Empire: Which was the third and last knot, and the whole Synthesis and Construction of the Pontificall Power.\n\nAnd therefore the Analysis, or Resolution is by the same way; but beginning with the knot that was last tyed; as wee may see in the dissolution of the praeterpoliticall Church Government in England.\n\nFirst, the Power of the Popes was dissolved totally by Queen Elizabeth; and the Bishops, who before exercised their Functions in Right of the Pope, did afterwards exercise the same in Right of the Queen and her Successours; though by retaining the phrase of Jure Divino, they were thought to demand it by immediate Right from God: And so was untyed the first knot. After this, the Presbyterians lately in England obtained the putting down of Episcopacy: And so was the second knot dissolved: And almost at the same time, the Power was taken also from the Presbyterians: And so we are reduced to the Independency of the Primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best: Which, if it be without contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ, by our affection to the Person of his Minister, (the fault which the Apostle reprehended in the Corinthians,) is perhaps the best: First, because there ought to be no Power over the Consciences of men, but of the Word it selfe, working Faith in every one, not alwayes according to the purpose of them that Plant and Water, but of God himself, that giveth the Increase: and secondly, because it is unreasonable in them, who teach there is such danger in every little Errour, to require of a man endued with Reason of his own, to follow the Reason of any other man, or of the most voices of many other men; Which is little better, then to venture his Salvation at crosse and pile. Nor ought those Teachers to be displeased with this losse of their antient Authority: For there is none should know better then they, that power is preserved by the same Vertues by which it is acquired; that is to say, by Wisdome, Humility, Clearnesse of Doctrine, and sincerity of Conversation; and not by suppression of the Naturall Sciences, and of the Morality of Naturall Reason; nor by obscure Language; nor by Arrogating to themselves more Knowledge than they make appear; nor by Pious Frauds; nor by such other faults, as in the Pastors of Gods Church are not only Faults, but also scandalls, apt to make men stumble one time or other upon the suppression of their Authority.\n\nBut after this Doctrine, “that the Church now Militant, is the Kingdome of God spoken of in the Old and New Testament,” was received in the World; the ambition, and canvasing for the Offices that belong thereunto, and especially for that great Office of being Christs Lieutenant, and the Pompe of them that obtained therein the principal Publique Charges, became by degrees so evident, that they lost the inward Reverence due to the Pastorall Function: in so much as the Wisest men, of them that had any power in the Civill State, needed nothing but the authority of their Princes, to deny them any further Obedience. For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for Bishop Universall, by pretence of Succession to St. Peter, their whole Hierarchy, or Kingdome of Darknesse, may be compared not unfitly to the Kingdome of Fairies; that is, to the old wives Fables in England, concerning Ghosts and Spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the originall of this great Ecclesiasticall Dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy, is no other, than the Ghost of the deceased Romane Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: For so did the Papacy start up on a Sudden out of the Ruines of that Heathen Power.\n\nThe Language also, which they use, both in the Churches, and in their Publique Acts, being Latine, which is not commonly used by any Nation now in the world, what is it but the Ghost of the Old Romane Language.\n\nThe Fairies in what Nation soever they converse, have but one Universall King, which some Poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, Prince of Daemons. The Ecclesiastiques likewise, in whose Dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one Universall King, the Pope.\n\nThe Ecclesiastiques are Spirituall men, and Ghostly Fathers. The Fairies are Spirits, and Ghosts. Fairies and Ghosts inhabite Darknesse, Solitudes, and Graves. The Ecclesiastiques walke in Obscurity of Doctrine, in Monasteries, Churches, and Churchyards.\n\nThe Ecclesiastiques have their Cathedral Churches; which, in what Towne soever they be erected, by vertue of Holy Water, and certain Charmes called Exorcismes, have the power to make those Townes, cities, that is to say, Seats of Empire. The Fairies also have their enchanted Castles, and certain Gigantique Ghosts, that domineer over the Regions round about them.\n\nThe fairies are not to be seized on; and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the Ecclesiastiques vanish away from the Tribunals of Civill Justice.\n\nThe Ecclesiastiques take from young men, the use of Reason, by certain Charms compounded of Metaphysiques, and Miracles, and Traditions, and Abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else, but to execute what they command them. The Fairies likewise are said to take young Children out of their Cradles, and to change them into Naturall Fools, which Common people do therefore call Elves, and are apt to mischief.\n\nIn what Shop, or Operatory the Fairies make their Enchantment, the old Wives have not determined. But the Operatories of the Clergy, are well enough known to be the Universities, that received their Discipline from Authority Pontificall.\n\nWhen the Fairies are displeased with any body, they are said to send their Elves, to pinch them. The Ecclesiastiques, when they are displeased with any Civill State, make also their Elves, that is, Superstitious, Enchanted Subjects, to pinch their Princes, by preaching Sedition; or one Prince enchanted with promises, to pinch another.\n\nThe Fairies marry not; but there be amongst them Incubi, that have copulation with flesh and bloud. The Priests also marry not.\n\nThe Ecclesiastiques take the Cream of the Land, by Donations of ignorant men, that stand in aw of them, and by Tythes: So also it is in the Fable of Fairies, that they enter into the Dairies, and Feast upon the Cream, which they skim from the Milk.\n\nWhat kind of Money is currant in the Kingdome of Fairies, is not recorded in the Story. But the Ecclesiastiques in their Receipts accept of the same Money that we doe; though when they are to make any Payment, it is in Canonizations, Indulgences, and Masses.\n\nTo this, and such like resemblances between the Papacy, and the Kingdome of Fairies, may be added this, that as the Fairies have no existence, but in the Fancies of ignorant people, rising from the Traditions of old Wives, or old Poets: so the Spirituall Power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own Civill Dominion) consisteth onely in the Fear that Seduced people stand in, of their Excommunication; upon hearing of false Miracles, false Traditions, and false Interpretations of the Scripture.\n\nIt was not therefore a very difficult matter, for Henry 8. by his Exorcisme; nor for Qu. Elizabeth by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this Spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by Missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yeeld him little fruit, may not return, or rather an Assembly of Spirits worse than he, enter, and inhabite this clean swept house, and make the End thereof worse than the beginning? For it is not the Romane Clergy onely, that pretends the Kingdome of God to be of this World, and thereby to have a Power therein, distinct from that of the Civill State. And this is all I had a designe to say, concerning the Doctrine of the POLITIQUES. Which when I have reviewed, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my Countrey.\n\nA REVIEW, AND CONCLUSION\n\n### Review and Conclusion, 1\n\nA REVIEW, AND CONCLUSION\n\nFrom the contrariety of some of the Naturall Faculties of the Mind, one to another, as also of one Passion to another, and from their reference to Conversation, there has been an argument taken, to inferre an impossibility that any one man should be sufficiently disposed to all sorts of Civill duty. The Severity of Judgment, they say, makes men Censorious, and unapt to pardon the Errours and Infirmities of other men: and on the other side, Celerity of Fancy, makes the thoughts lesse steddy than is necessary, to discern exactly between Right and Wrong. Again, in all Deliberations, and in all Pleadings, the faculty of solid Reasoning, is necessary: for without it, the Resolutions of men are rash, and their Sentences unjust: and yet if there be not powerfull Eloquence, which procureth attention and Consent, the effect of Reason will be little. But these are contrary Faculties; the former being grounded upon principles of Truth; the other upon Opinions already received, true, or false; and upon the Passions and Interests of men, which are different, and mutable.\n\nAnd amongst the Passions, Courage, (by which I mean the Contempt of Wounds, and violent Death) enclineth men to private Revenges, and sometimes to endeavour the unsetling of the Publique Peace; And Timorousnesse, many times disposeth to the desertion of the Publique Defence. Both these they say cannot stand together in the same person.\n\nAnd to consider the contrariety of mens Opinions, and Manners in generall, It is they say, impossible to entertain a constant Civill Amity with all those, with whom the Businesse of the world constrains us to converse: Which Businesse consisteth almost in nothing else but a perpetuall contention for Honor, Riches, and Authority.\n\nTo which I answer, that these are indeed great difficulties, but not Impossibilities: For by Education, and Discipline, they may bee, and are sometimes reconciled. Judgment, and Fancy may have place in the same man; but by turnes; as the end which he aimeth at requireth. As the Israelites in Egypt, were sometimes fastened to their labour of making Bricks, and other times were ranging abroad to gather Straw: So also may the Judgment sometimes be fixed upon one certain Consideration, and the Fancy at another time wandring about the world. So also Reason, and Eloquence, (though not perhaps in the Naturall Sciences, yet in the Morall) may stand very well together. For wheresoever there is place for adorning and preferring of Errour, there is much more place for adorning and preferring of Truth, if they have it to adorn. Nor is there any repugnancy between fearing the Laws, and not fearing a publique Enemy; nor between abstaining from Injury, and pardoning it in others. There is therefore no such Inconsistence of Humane Nature, with Civill Duties, as some think. I have known cleernesse of Judgment, and largenesse of Fancy; strength of Reason, and gracefull Elocution; a Courage for the Warre, and a Fear for the Laws, and all eminently in one man; and that was my most noble and honored friend Mr. Sidney Godolphin; who hating no man, nor hated of any, was unfortunately slain in the beginning of the late Civill warre, in the Publique quarrel, by an indiscerned, and an undiscerning hand.\n\nTo the Laws of Nature, declared in the 15. Chapter, I would have this added, “That every man is bound by Nature, as much as in him lieth, to protect in Warre, the Authority, by which he is himself protected in time of Peace.” For he that pretendeth a Right of Nature to preserve his owne body, cannot pretend a Right of Nature to destroy him, by whose strength he is preserved: It is a manifest contradiction of himselfe. And though this Law may bee drawn by consequence, from some of those that are there already mentioned; yet the Times require to have it inculcated, and remembred.\n\nAnd because I find by divers English Books lately printed, that the Civill warres have not yet sufficiently taught men, in what point of time it is, that a Subject becomes obliged to the Conquerour; nor what is Conquest; nor how it comes about, that it obliges men to obey his Laws: Therefore for farther satisfaction of men therein, I say, the point of time, wherein a man becomes subject of a Conquerour, is that point, wherein having liberty to submit to him, he consenteth, either by expresse words, or by other sufficient sign, to be his Subject. When it is that a man hath the liberty to submit, I have showed before in the end of the 21. Chapter; namely, that for him that hath no obligation to his former Soveraign but that of an ordinary Subject, it is then, when the means of his life is within the Guards and Garrisons of the Enemy; for it is then, that he hath no longer Protection from him, but is protected by the adverse party for his Contribution. Seeing therefore such contribution is every where, as a thing inevitable, (notwithstanding it be an assistance to the Enemy,) esteemed lawfull; as totall Submission, which is but an assistance to the Enemy, cannot be esteemed unlawfull. Besides, if a man consider that they who submit, assist the Enemy but with part of their estates, whereas they that refuse, assist him with the whole, there is no reason to call their Submission, or Composition an Assistance; but rather a Detriment to the Enemy. But if a man, besides the obligation of a Subject, hath taken upon him a new obligation of a Souldier, then he hath not the liberty to submit to a new Power, as long as the old one keeps the field, and giveth him means of subsistence, either in his Armies, or Garrisons: for in this case, he cannot complain of want of Protection, and means to live as a Souldier: But when that also failes, a Souldier also may seek his Protection wheresoever he has most hope to have it; and may lawfully submit himself to his new Master. And so much for the Time when he may do it lawfully, if hee will. If therefore he doe it, he is undoubtedly bound to be a true Subject: For a Contract lawfully made, cannot lawfully be broken.\n\nBy this also a man may understand, when it is, that men may be said to be Conquered; and in what the nature of Conquest, and the Right of a Conquerour consisteth: For this Submission is it implyeth them all. Conquest, is not the Victory it self; but the Acquisition by Victory, of a Right, over the persons of men. He therefore that is slain, is Overcome, but not Conquered; He that is taken, and put into prison, or chaines, is not Conquered, though Overcome; for he is still an Enemy, and may save himself if hee can: But he that upon promise of Obedience, hath his Life and Liberty allowed him, is then Conquered, and a Subject; and not before. The Romanes used to say, that their Generall had Pacified such a Province, that is to say, in English, Conquered it; and that the Countrey was Pacified by Victory, when the people of it had promised Imperata Facere, that is, To Doe What The Romane People Commanded Them: this was to be Conquered. But this promise may be either expresse, or tacite: Expresse, by Promise: Tacite, by other signes. As for example, a man that hath not been called to make such an expresse Promise, (because he is one whose power perhaps is not considerable;) yet if he live under their Protection openly, hee is understood to submit himselfe to the Government: But if he live there secretly, he is lyable to any thing that may bee done to a Spie, and Enemy of the State. I say not, hee does any Injustice, (for acts of open Hostility bear not that name); but that he may be justly put to death. Likewise, if a man, when his Country is conquered, be out of it, he is not Conquered, nor Subject: but if at his return, he submit to the Government, he is bound to obey it. So that Conquest (to define it) is the Acquiring of the Right of Soveraignty by Victory. Which Right, is acquired, in the peoples Submission, by which they contract with the Victor, promising Obedience, for Life and Liberty.\n\nIn the 29th Chapter I have set down for one of the causes of the Dissolutions of Common-wealths, their Imperfect Generation, consisting in the want of an Absolute and Arbitrary Legislative Power; for want whereof, the Civill Soveraign is fain to handle the Sword of Justice unconstantly, and as if it were too hot for him to hold: One reason whereof (which I have not there mentioned) is this, That they will all of them justifie the War, by which their Power was at first gotten, and whereon (as they think) their Right dependeth, and not on the Possession. As if, for example, the Right of the Kings of England did depend on the goodnesse of the cause of William the Conquerour, and upon their lineall, and directest Descent from him; by which means, there would perhaps be no tie of the Subjects obedience to their Soveraign at this day in all the world: wherein whilest they needlessely think to justifie themselves, they justifie all the successefull Rebellions that Ambition shall at any time raise against them, and their Successors. Therefore I put down for one of the most effectuall seeds of the Death of any State, that the Conquerours require not onely a Submission of mens actions to them for the future, but also an Approbation of all their actions past; when there is scarce a Common-wealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified.\n\nAnd because the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor lesse, than the name of Soveraignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they that use the former word, are understood to bee angry with them they call Tyrants; I think the toleration of a professed hatred of Tyranny, is a Toleration of hatred to Common-wealth in general, and another evill seed, not differing much from the former. For to the Justification of the Cause of a Conqueror, the Reproach of the Cause of the Conquered, is for the most part necessary: but neither of them necessary for the Obligation of the Conquered. And thus much I have thought fit to say upon the Review of the first and second part of this Discourse.\n\nIn the 35th Chapter, I have sufficiently declared out of the Scripture, that in the Common-wealth of the Jewes, God himselfe was made the Soveraign, by Pact with the People; who were therefore called his Peculiar People, to distinguish them from the rest of the world, over whom God reigned not by their Consent, but by his own Power: And that in this Kingdome Moses was Gods Lieutenant on Earth; and that it was he that told them what Laws God appointed to doe Execution; especially in Capitall Punishments; not then thinking it a matter of so necessary consideration, as I find it since. Wee know that generally in all Common-wealths, the Execution of Corporeall Punishments, was either put upon the Guards, or other Souldiers of the Soveraign Power; or given to those, in whom want of means, contempt of honour, and hardnesse of heart, concurred, to make them sue for such an Office. But amongst the Israelites it was a Positive Law of God their Soveraign, that he that was convicted of a capitall Crime, should be stoned to death by the People; and that the Witnesses should cast the first Stone, and after the Witnesses, then the rest of the People. This was a Law that designed who were to be the Executioners; but not that any one should throw a Stone at him before Conviction and Sentence, where the Congregation was Judge. The Witnesses were neverthelesse to be heard before they proceeded to Execution, unlesse the Fact were committed in the presence of the Congregation it self, or in sight of the lawfull Judges; for then there needed no other Witnesses but the Judges themselves. Neverthelesse, this manner of proceeding being not throughly understood, hath given occasion to a dangerous opinion, that any man may kill another, is some cases, by a Right of Zeal; as if the Executions done upon Offenders in the Kingdome of God in old time, proceeded not from the Soveraign Command, but from the Authority of Private Zeal: which, if we consider the texts that seem to favour it, is quite contrary.\n\n### Review and Conclusion, 2\n\nFirst, where the Levites fell upon the People, that had made and worshipped the Golden Calfe, and slew three thousand of them; it was by the Commandement of Moses, from the mouth of God; as is manifest, Exod. 32.27. And when the Son of a woman of Israel had blasphemed God, they that heard it, did not kill him, but brought him before Moses, who put him under custody, till God should give Sentence against him; as appears, Levit. 25.11, 12. Again, (Numbers 25.6, 7.) when Phinehas killed Zimri and Cosbi, it was not by right of Private Zeale: Their Crime was committed in the sight of the Assembly; there needed no Witnesse; the Law was known, and he the heir apparent to the Soveraignty; and which is the principall point, the Lawfulnesse of his Act depended wholly upon a subsequent Ratification by Moses, whereof he had no cause to doubt. And this Presumption of a future Ratification, is sometimes necessary to the safety [of] a Common-wealth; as in a sudden Rebellion, any man that can suppresse it by his own Power in the Countrey where it begins, may lawfully doe it, and provide to have it Ratified, or Pardoned, whilest it is in doing, or after it is done. Also Numb. 35.30. it is expressely said, “Whosoever shall kill the Murtherer, shall kill him upon the word of Witnesses:” but Witnesses suppose a formall Judicature, and consequently condemn that pretence of Jus Zelotarum. The Law of Moses concerning him that enticeth to Idolatry, (that is to say, in the Kingdome of God to a renouncing of his Allegiance) (Deut. 13.8.) forbids to conceal him, and commands the Accuser to cause him to be put to death, and to cast the first stone at him; but not to kill him before he be Condemned. And (Deut. 17. ver.4, 5, 6.) the Processe against Idolatry is exactly set down: For God there speaketh to the People, as Judge, and commandeth them, when a man is Accused of Idolatry, to Enquire diligently of the Fact, and finding it true, then to Stone him; but still the hand of the Witnesse throweth the first stone. This is not Private Zeal, but Publique Condemnation. In like manner when a Father hath a rebellious Son, the Law is (Deut. 21. 18.) that he shall bring him before the Judges of the Town, and all the people of the Town shall Stone him. Lastly, by pretence of these Laws it was, that St. Steven was Stoned, and not by pretence of Private Zeal: for before hee was carried away to Execution, he had Pleaded his Cause before the High Priest. There is nothing in all this, nor in any other part of the Bible, to countenance Executions by Private Zeal; which being oftentimes but a conjunction of Ignorance and Passion, is against both the Justice and Peace of a Common-wealth.\n\nIn the 36th Chapter I have said, that it is not declared in what manner God spake supernaturally to Moses: Not that he spake not to him sometimes by Dreams and Visions, and by a supernaturall Voice, as to other Prophets: For the manner how he spake unto him from the Mercy-seat, is expressely set down (Numbers 7.89.) in these words, “From that time forward, when Moses entred into the Tabernacle of the Congregation to speak with God, he heard a Voice which spake unto him from over the Mercy-Seate, which is over the Arke of the Testimony, from between the Cherubins he spake unto him.” But it is not declared in what consisted the praeeminence of the manner of Gods speaking to Moses, above that of his speaking to other Prophets, as to Samuel, and to Abraham, to whom he also spake by a Voice, (that is, by Vision) Unlesse the difference consist in the cleernesse of the Vision. For Face to Face, and Mouth to Mouth, cannot be literally understood of the Infinitenesse, and Incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature.\n\nAnd as to the whole Doctrine, I see not yet, but the principles of it are true and proper; and the Ratiocination solid. For I ground the Civill Right of Soveraigns, and both the Duty and Liberty of Subjects, upon the known naturall Inclinations of Mankind, and upon the Articles of the Law of Nature; of which no man, that pretends but reason enough to govern his private family, ought to be ignorant. And for the Power Ecclesiasticall of the same Soveraigns, I ground it on such Texts, as are both evident in themselves, and consonant to the Scope of the whole Scripture. And therefore am perswaded, that he that shall read it with a purpose onely to be informed, shall be informed by it. But for those that by Writing, or Publique Discourse, or by their eminent actions, have already engaged themselves to the maintaining of contrary opinions, they will not bee so easily satisfied. For in such cases, it is naturall for men, at one and the same time, both to proceed in reading, and to lose their attention, in the search of objections to that they had read before: Of which, in a time wherein the interests of men are changed (seeing much of that Doctrine, which serveth to the establishing of a new Government, must needs be contrary to that which conduced to the dissolution of the old,) there cannot choose but be very many.\n\nIn that part which treateth of a Christian Common-wealth, there are some new Doctrines, which, it may be, in a State where the contrary were already fully determined, were a fault for a Subject without leave to divulge, as being an usurpation of the place of a Teacher. But in this time, that men call not onely for Peace, but also for Truth, to offer such Doctrines as I think True, and that manifestly tend to Peace and Loyalty, to the consideration of those that are yet in deliberation, is no more, but to offer New Wine, to bee put into New Cask, that bothe may be preserved together. And I suppose, that then, when Novelty can breed no trouble, nor disorder in a State, men are not generally so much inclined to the reverence of Antiquity, as to preferre Ancient Errors, before New and well proved Truth.\n\nThere is nothing I distrust more than my Elocution; which neverthelesse I am confident (excepting the Mischances of the Presse) is not obscure. That I have neglected the Ornament of quoting ancient Poets, Orators, and Philosophers, contrary to the custome of late time, (whether I have done well or ill in it,) proceedeth from my judgment, grounded on many reasons. For first, all Truth of Doctrine dependeth either upon Reason, or upon Scripture; both which give credit to many, but never receive it from any Writer. Secondly, the matters in question are not of Fact, but of Right, wherein there is no place for Witnesses. There is scarce any of those old Writers, that contradicteth not sometimes both himself, and others; which makes their Testimonies insufficient. Fourthly, such Opinions as are taken onely upon Credit of Antiquity, are not intrinsically the Judgment of those that cite them, but Words that passe (like gaping) from mouth to mouth. Fiftly, it is many times with a fraudulent Designe that men stick their corrupt Doctrine with the Cloves of other mens Wit. Sixtly, I find not that the Ancients they cite, took it for an Ornament, to doe the like with those that wrote before them. Seventhly, it is an argument of Indigestion, when Greek and Latine Sentences unchewed come up again, as they use to doe, unchanged. Lastly, though I reverence those men of Ancient time, that either have written Truth perspicuously, or set us in a better way to find it out our selves; yet to the Antiquity it self I think nothing due: For if we will reverence the Age, the Present is the Oldest. If the Antiquity of the Writer, I am not sure, that generally they to whom such honor is given, were more Ancient when they wrote, than I am that am Writing: But if it bee well considered, the praise of Ancient Authors, proceeds not from the reverence of the Dead, but from the competition, and mutuall envy of the Living.\n\nTo conclude, there is nothing in this whole Discourse, nor in that I writ before of the same Subject in Latine, as far as I can perceive, contrary either to the Word of God, or to good Manners; or to the disturbance of the Publique Tranquillity. Therefore I think it may be profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities, in case they also think so, to whom the judgment of the same belongeth. For seeing the Universities are the Fountains of Civill, and Morall Doctrine, from whence the Preachers, and the Gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same (both from the Pulpit, and in their Conversation) upon the People, there ought certainly to be great care taken, to have it pure, both from the Venime of Heathen Politicians, and from the Incantation of Deceiving Spirits. And by that means the most men, knowing their Duties, will be the less subject to serve the Ambition of a few discontented persons, in their purposes against the State; and be the lesse grieved with the Contributions necessary for their Peace, and Defence; and the Governours themselves have the lesse cause, to maintain at the Common charge any greater Army, than is necessary to make good the Publique Liberty, against the Invasions and Encroachments of forraign Enemies.\n\nAnd thus I have brought to an end my Discourse of Civill and Ecclesiasticall Government, occasioned by the disorders of the present time, without partiality, without application, and without other designe, than to set before mens eyes the mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience; of which the condition of Humane Nature, and the Laws Divine, (both Naturall and Positive) require an inviolable observation. And though in the revolution of States, there can be no very good Constellation for Truths of this nature to be born under, (as having an angry aspect from the dissolvers of an old Government, and seeing but the backs of them that erect a new;) yet I cannot think it will be condemned at this time, either by the Publique Judge of Doctrine, or by any that desires the continuance of Publique Peace. And in this hope I return to my interrupted Speculation of Bodies Naturall; wherein, (if God give me health to finish it,) I hope the Novelty will as much please, as in the Doctrine of this Artificiall Body it useth to offend. For such Truth, as opposeth no man profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.\n\nFINIS\n\n*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEVIATHAN ***\n\nUpdated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.\n\nSTART: FULL LICENSE","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/leviathan/original.txt"},"translations":[{"id":"trn_leviathan_mouseia","translator":"Mouseia","kind":"curated","note":"Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the complete 1651 English text (introduction, forty-seven chapters, review and conclusion) for fidelity, the author’s force and cadence, and modern clarity. Hobbes’s marginal summaries are omitted.","text":"### Introduction\n\nNature—the art by which God has made and governs the world—is imitated by human art in this, as in many other things: it can make an artificial animal. For since life is only the motion of limbs, beginning in some principal part within, why should we not say that all automata—machines that move themselves by springs and wheels, as a watch does—have an artificial life? What is the heart but a spring; the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, moving the whole body as its maker intended? Art goes further still, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin CIVITAS), which is only an artificial man, though greater in stature and strength than the natural man for whose protection and defense it was intended. In it sovereignty is an artificial soul, giving life and motion to the whole body; magistrates and other officers of judgment and execution are artificial joints; reward and punishment, which, attached to the seat of sovereignty, move each joint and member to perform its duty, are the nerves, performing the same office in the natural body; the wealth and riches of all its individual members are its strength; Salus Populi (the People's Safety) is its business; counselors, who bring to its attention everything it needs to know, are its memory; equity and laws, its artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Finally, the pacts and Covenants by which the parts of this body politic were first made, assembled, and united resemble that Fiat, or “Let Us Make Man,” pronounced by God at the Creation.\n\nTo describe the nature of this artificial man, I will consider:\n\nFirst, its matter and its maker, both of which are man.\n\nSecond, how and by what Covenants it is made; what are the rights and just power or authority of a sovereign; and what preserves and dissolves it.\n\nThird, what a Christian Commonwealth is.\n\nLastly, what the Kingdom of Darkness is.\n\nConcerning the first, a saying much repeated lately holds that wisdom is acquired not by reading books, but by reading men. Accordingly, those who can generally offer no other proof of wisdom take great pleasure in showing what they think they have read in men, through uncharitable judgments of one another behind their backs. But there is another saying, little understood of late, by which they might learn truly to read one another if they would take the trouble: Nosce Teipsum, “Read Yourself.” It was not meant, as it is now used, to excuse barbarous conduct by people in power toward their inferiors or to encourage insolence in people of low standing toward their superiors. It was meant to teach us that, because one man's thoughts and Passions resemble another's, whoever looks into himself and considers what he does when he thinks, forms opinions, reasons, hopes, fears, and so forth, and on what grounds, will thereby read and know the thoughts and Passions of all other men on like occasions. I mean the resemblance of Passions, which are the same in all men—desire, fear, hope, and so forth—not the resemblance of the objects of the Passions, the things desired, feared, or hoped for. Individual constitution and particular upbringing make those objects so variable and so easy to conceal from us that the characters of a man's heart, blurred and confused by dissembling, lying, pretense, and false doctrines, are legible only to him who searches hearts. Though we sometimes discover men's designs through their actions, to do so without comparing those actions with our own and distinguishing every circumstance that might alter the case is to decipher without a key. We shall mostly be deceived, whether through too much trust or too much suspicion, according as the reader himself is a good or an evil man.\n\nHowever perfectly one man reads another by his actions, the knowledge serves him only among his acquaintances, who are few. Whoever is to govern a whole nation must read in himself not this or that particular man, but mankind. Though this is hard to do—harder than learning any language or science—once I have set down my own reading in an orderly and clear way, the only labor left to another will be to consider whether he too finds the same in himself. For this kind of doctrine admits no other demonstration.\n\nPART I. OF MAN\n\n### Part I, Chapter I\n\nOF SENSE\n\nConcerning human thoughts, I will consider them first singly, then in sequence or dependence upon one another. Taken singly, each is a representation or appearance of some quality or other attribute of a body outside us, commonly called an object. The object acts upon the eyes, ears, and other parts of the human body, and its different modes of action produce different appearances.\n\nThe origin of them all is what we call sense; for there is no conception in a human mind that was not first produced, wholly or in part, upon the organs of sense. All the rest derive from that origin.\n\nTo know the natural cause of sense is not strictly necessary to the present undertaking, and I have written about it at length elsewhere. Nevertheless, to give each part of my present method its due, I will briefly explain it here.\n\nThe cause of sense is the external body, or object, which presses upon the organ proper to each sense, either immediately, as in taste and touch, or indirectly, as in sight, hearing, and smell. This pressure, carried inward through the nerves and other fibers and membranes of the body to the brain and heart, causes there a resistance, or counterpressure: an effort by the heart to free itself. Because this effort is outward, it seems to be something outside us. And this seeming, or fancy, is what people call sense. To the eye it consists of light or color in a shape; to the ear, of sound; to the nostril, of odor; to the tongue and palate, of flavor; and to the rest of the body, of heat, cold, hardness, softness, and such other qualities as we discern by feeling. All these qualities called sensible are, in the object that causes them, only so many different motions of matter, pressing on our organs in different ways. Nor are they anything but different motions in us who are pressed, for motion produces nothing but motion. Yet their appearance to us is fancy, whether we are awake or dreaming. Just as pressing, rubbing, or striking the eye makes us fancy a light, and pressing the ear produces a din, so the bodies we see or hear produce the same effects by their powerful though imperceptible action. For if those colors and sounds were in the bodies or objects that cause them, they could not be separated from those bodies, as we see them separated through reflection in mirrors and echoes: the thing we see is in one place, the appearance in another. And although at a certain distance the real object itself seems clothed in the fancy it gives rise to in us, the object remains one thing, and its image or fancy another. Thus sense in every case is nothing but original fancy, caused, as I have said, by the pressure—that is, the motion—of external things upon our eyes, ears, and other organs appointed for that purpose.\n\nBut the schools of philosophy throughout the universities of Christendom, relying on certain texts of Aristotle, teach another doctrine. They say, to explain vision, that the thing seen sends out in every direction a visible species—that is, in English, a visible show, apparition, aspect, or “being seen”—and that its reception into the eye is seeing. To explain hearing, they say the thing heard sends out an audible species, an audible aspect or audible “being seen,” which enters the ear and makes hearing. Indeed, to explain understanding too, they say the thing understood sends out intelligible species, an intelligible “being seen,” which enters the understanding and makes us understand. I say this not because I disapprove of universities, but because I shall speak later of their office in a Commonwealth. I must therefore show you, as occasions arise, what needs reforming in them; among those things is their frequent use of meaningless speech.\n\nCHAPTER II. OF IMAGINATION\n\n### Part I, Chapter II\n\nOF IMAGINATION\n\nThat a thing at rest will remain at rest forever unless something else moves it is a truth no one doubts. But that a thing in motion will move forever unless something else stops it is not so readily accepted, although the reason is the same: nothing can change itself. For people measure not only other people but all other things by themselves. Finding themselves subject to pain and fatigue after moving, they think everything else tires of motion and seeks rest of its own accord, hardly considering whether the desire for rest they find in themselves might itself consist in some other motion. This is why the Schools say that heavy bodies fall downward from an appetite for rest and for preserving their nature in the place most proper to them. They absurdly ascribe to inanimate things an appetite and knowledge of what is good for their preservation—more knowledge than man possesses.\n\nOnce a body is in motion, it moves forever unless something else impedes it; and whatever impedes it cannot extinguish its motion instantly, but only gradually, over time. We see that although the wind dies down, waves go on rolling in the water for a long time afterward. So too with the motion produced in the inward parts of a person when he sees, dreams, and so forth. After the object has been removed, or the eye closed, we still retain an image of what we saw, though fainter than when we see it. The Latins call this imagination, from the image formed in seeing, and apply the same name, improperly, to all the other senses. The Greeks call it fancy, meaning appearance, a term as proper to one sense as to another. Imagination, therefore, is nothing but decaying sense; it occurs in human beings and many other living creatures, asleep as well as awake.\n\nThe decay of sense in waking people is not a decay of the motion made in sense, but an obscuring of it, as sunlight obscures the light of the stars. The stars exert their power to be seen no less by day than by night; but because, among the many impacts that our eyes, ears, and other organs receive from external bodies, only the predominant one is perceptible, the sunlight predominates and we do not perceive the action of the stars. Once any object has passed from our sight, its impression remains in us; yet, as other, more immediate objects come and act upon us, imagination of the past grows dim and weak, like a person's voice amid the noise of the day. It follows that the more time has passed since we saw or sensed an object, the weaker our imagination of it becomes. For the continual changes in the human body destroy over time the parts moved by sensation. Distance in time and distance in space thus have the same effect upon us: at a distance, what we look at appears dim, with its smaller parts indistinct, and voices grow faint and inarticulate; likewise, after a long time, imagination of the past grows weak, and we lose, for example, many individual streets from cities we have seen, and many particular circumstances from actions. When we wish to express the thing itself—I mean the fancy itself—we call this decaying sense imagination, as I said before. But when we wish to express its decay and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, we call it memory. Imagination and memory, then, are one thing with different names according to how we consider it.\n\nMuch memory, or memory of many things, is called experience. Again, imagination deals only with things previously perceived by sense, either all at once or in parts at different times. The former kind, imagining the whole object as it appeared to sense, is simple imagination, as when one imagines a man or a horse one has seen before. The other kind is compound imagination: from seeing a man at one time and a horse at another, we conceive a centaur in our minds. Likewise, when a man combines the image of his own person with the image of another man's actions, imagining himself a Hercules or an Alexander—as often happens to people deeply taken with romances—this is compound imagination, or, strictly speaking, a fiction of the mind. There are also other imaginations that arise in people, even while awake, from a strong impression on the senses. After gazing at the sun, for example, its impression leaves an image before our eyes for a long time; and after attending long and intensely to geometric figures, a person may see images of lines and angles before his eyes in the dark, although awake. This kind of fancy has no particular name, since it seldom enters into people's conversation.\n\nThe imaginations of those who sleep are what we call dreams. These too, like all other imaginations, have previously been present in sense, either whole or in parts. Because in sleep the brain and nerves, the necessary organs of sense, are so numbed that external objects do not easily move them, no imagination—and therefore no dream—can occur in sleep except one arising from agitation of the inward parts of the body. When those parts are disturbed, their connection with the brain and other organs keeps those organs in motion, so that images formed there earlier appear as if a person were awake. But since the organs of sense are now numbed, there is no new object to overpower and obscure those images with a stronger impression; amid this silence of sense a dream is necessarily clearer than our waking thoughts. Hence it is difficult, and many think it impossible, to distinguish exactly between sensation and dreaming. As for me, I consider that in dreams I do not often or consistently think of the same people, places, objects, and actions as when awake, nor do I remember as long a chain of connected thoughts in dreams as at other times. And since when awake I often notice the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am satisfied that when awake I know I am not dreaming, although when I dream I think myself awake.\n\nSince dreams are caused by disturbances of some inward parts of the body, different disturbances must cause different dreams. Thus lying cold gives rise to dreams of fear and calls up the image of some frightening object, the motion from the brain to the inner parts and from the inner parts to the brain being reciprocal. Just as anger causes heat in some parts of the body while we are awake, so when we sleep, overheating in those same parts causes anger and raises the image of an enemy in the brain. In the same way, just as natural affection when we are awake causes desire, and desire produces heat in certain other parts of the body, so excessive heat in those parts while we sleep raises in the brain an image of affection shown to us. In short, our dreams reverse our waking imaginations: the motion begins at one end when we are awake and at the other when we dream.\n\nIt is most difficult to distinguish a dream from waking thoughts when by some accident we do not notice that we have slept. This can easily happen to someone full of fearful thoughts and troubled in conscience, who sleeps without the usual business of going to bed or undressing, as when nodding off in a chair. A person who takes care and deliberately lies down to sleep, on the other hand, cannot easily mistake any strange and extravagant fancy that comes to him for anything but a dream. We read that Marcus Brutes, whose life Julius Caesar had spared and who was also his favorite, but who nevertheless murdered him, saw a dreadful apparition at Phillipi on the night before he gave battle to Augustus Caesar. Historians commonly relate it as a vision, but from the circumstances one may readily judge that it was only a brief dream. Sitting in his tent, brooding and troubled by the horror of his rash act, he could easily have dreamed as he dozed in the cold of the thing that frightened him most. As his fear gradually woke him, so it must also have made the apparition gradually vanish. Having no assurance that he had slept, he had no reason to think it a dream rather than a vision. Nor is this very rare: even people fully awake, if timid and superstitious, filled with frightening tales and alone in the dark, are subject to similar fancies and believe they see spirits and ghosts of the dead walking in churchyards. Yet it is either their fancy alone, or the trickery of people who take advantage of such superstitious fear to travel in disguise at night to places they would not want to be known to visit.\n\nFrom ignorance of how to distinguish dreams and other powerful fancies from vision and sensation arose much of the ancient religion of the Gentiles, who worshiped satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and the like; and from it comes the opinion that unschooled people nowadays hold about fairies, ghosts, and goblins, and the power of witches. As for witches, I do not think their witchcraft has any real power. Yet I think they are justly punished for their false belief that they can do such harm, joined to their purpose to do it if they can; their occupation is closer to a new religion than to a craft or science. As for fairies and wandering ghosts, I think belief in them has deliberately been taught, or left unchallenged, to preserve the standing of exorcism, crosses, holy water, and other such inventions of clerics. There is nevertheless no doubt that God can create apparitions contrary to nature. But it is no article of Christian faith that he does this so often that people should fear such things more than they fear a halt or change in the course of nature, which he also can halt or change. Evil people, however, under the pretext that God can do anything, are bold enough to say anything when it suits them, even if they believe it false. A wise man should believe them no further than sound reason makes what they say credible. If this superstitious fear of spirits were removed, together with forecasts drawn from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending on that fear, by which cunning, ambitious people deceive the simple, men would be much better prepared for civil obedience than they are.\n\nThis ought to be the work of the Schools; instead, they nourish such doctrines. Not knowing what imagination or the senses are, they teach whatever they receive: some say imaginations arise of themselves, without a cause; others say they arise most often from the will, and that good thoughts are blown, or inspired, into a person by God and evil ones by the Devil; or that good thoughts are poured, or infused, into a person by God and evil ones by the Devil. Some say the senses receive the species of things and hand them to the common sense, which hands them to fancy, which hands them to memory, which hands them to judgment, as if passing objects from hand to hand. With many words, they make nothing understood.\n\nThe imagination raised in a person, or any other creature capable of imagining, by words or other voluntary signs is what we generally call understanding; it is common to humans and animals. A dog learns by habit to understand its master's call or rebuke, and many other animals do likewise. Understanding peculiar to humanity is the understanding not only of another's will, but of his conceptions and thoughts, through the sequence and arrangement of the names of things in affirmations, negations, and other forms of speech. Of this kind of understanding I shall speak later.\n\nCHAPTER III. OF THE CONSEQUENCE OR TRAIN OF IMAGINATIONS\n\n### Part I, Chapter III\n\nOF THE CONSEQUENCE OR TRAIN OF IMAGINATIONS\n\nBy a consequence, or train, of thoughts I mean the succession of one thought after another, called mental discourse to distinguish it from discourse in words.\n\nWhen someone thinks about anything at all, the next thought is not quite so accidental as it seems. Not every thought follows any other indiscriminately. Just as we have no imagination of something we have not previously sensed, wholly or in parts, so we make no transition from one image to another unless we have experienced a like transition before in our senses. Here is why: all fancies are motions within us, remnants of motions produced in sense. Motions that followed one another immediately in sensation remain connected afterward; when the first recurs and becomes predominant, the second follows through the cohesion of the matter moved, much as water on a level table is drawn in the direction in which any one part is guided by a finger. But because in sensation one thing sometimes follows an object, sometimes another, it eventually becomes impossible to know with certainty what we shall imagine next when imagining any given thing. Only this is certain: it will be something that followed the same thing before, at one time or another.\n\nThis train of thoughts, or mental discourse, is of two kinds. The first is unguided, without design, and inconstant: no thought driven by Passion governs and directs the thoughts that follow toward itself as the end and aim of some desire or other Passion. In this case our thoughts are said to wander, and seem irrelevant to one another, as in a dream. Such are commonly the thoughts of people who are not only alone but free from any concern. Even then their thoughts are as busy as ever, but without harmony, like the sound a lute out of tune would give to anyone, or a lute in tune to someone unable to play. Yet in this wild ranging of the mind one can often perceive its course and the dependence of one thought on another. During a discussion of our present civil war, what could seem less relevant than to ask, as someone did, the value of a Roman penny? Yet the connection was clear enough to me. The thought of the war introduced the thought of handing over the King to his enemies; that brought to mind the handing over of Christ; and that, in turn, the 30 pence paid for that treachery. From there the malicious question followed easily. All this took only a moment, for thought is swift.\n\nThe second kind is steadier, governed by some desire and design. The impression made by things we desire or fear is strong and lasting, or, if it fades for a time, quick to return. It is sometimes strong enough to interrupt our sleep. Desire gives rise to the thought of some means we have seen produce something like what we seek; that brings the thought of a means to that means; and so on, until we arrive at a starting point within our power. And because the end, through the strength of its impression, often comes to mind, if our thoughts begin to wander they are quickly brought back on course. Observing this, one of the seven wise men gave people this precept, now worn out: Respice Finem, that is, in every action look often toward what you want, for it directs all your thoughts along the way to attain it.\n\nThe train of ordered thoughts has two kinds: in the first, imagining an effect, we seek the causes or means that produce it; this is common to humans and animals. In the other, imagining anything whatever, we seek all the possible effects it might produce—that is, we imagine what we could do with it if we had it. I have never seen a sign of this in any creature but a human being, for such curiosity can scarcely belong to an animal whose only Passions are sensual, such as hunger, thirst, lust, and anger. In short, when governed by design, the mind's discourse is nothing but seeking, or the faculty of invention, which the Latins call Sagacitas and Solertia: hunting out the causes of an effect, present or past, or the effects of a present or past cause. Sometimes a person looks for something lost. Starting from the place and time at which he misses it, his mind retraces its steps from place to place and time to time to find where and when he had it—that is, to establish a definite and limited time and place from which to begin searching. From there his thoughts run again through the same places and times, to find the act or other occasion by which he might have lost it. This we call remembrance, or calling to mind; the Latins call it Reminiscentia, as if retracing our former actions.\n\nSometimes a person knows a definite place within which to seek something. His thoughts then range over every part of it, as one sweeps a room to find a jewel, or a spaniel ranges a field until it finds a scent, or someone runs through the alphabet to find a rhyme.\n\nSometimes a person wants to know how an action will turn out. He then thinks of some similar past action and its results, one after another, supposing that similar results will follow similar actions. Someone foreseeing what will become of a criminal, for instance, runs through what he has seen follow a like crime before. His thoughts proceed in this order: the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows. This kind of thought is called foresight and prudence, or providence, and sometimes wisdom, though such conjecture is highly fallible because it is difficult to observe every circumstance. Yet this much is certain: the more experience of past events one man has than another, the more prudent he is, and the less often his expectations fail him. Only the present exists in nature. Past things exist only in memory, while things to come have no existence at all: the future is merely a fiction of the mind, applying the consequences of past actions to present ones. The man with the most experience does this with the greatest assurance, though never with enough for certainty. And although we call it prudence when events answer our expectations, in its own nature it is only presumption. Foresight of things to come—providence—belongs only to him by whose will they will come to pass. From him alone, and by supernatural means, comes prophecy. By nature, the best prophet is the best guesser, and the best guesser is the person most practiced and knowledgeable in the subject of his guesses, for he has the most signs to guide him.\n\nA sign is an event that comes before another, taken as a sign of what follows, or an event that follows another, taken as a sign of what came before, when similar sequences have already been observed. The more often they have been observed, the less uncertain the sign. Thus whoever has most experience in any business has the most signs from which to guess its future, and is consequently the most prudent—more prudent than someone new to that business by a margin no advantage of natural, spontaneous wit can equal, though many young men perhaps think otherwise.\n\nNevertheless, prudence is not what distinguishes man from beast. Some animals, at a year old, observe and pursue what is good for them more prudently than a child of ten.\n\nAs prudence is a presumption about the future drawn from experience of the past, so there is a presumption about past things drawn from other things that are also past, not future. A man who has seen the stages by which a flourishing State first fell into civil war and then into ruin will, at the sight of another State's ruins, guess that a similar war and similar stages occurred there too. His conjecture is almost as uncertain as a conjecture about the future, since both rest on experience alone.\n\nI can recall no other act of the human mind so naturally planted in it that nothing more is needed for its exercise than to be born human and live with the use of the five senses. The other faculties, of which I shall speak shortly, and which seem peculiar to human beings, are acquired and developed by study and effort, and learned by most through instruction and discipline. They all arise from the invention of words and speech. For apart from sense, thoughts, and trains of thought, the human mind has no other motion, though through the help of speech and method these same faculties can be raised high enough to distinguish humans from all other living creatures.\n\nWhatever we imagine is finite. Therefore we have no idea or conception of anything we call infinite. No one can hold in his mind an image of infinite magnitude, or conceive the ends and boundaries of what is so named. We conceive not the thing, but our own inability. Thus the name of GOD is used not to make us conceive him—for he is beyond comprehension, and his greatness and power cannot be conceived—but so that we may honor him. And since, as I said before, whatever we conceive has first been perceived by sense, either wholly or in parts, we can have no thought that represents something not subject to sense. No one, therefore, can conceive anything without conceiving it in some place, having a definite magnitude and divisible into parts. Nor can one conceive a thing existing wholly in one place and wholly in another at the same time, or two or more things occupying one and the same place at once. None of these things ever has been or can be encountered in sense; they are absurd expressions, accepted on trust without any meaning at all from deceived philosophers and deceived or deceitful Schoolmen.\n\nCHAPTER IV. OF SPEECH\n\n### Part I, Chapter IV, 1\n\nOF SPEECH\n\nThe invention of printing, ingenious though it is, is no great matter compared with the invention of letters. But who first discovered the use of letters is unknown. People say Cadmus, son of Agenor, King of Phaenicia, first brought them into Greece. It was a useful invention for preserving the memory of the past and joining humankind across so many far-flung regions of the Earth; and a difficult one, requiring careful observation of the various movements of the tongue, palate, lips, and other organs of speech, in order to devise a corresponding variety of written characters to remember them. But the noblest and most useful invention of all was speech, consisting of names or appellations and their connections. By it people record their thoughts, recall them when they have passed, and communicate them to one another for mutual benefit and conversation. Without it there would have been among human beings no Commonwealth, no society, no contract, and no peace, any more than among lions, bears, and wolves. The first author of speech was GOD himself, who taught Adam to name the creatures he presented to his sight; Scripture tells us no more than this. Yet this was enough to enable Adam to add further names as his experience and use of the creatures called for them, and gradually to join the names so as to make himself understood. In time he might thus acquire as much language as he found useful, though not so rich as an orator or philosopher requires. For I find nothing in Scripture from which one can infer, directly or by implication, that Adam was taught the names of all figures, numbers, measures, colors, sounds, fancies, and relations; much less the names of words and forms of speech, such as general, special, affirmative, negative, interrogative, optative, and infinitive, all of which are useful; and least of all such terms of the Schools as entity, intentionality, and quiddity.\n\nBut all the language Adam and his descendants had acquired and expanded was lost again at the tower of Babel, when God punished each man for rebellion by making him forget his former language. Forced thereby to disperse into different parts of the world, they must have developed the diversity of tongues that now exists by degrees, as necessity, the mother of all inventions, taught them; and with the passage of time those tongues grew richer everywhere.\n\nThe general use of speech is to turn our mental discourse into verbal discourse, or the train of our thoughts into a train of words. This has two advantages. The first is recording the consequences of our thoughts, which otherwise readily slip from our memory and force us to begin our labor anew, but can be recalled by the words with which we marked them. Thus the first use of names is to serve as marks, or aids to memory. The other advantage is that people using the same words can communicate to one another, through their arrangement and order, what they conceive or think about each matter, as well as what they desire, fear, or feel any other Passion toward; in this use words are called signs. The particular uses of speech are these. First, to record what we discover by thought to be the cause of anything present or past, and what we find present or past things can produce or bring about—in short, to acquire arts. Second, to show others what we have learned, which is to counsel and teach one another. Third, to make our wills and purposes known to others so that we may help one another. Fourth, innocently to please and delight ourselves and others by playing with words for pleasure or ornament.\n\nTo these uses correspond four abuses. The first occurs when people record their thoughts wrongly through the shifting meanings of their words, and thereby record as their own conceptions things they never conceived, deceiving themselves. The second occurs when they use words metaphorically, in a sense other than the one for which they were appointed, and thereby deceive others. The third is to declare in words a will that is not their own. The fourth is to use words to hurt one another. Since nature has armed living creatures with teeth, horns, or hands to hurt an enemy, it is an abuse of speech to hurt him with the tongue, unless he is someone we are obliged to govern; in that case our aim is not to hurt but to correct and improve him.\n\nSpeech serves the memory of the sequence of causes and effects through the assigning and connecting of names.\n\nSome names are proper, belonging to only one thing, as Peter, John, This Man, and This Tree. Others are common to many things, as Man, Horse, and Tree. Although each of these is one name, it names many individual things; with respect to them all together, it is called a universal. Nothing in the world is universal except names: the things named are each individual and singular.\n\nA single universal name is given to many things because they resemble one another in some quality or other attribute. A proper name calls to mind only one thing, while a universal can call to mind any of many things.\n\nOf universal names, some have a wider scope than others, the wider including the narrower; while some have equal scope and include each other reciprocally. For example, the name Body has a wider meaning than Man and includes it; whereas Man and Rational have equal scope and include one another. But we should notice here that a name does not always mean, as it does in grammar, only one word: it may be a phrase of several words. Thus all these words, He Who In His Actions Observes The Laws Of His Country, form a single name equivalent to the one word Just.\n\nBy assigning names of wider or narrower meaning, we turn the mind's reckoning of the consequences of imagined things into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations. For example, a person without any use of speech—someone born completely deaf and mute who remains so—might place before his eyes a triangle and, beside it, two right angles such as the corners of a square figure. By considering them, he might compare and discover that the triangle's three angles equal the two right angles beside it. But if he were shown a triangle of a different shape, he could not know without further effort whether its three angles were likewise equal to the same two angles. Someone who uses words, however, observes that this equality follows not from the length of the sides or any other feature peculiar to his triangle, but solely from its having straight sides and three angles—the very features for which he named it a triangle. He will confidently conclude as a universal rule that all triangles have this equality of angles, and record his discovery in these general terms: Every Triangle Has Its Three Angles Equal To Two Right Angles. Thus a consequence found in one particular case comes to be recorded and remembered as a universal rule. It frees our mental reckoning from time and place, spares the mind every labor but the first, and makes what was found true Here and Now true at All Times and Places.\n\nNowhere is the use of words in recording our thoughts more evident than in counting. A person of limited natural ability who has never learned the order of number words, such as One, Two, and Three, may note each stroke of a clock and nod at it or say “one, one, one,” yet can never know what hour it strikes. And it appears that there was a time when number words were not in use, and people had to apply the fingers of one or both hands to the things they wished to count. This may explain why number words in every nation now run only to ten, and in some nations only to five, before beginning again. Even someone who can count to ten will lose his place if he recites the numbers out of order and will not know when he is done; much less will he be able to add, subtract, or carry out other operations of arithmetic. Without words, therefore, we cannot reckon numbers, much less magnitudes, speed, force, and the other things whose reckoning is necessary to the existence or well-being of humankind.\n\nWhen two names are joined in a consequence or affirmation, as in “A Man Is A Living Creature,” or “If He Is A Man, He Is A Living Creature,” the affirmation or consequence is true if the second name, Living Creature, signifies everything signified by the first, Man; otherwise it is false. For true and false are attributes of speech, not of things. Where there is no speech, there is neither truth nor falsehood. There may be error, as when we expect what will not happen or suspect what has not happened, but in neither case can a person be charged with untruth.\n\n### Part I, Chapter IV, 2\n\nSince truth consists in the proper ordering of names in our assertions, anyone seeking exact truth must remember what each name he uses stands for and place it accordingly. Otherwise he will find himself entangled in words like a bird in sticky twigs: the more it struggles, the more firmly it is caught. Thus in geometry—the only science God has so far been pleased to bestow on humankind—people begin by fixing the meanings of their words. They call this fixing of meanings definitions and put them at the beginning of their reckoning.\n\nThis shows how necessary it is for anyone aspiring to true knowledge to examine the definitions of earlier authors, correcting them where they have been carelessly set down or making his own. For errors in definitions multiply as the reckoning proceeds and lead people into absurdities which they finally recognize but cannot escape without reckoning again from the beginning, where the foundation of their errors lies. Thus those who trust books are like people who add many small sums into a larger one without checking whether the smaller sums were correctly calculated. When the error finally becomes obvious, they do not suspect their first principles and cannot find a way out, but waste their time fluttering through their books, like birds that enter through a chimney and, trapped in a room, flutter against the false light of a glass window, lacking the wit to consider how they came in. The right definition of names, therefore, is the foundation of the first use of speech: the acquisition of science. Wrong definitions, or none at all, are the foundation of its first abuse, from which spring all false and senseless doctrines. They leave people who take instruction from the authority of books rather than their own reflection as far below the ignorant as those who possess true science stand above them. For ignorance lies between true science and erroneous doctrines. Natural sense and imagination are not subject to absurdity. Nature itself cannot err; and as people acquire a richer language, they become either wiser or madder than ordinary. Nor is it possible without letters for anyone to become exceptionally wise or—unless disease or defective organs damage his memory—exceptionally foolish. For words are counters to the wise, who only reckon with them; but they are money to fools, who value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas, or any other teacher, who is still only a man.\n\nWhatever can enter into or be considered in an account, added to something else to make a sum or subtracted from it to leave a remainder, is a subject for names. The Latins called accounts of money rationes, and accounting ratiocinatio; what we call items in bills or account books they called nomina, that is, names. This seems to be why they extended the word ratio to the faculty of reckoning in all other matters. The Greeks have a single word, logos, for both speech and reason: not because they thought there could be no speech without reason, but because they thought there could be no reasoning without speech. The act of reasoning they called syllogism, meaning the summing up of the consequences of one statement with another. And because the same things may enter into an account under different attributes, their names are bent and varied in different ways to show the difference. This variety of names can be reduced to four general kinds.\n\nFirst, a thing may enter into an account as matter or body, as in living, sensible, rational, hot, cold, moving, and still. In each of these names the word matter or body is understood; all are names of matter.\n\nSecond, it may enter into an account, or be considered, under some attribute or quality that we conceive it to possess, such as being in motion, being so long, or being hot. Then, by a slight alteration of the name of the thing itself, we make a name for the attribute under consideration: for living we reckon life; for moving, motion; for hot, heat; for long, length; and so on. All such names designate the attributes and properties by which one piece of matter or one body is distinguished from another. They are called abstract names because they are separated not from matter, but from the account of matter.\n\nThird, we bring into account the properties of our own bodies through which we make such distinctions. When we see something, we reckon not the thing itself but our sight of it, its color, its image in the imagination; and when we hear something, we reckon not the thing but our hearing or the sound alone, which is our imagination or conception of it through the ear. These are names of images.\n\nFourth, we bring into account, consider, and name names themselves and speeches. General, universal, special, and equivocal are names of names. Assertion, question, command, narrative, syllogism, sermon, oration, and many others like them are names of speeches.\n\nThis exhausts the variety of positive names, which mark something that exists in nature or may be imagined by the human mind: bodies that exist or may be conceived to exist, properties that bodies possess or may be imagined to possess, or words and speech.\n\nThere are also other names called negative, which indicate that a word is not the name of the thing in question: nothing, no man, infinite, unteachable, three lack four, and the like. Nevertheless, these are useful in reckoning or correcting a reckoning, and bring our past thoughts to mind. Though they name no thing, they make us refuse names used improperly.\n\nAll other names are merely meaningless sounds, of two sorts. One consists of new names whose meaning has not yet been explained by definition; scholastic writers and bewildered philosophers have coined them in abundance.\n\nThe other arises when people make one name out of two names whose meanings contradict each other and cannot be reconciled: an incorporeal body, for instance, or, what amounts to the same thing, an incorporeal substance, and many more. For whenever an assertion is false, its two constituent names, joined into one, signify nothing at all. If it is false to say that a quadrangle is round, for example, round quadrangle signifies nothing: it is mere sound. Likewise, if it is false to say that virtue can be poured or blown about, infused virtue and inspired virtue are as absurd and meaningless as round quadrangle. That is why one hardly encounters a senseless, meaningless word that is not compounded from Latin or Greek names. A Frenchman seldom hears our Savior called Parole, though he often hears him called Verbe; yet the only difference between verbe and parole is that the one is Latin and the other French.\n\nWhen a man hears a speech and has the thoughts its words and their connections were intended and established to signify, he is said to understand it; understanding is nothing other than conception produced by speech. If speech is peculiar to man, as far as I know it is, then understanding is peculiar to him as well. Universal assertions that are absurd and false therefore cannot be understood, though many believe they understand them when they merely repeat the words quietly or rehearse them in their minds.\n\nWhat kinds of speech signify the appetites, aversions, and passions of the human mind, and how they are used and abused, I shall discuss when I have discussed the passions.\n\nThe names of things that affect us—that please or displease us—have shifting meanings in ordinary conversation, because not everyone is affected alike by the same thing, nor is even the same person affected alike at all times. All names are given to signify our conceptions, and all our feelings are themselves conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoid giving them different names. For although the nature of what we conceive remains the same, the way we receive it varies with our bodily constitutions and our prejudices of opinion, and gives everything a coloring from our different passions. In reasoning, therefore, one must beware of words that signify not only what we imagine of a thing's nature but also the disposition and interest of the speaker, as the names of virtues and vices do. One man calls wisdom what another calls fear; one calls cruelty what another calls justice; one calls extravagance what another calls magnanimity; one calls gravity what another calls stupidity, and so on. Such names can never be sound foundations for reasoning. Neither can metaphors and figures of speech, though these are less dangerous because they openly declare their shifting character, which the others do not.\n\nCHAPTER V. OF REASON AND SCIENCE.\n\n### Part I, Chapter V\n\nOF REASON AND SCIENCE\n\nWhen a man reasons, he does nothing but conceive a total by adding parts together, or a remainder by subtracting one sum from another. If done with words, this means conceiving the consequence that leads from the names of all the parts to the name of the whole, or from the names of the whole and one part to the name of the other part. And although in some matters, such as numbers, people name operations besides addition and subtraction—multiplication and division—they are the same in kind: multiplication is merely adding equal things together, and division merely subtracting the same thing as many times as possible. These operations concern not only numbers but all things that can be added together and taken from one another. Just as arithmeticians teach addition and subtraction in numbers, geometers teach them in lines, figures both solid and plane, angles, proportions, times, degrees of speed, force, power, and the like. Logicians teach the same in the consequences of words, joining two names to make an assertion, two assertions to make a syllogism, and many syllogisms to make a demonstration; from the sum or conclusion of a syllogism they subtract one proposition to find the other. Writers on politics add agreements together to discover people's duties, and lawyers add laws and facts to determine right and wrong in the actions of private persons. In short, wherever addition and subtraction have a place, reason has a place; where they do not, reason has nothing to do.\n\nFrom all this we may define—that is, determine—what is meant by reason when we count it among the faculties of the mind. In this sense reason is nothing but reckoning, that is, adding and subtracting the consequences of general names agreed upon to mark and signify our thoughts. I say mark when we reckon by ourselves, and signify when we demonstrate or justify our reckoning to others.\n\nJust as beginners in arithmetic must sometimes make mistakes, and even experts often may add incorrectly, so in any other subject of reasoning the ablest, most attentive, most practiced people can deceive themselves and infer false conclusions. This is not because reason itself is ever anything but right reason, any more than arithmetic ceases to be a certain and infallible art. But no one man's reason, nor the reason of any group of men, establishes certainty; an account is not correctly reckoned merely because many people unanimously approve it. When an account is disputed, the parties must therefore agree to appoint the reason of some arbitrator or judge as right reason and accept his judgment; otherwise, for want of a right reason established by nature, their dispute must either come to blows or remain unsettled. So it is in debates of every kind. When people who think themselves wiser than everyone else clamor for right reason as their judge, while seeking only to have matters decided by no one's reason but their own, their conduct is as intolerable in human society as declaring whatever suit one holds most of to be trumps on every turn after the trump suit has already been drawn. For people do precisely this when they insist that each passion, as it comes to dominate them, be accepted as right reason in their own disputes. Their claim to right reason betrays their lack of it.\n\nThe purpose and end of reason is not to find the sum and truth of one or a few consequences far removed from the first definitions and settled meanings of names, but to begin with those definitions and proceed from one consequence to another. No final conclusion can be certain unless all the assertions and negations on which it rests and from which it is inferred are certain. Consider a head of household who totals every bill of expenses into a single sum without examining how the people submitting those bills calculated them, or what he is paying for. He gains no advantage over simply accepting the gross account on trust in each accountant's skill and honesty. Likewise, in reasoning on any subject, a man who takes conclusions on the authority of authors instead of deriving them from the first items in each reckoning—the meanings of names fixed by definitions—wastes his labor. He knows nothing; he merely believes.\n\nWhen a man reckons without words, as one can in particular cases—for example, when seeing something he conjectures what probably came before it or will probably follow it—if the anticipated consequence does not follow, or the supposed antecedent did not precede it, this is called error, to which even the most prudent are subject. But when we reason in words of general meaning and arrive at a false general inference, though this is commonly called error, it is in fact an absurdity, or senseless speech. Error is simply a mistaken assumption that something has happened or will happen when, though it has not or will not, nothing made it visibly impossible. But if we make a general assertion that is not true, its possibility cannot be conceived. Words of which we conceive nothing but their sound are what we call absurd, meaningless, and nonsense. Thus if a man spoke to me of a round quadrangle, or accidents of bread in cheese, or immaterial substances, or a free subject, a free will, or anything free except free from obstruction by opposition, I would not say he was in error, but that his words had no meaning: they were absurd.\n\nI said earlier, in the second chapter, that man excels all other animals in this faculty: whatever he conceives, he is inclined to inquire into its consequences and what effects he can produce with it. I now add another degree of the same excellence: he can use words to reduce the consequences he discovers to general rules called theorems or aphorisms. That is, he can reason or reckon not only with numbers but with all other things from which one thing may be added to, or subtracted from, another.\n\nBut this privilege is tempered by another: the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature but man is subject. Among men, those who profess philosophy are most subject to it. What Cicero says of them somewhere is quite true: nothing can be so absurd that it cannot be found in the books of philosophers. The reason is clear. Not one begins his reasoning with definitions or explanations of the names he intends to use, a method practiced only in geometry, whose conclusions have consequently been made indisputable.\n\nThe first cause of absurd conclusions I attribute to lack of method: people do not begin their reasoning with definitions, or fixed meanings of their words, as though they could calculate without knowing the value of the number words one, two, and three.\n\nAnd since all bodies may enter an account under various considerations, which I described in the previous chapter, these considerations bear different names; diverse absurdities arise when their names are confused and improperly joined in assertions. Accordingly:\n\nThe second cause of absurd assertions I attribute to giving names of bodies to attributes, or names of attributes to bodies. People do this when they say faith is infused or inspired, though nothing but a body can be poured or breathed into anything; or that extension is body, that phantasms are spirits, and so on.\n\nThe third is giving names of the attributes of bodies outside us to the attributes of our own bodies, as when people say that color is in the body or sound is in the air, and so on.\n\nThe fourth is giving names of bodies to names or speeches, as when people say that there are universal things, or that a living creature is a genus, a general thing, and so on.\n\nThe fifth is giving names of attributes to names and speeches, as when people say that the nature of a thing is in its definition, that a man's command is his will, and the like.\n\nThe sixth is using metaphors, figures of speech, and other rhetorical devices in place of proper words. Though in ordinary speech one may say, for instance, the road goes or leads this way or that, or the proverb says this or that—although roads cannot go and proverbs cannot speak—such expressions must not be admitted into reckoning and the pursuit of truth.\n\nThe seventh is the use of names that mean nothing but are picked up and learned by rote from the schools, such as hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-now, and similar scholastic jargon.\n\nAnyone who avoids these things is unlikely to fall into absurdity, unless the reckoning is so long that he forgets what came before. For everyone reasons alike and well by nature when equipped with sound principles. Who is so foolish that he would both make a mistake in geometry and persist in it after someone showed him his error?\n\nThis shows that reason, unlike sense and memory, is not born with us; nor is it gained merely by experience, as prudence is. It is acquired through effort: first by giving names aptly, and second by finding a sound and orderly method for advancing from the elements, which are names, to assertions formed by joining one name to another, then to syllogisms formed by joining one assertion to another, until we reach knowledge of all the consequences of names that pertain to the subject at hand. This is what people call science. Sense and memory are merely knowledge of fact, of what is past and cannot be undone; science is knowledge of consequences and of the dependence of one fact on another. Through it, knowing what we can do now, we know how to do something else when we choose, or how to do something similar at another time. For when we see how something comes about, through which causes and in what manner, then, when similar causes come under our control, we see how to produce similar effects.\n\nChildren therefore possess no reason at all until they acquire speech, though they are called rational creatures because they clearly may come to use reason later. Most people, though able to reason a little way, as in counting to a certain point, find little use for it in ordinary life. There they conduct themselves better or worse according to their differing experience, speed of memory, and inclinations toward different ends, but especially according to good or bad fortune and one another's errors. As for science, or certain rules for their actions, they are so far from possessing it that they do not know what it is. They have taken geometry for magic; and as for other sciences, those who have not learned their beginnings and made some progress in them, so as to see how they are acquired and produced, resemble children who, knowing nothing of reproduction, are persuaded by women that their brothers and sisters were not born but found in the garden.\n\nYet those who have no science are in a better and nobler condition with their natural prudence than those who, through faulty reasoning or trust in others who reason badly, adopt false and absurd general rules. Ignorance of causes and rules does not lead people so far astray as reliance on false rules, or mistaking for the causes of what they desire things that are not its causes but rather causes of the opposite.\n\nIn conclusion, the light of human minds is clear words, their wicks first trimmed by exact definitions and cleansed of ambiguity. Reason is the pace; the growth of science, the way; and the benefit of humankind, the destination. Conversely, metaphors and senseless and ambiguous words are like will-o'-the-wisps; reasoning from them means wandering among innumerable absurdities, ending in contention, sedition, or contempt.\n\nAs much experience is prudence, so much science is wisdom. Though we ordinarily call both wisdom, the Latins always distinguished prudentia from sapientia, assigning the former to experience and the latter to science. To make the difference clearer, imagine one man gifted with excellent natural dexterity in handling his weapons, and another who has added to that dexterity an acquired science of where he can strike or be struck by his adversary in every possible posture or guard. The first man's ability would stand to the second's as prudence stands to wisdom. Both are useful, but the latter is infallible. Those who trust only the authority of books and blindly follow the blind are like a man who trusts the false rules of a fencing master and rashly takes on an adversary who kills or humiliates him.\n\nSome signs of science are certain and infallible, others uncertain. They are certain when a person claiming knowledge of something can teach it—that is, clearly demonstrate its truth to another. They are uncertain when only some particular events support his claim, and on many occasions things turn out as he says they must. All signs of prudence are uncertain, because it is impossible to observe from experience and remember every circumstance that might alter the outcome. But in any business where a man has no infallible science to guide him, abandoning his natural judgment for general sayings read in authors, which admit many exceptions, is a sign of folly and is generally mocked as pedantry. Even among those who like to display their reading in politics and history in the councils of the Common-wealth, very few do so in domestic affairs where their own interests are at stake. They have prudence enough for private affairs; in public affairs they prize the reputation of their own cleverness above the success of another's business.\n\nCHAPTER VI. OF THE INNER BEGINNINGS OF VOLUNTARY MOTIONS COMMONLY CALLED THE PASSIONS, AND THE SPEECHES BY WHICH THEY ARE EXPRESSED.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VI, 1\n\nOF THE INNER BEGINNINGS OF VOLUNTARY MOTIONS COMMONLY CALLED THE PASSIONS, AND THE SPEECHES BY WHICH THEY ARE EXPRESSED\n\nAnimals have two kinds of motion peculiar to them. One is called vital: it begins at generation and continues without interruption throughout life, as in the circulation of the blood, the pulse, breathing, digestion, nutrition, excretion, and so on. These motions need no help from imagination. The other is animal motion, also called voluntary motion: walking, speaking, or moving any of our limbs in the manner first imagined in our minds. That sense is motion in the organs and inner parts of the human body, caused by the action of things we see, hear, and so on, and that imagination is only what remains of that motion after sensation, has already been said in the first and second chapters. Since walking, speaking, and similar voluntary motions always depend on a prior thought of where, by which route, and what to do, imagination is evidently the first internal beginning of all voluntary motion. Although those who have not studied the matter cannot conceive of motion where the moving thing is invisible, or where the distance it travels is too small to perceive, that does not mean such motions do not occur. However small a space may be, whatever moves over a larger space that includes it must first move over that smaller space. These slight beginnings of motion inside the human body, before they appear as walking, speaking, striking, or other visible actions, are commonly called ENDEAVOR.\n\nWhen this endeavor is directed toward something that causes it, it is called APPETITE or DESIRE. Desire is the more general name, while appetite is often restricted to the desire for food, namely hunger and thirst. When the endeavor is away from something, it is generally called AVERSION. We derive the words appetite and aversion from Latin, and both signify movements, one of approach and the other of withdrawal. The Greek words for them, orme and aphorme, do the same. Nature itself often presses truths upon people over which they stumble afterward when they look for something beyond nature. The schools find no actual motion at all in the mere appetite to go or move. But because they must acknowledge some motion, they call it metaphorical motion, which is an absurd expression: words may be metaphorical, but bodies and motions cannot.\n\nWhat people desire they are also said to LOVE, and what they are averse to, to HATE. Desire and love are therefore the same thing, except that desire always signifies the absence of its object, while love most often signifies its presence. Similarly, aversion signifies the absence of its object, and hate its presence.\n\nSome appetites and aversions are innate: appetite for food and for excretion and relief, though the latter might more properly be called aversions from something felt within the body; and a few other appetites besides. The remaining appetites, for particular things, arise from experience and from testing their effects on ourselves or others. For what we do not know at all, or do not believe exists, we can have no desire beyond the wish to taste and try it. But we have aversion not only to things we know have hurt us, but also to things whose power to hurt us is uncertain.\n\nThings we neither desire nor hate we are said to DESPISE. CONTEMPT is nothing but an immobility or stubbornness of the heart in resisting the action of certain things, arising either because more powerful objects already move the heart in another direction or because we have no experience of those things.\n\nSince the constitution of a person's body continually changes, it is impossible that all the same things should always cause the same appetites and aversions in that person; still less can everyone agree in desiring almost any single object.\n\nWhatever is the object of anyone's appetite or desire is what he, for his part, calls good. The object of his hate and aversion he calls evil; the object of his contempt, worthless and insignificant. For the words good, evil, and contemptible are always used in relation to the person using them. Nothing is simply and absolutely so, nor can any common rule of good and evil be drawn from the nature of objects themselves. The rule comes instead from the person himself where there is no Common-wealth; in a Common-wealth, from the person representing it; or from an arbitrator or judge whom disputing parties agree to appoint, making his decision the rule.\n\nLatin has two words whose meanings approach good and evil but do not precisely match them: pulchrum and turpe. The first signifies what promises good by some visible signs, and the second what promises evil. We have no equally general names for them in English. For pulchrum we say, according to the case, fair, beautiful, handsome, gallant, honorable, comely, or amiable; for turpe, foul, deformed, ugly, base, nauseous, and the like. In their proper contexts all these words mean nothing but an appearance or aspect promising good or evil. There are therefore three kinds of good: good in promise, or pulchrum; good in effect, as the desired end, called jucundum, delightful; and good as a means, called utile, profitable. There are likewise three kinds of evil: evil in promise, called turpe; evil in effect or as an end, called molestum, unpleasant or troublesome; and evil as a means, called inutile, unprofitable or harmful.\n\nAs in sensation what is truly within us, as I have said before, is only motion caused by the action of external objects, while what appears to sight is light and color, to hearing sound, to the nostril odor, and so forth, so when the action of the same object continues from the eyes, ears, and other organs to the heart, its real effect there is nothing but motion or endeavor, consisting in appetite toward, or aversion from, the moving object. But the appearance, or sensation, of that motion is what we call either DELIGHT or TROUBLE OF MIND.\n\nThis motion called appetite, and in its appearance delight or pleasure, seems to strengthen and assist vital motion. Hence things that cause delight were appropriately called jucunda, from a juvando, helping or strengthening; their opposites were called molesta, offensive, because they hinder and trouble vital motion.\n\nPleasure or delight, then, is the appearance or sensation of good; vexation or displeasure is the appearance or sensation of evil. Consequently all appetite, desire, and love are accompanied by some degree of delight, and all hatred and aversion by some degree of displeasure and offense.\n\nSome pleasures or delights arise from sensing an object present. These may be called pleasures of sense; the term sensual, used only by those who condemn them, has no place before laws exist. This kind includes all filling and emptying of the body, and whatever is pleasant to sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch. Others arise from expectation, born of foreseeing the end or consequence of things, whether those things please or displease the senses. These are pleasures of the mind that traces those consequences, and are generally called JOY. Likewise some displeasures belong to sensation and are called PAIN; others belong to the expectation of consequences and are called GRIEF.\n\nThe simple passions called appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief acquire different names under different considerations: first, when they succeed one another, according to a person's opinion of his chances of obtaining what he desires; second, according to the object loved or hated; third, according to several passions considered together; and fourth, according to the change or succession itself.\n\nHope— Appetite accompanied by an opinion that one will attain its object is called HOPE.\n\nDespair— The same appetite without that opinion is DESPAIR.\n\nFear— Aversion accompanied by an opinion that its object can hurt us is FEAR.\n\nCourage— The same aversion, with hope of avoiding the harm by resistance, is COURAGE.\n\nAnger— Sudden courage is ANGER.\n\nConfidence— Steady hope is CONFIDENCE in ourselves.\n\nDiffidence— Steady despair is DIFFIDENCE in ourselves.\n\nIndignation— Anger at great harm done to another when we conceive it as an injury is INDIGNATION.\n\nBenevolence— Desire for another's good is BENEVOLENCE, GOOD WILL, or CHARITY; if directed toward humanity generally, GOOD NATURE.\n\nCovetousness— Desire for riches is COVETOUSNESS, a name always used in blame because people competing for riches resent one another's success, although the desire itself deserves blame or approval according to the means used to seek those riches.\n\nAmbition— Desire for office or precedence is AMBITION, another name used in an unfavorable sense for the reason just mentioned.\n\nPusillanimity— Desire for things that contribute little to our ends, together with fear of things that present only slight obstacles, is PUSILLANIMITY.\n\nMagnanimity— Disregard for small helps and hindrances is MAGNANIMITY.\n\nValor— Magnanimity in the face of death or wounds is VALOR or FORTITUDE.\n\nLiberality— Magnanimity in the use of riches is LIBERALITY.\n\nMiserliness— Pusillanimity in the same matter is WRETCHEDNESS, MISERLINESS, or PARSIMONY, according as it is approved or disapproved.\n\nKindness— Love of people for companionship is KINDNESS.\n\nNatural lust— Love of people for the pleasure of the senses alone is NATURAL LUST.\n\nLuxury— Love of the same, acquired through brooding, that is, imagining past pleasure, is LUXURY.\n\nThe passion of love; jealousy— Love of one particular person, with a desire to be loved by that person alone, is THE PASSION OF LOVE. The same love, joined to fear that it is not returned, is JEALOUSY.\n\nRevengefulness— Desire to hurt another so as to make him condemn some deed of his own is REVENGEFULNESS.\n\nCuriosity— Desire to know why and how is CURIOSITY. It belongs to no living creature but man; thus man is distinguished from other animals not only by his reason but also by this singular passion. In them, the appetite for food and other pleasures of sense predominates and crowds out any concern for causes. That concern is a lust of the mind which, through the lasting delight of continually and tirelessly producing knowledge, surpasses the brief intensity of every bodily pleasure.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VI, 2\n\nReligion; superstition; true religion— Fear of invisible power, either invented by the mind or imagined from publicly accepted tales, is RELIGION; when the tales are not accepted, superstition. And when the power imagined truly is as we imagine it, it is TRUE RELIGION.\n\nPanic terror— Fear without perceiving why or what one fears is PANIC TERROR, so called from the fables that make Pan its author. In truth, the first person seized by such fear always has some inkling of its cause, though the rest flee by imitation, each supposing his neighbor knows why. This passion therefore occurs only in a crowd or multitude.\n\nAdmiration— Joy at the perception of novelty is ADMIRATION, peculiar to man because it arouses the appetite to know the cause.\n\nGlory; vain glory— Joy arising from a person's imagination of his own power and ability is the elation of mind called GLORYING. If grounded in experience of his own past actions, it is the same as confidence. But if grounded in others' flattery, or merely supposed by the man himself for the pleasure he takes in its consequences, it is called VAIN GLORY. The name is apt: well-grounded confidence gives rise to action, whereas a mere belief in one's power does not, and is therefore rightly called vain.\n\nDejection— Grief arising from a belief that one lacks power is called dejection of mind.\n\nThe vain glory that consists in inventing or supposing abilities in ourselves that we know we lack is particularly common among young men, and is nourished by histories or stories of gallant people. Age and work often correct it.\n\nSudden glory; laughter— Sudden glory is the passion that produces the grimaces called LAUGHTER. It is caused either by a sudden act of one's own that gives pleasure or by noticing some defect in another and suddenly applauding oneself by comparison. It is most common among those who are aware that they possess few abilities and must keep themselves in their own favor by observing others' imperfections. Much laughter at others' defects is therefore a sign of pusillanimity. One proper work of great minds is to help others and free them from scorn, comparing themselves only with the most able.\n\nSudden dejection; weeping— By contrast, sudden dejection is the passion that causes WEEPING. It arises from events that suddenly remove some ardent hope or some support of one's power. Those who rely chiefly on external help, such as women and children, are most subject to it. Some therefore weep for lost friends; others for their friends' unkindness; still others because reconciliation abruptly cuts short their thoughts of revenge. In every case laughter and weeping are sudden motions, and habit extinguishes both. No one laughs at an old joke or weeps over an old calamity.\n\nShame; blushing— Grief at the disclosure of some defect in one's ability is SHAME, the passion that reveals itself in BLUSHING. It consists in the perception of something dishonorable. In young men it is a commendable sign of love for a good reputation; in old men it is a sign of the same love, but, arriving too late, is not commendable.\n\nImpudence— Disregard for a good reputation is called IMPUDENCE.\n\nPity— Grief at another's calamity is PITY. It arises from imagining that the same calamity might befall oneself, and is therefore also called COMPASSION, or, in the language of our time, FELLOW FEELING. Thus the best people feel the least pity for calamity brought about by great wickedness; and for any given calamity those who think themselves least exposed to the same fate feel the least pity.\n\nCruelty— Disregard for, or slight awareness of, the calamity of others is what people call CRUELTY, arising from confidence in their own good fortune. I cannot conceive that anyone could take pleasure in the great suffering of others without some further end of his own.\n\nEmulation; envy— Grief at a competitor's success in wealth, honor, or some other good is called EMULATION when joined with an endeavor to strengthen our own abilities until we equal or surpass him; when joined with an endeavor to displace or hinder the competitor, it is ENVY.\n\nDeliberation— When appetites and aversions, hopes and fears, about the same thing arise alternately in a person's mind, and various good and evil consequences of doing or not doing what is proposed come successively to mind—so that at one moment we desire it, at another shrink from it; at one moment hope we can do it, at another despair or fear to try—the entire succession of desires, aversions, hopes, and fears, continuing until the thing is either done or thought impossible, is what we call DELIBERATION.\n\nThere can therefore be no deliberation about past events, which obviously cannot be changed, or about things known or believed to be impossible, since people know or think such deliberation futile. But we may deliberate about impossible things we take to be possible, unaware that our deliberation is futile. It is called DELIBERATION because it puts an end to the freedom we had to act or refrain according to our own appetite or aversion.\n\nThis alternating succession of appetites, aversions, hopes, and fears occurs in other living creatures no less than in man; beasts therefore deliberate too.\n\nEvery deliberation is said to end when its object has either been accomplished or is thought impossible, since until then we retain the freedom to act or refrain according to our appetite or aversion.\n\nIn deliberation, the final appetite or aversion immediately preceding action or its omission is what we call the WILL: the act, not the faculty, of willing. Beasts that deliberate must therefore have will as well. The schools commonly define will as a rational appetite, but that definition is unsound. If it were sound, no voluntary act could be contrary to reason, for a voluntary act is one that proceeds from the will, and no other. But if, instead of a rational appetite, we say an appetite arising from prior deliberation, the definition matches the one I have given here. The will, therefore, IS THE FINAL APPETITE IN DELIBERATION. In ordinary speech we may say that a man once had the will to do something he nevertheless refrained from doing. Properly speaking, that was only an inclination, which does not make an action voluntary, because the action depends not on it but on the last inclination or appetite. If the intervening appetites made an action voluntary, then by the same reasoning every intervening aversion would make that action involuntary; one and the same action would then be both voluntary and involuntary.\n\nIt is therefore clear that not only actions arising from covetousness, ambition, lust, or other appetites for the object proposed are voluntary, but also actions arising from aversion to, or fear of, the consequences of omitting them.\n\nThe forms of speech used to express the passions are partly the same as, and partly different from, those used to express our thoughts. In general, every passion may be expressed in the indicative: I love, I fear, I rejoice, I deliberate, I will, I command. But some have forms of expression peculiar to themselves; these are not assertions unless they also serve to support inferences other than those concerning the passion from which they spring. Deliberation is expressed in the subjunctive, the form used to signify suppositions and their consequences: if this is done, then that will follow. It differs from the language of reasoning only in that reasoning uses general words, while deliberation is mostly about particulars. The language of desire and aversion is imperative: do this, refrain from that. If the addressee is obliged to comply, this is a command; otherwise it is a request or advice. The language of vain glory, indignation, pity, and revengefulness is optative. Desire to know has a form peculiar to it, called interrogative: what is it? when will it happen? how is it done? why is it so? I find no other language of the passions; cursing, swearing, reviling, and the like signify not as speech, but as the actions of an accustomed tongue.\n\nThese forms of speech, I say, express or voluntarily signify our passions; but they are not certain signs of them, for people may use them at will whether or not they feel the passions. The best signs of present passions are in a person's face, bodily movements, and actions, or in the ends and aims we otherwise know him to have.\n\nSince deliberation is stirred by appetites and aversions arising from foresight of the good and evil consequences of the contemplated action, its good or evil outcome depends on foreseeing a long chain of consequences, whose end hardly anyone can see. But as far as a person can see, if the good in those consequences outweighs the evil, the whole chain is what writers call apparent or seeming good. Conversely, when evil outweighs good, the whole is apparent or seeming evil. Whoever has, by experience or reason, the broadest and surest view of consequences therefore deliberates best for himself and, when he chooses, can offer the best advice to others.\n\nContinual success in obtaining what a person desires from time to time—that is, continually prospering—is what people call FELICITY; I mean felicity in this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here. Life itself is motion, and can no more exist without desire and fear than without sensation. What kind of felicity God has ordained for those who devoutly honor him, a man will know no sooner than he enjoys it: those joys are now as incomprehensible as the scholastic phrase beatific vision is unintelligible.\n\nThe form of speech by which people signify their opinion of the goodness of anything is PRAISE; that by which they signify its power and greatness is MAGNIFYING. The form by which they express their opinion of a person's felicity is called makarismos by the Greeks; we have no name for it in our language. So much about the passions suffices for the present purpose.\n\nCHAPTER VII. OF THE ENDS OR RESOLUTIONS OF DISCOURSE\n\n### Part I, Chapter VII\n\nOF THE ENDS OR RESOLUTIONS OF DISCOURSE\n\nEvery discourse governed by a desire for knowledge comes at last to an end, either through attainment or through giving up. Wherever the chain of discourse is broken, there is an end for that time.\n\nIf the discourse is purely mental, it consists of alternating thoughts that a thing will be and will not be, or that it has been and has not been. Thus wherever you break off the chain of a person's discourse, you leave that person presuming either that it will be or that it will not be, or that it has been or has not been. All these are opinions. What is alternating appetite in deliberation about good and evil is alternating opinion in inquiry into the truth of the past and future. And as the last appetite in deliberation is called the will, so the last opinion in the search for the truth of the past and future is called the JUDGMENT, or the firm and final verdict of the person reasoning. And as the whole chain of alternating appetites in a question of good or bad is called deliberation, so the whole chain of alternating opinions in a question of true or false is called DOUBT.\n\nNo discourse whatever can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past or future. Knowledge of fact has its origin in sense and persists afterward in memory. And knowledge of consequence, which I have said is called science, is not absolute but conditional. No one can know by discourse that this or that is, has been, or will be—which would be absolute knowledge—but only that if this is, that is; if this has been, that has been; if this shall be, that shall be. This is conditional knowledge, not of the consequence of one thing from another, but of one name of a thing from another name of the same thing.\n\nTherefore, when discourse is put into speech and begins with definitions of words, proceeds by joining them into general affirmations, and joins these in turn into syllogisms, its end or final sum is called the conclusion; and the thought it expresses is that conditional knowledge, or knowledge of the consequence of words, commonly called science. But if the first foundation of such discourse is not definitions, or if the definitions are not rightly joined in syllogisms, then the end or conclusion is again OPINION: an opinion of the truth of something said, sometimes even in absurd and senseless words that cannot possibly be understood. When two or more people know one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it with one another: that is, to know it together. And because such people are the best witnesses to one another's acts, or to those of a third person, it was and always will be considered a grave wrong for anyone to speak against conscience, or to corrupt or compel another to do so. Accordingly, the plea of conscience has always been heard with great care. Later, people used the same word metaphorically for knowledge of their own secret actions and thoughts; hence the rhetorical saying that conscience is a thousand witnesses. Finally, people passionately attached to their own new opinions, however absurd, and obstinately determined to defend them, gave those opinions too the revered name of conscience, as if they wished to make it seem unlawful to change them or speak against them. Thus they claim to know the opinions are true when at most they know only that they think so.\n\nWhen a person's discourse does not begin with definitions, it begins either with some other thought of their own, in which case it is still called opinion, or with something said by another person whose capacity to know the truth and honesty in not deceiving they do not doubt. Then the discourse concerns not so much the thing as the person, and its resolution is called BELIEF and FAITH: faith in the person, belief both in the person and in the truth of what that person says. Belief, then, contains two opinions: one about what the person says, the other about that person's integrity. To have faith in, trust, or believe a person means the same thing: to hold an opinion of that person's truthfulness. But to believe what is said means only to hold an opinion of the truth of the statement. We must observe, however, that the phrase I believe in, as well as the Latin Credo In and the Greek Pisteno Eis, occurs only in the writings of theologians. Other writings use instead I believe him, I have faith in him, I rely on him; in Latin, Credo Illi, Fido Illi; and in Greek, Pisteno Anto. This peculiarity of ecclesiastical usage has raised many disputes about the proper object of Christian faith.\n\nBut by believing in, as the Creed has it, is meant not trust in the person, but confession and acknowledgment of the doctrine. For not only Christians but all sorts of people believe in God in the sense of accepting as true everything they hear him say, whether or not they understand it. This is all the faith and trust one can possibly have in anyone; yet they do not all believe the doctrine of the Creed.\n\nFrom this we may infer that whenever we believe a statement to be true on arguments drawn not from the thing itself or from the principles of natural reason, but from the authority of the speaker and our good opinion of that speaker, then the speaker, the person in whom we believe or trust and whose word we accept, is the object of our faith; and the honor conferred by believing is conferred on that person alone. Consequently, when we believe the Scriptures to be the word of God without receiving immediate revelation from God himself, our belief, faith, and trust are in the Church, whose word we accept and rest upon. Those who believe what a prophet relates to them in God's name accept the prophet's word, honor and trust the prophet, and believe the prophet about the truth of what is related, whether the prophet is true or false. So it is with every other history. If I did not believe all that historians have written about the glorious deeds of Alexander or Caesar, I do not think the ghost of Alexander or Caesar, or anyone but the historian, would have just cause for offense. If Livy says that the gods once made a cow speak and we do not believe it, we distrust not God but Livy. It is evident, then, that whatever we believe for no reason beyond the authority of people and their writings, whether they are sent from God or not, is faith in people alone.\n\nCHAPTER VIII. OF THE VIRTUES COMMONLY CALLED INTELLECTUAL, AND THEIR CONTRARY DEFECTS\n\n### Part I, Chapter VIII, 1\n\nOF THE VIRTUES COMMONLY CALLED INTELLECTUAL, AND THEIR CONTRARY DEFECTS\n\nVirtue in general, whatever its subject, is something valued for its excellence; it exists by comparison. If all things were equal in all people, nothing would be prized. By INTELLECTUAL virtues we always mean abilities of mind that people praise, value, and wish to have themselves. These generally go by the name of good wit, though the word wit is also used to distinguish one particular ability from the others.\n\nThese virtues are of two kinds, natural and acquired. By natural I do not mean what a person possesses from birth: that is nothing but sense, in which people differ so little from one another and from brute beasts that it cannot be counted among the virtues. I mean the wit gained solely by use and experience, without method, cultivation, or instruction. This NATURAL WIT consists chiefly in two things: speed of imagination (that is, the swift succession of one thought after another) and steady direction toward some approved end. Conversely, a slow imagination produces the defect or fault of mind commonly called DULLNESS or stupidity, and sometimes other names signifying slowness of movement or difficulty in being moved.\n\nThis difference in quickness arises from the difference in people's passions: different people love and dislike different things, and therefore their thoughts run in different directions and attend to and observe different things as they pass through the imagination. In the succession of people's thoughts, there is nothing to observe about the things they think of except how they resemble one another, how they differ, what they serve for, or how they serve a particular purpose. Those who notice resemblances rarely noticed by others are said to have good wit, meaning in this case a good fancy. But those who notice differences and dissimilarities—who distinguish, discern, and judge one thing against another—are said to have good judgment, if the distinctions are not easy to make. Especially in conversation and business, where one must distinguish times, places, and people, this virtue is called DISCRETION. The first, fancy without the help of judgment, is not praised as a virtue; the second, judgment and discretion, is praised in itself, without the help of fancy. Besides discretion concerning times, places, and people, a good fancy also requires the frequent application of one's thoughts to their end—that is, to some use to be made of them. With this, a person possessing the virtue will readily find comparisons that please not only by illuminating the discourse and adorning it with fresh, apt metaphors, but also by the rarity of their invention. Yet without steadiness and direction toward an end, a great fancy is a kind of madness: such as afflicts people who, entering into a discourse, are snatched from their purpose by everything that comes to mind, into so many and such long digressions and parentheses that they lose themselves entirely. I know no special name for this kind of folly. Its cause is sometimes lack of experience, through which what seems new and rare to a person does not seem so to others; sometimes faintheartedness, through which what seems great to that person appears trivial to others. Whatever is new or great, and therefore seems worth telling, gradually draws a person from the intended path of the discourse.\n\nIn a good poem, whether epic or dramatic, and likewise in sonnets, epigrams, and other pieces, both judgment and fancy are required. But fancy must be more prominent, because such works please by their extravagance, though they must not displease through indiscretion.\n\nIn a good history, judgment must be prominent, because its merit consists in its method, its truth, and its choice of the actions most useful to know. Fancy has no place except to adorn the style.\n\nIn speeches of praise and in invectives, fancy predominates, because the aim is not truth but honor or dishonor, achieved by noble or contemptible comparisons. Judgment does no more than suggest what circumstances make an action praiseworthy or blameworthy.\n\nIn exhortations and pleas, judgment or fancy is needed most according to whether truth or disguise best serves the design at hand.\n\nIn demonstration, in counsel, and in every rigorous search for truth, judgment does everything, except when an apt comparison is needed to open the understanding; then fancy has some use. But metaphors in this case are altogether excluded. Since they openly profess deception, to admit them into counsel or reasoning would be manifest folly.\n\nIn any discourse whatever, if a lack of discretion is apparent, however extravagant the fancy, the entire discourse will be taken as a sign of deficient wit. It will never be taken so when discretion is evident, however ordinary the fancy.\n\nA person's secret thoughts range over everything—holy and profane, clean and obscene, grave and light—without shame or blame. Spoken discourse cannot do so except as far as judgment approves the time, place, and company. An anatomist or physician may speak or write an opinion on unclean matters, because the aim is not to please but to benefit. For another person to write extravagant, agreeable fancies on the same subjects is like someone who has rolled in dirt presenting himself before respectable company. The difference is the lack of discretion. Again, in an avowedly relaxed mood and among familiar companions, one may play on the sounds and double meanings of words, sometimes with flashes of extraordinary fancy. But in a sermon, in public, or before strangers or people we ought to revere, no jingling of words will fail to be counted folly. The difference, again, is only a lack of discretion. Where wit is wanting, then, it is not fancy that is wanting but discretion. Judgment without fancy is wit; fancy without judgment is not.\n\nWhen a person with a design in hand lets their thoughts range over many things, observing how they conduce to that design or what other design they might serve, and when these observations are neither easy nor usual, this wit is called PRUDENCE. It depends on extensive experience and on memory of similar things and their past consequences. In this respect people differ less than they do in fancy and judgment: people of equal age do not differ greatly in the quantity of experience, but their experience lies in different occasions, each having private designs. Governing a family well and governing a kingdom well are not different degrees of prudence but different kinds of business, no more than drawing a picture smaller than life, life-sized, or larger than life represents different degrees of art. A plain farmer is more prudent in the affairs of his own household than a privy counselor in another person's affairs.\n\nAdd to prudence the use of unjust or dishonest means, such as fear or want commonly suggests, and you have the crooked wisdom called CRAFT, a sign of faintheartedness. For greatness of spirit is contempt for unjust or dishonest aids. What the Latins call Versutia (rendered in English as shifting) is evading a present danger or inconvenience by entering into a greater one, as when someone robs one person to pay another. It is merely a more shortsighted craft, called Versutia from Versura, meaning to borrow money at interest to make an interest payment due now.\n\nAs for acquired wit—I mean wit acquired through method and instruction—there is none but reason, founded on the right use of speech, which produces the sciences. But I have already spoken of reason and science in the fifth and sixth chapters.\n\nThe causes of these differences in wit lie in the passions; differences in passion proceed partly from differences in bodily constitution and partly from differences in education. If they proceeded from the temper of the brain and the organs of sense, whether external or internal, there would be no less difference between people in sight, hearing, and the other senses than in fancy and discretion. They proceed, therefore, from the passions, which differ not only with people's constitutions but also with their customs and education.\n\nThe passions that most cause differences of wit are chiefly the varying degrees of desire for power, riches, knowledge, and honor. All of these can be reduced to the first, desire for power; for riches, knowledge, and honor are various kinds of power.\n\nTherefore, someone without a strong passion for any of these things, someone indifferent, as people say, may be good enough not to give offense, but cannot possibly possess great fancy or much judgment. Thoughts are to desires what scouts and spies are to an army: they range abroad and find the way to the things desired. From desire comes all steadiness and quickness of the mind's movement. To have no desire is to be dead; to have weak passions is dullness; to have passions indiscriminately for everything is GIDDINESS and distraction; and to have stronger, more vehement passions for something than others usually display is what people call MADNESS.\n\nThere are nearly as many kinds of madness as there are passions. Sometimes an extraordinary, extravagant passion arises from a bad condition of the bodily organs or from injury to them; sometimes the injury and disorder of the organs are caused by the force or prolonged duration of a passion. But in both cases the madness is of one and the same nature.\n\nThe passion whose violence or persistence produces madness is either great vainglory, commonly called pride and self-conceit, or great dejection of mind.\n\nPride makes a person subject to anger, whose excess is the madness called RAGE and FURY. Thus excessive desire for revenge, when habitual, harms the organs and becomes rage; excessive love joined with jealousy also becomes rage; excessive regard for oneself on account of divine inspiration, wisdom, learning, beauty, and the like becomes distraction and giddiness; the same regard joined with envy becomes rage; and vehement conviction of the truth of something, when contradicted by others, becomes rage.\n\nDejection makes a person subject to baseless fears, a madness commonly called MELANCHOLY, which shows itself in various ways: haunting solitary places and graves, superstitious behavior, and fearing one particular thing or another. In sum, all passions that produce strange and unusual behavior are called by the general name of madness. Anyone willing to take the trouble could catalog a legion of its several kinds. And if excesses are madness, there is no doubt that the passions themselves, when they tend to evil, are degrees of the same thing.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VIII, 2\n\n(For example,) Though the folly of people convinced they are inspired does not always show itself in any one person through an extravagantly passionate act, the rage of the whole multitude becomes plain when many of them conspire together. What greater sign of madness could there be than to shout at, strike, and throw stones at our best friends? Yet such a multitude will do more: they will shout at, fight, and destroy those who have protected them from injury throughout their lives. And if this is madness in the multitude, it is madness in each individual. For in the middle of the sea, though one hears no sound from the water immediately nearby, one knows that this part contributes as much to the sea's roar as any other equal quantity. So too, though we perceive no great disturbance in one or two people, we may be sure that their individual passions are part of the seditious roar of a troubled nation. And even if nothing else betrayed their madness, their very claim to such inspiration would be proof enough. If someone in Bedlam were to talk soberly with you, and as you took your leave you asked who he was so that you might return his courtesy another time, and he told you that he was God the Father, I think you would need no extravagant act as further proof of his madness.\n\nThis belief in inspiration, commonly called the Private Spirit, very often begins when someone has the good fortune to discover an error generally accepted by others. Not knowing or remembering what path of reasoning led them to so singular a truth—as they think it, though often they have stumbled on an untruth—they promptly marvel at themselves as especially favored by God Almighty, who has supernaturally revealed it to them through his Spirit.\n\nAgain, that madness is merely passion appearing in excess may be gathered from the effects of wine, which are the same as those of a disordered state of the organs. The varieties of behavior among people who have drunk too much are the same as among the mad: some rage, others become amorous, others laugh, all extravagantly but each according to their dominant passions. For wine merely removes their pretense and blinds them to the ugliness of their passions. Indeed, I believe even the most sober people, walking alone without cares or mental occupation, would not wish the vanity and extravagance of their thoughts at such times to be publicly seen. This amounts to an admission that unguided passions are for the most part sheer madness.\n\nThe world has held two opinions, in ancient and later times, about the cause of madness. Some derive it from the passions; others from demons or spirits, good or evil, which they supposed might enter a person, possess him, and move his organs in the strange and uncouth way mad people behave. The former called such people mad; the latter sometimes called them demoniacs, that is, possessed by spirits, sometimes Energumeni, that is, agitated or moved by spirits. And in Italy they are now called not only Pazzi, mad people, but also Spiritati, people possessed.\n\nOnce a great crowd gathered in Abdera, a city of the Greeks, for a performance of the tragedy of Andromeda on an extremely hot day. Many spectators developed fevers, and from the heat and the tragedy together they began doing nothing but reciting iambic verses containing the names of Perseus and Andromeda. This condition, along with their fever, was cured by the coming of winter; and the madness was thought to arise from the passion impressed on them by the tragedy. Likewise, in another Greek city a bout of madness seized only young women and drove many to hang themselves. Most people then considered it the work of the Devil. But someone who suspected that their contempt for life arose from some passion of the mind, and supposed they did not also despise their honor, advised the magistrates to strip the women who hanged themselves and leave them hanging naked. The story says this cured the madness. On the other hand, the same Greeks often ascribed madness to the work of the Eumenides, or Furies, and sometimes to Ceres, Phoebus, and other gods. So much did people ascribe to phantoms that they thought them living bodies of air, and generally called them spirits. The Romans shared the Greeks' opinion in this, and so did the Jews: they called mad people prophets or, according to whether they thought the spirits good or evil, demoniacs. Some called both prophets and demoniacs mad people, and some called the same person both a demoniac and mad. In the case of the Gentiles, this is no wonder, since they named and worshipped diseases and health, vices and virtues, and many natural accidents as demons. Thus by a demon they sometimes meant a fever just as readily as a devil. But it is somewhat strange that the Jews held such an opinion. Neither Moses nor Abraham claimed to prophesy by possession of a spirit, but by God's voice or through a vision or dream; nor is there anything in his law, moral or ceremonial, teaching them that any such inspiration or possession exists. When God is said (Numb. 11. 25.) to take from the Spirit in Moses and give it to the 70. Elders, the Spirit of God, if taken to mean God's substance, is not divided. By the Spirit of God in a person, the Scriptures mean a person's spirit inclined toward godliness. And where it says (Exod. 28. 3.) “Whom I have filled with the Spirit of wisdom to make garments for Aaron,” it does not mean a spirit put into them that can make garments, but the wisdom of their own spirits in that craft. Likewise, when a person's spirit produces unclean actions, it is ordinarily called an unclean spirit; and other spirits are named similarly, though not always, whenever the virtue or vice so named is extraordinary and conspicuous. Nor did the other prophets of the Old Testament claim inspiration or say that God spoke in them; he spoke to them by voice, vision, or dream, and the Burden of the Lord was not possession but command. How, then, could the Jews have come to believe in possession? I can imagine no cause but one common to all people: a lack of curiosity about natural causes, and the placement of happiness in obtaining the grosser pleasures of the senses and the things that most immediately bring them about. For when people see any strange and unusual ability or defect in another's mind, unless they also see a probable cause, they can hardly think it natural. If it is not natural, they think it must be supernatural; and then what could it be but God or the Devil within that person? Hence, when our Savior (Mark 3.21.) was surrounded by a multitude, members of his household suspected he was mad and went out to restrain him; but the scribes said he had Beelzebub, by whose power he cast out devils, as if the greater madman had overawed the lesser. And so (John 10. 20.) some said, “He has a Devil, and is mad,” while others, regarding him as a prophet, said, “These are not the words of one who has a Devil.” Likewise in the Old Testament the man who came to anoint Jehu (2 Kings 9.11.) was a prophet, yet some of Jehu's companions asked, “Why did that madman come?” In sum, it is evident that the Jews thought anyone behaving in an extraordinary way possessed by a good or evil spirit, except for the Sadducees, who erred so far in the opposite direction as to deny the existence of spirits altogether (which comes very near outright atheism), and perhaps thereby provoked others all the more to call such people demoniacs rather than mad.\n\nBut why, then, does our Savior cure them as if they were possessed rather than mad? I can offer only the same kind of answer given to those who similarly invoke Scripture against the view that the Earth moves. Scripture was written to show people the kingdom of God and prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; it leaves the world and its philosophy to human debate and the exercise of natural reason. Whether the Earth's motion or the Sun's makes day and night, and whether people's extraordinary actions arise from passion or from the Devil, is all the same for our obedience and submission to God Almighty, provided we do not worship the Devil; for such obedience is the purpose for which Scripture was written. As for our Savior speaking to the disease as if to a person, this is the usual expression of those who cure solely by words, as Christ did, and as enchanters claim to do, whether they address a devil or not. Is not Christ also said (Math. 8.26.) to have rebuked the winds? Is he not also said (Luk. 4. 39.) to have rebuked a fever? Yet this does not prove that a fever is a devil. And where many of these devils are said to confess Christ, there is no need to interpret the passages otherwise than as saying that those mad people confessed him. And when our Savior (Math. 12. 43.) speaks of an unclean spirit that leaves a person, wanders through dry places seeking rest and finding none, and returns to the same person with seven other spirits worse than itself, it is plainly a parable alluding to a person who, after briefly trying to give up his lusts, is overcome by their strength and becomes seven times worse than before. Thus I see nothing at all in Scripture that requires belief that demoniacs were anything other than mad people.\n\nThere is still another fault in some people's discourse, which may be counted among the kinds of madness: the abuse of words that I discussed in the fifth chapter under the name of absurdity. It occurs when people utter combinations of words that have no meaning at all: some do so through misunderstanding words they have received and repeat by rote, others deliberately to deceive through obscurity. This happens only to those who engage with questions about incomprehensible matters, such as the schoolmen, or with questions of abstruse philosophy. Ordinary people seldom speak meaninglessly, and so these other eminent persons count them idiots. But to be sure that their words correspond to nothing in the mind, one would need examples. Anyone who wants them should take up the work of a schoolman and see whether he can translate a single chapter on some difficult point—the Trinity, the Deity, the nature of Christ, transubstantiation, free will, and so on—into any modern language in a way that makes it intelligible, or into any tolerable Latin such as was familiar to people when Latin was a common tongue. What do these words mean: “The first cause does not necessarily infuse anything into the second by virtue of the essential subordination of secondary causes, by which it may help it to act?” They translate the title of the sixth chapter of Suarez's first book, Of the Concurrence, Motion, and Help of God. When people write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad, or intent on making others so? And particularly on the question of transubstantiation: when some say that, after certain words are spoken, white-ness, round-ness, magni-tude, quali-ty, corruptibili-ty—all incorporeal things—leave the wafer and enter the body of our blessed Savior, do they not make those nesses, tudes, and ties so many spirits possessing his body? For by spirits they always mean things which, though incorporeal, can move from place to place. Thus this kind of absurdity may rightly be counted among the many kinds of madness; and all the time these people refrain from such disputation or writing, guided instead by clear thoughts about their worldly desires, is merely a lucid interval. So much for intellectual virtues and defects.\n\nCHAPTER IX. OF THE VARIOUS SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE\n\n### Part I, Chapter IX\n\nOF THE VARIOUS SUBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE\n\nThere are two kinds of KNOWLEDGE: one is knowledge of fact; the other, knowledge of the consequence of one assertion from another. The first is simply sense and memory, and is absolute knowledge, as when we see an act being done or remember its having been done. This is the knowledge required of a witness. The second is called science and is conditional, as when we know that if the figure shown is a circle, then any straight line through its center will divide it into two equal parts. This is the knowledge required of a philosopher, that is, someone who professes to reason.\n\nThe record of knowledge of fact is called history. It has two kinds: one is called natural history, the history of facts or effects of nature that do not depend on human will, such as the histories of metals, plants, animals, regions, and the like. The other is civil history, the history of people's voluntary actions in Common-wealths.\n\nThe records of science are books containing demonstrations of the consequences of one assertion from another; these are commonly called books of philosophy. They have many kinds, corresponding to the diversity of their subjects, and may be divided as I have divided them in the following table.\n\nI. Science, that is, knowledge of consequences, also called PHILOSOPHY\n\nA. Consequences from the properties of natural bodies, called\n\nNATURAL PHILOSOPHY\n\n1. Consequences from the properties common to all natural bodies,\n\nwhich are quantity and motion.\n\na. Consequences from quantity and motion considered without determination,\n\nwhich, being the principles or first foundation of\n\nphilosophy, are called Philosophia Prima\n\nFIRST PHILOSOPHY\n\nb. Consequences from motion and quantity as determined\n\n1) Consequences from quantity and motion as determined\n\na) By figure, by number\n\n1] Mathematics,\n\nGEOMETRY\n\nARITHMETIC\n\n2) Consequences from the motion and quantity of particular\n\nbodies\n\na) Consequences from the motion and quantity of the\n\ngreat parts of the world, such as the Earth and stars,\n\n1] Cosmography\n\nASTRONOMY\n\nGEOGRAPHY\n\nb) Consequences from the motion of particular kinds and\n\nshapes of bodies,\n\n1] Mechanics, doctrine of weight\n\nScience of\n\nENGINEERING\n\nARCHITECTURE\n\nNAVIGATION\n\n2. PHYSICS, or consequences from qualities\n\na. Consequences from the qualities of transient bodies, such\n\nas sometimes appear and sometimes vanish\n\nMETEOROLOGY\n\nb. Consequences from the qualities of permanent bodies\n\n1) Consequences from the qualities of the stars\n\na) Consequences from the light of the stars. From\n\nthis, and the motion of the Sun, comes the\n\nscience of\n\nSCIOGRAPHY\n\nb) Consequences from the influence of the stars,\n\nASTROLOGY\n\n2) Consequences from the qualities of liquid bodies that\n\nfill the space between the stars, such as the\n\nair or ethereal substance.\n\n3) Consequences from the qualities of terrestrial bodies\n\na) Consequences from parts of the Earth that are\n\nwithout sense,\n\n1] Consequences from the qualities of minerals, such as\n\nstones, metals, etc.\n\n2] Consequences from the qualities of plants\n\nb) Consequences from the qualities of animals\n\n1] Consequences from the qualities of animals in\n\ngeneral\n\na] Consequences from vision,\n\nOPTICS\n\nb] Consequences from sounds,\n\nMUSIC\n\nc] Consequences from the other senses\n\n2] Consequences from the qualities of human beings in particular\n\na] Consequences from human passions,\n\nETHICS\n\nb] Consequences from speech,\n\ni) In magnifying, vilifying, etc.\n\nPOETRY\n\nii) In persuading,\n\nRHETORIC\n\niii) In reasoning,\n\nLOGIC\n\niv) In contracting,\n\nThe science of\n\nJUST and UNJUST\n\nB. Consequences from the properties of political bodies, called\n\nPOLITICS and CIVIL PHILOSOPHY\n\n1. Of consequences from the institution of COMMON-WEALTHS to\n\nthe rights and duties of the political body, or Sovereign.\n\n2. Of consequences from the same to the duty and right of\n\nthe subjects.\n\nCHAPTER X. OF POWER, WORTH, DIGNITY, HONOR AND WORTHINESS\n\n### Part I, Chapter X, 1\n\nOF POWER, WORTH, DIGNITY, HONOR AND WORTHINESS\n\nA person's POWER, taken in its broadest sense, is the means presently available to obtain some future apparent good. It is either original or instrumental.\n\nNatural power is excellence in the faculties of body or mind: extraordinary strength, beauty, prudence, skill, eloquence, generosity, or noble birth. Instrumental powers are those acquired by these faculties or by fortune that serve as means to acquire more power: riches, reputation, friends, and the secret working of God that people call good luck. In this respect power is like fame, growing as it advances, or like the motion of heavy bodies, which gather speed the farther they travel.\n\nThe greatest human power is that compounded of the powers of many people united by consent in one person, natural or civil, who has the use of all their powers dependent on his will, as in the power of a Common-wealth. Or those powers may depend on the will of each individual, as in the power of a faction or several factions in league. Thus to have servants is power, and to have friends is power: their strengths are united.\n\nRiches joined with generosity are also power, because they procure friends and servants. Without generosity riches are not power in this way, because they do not protect their owner but expose that person as prey to envy.\n\nA reputation for power is power, because it draws the allegiance of those who need protection.\n\nSo too is a reputation for love of one's country, called popularity, for the same reason.\n\nAny quality that makes a person loved or feared by many, and even a reputation for such a quality, is power, because it is a means of gaining the help and service of many.\n\nSuccess is power, because it creates a reputation for wisdom or good fortune, which makes others either fear the successful person or rely upon him.\n\nAffability in someone already powerful increases power, because it wins affection.\n\nA reputation for prudence in the conduct of peace or war is power, because we entrust the government of ourselves to prudent people more willingly than to others.\n\nNoble birth is power, not everywhere but only in those Common-wealths where it carries privileges; their power consists in those privileges.\n\nEloquence is power, because it seems to be prudence.\n\nBeauty is power, because as a promise of good it recommends people to the favor of women and strangers.\n\nThe sciences have little power because they are not conspicuous, and so their presence in any person goes unrecognized. Few have them at all, and even they possess them only in a few matters. For science is such that no one can recognize its presence without having attained a considerable measure of it.\n\nArts of public use, such as fortification and the making of engines and other instruments of war, are power because they contribute to defense and victory. And though their true mother is science, namely mathematics, because the craftsman's hand brings them into the light they are considered his offspring: ordinary people take the midwife for the mother.\n\nA person's value, or WORTH, like the worth of everything else, is the price that would be paid for the use of that person's power. It is therefore not absolute, but depends on another's need and judgment. An able commander of soldiers has a high price in time of present or imminent war, but not in peace. A learned and incorruptible judge is worth much in peacetime, but not so much in war. With people as with other things, it is not the seller but the buyer who sets the price. Though a person may, as most do, rate his own value as high as possible, his true value is no greater than others estimate it to be.\n\nThe expression of the value we place on one another is commonly called honoring or dishonoring. To set a high value on someone is to honor that person; to set a low value is to dishonor. But high and low here are relative to the value each person sets on himself.\n\nA person's public worth, the value placed on him by the Common-wealth, is what people commonly call DIGNITY. This valuation by the Common-wealth is expressed through offices of command or judgment, public employment, or names and titles introduced to distinguish such value.\n\nTo ask another for aid of any kind is to HONOR that person, because it shows we think they have the power to help; and the more difficult the aid, the greater the honor.\n\nTo obey is to honor, for no one obeys those whom they think powerless to help or hurt them. Consequently, to disobey is to dishonor.\n\nTo give someone great gifts is to honor him, because this buys protection and acknowledges power. To give small gifts is to dishonor, because it is only almsgiving and implies the need for small assistance. To work diligently for another's good, or to flatter him, is also to honor, as a sign that we seek his protection or aid. To neglect him is to dishonor.\n\nTo yield to another in the enjoyment of any benefit is to honor, since this acknowledges greater power. To claim precedence is to dishonor.\n\nTo show any sign of love or fear of another is to honor; both love and fear assign value. To despise another, or to love or fear him less than he expects, is to dishonor, for it is to undervalue him.\n\nTo praise, magnify, or call someone happy is to honor, because only goodness, power, and happiness are valued. To revile, mock, or pity is to dishonor.\n\nTo speak to another thoughtfully, and to appear before him with propriety and humility, is to honor him, as a sign of fear of giving offense. To speak rashly to him, or do anything obscene, slovenly, or impudent in his presence, is to dishonor.\n\nTo believe, trust, or rely on another is to honor him, as a sign of our opinion of his virtue and power. To distrust or disbelieve is to dishonor.\n\nTo listen to someone's counsel or discourse of any kind is to honor, showing that we think him wise, eloquent, or witty. To sleep, leave, or talk while he speaks is to dishonor.\n\nTo do for another what he considers signs of honor, or what law or custom establishes as such, is to honor him: by approving the honor others show him, he acknowledges the power that they acknowledge. To refuse is to dishonor.\n\nTo agree with someone in opinion is to honor him, as a sign of approving his judgment and wisdom. To disagree is to dishonor and reproach him for error; if one disagrees on many points, for folly.\n\nTo imitate is to honor, for imitation gives emphatic approval. To imitate someone's enemy is to dishonor him.\n\nTo honor those whom another honors is to honor that person, showing approval of his judgment. To honor his enemies is to dishonor him.\n\nTo employ someone in counsel or in difficult actions is to honor, as a sign that we credit his wisdom or other power. To deny such employment to those who seek it is to dishonor.\n\nAll these forms of honor are natural, within Common-wealths as well as outside them. But in Common-wealths, where the person or people holding supreme authority can make whatever they please stand for a sign of honor, there are other honors.\n\nA Sovereign honors a subject with whatever title, office, employment, or action he wishes to be taken as a sign of his will to honor that subject.\n\nThe king of Persia honored Mordecai when he ordered that Mordecai be conducted through the streets in the king's garment, on one of the king's horses, with a crown on his head, and a prince before him proclaiming, “Thus shall it be done to the man whom the king wishes to honor.” Yet another king of Persia, or the same king at another time, granted a man who had asked to wear one of the king's robes in return for some great service permission to do so, but added that he should wear it as the king's fool; then it was dishonor. So it is with civil honor: magistracies, offices, titles, and in some places coats of arms and painted shields. People honor those who have them as bearers of so many signs of favor in the Common-wealth, and that favor is power.\n\nWhatever possession, action, or quality gives evidence and a sign of power is honorable.\n\nThus to be honored, loved, or feared by many is honorable, as evidence of power; to be honored by few or none is dishonorable.\n\n### Part I, Chapter X, 2\n\nGood fortune, if it lasts, is honorable, as a sign of God's favor. Ill fortune and losses are dishonorable. Riches are honorable, for they are power; poverty is dishonorable. Magnanimity, generosity, hope, courage, and confidence are honorable, for they spring from an awareness of power. Pusillanimity, stinginess, fear, and distrust are dishonorable.\n\nTimely resolution, or deciding what one is to do, is honorable, because it shows contempt for small difficulties and dangers. Irresolution is dishonorable, as a sign that one attaches too much weight to slight obstacles and slight advantages. For when a person has weighed matters as long as time permits and still does not decide, the difference in their weight can only be small. To remain undecided, then, is to overvalue small things, which is pusillanimity.\n\nAll actions and words that spring, or seem to spring, from great experience, knowledge, discretion, or wit are honorable, for all these are forms of power. Actions or words that spring from error, ignorance, or folly are dishonorable.\n\nGravity, insofar as it appears to come from a mind occupied with something else, is honorable, because occupation is a sign of power. But when it appears to come from a wish to look grave, it is dishonorable. The gravity of the former resembles the steadiness of a ship laden with merchandise; that of the latter, the steadiness of a ship ballasted with sand and other rubbish.\n\nTo be conspicuous—that is, to be known for wealth, office, great deeds, or some other eminent good—is honorable, as a sign of the power for which one is conspicuous. Obscurity, on the contrary, is dishonorable.\n\nTo descend from conspicuous parents is honorable, because their descendants more easily obtain the aid and friendship of their ancestors' associates. Descent from obscure parents, on the contrary, is dishonorable.\n\nActions that spring from equity and bring loss are honorable, as signs of magnanimity; for magnanimity is a sign of power. Cunning, evasion, and neglect of equity, on the contrary, are dishonorable.\n\nNor does it alter the question of honor whether an action, provided it is great and difficult and thus a sign of much power, is just or unjust: honor consists only in the opinion of power. Thus the ancient pagans did not think they dishonored the gods, but rather honored them greatly, when their poems portrayed them committing rape, theft, and other great yet unjust or unclean acts. Nothing in Jupiter is so celebrated as his adulteries, nor in Mercury as his frauds and thefts. His highest praise in a hymn of Homer is that, born in the morning, he had invented music by noon and before night had stolen Apollo's cattle from his herdsmen.\n\nAmong human beings, too, before great Common-wealths were established, being a pirate or a highway robber was thought no dishonor, but rather a lawful occupation—not only among the Greeks but among all other nations, as ancient histories show. And today, in this part of the world, private duels are and always will be honorable, though unlawful, until honor is ordained for those who refuse them and disgrace for those who issue the challenge. For duels are sometimes effects of courage, and courage always rests on strength or skill, which are power; though for the most part they arise from rash words and fear of dishonor in one or both combatants, who, having committed themselves rashly, are driven into the lists to escape disgrace.\n\nHereditary shields and coats of arms are honorable where they carry eminent privileges; otherwise they are not. Their power consists either in those privileges, in riches, or in something else equally honored in other people. This kind of honor, commonly called gentry, comes from the ancient Germans. Nothing of the kind was ever known where German customs were unknown, nor is it now practiced anywhere the Germans have not inhabited. Ancient Greek commanders going to war painted their shields with designs of their choice, so that an unpainted buckler signified poverty and the status of an ordinary soldier; but they did not pass these devices down as an inheritance. The Romans passed down the marks of their families, but these were images of their ancestors, not their devices. Among the peoples of Asia, Africa, and America there is, and never has been, any such practice. The Germans alone had this custom, from whom it passed into England, France, Spain, and Italy, when large numbers of them either aided the Romans or made conquests of their own in these western parts of the world.\n\nFor Germany, like every other country in its beginnings, was anciently divided among countless petty lords, or heads of families, continually at war with one another. These lords, chiefly so that their followers might recognize them when they were covered in armor, and partly for ornament, painted their armor, shields, or coats with the image of some beast or other thing, and placed a prominent, visible mark on the crest of their helmets. This ornament of arms and crest descended by inheritance to their children: to the eldest unchanged, and to the rest with some distinguishing mark, as the old master—called in Dutch the Here-alt—thought fit. But when many such families joined to form a greater monarchy, this duty of the herald, distinguishing shields, was made a separate office. The descendants of these lords are the great and ancient gentry, whose arms mostly display living creatures noted for courage and rapacity, or castles, battlements, belts, weapons, bars, palisades, and other signs of war; for nothing then was held in honor but military virtue. Later, not only kings but popular Common-wealths granted various kinds of shields to those departing for war or returning from it, as encouragement or reward for their service. An attentive reader can find all this in the ancient Greek and Latin histories that mention the German people and their customs in those times.\n\nTitles of honor, such as duke, count, marquis, and baron, are honorable because they signify the value placed on their holders by the Soveraigne Power of the Common-wealth. In former times these were titles of office and command, derived in some cases from the Romans, in others from the Germans and French. Dukes, in Latin duces, were generals in war; counts, comites, were those who accompanied the general as friends and were left to govern and defend conquered and pacified places; marquises, marchiones, were counts who governed the marches or borders of the empire. These titles of duke, count, and marquis entered the empire around the time of Constantine the Great, from the customs of the German militia. Baron, however, appears to have been a title of the Gauls, meaning a great man: one of the king's or prince's men employed near his person in war. It seems to derive through ber and bar from vir, which in the language of the Gauls meant the same as vir in Latin, and thence through bero and baro; such men were called berones and later barones, and in Spanish varones. Anyone wishing to learn more precisely the origin of titles of honor can find it, as I found this account, in Mr. Selden's excellent treatise on the subject. In time, owing to troubles and for reasons of good and peaceful government, these honorable offices became mere titles, serving chiefly to distinguish the precedence, place, and order of subjects within the Common-wealth. Men were made dukes, counts, marquises, and barons of places in which they had neither possession nor command; and other titles were devised for the same purpose.\n\nWorthiness differs from a person's worth or value, and also from merit or desert. It consists in a particular power or ability for the thing of which that person is said to be worthy; this particular ability is usually called fitness or aptitude.\n\nThe person worthiest to be a commander, a judge, or the holder of any other charge is the one best fitted with the qualities needed to discharge it well. The person worthiest of riches has the qualities most necessary to use them well. Even without any of these qualities, one may nevertheless be a worthy person, valuable for something else. Again, someone may be worthy of riches, office, and employment without having any claim to receive them before another, and therefore cannot be said to merit or deserve them. For merit presupposes a right, and that the thing deserved is owed by promise. I shall say more of this later, when I discuss contracts.\n\nCHAPTER XI. OF THE DIFFERENCE OF MANNERS\n\n### Part I, Chapter XI\n\nOF THE DIFFERENCE OF MANNERS\n\nBy manners I do not mean here the decencies of behavior—how one person should greet another, or wash one's mouth or pick one's teeth before company, and other such points of minor morality—but those qualities of humankind that bear on living together in peace and unity. To this end we must recognize that happiness in this life does not consist in the repose of a satisfied mind. There is no such finis ultimus, or ultimate aim, nor any summum bonum, or greatest good, of the kind discussed in the books of the old moral philosophers. A person whose desires have ended can no more live than one whose senses and imagination have stopped. Happiness is a continual progress of desire from one object to another, the attainment of the first being always only the path to the next. The reason is that the object of human desire is not merely to enjoy something once, for an instant, but to secure forever the way to satisfy future desire. And so the voluntary actions and inclinations of everyone tend not only to obtain a contented life but to secure it; they differ only in their methods. These differences arise partly from the diverse Passions of different people, and partly from the difference in what each knows or believes about the causes that bring about the desired effect.\n\nThus I place first, as a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceases only in death. The reason is not always that a person hopes for more intense pleasure than has already been attained, or cannot be content with moderate power. Rather, no one can secure the power and means of living well now possessed without acquiring more. That is why kings, whose power is greatest, strive to secure it at home by laws and abroad by wars. When this is done a new desire succeeds it: in some, for fame through fresh conquest; in others, for ease and sensual pleasure; in others, for admiration or flattery for excellence in some art or other ability of mind.\n\nCompetition for riches, honor, command, or other power inclines people toward contention, hostility, and war, because one competitor's way to obtain what he desires is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repel the other. Competition for praise in particular inclines people to revere antiquity. They contend with the living, not the dead; and attribute more than is due to the dead in order to dim the glory of the living.\n\nThe desire for ease and sensual delight disposes people to obey a common power, because such desires lead one to abandon the protection that could be hoped for from one's own industry and labor.\n\nFear of death and wounds has the same effect, and for the same reason. Conversely, needy and hardy people, dissatisfied with their present condition, and all those ambitious for military command, are inclined to perpetuate the causes of war and to stir up trouble and sedition. There is no military honor except through war, nor any comparable hope of improving a bad hand except by arranging a new shuffle.\n\nDesire for knowledge and the arts of peace inclines people to obey a common power, for such desire includes a desire for leisure, and consequently for protection by some power other than their own.\n\nDesire for praise disposes people to praiseworthy actions that please those whose judgment they value; for we also despise the praise of people we despise. Desire for fame after death does the same. And though after death we have no sensation of praise bestowed on us on earth—such joys being either swallowed up by the unspeakable joys of heaven or extinguished in the extreme torments of hell—such fame is not vain. People take pleasure in it now by foreseeing it and the benefit it may bring their descendants; though they cannot see that benefit yet, they imagine it, and whatever gives pleasure to the senses gives pleasure also to the imagination.\n\nTo receive from someone we consider our equal greater benefits than we can hope to repay disposes us to counterfeit love while secretly feeling hatred. It puts a person in the position of a desperate debtor who, avoiding his creditor's sight, silently wishes him where he would never see him again. For benefits impose obligations, and obligation is bondage, which is hateful when owed to an equal. But receiving benefits from someone we acknowledge as our superior inclines us to love, because the obligation is no new abasement; and cheerful acceptance, which people call gratitude, honors the benefactor in a way generally taken as repayment. Receiving benefits even from an equal or inferior likewise disposes us to love as long as there is hope of repaying them. In the recipient's intention the obligation is one of mutual aid and service; hence arises a rivalry over who will surpass the other in doing good, the noblest and most fruitful contest possible, in which the victor is pleased with victory and the other gets revenge by acknowledging it.\n\nTo have done someone more harm than one can, or is willing to, make amends for inclines the doer to hate the sufferer. For the doer must expect either revenge or forgiveness, both of which are hateful.\n\nFear of oppression disposes a person to strike first or to seek help through association, for there is no other way to secure one's life and liberty.\n\nIn tumult and sedition, those who distrust their own cunning are better placed to win than those who think themselves wise or crafty. The latter like to deliberate; the former, fearing they will be outwitted, strike first. And in sedition, when people are always poised for battle, holding together and using every advantage of force is a better stratagem than any subtlety of wit can devise.\n\nVainglorious people who, without being aware of any great ability in themselves, delight in imagining themselves valiant are inclined only to show off, not to act. For when danger or difficulty appears, they expect nothing but exposure of their inadequacy.\n\nVainglorious people who measure their ability by others' flattery or the good fortune of some earlier action, without sound grounds for hope in true self-knowledge, are inclined to commit themselves rashly and, when danger or difficulty draws near, to withdraw if they can. Since they see no path to safety, they prefer to risk their honor, which an excuse may repair, rather than their lives, for which no remedy suffices.\n\nPeople with a strong opinion of their own wisdom in government are disposed to ambition, because without public employment as counselors or magistrates the honor of their wisdom is lost. Eloquent speakers are therefore inclined to ambition, for eloquence appears to be wisdom both to themselves and to others.\n\nPusillanimity disposes people to irresolution and thus to miss occasions and the best opportunities for action. For if they have deliberated until the time for action approaches and it is still not clear what is best, that is a sign that the motives on either side differ little. Not to decide then is to lose the occasion by weighing trifles; that is pusillanimity.\n\nFrugality, though a virtue in poor people, makes a person ill-suited to accomplish deeds that require the strength of many people at once. For it weakens their effort, which must be nourished and kept vigorous by reward.\n\nConfidence in Others from Ignorance of the Signs of Wisdom and Kindness. Eloquence coupled with flattery disposes people to trust those who possess them, because the former appears to be wisdom, the latter kindness. Add a military reputation, and people are disposed to attach and subject themselves to such men. The first two give assurance against danger from the men themselves; the last gives assurance against danger from others.\n\nLack of knowledge, that is, ignorance of causes, disposes—or rather compels—a person to rely on the advice and authority of others. For everyone concerned with the truth must rely, if not on their own opinion, on that of someone else whom they think wiser than themselves and see no reason to suspect of deception.\n\nIgnorance of what words mean—that is, lack of understanding—disposes people to take on trust not only truths they do not know, but also the errors and, what is more, the nonsense of those they trust. Neither error nor nonsense can be detected without a thorough understanding of words.\n\nFrom this same ignorance it follows that people give different names to one and the same thing according to their different Passions. Those who approve of a private opinion call it an opinion; those who dislike it call it heresy. Yet heresy means nothing more than private opinion, only colored by greater anger.\n\nIt also follows from this that, without study and deep understanding, people cannot distinguish one action performed by many people from many actions performed by a multitude: for example, the single action of all the senators of Rome in killing Catiline from the many actions of a number of senators in killing Caesar. They are therefore disposed to call an action of the people what is in fact a multitude of actions performed by a multitude of people, perhaps led by the persuasion of one person.\n\nAdherence to Custom from Ignorance of the Nature of Right and Wrong. Ignorance of the causes and original establishment of right, equity, law, and justice disposes a person to take custom and example as the rule of conduct: to think unjust whatever it has been customary to punish, and just whatever one can cite an example of being left unpunished and approved—or, as lawyers who use only this false measure of justice crudely call it, a precedent. Such people are like little children, whose only rule of good and bad behavior is correction by parents and teachers, except that children hold steady to their rule, while adults do not. Having grown strong and stubborn, they appeal from custom to reason and from reason to custom as suits their purposes; they abandon custom when their interest requires it and oppose reason whenever reason opposes them. This is why right and wrong are perpetually disputed with both pen and sword, while lines and figures are not: in geometry people do not care what the truth is, because it thwarts no one's ambition, profit, or desire. For I do not doubt that, if the proposition that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two angles of a square had conflicted with anyone's right of dominion or the interests of those who hold dominion, that doctrine would, if not disputed, have been suppressed by burning every book of geometry, as far as the person concerned was able.\n\nAdherence to Private Men from Ignorance of the Causes of Peace. Ignorance of remote causes disposes people to attribute every event to its immediate, instrumental causes, for these are all they perceive. Thus everywhere people aggrieved by payments to the public vent their anger on the tax gatherers—that is, the farmers, collectors, and other officers of public revenue—and attach themselves to critics of the public government. Then, once committed beyond hope of justifying themselves, they turn against the Supreme Authority as well, for fear of punishment or shame at receiving a pardon.\n\nIgnorance of natural causes disposes a person to credulity and often to believe impossibilities: having no knowledge to the contrary, such people cannot see why these things might not be true, since they cannot detect their impossibility. And credulity, because people like to be listened to in company, disposes them to lie. Thus ignorance alone, without malice, can make a person both believe lies and tell them, and sometimes invent them too.\n\nAnxiety about the future disposes people to inquire into the causes of things, because knowing those causes enables them to arrange the present to their best advantage.\n\nCuriosity, or love of knowing causes, draws a person from considering an effect to seek its cause, and then the cause of that cause, until at last one must come to the thought that there is some cause with no prior cause, which exists eternally: what people call God. Thus it is impossible to inquire deeply into natural causes without being inclined thereby to believe in one eternal God, though they can have no idea of him in their minds corresponding to his nature. A person born blind, hearing others speak of warming themselves at a fire and being brought to warm himself there too, can readily grasp and be certain that something called fire is present and causes the heat he feels, yet cannot imagine what it looks like or form an idea of it such as sighted people have. In the same way, from the visible things of this world and their marvelous order a person may conceive that they have a cause called God, without having an idea or image of him in the mind.\n\nAnd those who make little or no inquiry into the natural causes of things are nevertheless moved by the fear arising from their very ignorance of what has the power to do them great good or harm. They are inclined to suppose and invent various kinds of invisible powers, to stand in awe of their own imaginings, to call upon them in distress, and to thank them when expecting success: thus making the creatures of their own fancy their gods. In this way, from the countless varieties of imagination, people have created countless kinds of gods in the world. This fear of invisible things is the natural seed of what each person calls religion in themselves and superstition in those who worship or fear that power differently.\n\nAnd because many have observed this seed of religion, some of those observers have been inclined to nurture, tend, and shape it into laws, and to add whatever opinions of the causes of future events they devised that they thought would best enable them to govern others and turn those powers to their greatest advantage.\n\nCHAPTER XII. OF RELIGION\n\n### Part I, Chapter XII, 1\n\nOF RELIGION\n\nSince signs and fruits of religion are found only in human beings, there is no reason to doubt that the seed of religion, too, is found only in them, and consists in some peculiar quality, or at least some remarkable degree of a quality, absent from other living creatures.\n\nFirst, it is peculiar to human nature to inquire into the causes of the events people see—some more than others, but all curious enough to investigate the causes of their own good and ill fortune.\n\nSecond, on seeing anything that has a beginning, a person thinks it must also have had a cause determining it to begin when it did, rather than sooner or later.\n\nThird, whereas beasts have no other happiness than enjoying their daily food, rest, and desires, having little or no foresight of the future because they do not observe and remember the order, sequence, and dependence of the things they see, human beings observe how one event has been produced by another and remember what preceded and followed. When a person cannot be sure of the true causes of things—for the causes of good and ill fortune are mostly invisible—that person supposes causes suggested by the imagination, or trusts the authority of others believed to be friends and wiser than oneself.\n\nThe Natural Cause of Religion: Anxiety about the Future. The first two qualities give rise to anxiety. For, being assured that all things that have happened or will happen have causes, a person who continually strives to guard against feared evils and obtain desired goods cannot help being perpetually concerned about the future. Everyone, and especially those who look too far ahead, is thus in a condition like that of Prometheus. For Prometheus—whose name means the prudent man—was bound to Mount Caucasus, a place with a wide view, where an eagle fed on his liver, devouring by day as much as was restored by night. So the person who looks too far ahead in caring for the future has a heart gnawed all day by fear of death, poverty, or some other calamity, and finds no rest or respite from anxiety except in sleep.\n\nThis perpetual fear, which always accompanies humankind in ignorance of causes, as though in the dark, must have an object. And when nothing can be seen, people can blame nothing for their good or ill fortune except some invisible power or agent. Perhaps it was in this sense that some ancient poets said the gods were first created by human fear; said of the gods—that is, the many gods of the Gentiles—it is quite true. But acknowledgment of one eternal, infinite, and omnipotent God can more readily be traced to the human desire to know the causes of natural bodies and their various properties and actions than to fear of what may befall us in the future. For whoever reasons from an effect to its next immediate cause, and thence to the cause of that cause, pursuing causes in depth, will at last arrive at the conclusion that there must be—as even the pagan philosophers admitted—one First Mover, that is, a first and eternal cause of everything, which is what people mean by God. All this can occur without a thought for one's fortune, concern for which both inclines people to fear and hinders their search for the causes of other things, thereby giving occasion for the invention of as many gods as there are people who invent them.\n\nAs for the matter or substance of the invisible agents thus imagined, natural thought could suggest nothing but the substance of the human soul; and people supposed that the human soul had the same substance as what appears in a dream to a sleeper or in a mirror to someone awake. Not knowing that these appearances are nothing but creations of the imagination, they take them for real, external substances and call them ghosts, as the Latins called them imagines and umbrae. They thought them spirits, that is, thin airy bodies, and imagined the invisible agents they feared to be like them, except that such agents appear and vanish at will. But the idea that these spirits are incorporeal or immaterial could never arise naturally in anyone's mind. For though people may join words of contradictory meaning, such as spirit and incorporeal, they can never imagine anything answering to them. Thus those who by their own reflection come to acknowledge one infinite, omnipotent, eternal God prefer to confess that he is incomprehensible and beyond their understanding, rather than define his nature as an incorporeal spirit and then admit that their definition cannot be understood. Or, if they do give him that title, they do so not dogmatically, intending to make the divine nature understood, but piously, honoring him with descriptions whose meanings are as far as possible from the grossness of visible bodies.\n\nNext, as to how they think these invisible agents produce their effects—that is, what immediate causes they use to bring things about—people who do not know what we mean by causing, which is nearly everyone, have no rule for conjecture but observing and remembering what they have seen precede a similar effect on earlier occasions, without perceiving any dependence or connection between the preceding and subsequent events. Thus from similar things in the past they expect similar things in the future, and superstitiously hope for good or ill luck from things that play no part in causing it. So the Athenians, for their war at Lepanto, demanded another Phormio; the Pompeian faction, for its war in Africa, another Scipio; and others since have done likewise on various occasions. In the same way, people attribute their fortune to a bystander, to a lucky or unlucky place, or to spoken words, especially when the name of God occurs in them, as in charms and conjuring—the liturgy of witches—believing that these can turn a stone into bread, bread into a human being, or anything into anything else.\n\nThird, the worship people naturally offer to invisible powers can consist only of the expressions of reverence they would use toward other people: gifts, petitions, thanks, bodily submission, respectful addresses, sober conduct, prepared words, and oaths—that is, assurances of promises to one another—invoking those powers. Beyond this, reason suggests nothing; it leaves people either to stop there or to rely for further ceremonies on those they believe wiser than themselves.\n\nLastly, as to how these invisible powers reveal to people what will come to pass, especially their good or ill fortune in general or success or failure in a particular undertaking, people are naturally at a loss. But because they habitually conjecture about the future from the past, they readily treat chance events, after one or two coincidences, as signs foretelling similar encounters ever afterward, and also believe similar predictions from others of whom they have once formed a good opinion.\n\nIn these four things—belief in ghosts, ignorance of secondary causes, devotion toward what people fear, and the taking of chance events for omens—consists the natural seed of religion. Owing to the differing imaginations, judgments, and Passions of different people, it has grown into ceremonies so varied that those practiced by one person are mostly ridiculous to another.\n\nFor these seeds have been cultivated by two kinds of people. The first have nourished and ordered them according to their own invention. The second have done so at God's command and direction. Both, however, have acted with the purpose of making those who relied on them more disposed to obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society. Thus religion of the first kind is part of human politics and teaches part of the duty earthly kings require of their subjects. Religion of the second kind is divine politics and contains precepts for those who have made themselves subjects in the Kingdome of God. Of the first kind were all the founders of Common-wealths and the lawgivers of the Gentiles; of the second were Abraham, Moses, and our blessed Savior, through whom the laws of the Kingdome of God have come down to us.\n\nAs for the part of religion consisting in beliefs about the nature of invisible powers, almost nothing with a name has failed, among the Gentiles in one place or another, to be regarded as a god or a devil, or to be imagined by their poets as animated, inhabited, or possessed by some spirit.\n\nThe unformed matter of the world was a god named Chaos.\n\nHeaven, the ocean, the planets, fire, earth, and the winds were all gods.\n\nMen, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, and a leek were deified. They also filled almost every place with spirits called demons: the plains with Pan and Panises, or satyrs; the woods with fauns and nymphs; the sea with Tritons and other nymphs; every river and fountain with a ghost bearing its name and with nymphs; every house with its Lares, or familiar spirits; every person with a Genius; hell with ghosts and spiritual officers such as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and at night every place with larvae, lemures, ghosts of the dead, and a whole kingdom of fairies and bogeymen. They also ascribed divinity and built temples to mere accidents and qualities, such as Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, Contention, Virtue, Honor, Health, Rust, Fever, and the like. When they prayed for or against these, they prayed to them as though ghosts of those names hovered overhead, bestowing or withholding the good or evil for or against which they prayed. They invoked their own wit under the name of Muses, their own ignorance under the name of Fortune, their own lust under the name of Cupid, their own rage under the name of Furies, and their private parts under the name of Priapus; they attributed their sexual defilements to incubi and succubae. In short, there was nothing a poet could introduce as a character in a poem that they did not make into a god or a devil.\n\nThe same authors of Gentile religion observed the second ground of religion: people's ignorance of causes and their consequent readiness to attribute their fortune to things on which it had no apparent dependence. They took the opportunity to foist on that ignorance, in place of secondary causes, a class of secondary, ministering gods. They attributed fertility to Venus, the arts to Apollo, subtlety and craft to Mercury, tempests and storms to Aeolus, and other effects to other gods, so that among the pagans the variety of gods was nearly as great as the variety of human occupations.\n\nTo the worship people naturally considered appropriate for their gods—offerings, prayers, thanks, and the other observances mentioned above—those same Gentile legislators added images in painting and sculpture. Their purpose was that the less informed, who make up most of the people, might imagine that the gods represented were actually enclosed and, as it were, housed in these images, and so stand in greater awe of them. They endowed the images with lands, houses, officers, and revenues set apart from every other human use—that is, consecrated and made holy to these idols—as well as caves, groves, woods, mountains, and entire islands. They attributed to them not only shapes, some human, some animal, some monstrous, but also the faculties and Passions of human beings and animals: sensation, speech, sex, lust, and procreation, not only by mingling gods with one another to propagate their kind but also by mingling them with men and women to beget mongrel gods, mere lodgers in heaven, such as Bacchus, Hercules, and others. They gave them anger, revenge, and other Passions of living creatures, along with the actions flowing from them: fraud, theft, adultery, sodomy, and any vice that could be taken as an effect of power or a cause of pleasure—all those vices that among human beings are regarded as offenses against law rather than honor.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XII, 2\n\nLastly, to forecasts of the future—which are, naturally, conjectures drawn from past experience, and, supernaturally, divine revelation—the authors of Gentile religion added countless other superstitious methods of divination, partly on the strength of supposed experience, partly of supposed revelation. They made people believe they could discover their fortunes sometimes in the ambiguous or senseless answers of the priests at Delphi, Delos, Ammon, and other famous oracles: answers made ambiguous by design, so they could claim either outcome, or made absurd by the intoxicating fumes of the place, common in sulfurous caves. Sometimes they sought them in the leaves of the Sibyls, some books of whose prophecies enjoyed esteem in the Roman Republic, though the fragments now extant seem to be later inventions, perhaps like those of Nostradamus. Sometimes they sought them in the meaningless utterances of madmen thought possessed by a divine spirit—a possession they called enthusiasm; these kinds of foretelling were called theomancy, or prophecy. Sometimes they sought them in the configuration of the stars at their birth, called horoscopy and counted a part of judicial astrology; sometimes in their own hopes and fears, called thumomancy, or presage; sometimes in the predictions of witches who claimed to converse with the dead, called necromancy, conjuring, and witchcraft, but amounting only to trickery and conspiratorial fraud. Sometimes they sought them in the chance flight or feeding of birds, called augury; sometimes in the entrails of a sacrificed beast, called haruspicy; sometimes in dreams; sometimes in the croaking of ravens or the chatter of birds; sometimes in the features of the face, called metoposcopy, or in the lines of the hand by palmistry, or in chance words, called omens. Sometimes they sought them in monsters or unusual events, such as eclipses, comets, rare meteors, earthquakes, floods, strange births, and the like, called portents and signs because they thought these foretold some great calamity; sometimes in sheer lottery, such as heads or tails, counting holes in a sieve, opening Homer or Virgil at random for a verse, and countless other vain devices. So readily are people drawn to believe anything by those who have won their confidence and know how, with gentleness and skill, to seize upon their fear and ignorance.\n\nThe Designs of the Authors of Heathen Religion. Accordingly, the first founders and legislators of Common-wealths among the Gentiles, whose aims were only to keep the people obedient and at peace, everywhere took care, first, to impress on their minds the belief that the religious precepts they issued came not from their own invention but from the commands of some god or other spirit; or else that they themselves were of a nature higher than mere mortals, so that their laws would be more readily accepted. Thus Numa Pompilius claimed to receive the ceremonies he established among the Romans from the nymph Egeria; the first king and founder of the kingdom of Peru claimed that he and his wife were children of the Sun; and Mahomet, to establish his new religion, claimed to converse with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove. Secondly, they took care to make people believe that the gods were displeased by the very things forbidden by law. Thirdly, they prescribed ceremonies, prayers, sacrifices, and festivals by which people were to believe the gods' anger could be appeased; they taught that defeat in war, widespread disease, earthquakes, and each person's private misery arose from the anger of the gods, and that this anger came from neglect of worship or the omission or mishandling of some required ceremony. And though among the ancient Romans people were not forbidden to deny what the poets wrote of pains and pleasures after this life—indeed several men of great authority and gravity in the state openly ridiculed it in their speeches—that belief was always encouraged more than its opposite.\n\nBy these and similar institutions, they achieved their end, the peace of the Common-wealth: ordinary people in misfortune blamed neglect or error in their ceremonies, or their own disobedience to the laws, and were thus less inclined to mutiny against their governors. Entertained by the pomp and diversion of festivals and public games held in honor of the gods, they needed only bread to keep them from discontent, grumbling, and unrest against the state. Thus the Romans, who conquered most of the world then known, had no scruples about tolerating any religion whatever in the city of Rome itself, unless it contained something incompatible with their civil government. We read of no religion forbidden there except that of the Jews, who, as the peculiar Kingdom of God, thought it unlawful to acknowledge subjection to any mortal king or state whatever. Thus the religion of the Gentiles was part of their policy.\n\nThe True Religion and the Laws of God's Kingdom Are the Same. But where God himself established religion by supernatural revelation, he also established for himself a peculiar kingdom and gave laws governing conduct not only toward himself but toward one another. Thus in the Kingdom of God, government and civil laws are part of religion; the distinction between temporal and spiritual dominion has no place there. God is, indeed, king of all the earth; yet he may also be king of a particular chosen nation. That is no more incongruous than for the commander of a whole army to have a particular regiment or company of his own. God is king of all the earth by his power, but king of his chosen people by Covenant. I have reserved another place in the discussion that follows to speak more fully of the Kingdom of God, both by nature and by Covenant.\n\nFrom the way religion spreads, it is not difficult to understand what causes it to dissolve back into its first seeds or principles: merely an opinion that a deity and invisible, supernatural powers exist. These can never be so thoroughly removed from human nature that new religions cannot spring up from them again, cultivated by people who have earned a reputation for that purpose.\n\nFor every established religion is founded at first on the faith of a multitude in one person whom they believe not only wise and devoted to their happiness, but holy, one to whom God himself deigns to reveal his will supernaturally. It follows necessarily that if those who govern religion come to be suspected of lacking such wisdom, sincerity, or love, or cannot show any credible sign of divine revelation, the religion they wish to uphold must likewise be suspected and, in the absence of fear of the civil sword, challenged and rejected.\n\nWhat destroys the reputation for wisdom of someone who founds a religion, or adds to one already founded, is requiring belief in contradictions. Both sides of a contradiction cannot be true. Requiring belief in both therefore shows ignorance, exposing the author on that point and discrediting everything else he proposes as supernatural revelation. A person may indeed receive revelation of many things above natural reason, but of nothing against it.\n\nWhat destroys a reputation for sincerity is doing or saying things that appear to show that those demanding belief from others do not believe it themselves. Such acts and sayings are called scandalous because they are stumbling blocks that make people fall from the path of religion: injustice, cruelty, profanity, greed, and luxury. For who can believe that someone who habitually acts from any of these roots believes in an invisible power to be feared, with which he terrifies others for lesser offenses?\n\nWhat destroys a reputation for love is the discovery of private ends, as when the belief demanded from others advances, or seems to advance, the acquisition of dominion, riches, dignity, or secure pleasure for those demanding it, alone or especially. Whatever brings people a benefit for themselves is thought to be done for their own sake, not for love of others.\n\nLastly, the only testimony people can give of a divine calling is the working of miracles, or true prophecy, itself a miracle, or extraordinary good fortune. Hence religious doctrines received from those who performed such miracles gain no additional credibility from additions by people who prove their calling by no miracle, beyond what local custom and laws have instilled in those brought up under them. As in natural matters people of judgment require natural signs and arguments, so in supernatural matters they require supernatural signs—miracles—before they consent inwardly and from the heart.\n\nAll these causes of the weakening of faith are evident in the examples that follow. First, the children of Israel: when Moses, who had proved his calling to them by miracles and by successfully leading them out of Egypt, was absent for only 40 days, they turned from worship of the true God he had commended to them and, setting up (Exod.32 1,2) a golden calf as their god, relapsed into the idolatry of the Egyptians, from whom they had only recently been delivered. Again, after Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and the generation that had seen God's great works in Israel (Judges 2 11) had died, another generation arose and served Baal. Thus when miracles failed, faith failed too.\n\nAgain, when Samuel's sons, (1 Sam.8.3) appointed judges in Bersabee by their father, took bribes and judged unjustly, the people of Israel refused any longer to have God as their king in any way other than he was king of other peoples. They therefore cried out to Samuel to choose a king for them after the manner of the nations. Thus when justice failed, faith also failed: to the point that they deposed God from reigning over them.\n\nWhen Christianity was first established, the oracles ceased throughout the Roman Empire and the number of Christians grew wonderfully every day and everywhere through the preaching of the apostles and evangelists. Much of that success can reasonably be attributed to the contempt the Gentile priests of that time had brought upon themselves by their uncleanness, greed, and intrigues among princes. Likewise, the religion of the Church of Rome was abolished in England and many other parts of Christendom partly for the same reason: as virtue fails among pastors, faith fails among the people. It was also partly because the schoolmen brought Aristotle's philosophy and doctrines into religion, producing so many contradictions and absurdities that they earned the clergy a reputation for both ignorance and fraudulent intent, inclining people to revolt against them, either against the will of their own princes, as in France and Holland, or with their consent, as in England.\n\nLastly, among the doctrines that the Church of Rome declares necessary for salvation, so many plainly serve the advantage of the Pope and his spiritual subjects residing in the territories of other Christian princes that, were it not for those princes' mutual rivalry, they could exclude all foreign authority without war or trouble as easily as it has been excluded in England. Who does not see whose interests are served by the belief that a king has no authority from Christ unless a bishop crowns him? That a king who is a priest cannot marry? That the question whether a prince was born in lawful marriage must be judged by authority from Rome? That subjects may be released from allegiance if the court of Rome judges their king a heretic? That a king, like Chilperique of France, may be deposed by a pope, like Pope Zachary, without cause, and his kingdom given to one of his subjects? That clergy and members of religious orders, in whatever country, shall be exempt from their king's jurisdiction in criminal cases? Or who does not see who profits from the fees for private masses and the revenues of Purgatory, along with other signs of private interest sufficient to extinguish even the liveliest faith, if, as I have said, the civil magistrate and custom did not sustain it more than any opinion people have of their teachers' holiness, wisdom, or integrity? Thus I may attribute every change of religion in the world to the same cause: displeasing priests, not only among Catholics but even in the church that has most presumed upon its Reformation.\n\nCHAPTER XIII. OF THE NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND, AS CONCERNING THEIR HAPPINESS AND MISERY\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIII\n\nOF THE NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND, AS CONCERNING THEIR HAPPINESS AND MISERY\n\nNature has made people so equal in bodily and mental faculties that, though one person may sometimes be plainly stronger in body or quicker in mind than another, when all is reckoned together the difference between them is not so great that one can claim a benefit to which another cannot equally lay claim. As for bodily strength, the weakest is strong enough to kill the strongest, either by secret plotting or by joining with others in the same danger.\n\nAs for mental faculties—setting aside the arts founded on words, and especially the skill of proceeding by general and infallible rules called science, which very few possess and then in only a few matters, since it is neither a faculty born with us nor one acquired, as prudence is, while we pursue something else—I find an even greater equality among people than in strength. For prudence is only experience, which equal stretches of time give equally to everyone in matters to which they equally apply themselves. What may make this equality seem incredible is merely a vain opinion of one's own wisdom. Almost everyone thinks he possesses more of it than ordinary people—that is, than everyone except himself and a few others whose fame, or agreement with him, wins his approval. Such is human nature that people may admit many others are wittier, more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe many are as wise as themselves. They see their own wit close at hand, and other people's at a distance. But this proves people equal in this respect rather than unequal: there is ordinarily no better sign of the equal distribution of anything than everyone's satisfaction with his share.\n\nFrom this equality of ability arises equality of hope in attaining our ends. If two people desire the same thing, which they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies and, in pursuit of their end—chiefly their own preservation, sometimes only their pleasure—try to destroy or subdue each other. Thus, where an invader need fear no more than another person's solitary strength, if someone plants, sows, builds, or occupies a suitable place, others may well be expected to come with forces united and dispossess him, taking not only the fruits of his labor but his life or liberty. And the invader in turn faces the same danger from another.\n\nFrom this mutual distrust there is no more reasonable way for anyone to secure himself than anticipation: using force or cunning to master as many people as he can, until he sees no power great enough to endanger him. This is no more than self-preservation requires and is generally allowed. Moreover, some people delight in contemplating their own power through acts of conquest, which they pursue further than their security requires. If others, who would otherwise gladly live at ease within modest bounds, did not enlarge their own power by invasion, they could not long survive by standing only on the defensive. Consequently, such an increase of dominion over others, being necessary for a person's preservation, must be allowed him.\n\nAgain, people take no pleasure, but rather great distress, in one another's company where there is no power capable of keeping them all in awe. For each expects his companion to value him as highly as he values himself; and at any sign of contempt or disparagement he naturally tries, as far as he dares—which, among people without a common power to keep them peaceful, is far enough to destroy one another—to force those who scorn him to value him more by doing them harm, and to force others by their example.\n\nThus in human nature we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; second, distrust; third, glory.\n\nThe first makes people invade for gain, the second for safety, and the third for reputation. Those driven by the first use violence to make themselves masters of other people's persons, wives, children, and cattle; those driven by the second, to defend them; those driven by the third, over trifles—a word, a smile, a difference of opinion, or any other sign of disrespect, directed either at themselves or, by implication, at their kindred, friends, nation, profession, or name.\n\nIt is therefore plain that while people live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in the condition called war: a war of everyone against everyone. For war consists not only in battle or the act of fighting, but in a stretch of time in which the will to fight is sufficiently known. Time must therefore be taken into account in the nature of war, just as in the nature of weather. Bad weather consists not of a shower or two, but of a tendency toward rain lasting many days; likewise war consists not in actual fighting, but in a known disposition to fight throughout the time when there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.\n\nEverything that follows from a time of war in which everyone is everyone's enemy follows also from the time when people live with no security beyond what their own strength and ingenuity can provide. In such a condition there is no place for industry, because its fruits are uncertain; consequently no cultivation of the earth, no navigation or use of goods imported by sea, no comfortable buildings, no machines for moving things that require great force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no reckoning of time, no arts, no letters, no society; and worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death. And human life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.\n\nSomeone who has not weighed these matters carefully may find it strange that nature should thus separate people and make them ready to attack and destroy one another; distrusting an inference drawn from the passions, he may wish to see it confirmed by experience. Let him consider what he does himself: when setting out on a journey he arms himself and seeks good company; when going to sleep he locks his doors; even at home he locks his chests. He does this though he knows that laws exist and public officers are armed to avenge any injury done to him. What opinion does he have of his fellow subjects when he rides armed, of his fellow citizens when he locks his doors, and of his children and servants when he locks his chests? Does he not accuse mankind by his actions as much as I do by my words? Yet neither of us thereby accuses human nature. Human desires and other passions are not in themselves sins. Neither are actions proceeding from those passions, until people know a law forbidding them; and they cannot know one until laws are made, nor can any law be made until they have agreed on the person who shall make it.\n\nIt may perhaps be thought that there was never a time or condition of war like this; and I believe it has never prevailed throughout the whole world. But many places live like this now. The peoples called savage in many parts of America, except for the rule of small families whose harmony depends on natural lust, have no government at all, and live to this day in the brutish manner I have described. In any case, one can see what life would be like where there was no common power to fear from the way people formerly living under a peaceful government are apt to sink into such a life in civil war.\n\nEven if individual people had never been at war with one another, kings and persons of Sovereign authority, in every age, are continually suspicious because of their independence. They stand like gladiators, weapons pointed and eyes fixed on one another: their forts, garrisons, and guns facing the frontiers of their kingdoms, and their spies continually watching their neighbors. That is a posture of war. But because they thereby sustain the industry of their subjects, the misery accompanying the liberty of private individuals does not follow from it.\n\nAnother consequence of this war of everyone against everyone is that nothing can be unjust. Notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where there is no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues in war. Justice and injustice are faculties neither of body nor of mind. If they were, someone alone in the world could have them, as he could have senses and passions. They are qualities that belong to people in society, not solitude. It also follows from the same condition that there is no property, no dominion, no distinction between mine and yours; only that each person owns whatever he can get, for as long as he can keep it. So much for the wretched condition in which mere nature actually places mankind, though there is a possibility of escaping it, arising partly from the passions and partly from reason.\n\nThe passions that incline people toward peace are fear of death, desire for what is needed to live comfortably, and hope of obtaining it through their industry. Reason suggests suitable articles of peace on which people may be brought to agreement. These articles are otherwise called the Laws of Nature; I shall speak of them more particularly in the next two chapters.\n\nCHAPTER XIV. OF THE FIRST AND SECOND NATURAL LAWS, AND OF CONTRACTS\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIV, 1\n\nOF THE FIRST AND SECOND NATURAL LAWS, AND OF CONTRACTS\n\nThe Right of Nature, commonly called Jus Naturale by writers, is the liberty each person has to use his own power as he wills for the preservation of his own nature—that is, his own life—and consequently to do whatever in his own judgment and reason he conceives to be the most suitable means of preserving it.\n\nLiberty, in the proper sense of the word, means the absence of external impediments. Such impediments may often take away part of a person's power to do what he wishes, but cannot prevent him from using the power left to him as his judgment and reason direct.\n\nA Law of Nature (Lex Naturalis) is a precept or general rule discovered by reason, by which a person is forbidden to do what destroys his life or takes away the means of preserving it, or to omit what he thinks will best preserve it. For though writers on this subject commonly confuse Jus and Lex, Right and Law, the two must be distinguished. Right consists in the liberty to act or refrain; Law determines and binds a person to one of the two. Thus Law and Right differ as much as obligation and liberty, which cannot coexist in the same matter.\n\nSince the condition of mankind, as declared in the preceding chapter, is a condition of war of everyone against everyone, in which each is governed by his own reason, and nothing he can use is incapable of helping him preserve his life against his enemies, it follows that in this condition everyone has a Right to everything, even to another person's body. Therefore, so long as this natural Right of everyone to everything endures, no one, however strong or wise, can be sure of living through the span nature ordinarily allows human beings.\n\nConsequently, it is a precept or general rule of reason that “Everyone ought to seek peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, he may seek and use every help and advantage of war.” The first branch of this rule contains the first and fundamental Law of Nature: “Seek peace and follow it.” The second contains the sum of the Right of Nature: “Defend ourselves by every means we can.”\n\nFrom this fundamental Law of Nature, commanding us to seek peace, is derived a second Law: “A person should be willing, when others are willing too, to lay down his right to all things, so far as he judges necessary for peace and his own defense, and be content with as much liberty against others as he would allow others against himself.” For as long as everyone keeps the Right to do anything he likes, everyone remains in the condition of war. But if others will not lay down their Right as he does, there is no reason for anyone to divest himself of his own: that would expose him as prey, which no one is bound to do, rather than dispose him to peace. This is the Law of the Gospel: “Whatever you require others to do to you, do that to them.” And it is that law of all people, “Quod tibi feiri non vis, alteri ne feceris.”\n\nTo lay down one's Right to anything is to divest oneself of the liberty of hindering another person from benefiting from his own Right to it. Someone who renounces or transfers his Right gives no other person a Right he did not already have, since everyone has by nature a Right to everything; he merely stands out of that person's way, so that the latter may enjoy his original Right without hindrance from him, though not without hindrance from someone else. Thus what one person gains when another gives up his Right is simply a reduction of impediments to the use of his own original Right.\n\nA Right is laid aside either by simply renouncing it or by transferring it to another. One simply renounces it when one does not care who receives the benefit; one transfers it when one intends the benefit for some particular person or persons. After a person has abandoned or granted away his Right in either way, he is said to be obliged or bound not to hinder those to whom the Right is granted or abandoned from enjoying it; he ought, and it is his duty, not to undo his own voluntary act. Such hindrance is injustice and injury, being sine jure, without Right, since the Right has already been renounced or transferred. Thus injury or injustice in worldly disputes is much like what scholars call absurdity in their arguments. As contradicting what one maintained at the outset is called an absurdity in an argument, so voluntarily undoing what one voluntarily did at the outset is called injustice or injury in the world. A person simply renounces or transfers his Right by declaring or signifying, through some voluntary and sufficient sign or signs, that he does so, or has done so, to the person who accepts it. These signs may be words alone, actions alone, or—as is most often the case—both words and actions. They are the bonds by which people are bound and obliged: bonds whose strength comes not from their own nature, for nothing is more easily broken than a person's word, but from fear of some evil consequence of breaking them.\n\nWhenever someone transfers or renounces his Right, he does so either in consideration of some Right transferred to him in return or for some other good he hopes to obtain. The act is voluntary, and every voluntary act has some good for oneself as its object. Accordingly there are certain Rights no person can be understood, by words or other signs, to have abandoned or transferred. First, no one can lay down the right to resist those who assault him by force to take his life, for no one can be understood to aim thereby at any good for himself. The same holds for wounds, chains, and imprisonment: there is no benefit in submitting to these, as there can be in allowing someone else to be wounded or imprisoned; moreover, when one sees others advancing against him with violence, one cannot know whether they intend to kill him. Finally, the motive and end of renouncing or transferring Right is nothing but the security of one's person, both life itself and the means of preserving it without becoming weary of living. Thus if someone appears by words or other signs to deprive himself of the very end for which those signs were intended, we should not understand that he meant or willed it, but that he did not know how those words and actions would be interpreted.\n\nThe mutual transferring of Right is what people call a Contract.\n\nThere is a difference between transferring the Right to a thing and transferring, or delivering, the thing itself. The thing can be delivered along with the transfer of Right, as in buying and selling for ready money, or exchanging goods or lands; or it can be delivered afterward.\n\nAgain, one of the parties to a Contract may deliver the thing he has contracted to give and leave the other to perform his part at a specified later time, trusting him meanwhile. In that case the Contract on the first party's part is called a Pact, or Covenant. Or both parties may contract now to perform later. In these cases the future performance of the trusted party is called keeping a promise, or faith; a voluntary failure to perform is a violation of faith.\n\nWhen the transfer of Right is not mutual, but one party transfers it in hope of gaining friendship or service from another or his friends, or of winning a reputation for charity or magnanimity, or of relieving the pain of compassion, or of receiving a reward in heaven, this is not a Contract but a gift, free gift, or grace: words signifying the same thing.\n\nSigns of a Contract are either express or inferred. Express signs are words spoken with an understanding of their meaning. Such words may refer to the present or past, as “I give,” “I grant,” “I have given,” “I have granted,” “I will that this be yours”; or to the future, as “I will give,” “I will grant.” These future-tense words are called a promise.\n\nInferred signs sometimes follow from words, sometimes from silence, sometimes from actions, and sometimes from refraining from action. In general, an inferred sign of any Contract is anything that sufficiently shows the will of the contracting party.\n\nWords alone, if they refer to the future and contain a bare promise, are not a sufficient sign of a free gift and therefore create no obligation. For future-tense words such as “Tomorrow I will give” show that I have not yet given, and consequently that my Right has not passed but remains mine until I transfer it by some other act. But if the words refer to the present or past, as “I have given, or do give, to be delivered tomorrow,” then my Right to tomorrow's thing is given away today by force of the words, even without further evidence of my will. There is a great difference in meaning between Volos Hoc Tuum Esse Cras and Cros Dabo, that is, between “I will that this be yours tomorrow” and “I will give it to you tomorrow.” For “I will” in the former expression signifies a present act of the will; in the latter, a promise of a future act of the will. Thus the former words, spoken in the present, transfer a future right; the latter, spoken of the future, transfer nothing. If, however, there are signs besides words of the will to transfer a Right, then even a free gift may be understood to pass by future-tense words. If someone offers a prize to whoever first reaches the end of a race, the gift is free, and though his words refer to the future, the Right passes: had he not wanted his words understood in this way, he should not have let them run.\n\nSigns of Contract Are Words Referring to the Past, Present, and Future. In Contracts, Right passes not only when the words refer to the present or past, but also when they refer to the future. Every Contract is a mutual transfer or exchange of Right. Consequently, someone who merely promises, having already received the benefit for which he promises, is understood to intend that the Right pass; otherwise the other party would not have performed first. For this reason, in buying and selling and other acts of Contract, a promise is equivalent to a Covenant and therefore binding.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIV, 2\n\nA person who performs first in a Contract is said to merit what he is to receive through the other's performance, and it is due to him. Likewise, when a prize is offered to many but given only to the winner, or money is thrown among a crowd for those who catch it, the gift is free, yet winning or catching it is to merit it and have it as one's due. For the Right passes when the prize is offered or the money thrown, though the outcome of the contest has yet to determine to whom it passes. These two kinds of merit differ, however: in a Contract, I merit through my own power and the contracting party's need; in the case of a free gift, I am enabled to merit only by the giver's generosity. In a Contract I merit the contracting party's relinquishment of his Right; in a gift I do not merit the giver's relinquishment of his Right, but merit receiving it rather than another once he has relinquished it. This, I think, is the meaning of the distinction made in the schools between Meritum Congrui and Meritum Condigni. For God Almighty has promised Paradise to those people who, though blindfolded by fleshly desires, can pass through this world according to the precepts and limits he has prescribed; the schoolmen say that whoever does so will merit Paradise Ex Congruo. But since no one can claim a Right to it by his own righteousness or any other power within himself, but only by God's free grace, they say no one can merit Paradise Ex Condigno. This, I say, is what I take the distinction to mean. But since disputants agree on the meaning of their own technical terms only so long as it suits them, I will make no assertion about what they mean. I say only this: where a gift is offered without specifying a recipient, as a prize to be contested, the winner merits the prize and may claim it as due.\n\nIf a Covenant is made in which neither party performs immediately but each trusts the other, then in the condition of mere nature—which is a condition of war of everyone against everyone—it is void upon any reasonable suspicion. But if a common power stands over both parties with sufficient Right and force to compel performance, it is not void. Whoever performs first has no assurance the other will perform later: the bonds of words are too weak to bridle human ambition, greed, anger, and other passions without fear of some coercive power. Such a power cannot be supposed in the condition of mere nature, where all are equal and each judges whether his own fears are justified. Whoever performs first therefore merely betrays himself to his enemy, contrary to the Right, which he can never abandon, to defend his life and the means of living.\n\nBut in a civil state, where a power has been established to constrain those who would otherwise break their word, that fear is no longer reasonable. Accordingly, the party bound by the Covenant to perform first must do so.\n\nThe cause for fear that invalidates such a Covenant must always arise after it is made: some new fact or other sign of unwillingness to perform. Otherwise it cannot make the Covenant void. What could not prevent a person from promising should not be admitted as a reason to prevent his performance.\n\nWhoever transfers a Right also transfers, as far as lies within his power, the means of enjoying it. One who sells land is understood to transfer its grass and whatever grows upon it; one who sells a mill cannot divert the stream that drives it. And those who give someone the Right to govern as Sovereign are understood to give him the right to levy money for the maintenance of soldiers and to appoint magistrates to administer justice.\n\nIt is impossible to make a Covenant with brute beasts: not understanding our speech, they neither understand nor accept a transfer of Right, nor can they transfer any Right to another. Without mutual acceptance, there is no Covenant.\n\nIt is impossible to make a Covenant with God except through the mediation of those to whom God speaks, whether through supernatural revelation or through his deputies who govern under him and in his name. Otherwise we cannot know whether our Covenants are accepted. Thus those who vow anything contrary to a Law of Nature vow in vain, since it would be unjust to fulfill such a vow; and if they vow something commanded by the Law of Nature, the Law, not the vow, binds them.\n\nThe matter or subject of a Covenant is always something open to deliberation—for making a Covenant is an act of the will, that is, an act, indeed the final act, of deliberation. It is therefore always understood to concern something in the future that the party making the Covenant judges it possible for him to perform.\n\nThus a promise to do what one knows to be impossible is no Covenant. But if something previously thought possible later proves impossible, the Covenant is valid and binds the party, though not to the thing itself, to its value; or if even that is impossible, to an honest effort to perform as much as possible, for no one can be bound to do more.\n\nPeople are released from Covenants in two ways: by performing or by being forgiven. Performance is the natural end of obligation; forgiveness restores liberty by transferring back the Right in which the obligation consisted.\n\nCovenants entered into through fear in the condition of mere nature are binding. For example, if I Covenant to pay an enemy ransom or service in exchange for my life, I am bound by it. This is a Contract in which one party receives the benefit of life and the other is to receive money or service in return; consequently, where no other law forbids performance, as in the condition of mere nature, the Covenant is valid. Therefore prisoners of war trusted to pay their ransom must pay it. And if a weaker prince makes a disadvantageous peace with a stronger out of fear, he is bound to keep it unless, as said before, some new and just cause for fear arises that renews the war. Even in Common-wealths, if a thief forces me to promise him money to redeem myself, I am bound to pay it until civil law releases me. For whatever I may lawfully do without obligation, I may lawfully Covenant to do out of fear; and I cannot lawfully break what I lawfully Covenant.\n\nAn earlier Covenant makes a later one void. Someone who has transferred his Right to one person today has no Right left to transfer to another tomorrow; therefore the later promise transfers no Right and is null.\n\nA Covenant not to defend myself against force with force is always void. As I have shown, no one can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself from death, wounds, and imprisonment—the avoidance of which is the sole end of laying down any Right. Hence in no Covenant does a promise not to resist force transfer any Right or impose any obligation. Someone may Covenant, “If I do not do such and such, kill me”; but he cannot Covenant, “If I do not do such and such, I will not resist when you come to kill me.” For by nature a person chooses the lesser evil, the danger of death in resisting, over the greater evil, certain and immediate death in not resisting. Everyone acknowledges this when criminals are escorted to prison and execution by armed guards, though those criminals have consented to the law under which they are condemned.\n\nA Covenant to accuse oneself without assurance of pardon is likewise invalid. In the condition of nature, where everyone is a judge, there is no place for accusation; in a civil state, accusation is followed by punishment, which, being force, no one is obliged not to resist. The same is true of accusing people whose condemnation would bring one misery, such as a father, wife, or benefactor. If such an accuser's testimony is not given willingly, it is presumed to be corrupted by nature and therefore not admissible; and where someone's testimony would not be credited, he is not bound to give it. Nor should accusations extracted under torture be regarded as testimony. Torture should be used only as a means of finding clues for further examination and the search for truth. What a tortured person confesses in that situation aims to relieve his own suffering, not to inform his torturers, and therefore should not carry the authority of sufficient testimony. Whether he frees himself by true or false accusation, he does so by his Right to preserve his own life.\n\nSince words, as I noted earlier, are too weak to hold people to the performance of their Covenants, human nature offers only two conceivable supports for them: fear of the consequences of breaking one's word, or glory and pride in appearing not to need to break it. The latter is a generosity too rare to count on, especially among those pursuing wealth, command, or sensual pleasure, who make up most of mankind. The passion one must count on is fear, with two very general objects: the power of invisible spirits and the power of the people one would offend. Though the former power is greater, fear of the latter is usually greater. Fear of the former is each person's own religion, present in human nature before civil society; fear of the latter does not exist in the same way, at least not strongly enough to keep people to their promises, since in the condition of mere nature inequalities of power become apparent only through the outcome of battle. Thus before civil society, or when it is interrupted by war, nothing can strengthen a Covenant of peace against the temptations of greed, ambition, lust, or other strong desires except fear of the invisible power each person worships as God and fears as an avenger of broken faith. All that two people outside civil power can do, therefore, is have each other swear by the God he fears. Such swearing, or an oath, is a form of speech added to a promise, by which the person promising signifies that if he fails to perform, he renounces the mercy of his God or calls down his vengeance upon himself. The heathen form was: “May Jupiter kill me otherwise, as I kill this beast.” Our form is: “I shall do this and that, so help me God.” Each person adds the rites and ceremonies of his own religion, to increase his fear of breaking faith.\n\nIt follows that an oath taken in any form or rite other than the swearer's own is in vain and is no oath. Nor can one swear by anything one does not regard as God. Though people have sometimes sworn by their kings out of fear or flattery, they thereby meant it understood that they attributed divine honor to them. To swear unnecessarily by God is simply to profane his name; and to swear by other things, as people do in ordinary conversation, is not swearing but an impious habit born of speaking with too much vehemence.\n\nIt also follows that an oath adds nothing to the obligation. A Covenant, if lawful, binds in the sight of God as much without an oath as with one; if unlawful, it does not bind at all, even when confirmed by an oath.\n\nCHAPTER XV. OF OTHER LAWS OF NATURE\n\n### Part I, Chapter XV, 1\n\nOF OTHER LAWS OF NATURE\n\nFrom the Law of Nature obliging us to transfer to another those rights which, if retained, obstruct the peace of mankind, follows a third: people must perform the covenants they have made. Without this, covenants are vain, mere empty words; and because everyone's right to everything remains, we are still in a condition of war.\n\nIn this Law of Nature lies the source and origin of justice. Where no covenant has come before, no right has been transferred, everyone has a right to everything, and therefore no action can be unjust. But once a covenant is made, to break it is unjust; and injustice is nothing other than failure to perform a covenant. Whatever is not unjust is just.\n\nJustice and property begin with the establishment of a Common-wealth. But covenants founded on mutual trust, when either party fears the other's failure to perform, are invalid, as I said in the preceding chapter. Thus, although the making of covenants is the origin of justice, there can be no actual injustice until the cause of that fear has been removed, and this cannot happen while people remain in the natural condition of war. Before the terms just and unjust can apply, there must therefore be a coercive power that compels people equally to perform their covenants, through fear of a punishment greater than the benefit they expect from breaking them, and that guarantees the property people acquire by mutual contract in exchange for the universal right they relinquish. No such power exists before the establishment of a Common-wealth. This can also be gathered from the usual definition of justice in the schools: they say, “Justice is the constant will to give every person what is their own.” Where there is nothing one's own—that is, no property—there is no injustice; and where no coercive power has been established—that is, where there is no Common-wealth—there is no property, because everyone has a right to everything. Therefore, where there is no Common-wealth, nothing is unjust. The nature of justice consists in keeping valid covenants; but covenants become valid only with the establishment of a civil power sufficient to compel people to keep them. That is also when property begins.\n\nThe fool has said in his heart that there is no such thing as justice, and sometimes said it aloud as well. He argues in earnest that, since each person's preservation and satisfaction are entrusted to that person's own care, there is no reason why anyone should not do whatever seems conducive to them. Therefore making or not making covenants, and keeping or not keeping them, cannot be against reason when it serves one's benefit. He does not deny that covenants exist, that they are sometimes broken and sometimes kept, or that breaking them can be called injustice and observing them justice. Rather, he asks whether injustice, if we set aside the fear of God (for this same fool has said in his heart that there is no God), might sometimes accord with the reason that directs everyone toward their own good—especially when it brings such an advantage that one can disregard not only others' blame and abuse but also their power. The Kingdom of God is taken by violence; but what if it could be taken by unjust violence? Would it be against reason to take it that way, when doing so could not possibly cause harm? And if it is not against reason, then it is not against justice, unless justice is not to be esteemed a good. Reasoning of this kind has won successful wickedness the name of virtue; some who condemn every other breach of faith nevertheless approve it when used to gain a kingdom. And the heathens who believed Saturn had been deposed by his son Jupiter nonetheless believed that Jupiter avenged injustice. Something similar appears in a passage of law in Coke's Commentaries on Littleton: he says that if the rightful heir to the Crown is convicted of treason, the Crown shall nevertheless descend to him, and Eo Instante the conviction shall be void. From these examples a person may readily infer that if the heir apparent to a kingdom kills its occupant, even if that occupant is his father, one may call it injustice or whatever else one likes, but it can never be against reason. For all voluntary human actions aim at the benefit of their agents, and the most reasonable actions are those best suited to their ends. Yet this plausible reasoning is false.\n\nThe question does not concern mutual promises where neither party has assurance of performance, as when no civil power has been established over the parties promising; such promises are not covenants. The question arises instead where one party has already performed, or where there is a power to compel performance: is it against reason, that is, against the other party's benefit, to perform or not? I say it is not against reason to perform. To make this clear, we should first consider that when someone does something that, by everything foreseeable and calculable, tends to destroy him, a chance event he could not expect may turn it to his advantage, but such an outcome does not make the act reasonable or wise. Second, in a condition of war, where for lack of a common power to keep all in awe everyone is everyone else's enemy, no one can hope to defend himself from destruction by strength or wit alone, without allies. Everyone expects the same defense from their alliance as everyone else. A person who declares that he thinks it reasonable to deceive those who help him can reasonably expect no means of safety except his own unaided power. Therefore a person who breaks his covenant, and thus declares that he believes he can reasonably do so, cannot be admitted into any society united for peace and defense except through the error of those who admit him; nor, once admitted, can he be kept in it unless they fail to see their error's danger. He cannot reasonably count on such errors as his means of safety. If he is excluded or expelled from society, he perishes; if he lives in society, it is through errors of others that he could neither foresee nor count on, and thus contrary to the reason of his preservation. All who do not contribute to his destruction leave him alone only through ignorance of their own good.\n\nAs for the example of attaining the secure and perpetual happiness of heaven by any means whatever, it is frivolous: only one way is imaginable, and it consists not in breaking a covenant but in keeping it.\n\nAs for the other example, attaining sovereignty by rebellion: plainly, even if it succeeds, success could not reasonably have been expected—rather, the contrary could—and success teaches others to gain sovereignty by the same means. The attempt is therefore against reason. Justice, then, which is keeping covenants, is a rule of reason forbidding us to do anything destructive of our life, and consequently a Law of Nature.\n\nSome go further and refuse to recognize as Laws of Nature those rules conducive to preserving human life on earth; they recognize only rules leading to eternal happiness after death. They think breaking a covenant may serve that end and may therefore be just and reasonable. Such people believe it meritorious to kill, depose, or rebel against the sovereign power established over them by their own consent. But since there is no natural knowledge of the human condition after death, still less of any reward then given for breach of faith—only belief founded on the claims of other people that they know it supernaturally, or know people who knew people who knew others who knew it supernaturally—breach of faith cannot be called a precept of reason or nature.\n\nOthers accept keeping faith as a Law of Nature but make exceptions for certain people, such as heretics and those who do not customarily perform their covenants with others. This too is against reason. If someone's fault is sufficient to release us from a covenant already made with him, it should by the same reasoning have sufficed to prevent us from making it.\n\nThe words just and unjust mean one thing when applied to people and another when applied to actions. Applied to people, they signify whether their character conforms to reason. Applied to actions, they signify whether particular actions conform to reason, not whether a person's character or way of life does. A just person, then, takes every care that all his actions be just; an unjust person neglects to do so. In our language, such people are more often called righteous and unrighteous than just and unjust, though the meaning is the same. A righteous person does not lose that name through one or a few unjust actions arising from sudden passion or a mistake about things or people. Nor does an unrighteous person lose his character through acts he performs or refrains from performing out of fear, since his will is shaped not by justice but by the apparent advantage of what he is to do. What gives human actions the character of justice is a certain nobility or gallantry of courage, rarely found, which makes a person scorn to owe the satisfaction of his life to fraud or broken promises. This justice of character is what we mean when we call justice a virtue and injustice a vice.\n\nBut the justice of actions does not make people just, only guiltless; and the injustice of actions, also called injury, makes them guilty, but no more.\n\nAgain, injustice of character is the disposition or readiness to injure; it is injustice before it issues in an act, without presupposing any particular injured person. But the injustice of an action, that is, injury, presupposes a particular injured person: the person to whom the covenant was made. Thus the person injured is often not the one who suffers the damage. If a master commands his servant to give money to a stranger and the servant fails to do so, the injury is to the master, whom the servant had covenanted to obey, while the damage falls on the stranger, to whom the servant owed no obligation and whom he therefore could not injure. Likewise in Common-wealths, private individuals may forgive one another's debts, but not robberies or other acts of violence by which they suffer damage: withholding a debt injures themselves, but robbery and violence injure the person of the Common-wealth.\n\nWhatever is done to someone in accordance with a will he has made known to the doer does not injure him. If the doer has not relinquished his original right to do as he pleases by a prior covenant, he has broken no covenant, and therefore caused no injury. If he has relinquished it, the other's stated wish that the act be done releases him from that covenant, so again there is no injury.\n\nWriters divide the justice of actions into commutative and distributive justice, claiming that the first rests on arithmetical proportion and the second on geometrical proportion. They thus place commutative justice in an equality between the values of things exchanged under contract, and distributive justice in an equal distribution of benefit to people of equal merit, as though it were unjust to sell for more than one paid, or to give someone more than he deserves. The value of anything exchanged under contract is measured by the appetite of the contracting parties, so the just value is what they are willing to give. And merit—apart from merit arising by covenant, where one party's performance merits the other's, which belongs to commutative, not distributive, justice—is not owed as a matter of justice, but rewarded only by grace. This distinction is therefore mistaken in its usual interpretation. Properly speaking, commutative justice is the justice of a contracting party: performance of a covenant in buying and selling, hiring and letting, lending and borrowing, exchanging, bartering, and other contractual acts.\n\nDistributive justice is the justice of an arbitrator: the act of determining what is just. If an arbitrator, trusted by those who appointed him, fulfills that trust, he is said to distribute to each person what is his own. His distribution is indeed just, and may be called, though improperly, distributive justice; more properly it is equity, which is also a Law of Nature, as will be shown in due course.\n\nAs justice depends on a prior covenant, so gratitude depends on prior grace, that is, a prior free gift. This is the fourth Law of Nature, which may be stated thus: “A person who receives a benefit from another's sheer generosity must endeavor to give the giver no reasonable cause to regret his goodwill.” No one gives without intending some good for himself, since a gift is voluntary, and every voluntary act has as its object some good of the agent. If people see this good will be denied them, there will be no beginning of benevolence or trust, and consequently no mutual help or reconciliation between people. They must then remain in a condition of war, contrary to the first and fundamental Law of Nature, which commands people to seek peace. Breach of this law is called ingratitude and bears the same relation to grace as injustice bears to obligation by covenant.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XV, 2\n\nA fifth Law of Nature is accommodation: “Everyone must strive to accommodate himself to others.” To understand this, we may observe that people differ in their fitness for society because their passions differ, much as stones brought together to build a structure differ. A stone whose rough, irregular shape takes more space from others than it fills itself, and whose hardness makes it difficult to smooth, obstructs the building and is discarded by the builders as useless and troublesome. Likewise, someone who, through a rough disposition, insists on retaining things that are superfluous to himself but necessary to others, and whose stubborn passions cannot be corrected, must be left behind or expelled from society as a burden to it. For everyone is presumed, not only by right but by natural necessity, to do all he can to obtain what he needs for his preservation. A person who opposes that effort for the sake of superfluities is responsible for the war that follows and therefore acts against the fundamental Law of Nature, which commands us to seek peace. Those who observe this law may be called sociable (the Latins call them Commodi); their opposites are stubborn, unsociable, perverse, and intractable.\n\nA sixth Law of Nature is this: “When those who have offended in the past repent and offer assurance for the future, they ought to be pardoned.” Pardon is simply the granting of peace. To grant it to those who persist in hostility is not peace but fear; yet to deny it to those who offer assurance for the future shows an aversion to peace and is therefore contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nA seventh is: “In taking revenge, that is, repaying evil for evil, people must regard not the magnitude of the evil done in the past but the magnitude of the good to follow.” This forbids us to punish for any purpose other than correcting the offender or guiding others. The law follows from the preceding one, which commands pardon upon assurance for the future. Moreover, revenge that takes no account of the example set or of future benefit is a triumph, a glorying in another's suffering that serves no end—for an end must always be something yet to come. Glorying to no end is vainglory and contrary to reason; hurting without reason tends to bring about war, against the Law of Nature, and is commonly called cruelty.\n\nBecause every sign of hatred or contempt provokes a fight, to the point that most people would rather risk their lives than leave themselves unavenged, we may set down this eighth precept as a Law of Nature: “No one must declare hatred or contempt for another by deed, word, expression, or gesture.” Breach of this law is commonly called insult.\n\nThe question of who is the better person has no place in the condition of mere nature, where, as shown before, everyone is equal. The inequality now present was introduced by civil laws. I know that Aristotle, in the first book of his Politics, makes the claim that some are naturally more fit to command, meaning the wiser sort (such as he took himself to be on account of his philosophy), and others to serve (meaning those with strong bodies who were not philosophers like him). He treats the distinction between master and servant as if it arose from differences of intelligence rather than human consent. This is contrary not only to reason but to experience: very few people are so foolish that they would not rather govern themselves than be governed by others. Nor do those who consider themselves wise always, or often, or almost ever win when they contend by force with people who distrust their own wisdom. If nature has made people equal, we must acknowledge that equality; and even if nature has made them unequal, people who believe themselves equal will make peace only on equal terms, so equality must still be admitted. I therefore give as the ninth Law of Nature: “Everyone must acknowledge every other person as his equal by nature.” Breach of this precept is pride.\n\nOn this law depends another: “When entering into terms of peace, no one must demand to keep for himself a right he is unwilling to let all others keep.” All who seek peace must lay down certain Rights of Nature, that is, give up the liberty to do whatever they please. Yet for life they must retain certain rights: to govern their own bodies, to enjoy air, water, movement, routes from place to place, and everything else without which they cannot live, or live well. If, in making peace, people demand for themselves what they would refuse others, they violate the preceding law commanding acknowledgment of natural equality, and thus the Law of Nature. Those who observe this law are called modest, and those who break it arrogant. The Greeks call its violation pleonexia, the desire for more than one's share.\n\nAlso, “If someone is trusted to judge between one person and another,” the Law of Nature commands “that he deal equally with them.” Otherwise their disputes can be settled only by war. A partial judge therefore does all he can to deter people from using judges and arbitrators, and consequently, contrary to the fundamental Law of Nature, becomes a cause of war.\n\nObservance of this law is called equity, from the equal distribution to each person of what belongs to him by reason, and, as I said before, distributive justice. Its violation is called favoritism, Prosopolepsia.\n\nAnother law follows: “Things that cannot be divided must be enjoyed in common, if possible, without limit if their quantity permits it, and otherwise in proportion to the number of those entitled to them.” Any other distribution is unequal and contrary to equity.\n\nSome things can neither be divided nor enjoyed in common. In such cases the Law of Nature prescribing equity requires “that the entire right, or else the first possession where use alternates, be determined by lot.” Equal distribution is required by the Law of Nature, and no other means of equal distribution can be imagined.\n\nThere are two sorts of lot: arbitrary and natural. An arbitrary lot is one agreed upon by the competing parties. A natural lot is either birthright, which the Greeks call Kleronomia, meaning given by lot, or first possession.\n\nTherefore, things that can neither be enjoyed in common nor divided should be awarded to the first possessor, and in some cases to the firstborn, as acquired by lot.\n\nIt is also a Law of Nature “that all who mediate peace be granted safe passage.” The law commanding peace as the end commands mediation as the means, and safe passage is the means to mediation.\n\nEven when people are entirely willing to observe these laws, questions may arise about someone's action: first, whether it was done at all, a question of fact; second, if it was done, whether it violated the law, a question of right. Unless the disputing parties mutually covenant to abide by another's judgment, they remain as far from peace as ever. The person to whose judgment they submit is called an arbitrator. It is therefore a Law of Nature “that people in dispute submit their right to the judgment of an arbitrator.”\n\nSince everyone is presumed to act for his own benefit, no one is a suitable arbitrator in his own case. Even if he were perfectly suitable, equity gives each party an equal benefit; if one is allowed to be judge, the other must be allowed as well, leaving the dispute—and the cause of war—unresolved, against the Law of Nature.\n\nFor the same reason, no one should be admitted as arbitrator in a case if one party's victory would evidently bring him more profit, honor, or pleasure than the other's. For he has taken a bribe, unavoidable though it may be, and no one can be obliged to trust him. Thus the dispute and the condition of war remain, contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nIn a dispute of fact, when there is no other evidence, the judge must give neither party more credence than the other, but must credit a third person, or a third and fourth, or more. Otherwise the matter remains undecided and is left to force, contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nThese are the Laws of Nature that prescribe peace as the means by which people living in multitudes preserve themselves, and they alone concern the doctrine of civil society. Other things, such as drunkenness and all other kinds of intemperance, tend to destroy particular individuals and may therefore be counted among the things forbidden by the Law of Nature; but they need not be mentioned and are not sufficiently relevant here.\n\nThis deduction of the Laws of Nature may seem too subtle for everyone to notice, most people being too busy finding food and the rest too inattentive to understand. But to leave no one an excuse, the laws have been compressed into one easy formula intelligible even to the simplest mind: “Do not do to another what you would not want done to yourself.” To learn the Laws of Nature, one need only take actions by others that seem too weighty when weighed against one's own and put them on the opposite side of the balance, with one's own actions in their place, so that one's passions and self-love add nothing to the weight. Then none of these Laws of Nature will fail to appear entirely reasonable.\n\nBut they take effect only when there is security. The Laws of Nature oblige in foro interno, that is, they bind us to desire their observance; but they do not always oblige in foro externo, that is, to put them into action. Someone who remained modest and accommodating and fulfilled every promise at a time and place where no one else did would only make himself others' prey and bring about his certain ruin. This would be contrary to the foundation of all Laws of Nature, which aim at nature's preservation. Conversely, someone who observes these laws toward a person who does not observe them himself seeks not peace but war, and consequently the violent destruction of his own nature.\n\nAny law that binds in foro interno can be broken not only by an act contrary to it but also by an act that agrees with it, if the agent believes the act contrary to it. For though his action in this case accords with the law, his intention does not, and where the obligation is in foro interno, that is a breach.\n\nThe Laws of Nature are immutable and eternal. Injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride, inequity, favoritism, and the rest can never become lawful. War can never preserve life while peace destroys it.\n\nThese same laws are easy to observe because they require only desire and effort—by which I mean sincere and constant effort. Since they demand nothing beyond endeavor, whoever endeavors to fulfill them does fulfill them; and whoever fulfills the law is just.\n\nKnowledge of them is the true and only moral philosophy. Moral philosophy is nothing other than knowledge of good and evil in human intercourse and society. Good and evil name our appetites and aversions, which vary with people's different dispositions, customs, and doctrines. People differ in their judgments not only of what pleases or displeases taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight, but also of what accords with or offends reason in ordinary life. Indeed, the same person differs from himself at different times, praising at one time and calling good what he later condemns and calls evil. Hence disputes, controversies, and at last war arise. So long as people remain in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war, private appetite is the measure of good and evil. Yet everyone agrees that peace is good, and therefore that the paths or means to peace—which, as I showed earlier, are justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, and the other Laws of Nature—are good: that is, moral virtues, while their opposing vices are evil. Knowledge of virtue and vice is moral philosophy; hence the true doctrine of the Laws of Nature is the true moral philosophy. Yet writers on moral philosophy, though they recognize these same virtues and vices, fail to see where their goodness lies, or that they are praised as the means of peaceful, sociable, and comfortable life. They place virtue in a moderate degree of passion, as if courage depended on the degree rather than the cause of daring, or generosity on the size rather than the purpose of a gift.\n\nPeople commonly call these dictates of reason laws, but improperly: they are only conclusions or theorems concerning what aids their preservation and defense. A law, properly speaking, is the word of someone with a right to command others. But if we consider these same theorems as delivered in the word of God, who has the right to command everything, then they are properly called laws.\n\nCHAPTER XVI. OF PERSONS, AUTHORS, AND THINGS REPRESENTED\n\n### Part I, Chapter XVI\n\nOF PERSONS, AUTHORS, AND THINGS REPRESENTED\n\nWhat a person is\n\nA PERSON is someone “whose words or actions are considered either as his own or as representing the words or actions of another person, or of anything else to which they are attributed, whether in truth or in fiction.”\n\nWhen considered as his own, he is called a natural person; when considered as representing another's words and actions, he is called a fictitious or artificial person.\n\nThe word person is Latin; the Greeks have Prosopon in its place, meaning face, while the Latin Persona means the disguise or outward appearance assumed by a person onstage, sometimes specifically the part that conceals the face, such as a mask or visor. From the stage the word has been extended to anyone who represents speech and action, in courts as well as theaters. A person is thus the same as an actor, both onstage and in ordinary conversation; to personate is to act or represent oneself or another. Someone who acts for another is said to bear that person's person, or act in his name. Cicero uses the word in this sense when he says, “Unus Sustineo Tres Personas; Mei, Adversarii, & Judicis: I bear three persons, my own, my adversary's, and the judge's.” Such an actor is variously called, according to the occasion, a representative, a lieutenant, a vicar, an attorney, a deputy, a procurator, an actor, and so on.\n\nOf artificial persons, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. In this case the person is the ACTOR, and the one who owns his words and actions is the AUTHOR; the actor then acts by authority. In speaking of goods and possessions we call someone an owner—in Latin Dominus, in Greek Kurios; in speaking of actions, we call him an author. As the right to possession is called dominion, so the right to perform an action is called AUTHORITY. Authority therefore always means a right to perform an act, and an act done by authority is done by commission or permission from the person to whom that right belongs.\n\nIt follows that when an actor makes a covenant by authority, he binds the author no less than if the author had made it himself, and subjects him just as fully to its consequences. Thus all I have said before (Chap. 14) about covenants between people in their natural capacity holds also when covenants are made through their actors, representatives, or procurators, insofar as they have been commissioned to act, but no further.\n\nTherefore someone who makes a covenant with an actor or representative without knowing the extent of his authority does so at his own risk. No one is bound by a covenant he did not authorize, and consequently no one is bound by a covenant made against or beyond the authority he gave.\n\nWhen an actor does something contrary to the Law of Nature at his author's command, and a previous covenant obliges him to obey, it is not the actor but the author who breaks the Law of Nature. Though the action is contrary to that law, it is not the actor's own; on the contrary, his refusal to perform it would violate the Law of Nature forbidding breach of covenant.\n\nSomeone who makes a covenant with an author through an actor without knowing the actor's authority, accepting only the actor's word, is no longer bound if that authority is not shown to him when he asks for it. A covenant made with the author is not valid without the author's confirming assurance. But if the contracting party knew in advance that he was to expect no assurance beyond the actor's word, the covenant is valid, for the actor has made himself the author. Thus when the authority is evident, the covenant binds the author, not the actor; when the authority is fictitious, it binds the actor alone, since there is no author but himself.\n\nFew things are incapable of being represented through fiction. Inanimate things, such as a church, a hospital, or a bridge, may be personated by a rector, master, or overseer. Inanimate things cannot, however, be authors or give their actors authority. Yet those actors may be given authority to provide for the upkeep of such things by their owners or governors. Such things therefore cannot be personated before some civil government exists.\n\nLikewise, children, fools, and people suffering madness who cannot use reason may be personated by guardians or curators, but while that condition lasts they can authorize none of the actions done for them, except insofar as they judge those actions reasonable once they recover the use of reason. During their incapacity, however, whoever has the right to govern them may give authority to the guardian. But again, this occurs only in a civil state, since before such a state there is no dominion over persons.\n\nAn idol, or mere invention of the mind, may be personated, as were the gods of the heathens. By officers appointed by the state, they were personated and held possessions, goods, and rights that people dedicated and consecrated to them from time to time. But idols cannot be authors, for an idol is nothing. Authority came from the state; therefore, before civil government was introduced, the gods of the heathens could not be personated.\n\nThe true God may be personated. He was personated first by Moses, who governed the Israelites—not his own people but God's—not in his own name with Hoc Dicit Moses, but in God's name with Hoc Dicit Dominus. Second, he was personated by the Son of Man, his own Son, our blessed Savior Jesus Christ, who came to bring back the Jews and bring all nations into his Father's Kingdom, not acting on his own behalf but sent by his Father. Third, he was personated by the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, speaking and working in the Apostles. This Holy Ghost was a Comforter who did not come of himself, but was sent and proceeded from them both.\n\nA multitude of people becomes one person when represented by one person, provided every individual in that multitude consents. The unity of the representative, not the unity of those represented, makes the person one. The representative bears the person, and bears only one person: unity in a multitude can be understood in no other way.\n\nSince a multitude is by nature not one but many, its members must be understood as many authors, not one, of everything their representative says or does in their name. Each gives their common representative authority individually and owns every action the representative performs if they give him unlimited authority. If instead they limit what he may represent and how far, none owns more of his acts than he commissioned him to perform.\n\nIf the representative consists of several people, the voice of the majority must be taken as the voice of them all. If, for example, the smaller number vote yes and the larger number vote no, more than enough negative votes cancel the positive votes, and the excess negative votes, left unanswered, are the representative's only voice.\n\nA representative consisting of an even number, especially a small number, will often have an equal number of opposing votes and thus will often be mute and incapable of acting. Yet in some cases equal opposing votes can decide a question. In a case of conviction or acquittal, a tie acquits by failing to convict; it does not, conversely, convict by failing to acquit. Once a case has been heard, not to convict is to acquit; but it is not true that not to acquit is to convict. Likewise, when deciding whether to act at once or postpone action, equal votes mean that not voting for immediate execution amounts to a decision to defer it.\n\nOr suppose there is an odd number, three or more, of persons or assemblies, and each has the authority by a negative vote to annul all the positive votes of the others. That body is not a representative, since people's differing opinions and interests often render it a mute person in matters of greatest consequence, unfit for many things and especially for governing a multitude in time of war.\n\nThere are two kinds of authors. The first is an author in the strict sense, whom I defined above as one who simply owns another's action. The second owns another's action or covenant conditionally: he undertakes to perform it if the other has failed to do so by a certain time. Such conditional authors are generally called SURETIES, in Latin Fidejussores and Sponsores; those guaranteeing a debt are particularly called Praedes, and those guaranteeing an appearance before a judge or magistrate Vades.\n\nPART II. OF COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVII\n\nOF THE CAUSES, GENERATION, AND DEFINITION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\nThe ultimate cause, end, or purpose for which people, who naturally love liberty and dominion over others, place themselves under the restraint we see in Common-wealths is their foresight of their own preservation and a more contented life. They seek to escape that miserable condition of war which, as I have shown, necessarily follows from natural human passions when no visible power keeps them in awe and binds them by fear of punishment to perform their covenants and observe the Laws of Nature set out in the fourteenth and fifteenth Chapters.\n\nFor the Laws of Nature—justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would have them do to us—are, by themselves and without the terror of some power enforcing them, contrary to our natural passions, which carry us toward partiality, pride, revenge, and the like. Covenants without the sword are only words, powerless to secure anyone. Thus, notwithstanding the Laws of Nature, which each person observes when he wishes to and can do so safely, if no power has been established, or none great enough to secure us, everyone will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and ingenuity for protection against everyone else. Wherever people have lived in small families, robbing and plundering one another has been a trade. Far from being held contrary to the Law of Nature, it won greater honor the greater the spoils; the only rules they followed were rules of honor, refraining from cruelty and leaving people their lives and tools for farming. As small families did then, so cities and kingdoms now—merely larger families—enlarge their dominions for their own security, pleading every sort of danger, fearing invasion or assistance to invaders, and doing all they can to subdue or weaken their neighbors by open force and secret arts. In the absence of any other protection, they do so justly, and are remembered with honor in later ages.\n\nNor does joining a small number of people provide this security. With small numbers, a small addition to either side creates an advantage in strength great enough to bring victory and thus encourage invasion. The multitude in which we may trust for security is not fixed by any definite number but measured against the enemy we fear. It is sufficient when the enemy's advantage is not so clear and conspicuous as to determine the outcome of war and move him to attack.\n\nNo matter how large a multitude may be, if each person's actions are governed by individual judgments and appetites, they can expect no defense or protection, either against a common enemy or against injuries from one another. Divided in their opinions about how best to use their strength, they hinder rather than help one another and reduce their strength to nothing through mutual opposition. Thus a very few who act together can easily subdue them; and, even in the absence of a common enemy, they make war on one another for their private interests. If we could suppose a great multitude to observe justice and the other Laws of Nature by mutual consent without a common power to keep them all in awe, we might just as well suppose all mankind to do so. Then no civil government or Common-wealth would exist or be needed, since peace would prevail without subjection.\n\nNor does the security people wish to enjoy throughout their lives arise merely because they are governed and directed by a single judgment for a limited time, as in one battle or one war. Though they win a victory by united effort against a foreign enemy, afterward, when they either have no common enemy or one faction regards as a friend someone the other regards as an enemy, their divergent interests must dissolve their union and plunge them back into war with one another.\n\nIt is true that certain living creatures, such as bees and ants, live together socially and are therefore numbered by Aristotle among political creatures. Yet they have no guidance but their individual judgments and appetites, and no speech through which one can tell another what he thinks best for their common benefit. Someone may therefore ask why humankind cannot do the same. I answer:\n\nFirst, people continually compete for honor and dignity, while these creatures do not. Among people this produces envy and hatred, and ultimately war; not so among those creatures.\n\nSecond, among those creatures the common good does not differ from the private good; by pursuing their own good, as they naturally do, they also secure the common benefit. But human joy consists in comparison with others, and a person can relish nothing that is not outstanding.\n\nThird, since these creatures do not possess reason as people do, they do not see, or imagine that they see, any fault in the management of their common affairs. Among people, however, many consider themselves wiser and more capable of governing the public than their fellows. One seeks reform and innovation in one direction, another in a different direction, and so they bring it into disorder and civil war.\n\nFourth, though these creatures have voices with which to communicate their desires and other feelings, they lack the art of words by which some people portray good as evil and evil as good, magnify or diminish the apparent size of good and evil, and at their pleasure stir discontent and disturb the peace.\n\nFifth, creatures without reason cannot distinguish injury from damage, and therefore take no offense at their fellows as long as they are comfortable. A human being, by contrast, is most troublesome when most comfortable: it is then that he likes to display his wisdom and criticize the actions of those governing the Common-wealth.\n\nLast, the agreement of these creatures is natural, while that of people comes only by covenant and is therefore artificial. No wonder, then, that something besides a covenant is needed to make their agreement constant and lasting: a common power to keep them in awe and direct their actions toward the common benefit.\n\nThe only way to establish a common power able to defend them from foreign invasion and injuries inflicted by one another, and so to secure them that they may sustain themselves through their own industry and the fruits of the earth and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength on one man or on one assembly of people. By a majority of voices that person or assembly can bring all their wills into one will. In other words, they must appoint one man or assembly to bear their person, and each must own and acknowledge himself the author of everything the bearer of their person does or causes to be done in matters concerning their common peace and safety. In these matters each must submit his will to that person's will and his judgment to that person's judgment. This is more than consent or concord: it is the real unity of them all in one and the same person, formed by every person's covenant with every other, as if each said to every other: “I authorize this man, or this assembly of people, and surrender to him my right to govern myself, on condition that you surrender your right to him and authorize all his actions in the same way.” This done, the multitude united in one person is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather—to speak more reverently—of that mortal god to whom, under the immortal God, we owe our peace and defense. By the authority each person in the Common-wealth has given him, he commands so much power and strength that their terror enables him to shape all their wills toward peace at home and mutual aid against enemies abroad.\n\nIn him lies the essence of the Common-wealth, which may be defined as “one person whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants with one another, have each made themselves the author, so that he may use the strength and resources of them all as he thinks expedient for their peace and common defense.”\n\nThe bearer of this person is called the SOVEREIGN and is said to hold sovereign power; everyone else is his SUBJECT.\n\nSovereign power may be attained in two ways. One is by natural force, as when a man makes his children and their children submit to his government because he can destroy them if they refuse, or subdues enemies by war and grants them their lives on condition that they submit to his will. The other is when people voluntarily agree among themselves to submit to some man or assembly, trusting him to protect them against everyone else. The latter may be called a political Common-wealth, or a Common-wealth by institution; the former, a Common-wealth by acquisition. I shall speak first of a Common-wealth by institution.\n\nCHAPTER XVIII. OF THE RIGHTS OF SOVEREIGNS BY INSTITUTION\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVIII, 1\n\nOF THE RIGHTS OF SOVEREIGNS BY INSTITUTION\n\nA commonwealth is said to be instituted when a multitude of people agree and covenant, each with every other, that whoever is given by the majority the right to represent the person of them all—whether a man or an assembly—shall have every action and judgment of his authorized by everyone, those who voted for him no less than those who voted against him, as though each action and judgment were their own. Their purpose is to live in peace among themselves and be protected against others.\n\nFrom the institution of a commonwealth flow all the rights and powers of the man or assembly upon whom the sovereign power is conferred by the consent of the assembled people.\n\nFirst, because they covenant, they are understood not to be bound by any previous covenant to do anything contrary to this one. Consequently, those who have already instituted a commonwealth, and are thus bound by covenant to own the actions and judgments of one representative, cannot lawfully make a new covenant among themselves to obey anyone else in any matter without his permission. Subjects of a monarch therefore cannot, without his leave, cast off monarchy and return to the confusion of a disunited multitude, or transfer their person from the one who bears it to another man or assembly. Each is bound to every other to own and be considered the author of everything their existing sovereign does or judges fit to do. If even one dissents, all the others would break their covenant with him, which is injustice. Moreover, each has given sovereignty to the one who bears their person; to depose him would therefore be to take what belongs to him, and would again be injustice. Furthermore, if someone attempting to depose his sovereign is killed or punished by him for the attempt, he is the author of his own punishment, since by the institution he authorizes everything his sovereign does. Since it is unjust for a person to do something for which he may be punished by his own authority, he is unjust on this count as well. Some have invoked a new covenant, made not with people but with God, to excuse disobedience to their sovereign. This too is unjust: no one covenants with God except through the mediation of someone who represents God's person, and none does so except God's lieutenant, who holds sovereignty under God. But this claim to a covenant with God is so obvious a lie, even to the consciences of those making it, that it reveals not only injustice but a base and cowardly disposition.\n\nSecondly, since the right to bear the person of them all is given to the sovereign by their covenants with one another, not by any covenant he makes with them, there can be no breach of covenant on the sovereign's part. Consequently, no subject can claim to be released from subjection on the pretext that he has forfeited his right. It is plain that the person made sovereign makes no advance covenant with his subjects: he would have to covenant either with the entire multitude as one party, or separately with each individual. He cannot covenant with the multitude as one party, since they are not yet one person. And if he makes as many separate covenants as there are people, those covenants become void once he has sovereignty: whatever act any individual alleges as a breach is the act of that same individual and all the others, since it is done in the person and by the right of each of them. Moreover, if one or more allege a breach of the covenant made by the sovereign at his institution, while others, or even one other subject, or the sovereign himself, deny any such breach, there is no judge to settle the dispute. The matter returns to the sword, and each regains the right to protect himself by his own strength, contrary to the purpose for which they instituted the commonwealth. It is therefore futile to grant sovereignty on the basis of a prior covenant. The view that a monarch receives his power by covenant, that is, on condition, comes from failing to understand this simple truth: covenants, being only words and breath, have no power to bind, restrain, compel, or protect anyone except what they derive from the public sword—from the unfettered hands of the man or assembly holding sovereignty, whose actions are acknowledged by all and carried out with the united strength of all. Yet when an assembly is made sovereign, no one imagines such a covenant was made at its institution. No one is foolish enough to say, for example, that the people of Rome covenanted with the Romans to hold sovereignty on certain conditions, whose breach would allow the Romans lawfully to depose the Roman people. That people fail to recognize the same reasoning in a monarchy as in popular government arises from the ambition of some, who favor an assembly in which they hope to take part over a monarchy they cannot hope to enjoy.\n\nThirdly, because the majority has declared a sovereign by its votes, the dissenter must now consent with the rest: that is, he must be willing to acknowledge all the sovereign's actions, or else be justly destroyed by the rest. By voluntarily joining the assembled body, he made his will sufficiently clear, and so tacitly covenanted to abide by whatever the majority ordained. If he refuses, or protests against any of its decrees, he acts against his covenant and thus unjustly. Whether or not he belonged to the assembly, and whether or not his consent was sought, he must either submit to its decrees or be left in his former condition of war, where anyone may destroy him without injustice.\n\nFourthly, since by this institution every subject is the author of every action and judgment of the sovereign instituted, nothing the sovereign does can injure any of his subjects, nor should any subject accuse him of injustice. One who acts on another's authority does no injury by that act to the one whose authority he bears. By the institution of a commonwealth, every individual authorizes everything the sovereign does. Thus whoever complains of injury from his sovereign complains of something he himself has authorized and should accuse no one but himself—indeed, not even himself of injury, since it is impossible to injure oneself. Those who hold sovereign power can certainly commit iniquity, but not injustice or injury in the proper sense.\n\nFifthly, and as a consequence of the preceding point, no holder of sovereign power can justly be put to death or otherwise punished by his subjects. Since each subject is the author of his sovereign's actions, in punishing him he would punish another for acts committed by himself.\n\nAnd since the purpose of this institution is the peace and defense of all, and whoever has a right to an end has a right to the means, the man or assembly holding sovereignty has the right to judge both the means of peace and defense and the things that obstruct or disturb them. He may do whatever he thinks necessary, both beforehand, to preserve peace and security by preventing discord at home and hostility from abroad, and afterward, when peace and security have been lost, to restore them. Therefore:\n\nSixthly, sovereignty includes the right to judge which opinions and doctrines oppose peace and which promote it; consequently, to decide on what occasions, to what extent, and on what subjects people may be trusted to speak before multitudes; and to decide who shall examine the doctrines in books before publication. Human actions spring from opinions, and governing opinions well is what makes the good government of actions possible, for peace and concord. Although truth alone should matter in doctrine, this does not conflict with regulating doctrine for the sake of peace: a doctrine hostile to peace can no more be true than peace and concord can violate the Law of Nature. It is true that in a commonwealth where the negligence or incompetence of governors and teachers has allowed false doctrines to gain general acceptance over time, the opposing truths may be widely resented. But even the most sudden and violent intrusion of a new truth never breaks the peace; sometimes it merely wakes a war already present. People so weakly governed that they dare take up arms to defend or introduce an opinion are already at war. Their condition is not peace but only a cease-fire born of mutual fear, and they live, as it were, forever on the verge of battle. The holder of sovereign power must therefore judge opinions and doctrines, or appoint all those who judge them, as a measure necessary to peace and to the prevention of discord and civil war.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVIII, 2\n\nSeventhly, sovereignty includes the entire power to prescribe the rules by which each person may know what goods he may enjoy and what actions he may perform without interference from his fellow subjects. This is what people call property. Before the establishment of sovereign power, as has already been shown, everyone had a right to everything, which necessarily causes war. Property, being necessary to peace and dependent on sovereign power, is therefore an act of that power for the sake of public peace. These rules of property, of mine and yours, and of good and evil, lawful and unlawful, in subjects' actions are the civil laws: the laws particular to each commonwealth. The name civil law is now confined, however, to the ancient civil laws of the city of Rome, whose laws, when it ruled a great part of the world, were the civil law in those regions.\n\nEighthly, sovereignty includes the right of judicature: to hear and decide all disputes arising over law, whether civil or natural, or over fact. Without decisions in disputes, one subject has no protection against injury by another; the laws concerning mine and yours are useless; and each person retains, through his natural and necessary desire for self-preservation, the right to protect himself by his private strength. That is the condition of war and runs counter to the purpose for which every commonwealth is instituted.\n\nNinthly, sovereignty includes the right to make war and peace with other nations and commonwealths: to judge when such action serves the public good, how large a force must be raised, armed, and paid for that purpose, and how much money must be levied on the subjects to cover its expenses. For the power that defends the people lies in their armies, and an army's strength lies in the union of its forces under one command. That command therefore belongs to the instituted sovereign, since command of the armed forces, without any further institution, makes its holder sovereign. Thus, whoever is made general of an army, the holder of sovereign power is always commander-in-chief.\n\nTenthly, sovereignty includes the choice of all counselors, ministers, magistrates, and officers, in both peace and war. Since the sovereign is charged with securing the end—the common peace and defense—he is understood to have the power to use whatever means he thinks best for the task.\n\nEleventhly, the sovereign is entrusted with the power to reward any subject with riches or honor, and to punish any subject in body, in money, or by disgrace, according to the law he has previously made; or, if there is no law on the matter, according to whatever he judges will best encourage service to the commonwealth or deter disservice to it.\n\nLastly, consider the value people naturally set upon themselves, the respect they expect from others, and the little value they set on others. From these attitudes continually arise rivalry, quarrels, factions, and finally war, destroying one another and weakening their strength against a common enemy. There must therefore be laws of honor, and a public standard for valuing those who have served or are capable of serving the commonwealth well, together with power in someone's hands to enforce these laws. But it has already been shown that not only the commonwealth's entire armed force but also the judgment of all disputes belongs to sovereignty. It follows that the sovereign also has the right to confer titles of honor, to assign every person's rank and dignity, and to prescribe the signs of respect people must give one another in public or private gatherings.\n\nThese rights constitute the essence of sovereignty and are the marks by which one may discern the man or assembly in whom sovereign power resides. They cannot be shared or separated. The power to coin money, to dispose of the property and persons of infant heirs, to have first choice in markets, and all other prerogatives granted by statute may be transferred by the sovereign while he retains the power to protect his subjects. But if he transfers command of the armed forces, he retains the power of judgment in vain, lacking the means to enforce the laws. If he gives away the power to raise money, the armed forces are useless; if he gives away the government of doctrine, fear of spirits will frighten people into rebellion. Consider any one of these rights, and it becomes immediately clear that possession of all the others is powerless to preserve peace and justice, the purpose for which commonwealths are instituted. Of such a division it is said, “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand”; for unless sovereignty is divided first, there can be no division into opposing armies. Had most people in England not first come to believe that these powers were divided among the King, the Lords, and the House of Commons, they would never have divided and fallen into this civil war: first those who differed over politics, and afterward those who disagreed over religious liberty. These events have so instructed people concerning sovereign right that few in England now fail to see that these rights are inseparable. They will be generally recognized when peace next returns, and will remain so until the sufferings are forgotten, but no longer—unless ordinary people are taught better than they have been up to now.\n\nBecause these rights are essential and inseparable, it necessarily follows that whatever words appear to grant any of them away, the grant is void unless sovereign power itself is expressly renounced and the grantees no longer call the grantor sovereign. For once he has granted all he can, if we grant sovereignty back to him, everything is restored with it, inseparably attached.\n\nSince this great authority is indivisible and inseparable from sovereignty, there is little basis for the view that sovereign kings, though Singulis Majores, greater in power than each subject, are nevertheless Universis Minores, less powerful than all their subjects together. If by “all together” they do not mean the collective body acting as one person, then “all together” and “each one” mean the same thing, and the claim is absurd. If they mean all together as one person—a person whom the sovereign bears—then the power of all together is identical with the sovereign's power, and the claim is again absurd. People see this absurdity perfectly well when sovereignty belongs to an assembly of the people, but fail to see it in a monarchy, although sovereign power is the same wherever it resides.\n\nThe sovereign's honor, like his power, must also exceed that of any or all of the subjects. Sovereignty is the fountain of honor. The dignities of lord, earl, duke, and prince are its creations. As servants are equal, and without honor, in their master's presence, so subjects are in the presence of the sovereign. Although some shine more brightly than others when out of his sight, before him they shine no more than stars before the sun.\n\nSomeone may object that subjects are in a miserable condition, exposed to the desires and other unruly passions of whoever wields such unlimited power. Those living under a monarch commonly blame monarchy, while those living under a democracy or another sovereign assembly attribute every hardship to that form of commonwealth. Yet the power is the same in every form that is capable of protecting its subjects. They fail to consider that the human condition can never be without some hardship, and that the greatest hardship the people as a whole could suffer under any form of government is barely perceptible beside the misery and terrible calamities of civil war, or the lawless condition of people without masters, subject to neither laws nor a coercive power to hold back their hands from robbery and revenge. Nor do they consider that the greatest burdens imposed by sovereign rulers do not arise from any pleasure or gain rulers expect from harming or weakening their subjects, upon whose vigor their own strength depends. Rather, because the subjects are unwilling to contribute to their own defense, their rulers must collect what they can from them in peacetime, so that when an emergency or sudden need arises they will have the means to resist or take advantage of their enemies. For all people are naturally equipped with remarkable magnifying glasses—their passions and self-love—through which every small payment appears a great grievance. But they lack the perspective lenses—moral and civil science—needed to see from afar the miseries awaiting them that such payments alone can avert.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XIX, 1\n\nOF THE SEVERAL KINDS OF COMMONWEALTH BY INSTITUTION, AND OF SUCCESSION TO SOVEREIGN POWER\n\nCommonwealths differ according to who is sovereign, that is, who represents each and every member of the multitude. Sovereignty belongs either to one man or to an assembly of more than one; and in that assembly either everyone has the right to take part, or only certain people distinguished from the rest. Clearly, then, there can be only three kinds of commonwealth. The representative must be one or more; if more, the assembly must comprise everyone or only some. Where the representative is one man, the commonwealth is a monarchy; where it is an assembly open to all who wish to attend, it is a democracy, or popular commonwealth; where it is an assembly of only some, it is an aristocracy. There can be no other kind of commonwealth, for the entire sovereign power—which I have shown to be indivisible—must belong to one, to some, or to all.\n\nOther names for governments appear in histories and books of politics, such as tyranny and oligarchy. These name not different forms of government, but the same forms viewed with dislike. Those discontented under monarchy call it tyranny; those displeased with aristocracy call it oligarchy. Likewise, those who suffer under democracy call it anarchy, meaning the absence of government. Yet I think no one believes the absence of government is a new kind of government. For the same reason no one should believe that a government changes its kind depending on whether people like it or dislike it, or feel oppressed by its rulers.\n\nClearly, people in absolute liberty may, if they wish, authorize one man to represent them individually just as they may authorize any assembly; and so they may submit themselves, if they think fit, as absolutely to a monarch as to any other representative. Once sovereign power has been established, therefore, no other representative of the same people may exist except for particular purposes limited by the sovereign. Otherwise there would be two sovereigns, each person represented by two actors whose opposition would divide a power that must remain indivisible if people are to live in peace, and thus return the multitude to the condition of war, defeating the purpose for which sovereignty is instituted. It would be absurd to suppose that when a sovereign assembly invites the people under its rule to send deputies to present their advice or desires, these deputies thereby become the people's absolute representatives instead of the assembly itself. It is equally absurd to suppose this under a monarchy. I cannot understand why so obvious a truth has lately been so little observed. In a monarchy, a man whose sovereignty rested on 600 years of hereditary descent was alone called sovereign, addressed as Majesty by every subject, and unquestionably accepted by them as their King; yet he was never regarded as their representative. That name passed without dispute to the men whom the people sent at his command to present their petitions and, if he allowed it, offer him advice. Let this be a warning to those who truly and absolutely represent a people: they should teach others the nature of that office, and take care not to admit any other general representation on any pretext, if they intend to discharge the trust committed to them.\n\nThese three kinds of commonwealth differ not in power but in their convenience, or fitness, for producing the peace and security of the people, the end for which they were instituted. In comparing monarchy with the other two, we may observe first that whoever bears the people's person, whether alone or as a member of an assembly, also bears his own natural person. Though he takes care in his public capacity to secure the common interest, he is at least as careful to secure the private advantage of himself, his family, his kin, and his friends. When public and private interests conflict, he generally prefers his own, for people's passions are commonly stronger than their reason. Consequently, the public interest fares best where it is most closely joined to private interest. In a monarchy, the monarch's private interest is the public interest. His wealth, power, and honor arise solely from the wealth, strength, and reputation of his subjects. No king can be rich, glorious, or secure if his subjects are poor or despised, or too weak through want or dissension to sustain a war against their enemies. In a democracy or aristocracy, by contrast, public prosperity does less for the private fortune of a corrupt or ambitious man than treacherous counsel, a perfidious act, or a civil war often can.\n\nSecondly, a monarch may seek counsel from whomever he chooses, whenever and wherever he chooses. He can therefore hear people knowledgeable about the matter under deliberation, whatever their rank, as far in advance of action as he wishes and with whatever secrecy he requires. A sovereign assembly in need of counsel, however, admits only those who have a preexisting right to participate. Most of these are more practiced in acquiring wealth than knowledge, and they deliver long speeches which can, and commonly do, stir people to action but cannot guide them in it. The flame of passion never illuminates understanding; it dazzles it. Nor can an assembly, because of its numbers, ever receive counsel in secrecy.\n\nThirdly, a monarch's decisions are subject to no instability beyond that of human nature. Assemblies have, in addition, an instability arising from their numbers. If a few supporters of an earlier decision are absent—through complacency, negligence, or private hindrances—or a few opponents take the trouble to attend, all that was decided yesterday may be undone today.\n\nFourthly, a monarch cannot disagree with himself out of envy or self-interest, but an assembly can, even to the point of bringing about civil war.\n\nFifthly, monarchy has this disadvantage: by the power of one man a subject may be stripped of all he owns to enrich a favorite or a flatterer. This, I acknowledge, is a great and unavoidable disadvantage. But the same can happen when sovereign power belongs to an assembly, for its power is the same. Its members are as vulnerable to bad advice and the persuasion of orators as a monarch is to flatterers; flattering one another, they serve one another's greed and ambition in turn. Moreover, an assembly's favorites are numerous, and their relatives far more numerous than a monarch's. Besides, a monarch's favorite is as capable of helping his friends as of harming his enemies; but orators, the favorites of sovereign assemblies, have great power to harm and little power to save. For it takes less eloquence to accuse than to defend—such is human nature—and condemnation looks more like justice than acquittal does.\n\nSixthly, monarchy has the disadvantage that sovereignty may descend upon a child, or on someone unable to distinguish good from evil. The difficulty is that the exercise of his power must then be placed in the hands of another man or an assembly, governing in his right and in his name as guardians and protectors of his person and authority. But to say that placing the exercise of sovereign power in the hands of a man or an assembly is itself a disadvantage is to say that all government is worse than confusion and civil war. Any genuine danger must therefore arise from competition among those seeking an office of such honor and profit. To see that this disadvantage does not spring from monarchy itself, consider whether the preceding monarch has appointed a guardian for his infant successor, either expressly by will or tacitly by allowing the established custom to stand. If so, any resulting trouble must be attributed not to monarchy but to the ambition and injustice of subjects, which pose the same danger under every form of government where the people have not been properly instructed in their duty and the rights of sovereignty. Or suppose the preceding monarch made no provision at all for guardianship. The Law of Nature then supplies a sufficient rule: guardianship belongs to whoever has by nature the strongest interest in preserving the child's authority, and stands to gain least from the child's death or loss of power. Since everyone naturally pursues his own advantage and advancement, to place a child in the hands of those who can advance themselves by destroying or harming him is not guardianship but treachery. With sufficient provision thus made against every legitimate quarrel over government during a child's reign, any dispute that disturbs public peace must be blamed on the subjects' ambition and ignorance of their duty, not on monarchy. Conversely, every great commonwealth governed by a large sovereign assembly is, in deliberating on peace, war, and laws, in much the same position as a child ruler. A child lacks the judgment to dissent from the advice he receives, and must therefore follow the guidance of the person or people entrusted with him; likewise an assembly lacks the freedom to dissent from the advice of the majority, whether good or bad. A child needs a guardian or protector to preserve his person and authority; likewise, in great dangers and disturbances, a sovereign assembly in a great commonwealth needs Custodes Libertatis, guardians of liberty: dictators or protectors of its authority. These are effectively temporary monarchs, entrusted for a time with the full exercise of the assembly's power; and when their term expires, they have more often deprived the assembly of that power than protectors, regents, or other guardians have deprived infant kings of theirs.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XIX, 2\n\nThough there are only three kinds of sovereignty, as I have shown—monarchy, where one man holds it; democracy, where the general assembly of subjects holds it; and aristocracy, where it belongs to an assembly of certain people nominated or otherwise distinguished from the rest—someone surveying the particular commonwealths that have existed and still exist may find them hard to fit into those three kinds. He may therefore be inclined to imagine other forms, arising from mixtures of these. Consider elective kingdoms, in which kings receive sovereign power for a time, or kingdoms in which a king's power is limited: most writers nevertheless call these governments monarchies. Similarly, when a popular or aristocratic commonwealth conquers an enemy country and rules it through a president, procurator, or other magistrate, the government may at first appear democratic or aristocratic. It is not. Elective kings are not sovereigns but ministers of the sovereign; nor are limited kings sovereigns, but ministers of those who hold sovereign power. Provinces subject to the democracy or aristocracy of another commonwealth are governed not democratically or aristocratically, but monarchically.\n\nFirst, consider an elective king whose power lasts for his lifetime, as it does in many parts of Christendom today, or for a fixed number of years or months, as did the power of Roman dictators. If he has the right to appoint his successor, he is no longer elective but hereditary. If he has no power to choose his successor, some other known man or assembly must have the power to elect a new ruler after his death. Otherwise the commonwealth dies and dissolves with him, returning to the condition of war. If it is known who may confer sovereignty after his death, it is also known that sovereignty rested with them before his death: no one has the right to give away what he has no right to possess and retain if he wishes. But if no one can confer sovereignty after the death of the first elected ruler, then that ruler has the power—indeed, is obliged by the Law of Nature—to establish a successor, so that those who entrusted him with government will not fall back into the miserable condition of civil war. Consequently, when elected, he was an absolute sovereign.\n\nSecondly, a king whose power is limited is not superior to those who have the power to limit it; and one who is not superior is not supreme, that is, not sovereign. Sovereignty therefore always resided in the assembly with the right to limit him. The government is consequently not a monarchy, but either a democracy or an aristocracy, as in ancient Sparta, where the kings had the privilege of leading armies but sovereignty belonged to the Ephori.\n\nThirdly, though the Roman people once governed the land of Judea, for example, through a president, Judea was not therefore a democracy. Its people were not governed by an assembly they had any right to enter. Nor was it an aristocracy, since they were not governed by an assembly anyone among them could join by their election. They were governed by one person. That person was an assembly of the people—a democracy—with respect to the people of Rome, but a monarch with respect to the people of Judea, who had no right to participate in the government. Where a people is governed by an assembly chosen from among themselves, the government is called a democracy or an aristocracy; where an assembly not of their choosing governs them, it is a monarchy—not of one man over another, but of one people over another.\n\nAll these forms of government are made of mortal material: not only monarchs but whole assemblies die. The preservation of human peace therefore requires that, just as provision was made for an artificial man, provision must also be made for an artificial eternity of life. Without it, those governed by an assembly would return to the condition of war in every generation, and those governed by one man as soon as their ruler died. This artificial eternity is what people call the right of succession.\n\nNo form of government is complete unless the present sovereign controls the succession. If that right belongs to any other individual or private assembly, it belongs to a subject and may be taken over by the sovereign at his pleasure; consequently the right belongs to the sovereign himself. If it belongs to no particular person, but is left to a fresh choice, the commonwealth is dissolved, and the right falls to whoever can seize it, contrary to the intention of those who instituted the commonwealth for lasting, not temporary, security.\n\nIn a democracy, the whole assembly cannot cease to exist unless the multitude to be governed ceases to exist. Questions about the right of succession therefore have no place in this form of government.\n\nIn an aristocracy, when a member of the assembly dies, the choice of his replacement belongs to the assembly as sovereign, which has the right to choose all counselors and officers. For whatever the representative does as actor, every subject does as author. The sovereign assembly may empower others to elect new members to fill its seats, but the election is still made by its authority and may be revoked by that same authority when the public interest requires it.\n\nThe present monarch has the right to determine the succession. The greatest difficulty concerning succession arises in monarchy: at first sight, it is not obvious who is to appoint the successor, nor, often, whom he has appointed. Both questions require more exact reasoning than most people are accustomed to employ. To answer who appoints the successor of a monarch holding sovereign authority—for elective kings and princes hold sovereign power in its exercise only, not as their own property—we must consider that either the present holder has the right to determine the succession, or the right returns to the dissolved multitude. The death of one who holds sovereign power as his own leaves the multitude without any sovereign, that is, without a representative to unite them and make them capable of acting together at all. They therefore cannot elect a new monarch. Each has an equal right to submit to whoever he thinks most capable of protecting him, or to defend himself by his own sword if he can. This is a return to confusion and to the war of every man against every man, contrary to the purpose for which monarchy was first instituted. Clearly, then, the institution of monarchy always leaves the choice of successor to the judgment and will of the current holder.\n\nAs for the question that may sometimes arise of whom the reigning monarch has designated to inherit his power, the answer is determined by his express words and testament, or by other sufficient tacit signs.\n\nHe makes his choice by express words or testament when he declares it in his lifetime, viva voce or in writing, as the first emperors of Rome declared who should be their heirs. The word heir does not in itself mean a person's children or closest relatives; it means whoever he declares in any way that he wishes to succeed to his estate. If a monarch expressly declares by speech or writing that someone shall be his heir, that person acquires the right to be monarch immediately upon the death of his predecessor.\n\nWhen neither testament nor express words exist, other natural signs of the monarch's will must be followed. One such sign is custom. Where custom gives succession unconditionally to the closest relative, that relative has the right to succeed; if the will of the reigning monarch had differed, he could easily have said so during his lifetime. Likewise, where custom favors the nearest male relative, that man has the right to succeed for the same reason. The same holds if custom favors a female relative. Any custom a person could overturn with a word but does not overturn is a natural sign that he wishes it to continue.\n\nWhere neither custom nor testament provides an answer, we must understand, first, that a monarch wishes the government to remain monarchic, since he has approved that government in his own person. Secondly, he prefers his own child, male or female, to anyone else, for people are presumed by nature to favor their own children above those of others; and among their own children, a male above a female, since men are by nature better suited than women to laborious and dangerous undertakings. Thirdly, in the absence of children of his own, he prefers a brother to a stranger, and generally a closer blood relative to a more distant one. The nearer relative is always presumed to be nearer in affection, and clearly a person gains the most reflected honor from the distinction of his nearest kin.\n\nBut if a monarch may lawfully determine the succession by contract or testament, some may object that a grave disadvantage follows: he can sell or give his right to rule to a foreigner. Foreigners—that is, people unused to living under the same government and speaking the same language—commonly undervalue one another, and such a transfer may lead to the oppression of his subjects. This is indeed a grave disadvantage, but it does not necessarily arise from subjection to foreign government; it arises from the incompetence of rulers ignorant of the true principles of politics. When the Romans conquered many nations, therefore, they made their rule more acceptable by removing this grievance as far as they thought necessary: they sometimes bestowed not only the privileges but also the name of Romans on whole nations, and sometimes on leading men of each conquered nation. They admitted many such men to the Senate and to offices of responsibility even in the city of Rome. This was the aim of our most wise King, King James, when he sought to unite his two realms of England and Scotland. Had he succeeded, he would in all likelihood have prevented the civil wars that now make both kingdoms miserable. A monarch's disposition of the succession by will is therefore no injury to the people, though the faults of many princes have sometimes made it disadvantageous. Another argument for its lawfulness is that every disadvantage that might arise from giving a kingdom to a foreigner may also arise from a marriage with foreigners that lets the right of succession pass to them; yet everyone regards such marriages as lawful.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XX, 1\n\nOF PATERNAL AND DESPOTIC DOMINION\n\nA Common-wealth by acquisition is one in which sovereign power is acquired by force. It is acquired by force when men, individually or in a group by majority vote, authorize all the actions of the man or assembly that holds their lives and liberty in its power, for fear of death or imprisonment.\n\nThis kind of dominion, or sovereignty, differs from sovereignty by institution only in this: men who choose their sovereign do so from fear of one another, not from fear of the one they institute; here, by contrast, they subject themselves to the one they fear. In both cases they act from fear. This should be noted by those who hold that all Covenants arising from fear of death or violence are void: if that were true, no man in any kind of Common-wealth could be bound to obedience. It is true that in a Common-wealth already instituted or acquired, promises arising from fear of death or violence are not Covenants, and do not bind, when what is promised is contrary to the laws. But the reason is not that the promise was made in fear; it is that the person promising has no right to the thing promised. Moreover, when he may lawfully perform his promise but fails to do so, it is not the invalidity of the Covenant that absolves him, but the sovereign's sentence. Otherwise, whenever a man lawfully promises, he unlawfully breaks his promise. But when the sovereign, who is the actor, acquits him, he is acquitted by the one who exacted the promise, as the author of that absolution.\n\nThe rights and consequences of sovereignty, however, are the same in both cases. Its power cannot be transferred to another without the sovereign's consent; he cannot forfeit it; he cannot be accused of injury by any of his subjects; they cannot punish him. He judges what is necessary for peace, and judges doctrines. He is the sole legislator, the supreme judge of controversies, and the judge of the times and occasions for war and peace. It belongs to him to choose magistrates, counselors, commanders, and all other officers and ministers, and to determine rewards and punishments, honor and rank. The reasons are the same as those given in the preceding chapter for these same rights and consequences of sovereignty by institution.\n\nDominion is acquired in two ways: by generation and by conquest. The right of dominion by generation is the right a parent has over his children, and is called PATERNAL. It is not derived from generation in the sense that a parent has dominion over his child merely because he begot him, but from the child's consent, expressed or otherwise sufficiently declared. For God has ordained that man have a helper in generation, and there are always two who are equally parents. Dominion over the child should therefore belong equally to both, and the child should be equally subject to both—which is impossible, for no man can obey two masters. Those who have attributed dominion to the man alone, as the more excellent sex, are mistaken. The difference of strength or prudence between man and woman is not always such that their right can be determined without war. In Common-wealths the civil law decides this dispute, and its decision favors the father for the most part, though not always, because Common-wealths have for the most part been founded by the fathers, not the mothers, of families. But our question concerns the state of mere nature, in which we suppose there are no laws of marriage, no laws governing the education of children, but only the Law of Nature and the natural inclinations of the sexes toward each other and toward their children. In this condition of mere nature, either the parents settle dominion over the child between themselves by contract, or they do not settle it at all. If they do, the right passes according to their contract. We find in history that the Amazons made a contract with the men of neighboring countries, to whom they went to conceive children, that male offspring would be sent back but female offspring would remain with them; thus dominion over the daughters lay with their mother.\n\nIf there is no contract, dominion belongs to the mother. In the condition of mere nature, where there are no marriage laws, the father cannot be known unless the mother declares who he is; the right of dominion over the child therefore depends on her will and consequently belongs to her. Again, the infant is first in its mother's power: she may either nourish or expose it. If she nourishes it, it owes its life to her and is therefore bound to obey her rather than anyone else; consequently dominion over it is hers. But if she exposes it and another person finds and nourishes it, dominion belongs to the person who nourishes it. For the child ought to obey the one who preserves it: since the preservation of life is the end for which one person becomes subject to another, everyone is supposed to promise obedience to the person who has it in his power to save or destroy him.\n\nIf the mother is the father's subject, the child is in the father's power; and if the father is the mother's subject, as when a sovereign queen marries one of her subjects, the child is subject to the mother, because the father is her subject too.\n\nIf a man and woman who are monarchs of two separate kingdoms have a child and make a contract about which of them shall have dominion over the child, the right of dominion passes according to that contract. If they make no contract, dominion follows the dominion of the place where the child resides. For the sovereign of each country has dominion over all who live there.\n\nWhoever has dominion over a child also has dominion over that child's children. For whoever has dominion over a person's body has dominion over all that belongs to that person; without this, dominion would be a title without effect.\n\nThe right of succession to paternal dominion proceeds in the same manner as the right of succession to monarchy, of which I have already spoken sufficiently in the preceding chapter.\n\nDominion acquired by conquest, or victory in war, is what some writers call DESPOTIC, from despotes, meaning lord or master; it is the dominion of a master over his servant. The victor acquires this dominion when the vanquished person, to escape the immediate stroke of death, Covenants by express words or other sufficient signs of his will that, so long as his life and bodily liberty are allowed him, the victor may make use of them as he pleases. After making such a Covenant the vanquished person is a SERVANT, and not before. For by servant—whether the word derives from servire, to serve, or servare, to save, a dispute I leave to grammarians—I do not mean a captive kept in prison or chains until the one who captured him, or bought him from his captor, decides what to do with him. Such men, commonly called slaves, have no obligation at all: they may justly break their chains or prison, and kill or take captive their master. I mean instead one who, after being captured, is allowed bodily liberty, and whom the master trusts on his promise neither to run away nor to do him violence.\n\nIt is therefore not victory that gives the right of dominion over the vanquished, but the vanquished person's own Covenant. Nor is he bound because he is conquered—that is, beaten and captured or put to flight—but because he comes in and submits to the victor. Nor is the victor bound to spare an enemy who surrenders without a promise of life merely because that enemy has yielded to his discretion: such surrender binds the victor no longer than he, in his discretion, sees fit.\n\nWhat men do when they ask for what is now called quarter, which the Greeks called zogria, taking alive, is to escape the victor's immediate fury by submitting, and to bargain for their lives with ransom or service. Thus one who receives quarter has not been granted his life, but has had his death deferred pending further deliberation; he has not surrendered on condition of life, but at the victor's discretion. His life becomes secure, and his service due, only when the victor trusts him with bodily liberty. Slaves who work in prisons or fetters do so not from duty but to avoid the cruelty of their taskmasters.\n\nThe master of the servant is also master of all the servant has, and may demand the use of it—his goods, his labor, his servants, and his children—as often as he sees fit. For the servant holds his life from his master under the Covenant of obedience: he acknowledges and authorizes whatever the master does. If the master kills him, puts him in chains, or otherwise punishes him for refusing obedience, the servant himself is the author of the act and cannot accuse the master of injury.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XX, 2\n\nIn sum, the rights and consequences of both paternal and despotic dominion are exactly the same as those of a sovereign by institution, and for the same reasons, which were set out in the preceding chapter. Suppose a man is monarch of several nations, holding sovereignty in one by institution through the people assembled, and in another by conquest—that is, through the submission of each individual to escape death or imprisonment. To demand more from one nation than from the other on the grounds that it is a conquered nation betrays ignorance of the rights of sovereignty. For the sovereign has absolute power over both alike, or else there is no sovereignty at all, and every man may lawfully defend himself with his own sword, if he can: that is the condition of war.\n\nIt appears from this that a large family, if it belongs to no Common-wealth, is itself a little monarchy as regards the rights of sovereignty, whether the family consists of a man and his children, a man and his servants, or a man with both children and servants; the father or master is its sovereign. Yet a family is not properly a Common-wealth unless its numbers, or some other advantage, give it enough power that it cannot be subdued without the hazard of war. Where a group is plainly too weak to defend itself even when united, each member may use his own reason in time of danger to save his life, whether by flight or by submitting to the enemy, as he thinks best. So a very small company of soldiers surprised by an army may lay down its arms and ask for quarter, or flee, rather than be put to the sword. This will suffice for what I find, by reflection and deduction, concerning sovereign rights derived from the nature, needs, and designs of men in establishing Common-wealths and placing themselves under monarchs or assemblies entrusted with sufficient power to protect them.\n\nLet us now consider what Scripture teaches on this point. The children of Israel say to Moses (Exod. 20. 19): “Speak to us, and we will hear you; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” This is absolute obedience to Moses. Concerning the right of kings, God himself says through Samuel (1 Sam. 8. 11, 12, &c.): “This shall be the right of the king you wish to reign over you. He shall take your sons and set them to drive his chariots, to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and to gather in his harvest, and to make his engines of war and the equipment of his chariots. He shall take your daughters to make perfumes and to be his cooks and bakers. He shall take your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves and give them to his servants. He shall take the tithe of your grain and wine and give it to the men of his chamber and to his other servants. He shall take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and employ them in his business. He shall take the tithe of your flocks; and you shall be his servants.” This is absolute power, summed up in the final words: “you shall be his servants.” Again, when the people had heard what power their king would have, they nevertheless consented to it, saying (Verse. 19 &c.): “We will be like all other nations, and our king shall judge our causes and go before us to lead our wars.” Here the sovereign's right both to command the military and to exercise all judicial authority is confirmed, comprising as absolute a power as one man can possibly transfer to another. Again, King Solomon prayed to God as follows (1 Kings 3. 9): “Give your servant understanding to judge your people and to discern between good and evil.” It therefore belongs to the sovereign to judge and to prescribe the rules for discerning good and evil. Those rules are laws; the legislative power therefore lies with him. Saul sought David's life, yet when David had the power to kill Saul and his servants would have done so, he forbade them, saying (1 Sam. 24. 9): “God forbid that I should act against my lord, God's anointed.” Concerning the obedience of servants, St. Paul says (Coll. 3. 20): “Servants, obey your masters in all things,” and (Verse. 22): “Children, obey your parents in all things.” Those subject to paternal or despotic dominion owe unqualified obedience. Again (Math. 23. 2,3): “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' chair; therefore observe and do all that they bid you observe.” Here again is unqualified obedience. And St. Paul (Tit. 3. 2): “Remind them to submit to princes and those in authority, and to obey them.” This obedience too is unqualified. Lastly, our Savior himself acknowledges that men ought to pay the taxes imposed by kings, saying, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's”; and he paid such taxes himself. He acknowledges too that a king's word suffices to take anything from a subject when it is needed, and that the king judges that need. For as king of the Jews he himself commanded his disciples to take the donkey and her colt to carry him into Jerusalem, saying (Mat. 21. 2,3): “Go into the village opposite you, and you shall find a female donkey tied up, with her colt; untie them and bring them to me. And if anyone asks what you mean by it, say the Lord needs them, and they will let them go.” They will not ask whether his need provides sufficient title, or whether he is the judge of that need, but will accept the Lord's will.\n\nTo these passages may be added the passage in Genesis (Gen. 3. 5): “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”; and verse 11: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” For knowledge and judgment of good and evil were forbidden under the name of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as a test of Adam's obedience. The Devil, to inflame the woman's ambition when the fruit already seemed beautiful to her, told her that by tasting it they would be as gods, knowing good and evil. Having both eaten it, they did indeed assume God's office, that of judging good and evil, but gained no new ability to distinguish rightly between them. And when it is said that after eating they saw they were naked, no one has understood this to mean that they had previously been blind and could not see their own skin. Its meaning is plain: only then did they first judge their nakedness, in which God had chosen to create them, to be unseemly; by feeling shame they silently censured God himself. God therefore says, “Have you eaten, &c.,” as if to say: Do you, who owe me obedience, presume to judge my commandments? This clearly signifies, though allegorically, that subjects must neither censure nor dispute the commands of those who have the right to command.\n\nThus it seems plain to me, both from reason and from Scripture, that sovereign power, whether placed in one man, as in a monarchy, or in one assembly, as in popular and aristocratic Common-wealths, is as great as men can possibly be imagined to make it. Men may imagine many evil consequences of a power so unlimited, yet the consequences of lacking it—the perpetual war of every man against his neighbor—are much worse. The condition of man in this life will never be without hardships; but no great hardship occurs in any Common-wealth except through the subjects' disobedience and breach of the Covenants from which the Common-wealth arose. Anyone who thinks sovereign power too great and seeks to diminish it must subject himself to the power that can limit it—that is, to a greater power.\n\nThe strongest objection is one drawn from practice: men ask where and when subjects have acknowledged such power. But one may ask them in return when or where a kingdom has long remained free from sedition and civil war. In nations whose Common-wealths have endured for a long time and were destroyed only by foreign war, subjects never disputed sovereign power. In any case, an argument drawn from the practice of men who have not probed to the bottom or weighed with precise reasoning the causes and nature of Common-wealths, and who suffer daily the miseries arising from their ignorance, is invalid. Even if men everywhere in the world laid the foundations of their houses on sand, it would not follow that they ought to do so. The skill of making and preserving Common-wealths consists in certain rules, as arithmetic and geometry do, and does not rest on practice alone, as tennis does. The poor have no leisure to discover these rules; and those who have had the leisure have until now lacked the curiosity or the method.\n\nCHAPTER XXI. OF THE LIBERTY OF SUBJECTS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXI, 1\n\nOF THE LIBERTY OF SUBJECTS\n\nLiberty, or FREEDOM, properly means the absence of opposition—by opposition I mean external impediments to motion—and applies no less to irrational and inanimate creatures than to rational ones. Whatever is tied up or enclosed so that it can move only within a certain space, bounded by the obstruction of some external body, we say lacks the liberty to go farther. So too with living creatures confined or restrained by walls or chains, and with water contained by banks or vessels when it would otherwise spread into a wider space: we commonly say that they are not at liberty to move as they would without those external impediments. But when the impediment to motion lies in the constitution of the thing itself, we say that it lacks not the liberty but the power to move, as when a stone lies still or a man is confined to his bed by sickness.\n\nAccording to this proper and generally accepted meaning of the word, a FREE MAN is “one who, in the things his strength and intelligence enable him to do, is not prevented from doing what he wills.” But when the words free and liberty are applied to anything other than bodies, they are misused; for what is not subject to motion is not subject to impediment. Thus when we say, for example, that the way is free, we do not mean that the way has liberty, but that those who walk it can pass without obstruction. When we say a gift is free, we mean not that the gift has liberty but that the giver was not bound by any law or Covenant to give it. Likewise, when we speak freely, the liberty belongs not to the voice or pronunciation but to the speaker, whom no law has bound to speak otherwise. Finally, the expression free will implies no liberty of the will, desire, or inclination, but only of the person, whose liberty consists in encountering no obstruction when doing what he wills, desires, or inclines to do.\n\nFear and liberty are consistent. When a man throws his goods into the sea for fear that the ship will sink, he still acts willingly and may refuse to do so if he chooses. It is therefore the act of a free man. So too a man may pay his debt only for fear of imprisonment: since no one prevented him from withholding payment, his was the act of a man at liberty. In general, all acts men perform in Common-wealths for fear of the law are acts they had the liberty to omit.\n\nLiberty and necessity are also consistent. Water has not only the liberty but the necessity of descending along its channel. So too with actions men perform voluntarily: because they proceed from the will, they proceed from liberty; yet because every act of a man's will, every desire and inclination, arises from some cause, and those causes form a continuous chain whose first link is in the hand of God, the first of all causes, they proceed from necessity. To anyone able to see the connection of those causes, the necessity of all men's voluntary actions would be manifest. God, who sees and orders all things, sees that man's liberty to do what he wills is accompanied by the necessity of doing what God wills, neither more nor less. For though men can do many things God does not command and of which he is therefore not the author, they can have no passion or appetite for anything unless God's will is the cause of that appetite. If his will did not ensure the necessity of man's will and of everything depending on it, human liberty would contradict and obstruct the omnipotence and liberty of God. This will suffice, for our present purpose, on the natural liberty that alone is properly called liberty.\n\nBut as men, to attain peace and thereby preserve themselves, have made an artificial man called a Common-wealth, so too they have made artificial chains called civil laws. By mutual Covenants they have fastened one end of these chains to the lips of the man or assembly to whom they have given sovereign power, and the other to their own ears. These bonds, though weak in themselves, may nevertheless hold because breaking them is dangerous, not because it is difficult.\n\nIt is only in relation to these bonds that I shall now speak of the liberty of subjects. Since no Common-wealth anywhere can regulate every action and word of its people, as that is impossible, it necessarily follows that in every matter the laws leave unregulated, men have the liberty to do what their own reason suggests will profit them most. If we take liberty in its proper sense as bodily liberty, freedom from chains and prison, it would be absurd for men to clamor, as they do, for a liberty they so plainly enjoy. Again, if by liberty we mean exemption from laws, it is no less absurd for men to demand a liberty that would give every other man mastery over their lives. Absurd as it is, this is precisely what they demand, not knowing that laws have no power to protect them without a sword in the hands of a man or men to enforce them. The liberty of a subject therefore lies only in what the sovereign has left unregulated: the liberty to buy and sell and otherwise contract with one another, to choose their own home, diet, and livelihood, to bring up their children as they think fit, and the like.\n\nYet we must not suppose that this liberty abolishes or limits the sovereign's power over life and death. For I have already shown that nothing the sovereign representative does to a subject, on whatever pretext, can properly be called injustice or injury, because every subject is the author of every act the sovereign performs. Thus the sovereign never lacks the right to do anything, except insofar as he himself is subject to God and thereby bound to observe the Laws of Nature. It may therefore happen, as it often does in Common-wealths, that a subject is put to death at the sovereign's command although neither wrongs the other, as when Jephthah had his daughter sacrificed. In that case and others like it, the person who dies had the liberty to perform the act for which he is nevertheless put to death without injury. The same holds for a sovereign prince who puts an innocent subject to death. Though his deed is against the Law of Nature because it violates equity, as was David's killing of Uriah, the injury is done not to Uriah but to God: not to Uriah, because Uriah himself gave David the right to do as he pleased; but to God, because David was God's subject and the Law of Nature forbade him all wrongdoing. David himself made this distinction plain when, repenting of the deed, he said, “Against you alone have I sinned.” In the same way, the people of Athens, when they banished the most powerful men in their Common-wealth for ten years, believed they committed no injustice. They never asked what crime a man had committed, but what harm he might do. Indeed, they ordered the banishment of a person they did not even know in advance: each citizen brought to the marketplace an oyster shell inscribed with the name of the person he wanted banished, without formally accusing him. At times they banished an Aristides because of his reputation for justice; at others a scurrilous jester like Hyperbolus, for the amusement of it. Yet no one can say that the sovereign people of Athens lacked the right to banish these men, or that an Athenian lacked the liberty to jest or to be just.\n\nThe liberty so often and honorably mentioned in the histories and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in the writings and speech of those who learned all their politics from them, is not the liberty of individual men but the liberty of the Common-wealth. It is the same liberty each person would have if there were no civil laws and no Common-wealth at all; its effects are the same as well. Among men without a master there is perpetual war, every man against his neighbor; there is no inheritance to pass to a son or expect from a father, no ownership of goods or land, no security, but full and absolute liberty for every individual. Likewise, among states and Common-wealths that are independent of one another, every Common-wealth—not every person—has absolute liberty to do what it judges, through the man or assembly representing it, to be most conducive to its advantage. But these states also live in a condition of perpetual war, poised for battle on their borders, their frontiers armed and cannon pointed at their neighbors on every side. The Athenians and Romans were free—that is, their Common-wealths were free—not because any individual had liberty to resist his representative, but because their representative had liberty to resist or invade other peoples. To this day the word LIBERTAS is written in large letters on the towers of the city of Lucca; yet no one can infer from this that an individual there has more liberty, or more exemption from service to the Common-wealth, than in Constantinople. Whether a Common-wealth is monarchic or popular, the freedom remains the same.\n\nIt is easy for men to be deceived by the attractive name of liberty and, lacking judgment to distinguish the two, to mistake the right belonging to the public alone for their private inheritance and birthright. When this error is reinforced by the authority of respected writers on the subject, it is no wonder that it breeds sedition and changes of government. In these western parts of the world, we have come to take our views on the establishment and rights of Common-wealths from Aristotle, Cicero, and other Greek and Roman writers. Living in popular states, those men derived these rights not from the principles of nature, but copied them into their books from the practice of their own popular Common-wealths—just as grammarians describe rules of language from the practice of their time, or rules of poetry from the poems of Homer and Virgil. Because the Athenians were taught, to discourage them from wanting a change of government, that they were free men and everyone living under a monarchy was a slave, Aristotle therefore writes in his Politics (lib.6.cap.2): “In democracy, liberty is to be assumed; for it is commonly held that no man is free under any other government.” Like Aristotle, Cicero and other writers based their civil doctrine on the opinions of the Romans, who were taught to hate monarchy first by the men who deposed their sovereign and divided the sovereignty of Rome among themselves, and afterward by those men's successors. Through reading these Greek and Latin authors, men since childhood have acquired a habit, under the false appearance of liberty, of favoring tumults and licentiously calling their sovereigns' actions to account, and then calling those critics to account in turn, at such a cost in blood that I think I may truly say nothing was ever bought so dearly as these western regions have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin languages.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXI, 2\n\nNow to consider the particulars of a subject's true liberty—that is, what he may refuse to do without injustice even when commanded by the sovereign—we must ask what rights we give up when we make a Common-wealth, or, what amounts to the same thing, what liberty we deny ourselves when we acknowledge as our own all the acts, without exception, of the man or assembly we make our sovereign. For both our obligation and our liberty arise from the act of our submission, and must therefore be inferred from arguments grounded in it: no obligation rests on any man unless it arises from some act of his own, since all men are equally free by nature. Such arguments must be drawn either from the express words “I authorize all his actions,” or from the intention of the one submitting to his power, an intention understood from the end for which he submits. Thus the obligation and liberty of the subject must be derived either from those words, or equivalent ones, or from the end for which sovereignty is instituted: peace among the subjects themselves and their defense against a common enemy.\n\nFirst, since sovereignty by institution arises from a Covenant of each person with every other, and sovereignty by acquisition from the Covenants of the vanquished with the victor, or of the child with the parent, every subject plainly retains liberty in all matters whose right cannot be transferred by Covenant. I showed earlier, in the 14. Chapter, that Covenants not to defend one's own body are void. Therefore,\n\nIf the sovereign commands a man, even a man justly condemned, to kill, wound, or maim himself; not to resist those who attack him; or to refrain from food, air, medicine, or anything else without which he cannot live, that man nevertheless has the liberty to disobey.\n\nIf a man is questioned by the sovereign, or by the sovereign's authority, about a crime he himself has committed, he is not bound to confess it without assurance of pardon, because no one, as I showed in the same chapter, can be obliged by Covenant to accuse himself.\n\nAgain, a subject's consent to sovereign power is expressed in these words: “I authorize, or take responsibility for, all his actions.” They impose no restriction at all on his former natural liberty. For by permitting the sovereign to kill me, I do not bind myself to kill myself at his command. “It is one thing to say, ‘Kill me or my fellow if you please’; another to say, ‘I will kill myself or my fellow.’” It follows, therefore, that\n\nNo man is bound by those words themselves to kill himself or anyone else. Consequently, any obligation a man may sometimes have, at the sovereign's command, to undertake a dangerous or dishonorable duty depends not on the words of our submission, but on its intention, which is understood from its end. Thus when our refusal to obey would frustrate the end for which sovereignty was instituted, we have no liberty to refuse; otherwise, we do.\n\nOn these grounds, a man ordered to fight the enemy as a soldier may in many cases refuse without injustice, even though his sovereign has ample right to punish his refusal with death. He may, for example, put a capable soldier in his place, in which case he does not abandon the service of the Common-wealth. Allowance must also be made for natural fearfulness, not only in women, from whom no such dangerous duty is expected, but also in men of feminine courage. When armies meet in battle, men on one side or both may flee; yet if they flee from fear rather than treachery, their act is held dishonorable, not unjust. For the same reason, avoiding battle is cowardice but not injustice. A man who enlists as a soldier, however, or accepts an advance of pay, surrenders the excuse of a fearful nature, and is bound not only to go into battle but also not to flee without his captain's leave. And when the defense of the Common-wealth demands the help of everyone able to bear arms at once, everyone is bound to give it; otherwise, instituting a Common-wealth they have neither the purpose nor the courage to preserve would have been in vain.\n\nNo man has the liberty to resist the sword of the Common-wealth in defense of another, whether guilty or innocent, because such liberty would deprive the sovereign of the means to protect us and so destroy the very essence of government. But suppose many men have already joined in unjust resistance to sovereign power or committed a capital crime for which each expects death. Do they not then have the liberty to unite and help defend one another? Certainly they do: they are merely defending their lives, which a guilty man may do as well as an innocent one. Their first breach of duty was indeed unjust; but their subsequent taking up of arms, even to maintain what they have done, is no new act of injustice. If it is solely to defend their own persons, it is not unjust at all. But an offer of pardon deprives those to whom it is offered of the plea of self-defense, and makes their continued assistance to or defense of the others unlawful.\n\nOther liberties depend on the silence of the law. Where the sovereign has prescribed no rule, the subject has liberty to act or refrain according to his own judgment. Such liberty is therefore greater in some places and smaller in others, greater at some times and smaller at others, as those who hold sovereignty think most convenient. For example, there was a time when a man in England could enter his own land by force and dispossess someone wrongfully holding it. Later that liberty of forcible entry was taken away by a statute enacted by the king in Parliament. And in some parts of the world men have the liberty to have many wives; elsewhere they do not.\n\nIf a subject has a dispute with his sovereign concerning a debt, the right to possess land or goods, a service required of him, or a bodily or monetary penalty founded on a preexisting law, he has the same liberty to sue for his right as he would have against another subject, before judges appointed by the sovereign. For when the sovereign bases his claim on a former law rather than on his own power, he thereby declares that he requires no more than what that law shows to be due. Such a suit therefore does not contradict the sovereign's will, and the subject has the liberty to demand a hearing and a judgment under that law. But if the sovereign demands or takes something by virtue of his power, no legal action lies against him: everything he does by virtue of that power is done by the authority of every subject, so that anyone who brings an action against the sovereign brings it against himself.\n\nIf a monarch or sovereign assembly grants all or some of his subjects a liberty that, while the grant stands, disables him from providing for their safety, the grant is void, unless he directly renounces sovereignty or transfers it to another. For he could have renounced or transferred it openly and in plain words if he had wished, and did not; we must therefore understand that he did not intend to do so. Rather, the grant arose from ignorance that such liberty is incompatible with sovereign power. Sovereignty is therefore still retained, together with all the powers needed to exercise it: the power to make war and peace, to judge, to appoint officers and counselors, to levy money, and the others named in the 18th Chapter.\n\nThe subjects' obligation to the sovereign is understood to last only as long as the power by which he can protect them lasts. For no Covenant can make men surrender the Right of Nature to protect themselves when no one else can protect them. Sovereignty is the soul of the Common-wealth; once it leaves the body, the limbs no longer receive their motion from it. The end of obedience is protection; wherever a man sees protection, whether in his own sword or another's, nature directs his obedience to it and his efforts toward maintaining it. Though those who establish sovereignty intend it to be immortal, it is by its nature vulnerable not only to violent death through foreign war, but also, through men's ignorance and passions, bears within itself from its very foundation many seeds of natural mortality in civil discord.\n\nIf a subject is taken prisoner in war, or if his person or means of living fall within the enemy's control, and he is granted his life and bodily liberty on condition that he become subject to the victor, he has the liberty to accept that condition. Once he accepts it, he is subject to his captor, for he had no other way to preserve himself. The same applies if he is detained on the same terms in a foreign country. But if he is held in prison or chains, or is not trusted with bodily liberty, he cannot be understood to be bound to subjection by Covenant, and may escape by any means he can.\n\nIf a monarch relinquishes sovereignty both for himself and for his heirs, his subjects return to the absolute liberty of nature. For though nature may show who his sons and nearest relatives are, it depends on his own will, as I said in the preceding chapter, who shall be his heir. If he chooses to have no heir, therefore, there is no sovereignty and no subjection. The same is true if he dies without known relatives and without naming an heir: then no heir can be known, and consequently no subjection is owed.\n\nIf the sovereign banishes a subject, that person is not a subject during his banishment. Someone sent on an errand or given leave to travel remains a subject, however, by agreement between sovereigns rather than by virtue of the Covenant of subjection. For anyone who enters another's dominion is subject to all its laws, unless he has a privilege through the sovereigns' friendship or through a special license.\n\nIf a monarch conquered in war submits to the victor as a subject, his subjects are released from their former obligation and become obliged to the victor. But if he is held prisoner or lacks bodily liberty, he cannot be understood to have surrendered the right of sovereignty. His subjects are therefore bound to obey the magistrates previously appointed, who govern not in their own name but in his. For while his right remains, the only question is one of administration, that is, of magistrates and officers; if he cannot appoint them, he is presumed to approve those he himself appointed earlier.\n\nCHAPTER XXII. OF SUBJECT SYSTEMS, POLITICAL AND PRIVATE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXII, 1\n\nON SUBJECT SYSTEMS, POLITICAL AND PRIVATE\n\nHaving spoken of the generation, form, and power of a Common-wealth, I shall now speak in turn of its parts. First come systems, which resemble the similar parts, or muscles, of a natural body. By systems I mean any number of people joined in one interest or one business. Some are regular and some irregular. Those are regular in which one man or assembly of men is constituted representative of the whole number; all others are irregular.\n\nAmong regular systems, some are absolute and independent, subject to none but their own representative. Only Common-wealths are of this kind; I have spoken of them in the 5 preceding chapters. Others are dependent, that is, subordinate to some Sovereign Power to which every member, including their representative, is subject.\n\nAmong subordinate systems, some are political and some private. Political systems, also called political bodies and persons in law, are constituted by authority from the Sovereign Power of the Common-wealth. Private systems are constituted by subjects among themselves or by authority from a foreigner. For no authority derived from foreign power within another's dominion is public there; it is private.\n\nAmong private systems, some are lawful and some unlawful: the lawful are those the Common-wealth allows; all others are unlawful. Irregular systems have no representative and consist only in a gathering of people. If such gatherings are not forbidden by the Common-wealth and are not formed with an evil design—as when people gather at markets or shows or for any other harmless purpose—they are lawful. But if their intention is evil or, when their numbers are considerable, unknown, they are unlawful.\n\nIn political bodies the representative's power is always limited; it is the Sovereign Power that prescribes its limits. Unlimited power is absolute sovereignty. The Sovereign in every Common-wealth is the absolute representative of all the subjects, so no one else can represent any part of them except insofar as the Sovereign permits. To permit a political body of subjects to have an absolute representative for every purpose would be to surrender the government of that part of the Common-wealth and divide the dominion, contrary to its peace and defense. The Sovereign cannot be understood to have done this by any grant that does not plainly and directly release those subjects from subjection. For conclusions drawn from words are not signs of his will when other conclusions point to the contrary; they are instead signs of error and miscalculation, to which all mankind is too prone.\n\nThe limits of the power given to the representative of a political body are to be learned from two things: its writ or letters from the Sovereign, and the law of the Common-wealth.\n\nIn the institution or acquisition of an independent Common-wealth, no written instrument is needed, for the representative's power has no limits there except those prescribed by the unwritten Law of Nature. But subordinate bodies need such varied limits on their businesses, times, and places that these could not be remembered without written letters, nor known unless those letters were made public for people to read and also sealed or attested by seals or other lasting signs of Sovereign Authority.\n\nAnd because it is not always easy, or perhaps even possible, to describe these limits in writing, the ordinary laws common to all subjects must determine what the representative may lawfully do in every case on which the letters are silent. Therefore:\n\nIf the representative of a political body is one man, anything he does in the body's name that is authorized neither by his letters nor by the laws is his own act, not that of the body or any of its other members. Beyond the limits prescribed by his letters or the laws, he represents no person's identity but his own. But what he does in accordance with them is everyone's act. For everyone is author of the Sovereign's act, since the Sovereign is their unlimited representative; and the act of one who keeps within the Sovereign's letters is the Sovereign's act, of which every member of the body is therefore author.\n\nBut if the representative is an assembly, any decree it makes without authorization from its letters or the laws is the act of the assembly or political body, and of everyone whose vote carried the decree. It is not the act of anyone present who voted against it, or of anyone absent unless he voted for it by proxy. It is the assembly's act because it was carried by a majority. If it is a crime, the assembly may be punished insofar as it is capable of punishment, by dissolution or forfeiture of its letters—which is capital punishment for such artificial, fictitious bodies—or, if the assembly has a common stock in which no innocent member owns a share, by a monetary fine. Nature has exempted all political bodies from corporal penalties. But those who did not vote for the decree are innocent: in matters its letters do not authorize, the assembly cannot represent them, and consequently its votes do not implicate them.\n\nWHEN THE REPRESENTATIVE IS ONE MAN, IF HE BORROWS MONEY OR INCURS A CONTRACTUAL DEBT, HE ALONE IS LIABLE, NOT THE MEMBERS. If the single representative of a political body borrows money from an outsider, someone who does not belong to that body, the debt is the representative's. No letters need limit borrowing, since it is for people to decide for themselves how much to lend. If his letters authorized him to make the members pay what he borrowed, he would thereby have sovereignty over them. The grant would therefore either be void as the product of error, common to human nature, and an insufficient sign of the grantor's will; or, if the grantor affirmed it, the representative would be Sovereign and would not come under the present question, which concerns only subordinate bodies. No member, then, is obliged to pay a debt so borrowed, except the representative himself. The lender, being a stranger to the letters and the body's qualifications, recognizes as his debtors only those who have bound themselves. Since the representative can bind himself and no one else, he alone is the debtor, and must pay out of the common stock, if any exists, or otherwise out of his own estate.\n\nIf he incurs a debt by contract or by fine, the case is the same.\n\nBut when the representative is an assembly and the debt is owed to an outsider, all those, and only those, who voted to borrow, to enter into the contract that incurred the debt, or to perform the act for which the fine was imposed, are answerable for it. By voting, each bound himself to pay. Anyone who authorizes borrowing is obliged to repay even the whole debt, though payment by any one of them discharges him.\n\nIf the debt is owed to a member of the assembly, however, only the assembly is obliged to pay, out of its common stock, if it has any. Being free to vote, if he votes to borrow the money, he votes to repay it. If he votes not to borrow, or is absent, he nevertheless votes for the borrowing by lending; thus he contradicts his former vote and is bound by the later one. He becomes both borrower and lender, and can therefore demand repayment from no individual, but only from the common treasury. If that fails, he has no remedy and no one to complain of but himself: although he knew the assembly's acts and its means to pay, and was under no compulsion, he foolishly lent his money all the same.\n\nSOMETIMES LAWFUL, BUT NEVER AGAINST SOVEREIGN POWER. It is clear from this that in subordinate political bodies subject to a Sovereign Power, it is sometimes not only lawful but expedient for an individual to protest openly against the decrees of the representative assembly and have his dissent recorded or witnessed. Otherwise he might be bound to repay debts contracted and answer for crimes committed by others. In a sovereign assembly, however, he has no such liberty: one who protests there denies its sovereignty; moreover, whatever Sovereign Power commands is justified for the subject by that command, though not always in the sight of God, since every subject is the author of such a command.\n\nThe variety of political bodies is almost infinite. They differ not only in the business for which they are constituted, which is of unspeakable variety, but also in the many limitations placed on their times, places, and numbers. As to their business, some are established to govern. First, the government of a province may be entrusted to an assembly whose decisions depend on majority votes; such an assembly is a political body whose power is limited by its commission. The word province means a charge or responsibility for business, entrusted by the person whose business it is to another to administer for him and under him. Thus when a Common-wealth contains several territories with distinct laws or widely separated locations, and their administration is entrusted to different people, the territories where the Sovereign does not reside but governs by commission are called provinces. There are, however, few examples of a province governed by an assembly residing within it. Though the Romans had sovereignty over many provinces, they always governed them by presidents and praetors, not assemblies, as they governed the city of Rome and its neighboring lands. Similarly, when colonies went from England to settle Virginia and the Sommer-Ilands, their government here was entrusted to assemblies in London, yet those assemblies never entrusted the government under them to an assembly there; they sent a single governor to each plantation. For though everyone naturally wishes to take part in government wherever he can be personally present, where he cannot be present he is also naturally inclined to entrust the government of his common interest to a monarchic rather than a popular form. This is also evident among people with large private estates: when they do not wish to undertake the work of managing their affairs, they prefer to trust one servant rather than an assembly of friends or servants. But whatever the actual practice, we may suppose that the government of a province or colony has been entrusted to an assembly. In that case what I must say here is this: any debt contracted by the assembly, or any unlawful act it decrees, is the act only of those who assented, not of those who dissented or were absent, for the reasons already given. Further, an assembly residing outside the bounds of the colony it governs cannot exercise power over the persons or property of its inhabitants by seizing them for a debt or other duty anywhere outside the colony itself. Having neither jurisdiction nor authority elsewhere, it must resort to the remedies allowed by the law of that place. And though the assembly has the right to fine any member who breaks its laws, it has no right to enforce the fine outside the colony itself. What I have said here about the rights of an assembly governing a province or colony applies also to an assembly governing a town, university, college, church, or any other institution with authority over people.\n\nIn general, in every political body, if a member believes himself injured by the body itself, judgment of his case belongs to the Sovereign and to the judges the Sovereign has appointed for such cases or appoints for this particular case, not to the body itself. The whole body is his fellow subject in this instance. It is otherwise in a sovereign assembly: if the Sovereign is not judge there, even in his own cause, there can be no judge at all.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXII, 2\n\nIn a political body organized to manage foreign trade, the most suitable representative is an assembly of all its members: one in which everyone who ventures his money may, if he wishes, attend all the body's deliberations and decisions. To see why, consider the purpose for which merchants, who can buy and sell, export and import their merchandise at their own discretion, nevertheless bind themselves together into a single corporation. It is true that few merchants can fill a ship with the goods they buy at home for export, or with those they buy abroad to bring back, and therefore need to join in a society. In it each may share in the gain in proportion to what he ventures, or take his own goods and sell what he exports or imports at whatever prices he sees fit. But this is not a political body: it has no common representative to bind its members to any law beyond that which binds all other subjects. Their purpose in incorporating is to increase their gain, which they do in two ways: by exclusive buying and exclusive selling, at home and abroad alike. To grant a company of merchants corporate status as a political body, then, is to grant a double monopoly: one over buying and another over selling. When a company is incorporated for trade with a particular foreign country, only its members export the commodities saleable there; this is exclusive buying at home and exclusive selling abroad. At home there is only one buyer, and abroad only one seller. Both benefit the merchant: he buys more cheaply at home and sells more dearly abroad. And abroad there is only one buyer of foreign merchandise, while at home there is only one seller of it; both arrangements again benefit the investors.\n\nOne part of this double monopoly harms the people at home, the other foreigners. By holding the exclusive right to export, the merchants set whatever price they please on the products of the people's farming and handicrafts; by holding the exclusive right to import, they set whatever price they please on all the foreign commodities the people need. Both harm the people. Conversely, by being the sole sellers of native commodities abroad and the sole buyers of foreign commodities where they are produced, they raise the price of the former and lower that of the latter, to the foreigner's disadvantage. Where there is only one seller, goods are dearer; where there is only one buyer, cheaper. Such corporations, then, are nothing but monopolies. They would, however, be very profitable to a Common-wealth if, though joined into one body in foreign markets, their members were free at home to buy and sell, each at whatever price he could obtain.\n\nThe purpose of these merchant bodies, then, is not the common benefit of the whole body—which in this case has no common stock except what is deducted from individual investments for building, buying, provisioning, and manning ships—but the individual gain of every investor. It is therefore reasonable that each should know how his own investment is being used: each should belong to the assembly empowered to direct it and be acquainted with its accounts. The representative of such a body must accordingly be an assembly at whose deliberations every member may attend if he wishes.\n\nIf a political body of merchants incurs a debt to an outsider by an act of its representative assembly, each member is individually liable for the whole. An outsider cannot be expected to know their private rules; he regards them as so many individuals, each obliged to pay the entire sum until one person's payment releases all the others. But if the debt is owed to one of the company, the creditor owes the whole to himself and can therefore demand repayment only from the common stock, if there is any.\n\nIf the Common-wealth taxes the body, the tax is understood as levied on each member in proportion to his individual investment in the company. For in this case there is no common stock other than what is formed from their individual investments.\n\nIf the body is fined for some unlawful act, only those whose votes decreed the act or whose assistance carried it out are liable. The rest have committed no crime except that of belonging to the body; and if that is a crime, since the body was established by the authority of the Common-wealth, it is not theirs.\n\nIf a member owes a debt to the body, the body may sue him. But it cannot seize his goods or imprison him by its own authority, only by that of the Common-wealth. If it could do so by its own authority, it could also decide by its own authority that the debt was due, which would be to judge its own cause.\n\nThese bodies formed to govern people or trade may be perpetual or limited to a period specified in writing. But there are also bodies whose duration is limited simply by the nature of their business. For example, a sovereign monarch or sovereign assembly may see fit to command the towns and other several parts of their territory to send deputies to report the condition and needs of the subjects, to advise in making good laws, or for some other reason to consult with the one person representing the whole country. Given an appointed place and time to meet, those deputies form there and then a political body representing every subject of that dominion. But they represent them only in matters laid before them by the man or assembly whose Sovereign Authority summoned them; when it is announced that no more matters are to be laid before them or debated, the body dissolves. If they represented the people absolutely, they would be the sovereign assembly, and there would thus be two sovereign assemblies, or two sovereigns, over the same people—which is incompatible with their peace. Wherever sovereignty already exists, therefore, there can be no absolute representation of the people except by that sovereignty. The extent to which such a body represents the whole people is set out in the written summons. The people cannot choose their deputies for a purpose other than that expressed in the directions sent them by their Sovereign.\n\nPrivate bodies that are regular and lawful are constituted without letters or any other written authorization beyond the laws common to all subjects. Because they are united in one representative person, they count as regular. Such are all families, where a father or master directs the whole household. He binds his children and servants as far as the law permits, but no further, since none of them is obliged to obey in actions the law forbids. In all other actions, while they remain under domestic government, they are subject to their fathers and masters as to their immediate sovereigns. Before the institution of the Common-wealth, fathers and masters were absolute sovereigns in their own families; afterward they lose no more of their authority than the law of the Common-wealth takes away.\n\nPrivate bodies that are regular but unlawful unite themselves under one representative person without any public authority. Such are corporations of beggars, thieves, and Gypsies, formed to manage their trades of begging and stealing more effectively; and corporations of men who, on authority from some foreign person, unite within another's dominion to spread doctrines more easily and build a party against the power of the Common-wealth.\n\nIrregular systems, being in their nature only leagues or sometimes mere gatherings of people, are united by no common representative or mutual obligation to any particular design, but arise only from a similarity of wills and inclinations. They become lawful or unlawful according as each individual's design in them is lawful or unlawful; and his design must be inferred from the occasion.\n\nLeagues of subjects, since leagues are generally formed for mutual defense, are mostly unnecessary in a Common-wealth—which is itself nothing more than a league of all the subjects together. They suggest an unlawful design and are unlawful on that account, commonly going by the name of factions or conspiracies. For a league is a union of people by Covenants. If, as in the condition of mere nature, no power has been given to any man or assembly to compel their performance, it remains valid only as long as there is no just cause for distrust. Hence leagues between Common-wealths, over which no human power has been established to hold them all in awe, are not merely lawful but profitable for as long as they last. But leagues among subjects of one and the same Common-wealth, in which everyone can obtain his right through the Sovereign Power, are unnecessary to preserve peace and justice; if their design is evil or unknown to the Common-wealth, they are unlawful. Any union of private people's strength is unjust if intended for evil, and if its intention is unknown it is dangerous to the public and unjustly concealed.\n\nIf the Sovereign Power resides in a large assembly, and a number of its members consult apart without authority to devise how to guide the rest, theirs is an unlawful faction or conspiracy, fraudulently seducing the assembly to serve their particular interest. But a man whose private interest is to be debated and judged in the assembly commits no injustice by making as many friends as he can, since in this case he is not a member of the assembly. Even if he hires these friends with money, it is no injustice unless an express law forbids it. For sometimes, given people's ways, justice cannot be had without money; and everyone may believe his own cause just until it has been heard and judged.\n\nIn any Common-wealth, if a private man maintains more servants than are needed to manage his estate and perform the lawful work he has for them, this is an unlawful faction. Under the protection of the Common-wealth he has no need of defense by private force. And though in nations not fully civilized numerous families have lived in continual hostility and attacked one another with private forces, it is clear that they acted unjustly—or else that they had no Common-wealth.\n\nAs with factions formed around kinship, so too factions formed to govern religion—Papists, Protestants, and the like—or the state, such as the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome and the aristocrats and democrats of ancient Greece, are unjust. They threaten the people's peace and safety and take the sword from the Sovereign's hand.\n\nA gathering of people is an irregular system; its lawfulness depends on the occasion and the number assembled. If the occasion is lawful and plain to see, the gathering is lawful, as with customary attendance at church or a public show in customary numbers. If the numbers are extraordinarily large, however, the occasion is not evident; anyone unable to give a particular and sound account of his presence among them must therefore be judged aware of an unlawful, riotous design. It may be lawful for a thousand men to join in a petition delivered to a judge or magistrate, but if a thousand come to present it, their gathering is riotous: one or two would suffice. In such cases it is not a fixed number that makes an assembly unlawful, but a number too great for the officers then present to suppress and bring to justice.\n\nWhen an unusual number of people assemble against someone they accuse, the gathering is an unlawful riot: a few, or even one person, could deliver their accusation to the magistrate. Such was the case of St. Paul at Ephesus, where Demetrius and a great many others brought two of Paul's companions before the magistrate, crying with one voice, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” This was their way of demanding justice against the men for teaching doctrines opposed to their religion and trade. Given that people's laws, the occasion was just; yet the assembly was judged unlawful, and the magistrate rebuked them in these words (Acts 19. 40): “If Demetrius and the other craftsmen have an accusation against any man, there are courts and deputies; let them accuse one another. And if you have anything further to demand, your case may be judged in a lawfully called assembly. For we are in danger of being accused of sedition today, since there is no cause by which anyone can give a reason for this gathering of people.” Here he calls an assembly for which no one can give a just account a sedition, one for which they could offer no defense. This is all I shall say of systems and assemblies of people, which may be compared, as I said, to the similar parts of a man's body: lawful ones to muscles, unlawful ones to wens, boils, and abscesses, produced by an unnatural gathering of harmful humors.\n\nCHAPTER XXIII. ON THE PUBLIC MINISTERS OF SOVEREIGN POWER\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIII\n\nON THE PUBLIC MINISTERS OF SOVEREIGN POWER\n\nIn the last chapter I spoke of the similar parts of a Common-wealth; in this one I shall speak of its organic parts, the public ministers.\n\nA public minister is a person employed by the Sovereign, whether a monarch or an assembly, in some affair, with authority in that employment to represent the person of the Common-wealth. Every man or assembly possessing sovereignty represents two persons, or, as it is more commonly put, acts in two capacities: one natural and one political. A monarch has the person of a man as well as that of the Common-wealth, and a sovereign assembly has the person of the assembly as well as that of the Common-wealth. Those who serve them in their natural capacity, therefore, are not public ministers; only those who serve them in administering public business are. Thus neither the ushers, sergeants, and other officers who attend an assembly in an aristocracy or democracy merely for the convenience of those assembled, nor the stewards, chamberlains, treasurers, and other household officers of a monarch in a monarchy, are public ministers.\n\nSome public ministers are entrusted with general administration, either of the whole dominion or of a part. The entire administration of a kingdom may, for example, be entrusted by the predecessor of an infant king to a protector or regent during the king's minority. In that case every subject is obliged to obey insofar as the ordinances the regent makes and the commands he gives are in the king's name and do not conflict with the king's sovereign power. A part or province may likewise be entrusted by a monarch or sovereign assembly to the general charge of a governor, lieutenant, prefect, or viceroy. Here too everyone in that province is obliged by everything the governor does in the Sovereign's name that is compatible with the Sovereign's Right. Such protectors, viceroys, and governors have no right except what depends on the Sovereign's will; and no commission granted to them can be interpreted as a declaration of the will to transfer sovereignty unless it uses express and unmistakable words to that effect. Public ministers of this kind resemble the nerves and tendons that move the several limbs of a natural body.\n\nOthers have special administration: responsibility for some particular business, at home or abroad. At home, first, in the economy of a Common-wealth, those authorized to collect, receive, disburse, or audit the accounts of its treasury—tributes, duties, rents, fines, or any other public revenue—are public ministers. They are ministers because they serve the representative person and can do nothing against his command or without his authority; they are public because they serve him in his political capacity.\n\nSecond, those authorized in matters of military force to keep arms, forts, and ports; to levy, pay, or lead soldiers; or to provide anything needed for war on land or sea, are public ministers. But a soldier who has no command, even if he fights for the Common-wealth, does not on that account represent its person: there is no one to whom he represents it. Anyone who commands represents it only to those under his command.\n\nThose authorized to teach the people their duty to the Sovereign Power, or to empower others to teach it, and to instruct them in what is just and unjust—making them better able to live in godliness and peace with one another and to resist the public enemy—are also public ministers. They are ministers because they act by another's authority, not their own; and public because they act, or should act, by no authority but the Sovereign's. Only the monarch or sovereign assembly has immediate authority from God to teach and instruct the people. No one but the Sovereign receives power simply Dei Gratia, that is, by the favor of God alone. Everyone else receives it by the favor and providence of God and of their sovereigns: in a monarchy, Dei Gratia & Regis, or Dei Providentia & Voluntate Regis.\n\nThose to whom jurisdiction is given are public ministers too. In their courts they represent the person of the Sovereign, and their sentence is his sentence. For, as I have explained, all jurisdiction is essentially attached to sovereignty; all other judges are therefore ministers of the person or persons who possess Sovereign Power. And since controversies are of two kinds, those of fact and those of law, judgments too may concern either fact or law. Consequently, a single controversy may have two judges, one of fact and another of law.\n\nIn either sort of controversy, a dispute may arise between the party judged and the judge. Because both are subjects of the Sovereign, equity requires that it be judged by persons to whom both consent: no one can be judge in his own cause. But both have already agreed to the Sovereign as judge. He must therefore hear and decide the cause himself, or appoint as judge someone to whom both parties agree. Their agreement can be understood as made in several ways. First, if the defendant is allowed to challenge judges whose interests make them suspect to him—the complainant having already chosen his own judge—those whom he does not challenge are judges to whom he himself agrees. Second, if he appeals to another judge, he can appeal no further, since his appeal is his choice. Third, if he appeals to the Sovereign himself, and the Sovereign pronounces sentence either in person or through delegates accepted by both parties, that sentence is final: the defendant has been judged by judges of his own choosing, and thus by himself.\n\nConsidering these properties of just and rational judgment, I cannot refrain from noting the excellent constitution of the courts of justice established in England for both common and public pleas. By common pleas I mean those in which complainant and defendant are both subjects; by public pleas, also called pleas of the Crown, those in which the complainant is the Sovereign. Of the two orders of people, Lords and Commons, the Lords had the privilege of being judged in every capital crime only by Lords, as many of them as wished to be present. Since this was always acknowledged as a privilege granted in their favor, their judges were none but those they had themselves desired. In every controversy, each subject—and the Lords as well, in civil controversies—had as judges men from the district where the matter at issue lay. He could challenge them until twelve men against whom he had no objection were agreed upon, and those twelve judged him. Having judges of his own choosing, the party could offer no reason why their sentence should not be final. These public persons, authorized by the Sovereign Power to instruct or judge the people, may fittingly be compared to the organs of voice in a natural body.\n\nPublic ministers also include all those authorized by the Sovereign to enforce judgments rendered, publish the Sovereign's commands, suppress disturbances, apprehend and imprison offenders, and perform other acts tending to preserve peace. Every act they perform under such authority is an act of the Common-wealth; their service corresponds to that of the hands in a natural body.\n\nPublic ministers abroad are those who represent the person of their own Sovereign to foreign states: ambassadors, messengers, agents, and heralds sent by public authority on public business.\n\nBut persons sent only on the authority of some private party within a troubled state, even if received, are neither public nor private ministers of the Common-wealth, since the Common-wealth is the author of none of their actions. Likewise, an ambassador sent by a prince to offer congratulations or condolences, or to attend a solemn occasion, is a private person: though his authority is public, his business is private and belongs to the prince in his natural capacity. Again, someone secretly sent into another country to investigate its counsels and strength is only a private minister, though still a minister of the Common-wealth: his authority and business are public, but no one there recognizes in him any person except his own. He may be compared to an eye in the natural body. Those appointed to receive the people's petitions or other information, serving as a kind of public ear, are public ministers and represent their Sovereign in that office.\n\nNeither a counselor nor a council of state is a public person if we consider it as possessing no authority to judge or command, but only to advise the Sovereign when asked, or to offer advice unasked. Advice is addressed solely to the Sovereign, and another cannot represent his person to him in his own presence. But a body of counselors is never without some other authority, either to judge or to administer directly. In a monarchy, they represent the monarch when they deliver his commands to public ministers. In a democracy, the council or senate proposes the conclusions of its deliberations to the people as a council; but when it appoints judges, hears causes, or receives ambassadors, it acts as a minister of the people. In an aristocracy, the council of state is itself the sovereign assembly and advises no one but itself.\n\nCHAPTER XXIV. ON THE NUTRITION AND PROCREATION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIV\n\nOF THE NOURISHMENT AND PROCREATION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\nThe Nourishment of a Common-wealth Consists in the Commodities\n\nOf Sea and Land\n\nThe nourishment of a Common-wealth consists in the abundance and distribution of materials that sustain life; in their digestion, or preparation; and, once digested, in their conveyance through suitable channels to public use.\n\nAs for the abundance of material, nature limits it to those commodities which God ordinarily gives freely, or sells for labor, to humankind from land and sea, the two breasts of our common mother.\n\nFor the materials of this nourishment—animals, plants, and minerals—God has freely placed before us, in or near the earth’s surface; nothing is needed but the labor and industry to gather them. Thus abundance depends, next to God’s favor, solely on human labor and industry.\n\nThis material, commonly called commodities, is partly native and partly foreign: native if it can be had within the territory of the Common-wealth, foreign if imported from outside. Since no territory under one Common-wealth’s dominion, unless it is very extensive, produces everything needed to sustain and move the whole body, and few territories fail to produce something beyond their needs, commodities in surplus at home cease to be surplus when they supply domestic wants through the importation of what can be had abroad, whether by exchange, by just war, or by labor. For a man’s labor, like anything else, is a commodity exchangeable for benefit. Some Common-wealths have possessed no more territory than they needed for habitation, yet have not only maintained but increased their power, partly by the labor of trading from place to place, partly by selling manufactured goods whose materials were brought in from elsewhere.\n\nThe distribution of the materials of this nourishment establishes mine, yours, and his—in a word, property—and in every kind of Common-wealth belongs to the Soveraigne power. For where there is no Common-wealth there is, as already shown, perpetual war of every man against his neighbor. Everything therefore belongs to whoever takes it and holds it by force; and that is neither property nor common ownership, but uncertainty. This is so evident that even Cicero, a passionate defender of liberty, attributed all property to civil law in a public speech: “Let civil law be abandoned, or merely guarded negligently—not to say oppressed—and nothing remains that anyone can be sure of receiving from his ancestors or leaving to his children.” And again: “Take away civil law, and no man knows what is his own and what belongs to another.” Since the introduction of property is thus an effect of the Common-wealth, which can act only through the person who represents it, it is an act of the Soveraigne alone, and consists in laws that no one without Soveraigne power can make. The ancients knew this well: they called what we call law nomos, meaning distribution, and defined justice as distributing to each man his own.\n\nIn this distribution, the first law concerns the division of the land itself: the Soveraigne assigns each man a portion according to what he, not any subject or number of subjects, judges consistent with equity and the common good. The children of Israel were a Common-wealth in the wilderness, but lacked the earth’s commodities until they mastered the promised land. The land was then divided among them not at their own discretion, but at the discretion of Eleazar the priest and Joshua their general. Though they made thirteen tribes from twelve by subdividing the tribe of Joseph, they made only twelve portions of land; to the tribe of Levi they assigned no land, but gave it a tenth of all the fruits. That division was therefore discretionary. And although a people who gain possession of a land by war do not always exterminate its ancient inhabitants, as the Jews did, but leave many, most, or all of them their estates, it is clear that they thereafter hold those estates by the victors’ distribution, as the people of England held all theirs from William the Conqueror.\n\nFrom this we may infer that a subject’s property in his lands consists in a right to exclude all other subjects from their use, but not to exclude the Soveraigne, whether an assembly or a monarch. For since the Soveraigne—that is, the Common-wealth whose person he represents—is understood to act only for the common peace and security, the distribution of land must be understood to serve that same end. Consequently, any distribution he makes to its detriment is contrary to the will of every subject who entrusted his peace and safety to the Soveraigne’s discretion and conscience, and must therefore, by the will of each, be regarded as void. It is true that a Soveraigne monarch, or the majority of a Soveraigne assembly, may ordain many things in pursuit of their Passions, against their own consciences; this is a breach of trust and of the Law of Nature. Yet it does not authorize any subject to make war on the Soveraigne, or even to accuse him of injustice or speak ill of him in any way, because they authorized all his actions and, in conferring Soveraigne power, made those actions their own. The cases in which a Soveraigne’s commands conflict with equity and the Law of Nature will be considered elsewhere.\n\nIn distributing land, one may imagine the Common-wealth itself receiving a portion, possessing and improving it through its representative, and that portion being made sufficient to sustain the whole expense necessarily required for common peace and defense. This would indeed be true if we could imagine a representative free of human Passions and frailties. But human nature being what it is, setting aside public land or any fixed revenue for the Common-wealth is futile; it tends toward the dissolution of government and a return to the condition of mere nature and war as soon as Soveraigne power comes into the hands of a monarch or assembly either too careless of money or too willing to risk the public stock in a long or costly war. Common-wealths cannot be put on a diet: their expenses are limited not by their own appetite, but by external accidents and the appetites of their neighbors; public wealth therefore cannot be bounded except by the demands of emergencies as they arise. In England the Conqueror reserved various lands for his own use, besides forests and hunting grounds for his recreation or the preservation of woods, and reserved various services from the lands he gave his subjects. Yet these appear to have been reserved for his maintenance in his natural, not his public, capacity: he and his successors nevertheless imposed taxes at their discretion on all subjects’ land when they judged it necessary. Or, if these public lands and services were intended to maintain the Common-wealth sufficiently, the arrangement defeated the purpose of its institution: the taxes imposed afterward showed it was insufficient, and the Crown’s recent revenue shows it was subject to alienation and diminution. It is therefore futile to allot a portion to the Common-wealth, which can sell or give it away, and does so whenever its representative does.\n\nAs the distribution of lands at home belongs to the Soveraigne, so does the determination of the places where, and commodities in which, subjects may trade abroad. For if private persons could decide for themselves, some would be drawn by profit to furnish an enemy with the means to injure the Common-wealth, and to injure it themselves by importing things that please men’s appetites but are harmful to them, or at least of no use. It therefore belongs to the Common-wealth—that is, to the Soveraigne alone—to approve or disapprove both the places and the goods of foreign trade.\n\nFurther, a Common-wealth cannot be sustained merely by giving each man property in a portion of land, in a few commodities, or in some useful craft naturally his own; and there is no craft in the world that is not necessary to the existence or well-being of almost every individual. Men must therefore distribute what they can spare and mutually transfer property in it by exchange and contract. Thus the Common-wealth—that is, the Soveraigne—must determine how every kind of contract between subjects, such as buying, selling, exchanging, borrowing, lending, leasing, and hiring, is to be made, and which words and signs make it valid. This is enough on the materials and distribution of nourishment to the several members of the Common-wealth, given the design of the whole work.\n\nBy digestion I mean converting all commodities not consumed immediately, but reserved for future nourishment, into something of equal value and portable enough not to hinder people moving from place to place, so that a man may obtain whatever nourishment a place affords wherever he goes. This is nothing other than gold, silver, and money. Gold and silver, being highly valued in nearly every country of the world, happen to offer a convenient measure of the value of all other things in trade between nations; and money, whatever its material, coined by a Common-wealth’s Soveraigne, sufficiently measures the value of other things among its subjects. By these measures, all commodities, movable and immovable, can accompany a man wherever he goes, within and beyond his usual residence. Money passes from man to man within the Common-wealth, circulating and nourishing every part as it goes; this digestion is, as it were, the making of the Common-wealth’s blood. Natural blood is likewise made from the fruits of the earth, and nourishes every member of the human body as it circulates.\n\nBecause silver and gold derive their value from their material, they enjoy, first, the privilege that neither one nor a few Common-wealths can change their value, since they are a common measure of commodities everywhere. Base money, however, can easily be raised or lowered in value. Second, they enable Common-wealths, when necessary, to move and extend their arms into foreign countries and supply provisions not only to traveling subjects but to whole armies. Coin valued not for its material but for the stamp of its place of origin cannot endure a change of air: it works only at home, where it is also subject to changes in law that diminish its value, often to the detriment of its holders.\n\nThe channels and paths by which nourishment is carried to public use are of two kinds: one conveys it to the public treasury; the other sends it out again for public payments. The first consists of collectors, receivers, and treasurers; the second, again, of treasurers and the officers appointed to pay various public or private ministers. Here, too, the artificial man resembles the natural one: his veins receive blood from the several parts of the body and carry it to the heart; there it is made vital, and the heart sends it out through the arteries to give life and motion to all the body’s members.\n\nThe offspring, or children, of a Common-wealth are what we call settlements or colonies: groups of people sent out from the Common-wealth under a leader or governor to inhabit a foreign country, either previously without inhabitants or made so by war. Once a colony is established, its people either form a Common-wealth of their own, released from subjection to the Soveraigne who sent them, as happened with many ancient Common-wealths—in which case the Common-wealth they left was called their metropolis, or mother, and asks no more of them than fathers ask of children emancipated from household rule: honor and friendship—or they remain united to their metropolis, as did the colonies of Rome, and are then not Common-wealths in their own right but provinces and parts of the Common-wealth that sent them. Thus the rights of colonies, apart from honor and alliance with their metropolis, depend wholly on the license or letters by which their Soveraigne authorized their settlement.\n\nCHAPTER XXV. OF COUNSEL\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXV, 1\n\nOF COUNSEL\n\nHow deceptive it is to judge the nature of things by ordinary, changeable usage is nowhere more apparent than in the confusion of counsel with command. Both use the imperative, as do other forms of speech. For “Do this” may be spoken not only by one who commands, but by one who gives counsel or exhorts. Yet few people fail to see that these are very different things, or cannot distinguish them when they know who speaks, to whom, and on what occasion. But when people encounter these expressions in writing and cannot, or will not, consider their circumstances, they sometimes mistake the precepts of counselors for those of commanders, and sometimes the reverse, according to which mistake best suits the conclusions they wish to draw or the actions they approve. To prevent such mistakes and give commanding, counseling, and exhorting their proper, distinct meanings, I define them as follows.\n\nA COMMAND is given when someone says, “Do this,” or “Do not do this,” expecting no reason for obedience beyond the will of the speaker. It follows plainly that whoever commands thereby seeks his own benefit: the reason for the command is his will alone, and the proper object of every man’s will is some good for himself.\n\nCOUNSEL is given when someone says, “Do this,” or “Do not do this,” and draws his reasons from the benefit it will bring to the person addressed. Plainly, then, whoever gives counsel professes to seek only the good of the person he counsels, whatever his actual intentions.\n\nOne great difference between counsel and command, then, is that command is directed toward the speaker’s benefit, counsel toward another’s. From this arises another difference: a man may be obliged to do what he is commanded, as when he has made a Covenant to obey; but he cannot be obliged to do as he is counseled, since the harm of disregarding it is his own. If he makes a Covenant to follow it, the counsel takes on the nature of a command. A third difference is that no man can claim a right to serve as another’s counselor, since he is not entitled to seek his own benefit by it. To claim a right to counsel another shows a desire to learn his plans or secure some other good for oneself—and that, as I said, is the proper object of every man’s will.\n\nIt is also inherent in counsel that the person who asks for it cannot justly accuse or punish the counsel he receives. To ask another’s counsel is to permit him to offer what he thinks best. Consequently, a person who gives counsel at the request of his Soveraigne, whether monarch or assembly, cannot justly be punished for it, whether it accords with the majority’s opinion or not, so long as it addresses the proposal under debate. For if the assembly’s judgment can be known before the debate is over, no further counsel should be sought or heard: the assembly’s judgment is the resolution of the debate and the end of deliberation. More generally, whoever asks for counsel is its author and therefore cannot punish it; and no one else can do what the Soveraigne cannot. But if one subject counsels another to do something contrary to the laws, that counsel is punishable by the Common-wealth, whether it springs from ill intent or mere ignorance: ignorance of the law is no good excuse where everyone is bound to know the laws to which he is subject.\n\nEXHORTATION and DISSUASION are counsel accompanied by signs of the counselor’s vehement desire that it be followed—or, more briefly, counsel pressed vehemently. A person who exhorts does not trace the consequences of his advice and bind himself to the rigor of sound reasoning; he spurs the person he counsels to action, just as one who dissuades deters him from it. In setting out their reasons, therefore, such speakers appeal to common Passions and opinions, employing comparisons, metaphors, examples, and other tools of oratory to persuade their hearers that following their advice is useful, honorable, or just.\n\nFrom this we may infer, first, that exhortation and dissuasion are directed to the good of the person giving the counsel, not of the person asking for it. This is contrary to the duty of a counselor, who, by the definition of counsel, must consider the benefit of the person he advises, not his own. That the speaker directs it toward his own benefit is evident in his long and vehement insistence or his artful presentation: these were not asked of him, and thus arise from his own needs; they are chiefly for his own benefit, and only incidentally, if at all, for the good of the person counseled.\n\nSecond, exhortation and dissuasion are useful only when speaking to a multitude. A single listener can interrupt and examine a speaker’s reasons more rigorously than a multitude can, since its members are too numerous to debate or converse with someone addressing all of them at once. Third, those who exhort or dissuade when asked to give counsel are corrupt counselors, bribed, as it were, by their own interests. However good their counsel, its giver is no more a good counselor than someone who gives a just verdict for a reward is a just judge. Yet when a man may lawfully command, as a father in his family or a leader in an army may, his exhortations and dissuasions are not only lawful but necessary and praiseworthy. They are then no longer counsel but commands. When commands call for the performance of harsh labor, necessity sometimes, and humanity always, requires them to be softened by encouragement and delivered in the tone and language of counsel rather than in the harsher language of command.\n\nExamples of the difference between command and counsel may be taken from the forms of speech found in Holy Scripture. “Have no other gods but me; make no graven image for yourself; do not take God’s name in vain; keep the Sabbath holy; honor your parents; do not kill; do not steal,” and so forth, are commands, because the reason for obeying them is the will of God our King, whom we are obliged to obey. But the words “Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and follow me” are counsel, because the reason for doing so is our own benefit: we shall have “treasure in heaven.” The words “Go to the village opposite you, and you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt; untie her and bring her to me” are a command, because the reason for the act is their master’s will. But “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus” is counsel, because the reason for doing it is not any benefit to God Almighty, who remains King however we rebel, but our own benefit: we have no other means of avoiding the punishment that hangs over us for our sins.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXV, 2\n\nAs I have distinguished counsel from command by the nature of counsel—its account of the benefit or harm that may come to the person counseled through the necessary or probable consequences of a proposed action—so the difference between capable and incapable counselors may be derived from the same nature. Experience is only the memory of the consequences observed in similar actions before, and counsel is speech that communicates that experience to another. The virtues and defects of counsel are therefore the same as the virtues and defects of the intellect; counselors serve the person of a Common-wealth as memory and mental deliberation serve a natural man. But this resemblance between a Common-wealth and a natural man carries one important difference: a natural man gains experience from objects of sense, which act on him without any Passions or interests of their own; those who counsel a Common-wealth’s representative, by contrast, may have—and often do have—private aims and Passions that always cast suspicion on their counsel and often make it unfaithful. We may therefore establish as the first condition of a good counselor that his aims and interests must not conflict with those of the person he counsels.\n\nSecond, when an action is under deliberation, a counselor’s task is to reveal its consequences so that the person counseled may be truly and clearly informed. He should therefore present his advice in language that makes the truth as clear as possible: with reasoning as sound, words as precise and fitting, and expression as brief as clarity permits. Thus hasty and unsupported inferences—such as those drawn only from examples or the authority of books, which testify to facts or opinions rather than proving what is good or bad—obscure, confused, and ambiguous expressions, and metaphors meant to stir Passions all run counter to a counselor’s office. Such reasoning and language serve only to deceive, or to lead the person counseled toward ends other than his own.\n\nThird, since skill in counsel comes from experience and long study, and no one can be presumed experienced in everything necessary to administer a great Common-wealth, no one should be presumed a good counselor except in matters in which he has both extensive experience and much thoughtful reflection. A Common-wealth must preserve its people at home and defend them from foreign invasion. This requires a deep knowledge of human dispositions, the rights of government, and the nature of equity, law, justice, and honor—knowledge unattainable without study. It also requires knowledge of the strength, commodities, and locations of one’s own country and its neighbors, and of the inclinations and plans of every nation that might threaten it; that cannot be gained without extensive experience. The whole range of these matters, and indeed every particular, calls for the years and observations of a mature person and for more than ordinary study. As I said before, the faculty needed for counsel is judgment; differences between men in judgment arise because their education equips some for one field of study or business, others for another. Where there are infallible rules for doing something, as there are rules of geometry for machines and buildings, all the experience in the world cannot equal the counsel of one who has learned or discovered the rule. Where there is no such rule, the man with most experience in that particular kind of business has the best judgment in it and is the best counselor.\n\nFourth, to counsel a Common-wealth in a matter concerning another Common-wealth, one must know the intelligence and letters received from it, and all the records of treaties and other affairs of state between them. Only those whom the representative considers fit can have access to these. We can therefore see that people not invited to give counsel cannot offer sound counsel in such matters unasked.\n\nFifth, assuming an equal number of counselors, a man is better counseled by hearing each separately than by hearing them in an assembly, for several reasons. First, separate consultations give him each man’s advice. In an assembly many express their advice with an “Aye” or “No,” or by moving their hands or feet, prompted not by their own judgment but by another’s eloquence, or by fear of displeasing a speaker or the whole assembly through contradiction, or of seeming less perceptive than those who applauded the opposing view. Second, an assembly of many is bound to include some whose interests conflict with the public interest. Their interests make them passionate, Passion makes them eloquent, and eloquence draws others to their advice. Men’s Passions, moderate when apart, like the heat of a single firebrand, become in an assembly like a heap of brands that kindle one another—especially when fanned by speeches—until they set the Common-wealth on fire in the name of counseling it. Third, hearing each man alone allows one, when needed, to test the truth or probability of his reasons and the grounds of his advice by frequent questions and objections. That cannot be done in an assembly, where, on any difficult question, a man is more likely to be astonished and dazzled by the variety of arguments than informed of the course to take. Moreover, any large assembly called together for advice must include some who aspire to a reputation for eloquence and political learning. They attend not to the business proposed but to the applause won by their motley speeches, patched together from multicolored threads and scraps of authors. At the very least, this irrelevance wastes the time needed for serious consultation, and is easily avoided by counseling separately and in private. Fourth, many public affairs require secrecy, which the counsel of many, especially in assemblies, endangers. Large assemblies are therefore compelled to entrust such affairs to smaller groups, consisting of those most experienced and most trusted for their fidelity.\n\nFinally, who so approves taking counsel from a great assembly of counselors that he would seek or accept their services in marrying his children, disposing of his lands, governing his household, or managing his private estate—especially if some members wished him ill? A man who conducts his business with the aid of many prudent counselors, each consulted separately on his own subject, does best, like a tennis player who uses capable assistants stationed in their proper places. One who relies on his own judgment does next best, like a player with no assistant at all. But the man carried about his business in a contrived council that cannot move without a majority of consenting opinions, whose decisions are commonly delayed by dissenters out of envy or self-interest, does worst of all. He is like a player carried toward the ball by skilled players, but in a wheelbarrow or other frame that is heavy in itself and further slowed by the conflicting judgments and efforts of those who push it. The more hands push, the worse it becomes—worst of all when one or more of them want him to lose. It is true that many eyes see more than one; but this applies to counselors only when the final decision lies with one man. Otherwise, many eyes see the same object from different angles and are apt to squint toward private benefit. Those who do not wish to miss their mark may look about with two eyes, but they aim with only one. Thus no great popular Common-wealth has ever been sustained except by a foreign enemy that united its people, the reputation of one eminent man among them, the private counsel of a few, or the mutual fear of evenly matched factions—not by the assembly’s open consultations. As for very small Common-wealths, whether popular or monarchical, no human wisdom can uphold them longer than the jealousy of their powerful neighbors endures.\n\nCHAPTER XXVI. OF CIVIL LAWS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 1\n\nOF CIVIL LAWS\n\nBy CIVIL LAWS I mean the laws men are bound to observe because they are members not of this or that particular Common-wealth, but of a Common-wealth. Knowledge of particular laws belongs to those who study the laws of their respective countries; knowledge of civil law in general is open to anyone. The ancient law of Rome was called its civil law from civitas, meaning a Common-wealth. Countries formerly under the Roman Empire and governed by its law that still retain whatever parts of it they think fit call those parts the civil law, to distinguish them from the rest of their own civil laws. But that is not my subject here. I intend to show not what the law is here or there, but what law is, as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and various others have done without professing the study of law.\n\nFirst, it is plain that law in general is not counsel but command; nor is it a command given by just anyone to anyone, but only by someone whose command is addressed to a person already obliged to obey him. Civil law adds only the name of the commanding person: Persona Civitatis, the person of the Common-wealth.\n\nWith this in mind, I define civil law thus: “CIVIL LAW is, for every subject, the rules the Common-wealth has commanded him, by word, writing, or another sufficient sign of its will, to use in distinguishing right from wrong—that is, what is contrary to the rule from what is not.”\n\nNothing in this definition is not evident at first sight. Everyone sees that some laws address all subjects in general, some particular provinces, some particular occupations, and some particular people. They are therefore laws for those to whom the command is addressed, and for no others. Laws are also rules of just and unjust, since nothing is considered unjust that does not violate some law. Likewise, only the Common-wealth can make laws, because we are subject to the Common-wealth alone; and commands must be conveyed by sufficient signs, or a man cannot know how to obey them. Whatever follows necessarily from this definition should therefore be acknowledged as true. I now draw the following conclusions.\n\n1. In every Common-wealth the legislator is the Soveraigne alone, whether one man, as in a monarchy, or one assembly, as in a democracy or aristocracy. The legislator is the maker of law, and the Common-wealth alone prescribes and commands observance of the rules we call laws; therefore the Common-wealth is the legislator. But a Common-wealth is not a person and cannot act except through its representative, the Soveraigne. Thus the Soveraigne alone is the legislator. For the same reason, none but the Soveraigne can repeal an established law, since a law can be repealed only by another law forbidding its enforcement.\n\n2. The Soveraigne of a Common-wealth, whether an assembly or one man, is not subject to civil laws. Having the power to make and repeal laws, he can free himself of that subjection whenever he pleases by repealing troublesome laws and making new ones; consequently, he was free already. Whoever can be free at will is free. Nor can anyone be bound to himself: whoever can bind can also release, so that whoever is bound to himself alone is not bound at all.\n\n3. When long usage acquires the authority of law, the length of time does not confer that authority; the Soveraigne’s will, signified by his silence, does—for silence sometimes indicates consent. It remains law only while the Soveraigne remains silent about it. If a question arises concerning a right of the Soveraigne based not on his present will but on laws made earlier, the passage of time cannot prejudice his right; the question must be judged by equity. Many unjust acts and judgments go unchallenged longer than anyone can remember. Our lawyers count as law only reasonable customs and hold that bad customs should be abolished. But judgment of what is reasonable and what must be abolished belongs to the lawmaker, the Soveraigne assembly or monarch.\n\n4. The Law of Nature and civil law each contain the other and have the same extent. The Laws of Nature, consisting of equity, justice, gratitude, and the other moral virtues dependent on them, are not properly laws in the condition of mere nature, as I said at the end of the 15th Chapter; they are qualities disposing men to peace and obedience. Once a Common-wealth is established, they become actual laws, and not before, because they are then commands of the Common-wealth and therefore civil laws. It is Soveraigne power that obliges men to obey them. To declare what equity, justice, and moral virtue mean in disputes between private persons, and to make them binding, requires ordinances of Soveraigne power and prescribed punishments for violations; these ordinances are therefore part of civil law. Thus the Law of Nature is part of the civil law in every Common-wealth in the world. Conversely, civil law is part of the dictates of nature. Justice—that is, keeping Covenant and giving each man his own—is a dictate of the Law of Nature. But every subject of a Common-wealth has made a Covenant to obey civil law, whether mutually with other subjects when they assemble to form a common representative, or individually with the representative when, overcome by the sword, they promise obedience in order to live. Obedience to civil law is therefore also part of the Law of Nature. Civil and natural law are not different kinds of law but different parts of it: the written part is called civil, the unwritten natural. Yet the Right of Nature, man’s natural liberty, may be curtailed and restrained by civil law; indeed, laws are made for no other purpose than this restraint, without which peace is impossible. Law came into the world for no other reason than to limit each man’s natural liberty so that people might help rather than harm one another, and unite against a common enemy.\n\n5. If one Common-wealth’s Soveraigne subdues a people formerly governed by other written laws and then governs them under those same laws, they are nonetheless the civil laws of the victor, not of the conquered Common-wealth. The legislator is not the one whose authority first made the laws, but the one whose authority maintains them as laws now. Thus, where a Common-wealth’s dominion contains several provinces with different laws, commonly called the customs of the respective provinces, we must not suppose those customs derive their force merely from long usage. They were once written laws, or otherwise made known as the ordinances and statutes of their Soveraignes, and are now laws by virtue not of the passage of time but of their present Soveraignes’ ordinances. But if an unwritten law is generally observed in every province of a dominion and no injustice appears in its use, it can only be a Law of Nature, binding all humankind equally.\n\n6. Since every law, written or unwritten, derives its authority and force from the will of the Common-wealth—that is, of its representative, the monarch in a monarchy and the Soveraigne assembly in other Common-wealths—one may wonder how opinions have arisen in the writings of eminent lawyers in various Common-wealths that, directly or by implication, make legislative power depend on private men or subordinate judges. For example: “The common law has no controller but Parliament.” This is true only where Parliament holds Soveraigne power and cannot be assembled or dissolved except at its own discretion. For if anyone else has the right to dissolve it, that person also has the right to control it, and consequently to control its acts of control. If no one else has that right, the controller of the laws is not Parlamentum, but Rex In Parlamento. And where a Parliament is Soveraigne, however many wise men it assembles from the countries under its rule, and for whatever purpose, no one will believe that the resulting assembly has thereby gained legislative power. Again, it is said that the two arms of a Common-wealth are force and justice, the first held by the king and the second placed in the hands of Parliament—as if a Common-wealth could exist with force in hands that justice lacks the authority to command and govern.\n\n7. Our lawyers agree that law can never be against reason, and that the law is not the letter—that is, every possible interpretation of it—but the interpretation consistent with the legislator’s intention. This is true; the question is whose reason is to be accepted as law. It cannot be the private reason of any individual, for then the laws would be as contradictory as the schools. Nor can it be, as Sr. Ed, Coke calls it (Sir Edward Coke, upon Littleton Lib.2. Ch.6 fol 97.b), an artificial perfection of reason gained through long study, observation, and experience, as his was. Long study can increase and entrench mistaken judgments; when men build on false foundations, the more they build, the greater the ruin. And those who study and observe with equal diligence for equal lengths of time do and must still differ in their reasons and conclusions. The law is made, then, not by that Juris Prudentia, or wisdom of subordinate judges, but by the reason and command of our artificial man, the Common-wealth. Since the Common-wealth is one person in its representative, contradictions between laws do not readily arise; and when they do, the same reason can remove them by interpretation or alteration. In every court of justice it is the Soveraigne, the person of the Common-wealth, who judges. A subordinate judge must attend to the reason that moved his Soveraigne to make the law, so that his sentence accords with it and is thus his Soveraigne’s sentence; otherwise it is his own, and unjust.\n\n8. Since law is a command, and a command consists in declaring or manifesting the commander’s will by voice, writing, or some other sufficient indication, we can see that the Common-wealth’s command is law only for those who have means to learn of it. There is no law over those naturally incapable of understanding, children, or the insane, any more than over animals. Nor are they capable of being called just or unjust, since they have never had the power to make a Covenant or understand its consequences, and therefore have never undertaken to authorize a Soveraigne’s actions, as those who form a Common-wealth must do. Just as those deprived by nature or accident of all knowledge of law in general are excused, so too anyone who, through an accident not caused by his own fault, lacks the means to learn of a particular law is excused for not observing it. Strictly speaking, that law is no law for him. We must therefore consider here what indications and signs suffice for knowledge of what the law is—that is, the Soveraigne’s will—in monarchies and other forms of government alike.\n\nFirst, if a law obliges all subjects without exception but has neither been written nor otherwise published where they can learn of it, it is a Law of Nature. For whatever men must recognize as law, not on another’s word but each through his own reason, must accord with the reason of all; only the Law of Nature can do so. The Laws of Nature need no publication or proclamation, being contained in this single saying approved throughout the world: “Do not do to another what you think it unreasonable for another to do to you.”\n\nSecond, if a law obliges only people of a certain condition, or a particular person, and is neither written nor announced by word, it too is a Law of Nature, known by the same arguments and signs that distinguish people of that condition from other subjects. Any law not written or otherwise published by its maker can be known only through the reason of the person who must obey it; it is therefore natural as well as civil law. For example, if the Soveraigne employs a public minister without written instructions, the minister must take the dictates of reason as his instructions. If he appoints a judge, the judge must recognize that his sentence should accord with his Soveraigne’s reason; that reason being always understood as equity, the Law of Nature binds him to it. If he appoints an ambassador, the ambassador must take as his instruction, in everything his written instructions do not cover, whatever reason dictates as most conducive to his Soveraigne’s interests; the same applies to every other minister of Soveraigne power, public or private. All these instructions of natural reason may be gathered under the name fidelity, a branch of natural justice.\n\nExcept for the Law of Nature, it is essential to every law that it be made known to everyone obliged to obey it, by word, writing, or some other act known to proceed from Soveraigne authority. For another’s will can be understood only from his own words or acts, or from an inference about his aim and purpose; and the purpose of the person of the Common-wealth is always presumed to accord with equity and reason. In ancient times, before writing was commonly used, laws were often put into verse so that ordinary people, taking pleasure in singing or reciting them, might remember them more readily. For the same reason Solomon advises a man to bind the ten commandments (Prov. 7. 3) on his ten fingers. As for the law Moses gave the people of Israel when renewing the Covenant, he commands them (Deut. 11. 19) to teach it to their children by talking of it at home and on the road, when going to bed and when rising, and to write it on the posts and doors of their houses; and (Deut. 31. 12) to gather the people, men, women, and children, to hear it read.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 2\n\nNor is it enough for the Law to be written and published: there must also be visible signs that it proceeds from the will of the Sovereign. For private persons, when they have, or believe they have, force enough to secure their unjust designs and carry them safely to their ambitious ends, may publish whatever they please as Laws, without or against the legislative authority. What is required, therefore, is not only a declaration of the Law, but sufficient signs of its author and his authority. The author, or legislator, is presumed to be evident in every Commonwealth, since he is the Sovereign, constituted by the consent of each person and therefore presumed to be sufficiently known to all. And although men's ignorance and complacency are usually such that, once the memory of the first establishment of their Commonwealth has faded, they do not consider whose power defends them against their enemies, protects their work, and grants them redress for injuries, still no one who gives the matter thought can doubt whose power it is; ignorance of where Sovereignty lies therefore affords no excuse. It is a dictate of natural reason, and consequently an evident Law of Nature, that no one ought to weaken the power whose protection he himself has sought or knowingly accepted against others. Thus no one can doubt who is Sovereign except through his own fault, whatever wicked men may suggest. The difficulty lies in proving an authority derived from him. Resolving it depends on knowledge of the public registers, public councils, public ministers, and public seals, by which all Laws are sufficiently verified.\n\nVerified, I say, not authorized: verification is only testimony and record, not the authority of the Law, which consists solely in the command of the Sovereign.\n\nIf, then, a person has a question of injury that depends on the Law of Nature, that is, on common equity, the judgment of a judge commissioned to hear such cases sufficiently verifies the Law of Nature in that particular case. For although the advice of someone who professes to study the Law is useful in avoiding disputes, it remains only advice: the judge must tell people what the Law is after hearing the controversy.\n\nBut when the question concerns an injury or crime under a written Law, anyone can consult the registers, himself or through others, and, if he wishes, learn sufficiently before committing the act whether it is an injury or not. Indeed, he ought to do so: when someone doubts whether an act he is about to perform is just or unjust, and can inform himself if he wishes, to perform it is unlawful. Likewise, if someone believes himself injured in a matter settled by a written Law that he can see and consider, himself or through others, he acts unjustly if he complains before consulting the Law, betraying a desire to vex others rather than claim his right.\n\nIf the question concerns obedience to a public officer, seeing his commission with the public seal and hearing it read, or having the means to learn its contents if one wishes, sufficiently verifies his authority. For everyone is obliged to do his best to inform himself of all written Laws that may concern his future actions.\n\nWhen the legislator is known, and the Laws have been sufficiently published, whether in writing or by the light of nature, one more essential condition is needed to make them binding. For the nature of the Law lies not in its letter but in its intention or meaning: that is, in its authentic interpretation, which is the legislator's sense. Therefore the interpretation of all Laws depends on Sovereign authority, and no one can interpret them except those whom the Sovereign, to whom alone the Subject owes obedience, appoints. Otherwise an interpreter's craft might make the Law bear a meaning contrary to the Sovereign's, and so make the interpreter the legislator.\n\nAll Laws, written and unwritten, need interpretation. The unwritten Law of Nature is easy for those who use their natural reason without partiality or passion, and it therefore leaves its violators without excuse. Yet since very few people, perhaps none, are never blinded in some case by self-love or another passion, it has now become the most obscure of all Laws, and consequently has the greatest need of competent interpreters. Short written Laws are easily misinterpreted because a word or two can have different meanings; long ones become more obscure through the different meanings of many words. Thus no written Law, however few or many its words, can be properly understood without a full understanding of the final purposes for which it was made, purposes known to the legislator. No knot in the Law can therefore remain insoluble to him: he may find the ends by which to untie it, or use his legislative power to establish whatever ends he wishes, as Alexander did with his sword at the Gordian knot. No other interpreter can do this.\n\nThe interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Commonwealth does not depend on books of moral philosophy. Without the authority of the Commonwealth, the authority of writers does not make their opinions Law, however true those opinions may be. What I have written in this treatise about the moral virtues and their necessity for obtaining and maintaining peace, though evidently true, is not for that reason immediately Law; it is Law because it forms part of the civil Law in every Commonwealth in the world. Though naturally reasonable, it is made Law by the Sovereign Power. Otherwise it would be a grave error to call the Laws of Nature unwritten Law, when we see so many volumes published about them, containing so many contradictions both of one another and of themselves.\n\nThe interpretation of the Law of Nature is the judgment of a judge appointed by Sovereign authority to hear and decide controversies depending on it, and consists in applying the Law to the present case. In judging, the judge does no more than consider whether a party's claim agrees with natural reason and equity; the judgment he gives is therefore an interpretation of the Law of Nature. It is authentic not because it is his private opinion, but because he delivers it by authority of the Sovereign, making it the Sovereign's judgment and Law for that time to the parties before him.\n\nBut since any judge, whether subordinate or Sovereign, may err in a judgment of equity, if he later finds in another similar case that a contrary judgment better accords with equity, he is obliged to give it. No one's error becomes a Law for himself or obliges him to persist in it. For the same reason it does not become a Law for other judges, even if they are sworn to follow it. A mistaken judgment delivered by Sovereign authority, if the Sovereign knows and approves it, may constitute a new Law among mutable Laws in cases where every small circumstance is identical. But with immutable Laws, such as the Laws of Nature, mistaken judgments make no Law for the same judge or for other judges in similar cases ever afterward. Princes succeed one another; one judge departs and another arrives; even heaven and earth shall pass away, but not one stroke of the Law of Nature shall pass away, for it is the eternal Law of God. Thus all the judgments of all former judges together cannot make a Law contrary to natural equity. Nor can the examples of earlier judges justify an unreasonable judgment, or spare a present judge the labor of determining equity in the case before him by the principles of his own natural reason. For example, it is against the Law of Nature to punish the innocent; and a person is innocent who has been judicially acquitted and acknowledged innocent by the judge. Suppose a man is accused of a capital crime. Knowing the power and malice of an enemy, and the frequent corruption and partiality of judges, he flees for fear of the outcome. Later he is captured and brought to lawful trial, proves sufficiently that he did not commit the crime, and is acquitted, but is nevertheless condemned to lose his goods. This is plainly a condemnation of the innocent. I say, then, that nowhere in the world can this be an interpretation of a Law of Nature, or be made Law by judgments of earlier judges who did the same. The first judge acted unjustly, and injustice cannot serve as a model for later judges. A written Law may forbid innocent people to flee, and they may be punished for fleeing. But after a person has been judicially acquitted of a crime, to treat flight from fear of injury as a presumption of guilt is contrary to the nature of a presumption, which has no place once judgment is given. Yet a great lawyer sets this down as the common Law of England. “If a man,” he says, “who is innocent is accused of felony and flees for fear of it, even though he judicially acquits himself of the felony, still, if it is found that he fled because of the felony, he shall, notwithstanding his innocence, forfeit all his goods, chattels, debts, and dues. For as regards their forfeiture, the Law will admit no proof against the presumption in Law founded upon his flight.” Here you see an innocent man, judicially acquitted, notwithstanding his innocence and when no written Law forbade him to flee, condemned after his acquittal, upon a presumption in Law, to lose all his goods. If the Law grounds on his flight a presumption that he committed the offense—which was a capital one—the judgment ought to have been capital. If it is not a presumption that he committed the offense, why should he lose his goods? This, therefore, is no Law of England; nor is the condemnation grounded on a presumption of Law, but on the presumption of the judges. It is also against Law to say that no proof shall be admitted against a presumption of Law. For judges, Sovereign and subordinate alike, refuse to do justice if they refuse to hear proof. Even if the judgment itself is just, judges who condemn without hearing the evidence offered are unjust judges; their presumption is only prejudice, which no one should bring to the seat of justice, whatever earlier judgments or examples he claims to follow. There are other matters of this kind in which reliance on precedents has corrupted men's judgments. But this suffices to show that, although the judge's judgment is Law to the party before him, it is not Law to a judge who later succeeds him in office.\n\nLikewise, when the question concerns the meaning of written Laws, the person who writes a commentary on them is not their interpreter. For commentaries are usually more open to quibbling than the text itself, and so need further commentaries, with no end to such interpretation. Therefore, unless there is an interpreter authorized by the Sovereign from whom subordinate judges may not depart, the interpreters can only be the ordinary judges, as they are in cases of unwritten Law. The parties before them must accept their judgments as Law in that particular case, but other judges are not bound to give like judgments in like cases. A judge may err even in interpreting written Laws; but no error by a subordinate judge can change the Law, which is the general judgment of the Sovereign.\n\nIn written Laws, people commonly distinguish between the letter and the sense of the Law; and the distinction is sound if by the letter they mean whatever can be drawn from the bare words. For the meanings of almost all words, whether in themselves or in metaphorical use, are ambiguous and can be made to support many senses in argument; but the Law has only one sense. If, however, by the letter they mean the literal sense, then the letter and the sense or intention of the Law are the same. For the literal sense is the sense consistent with equity, which must always be presumed to be the legislator's intention: it would be a grave insult for a judge to think otherwise of the Sovereign. If the words of the Law do not fully authorize a reasonable judgment, the judge should therefore supply what is lacking from the Law of Nature; or, if the case is difficult, postpone judgment until he has received fuller authority. For example, a written Law ordains that anyone driven from his house by force shall be restored to it by force. A man negligently leaves his house empty, and when he returns is kept out by force; no special Law addresses this case. Clearly it falls under the same Law, since otherwise he has no remedy at all, contrary to the presumed intention of the legislator. Again, the words of a Law command a judge to judge according to the evidence. A man is falsely accused of an act the judge himself saw another man commit, and saw that the accused did not commit. Here the judge must neither follow the letter of the Law to condemn the innocent nor give judgment contrary to the witnesses' evidence, since the letter of the Law forbids that too. Instead he must arrange for the Sovereign to appoint another judge and himself become a witness. Thus the harm that follows from the bare words of a written Law may lead the judge to its intention and help him interpret it better, though no harm can justify a judgment against the Law. For not everyone who judges right and wrong is also a judge of what benefits or harms the Commonwealth.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 3\n\nThe abilities required of a good interpreter of the Law, that is, a good judge, are not the same as those required of an advocate: namely, the study of the Laws. For just as a judge ought to learn the facts from no one but the witnesses, so he ought to learn the Law from nothing but the statutes and constitutions of the Sovereign cited in the pleadings, or declared to him by persons authorized by the Sovereign Power to declare them. He need not decide beforehand how he will judge: the witnesses will give him what he must say about the facts, and those who show and authoritatively interpret the Law in their pleadings will give him what he must say about the Law there and then. The Lords of Parliament in England were judges and have heard and decided the most difficult cases, yet few were deeply versed in the study of the Laws and fewer still practiced law as a profession. Although they consulted lawyers appointed to be present for that purpose, the Lords alone had authority to pronounce judgment. Likewise, in ordinary trials concerning rights, twelve people from the common people are the judges and pronounce judgment not only on the facts but on the right, simply finding for the complainant or the defendant. Thus they judge both fact and right; and in a criminal case they decide not only whether the act was done, but whether it is murder, homicide, felony, assault, or the like, which are questions of Law. Yet because they are not expected to know the Law on their own, someone with authority informs them of it for the particular case they must decide. If they do not judge as he tells them, however, they incur no penalty unless it is shown that they acted against their consciences or were corrupted by a reward. The qualities that make a good judge or interpreter of the Laws are, first, a sound understanding of the principal Law of Nature called equity. This depends not on reading the writings of others but on the soundness of one's own natural reason and reflection, and is presumed to be greatest in those who have had the most leisure and inclination to reflect upon it. Second, contempt for unnecessary riches and advancement. Third, the ability in judging to divest oneself of all fear, anger, hatred, love, and compassion. Fourth and last, patience in hearing, diligent attention while hearing, and a memory that retains, digests, and applies what it has heard.\n\nLaws have been distinguished and divided in various ways, according to the different methods of those who have written about them. Such divisions depend not on nature but on the writer's purpose, and serve each writer's own method. In Justinian's Institutes we find seven kinds of civil Laws.\n\n1. The edicts, constitutions, and letters of the prince, that is, the emperor, because the whole power of the people lay in him. The proclamations of the kings of England resemble these.\n\n2. The decrees of the whole Roman people, including the Senate, when the Senate put them to a vote. These were Laws at first by virtue of the Sovereign Power residing in the people; and those not repealed by the emperors remained Laws by imperial authority. For any Laws that bind us are understood to be Laws by the authority of the person who has power to repeal them. The Acts of Parliament in England somewhat resemble these Laws.\n\n3. The decrees of the common people, excluding the Senate, when the tribune of the people put them to a vote. Those not repealed by the emperors remained Laws by imperial authority. The orders of the House of Commons in England resembled these.\n\n4. Senatus Consulta, the orders of the Senate. When the people of Rome had grown too numerous to assemble conveniently, the emperor thought it fitting that people should consult the Senate instead of the people. These bear some resemblance to Acts of Council.\n\n5. The edicts of praetors and, in some cases, of aediles, who resemble the chief justices in the courts of England.\n\n6. Responsa Prudentum: the judgments and opinions of lawyers to whom the emperor gave authority to interpret the Law and answer those who sought their advice on legal matters. By the emperor's constitutions, judges were obliged to observe these answers in giving judgment. They would be like reports of decided cases if other judges were bound by the Law of England to observe such reports. For the judges of England's common Law are not properly judges but Juris Consulti, legal advisers whom the actual judges, whether the Lords or twelve people of the country, must consult on questions of Law.\n\n7. Unwritten customs also—which by their nature imitate Law—are true Laws by the tacit consent of the emperor, provided they are not contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nAnother division is between natural and positive Laws. Natural Laws have been Laws from all eternity and are called not only natural but moral Laws; they consist in the moral virtues, such as justice, equity, and all habits of mind conducive to peace and charity. I have already discussed these in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters.\n\nPositive Laws have not existed from eternity, but have been made Laws by the will of those who have held Sovereign Power over others. They are either written or made known to people by some other sign of the legislator's will.\n\nAgain, some positive Laws are human and some divine; and some human positive Laws are distributive, others penal. Distributive Laws determine the rights of Subjects, declaring how each person acquires and holds property in land or goods, and a right or liberty of action; these address all Subjects. Penal Laws declare what penalty shall be inflicted on those who violate a Law, and address the ministers and officers appointed to enforce it. For although everyone ought to know beforehand the punishments prescribed for transgression, the command is not directed to the offender, who cannot be expected faithfully to punish himself, but to the public ministers appointed to see the penalty carried out. Penal Laws are for the most part written together with distributive Laws, and are sometimes called judgments. For all Laws are general judgments or sentences of the legislator, just as every particular judgment is a Law to the person whose case is judged.\n\nDivine positive Laws—for natural Laws, being eternal and universal, are all divine—are commandments of God that are neither from all eternity nor universally addressed to all humanity, but addressed only to a particular people or particular persons, and declared to be such by those whom God has authorized to declare them. But how can a person's authority to declare these positive Laws of God be known? God may command someone by supernatural means to deliver Laws to others. Yet the person who is to be bound by a Law must be assured of the authority of the person who declares it, and we cannot naturally know that this authority comes from God. How, then, can someone without supernatural revelation be assured of the revelation received by the declarer? And how can he be bound to obey the Laws so declared? As to the first question, it is plainly impossible for someone to be assured of another's revelation without a revelation addressed particularly to himself. He may be induced to believe it by seeing the other person work miracles, or observing the extraordinary holiness of his life, or the extraordinary wisdom or extraordinary success of his actions—all signs of God's extraordinary favor. But none is certain evidence of a special revelation. Miracles are marvelous works, but what is marvelous to one person may not be so to another. Holiness may be feigned, and visible successes in this world are most often God's work through natural and ordinary causes. Thus no one can know infallibly by natural reason that another has received a supernatural revelation of God's will. He can only believe it, with a stronger or weaker belief according as its signs appear greater or lesser.\n\nBut the second question, how he can be bound to obey these Laws, is less difficult. If the Law declared is not against the Law of Nature, which is undoubtedly God's Law, and he undertakes to obey it, he is bound by his own act. He is bound, I say, to obey it, but not to believe it: for men's beliefs and inward thoughts are subject not to commands, but only to God's operation, ordinary or extraordinary. Faith in supernatural Law is not its fulfillment but only assent to it; it is not a duty we render to God but a gift God freely gives to whom he pleases. Likewise, unbelief is not a breach of any of his Laws but a rejection of all of them except the natural Laws. What I say will become clearer through examples and testimony concerning this point in holy Scripture. The Covenant God made with Abraham in a supernatural manner was this (Gen. 17. 10): “This is the Covenant you shall observe between Me and You and your Seed after you.” Abraham's Seed had received no such revelation, nor did they yet exist. Nevertheless they were parties to the Covenant, bound to obey what Abraham should declare to them as God's Law; they could be bound only by the obedience they owed their parents, who, if subject to no other earthly power, as Abraham was in this case, have Sovereign power over their children and servants. Again, where God says to Abraham, “In you shall all Nations of the earth be blessed: For I know you will command your children, and your household after you to keep the way of the Lord, and to observe Righteousness and Judgment,” it is clear that the obedience of his family, who had received no revelation, depended on their prior obligation to obey their Sovereign. At Mount Sinai only Moses went up to God; the people were forbidden to approach on pain of death, yet were bound to obey all that Moses declared to them as God's Law. On what grounds, except their own submission: “Speak to us yourself, and we will hear you; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die”? These two passages sufficiently show that, in a Commonwealth, a Subject who has received no certain and assured revelation addressed particularly to himself concerning the will of God must obey the command of the Commonwealth as God's command. For if people were free to take their own dreams and fancies, or those of private persons, for God's commandments, hardly two would agree about what God's commandment was, yet each would despise the commandments of the Commonwealth in its name. I conclude, therefore, that in all matters not contrary to the moral Law, that is, to the Law of Nature, all Subjects are bound to obey as divine Law whatever the Laws of the Commonwealth declare to be such. This too is plain to anyone's reason: whatever is not against the Law of Nature may be made Law in the name of those who hold Sovereign Power, and there is no reason for people to be less bound by it when it is proposed in God's name. Moreover, nowhere in the world are people permitted to claim commandments of God other than those declared to be such by the Commonwealth. Christian states punish those who abandon the Christian religion, and all other states punish those who establish a religion they have forbidden. For in whatever the Commonwealth has not regulated, equity—which is the Law of Nature and thus an eternal Law of God—requires that everyone enjoy his liberty equally.\n\nThere is also a distinction between fundamental and nonfundamental Laws, though I have never seen an author explain what a fundamental Law means. Nevertheless, one can reasonably distinguish Laws this way.\n\nFor in every Commonwealth a fundamental Law is one whose removal causes the Commonwealth to fail and dissolve completely, like a building whose foundation is destroyed. Thus a fundamental Law binds Subjects to uphold every power granted to the Sovereign, whether a monarch or a Sovereign assembly, without which the Commonwealth cannot stand: the power of war and peace, of judging cases, of selecting officers, and of doing whatever the Sovereign deems necessary for the public good. A nonfundamental Law is one whose repeal does not bring about the dissolution of the Commonwealth, such as Laws concerning disputes between one Subject and another. So much for the divisions of Laws.\n\nI find that even the most learned authors use the expressions Lex Civilis and Jus Civile—that is, civil Law and civil right—as though they meant the same thing. But they ought not to. A right is a liberty, namely the liberty that civil Law leaves us; whereas civil Law is an obligation and takes from us the liberty that the Law of Nature gave us. Nature gave everyone the right to secure himself by his own strength, and to invade a neighbor he suspected, as a precaution; but civil Law takes away that liberty wherever one can safely wait for the Law's protection. Lex and Jus therefore differ as obligation differs from liberty.\n\nLaws and charters are likewise used as though they meant the same thing. Yet charters are gifts from the Sovereign, not Laws but exemptions from Law. The language of a Law is Jubeo, Injungo—“I command and enjoin”; that of a charter is Dedi, Concessi—“I have given, I have granted.” What is given or granted to a person is not forced upon him by a Law. A Law may be made to bind all the Subjects of a Commonwealth; a liberty or charter is granted only to one person or some one part of the people. To say that all the people of a Commonwealth have liberty in any particular case is to say that in that case no Law has been made, or that a Law once made has now been repealed.\n\nCHAPTER XXVII. OF CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND EXTENUATIONS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVII, 1\n\nOF CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND EXTENUATIONS\n\nWhat Sin Is\n\nA sin is not only a transgression of a Law, but any contempt for the legislator. Such contempt breaks all his Laws at once. It may therefore consist not only in doing an act or speaking words the Laws forbid, or failing to do what the Law commands, but also in the intention or purpose to transgress. For the purpose of breaking a Law shows some degree of contempt for the person responsible for enforcing it. Merely taking pleasure in imagining oneself in possession of another person's goods, servants, or wife, without any intention of taking them by force or fraud, is no breach of the Law that says, “You shall not covet.” Nor is it a sin to take pleasure in imagining or dreaming of the death of someone from whose life one expects nothing but harm and distress; the sin lies in resolving to perform an act that tends toward his death. For delight in a fiction that would please us if it were real is a Passion so inherent in the nature of human beings and every other living creature that to make it a sin would be to make being human a sin. This consideration has made me think too severe, both toward themselves and others, those who maintain that the first stirrings of the mind are sins, even when checked by the fear of God. But I admit that it is safer to err on that side than on the other.\n\nA crime is a sin consisting in doing, by deed or word, what the Law forbids, or failing to do what it commands. Thus every crime is a sin, but not every sin is a crime. To intend to steal or kill is a sin, even if it never appears in word or deed, for God, who sees human thoughts, can hold it against a person. But until it appears in something done or said, through which the intention may be discerned, it is not a crime. The Greeks observed this distinction in their words amartema and egklema or aitia. The first, translated as sin, signifies any departure whatsoever from the Law; the latter two, translated as crime, signify only a sin of which one person may accuse another. Intentions that never appear in any outward act afford no grounds for human accusation. Likewise the Latins use Peccatum, or sin, for every kind of departure from the Law, but crimen, which they derive from Cerno, meaning “to perceive,” only for sins that can be made visible before a judge, and therefore not for mere intentions.\n\nFrom the relation of sin to Law, and of crime to civil Law, we may infer, first, that where Law ceases, sin ceases. But since the Law of Nature is eternal, breach of Covenants, ingratitude, arrogance, and all acts contrary to any moral virtue can never cease to be sins. Second, when civil Law ceases, crimes cease: with no Law remaining but that of Nature, there is no place for accusation, since everyone is his own judge, accused only by his own conscience and cleared by the uprightness of his own intention. When his intention is right, then, his act is no sin; if not, his act is a sin but not a crime. Third, when the Sovereign Power ceases, crime ceases too. For where there is no such Power, the Law affords no protection and everyone may protect himself by his own power: no one who establishes Sovereign Power can be supposed to surrender the right to preserve his own body, for whose safety all Sovereignty was established. This applies only to those who did not themselves contribute to destroying the Power that protected them, for to do so was a crime from the beginning.\n\nThe source of every crime is some defect of understanding, some error in reasoning, or some sudden force of the Passions. A defect of understanding is ignorance; a defect of reasoning is erroneous opinion. Ignorance, in turn, is of three kinds: ignorance of the Law, of the Sovereign, and of the penalty. Ignorance of the Law of Nature excuses no one, because everyone who has attained the use of reason is presumed to know that he should not do to another what he would not have done to himself. Wherever a person goes, then, to do anything contrary to that Law is a crime. If a man comes here from the Indies and persuades people to adopt a new religion, or teaches them anything tending toward disobedience to this country's Laws, however firmly he is convinced of the truth of what he teaches, he commits a crime and may justly be punished for it. This is not only because his doctrine is false, but because he does what he would not approve in someone coming from here and attempting to alter the religion there. Ignorance of civil Law, however, excuses a person in a foreign country until that Law is declared to him, for until then no civil Law binds him.\n\nLikewise, if the civil Law of a person's own country has not been sufficiently declared for him to know it if he wishes, and the act is not against the Law of Nature, ignorance is a valid excuse. In other cases ignorance of civil Law does not excuse him.\n\nIgnorance of the Sovereign Power where a person ordinarily lives does not excuse him, for he ought to know the Power that has protected him there.\n\nIgnorance of the penalty where the Law has been declared excuses no one. Whoever breaks a Law—which, without fear of a penalty to follow, would be not a Law but empty words—incurs its penalty even if he does not know what it is. For whoever voluntarily acts accepts all the known consequences of the act, and punishment is a known consequence of violating the Laws in every Commonwealth. If the punishment has already been fixed by Law, he is subject to it; otherwise he is subject to a punishment fixed at discretion. It is reasonable that someone who injures another without any limit but his own will should suffer punishment subject to no limit but the will of the person whose Law he has violated.\n\nBut where a penalty is attached to a crime by the Law itself, or has customarily been imposed in similar cases, the offender is excused from any greater penalty. For a punishment known in advance, if not great enough to deter people, is an invitation to commit the act. When people compare the benefit of their injustice with the harm of their punishment, they necessarily choose whatever appears best for themselves. Thus when they are punished more severely than the Law had previously prescribed, or more severely than others were punished for the same crime, it is the Law that has tempted and deceived them.\n\nNo Law made after an act is done can make the act a crime. If it is against the Law of Nature, that Law existed before the act; and a positive Law cannot be known before it is made and therefore cannot yet bind. But when the Law forbidding an act is made before the act is done, its perpetrator is liable to a penalty prescribed afterward, if no lesser penalty was previously made known, either in writing or by example, for the reason just given.\n\nThrough defects of reasoning, that is, errors, people become inclined to violate the Laws in three ways. First, by presuming false principles. People observe that in every place and age unjust acts have been authorized by the force and victories of those who committed them; that powerful people have broken through the cobweb Laws of their country, while the weak and those who failed in their ventures alone have been regarded as criminals. From these observations they take as principles and grounds of reasoning: “Justice is only an empty word; whatever a person can obtain through his own effort and risk is his own; the practice of all nations cannot be unjust; the examples of former ages are good arguments for doing the same again,” and many others of this kind. Admit these principles, and no act can be a crime in itself: it must be made one not by the Law but by the success of those who commit it. The same act will be virtuous or vicious as fortune pleases, so that what Marius makes a crime Sylla makes meritorious and Caesar, while the same Laws remain in force, turns back into a crime, to the perpetual disturbance of the peace of the Commonwealth.\n\nSecond, through teachers who either misinterpret the Law of Nature, thereby making it conflict with civil Law, or teach as Laws their own doctrines or the traditions of former times when these are inconsistent with a Subject's duty.\n\nThird, through erroneous inferences from true principles. This commonly happens to people who are hasty and precipitate in reaching conclusions and deciding what to do. They have a high opinion of their own understanding and believe that such matters need no time or study, only common experience and good natural wit, qualities no one thinks himself without; whereas no one claims knowledge of right and wrong, a no less difficult subject, without long and serious study. None of these defects of reasoning can excuse a crime, though some may lessen it, in anyone who claims to manage his own private affairs, much less in those who undertake public office: they claim to possess the very reason whose absence they would invoke as an excuse.\n\nAmong the Passions most frequently causing crimes is vainglory, a foolish overestimation of one's own worth, as though differences of worth were produced by wit, riches, blood, or some other natural quality rather than by the will of those who hold Sovereign Authority. From it comes the presumption that punishments prescribed by the Laws for all Subjects should not be inflicted on them as rigorously as on poor, obscure, and simple people, those included under the name of the common multitude.\n\nThus those who value themselves for the greatness of their wealth commonly venture to commit crimes in the hope of escaping punishment by corrupting public justice or buying a pardon with money or other rewards.\n\nThose with many powerful relatives, and popular figures who have won standing among the multitude, likewise take courage to violate the Laws in the hope of overpowering the Power responsible for enforcing them.\n\nAnd those with a high and false opinion of their own wisdom presume to censure the actions and question the authority of those who govern. By their public discourse they unsettle the Laws until nothing counts as a crime except what their own designs require to be one. The same people are also prone to crimes of cunning and deceit against their neighbors, since they think their designs too subtle to be detected. These, I say, are effects of a false presumption of their own wisdom. For of the first instigators of disturbance in a Commonwealth—which cannot take place without civil war—very few remain alive long enough to see their new designs established. Thus the benefits of their crimes pass to posterity and to those whom they would least have wished to benefit, showing that they were not so wise as they believed. Those who deceive in the hope of going unnoticed commonly deceive themselves: the darkness in which they think they are hidden is nothing but their own blindness. They are no wiser than children who think everything is hidden when they cover their own eyes.\n\nAnd vainglorious people generally, unless also timid, are prone to anger, being more inclined than others to take the ordinary freedom of conversation as contempt. Few crimes cannot be produced by anger.\n\nAs for the Passions of hatred, lust, ambition, and covetousness, the crimes they tend to produce are so plain to everyone's experience and understanding that nothing need be said of them except this: they are weaknesses so bound to the nature of human beings and all other living creatures that their effects can be prevented only by an extraordinary use of reason or by consistently severe punishment. What a person hates constantly and unavoidably troubles him; either his patience must last forever or he must find relief by removing the power of the thing that troubles him. The first is difficult, and the second is often impossible without breaking a Law. Ambition and covetousness are Passions that press constantly upon us, while reason is not constantly present to resist them; whenever there appears to be hope of impunity, therefore, their effects follow. And what lust lacks in duration it possesses in intensity, enough to outweigh the prospect of any light or uncertain punishment.\n\nOf all Passions, fear inclines people least to break the Laws. Indeed, apart from a few generous natures, when breaking the Laws promises profit or pleasure, fear alone makes people keep them. Yet fear can lead to a crime in many cases.\n\nFor not every fear justifies the act it produces, but only fear of bodily harm, which we call bodily fear, when a person sees no way to escape it except by acting. A man is attacked and fears immediate death, from which he sees no escape but to wound his attacker. If the wound kills the attacker, it is no crime: no one is presumed, in establishing a Commonwealth, to have abandoned the defense of his life or limbs where the Law cannot reach him in time to help. But to kill a man because his acts or threats suggest that he will kill me when he can, when I have time and means to seek protection from the Sovereign Power, is a crime. Again, a person suffers insulting words or slight injuries for which the lawmakers have assigned no punishment, regarding them as unworthy of notice by anyone with the use of reason. He fears that unless he takes revenge he will fall into contempt and so be exposed to like injuries from others; to avoid this he breaks the Law and seeks to secure himself against future injuries through the terror of his private revenge. This is a crime: the harm is not bodily but imaginary, and although a custom begun not many years ago among young and vain men in this part of the world has made it seem palpable, it is too slight for a gallant person confident in his own courage to notice. A person may also fear spirits through his own superstition or through excessive trust in others who tell him of strange dreams and visions. He may thus be led to believe the spirits will harm him if he does or refrains from various things, even though doing or refraining from them is contrary to the Laws. An act or omission so induced is not excused by this fear; it is a crime. For, as I showed earlier in the second chapter, dreams are naturally only images lingering in sleep from impressions our senses received while awake. When people are for some reason unsure that they have been asleep, these seem like real visions. Thus whoever presumes to break the Law on account of his own dream or another's, a supposed vision, or a fancy about the power of invisible spirits beyond what the Commonwealth permits, abandons the Law of Nature, which is certainly an offense, and follows the imagery of his own or another private person's brain. He can never know whether that imagery signifies anything at all, or whether the person who tells his dream speaks truly or lies. If every private person were allowed to do this—as they must be by the Law of Nature if any one of them is allowed—no Law could remain in force, and every Commonwealth would be dissolved.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVII, 2\n\nFrom these different sources of crimes, it is already clear that not all crimes are, as the ancient Stoics maintained, of the same degree. There is room not only for excuse, by which an apparent crime is shown to be no crime at all, but also for mitigation, by which a crime that appeared great is shown to be less so. For although all crimes equally deserve the name of injustice, just as every deviation from a straight line is equally crookedness, as the Stoics rightly observed, it does not follow that all crimes are equally unjust, any more than all crooked lines are equally crooked. The Stoics, failing to observe this, held that killing a hen against the law was as great a crime as killing one's father.\n\nNothing can wholly excuse an act, stripping it of the nature of a crime, except something that at the same time removes the obligation of the law. For an act committed against a law that binds its author can only be a crime.\n\nLack of any means of knowing the law is a complete excuse: a law of which a man has no means to inform himself does not bind him. But failure to take the trouble to inquire shall not count as lack of means. Nor shall anyone who claims enough reason to govern his own affairs be supposed to lack the means to know the Laws of Nature, since they are known through the very reason he claims. Only children and people who are mentally ill are excused from offenses against Natural Law.\n\nWhen a man is captive or in the enemy's power—and he is in that power when either his person or his means of living is in it—if this happens through no fault of his own, his obligation under the law ceases. He must obey the enemy or die, and consequently his obedience is no crime: when the law's protection fails, no man is bound to refrain from protecting himself by the best means he can.\n\nIf terror of immediate death compels a man to act against the law, he is wholly excused, because no law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation. And even if such a law were binding, he would reason: “If I do not do it, I die at once; if I do it, I die later; by doing it, therefore, I gain some time to live.” Nature, then, compels him to act.\n\nWhen a man lacks food or some other necessity of life and cannot preserve himself except by an act against the law—for instance, if in a great famine he takes by force or stealth food he cannot obtain for money or by charity, or snatches away another man's sword in defense of his life—he is wholly excused, for the reason just given.\n\nAgain, acts done against the law on another's authority are by that authority excused as against their author: no man should accuse, in the person of another who is merely his instrument, an act that is his own. They are not thereby excused as against an injured third party, since in violating the law both author and actor are criminals. It follows that when the man or assembly holding Sovereign Power commands a man to do something contrary to a former law, the act is wholly excused. The sovereign ought not to condemn it, being its author; and what the sovereign cannot justly condemn, no one else can justly punish. Moreover, when the sovereign commands an act against his own former law, the command repeals the law as to that particular act.\n\nIf the man or assembly holding Sovereign Power disclaims a right essential to sovereignty, thus giving a subject some liberty inconsistent with Sovereign Power—that is, with the very existence of a Common-wealth—and the subject refuses to obey a command contrary to the liberty granted, he nevertheless sins and acts against his duty. He ought to recognize what is inconsistent with sovereignty, since he established it by his own consent and for his own defense, and to recognize that an incompatible liberty was granted in ignorance of its harmful consequences. But if he not only disobeys but resists a public minister carrying out the command, his act is a crime, since he could have obtained redress through a complaint without any breach of the peace.\n\nThe degrees of crime are measured on several scales: first, by the malignity of their source or cause; second, by the contagion of their example; third, by the harm of their effect; and fourth, by the circumstances of time, place, and person.\n\nThe same unlawful act is a greater crime if it springs from confidence in one's strength, riches, or friends to resist those who execute the law than if it springs from hope of escaping discovery or fleeing. For confidence that force will ensure impunity is a root from which contempt for all laws springs at all times and under all temptations; whereas in the latter case, fear of danger that drives a man to flee makes him more obedient thereafter. A crime committed in the knowledge that it is a crime is greater than the same crime committed under the false belief that it is lawful. The man who acts against his conscience relies on his strength or some other power that encourages him to repeat the offense; but the man who acts in error conforms to the law once his error is shown him.\n\nA man whose error proceeds from the authority of a publicly authorized teacher or interpreter of the law is less at fault than one whose error proceeds from an unyielding pursuit of his own principles and reasoning. What a person vested with public authority teaches is taught by the Common-wealth, and resembles law until the same authority corrects it; in all crimes that neither deny Sovereign Power nor violate an evident law, this affords a complete excuse. But the man who bases his actions on his private judgment must stand or fall according to its soundness or error.\n\nThe same act, if consistently punished in other people, is a greater crime than if there have been many precedents of impunity. Those precedents are so many hopes of impunity furnished by the sovereign himself; and because a man who furnishes such hope and expectation of mercy, encouraging the offender, bears some part in the offense, he cannot reasonably charge the offender with all of it.\n\nA crime arising from a sudden Passion is not so great as the same crime arising from prolonged meditation. In the former case, the common weakness of human nature allows some mitigation; but a man who acts with premeditation has considered the law, the punishment, and the consequences for human society, all of which he has despised and set below his own appetite in committing the crime. Yet no Passion is so sudden as to excuse entirely: all the time between first learning the law and committing the act counts as time for deliberation, since a man ought through reflection on the law to correct the irregularity of his Passions.\n\nWhen a law is publicly and regularly read and explained before all the people, an act against it is a greater crime than where men, without such instruction, must inquire into it with difficulty and uncertainty and at the expense of their work, relying on information from private persons. In the latter case part of the fault may be laid on common frailty; in the former there is evident negligence, which carries some contempt for Sovereign Power.\n\nActs expressly condemned by the law but tacitly approved by other manifest signs of the lawmaker's will are lesser crimes than the same acts condemned both by law and lawmaker. Since the lawmaker's will is law, there appear in this case two contradictory laws. That would afford a complete excuse if men were obliged to recognize the sovereign's approval from evidence other than his express command. But because punishment may follow not only from transgressing his law but also from observing it, he is partly responsible for the transgression and cannot reasonably impute the whole crime to the offender. For example, the law condemns duels and prescribes death as their punishment. On the other hand, a man who refuses a duel is exposed to contempt and scorn without remedy, and sometimes even the sovereign thinks him unworthy of a command or promotion in war. If he therefore accepts a duel, given that all men may lawfully seek the good opinion of those who hold Sovereign Power, reason requires that he not be punished rigorously, since part of the fault may be charged to the punisher. I say this not because I wish to allow private revenge or any other disobedience, but because rulers should take care not indirectly to encourage what they directly forbid. The example of princes has always governed the actions of those who see them more powerfully than the laws themselves. And though our duty is to do what they say, not what they do, that duty will never be fulfilled until God chooses to give men extraordinary, supernatural grace to follow the precept.\n\nAgain, if we compare crimes by the harm of their effects, the same act is greater when it injures many than when it injures few. Thus an act that causes harm not only now but also in the future through its example is a greater crime than one that harms only now: the former is fertile and multiplies its injury among many, while the latter is barren. For an authorized preacher to uphold doctrines contrary to the religion established in the Common-wealth is a greater fault than for a private person to do so; the same is true of living profanely or without restraint, or of committing any other irreligious act. Similarly, for a professor of law to uphold a position or do an act tending to weaken Sovereign Power is a greater crime than it is for another man. An unlawful act is likewise a greater crime in a man so renowned for wisdom that many follow his counsel or imitate his actions than in another man: such people not only commit crimes but teach them to everyone else as law. In general, crimes are magnified by the scandal they give—that is, by becoming stumbling blocks to the weak, who pay less attention to the path they themselves walk than to the light others carry before them.\n\nActs of hostility against the present state of the Common-wealth are also greater crimes than the same acts against private persons, since their harm extends to everyone. Such acts include betraying the Common-wealth's defenses or revealing its secrets to an enemy; attempts against its representative, whether monarch or assembly; and every effort in word or deed to diminish that representative's authority now or in the succession. The Latin name for these crimes is Crimina Laesae Majestatis; they consist in a design or act against a Fundamental Law.\n\nCrimes that render judgments ineffective are likewise greater than injuries to one or a few persons. Taking money to give false judgment or testimony is a greater crime than otherwise cheating a man of an equal or even larger sum: not only is the person against whom the judgment goes wronged, but all judgments are made useless, and an occasion is supplied for violence and private revenge.\n\nRobbery and embezzlement of the public treasury or revenue are also greater crimes than robbing or defrauding a private man, since to rob the public is to rob many at once.\n\nLikewise, falsely assuming public office and counterfeiting public seals or public coin are greater crimes than impersonating a private man or counterfeiting his seal, since their fraud harms many.\n\nAmong unlawful acts against private persons, the greater crime is the one whose harm is, in the common judgment of men, more keenly felt. Accordingly:\n\nUnlawful killing is a greater crime than any other injury short of taking life.\n\nKilling with torture is greater than killing without it.\n\nMutilating a limb is greater than depriving a man of his goods.\n\nTaking a man's goods by threat of death or wounds is greater than taking them by stealth.\n\nTaking them by stealth is greater than obtaining them by fraudulent consent.\n\nViolating chastity by force is greater than doing so by flattery.\n\nViolating the chastity of a married woman is greater than doing so to an unmarried woman.\n\nFor these are the values commonly set on these acts, though some people feel a given offense more keenly than others. The law regards not individual feelings but the general inclination of mankind.\n\nThus the laws of the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient and modern Common-wealths have disregarded offenses taken at insulting words or gestures when they cause no harm beyond the immediate distress of the person insulted. They assume the true cause of such distress lies not in the insult, which has no hold on those conscious of their own virtue, but in the faintheartedness of the person offended.\n\nA crime against a private man is also greatly aggravated by the person, time, and place. Killing one's parent is a greater crime than killing another person: a parent ought to receive the honor due a sovereign, though he has surrendered his power to civil law, because he originally possessed it by nature. And robbing a poor man is a greater crime than robbing a rich one, because the loss is more keenly felt by the poor man.\n\nA crime committed at a time or place appointed for devotion is greater than one committed at another time or place, since it arises from greater contempt for the law.\n\nMany other cases of aggravation and mitigation could be added; but from those I have set out, anyone can readily gauge the degree of any other proposed crime.\n\nLastly, because almost every crime injures not only some private person but also the Common-wealth, the same crime, when prosecuted in the name of the Common-wealth, is called a public crime; when prosecuted in a private person's name, a private crime. The proceedings are accordingly called public proceedings, Judicia Publica, pleas of the Crown, or private proceedings. Thus in an accusation of murder, if the accuser is a private person, the proceeding is private; if the accuser is the sovereign, it is public.\n\nCHAPTER XXVIII. OF PUNISHMENTS AND REWARDS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVIII, 1\n\nOF PUNISHMENTS AND REWARDS\n\n“A punishment is an evil inflicted by public authority on a person who has done, or failed to do, something judged by that same authority to be a transgression of the law, in order that men's wills may thereby be better disposed to obedience.”\n\nBefore drawing any inference from this definition, I must answer an important question: by what door did the right or authority to punish in any case enter? For, as has been said, no man is presumed bound by Covenant not to resist violence; consequently he cannot be understood to have given another the right to lay violent hands on him. In founding a Common-wealth, each man gives up the right to defend another, but not to defend himself. He also obliges himself to assist the holder of sovereignty in punishing another, but not in punishing himself. Yet a Covenant to assist the sovereign in harming another does not give the sovereign a right to punish unless the man who makes that Covenant has the right to inflict that harm himself. It is clear, then, that the Common-wealth's right to punish—that is, the right of its representative or representatives—does not rest on any grant or gift from the subjects. But I have also shown that before the establishment of a Common-wealth, every man had a right to everything, and to do whatever he thought necessary for his own preservation, including subduing, hurting, or killing anyone for that purpose. This is the foundation of the right of punishment exercised in every Common-wealth. The subjects did not give the sovereign that right: by laying down their own, they merely strengthened him to use his as he thought fit for the preservation of them all. Thus it was not given to him but left to him, and to him alone; except for the limits imposed by Natural Law, it remains as entire as it was in the condition of mere nature and the war of every man against his neighbor.\n\nFrom this definition of punishment I infer, first, that private revenge and injuries done by private persons cannot properly be called punishment, because they do not proceed from public authority.\n\nSecond, being neglected and passed over for public favor is not punishment, because no new evil is inflicted on anyone by it; he is simply left as he was before.\n\nThird, an evil inflicted by public authority without a prior public condemnation is not properly called punishment but an act of hostility, since the act for which a man is punished must first be judged a transgression of the law by public authority.\n\nFourth, an evil inflicted by usurped power or by judges lacking authority from the sovereign is not punishment but an act of hostility: an act of usurped power is not authorized by the person condemned and therefore is not an act of public authority.\n\nFifth, any evil inflicted without the intention, or any possibility, of disposing the offender or, through his example, others to obey the laws is not punishment but an act of hostility; without that purpose the harm cannot bear the name.\n\nSixth, some actions have harmful consequences attached to them by nature: a man who attacks another may himself be killed or wounded, or a man may fall sick through committing an unlawful act. Such harm may be said, in relation to God, the author of nature, to have been inflicted, and therefore to be divine punishment; but in relation to men it does not fall under the name of punishment, since human authority did not inflict it.\n\nSeventh, if the harm inflicted is less than the benefit or satisfaction that naturally follows from the crime, it does not fall within the definition: it is the price or cost of redeeming the crime rather than its punishment. Punishment by nature aims to dispose men to obey the law; when the harm is less than the benefit of transgression, it fails to attain that end and has the opposite effect.\n\nEighth, if a punishment is fixed and specified in the law itself, and after the crime a greater penalty is inflicted, the excess is not punishment but an act of hostility. The aim of punishment is deterrence, not revenge; once a lesser penalty has been declared, it dispels the fear of an unknown, greater one, so an unexpected addition is no part of the punishment. But where the law prescribes no punishment at all, whatever is inflicted has the character of punishment. A man about to violate a law with no specified penalty expects an unspecified, that is, an arbitrary punishment.\n\nNinth, harm inflicted for an act done before there was a law forbidding it is not punishment but an act of hostility. Before the law exists there can be no transgression of it; but punishment presupposes an act judged to have been a transgression of the law. Harm inflicted for an act committed before the law was made is therefore not punishment but an act of hostility.\n\nTenth, harm inflicted on the representative of the Common-wealth is not punishment but an act of hostility, since punishment by nature is inflicted by public authority, which belongs only to that representative himself.\n\nLastly, harm inflicted on a declared enemy does not fall under the name of punishment. Such enemies have either never been subject to the law and therefore cannot transgress it, or, having once been subject to it, now profess that they are not, thereby denying that they can transgress it. All harm done to them must therefore be regarded as acts of hostility. But in declared hostilities any infliction of evil is lawful. It follows that if a subject knowingly and deliberately denies, by word or deed, the authority of the representative of the Common-wealth, he may lawfully be made to suffer whatever the representative chooses, whatever penalty may previously have been prescribed for treason. For by denying subjection he disclaims the punishment prescribed by law and so suffers as an enemy of the Common-wealth, according to the will of its representative. The punishments set down in law apply to subjects, not to enemies, including those who, having made themselves subjects by their own act, deliberately revolt and deny Sovereign Power.\n\nThe first and broadest division of punishments is into divine and human. I shall have occasion to speak of the former later, in a more suitable place.\n\nHuman punishments are those inflicted at the command of man. They are corporal, pecuniary, disgrace, imprisonment, exile, or a mixture of these.\n\nCorporal punishment is inflicted directly on the body by intention of the person inflicting it: blows, wounds, or deprivation of bodily pleasures previously enjoyed lawfully.\n\nSome corporal punishments are capital, others less than capital. Capital punishment is the infliction of death, either alone or with torture. Punishments less than capital include blows, wounds, chains, and any other bodily pain not mortal in itself. If death follows the infliction of a punishment without being intended by the person who inflicts it, the punishment is not to be regarded as capital, even if the harm proves fatal through an unforeseen accident. In that case death was not inflicted but hastened.\n\nPecuniary punishment consists not only in taking away a sum of money but also in taking land or any other goods ordinarily bought and sold for money. If the law prescribing such a penalty was designed to collect money from those who transgress it, the payment is not properly punishment but the price of a privilege or exemption from a law that forbids the act only to those unable to pay. The exception is where the law is Natural Law or a part of religion: then the payment buys no exemption but follows a transgression. For example, if a law requires a monetary fine from those who take God's name in vain, paying it is not the price of permission to swear but punishment for violating a law from which no dispensation can be given. Likewise, if the law imposes a sum of money payable to an injured person, that is only compensation for the injury; it extinguishes the injured party's complaint but not the offender's crime.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVIII, 2\n\nDisgrace is the infliction of an evil made dishonorable, or the deprivation of a good made honorable, by the Common-wealth. Some things are honorable by nature, such as the fruits of courage, magnanimity, strength, wisdom, and other abilities of body and mind; others are made honorable by the Common-wealth, such as badges, titles, offices, and other distinctive marks of the sovereign's favor. The former may fail through nature or accident, but cannot be taken away by law, and their loss is therefore not punishment. The latter can be taken away by the public authority that made them honorable, and their removal is properly punishment: as when condemned men are stripped of their badges, titles, and offices or declared ineligible for them in the future.\n\nImprisonment is deprivation of a man's liberty by public authority. It may serve two distinct ends: the safe custody of an accused man or the infliction of pain on a condemned man. The first is not punishment, because no man is presumed punishable before he has been heard in court and found guilty. Thus any suffering caused by bonds or restraint before his case is heard, beyond what is needed to secure his custody, is against the Law of Nature. The second is punishment, because it is an evil inflicted by public authority for something that same authority has judged a transgression of the law. By imprisonment I mean every restriction of movement caused by an external obstacle: a building, commonly called a prison; an island to which a person is confined; a workplace, as men were formerly condemned to quarries and are now condemned to galleys; or a chain or any other such impediment.\n\nExile or banishment is a sentence requiring a man, for a crime, to leave the dominion of the Common-wealth or some part of it, and not to return for a fixed time or forever. By itself, without other circumstances, exile seems less a punishment than an escape or a public command to evade punishment by flight. Cicero says no such punishment was ever established in the city of Rome, but calls it a refuge for men in danger. If an exile is still allowed to enjoy his goods and the income from his lands, a mere change of air is no punishment; nor does it advance the benefit to the Common-wealth for which every punishment is instituted, namely, shaping men's wills to observe the law. Indeed, it often harms the Common-wealth, for a banished man, no longer one of its members, is its lawful enemy. If his lands or goods are also taken, the punishment lies not in his exile but among pecuniary punishments.\n\nEvery punishment of innocent subjects, great or small, is against the Law of Nature. Punishment applies only to transgression of the law; there can therefore be no punishment of the innocent. It violates, first, the Law of Nature forbidding men in their acts of revenge to seek anything but some future good: no good comes to the Common-wealth from punishing the innocent. Second, it violates the law against ingratitude: Sovereign Power is originally conferred by the consent of all subjects so that they will be protected so long as they obey, and punishing the innocent repays good with evil. Third, it violates the law commanding equity, that is, the equal distribution of justice, which is not observed when the innocent are punished.\n\nBut inflicting any evil on an innocent person who is not a subject, if it benefits the Common-wealth and breaks no previous Covenant, does not violate the Law of Nature. All non-subjects are either enemies or have ceased to be enemies through some prior Covenant. Against enemies whom the Common-wealth judges capable of harming it, the original Right of Nature permits war. In war the sword does not judge, nor does the victor distinguish the guilty from the innocent in respect of past acts, nor does he show mercy except as it serves the good of his own people. On this same ground, vengeance against subjects who deliberately deny the authority of the established Common-wealth lawfully extends not only to the fathers but even to a third and fourth generation not yet born, and therefore innocent of the act for which they suffer. This offense consists in renouncing subjection, which is a relapse into the condition of war commonly called rebellion; those who commit it suffer not as subjects but as enemies. For rebellion is simply war renewed.\n\nREWARD is either a gift or given by contract. Reward by contract is called salary or wages: a benefit due for service performed or promised. Reward as a gift is a benefit proceeding from the grace of those who give it, meant to encourage or enable men to serve them. Thus when the sovereign of a Common-wealth assigns a salary to a public office, its recipient is bound in justice to fulfill its duties; without a salary he is bound only in honor to acknowledge the favor and try to repay it. Although men have no legal remedy when commanded to set aside their private affairs to serve the public without reward or salary, they are not bound to do so by the Law of Nature or by the institution of the Common-wealth unless the service cannot be performed otherwise. The sovereign is presumed able to use all their means; accordingly even the commonest soldier may demand his wages for fighting as a debt.\n\nBenefits that a sovereign bestows on a subject out of fear of his power and ability to harm the Common-wealth are not properly rewards. They are not salaries, since there is no contract in such a case: every man is already obliged not to harm the Common-wealth. Nor are they acts of grace, since they are extorted by fear, which ought not to affect Sovereign Power. Rather, they are sacrifices the sovereign, considered in his natural person and not as the person of the Common-wealth, makes to appease the discontent of someone he thinks more powerful than himself. They encourage not obedience but, on the contrary, continued and increasing extortion.\n\nSome salaries are fixed and paid from the public treasury; others are uncertain and incidental, derived from carrying out the office for which the salary is assigned. The latter can harm the Common-wealth, as in the administration of justice. If the income of judges and court officers grows with the number of cases brought before them, two problems necessarily follow. One is the encouragement of lawsuits: more suits mean more income. The other, depending on the first, is contention over jurisdiction, each court drawing as many cases as it can to itself. Offices of execution have no such problems, because their holders cannot increase their employment by efforts of their own. So much will suffice concerning the nature of punishment and reward, which are, as it were, the nerves and tendons moving the limbs and joints of a Common-wealth.\n\nSo far I have set forth the nature of man, whose pride and other Passions have compelled him to submit to government, together with the great power of his ruler. I compared that ruler to Leviathan, taking the comparison from the final two verses of Job 41, where God, having described Leviathan's great power, calls him King of the Proud. “There is nothing,” he says, “on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He sees every high thing beneath him; and is King of all the children of pride.” But because he is mortal and subject to decay, like every other earthly creature, and because there is one in heaven, though none on earth, whom he should fear and whose laws he ought to obey, I shall speak in the following chapters of his diseases and the causes of his mortality, and of which Laws of Nature he is bound to obey.\n\nCHAPTER XXIX. OF THOSE THINGS THAT WEAKEN OR TEND TO DISSOLVE A COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIX, 1\n\nOF THOSE THINGS THAT WEAKEN OR TEND TO DISSOLVE A COMMON-WEALTH\n\nThe Dissolution of Common-wealths Proceeds from Imperfect Institution\n\nThough nothing made by mortals can be immortal, if men possessed the reason they claim to possess, their Common-wealths might at least be secured against death from internal diseases. For by the nature of their institution they are designed to live as long as mankind, or the Laws of Nature, or justice itself, which gives them life. When they dissolve through internal disorder rather than external violence, the fault lies not with men as their material but with men as their makers and organizers. Men grow weary at last of disorderly jostling and cutting one another down, and long with all their hearts to be formed into one firm, enduring edifice. Yet lacking both the art of making suitable laws by which to square their actions and the humility and patience to have the rough, awkward edges of their present greatness trimmed away, they cannot, without a very skilled architect, be assembled into anything but a rickety building, one scarcely able to last their own lifetime and sure to collapse on the heads of their descendants.\n\nAmong the infirmities of a Common-wealth, therefore, I put first those arising from imperfect institution, which resemble the diseases of a natural body caused by defective generation.\n\nOne such infirmity is this: “In order to acquire a kingdom, a man is sometimes content with less power than is necessarily required for the peace and defense of the Common-wealth.” When the power laid aside must be taken up again for public safety, the act appears unjust and disposes great numbers of men to rebel when opportunity offers. Similarly, children conceived by diseased parents are liable either to untimely death or to break out in boils and scabs as they purge the ill quality inherited from their flawed conception. When kings deny themselves some such necessary power, they do so not always—though sometimes—through ignorance of what their office requires, but often in the hope of recovering that power whenever they please. In this they reason badly: those who seek to hold them to their promises will be supported against them by foreign Common-wealths, which for the sake of their own subjects miss few opportunities to weaken their neighbors. Thus the Pope supported Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury, against Henry the Second: William the Conqueror, when he was received, had exempted churchmen from subjection to the Common-wealth by taking an oath not to infringe the liberty of the Church. Similarly the French supported the barons in their rebellion against King John: William Rufus had increased their power to a degree inconsistent with Sovereign Power in order to gain their help in transferring the succession from his elder brother to himself. Nor does this happen only in monarchy. Though the ancient Roman Common-wealth styled itself “The Senate and People of Rome,” neither Senate nor People claimed the whole power. This first brought about the seditions of Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Gracchus, Lucius Saturnius, and others; later the wars between Senate and People under Marius and Sylla, and again under Pompey and Caesar, ending in the extinction of their democracy and the establishment of monarchy.\n\nThe people of Athens restricted themselves in just one action: on pain of death, no man was to propose renewing the war for the island of Salamis. Yet if Solon had not had word spread that he was mad and then proposed the war in verse to the crowds gathered around him, dressed and acting like a madman, Athens would have had an enemy perpetually ready at the very gates of the city. Such harm and such evasions are the fate of all Common-wealths whose power is limited in even the smallest degree.\n\nSecond, I observe the diseases of a Common-wealth that arise from the poison of seditious doctrines. One such doctrine is “Every private man is judge of good and evil actions.” This is true in the condition of mere nature, where there are no civil laws, and even under civil government in cases not determined by law. Otherwise it is plain that the measure of good and evil actions is civil law, and their judge the legislator, who is always the representative of the Common-wealth. This false doctrine inclines men to debate the commands of the Common-wealth within themselves and question them, then to obey or disobey as their private judgments see fit. In this way the Common-wealth is divided and weakened.\n\nAnother doctrine hostile to civil society is “Whatever a man does against his conscience is sin.” It rests on the presumption that he may make himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing; conscience, like judgment, can be mistaken. Thus one who is subject to no civil law sins whenever he acts against his conscience, since his own reason is his only guide; but the same is not true of one living in a Common-wealth, since the law is the public conscience by which he has already agreed to be guided. Otherwise, with private consciences—which are only private opinions—differing so widely, the Common-wealth must be torn apart, and no one would dare obey Sovereign Power any farther than seemed right in his own eyes.\n\nIt has also commonly been taught that “Faith and sanctity are attained not by study and reason but by supernatural inspiration or infusion.” If this is granted, I cannot see why anyone should give a reason for his faith, why every Christian should not also be a prophet, or why anyone should take the law of his country rather than his own inspiration as the rule of his actions. Thus we fall back into the error of presuming to judge good and evil for ourselves, or making judges of private men who claim supernatural inspiration, to the dissolution of all civil government. Faith comes by hearing; hearing comes through the circumstances that bring us into the presence of those who speak to us. All these circumstances are arranged by God Almighty; yet they are not supernatural, merely too numerous in their convergence on each result for us to observe. Faith and sanctity are indeed uncommon, but they are not miracles. They are brought about through education, discipline, correction, and other natural means by which God works them in his elect at the time he thinks fit. These three opinions, destructive of peace and government, have in this part of the world proceeded chiefly from the tongues and pens of unlearned divines, who join the words of Holy Scripture together in ways contrary to reason and do everything they can to persuade men that sanctity and natural reason cannot coexist.\n\nA fourth opinion contrary to the nature of a Common-wealth is this: “The holder of Sovereign Power is subject to the civil laws.” It is true that all sovereigns are subject to the Laws of Nature, for those laws are divine and cannot be repealed by any man or Common-wealth. But the sovereign is not subject to the laws that he himself—that is, the Common-wealth—makes. To be subject to the laws would be to be subject to the Common-wealth, that is, to the sovereign representative, that is, to himself; this is not subjection but freedom from the laws. By placing laws above the sovereign, this error also places a judge above him with power to punish him, thus creating a new sovereign; then, for the same reason, a third to punish the second, and so on without end, until the Common-wealth is confused and dissolved.\n\nA fifth doctrine tending to dissolve a Common-wealth is “Every private man has absolute property in his goods, excluding the sovereign's right.” A man does indeed have property that excludes every other subject's right; but he holds it only from Sovereign Power. Without its protection, every other man would have an equal right to the same goods. If the sovereign's right is excluded as well, he cannot perform the task for which the subjects appointed him: defending them from foreign enemies and from one another's injuries. Consequently there is no longer a Common-wealth.\n\nAnd if the subjects' property does not exclude the sovereign representative's right to their goods, still less can it exclude his right to their offices of judgment and execution, in which they represent the sovereign himself.\n\nA sixth doctrine is plainly and directly opposed to the essence of a Common-wealth: “Sovereign Power may be divided.” What is dividing the power of a Common-wealth but dissolving it, when divided powers destroy one another? Men are chiefly indebted for these doctrines to some who profess the law and seek to make it depend on their own learning rather than on legislative power.\n\nAs false doctrine can do, so too the example of a different government in a neighboring nation often inclines men to change the form already established. Thus the people of the Jews were stirred to reject God and call on the prophet Samuel for a king after the manner of other nations. Similarly, the smaller cities of Greece were continually disturbed by uprisings of aristocratic and democratic factions, one side in almost every Common-wealth wishing to imitate the Lacedaemonians and the other the Athenians. And I do not doubt that many men welcomed the recent troubles in England in imitation of the Low Countries, imagining that to grow rich they needed only to change the form of their government as those countries had done. Human nature is itself prone to desire novelty. When men are further provoked by the proximity of others who have grown rich through it, they can scarcely help welcoming those who urge them to change; they love the first beginnings, though they suffer from the ensuing disorder. They are like hot-blooded people who, afflicted with an itch, tear at their own skin with their nails until they can no longer bear the pain.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIX, 2\n\nAs for rebellion against monarchy in particular, one of its most common causes is the reading of books on politics and the histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Young men, and others without the antidote of sound reason, receive from these books a powerful and pleasurable impression of the great feats of war achieved by the commanders of their armies. They come to admire everything else those commanders did as well, and imagine that their extraordinary prosperity arose not from the rivalry of particular men but from the excellence of their popular form of government. They give no thought to the frequent seditions and civil wars produced by defects in that government. From reading such books, I say, men have undertaken to kill their kings because Greek and Latin writers, in their works and discussions of politics, pronounce it lawful and praiseworthy for anyone to do so, provided that he first calls the king a tyrant. They say that not regicide, the killing of a king, but tyrannicide, the killing of a tyrant, is lawful. From the same books, people living under a monarch acquire the belief that subjects in a popular Common-wealth enjoy liberty, while those in a monarchy are all slaves. I say that those living under a monarchy acquire this belief, not those living under a popular government, who find no such thing. In short, I cannot imagine anything more harmful to a monarchy than allowing these books to be read publicly without at once applying the remedies of judicious teachers to draw out their venom. I do not hesitate to compare that venom to the bite of a rabid dog, which causes the disease physicians call hydrophobia, or fear of water. The person bitten suffers an unceasing torment of thirst yet recoils from water, as though the poison were trying to turn him into a dog. So, too, when a monarchy has been bitten to the quick by democratic writers who continually snarl at that form of government, nothing is more needed than a strong monarch; yet through a kind of tyrannophobia, a fear of firm government, its people recoil from him when they have him.\n\nJust as there have been teachers who hold that a man has three souls, so there are others who think a Common-wealth may have more than one soul—that is, more than one Sovereign. They set up supremacy against sovereignty, canons against laws, and spiritual authority against civil authority. They work upon men's minds with words and distinctions that mean nothing in themselves, but whose very obscurity betrays the presence, as some imagine, of another kingdom moving invisibly in the dark, a kingdom of fairies. Now it is plain that civil power and the power of the Common-wealth are the same, and that supremacy, and the power to make canons and grant faculties, imply a Common-wealth. It follows that where one is Sovereign and another supreme, where one can make laws and another canons, there must be two Common-wealths composed of the same subjects: a kingdom divided against itself, which cannot stand. Despite the meaningless distinction between temporal and spiritual, these remain two kingdoms, and every subject serves two masters. For when the spiritual power claims the right to declare what is sin, it consequently claims the right to declare what is law, since sin is nothing but the transgression of law. And when the civil power likewise claims the right to declare what is law, every subject must obey two masters, both of whom demand that their commands be observed as law; that is impossible. Or, if there is only one kingdom, either the civil power, the power of the Common-wealth, must be subordinate to the spiritual, or the spiritual must be subordinate to the temporal; in the latter case there is no supremacy but the temporal. When these two powers oppose one another, therefore, the Common-wealth must be in grave danger of civil war and dissolution. Civil authority is more visible, and stands in the clearer light of natural reason, so it cannot fail at any time to draw a substantial share of the people to itself. Spiritual authority, though it stands in the darkness of scholastic distinctions and difficult words, nevertheless finds a party large enough to disturb, and sometimes destroy, a Common-wealth, because fear of darkness and ghosts is stronger than other fears. This disease may aptly be compared to epilepsy, or falling sickness, which the Jews took to be a form of possession by spirits, in the natural body. In that disease an unnatural spirit or wind in the head obstructs the roots of the nerves and shakes them violently. It takes away the movement they should naturally receive from the power of the soul in the brain and produces violent, irregular movements in the limbs, called convulsions. The sufferer sometimes falls into water and sometimes into fire, as though deprived of his senses. So also in the body politic: when spiritual power, through fear of punishments and hope of rewards, moves the members of the Common-wealth—its nerves—in a way different from the movement they ought to receive from civil power, the soul of the Common-wealth, and stifles the people with strange and difficult words, it either overwhelms the Common-wealth with oppression or casts it into the fire of civil war.\n\nSometimes even a purely civil government has more than one soul. The power to levy money, its nutritive faculty, may depend on a general assembly; the power of command and direction, its faculty of motion, on one man; and the power to make laws, its rational faculty, on the contingent agreement not only of those two but of a third as well. This endangers the Common-wealth, sometimes for want of agreement on good laws, but more often for want of the nourishment necessary to life and motion. Few perceive that this is not a government but a division of the Common-wealth into three factions, and call it a mixed monarchy. In truth, however, it is not one independent Common-wealth but three independent factions, not one representative person but three. In the Kingdome of God there may be three independent Persons without any breach in the unity of the God who reigns; but it cannot be so where those who reign are human beings, subject to different opinions. Thus if the king bears the person of the people, the general assembly also bears the person of the people, and another assembly bears the person of a part of the people, they are not one person and one Sovereign, but three persons and three Sovereigns.\n\nI do not know what disease of the natural human body exactly resembles this disorder in a Common-wealth. But I have seen a man with another man growing from his side, complete with his own head, arms, chest, and stomach. Had another man grown from his other side as well, the comparison would have been exact.\n\nSo far I have named the diseases of a Common-wealth that present the greatest and most immediate danger. There are others, less serious, but still worth observing. The first is the difficulty of raising money for the necessary purposes of the Common-wealth, especially when war approaches. This arises from each subject's belief that his property in his lands and goods excludes the Sovereign's right to use them. Consequently, the Sovereign power foresees the Common-wealth's needs and dangers but finds the passage of money to the public treasury blocked by the people's tenacity. When it ought to extend itself to confront and prevent these dangers at their outset, it contracts as long as it can. When it can contract no longer, it struggles against the people by stratagems of law to obtain small sums. These prove insufficient, and at last it must violently force open a way to meet its immediate needs, or perish. Driven often to such extremes, it eventually brings the people to a proper disposition, or else the Common-wealth must perish. We may aptly compare this disorder to an ague. When the fleshy parts are congealed or obstructed by poisonous matter, the veins that naturally empty into the heart do not receive their proper supply from the arteries. First comes a cold contraction and trembling of the limbs; afterward the heart strives hotly and strongly to force a passage for the blood. Before it succeeds, it makes do with the little relief of things that cool it for a while, until, if nature is strong enough, it finally breaks the resistance of the obstructed parts and releases the poison in sweat; if nature is too weak, the patient dies.\n\nAnother disease of the Common-wealth resembles pleurisy: the public treasure flows out of its proper course and accumulates excessively in the hands of one or a few private men through monopolies or leases of public revenues. In the same way, blood entering the membrane of the chest in pleurisy produces inflammation, fever, and painful stitches.\n\nThe popularity of a powerful subject is also a dangerous disease, unless the Common-wealth has very good assurance of his loyalty. The people, who ought to take their direction from the Sovereign's authority, are drawn by the flattery and reputation of an ambitious man away from obedience to the laws and into following someone whose virtues and designs they do not know. This is usually more dangerous under popular government than under monarchy, for they may easily be made to believe that they themselves are the People. Thus Julius Caesar, raised up by the People against the Senate, won the affection of his army and made himself master of both Senate and People. Such conduct by popular and ambitious men is outright rebellion, and may be likened to the effects of witchcraft.\n\nAnother infirmity of a Common-wealth is the excessive size of a city able to provide, from within its own bounds, the men and expense of a large army. So too is the great number of corporations, which are like many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a larger one, like worms in a human being's intestines.\n\nTo these may be added the freedom claimed by pretenders to political wisdom to dispute against absolute power. Though they mostly arise from the dregs of the people, false doctrines animate them to meddle endlessly with the fundamental laws, troubling the Common-wealth like the little worms physicians call ascarides.\n\nWe may add the insatiable appetite, or bulimia, for expanding dominion, and the incurable wounds so often received from enemies as a result; the growths of conquests that remain unassimilated, which often prove a burden and could be lost with less danger than they are kept; and the lethargy of ease and the wasting disease of riotous living and vain expense.\n\nLastly, when enemies win a final victory in a war, whether foreign or civil, so that the forces of the Common-wealth can no longer hold the field and subjects can no longer be protected in their loyalty, the Common-wealth is DISSOLVED. Everyone is then free to protect himself by whatever means his own discretion suggests. For the Sovereign is the public soul, giving life and motion to the Common-wealth; once that soul departs, it governs the members no more than a man's departed, though immortal, soul governs his corpse. Though another's act cannot extinguish the right of a sovereign monarch, it may extinguish the obligations of his subjects. Whoever lacks protection may seek it anywhere; and once he has found it, he is bound to protect his protector as long as he can, without falsely claiming that he submitted merely out of fear. But once the power of an assembly is suppressed, its right perishes altogether: the assembly itself is extinct, and sovereignty cannot possibly return to it.\n\nCHAPTER XXX. OF THE OFFICE OF THE SOVEREIGN REPRESENTATIVE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 1\n\nOF THE OFFICE OF THE SOVEREIGN REPRESENTATIVE\n\nThe OFFICE of the Sovereign, whether monarch or assembly, consists in fulfilling the end for which sovereign power was entrusted to him: securing the safety of the people. The Law of Nature binds him to this duty, and he must answer for it to God, the author of that law, and to no one else. By safety I mean not mere preservation but all the other satisfactions of life that each person can acquire by lawful industry, without danger or injury to the Common-wealth.\n\nThis end is to be pursued not by caring for individuals, beyond protecting them against injuries when they complain, but by a general providence: public instruction in doctrine and example, and the making and enforcement of good laws, which individuals can apply to their own cases.\n\nIf the essential rights of sovereignty, described earlier in the eighteenth Chapter, are taken away, the Common-wealth is dissolved and each person returns to the condition and calamity of war with everyone else, the greatest evil that can happen in this life. The Sovereign's office is therefore to preserve these rights intact. First, it is against his duty to transfer any of them to another or to surrender them. For whoever abandons the means abandons the end. A Sovereign abandons the means if he acknowledges himself subject to civil laws; renounces the power of final judgment; gives up his own authority to make war or peace, to judge the needs of the Common-wealth, or to levy money and soldiers whenever and in whatever numbers his conscience finds necessary; or relinquishes the power to appoint officers and ministers for war and peace, or to appoint teachers and examine which doctrines further or oppose the defense, peace, and good of the people. Second, it is against his duty to allow the people to remain ignorant or misinformed about the grounds and reasons for these essential rights. Otherwise they can readily be led astray and drawn into resisting him when the needs of the Common-wealth call for those rights to be exercised.\n\nThese grounds must be taught all the more diligently and truthfully because no civil law or threat of legal punishment can secure them. A civil law forbidding rebellion—and any resistance to the essential rights of sovereignty is rebellion—binds people not in virtue of being a civil law, but only through the Law of Nature forbidding breach of faith. If people do not know of this natural obligation, they cannot understand the rightful authority of any law the Sovereign makes. As for punishment, they will regard it merely as an act of hostility, which they will try to escape by hostile acts whenever they think themselves strong enough.\n\nI have heard some say that justice is a word without substance and that whatever anyone can acquire by force or cunning belongs to him, not only in a state of war but within a Common-wealth. I have already shown this to be false. There are also those who maintain that no rational grounds or principles support the essential rights that make sovereignty absolute: if such grounds existed, they say, they would have been discovered somewhere, whereas no Common-wealth yet has recognized or claimed these rights. This is as poor an argument as it would be for the indigenous peoples of America to deny that rational principles for building a house to last as long as its materials exist, merely because they have never seen one built so well. Time and industry yield new knowledge every day. The art of sound building derives from rational principles discovered by industrious people who studied the nature of materials and the varied effects of shape and proportion, long after humanity had begun to build, however poorly. So, long after men began forming imperfect Common-wealths, liable to fall back into disorder, diligent reflection may uncover rational principles for their construction. Whether anyone makes use of them or neglects them matters very little to my personal interest today. But even supposing my principles are not principles of reason, I am sure they derive from the authority of Scripture, as I shall show when I come to speak of the Kingdome of God, administered by Moses over the Jews, his chosen people by Covenant.\n\nSome reply that, even if the principles are right, ordinary people cannot be made to understand them. I wish that the rich and powerful subjects of a kingdom, or those reputed most learned, were no less capable of understanding than ordinary people. Everyone knows that the obstacles to teaching this doctrine arise less from its difficulty than from the interests of those who are meant to learn it. Powerful men have trouble digesting anything that establishes a power able to restrain their desires, and learned men anything that exposes their errors and thus diminishes their authority. The minds of ordinary people, unless tainted by dependence on the powerful or covered with the opinions of their teachers, are like clean paper, ready to receive what public authority prints upon them. Can whole nations be brought to accept the great mysteries of Christianity, which transcend reason, and millions made to believe that the same body can be in innumerable places at one and the same time, which contradicts reason? And yet cannot people, by teaching and preaching protected by law, be brought to accept something so consonant with reason that anyone free from prejudice needs only to hear it in order to learn it? I conclude, therefore, that while a Sovereign retains his full power, any difficulty in instructing the people in the essential rights of sovereignty, which are its natural and fundamental laws, arises from his own fault or from the fault of those he entrusts with governing the Common-wealth. It is consequently his duty to have the people instructed in them; and it serves his own benefit and security against the danger rebellion may bring to him personally.\n\nTo descend to particulars, the people must be taught, first, not to love any form of government they see in neighboring nations more than their own, nor to desire change, whatever prosperity they observe in nations governed differently. The prosperity of a people ruled by an aristocratic or democratic assembly comes not from aristocracy or democracy, but from the obedience and harmony of the subjects. Nor do people flourish under monarchy because one man possesses the right to rule them, but because they obey him. Take obedience away from any kind of state, and with it the harmony of the people, and they will not flourish but soon dissolve. Those who try by disobedience merely to reform the Common-wealth will find that they destroy it, like the foolish daughters of Peleus in the fable. Wishing to restore their aged father to youth, they followed Medea's advice, cut him to pieces, and boiled him with strange herbs, but made no new man of him. This desire for change resembles the breaking of God's first Commandment. There God says, Non Habebis Deos Alienos—“You shall not have the gods of other nations”; and elsewhere he says of kings that they are gods.\n\nSecond, they must be taught not to be so captivated by admiration for the virtue of a fellow subject, however high his station or conspicuous his splendor in the Common-wealth, or by admiration for any assembly other than the Sovereign assembly, that they give him or it the obedience or honor owed only to the Sovereign, whom such persons represent in their respective offices. Nor should they receive any influence from them except what they convey from sovereign authority. A Sovereign cannot be thought to love his people as he ought if he is not vigilant over them, but lets popular men flatter them away from their loyalty. This has often happened not just secretly but openly, with preachers proclaiming a marriage to these men In Facie Ecclesiae, and publicizing it in the streets. It may fittingly be compared with a breach of the second of the ten Commandments.\n\nNor Dispute the Sovereign Power\n\nThird, it follows that they must be informed how grave a fault it is to speak ill of the sovereign representative, whether a man or an assembly; to question or dispute his power; or to speak of him irreverently in any way. Such conduct can bring him into contempt among his people and weaken the obedience on which the safety of the Common-wealth depends. By analogy, the third Commandment points to this teaching.\n\nFourth, the people cannot be taught these things, remember them once taught, or even know after a generation has passed where sovereign power lies, unless certain times are set apart from their ordinary work for them to attend appointed instructors. It is therefore necessary to establish times when they can gather and, after praying to and praising God, the Sovereign of sovereigns, hear their duties explained and the positive laws that concern everyone read and expounded, and be reminded of the authority that makes them laws. For this purpose the Jews had a Sabbath every seventh day, when the Law was read and expounded. Its observance reminded them that God was their King: he had created the world in six days and rested on the seventh; and their rest from labor reminded them that the God who was their King had delivered them from their painful servitude in Egypt and given them time, after rejoicing in God, to enjoy themselves through lawful recreation. Thus the whole first Table of the Commandments sets forth the sum of God's absolute power, not only as God but as King by agreement over the Jews in particular. It can therefore show those on whom men have conferred sovereign power what doctrine they ought to teach their subjects.\n\nBecause children's earliest instruction depends on the care of their parents, they must obey them while under their guidance. And afterward, as gratitude requires, they must acknowledge the benefit of their upbringing by outward signs of honor. To this end they should be taught that originally every person's father was also his sovereign lord, with power over his life and death; and that when fathers of families instituted a Common-wealth and surrendered that absolute power, they never meant to lose the honor owed them for raising their children. Surrendering such a right was not necessary to establish sovereign power. Nor would anyone have reason to want children, or to take the trouble to nourish and teach them, if afterward he could expect no more benefit from them than from anyone else. This agrees with the fifth Commandment.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 2\n\nAgain, every Sovereign ought to have justice taught. Since justice consists in taking from no one what belongs to him, this means teaching people not to deprive their neighbors, by force or fraud, of anything that is theirs by sovereign authority. Of things held as property, those dearest to a person are his own life and limbs; next, for most, come the matters of marital affection; and after these, wealth and the means of living. The people must therefore be taught to refrain from violence against one another's persons in private revenge, from violations of marital honor, and from forcibly plundering or fraudulently stealing one another's goods. For the same purpose they must be shown the harmful consequences of false judgment brought about by the corruption of judges or witnesses: it destroys the distinction between what belongs to different people and renders justice powerless. All these things are implied in the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth Commandments.\n\nLastly, they must be taught that not only unjust acts but the designs and intentions to commit them, even if frustrated by chance, are injustice. It lies as much in the corruption of the will as in the disorder of the act. This is the meaning of the tenth Commandment and the sum of the Second Table, which is all gathered into the one commandment of mutual charity, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” just as the sum of the first Table is gathered into “the love of God,” whom they had then newly accepted as their King.\n\nAs for the means and channels by which the people may receive this instruction, we should ask how so many opinions opposed to the peace of mankind, based on weak and false principles, have nevertheless taken such deep root among them. I mean the opinions I named in the preceding Chapter: that people should judge what is lawful and unlawful by their own private judgments rather than by the law itself; that subjects sin when they obey the commands of the Common-wealth without first deciding for themselves that those commands are lawful; that their property rights in their wealth exclude the Common-wealth's dominion over it; that subjects may lawfully kill those they call tyrants; that sovereign power can be divided; and others like these. They are instilled in the people as follows. Those whom necessity or greed keeps intent on their trades and labor, and those whom excess wealth or idleness drives to sensual pleasures—two groups that make up most of humanity—are diverted from the sustained reflection required to learn the truth, not only about natural justice but about every other science. They get their ideas of duty mainly from theologians in the pulpit, and partly from neighbors and acquaintances whose ready and plausible speech makes them seem wiser and more learned in law and conscience than themselves. The theologians and others who make a show of learning, in turn, derive their knowledge from universities, law schools, or books published by distinguished men from those schools and universities. Evidently, then, the instruction of the people depends entirely on teaching the young correctly in the universities. But some may ask: are the universities of England not learned enough already to do this? Or do you intend to teach the universities yourself? Difficult questions. Yet I do not hesitate to answer the first: until near the end of the reign of Henry the Eighth, the Pope's power against that of the Common-wealth was upheld chiefly by the universities. The doctrines maintained by so many preachers against the sovereign power of the king, and by so many lawyers and others educated there, are sufficient proof that, even if the universities did not originate these false doctrines, they did not know how to plant the true ones. With such a conflict of opinions, it is certain they have not been adequately instructed; no wonder they still retain the taste of the subtle liquor with which they were first seasoned against civil authority. As for the second question, it is neither fitting nor necessary for me to say yes or no. Anyone who sees what I am doing can readily see what I think.\n\nThe safety of the people further requires those who hold sovereign power to administer justice equally to every rank. The rich and powerful, no less than the poor and obscure, must receive redress for injuries done to them; and the great must have no greater hope of impunity when they use violence, dishonor, or otherwise injure the humble than the humble would have if they did the same to the great. This is equity, a precept of the Law of Nature that binds a Sovereign as fully as the humblest of his people. All breaches of law are offenses against the Common-wealth, but some are offenses against private individuals as well. Offenses against the Common-wealth alone can be pardoned without violating equity, for anyone may pardon a wrong done to himself as he sees fit. But equity does not permit the pardon of an offense against a private person without that person's consent or reasonable satisfaction.\n\nInequality among subjects arises from acts of sovereign power; it has no more place before the Sovereign, that is, in a court of justice, than inequality between kings and their subjects has before the King of Kings. Great persons should be honored for their beneficence and the aid they give people of lower rank, or not honored at all. Their violence, oppression, and injuries are not mitigated but made worse by their greatness, for they have the least need to commit them. Partiality toward the great has these consequences: impunity breeds insolence; insolence breeds hatred; and hatred breeds efforts to bring down every oppressive and arrogant greatness, even if the Common-wealth falls with it.\n\nEqual taxation also belongs to equal justice. Its equality depends not on equal wealth, but on the equal debt each person owes the Common-wealth for his defense. It is not enough for a person to labor to support his life: he must also fight, if need be, to secure the fruits of his labor. People must either do as the Jews did when rebuilding the Temple after their return from captivity, building with one hand and holding a sword in the other, or hire others to fight on their behalf. Taxes imposed on the people by sovereign power are simply the wages owed to those who hold the public sword, defending private individuals as they practice their various trades and occupations. Since the benefit each receives is the enjoyment of life, which is equally dear to rich and poor, a poor person owes the defenders of his life the same debt a rich person owes for defense of his own—except that the rich, who have the service of the poor, may owe a debt for many persons besides themselves. Given this, equality of taxation consists rather in equality of consumption than in equality of the consumers' wealth. Why should a person who works hard and spends little of the fruits of his labor be taxed more than an idle person who earns little and spends everything he earns, when the Common-wealth protects the one no more than the other? But when taxes fall on what people consume, each pays equally for what he uses; nor is the Common-wealth deprived of revenue by the luxurious waste of individuals.\n\nMany people, through unavoidable accident, become unable to maintain themselves by their labor. They should not be left to private charity, but provided for by the laws of the Common-wealth as far as their natural necessities require. Just as it is uncharitable for any individual to neglect those who cannot help themselves, so it is uncharitable for the Sovereign of a Common-wealth to expose them to the risks of such uncertain charity.\n\nThe case is different for those whose bodies are strong: they must be made to work. To prevent the excuse that no employment can be found, laws should encourage every kind of craft, including navigation, agriculture, fishing, and all forms of manufacturing that require labor. As the number of poor but able-bodied people continues to increase, they should be settled in countries that are not sufficiently inhabited. There they must not exterminate the inhabitants they find, but require them to live closer together and, rather than roam over a great stretch of land snatching whatever they find, to cultivate each small plot with skill and labor so that it feeds them in due season. When the whole world is overcrowded, the final remedy is war, which provides for everyone through victory or death.\n\nThe Sovereign's care includes making good laws. But what is a good law? By a good law I do not mean a just one, for no law can be unjust. Law is made by sovereign power, and everything that power does is authorized and owned by each member of the people; what everyone has willed, no one can call unjust. The laws of a Common-wealth are like the rules of a game: what all the players agree to is an injustice to none of them. A good law is one that is necessary for the good of the people and is also clear.\n\nFor laws are authorized rules, and their purpose is not to restrain the people from every voluntary action, but to guide their movement so they do not hurt themselves through the force of their desires, rashness, or poor judgment. Hedges are set up not to stop travelers but to keep them on the road. Thus a law that is unnecessary does not serve the true end of law and is not good. A law might be thought good if it benefits the Sovereign, even though it is not necessary for the people; but this is not so, since the good of Sovereign and people cannot be separated. A Sovereign with weak subjects is weak, and so are people whose Sovereign lacks power to govern them as he wills. Unnecessary laws are not good laws but traps for money: where the right of sovereign power is recognized they are superfluous, and where it is not recognized they are insufficient to defend the people.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 3\n\nClarity lies less in the words of a law themselves than in a statement of the causes and motives for which it was made. Such a statement reveals the lawgiver's meaning, and once that meaning is known, the law is easier to understand in few words than in many. Every word is open to ambiguity, so multiplying the words in the body of a law multiplies its ambiguities. Excessive diligence also seems to imply that whoever can evade the wording is beyond the law's reach; this gives rise to many needless lawsuits. When I consider how brief ancient laws were, and how they have gradually grown longer, I seem to see a contest between the drafters and the pleaders of the law: the first trying to confine the second, the second trying to escape their confines, and the pleaders winning. It is therefore the lawgiver's office—the supreme representative in every Common-wealth, whether one man or an assembly—to make clear why the law was made, and to make the law itself as brief as possible while using proper and meaningful terms.\n\nIt is also the Sovereign's office to apply punishments and rewards rightly. The purpose of punishment is not revenge or the release of anger, but correction of the offender or of others through his example. The severest punishments must therefore be imposed for crimes that pose the greatest danger to the public: crimes arising from malice toward the established government; from contempt for justice; crimes that stir indignation among the people; and crimes that, if left unpunished, seem to have official approval, as when they are committed by the sons, servants, or favorites of people in authority. For indignation turns people not only against the perpetrators and instigators of injustice, but also against any power likely to protect them. Thus Tarquin was driven from Rome and the monarchy itself dissolved because of the outrageous act of one of his sons. But crimes of weakness, arising from intense provocation, great fear, dire necessity, or ignorance of whether an act is a grave offense, often admit of leniency without harm to the Common-wealth; and when there is room for leniency, the Law of Nature requires it. It is the punishment of leaders and teachers in a disturbance, not of the poor people led astray, that can benefit the Common-wealth as an example. To be severe with the people is to punish ignorance for which the Sovereign may be largely responsible, since he failed to instruct them better.\n\nLikewise the Sovereign's office and duty require him always to assign rewards so that they benefit the Common-wealth, which is their purpose and end. He does this when those who have served the Common-wealth well are compensated, at the lowest possible cost to the public treasury, generously enough to encourage others both to serve it as faithfully as they can and to study the arts that will enable them to serve it better. To buy the peace of a popular and ambitious subject with money or advancement, so that he stops making harmful impressions on the minds of the people, is no reward: rewards are intended for past service, not misconduct. Such payment is a sign not of gratitude but of fear; it harms the public rather than benefiting it. This struggle against ambition resembles Hercules' struggle against the many-headed Hydra: for every head he defeated, three more sprang up. Similarly, when one popular man's obstinacy is overcome by a reward, many others follow his example and cause the same trouble in hope of the same advantage. Malice, like every other product, grows more plentiful when it can be sold. A civil war may sometimes be postponed by these means, but the danger continues to grow and the public ruin becomes more certain. It is therefore against the duty of the Sovereign, who is entrusted with public safety, to reward those who seek greatness by disturbing their country's peace. He should instead oppose them at the outset, accepting a small danger rather than confronting a greater one later.\n\nAnother task of the Sovereign is to choose good counselors: those whose advice he takes in governing the Common-wealth. The word counsel, Consilium, corrupted from Considium, has a wide meaning, covering all assemblies of people who sit together not only to deliberate on future action but also to judge past events and present law. Here I use it in the first sense alone. In this sense there is no choice of counselors in democracy or aristocracy, since those giving counsel are members of the person counseled. The choice of counselors therefore belongs to monarchy. A Sovereign who fails to seek out the most capable in every field does not discharge his office as he ought. The best counselors are those who have least hope of gain from giving bad advice and greatest knowledge of what promotes the peace and defense of the Common-wealth. It is hard to know who expects to profit from public turmoil. But reason for suspicion can be found when men whose resources cannot meet their customary expenses flatter the people over grievances that are unreasonable or cannot be remedied; anyone with reason to look can readily observe this. It is harder still to know who has the greatest knowledge of public affairs, and those who have such knowledge have much less need of advisers. Knowing who understands the rules of almost any art already requires considerable knowledge of that art, for no one can judge the truth of another's rules unless he has first learned to understand them. The best signs of mastery of any art are extensive practice and consistently good results. Good counsel comes neither by lot nor by inheritance. There is therefore no more reason to expect sound advice about affairs of state from the rich or noble than to expect them to draw up the dimensions of a fortress, unless we suppose that politics, unlike geometry, needs no disciplined study, only spectatorship—which is false. Politics is the harder of the two fields. In these parts of Europe, a place on the highest council of state has been regarded as the hereditary right of certain people. This custom comes from the conquests of the ancient Germans: many independent lords who joined forces to conquer other nations would not enter the alliance without privileges to distinguish their descendants from the descendants of their subjects in future generations. Such privileges conflict with sovereign power. By the Sovereign's favor their holders may seem to retain them; but if they insist on them as rights, they must gradually lose them, until they have no honor beyond what their abilities naturally earn.\n\nHowever capable the counselors in any matter, their advice is more useful when each offers his views and reasons separately than when they deliver speeches in an assembly, and when they have considered their advice in advance rather than speaking offhand. They then have more time to examine the consequences of an action and are less likely to be driven into contradiction by envy, rivalry, or other passions arising from differences of opinion.\n\nFor matters that concern no other nations, but only the comfort and benefit subjects can enjoy from laws governing internal affairs, the best counsel comes from the general reports and complaints of the people in each province. They know their own needs best and, so long as their requests take nothing from the essential rights of sovereignty, deserve attentive consideration. For without those essential rights, as I have often said, the Common-wealth cannot survive at all.\n\nA commander in chief who is not popular will not be loved or feared by his army as he ought and cannot perform his office successfully. He must therefore be industrious, brave, approachable, generous, and fortunate, so that he gains a reputation for competence and for loving his soldiers. This is popularity: it gives soldiers the desire and courage to earn his favor and shields the general when he must punish mutinous or negligent soldiers with severity. Yet the soldiers' love is dangerous to sovereign power unless their commander's loyalty is assured, especially when sovereign power rests with an assembly that is not popular. For the people's safety, therefore, those to whom the Sovereign commits his armies must be both capable commanders and faithful subjects.\n\nBut when the Sovereign himself is popular—that is, revered and loved by his people—there is no danger at all in a subject's popularity. Soldiers are never so generally unjust that they will side with their captain against their Sovereign, however much they love him, when they love both the Sovereign himself and his cause. Accordingly, those who have violently suppressed a lawful Sovereign's power have always, before establishing themselves in his place, had the trouble of devising titles to their rule, to spare the people the shame of accepting them. A recognized right to sovereign power is so popular a quality that its holder needs only to show that he can govern his own household absolutely to win his subjects' hearts, and only to see his enemies' armies disbanded to overcome opposition. For the largest and most active part of mankind has never yet been content with its present condition.\n\nI need say nothing here about the duties of one Sovereign to another, embraced by what is commonly called the Law of Nations, because the Law of Nations and the Law of Nature are the same. Each Sovereign has the same right in securing his people's safety as any individual has in securing the safety of his own body. The same law that tells people without civil government what to do and what to avoid toward one another tells Common-wealths the same—that is, it speaks to the consciences of sovereign princes and sovereign assemblies. For the only court of natural justice is the conscience, where not man but God reigns. His laws, insofar as they bind all mankind, are natural laws when God is considered as the author of nature, and laws when that same God is considered as King of Kings. But of the Kingdome of God as King of Kings, and also as King of a particular people, I shall speak in the remainder of this discourse.\n\nCHAPTER XXXI. OF THE KINGDOME OF GOD BY NATURE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXXI, 1\n\nOF THE KINGDOM OF GOD BY NATURE\n\nI have sufficiently proved in what I have already written that the condition of mere nature—that is, of absolute liberty, belonging to those who are neither sovereigns nor subjects—is anarchy and a condition of war; that the precepts guiding men away from it are the Laws of Nature; that a Common-wealth without Sovereign Power is only a word without substance and cannot endure; and that subjects owe sovereigns unqualified obedience in all matters where obedience does not conflict with the Laws of God. To know the whole of civil duty, we need only know what those Laws of God are. Without that knowledge a man cannot tell whether a command of the civil power conflicts with God's law; and so he either offends the Divine Majesty by excessive civil obedience or, fearing to offend God, transgresses the commands of the Common-wealth. To avoid both these dangers, we must know the divine laws. And since knowledge of every law depends on knowledge of the sovereign power, I shall now say something about the KINGDOM OF GOD.\n\n“God is King, let the Earth rejoice,” says the Psalmist (Psal. 96. 1). And again, “God is King though the Nations be angry; and he that sits on the Cherubim, though the earth be moved” (Psal. 98. 1). Whether they wish it or not, men must always be subject to divine power. By denying God's existence or providence, men may cast off their ease, but not their yoke. Yet to call this power of God—which reaches not only men but beasts, plants, and inanimate bodies—a kingdom is to use the word metaphorically. Only one who governs subjects by his word, promising rewards to those who obey and threatening punishment to those who do not, can properly be said to reign. The subjects of God's kingdom, then, are not inanimate bodies or irrational creatures, which cannot understand precepts as his; nor atheists or those who deny that God cares about human actions, since they acknowledge no word as his and hope for no reward or fear any threat from him. Those who believe in a God who governs the world, has given precepts to mankind, and has set forth rewards and punishments are God's subjects; all the rest are to be understood as enemies.\n\nTo rule by words requires making those words manifestly known; otherwise they are not laws. A sufficient and clear promulgation, removing the excuse of ignorance, belongs to the nature of law. For human laws there is only one way of doing this: proclamation, or promulgation by a human voice. But God declares his laws in three ways: by the dictates of natural reason, by revelation, and by the voice of a man whom, through miracles, he has made credible to others. Hence there arise three kinds of God's word—the rational, the perceptible, and the prophetic—and three corresponding ways of hearing: right reason, supernatural perception, and faith. No universal laws have been delivered by supernatural perception, consisting in revelation or inspiration, because God speaks in that manner only to particular persons, and says different things to different people.\n\nA Twofold Kingdom of God, Natural and Prophetic. From the distinction between the other two kinds of God's word, rational and prophetic, we may attribute to God a twofold kingdom, natural and prophetic. In the natural kingdom he governs, by the natural dictates of right reason, all mankind who acknowledge his providence. In the prophetic kingdom, having chosen one particular nation, the Jews, for his subjects, he governed them and no others, not only by natural reason but by positive laws given through the mouths of his holy prophets. In this chapter I intend to speak of the natural kingdom of God.\n\nThe Right of God's Sovereignty Derives from His Omnipotence. The Right of Nature by which God reigns over men and punishes those who break his laws derives not from his having created them, as though he demanded obedience in gratitude for his benefits, but from his irresistible power. I have already shown how sovereign right arises from covenant. To show how the same right may arise from nature, it is enough to show a case in which it is never surrendered. Since all men by nature had a right to everything, each had a right to reign over all the rest. But since they could not enforce this right, the safety of each required them to lay it aside and, by common consent, appoint men with sovereign authority to rule and defend them. Had there been a man of irresistible power, however, there would have been no reason why he should not use that power to rule and defend both himself and them as he saw fit. Thus dominion over all men belongs naturally to those whose power is irresistible by virtue of their superior power. Consequently it is from this power that the kingdom over men and the right to afflict them as he pleases belong naturally to God Almighty—not as creator and benefactor, but as omnipotent. And though punishment is due only for sin, because the word means affliction for sin, the right to afflict does not always derive from men's sin, but from God's power.\n\nThe question “Why do evil men often prosper, while good men suffer adversity?” was much disputed by the ancients. It is the same as our question, “By what right does God distribute the prosperity and adversity of this life?” Its difficulty has shaken faith in divine providence not only among ordinary people but among philosophers and even saints. “How good,” says David, “is the God of Israel to those who are upright in heart; and yet my feet were almost gone, my steps had nearly slipped; for I was grieved at the wicked when I saw the ungodly prosper so.” And how earnestly Job argues with God over the many afflictions he suffered despite his righteousness! In Job's case, God himself settles the question, not by arguments drawn from Job's sin but from his own power. Job's friends inferred sin from his afflictions, while Job defended himself in the knowledge of his innocence. God himself takes up the matter and justifies the affliction by arguments from his power, such as “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” In doing so he both approves Job's innocence and rebukes his friends' erroneous doctrine. The words of our Savior concerning the man born blind accord with this teaching: “Neither has this man sinned, nor his fathers; but this happened so that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” And although it is said that “Death entered into the world by sin”—meaning that if Adam had never sinned, he would never have died, that is, his soul would never have been separated from his body—it does not follow that God could not justly have afflicted him even without sin, just as he afflicts other living creatures that cannot sin.\n\nHaving spoken of the right of God's sovereignty as grounded solely in nature, we must next consider the divine laws, or dictates of natural reason. These concern either the natural duties of one man toward another or the honor naturally due to our divine sovereign. The first are the same Laws of Nature that I discussed in the 14. and 15. chapters of this treatise: equity, justice, mercy, humility, and the other moral virtues. What remains is to consider what precepts natural reason alone, without any other word of God, dictates to men concerning the honor and worship of the Divine Majesty.\n\nHonor consists in an inward thought and judgment of another's power and goodness. To honor God, therefore, is to think as highly of his power and goodness as possible. The outward signs of that judgment, appearing in men's words and actions, are called worship; this is one part of what the Latin word Cultus means. For Cultus properly and invariably signifies labor bestowed upon something in the hope of deriving benefit from it. The things from which we derive benefit either are subject to us, so that the profit they yield follows naturally from our labor, or are not subject to us, but respond to our labor according to their own wills. In the first sense, labor bestowed on the earth is called cultivation, and the education of children a cultivation of their minds. In the second sense, where men's wills are won to our purposes not by force but by pleasing them, the word means courting: winning favor through good offices, such as praise, acknowledging their power, and whatever else pleases those from whom we expect some benefit. This is properly worship. In this sense Publicola means a worshipper of the people, and Cultus Dei the worship of God.\n\nFrom inward honor, consisting in a judgment of power and goodness, arise three Passions: love, which relates to goodness, and hope and fear, which relate to power. There arise also three parts of outward worship: praise, magnification, and blessing. Goodness is the subject of praise; power and its effect, felicity, are the subjects of magnification and blessing. Praise and magnification may be expressed in words or actions: in words when we say a man is good or great; in actions when we thank him for his bounty and obey his power. The belief in another's happiness can be expressed only in words.\n\nSome signs of honor, both attributes and actions, are naturally such: among attributes, good, just, generous, and the like; among actions, prayers, thanks, and obedience. Others derive their meaning from human institution or custom and are honorable in some times and places, dishonorable in others, and indifferent in still others. Such are gestures of greeting, prayer, and thanksgiving, used differently in different times and places. The former is natural worship; the latter, arbitrary worship.\n\nArbitrary worship, in turn, has two kinds: commanded and voluntary. It is commanded when it takes the form required by the one worshipped, and voluntary when it takes the form the worshipper thinks fitting. When worship is commanded, it is not the words or gestures but the obedience that constitutes the worship. When it is voluntary, its character depends on the judgment of its spectators: if the words or actions by which we intend honor appear to them ridiculous or insulting, they are not worship. For a sign is not a sign to the one who gives it, but to the one to whom it is made—that is, to the spectator.\n\nAgain, worship may be public or private. Public worship is what a Common-wealth performs as one person; private worship is what a private person offers. Public worship is voluntary as regards the whole Common-wealth, but not as regards particular men. Private worship is free in secret, but in the sight of the multitude it is never without some restraint, whether from laws or from men's opinions; such restraint is contrary to the nature of liberty.\n\nAmong men, the end of worship is power. When a man sees another worshipped, he supposes that person powerful and is more ready to obey him, thereby increasing his power. But God has no ends. The worship we render him proceeds from our duty and is directed, so far as our capacity allows, by the rules of honor that reason tells the weak to observe toward men more powerful than themselves—in hope of benefit, in fear of harm, or in gratitude for good already received.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXXI, 2\n\nTo know what worship of God the light of nature teaches us, I shall begin with his attributes. First, plainly, we ought to attribute existence to him, for no one can intend to honor what he thinks does not exist.\n\nSecond, philosophers who said the world, or the soul of the world, was God spoke of him unworthily and denied his existence. For God means the cause of the world; to say that the world is God is to say that it has no cause, and thus that there is no God.\n\nThird, to say that the world was not created but is eternal is to deny that there is a God, since what is eternal has no cause.\n\nFourth, those who think they are granting God repose when they deny that he cares for mankind take away his honor: they remove men's love and fear of him, which are the root of honor.\n\nFifth, in matters signifying greatness and power, to call him finite is not to honor him. Attributing to God less than we can does not show a will to honor him, and finite is less than we can attribute, since it is easy to add more to anything finite.\n\nTherefore it does not honor him to attribute shape to him, for every shape is finite;\n\nNor to say that we conceive or imagine him, or hold an idea of him in our minds, for everything we conceive is finite;\n\nNor to attribute parts or totality to him, since these are attributes only of finite things;\n\nNor to say he is in this or that place, for whatever is in a place is bounded and finite;\n\nNor that he moves or rests, for both attributes assign him a place;\n\nNor that there are more gods than one, since this implies that all are finite: there cannot be more than one infinite being. Nor should we ascribe to him Passions involving grief, such as repentance, anger, and mercy; or want, such as appetite, hope, and desire; or any passive faculty—unless we speak metaphorically, meaning not the Passion but its effect. For Passion is power limited by something else.\n\nThus, when we attribute a will to God, we must understand it not as a rational appetite like the human will, but as the power by which he brings everything about.\n\nThe same applies when we attribute to him sight and other acts of sense, or knowledge and understanding. In us these are nothing but a commotion of the mind, raised by external things pressing upon the organic parts of the human body. Nothing of that sort exists in God; since these things depend on natural causes, they cannot be attributed to him.\n\nAnyone who would attribute nothing to God that natural reason does not warrant must use either negative attributes, such as infinite, eternal, and incomprehensible; superlatives, such as Most High and Most Great; or indefinite attributes, such as good, just, holy, and creator. He must use these as though he meant not to declare what God is—for that would confine him within the limits of our imagination—but to express how greatly we admire him and how ready we are to obey him. This is a sign of humility and of a will to honor him as much as we can. For there is only one name to signify our conception of his nature: I AM; and only one name for his relation to us: God, which includes Father, King, and Lord.\n\nConcerning acts of divine worship, reason gives a most general precept: they must be signs of an intention to honor God. The first are prayers. It was not the craftsmen who made images who were thought to make them gods, but the people who prayed to them.\n\nSecond is thanksgiving. In divine worship it differs from prayer only because prayers precede the benefit and thanks follow it; the purpose of both is to acknowledge God as the author of all benefits, past and future.\n\nThird are gifts—that is, sacrifices and offerings, if they are of the best—which are signs of honor, for they are acts of thanksgiving.\n\nFourth, to swear by none but God is naturally a sign of honor: it acknowledges that God alone knows the heart, and that no man's wit or strength can shield a perjurer from God's vengeance.\n\nFifth, it is part of rational worship to speak of God with care; this shows fear of him, and fear acknowledges his power. It follows that God's name must not be used rashly or to no purpose, which is to use it in vain. Its use has a purpose only in an oath ordered by the Common-wealth to establish certainty in judgments, or in an oath between Common-wealths to avoid war. It also follows that disputing about God's nature is contrary to his honor. For we suppose that in this natural kingdom of God nothing can be known except by natural reason, that is, from the principles of natural science. These principles are so far from teaching us anything of God's nature that they cannot teach us even our own nature or the nature of the smallest living creature. Therefore when men dispute about the attributes of God from the principles of natural reason, they only dishonor him. In the attributes we give God we should consider not their meaning as philosophical truth, but their meaning as a pious intention to do him the greatest honor we can. Failure to recognize this has produced volumes of disputes about God's nature, tending not to his honor but to the honor of our own cleverness and learning, and amounting only to thoughtless and vain abuses of his sacred name.\n\nSixth, natural reason dictates that prayers, thanksgivings, offerings, and sacrifices should each be the best of their kind and most expressive of honor. Prayers and thanksgivings, for example, should be spoken in words and phrases that are neither hasty, frivolous, nor coarse, but beautiful and well composed; otherwise we do not honor God as much as we can. The heathens were therefore absurd to worship images as gods, but reasonable to do so in verse and with music, both vocal and instrumental. Likewise it was reasonable that the beasts and gifts they offered and their actions in worship should express complete submission and commemorate benefits received, since all proceeded from an intention to honor him.\n\nSeventh, reason directs us to worship God not only in secret but also, and especially, in public, before other people. Otherwise the inducement of others to honor him—the most acceptable aspect of honor—is lost.\n\nLastly, obedience to his laws, which in this case are the Laws of Nature, is the greatest worship of all. Just as obedience is more acceptable to God than sacrifice, so contempt for his commands is the greatest insult of all. These are the laws of divine worship that natural reason dictates to private men.\n\nBut since a Common-wealth is only one person, it too ought to offer God only one form of worship. It does so when it commands private people to perform that worship publicly. This is public worship, whose defining property is uniformity: actions performed in different ways by different people cannot be called one public worship. Thus where many forms of worship arising from the different religions of private individuals are permitted, there can be said to be no public worship, nor can the Common-wealth be said to have any religion at all.\n\nSince words, and therefore God's attributes, acquire their meaning by human agreement and institution, those attributes must be held to signify honor that men intend to signify it. Whatever private individuals can do by their own wills where reason is the only law, the Common-wealth can do by its will through civil laws. And since a Common-wealth has no will and makes no laws except through the will of whoever holds Sovereign Power, the attributes the sovereign ordains as signs of honor in the worship of God must be accepted and used as such by private people in their public worship.\n\nBut not all actions are signs by convention. Some are naturally signs of honor and others of contempt. The latter—actions men would be ashamed to do before those they revere—cannot be made part of divine worship by human authority; nor can the former, such as decent, modest, humble conduct, ever be separated from it. Yet there are infinitely many actions and gestures indifferent in themselves. Those that the Common-wealth ordains for public and universal use as signs of honor and as part of God's worship must be accepted and used as such by its subjects. And the words of Scripture, “It is better to obey God than men,” apply to the kingdom of God by covenant, not by nature.\n\nHaving spoken briefly of the natural kingdom of God and his natural laws, I will add to this chapter only a short account of his natural punishments. No human action in this life fails to begin a chain of consequences so long that no human foresight can see to its end. Pleasant and unpleasant events are linked together in this chain, so that whoever does something for pleasure must also undertake to bear all the pains attached to it. These pains are the natural punishments of actions that begin more harm than good. Thus intemperance is naturally punished by disease; rashness by misfortune; injustice by the violence of enemies; pride by ruin; cowardice by oppression; negligent government by princes by rebellion; and rebellion by slaughter. For since punishments follow breaches of law, natural punishments must naturally follow breaches of the Laws of Nature; they follow as natural effects, not as arbitrary ones.\n\nSo much for the constitution, nature, and right of sovereigns, and for the duty of subjects as derived from the principles of natural reason. Now, when I consider how different this doctrine is from the practice of most of the world, especially those western regions that have learned their morals from Rome and Athens, and how much depth of moral philosophy is required of those who administer Sovereign Power, I am close to believing my labor as useless as Plato's Common-wealth. For he too holds that disorders of state and changes of government through civil war cannot be ended until sovereigns become philosophers. But I consider again that the science of natural justice is the only science necessary for sovereigns and their chief ministers; that they need not be burdened, as Plato requires, with the mathematical sciences beyond encouraging their study through good laws; and that neither Plato nor any other philosopher has yet ordered and sufficiently, or even plausibly, proved all the theorems of moral doctrine by which men might learn both to govern and to obey. I therefore regain some hope that one day this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign who will consider it for himself—it is short, and I think clear—without the help of any interested or envious interpreter, and who, by exercising undivided sovereignty to protect its public teaching, will turn this speculative truth into practical benefit.\n\nPART III. OF A CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXII\n\nOF THE PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN POLITICS\n\nThe Word of God Delivered by Prophets Is the Main Principle\n\nOf Christian Politics\n\nSo far I have derived the rights of Sovereign Power and the duty of subjects solely from the principles of nature: principles found true by experience or made true by agreement about the use of words. That is, I have drawn on human nature as known by experience, and on universally accepted definitions of words essential to all political reasoning. But the subject I take up next, the nature and rights of a CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH, depends in large part on supernatural revelations of God's will. My discourse must therefore rest not only on the natural word of God but also on the prophetic word.\n\nNevertheless, we must not renounce our senses and experience, nor our natural reason, which is undoubtedly the word of God. These are the talents he has placed in our hands for us to put to work until the return of our blessed Savior. They must not be wrapped in the napkin of an unexamined faith, but used to gain justice, peace, and true religion. For although much in God's word is above reason, meaning that natural reason can neither demonstrate nor refute it, nothing in it is contrary to reason. When it seems otherwise, the fault lies either in our unskillful interpretation or in our faulty reasoning.\n\nThus, when something written there is too difficult for us to examine, we are told to bring our understanding into submission to the words, rather than sift with logic for a philosophical truth in mysteries we cannot comprehend and that fall under no rule of natural science. The mysteries of our religion are like wholesome pills for the sick: swallowed whole they have the power to heal, but chewed they are generally thrown up again without effect.\n\nBut bringing our understanding into submission does not mean subjecting our intellectual faculty to another man's opinion. It means submitting our will in obedience where obedience is due. We have no power to change our senses, memory, understanding, reason, or opinions: they always and necessarily follow what the things we see, hear, and consider suggest to us. They are therefore not effects of our will; rather, our will follows from them. We bring our understanding and reason into submission when we refrain from contradiction, speak as lawful authority commands us to speak, and live accordingly. In short, this is trust and faith placed in the speaker, even when the mind cannot form any notion at all from his words.\n\nWhen God speaks to a man, he must do so either immediately or through another man to whom he has previously spoken immediately. Those to whom God has spoken immediately may understand well enough how he does so, but it is difficult, if not impossible, for someone else to understand it. If a man claims to me that God has spoken to him supernaturally and immediately, and I doubt him, I cannot readily see what argument he could offer to oblige me to believe him. If he is my sovereign, it is true, he can oblige me to obedience, so that I do not declare by word or act that I disbelieve him; but he cannot oblige me to think otherwise than my reason persuades me. If someone with no such authority over me makes the same claim, nothing requires either belief or obedience from me.\n\nTo say that God spoke to him in Holy Scripture is not to say that God spoke to him immediately, but through the prophets, apostles, or Church, as he speaks to all other Christians. To say God spoke to him in a dream is merely to say he dreamed that God spoke to him. This has no force to win belief from anyone who knows that dreams are generally natural and may arise from earlier thoughts; such a dream may come from vanity, foolish arrogance, and a false opinion of one's own godliness or other virtue, through which one imagines oneself worthy of an extraordinary revelation. To say he saw a vision or heard a voice is to say he dreamed while half asleep and half awake. In this state a man often naturally mistakes his dream for a vision because he has not noticed his own drowsiness. To say he speaks through supernatural inspiration is to say he feels an ardent desire to speak or holds some strong opinion about himself for which he can give no natural and sufficient reason. Thus, though God Almighty can speak to a man through dreams, visions, voices, and inspiration, he does not oblige anyone to believe that he has done so to a man who claims it. That claimant, being human, can be mistaken and, moreover, can lie.\n\nHow, then, can someone to whom God has never revealed his will immediately—except by natural reason—know when to obey or disobey God's word delivered by one who says he is a prophet? (1 Kings 22) Of the 400 prophets whom the King of Israel consulted about his war against Ramoth Gilead, only Micaiah was a true prophet. (1 Kings 13) The prophet sent to prophesy against the altar set up by Jeroboam was a true prophet, as two miracles performed in his presence showed him to have been sent from God; yet he was deceived by another, older prophet, who persuaded him, claiming to speak for God, to eat and drink with him. If one prophet can deceive another, how can we be certain of God's will except through reason? My answer from Holy Scripture is that a true prophet can be recognized by two marks taken together, not separately: the performance of miracles and the refusal to teach a religion other than the one already established. Neither alone, I say, is enough. (Deut. 13 v. 1,2,3,4,5 ) “If a Prophet arises among you, or a dreamer of dreams, and claims to perform a miracle, and the miracle comes to pass; if he says, Let us follow strange gods whom you have not known, you shall not listen to him, etc. But that prophet and dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has spoken to you to revolt from the Lord your God.” Two points should be observed here. First, God will not allow miracles alone to prove a prophet's calling; rather, as the third verse says, they test how steadfastly we adhere to God himself. The works of the Egyptian sorcerers, though not as great as those of Moses, were still great miracles. Second, however great a miracle may be, if it tends to incite revolt against the king or someone governing by the king's authority, its worker must be regarded only as someone sent to test the people's allegiance. For “revolt from the Lord your God” here is equivalent to “revolt from your King.” At the foot of Mount Sinai they had made God their King by covenant, and he ruled them only through Moses: Moses alone spoke with God and declared God's commands to the people from time to time. Similarly, after our Savior Christ had made his disciples acknowledge him as the Messiah—that is, God's anointed, whom the Jewish nation expected daily as their King but rejected when he came—he did not fail to warn them of the danger of miracles. “There shall arise,” he says, “false Christs and false Prophets, and shall perform great wonders and miracles, even to seduce, if it were possible, the very elect” (Mat. 24. 24). It is clear from this that false prophets can have the power to work miracles, yet we must not take their doctrine for God's word. St. Paul goes further in writing to the Galatians that “if I myself, or an angel from heaven, preach another Gospel to you than the one I preached, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1. 8). That Gospel was that Christ was King. Consequently, in these words St. Paul curses all preaching against the power of the King already received. For he addresses people who, through his preaching, had already received Jesus as the Christ, that is, as King of the Jews.\n\nJust as miracles without preaching the doctrine established by God are not sufficient, so preaching true doctrine without miracles is not sufficient proof of immediate revelation. If a man who teaches no false doctrine claims to be a prophet but shows no miracle, his claim deserves no more regard, as is clear from Deut. 18. v. 21, 22: “If you say in your heart, How shall we know that the word of the Prophet is not what the Lord has spoken? When the Prophet speaks in the name of the Lord something that does not come to pass, that is a word the Lord has not spoken; the Prophet has spoken it from the pride of his own heart. Do not fear him.” But one might ask again: when a prophet foretells something, how can we know whether it will come to pass? He may predict that it will occur after some long period, longer than a man's lifetime, or indefinitely, at one time or another. In that case this mark of a prophet is useless. The miracles that oblige us to believe a prophet must therefore be confirmed by an immediate event or one not long deferred. Plainly, then, Scripture requires both teaching the religion established by God and showing a present miracle together as the only marks by which a true prophet—that is, immediate revelation—is to be recognized. Neither mark by itself obliges anyone else to heed him.\n\nSince miracles have now ceased, we have no sign left by which to recognize any private man's claimed revelations or inspirations, nor any obligation to heed a doctrine beyond the extent to which it conforms to Holy Scripture. Since the time of our Savior, Scripture has supplied the place of every other form of prophecy. From it, through wise and careful reasoning, we can readily derive all the rules and precepts necessary to know our duty to God and man, without religious frenzy or supernatural inspiration. From this Scripture, then, I shall draw the principles of my discourse on the rights of the supreme governors of Christian Common-wealths on earth and the duty of Christian subjects toward their sovereigns. To that end, in the next chapter I shall discuss the books, writers, scope, and authority of the Bible.\n\nCHAPTER XXXIII. OF THE NUMBER, ANTIQUITY, SCOPE, AUTHORITY, AND INTERPRETERS OF THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIII, 1\n\nOF THE NUMBER, ANTIQUITY, SCOPE, AUTHORITY, AND INTERPRETERS OF THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\nThe books of Holy SCRIPTURE are those that ought to be the canon, that is, the rules of Christian life. And since all rules of life that men are bound in conscience to observe are laws, the question of Scripture is the question of what constitutes law throughout Christendom, both natural and civil. Scripture does not determine which laws each Christian king shall enact within his dominions, but it does determine which laws he shall not enact. Since I have already proved that sovereigns are the sole legislators within their own dominions, only those books established as such by sovereign authority are canonical—that is, law—in any nation. God, it is true, is sovereign over all sovereigns; when he speaks to a subject, that subject ought to obey him, whatever an earthly ruler commands to the contrary. But the question is not whether to obey God; it is when and what God has spoken. Subjects who have no supernatural revelation can know this only by the natural reason that led them, in pursuit of peace and justice, to obey the authority of their respective Common-wealths—that is, their lawful sovereigns. In keeping with this obligation, I can acknowledge as Holy Scripture no books of the Old Testament other than those that the authority of the Church of England has commanded us to acknowledge as such. These books are well enough known without a catalog here. They are the same books acknowledged by St. Jerome, who holds the rest—namely, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobias, the first and second of Maccabees (though he had seen the first in Hebrew), and the third and fourth of Esdras—to be Apocrypha. Of the canonical books Josephus, a learned Jew writing in the time of the Emperor Domitian, counts Twenty Two, matching the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. St. Jerome counts the same number, though he groups them differently. Josephus counts Five books of Moses, Thirteen of prophets who wrote the history of their own times (how that agrees with the prophetic writings in the Bible we shall see later), and Four of hymns and moral precepts. St. Jerome counts Five books of Moses, Eight of prophets, and Nine of other holy writings, which he calls Hagiographa. The Septuagint, 70. learned Jews summoned by Ptolemy, King of Egypt, to translate the Jewish law from Hebrew into Greek, have left us no books as holy Scripture in Greek other than those received by the Church of England.\n\nAs for the books of the New Testament, all Christian Churches and all Christian sects that admit any books as canonical acknowledge them equally as canon.\n\nNo sufficient testimony from other history—the only proof of a matter of fact—has established who originally wrote the several books of Holy Scripture. Nor can arguments from natural reason establish it, since reason demonstrates the truth of consequences, not of facts. We must therefore seek guidance on this question in what the books themselves show us. Though they do not identify the writer of every book, they are not useless in establishing when the books were written.\n\nFirst, the fact that the Pentateuch is called the five books of Moses is not enough to prove that Moses wrote them, any more than the titles The Book of Joshua, The Book of Judges, The Book of Ruth, and The Books of the Kings suffice to prove that Joshua, the judges, Ruth, and the kings wrote those books. A book's title marks its subject as often as its author. The History of Livy names the author; the History of Scanderbeg takes its name from its subject. In the last chapter of Deuteronomy, Ver. 6, we read concerning Moses' grave “that no man knows his grave to this day”—that is, to the day those words were written. Clearly, then, the words were written after his burial. It would be a strange interpretation to say that Moses spoke of his own grave, even prophetically, as undiscovered up to a day when he was still alive. Perhaps it will be alleged that only the last chapter, not the whole Pentateuch, was written by another person. Let us therefore consider Genesis, Chap. 12. Ver. 6: “And Abraham passed through the land to the place of Sichem, to the plain of Moreh, and the Canaanite was then in the land.” These must be the words of someone writing when the Canaanites were no longer in the land, and therefore not of Moses, who died before entering it. Likewise, in Numbers 21. Ver. 14, the writer cites an older book entitled The Book of the Wars of the Lord, which recorded the acts of Moses at the Red Sea and the brook of Arnon. It is therefore sufficiently evident that the five books of Moses were written after his time, although how long afterward is less clear.\n\nBut although Moses did not compile those books in their entirety or in the form in which we have them, he did write everything they say he wrote. For example, there is the volume of the Law, apparently contained in the 11 of Deuteronomy and the following chapters up to the 27., which was also ordered to be written on stones when the people entered the land of Canaan. (Deut. 31. 9) Moses himself wrote this and gave it to the priests and elders of Israel to be read to all Israel every seventh year when they assembled for the feast of Tabernacles. This is the Law of which God commanded their kings, once that form of government was established, to take a copy from the priests and Levites to place beside the Ark. (Deut. 31. 26) It is the same Law that, after being lost, was found again much later by Hilkiah and sent to King Josias. He had it read to the people and renewed the covenant between them and God. (2 King. 22. 8 & 23. 1,2,3)\n\nMany passages in the Book of Joshua suggest that it too was written long after Joshua's time. Joshua had set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan as a memorial of the people's crossing. (Josh 4. 9) Of these the writer says, “They are there to this day.” (Josh 5. 9) For “to this day” is a phrase signifying a time so distant it is beyond living memory. Likewise, when the Lord says he has rolled away the people's reproach of Egypt, the writer adds, “The place is called Gilgal to this day,” an expression that would have been inappropriate in Joshua's time. And concerning the name of the Valley of Achor, given because of the trouble Achan caused in the camp, the writer says (Josh. 7. 26) that it “remains to this day”; this too must have been written long after Joshua. There are many other arguments of the same kind, as in Josh. 8. 29. 13. 13. 14. 14. 15. 63.\n\nSimilar arguments make the same point about the Book of Judges, chap. 1. 21,26 6.24 10.4 15.19 17.6, and Ruth 1. 1., but especially Judg. 18. 30., where it is said that Jonathan “and his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land.”\n\nSimilar arguments show that the Books of Samuel were also written after Samuel's time: 1 Sam. 5.5. 7.13,15. 27.6. & 30.25. After David had ruled that those who guarded the supplies should receive an equal share of the spoils with those who fought, the writer says, “He made it a statute and an ordinance in Israel to this day.” (2. Sam. 6.4.) Again, when David, angered that the Lord had struck down Uzzah for reaching out to steady the Ark, named the place Perez-Uzzah, the writer says it is called that “to this day.” Thus the book must have been written long after the event—that is, long after David's time.\n\nAs for the two Books of the Kings and the two Books of the Chronicles, they include passages mentioning monuments that, the writer says, remained in his own day: 1 Kings 9.13. 9.21. 10. 12. 12.19. 2 Kings 2.22. 8.22. 10.27. 14.7. 16.6. 17.23. 17.34. 17.41. 1 Chron. 4.41. 5.26. But the continuation of their history to the captivity in Babylon is proof enough that they were written after it. For the recorded events always precede the books that mention and cite the record, as these books repeatedly do when they refer readers to the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, the books of the Prophet Samuel or the Prophet Nathan, of the Prophet Ahijah, the Vision of Jehdo, and the books of the Prophet Serveiah and the Prophet Addo.\n\nThe books of Esdras and Nehemiah were certainly written after the return from captivity, for they contain accounts of that return, the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls and houses, the renewal of the covenant, and the establishment of their government.\n\nThe history of Queen Esther takes place at the time of the Captivity; its writer must therefore have lived then or afterward.\n\nThe Book of Job contains no indication of when it was written. Though it is sufficiently clear (Exekiel 14.14, and James 5.11.) that Job was not an invented person, the book itself seems less a history than a treatise on a question much debated in ancient times: “Why have wicked men often prospered in this world, while good men have suffered?” This is the more likely because, as St. Jerome testifies, the Hebrew is in prose from the beginning through the third verse of the third chapter, where Job's complaint begins; from there through the sixth verse of the last chapter it is in hexameter verse; and the remainder of the last chapter is again in prose. The whole debate, then, is in verse, with prose added as a preface at the beginning and an epilogue at the end. Verse is not the usual manner of people suffering great pain, like Job, or of those who come to comfort them, like his friends; but in ancient times it was common in philosophy, especially moral philosophy.\n\nMost of the Psalms were written by David for the use of the choir. To these have been added some songs of Moses and other holy men, and some Psalms written after the return from the Captivity, such as the 137. and the 126. It is therefore clear that the Psalter was compiled and given its present form after the Jews returned from Babylon.\n\nThe Proverbs are a collection of wise and godly sayings, some by Solomon, some by Agur the son of Jakeh, and some by the mother of King Lemuel. It is no more plausible that Solomon collected them than that Agur or Lemuel's mother did. Though the sayings are theirs, some other godly person who lived after them all must have collected and compiled them into one book.\n\nThe books of Ecclesiastes and the Canticles contain nothing that is not Solomon's, except perhaps their titles or inscriptions. For “The words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King in Jerusalem” and “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's” seem to have been added to distinguish the books when the books of Scripture were gathered together into one body of law, so that not only the doctrine but also its authors might be known.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIII, 2\n\nOf the Prophets, the earliest are Sophoniah, Jonas, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Michaiah, who lived in the time of Amaziah and Azariah, otherwise Ozias, Kings of Judah. But the Book of Jonas is not properly a record of his prophecy (which consists of these few words: “Forty days and Ninivy shall be destroyed”), but a history or account of his stubbornness and his disputes with God's commandments. It is therefore unlikely that he was its author, since he is its subject. The Book of Amos, however, is his prophecy.\n\nJeremiah, Abdias, Nahum, and Habakkuk prophesied in the time of Josiah.\n\nEzekiel, Daniel, Aggeus, and Zacharias prophesied during the Captivity.\n\nWhen Joel and Malachi prophesied is not evident from their writings. But considering the inscriptions, or titles, of their books, it is clear enough that the whole Scripture of the Old Testament was set forth in the form we have it after the Jews returned from their Captivity in Babylon and before the time of Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, who had it translated into Greek by seventy men sent to him from Judea for that purpose. And if the Books of Apocrypha (which the Church recommends to us, though not as canonical, yet as books useful for our instruction) can be trusted on this point, Scripture was set forth in the form we have it by Esdras. This may be seen from what he himself says in the second book, chapt. 14. verse 21, 22, &c. Speaking to God, he says: “Your law is burned; therefore no one knows the things you have done, or the works that are to begin. But if I have found grace before you, send down the holy Spirit into me, and I shall write all that has been done in the world since the beginning, which was written in your Law, so that men may find your path, and those who will live in later days may live.” And verse 45: “And it came to pass, when the forty days were fulfilled, that the Highest spoke, saying, ‘The first that you have written, publish openly, so that the worthy and unworthy may read it; but keep the last seventy, so that you may deliver them only to such as are wise among the people.’” So much for the time when the books of the Old Testament were written.\n\nThe writers of the New Testament all lived less than an age after Christ's Ascension, and all had seen our Savior or been his disciples, except St. Paul and St. Luke. Consequently, whatever they wrote is as old as the time of the Apostles. But the time when the books of the New Testament were received and acknowledged by the Church as their writings is not quite so ancient. For just as the books of the Old Testament come down to us from no earlier time than that of Esdras, who, guided by God's Spirit, recovered them after they were lost, so the books of the New Testament, of which there were not many copies, and which could not easily all be in any private person's hands, cannot be traced further back than the time when the governors of the Church collected, approved, and recommended them to us as the writings of the Apostles and Disciples whose names they bear. The first enumeration of all the books of both the Old and New Testament is in the Canons of the Apostles, supposed to have been collected by Clement the first (after St. Peter) Bishop of Rome. But since that is merely supposed, and disputed by many, the Council of Laodicea is the first we know of to have recommended the Bible to the Christian Churches of that time as the writings of the Prophets and Apostles; this Council was held in the 364. year after Christ. By then ambition had so prevailed among the great Doctors of the Church that they no longer regarded Emperors, even Christian ones, as shepherds of the people, but as sheep, and non-Christian Emperors as wolves. They sought to present their doctrine not as counsel and information, in their capacity as preachers, but as laws, in the capacity of absolute governors; and they considered frauds that made the people more obedient to Christian doctrine to be pious. Yet I am persuaded that they did not therefore falsify the Scriptures, even though copies of the New Testament books were only in the hands of ecclesiastics. Had they intended to do so, they would surely have made those books more favorable than they are to their power over Christian Princes and civil sovereignty. I therefore see no reason to doubt that the Old and New Testament as we have them now are true records of what the Prophets and Apostles did and said. And perhaps the same is true of some books called Apocrypha, if they were left out of the canon not for any conflict of doctrine with the others, but merely because they are not found in Hebrew. For after Alexander the Great conquered Asia, few learned Jews were not proficient in Greek. The seventy interpreters who translated the Bible into Greek were all Hebrews; and we still have the works of Philo and Josephus, both Jews, eloquently written in Greek. But it is not the writer, but the authority of the Church, that makes a book canonical.\n\nAnd although these books were written by different men, it is plain that their writers were all endowed with one and the same Spirit, since they converge on one and the same end: to set forth the rights of the Kingdom of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Book of Genesis traces the genealogy of God's people from the creation of the world to their going into Egypt. The other four Books of Moses contain their election of God as their King and the laws he prescribed for their government. The Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Samuel, down to the time of Saul, describe the deeds of God's people until they cast off God's yoke and demanded a King after the fashion of neighboring nations. The remainder of the history of the Old Testament traces the succession of David's line to the Captivity; from that line was to spring the restorer of the Kingdom of God, our blessed Savior God the Son, whose coming was foretold in the Books of the Prophets. After him the Evangelists wrote of his life and actions and his claim to the Kingdom while he lived on earth. Finally, the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles declare the coming of God the Holy Ghost, and the authority he left with them and their successors to guide the Jews and invite the Gentiles. In sum, the histories and prophecies of the Old Testament, and the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, have had one and the same aim: to bring men to obedience to God: 1. in Moses and the Priests; 2. in the man Christ; and 3. in the Apostles and the successors to apostolic power. For these three represented the person of God at different times: Moses, and his successors the High Priests and Kings of Judah, in the Old Testament; Christ himself while he lived on earth; and the Apostles and their successors, from the day of Pentecost (when the Holy Ghost descended upon them) to this day.\n\nA question much disputed among the various sects of the Christian religion is: From where do the Scriptures derive their authority? The question is sometimes put in other terms, such as: How do we know them to be the Word of God? or: Why do we believe them to be so? The difficulty of answering it arises chiefly from the imprecision of the words in which the question itself is framed. For all sides believe that God is their first and original author, so that is not the matter in dispute. Again, plainly no one can know that they are God's Word (though all true Christians believe it) except those to whom God himself has revealed it supernaturally; the question is therefore not rightly asked in terms of our knowledge. Finally, when the question is put in terms of our belief, since some are moved to believe for one reason and others for another, no single general answer can be given for all. The question properly stated is: By what authority are they made law?\n\nInsofar as they do not differ from the Laws of Nature, there is no doubt that they are the Law of God and carry their authority within them, legible to all men who have the use of natural reason. But this authority is no different from that of any other moral teaching consistent with reason, whose dictates are laws not made, but eternal.\n\nIf God himself makes them law, they have the character of written laws, which are laws only for those to whom God has published them so adequately that no one can excuse himself by saying he did not know they were God's.\n\nTherefore, a man to whom God has not supernaturally revealed that they are his, or that their publishers were sent by him, is not obliged to obey them by any authority but that of someone whose commands already have the force of law: that is, by no authority other than that of the Common-wealth, residing in the Sovereign, who alone has legislative power. Again, if it is not the legislative authority of the Common-wealth that gives them the force of laws, it must be some other authority derived from God, either private or public. If private, it obliges only the person to whom God has chosen to reveal it in particular. For if every man were obliged to accept as God's law whatever particular men, claiming private inspiration or revelation, sought to impose upon him—amid such numbers of men who, from pride and ignorance, take their dreams, extravagant fancies, and madness for testimonies of God's Spirit, or from ambition falsely claim such divine testimonies against their own consciences—it would be impossible for any divine law to be acknowledged. If public, it is the authority of the Common-wealth or of the Church. But the Church, if it is one person, is the same as a Common-wealth of Christians: called a Common-wealth because it consists of men united in one person, their Sovereign; and a Church because it consists of Christian men united under one Christian Sovereign. If, however, the Church is not one person, it has no authority at all: it can neither command nor perform any act; it can possess no power or right to anything; nor does it have any will, reason, or voice, for all these qualities belong to a person. Now if all Christians are not contained within one Common-wealth, they are not one person, nor is there a Universal Church that has authority over them; thus the Scriptures are not made laws by the Universal Church. Or if it is one Common-wealth, then all Christian Monarchs and States are private persons, subject to judgment, deposition, and punishment by a Universal Sovereign of all Christendom. Thus the question of the authority of the Scriptures comes down to this: “Whether Christian Kings and the Sovereign Assemblies in Christian Common-wealths are absolute within their own territories, immediately under God; or subject to one Vicar of Christ, appointed over the Universal Church, who may judge, condemn, depose, and put them to death as he thinks expedient or necessary for the common good.”\n\nThis question cannot be answered without a more particular examination of the Kingdom of God, from which we must also judge who has the authority to interpret Scripture. For whoever has the lawful power to make any writing law also has the power to approve or reject its interpretation.\n\nCHAPTER XXXIV. ON THE MEANING OF SPIRIT, ANGEL, AND INSPIRATION IN THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIV, 1\n\nON THE MEANING OF SPIRIT, ANGEL, AND INSPIRATION IN THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\nSince the foundation of all sound reasoning is the consistent meaning of words, and since in the doctrine that follows their meaning depends neither on the writer's will (as in natural science) nor on common usage (as in ordinary conversation), but on the sense they bear in Scripture, I must determine from the Bible, before proceeding further, the meaning of words whose ambiguity might make the conclusions I draw from them obscure or open to dispute. I shall begin with BODY and SPIRIT, which in the language of the Schools are called corporeal and incorporeal substances.\n\nThe word body, in its broadest sense, means something that fills or occupies a certain space or imaginable place; it does not depend on imagination, but is a real part of what we call the universe. For since the universe is the aggregate of all bodies, no real part of it is not also a body, nor is anything properly a body that is not also part of the universe, that aggregate of all bodies. This same thing, because bodies are subject to change—that is, to changes in how they appear to living creatures' senses—is also called substance, meaning a subject of various accidents: sometimes moving, sometimes still; seeming to our senses sometimes hot, sometimes cold, sometimes of one color, smell, taste, or sound, and sometimes of another. This diversity of appearances (produced by the different ways bodies act on our sense organs) we attribute to changes in the bodies that act, and call them accidents of those bodies. In this sense, substance and body mean the same thing. Thus the words incorporeal substance, joined together, cancel each other out, as they would if someone said an incorporeal body.\n\nBut in common understanding, not all the universe is called body, only those parts of it that people can perceive by touch to resist their force, or by sight to obstruct their view beyond. Thus in ordinary speech, air and aerial substances are not usually taken for bodies, but (whenever people sense their effects) are called wind or breath, or, because these are called spiritus in Latin, spirits; as when people call the aerial substance that gives a living creature's body life and motion its vital and animal spirits. As for those idols of the brain that present bodies to us where they are not, as in a mirror, in a dream, or to a disordered brain while awake, they are (as the Apostle says of all idols generally) nothing: nothing at all, I say, where they seem to be; and in the brain itself nothing but tumult, arising either from the action of objects or from the disorderly agitation of our sense organs. People occupied with other matters than investigating their causes do not know for themselves what to call them. They can therefore easily be persuaded by those whose knowledge they greatly respect: some to call them bodies, imagining them made of air compacted by a supernatural power, because sight judges them corporeal; others to call them spirits, because touch finds nothing where they appear that resists the fingers. Thus in ordinary speech spirit properly means either a subtle, fluid, invisible body, or a ghost or other idol or phantom of the imagination. But it has many metaphorical meanings. Sometimes it means a disposition or inclination of mind: an inclination to contradict what others say is called a spirit of contradiction; an inclination to impurity, an unclean spirit; perversity, a stubborn spirit; sullenness, a dumb spirit; and an inclination toward godliness and God's service, the Spirit of God. Sometimes it means an outstanding ability or an extraordinary passion or disease of mind, as when great wisdom is called the spirit of wisdom, and madmen are said to be possessed by a spirit.\n\nI find no other meaning of spirit anywhere. Where none of these meanings can make sense of that word in Scripture, the passage lies beyond human understanding, and our faith in it consists not in our opinion but in our submission. This is so wherever God is said to be a spirit, or the Spirit of God means God himself. For God's nature is incomprehensible: we understand nothing of what he is, only that he is. The attributes we give him, therefore, are not intended to tell one another what he is, nor to express our opinion of his nature, but to express our desire to honor him with names that we consider most honorable among ourselves.\n\nGen. 1. 2. “The Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.” If Spirit of God here means God himself, then motion, and consequently place, are attributed to God, though these are intelligible only of bodies, not of incorporeal substances. The passage would thus be beyond our understanding: we cannot conceive of something moving without changing place, or without having dimensions; and whatever has dimensions is a body. But the words are best understood through a similar passage, Gen. 8. 1. When the earth was covered with waters, as in the beginning, and God intended to reduce them and expose dry land again, he used similar words: “I will bring my Spirit over the earth, and the waters shall diminish.” Here spirit means a wind (that is, air or spirit in motion), which could be called the Spirit of God, as in the former passage, because it was God's work.\n\nGen. 41. 38. Pharaoh calls Joseph's wisdom the Spirit of God. Joseph had advised him to seek out a wise and discreet man and set him over the land of Egypt, and Pharaoh says, “Can we find a man such as this, in whom is the Spirit of God?” And Exod. 28.3. “You shall speak,” says God, “to all who are wise-hearted, whom I have filled with the Spirit of Wisdom, to make Aaron garments, to consecrate him.” Here exceptional understanding, even if only in making garments, is called the Spirit of God because it is God's gift. The same occurs again in Exod. 31.3,4,5,6. and 35.31. And in Isaiah 11.2,3. the Prophet, speaking of the Messiah, says, “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and fortitude; and the Spirit of the fear of the Lord.” Plainly this means not so many ghosts, but so many outstanding gifts of grace that God would give him.\n\nIn the Book of Judges, exceptional zeal and courage in defense of God's people are called the Spirit of God, as when it stirred Othoniel, Gideon, Jeptha, and Samson to deliver them from servitude, Judg. 3.10. 6.34. 11.29. 13.25. 14.6,19. And of Saul, on hearing news of the Ammonites' insolence toward the men of Jabeth Gilead, it is said (1 Sam.11.6.) that “The Spirit of God came upon Saul, and his anger (or, as it is in Latin, his fury) was greatly kindled.” This probably means not a ghost, but exceptional zeal to punish the Ammonites' cruelty. Likewise, the Spirit of God that came upon Saul while he was among the Prophets praising God in song and music (1 Sam.19.20.) is to be understood not as a ghost, but as an unexpected, sudden zeal to join their devotions.\n\nThe false Prophet Zedekiah says to Micaiah (1 Kings 22.24.), “Which way did the Spirit of the Lord go from me to speak to you?” This cannot mean a ghost, for Micaiah had declared the outcome of the battle before the Kings of Israel and Judah as something shown to him in a vision, not by a spirit speaking within him.\n\nIn the same way it appears in the Books of the Prophets that, although they spoke by the Spirit of God—that is, by a special gift of predicting the future—their knowledge of what was to come came not from a ghost inside them, but from some supernatural dream or vision.\n\nGen. 2.7. says, “God made man from the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils (spiraculum vitae) the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Here the breath of life inspired by God means no more than that God gave him life. And (Job 27.3.) “as long as the Spirit of God is in my nostrils” means no more than “as long as I live.” So too, in Ezek. 1.20. “the spirit of life was in the wheels” is equivalent to “the wheels were alive.” And (Ezek. 2.30.) “the spirit entered into me, and set me on my feet” means “I recovered my vital strength,” not that any ghost or incorporeal substance entered and possessed his body.\n\nIn the 11 chap. of Numbers, verse 17, God says, “I will take of the Spirit which is upon you and put it upon them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with you”—that is, upon the seventy Elders. Thereafter two of the seventy are said to prophesy in the camp; some complained of them, and Joshua asked Moses to forbid them, which Moses refused to do. This shows that Joshua did not know they had been given authority to do so and that they prophesied according to Moses' mind: that is, by a spirit, or authority, subordinate to his own.\n\nIn the same sense we read (Deut. 34.9.) that “Joshua was full of the Spirit of wisdom,” because Moses had laid his hands on him: that is, because Moses had ordained him to carry on the work he himself had begun—bringing God's people into the promised land—but could not finish because death intervened.\n\nIn the same sense it is said (Rom. 8.9.), “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his”; this means not the ghost of Christ, but submission to his doctrine. Likewise (1 John 4.2.), “By this you shall know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” This means the spirit of sincere Christianity, or submission to that central article of Christian faith, that Jesus is the Christ; it cannot be interpreted as a ghost.\n\nLikewise these words (Luke 4.1.), “And Jesus, full of the Holy Ghost” (that is, as it is expressed in Mat. 4.1. and Mar. 1.12., “of the Holy Spirit”), may mean zeal to do the work for which God the Father sent him. But to interpret them as referring to a ghost would be to say that God himself (for so our Savior was) was filled with God, which is most improper and meaningless. How we came to translate spirits with the word ghosts, which denotes nothing in heaven or earth but imaginary inhabitants of the human brain, I do not investigate. But I say this: spirit in the text means no such thing, but either, literally, a real substance, or, metaphorically, some extraordinary ability or affection of mind or body.\n\nThe Disciples of Christ, seeing him walking on the sea (Mat. 14.26. and Marke 6.49.), supposed he was a spirit: by this they meant an aerial body, not a phantom. For it is said that they all saw him. This cannot be said of delusions of the brain, which are not shared by many at once, as visible bodies are, but are individual because imaginations differ. It can be said only of bodies. The same applies when those Apostles took him for a spirit (Luke 24.3,7.). So too (Acts 12.15), when St. Peter was released from prison, they would not believe it; but when the maid said he was at the door, they said it was his angel. This must mean a corporeal substance, unless we say that the Disciples themselves held the common opinion of both Jews and Gentiles that some such apparitions were not imaginary but real, and did not need human fancy in order to exist. The Jews called these spirits and angels, good or bad, as the Greeks called them daemons. Some such apparitions may indeed be real and substantial: subtle bodies which God can form by the same power with which he formed all things, and use as ministers and messengers (that is, angels) to declare and execute his will whenever he pleases, in an extraordinary and supernatural manner. But once he has formed them, they are substances endowed with dimensions, occupying space and capable of moving from place to place, which are properties peculiar to bodies. Thus they are not incorporeal ghosts: ghosts in no place, that is, nowhere, and therefore things which seem to be something but are nothing. But if corporeal is taken in the most ordinary sense, meaning substances perceptible by our external senses, then an incorporeal substance is something not imaginary but real: a thin, invisible substance having the same dimensions as grosser bodies.\n\nThe name ANGEL generally means a messenger, most often a messenger of God. A messenger of God means anything that makes known his extraordinary presence: that is, the extraordinary manifestation of his power, especially by a dream or vision.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIV, 2\n\nConcerning the creation of angels, Scripture tells us nothing. That they are spirits is often repeated. But in Scripture and in common speech among both Jews and Gentiles, spirit sometimes means thin bodies—the air, the wind, the vital and animal spirits of living creatures—and sometimes the images that arise in the imagination in dreams and visions. These images are not real substances but accidents of the brain; yet when God raises them supernaturally to signify his will, they are not improperly called God's messengers, that is, his angels.\n\nAnd just as the Gentiles commonly took the images of the brain for things that really existed outside themselves, independently of the imagination, and from these images formed their notions of good and evil daemons—which, because they seemed really to exist, they called substances, and because they could not feel them with their hands, incorporeal—so the Jews, on the same grounds and without anything in the Old Testament compelling them to do so, generally believed (except for the sect of the Sadduces) that these apparitions, which God sometimes chose to produce in men's imaginations for his own purposes and which were therefore called his angels, were substances: permanent creatures of God, independent of the imagination. Those they thought would benefit them they regarded as God's angels; those they thought would harm them they called evil angels or evil spirits, such as the Spirit of Python and the spirits of madmen, lunatics, and epileptics. For they regarded people afflicted with such diseases as possessed by daemons.\n\nBut if we examine the passages of the Old Testament where angels are mentioned, we shall find that in most of them angel can mean nothing other than an image raised supernaturally in the imagination to signify God's presence as he performs some supernatural work. Therefore, in the remaining passages, where their nature is not specified, the word can be understood in the same way.\n\nFor we read in Gen. 16. that the same apparition is called not only an angel but God. The one called the angel of the Lord in verse 7. says to Agar in the tenth verse, “I will multiply your offspring exceedingly”; that is, he speaks in the person of God. Nor was this apparition an imagined figure, but a voice. Thus it is clear that angel there means nothing but God himself, who caused Agar supernaturally to hear a supernatural voice testifying to God's special presence there. Why, then, might the angels who appeared to Lot, called men in Gen. 19.13., and to whom Lot, though they were two, speaks (ver. 18.) as to one, and that one as God (for the words are “Lot said to them, Oh, not so, my Lord”), not be understood as images of men supernaturally formed in the imagination, just as angel previously meant an imagined voice? When the angel called from heaven to Abraham to stay his hand (Gen. 22.11.) from killing Isaac, there was no apparition but a voice. Yet it was properly enough called a messenger or angel of God, because it declared God's will supernaturally, without the need to suppose the existence of permanent ghosts. The angels Jacob saw on the ladder to heaven (Gen. 28.12.) were a vision in his sleep, hence only an image of the imagination and a dream. Yet because they were supernatural and signs of God's special presence, these apparitions are not improperly called angels. The same is to be understood in Gen.31.11., where Jacob says, “The Angel of the Lord appeared to me in my sleep.” For an apparition to someone asleep is what everyone calls a dream, whether that dream is natural or supernatural. And what Jacob calls an angel there was God himself, for the same angel says (verse 13.), “I am the God of Bethel.”\n\nAlso (Exod.14.9.) the angel that went before the Army of Israel toward the Red Sea and then moved behind it is (verse 19.) the Lord himself. He appeared not as a beautiful man, but (by day) as a pillar of cloud and (by night) as a pillar of fire. Yet this pillar was the whole apparition, and the angel promised to Moses (Exod. 14.9.) as the Army's guide. For this pillar of cloud is said to have descended, stood at the door of the Tabernacle, and spoken with Moses.\n\nHere you see motion and speech, commonly attributed to angels, attributed to a cloud, because the cloud served as a sign of God's presence. It was no less an angel than if it had taken the form of a man or a child of surpassing beauty, or had wings, as angels are commonly painted to the misinstruction of ordinary people. For it is not their shape but their purpose that makes them angels. Their purpose is to signify God's presence in supernatural acts. Thus when Moses (Exod. 33.14.) asked God to accompany the camp (as he had always done before the making of the Golden Calf), God did not answer, “I will go,” nor “I will send an angel in my place,” but “My presence shall go with you.”\n\nIt would take too long to mention every place in the Old Testament where the name angel occurs. To encompass them all at once, then, I say that no text in the part of the Old Testament that the Church of England holds canonical allows us to conclude that any permanent thing called a spirit or angel has been, or is, created without quantity, or that it cannot be divided by the understanding—that is, considered in parts, so that one part can be in one place and the next part in the next place beside it—or, in short, that it is not corporeal, taking body to mean something that exists somewhere. In every passage, angel can bear the meaning messenger, just as John Baptist is called an angel and Christ the Angel of the Covenant; by the same analogy, the Dove and the Fiery Tongues, as signs of God's special presence, might also be called angels. Though we find two angels named in Daniel, Gabriel and Michael, the text itself makes clear (Dan. 12.1) that Michael means Christ, not as an angel but as a Prince; and Gabriel (like similar apparitions to other holy men in their sleep) was nothing but a supernatural phantom, by which Daniel seemed to see in his dream two Saints talking, one saying to the other, “Gabriel, let us make this man understand his vision.” For God has no need to distinguish his celestial servants by names, which are useful only to the short memories of mortals. Nor is there any passage in the New Testament from which it can be proved that angels—except where the word denotes men whom God has made messengers and ministers of his word or works—are both permanent and incorporeal. That they are permanent may be gathered from our Savior's own words (Mat. 25.41.), where he says that on the last day the wicked shall be told, “Go, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.” This passage plainly supports the permanence of evil angels (unless we might understand the Devil and his angels to mean the Church's adversaries and their ministers). But it then conflicts with their immateriality, because everlasting fire is no punishment to things incapable of suffering, as all incorporeal things are. This passage therefore does not prove angels incorporeal. Likewise, St. Paul says (1 Cor. 6.3.), “Do you not know that we shall judge the angels?” And (2 Pet. 2.4.), “For if God did not spare the angels that sinned, but cast them down into Hell.” And (Jude 1,6.), “And the angels who did not keep their first estate, but left their own habitation, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness until the judgment of the last day.” Though these passages prove that angelic nature is permanent, they also confirm its materiality. And (Mat. 22.30.), “In the resurrection men neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.” Yet in the resurrection men will be permanent, not incorporeal; therefore so are angels.\n\nVarious other passages allow the same conclusion. To those who understand the meaning of substance and incorporeal, taking incorporeal not to mean a subtle body but no body, the words are contradictory: to say that an angel or spirit is an incorporeal substance in that sense is, in effect, to say that no angel or spirit exists at all. Considering, therefore, the meaning of angel in the Old Testament, and the nature of dreams and visions that occur to men in the ordinary course of nature, I was inclined to believe that angels were nothing but supernatural apparitions of the imagination, raised by God's special and extraordinary operation to make his presence and commandments known to mankind, chiefly to his own people. But the many passages of the New Testament, and our Savior's own words, in texts where there is no reason to suspect corruption of Scripture, have compelled my feeble reason to acknowledge and believe that substantial, permanent angels also exist. Yet Scripture cannot prove that they exist in no place—that is, nowhere, and hence are nothing—as those who insist they are incorporeal say, though indirectly.\n\nThe meaning of INSPIRATION depends on that of spirit. Inspiration must either be taken literally, in which case it is nothing but the blowing of thin, subtle air or wind into a man, as a man fills a bladder with his breath; or, if spirits are not corporeal but exist only in the imagination, it means the blowing in of a phantom. This is both an improper expression and an impossibility, for phantoms do not exist as things, but only seem to. Thus the word is used in Scripture only metaphorically. When (Gen. 2.7.) it says that God inspired into man the breath of life, it means no more than that God gave him living motion. We must not think that God first made a living breath and then blew it into Adam once he had been made, whether that breath was real or apparent, but only, as it says (Acts 17.25.), “that he gave him life and breath”: that is, made him a living creature. And when it says (2 Tim. 3.16.) “all Scripture is given by inspiration from God,” speaking of the Scripture of the Old Testament, this is an easy metaphor, meaning that God inclined the spirits or minds of its writers to write what would be useful in teaching, reproving, correcting, and instructing men in righteous living. But when St. Peter (2 Pet. 1.21.) says that “Prophecy did not come in old times by the will of man, but the holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit,” the Holy Spirit means the voice of God in a supernatural dream or vision, which is not inspiration. Nor, when our Savior breathed on his Disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” was that breath the Spirit: it was a sign of the spiritual graces he gave them. And though many people, including our Savior himself, are said to be full of the Holy Spirit, this fullness means not an infusion of God's substance but an abundance of his gifts, such as holiness of life, tongues, and the like, whether attained supernaturally or through study and effort; in all cases they are God's gifts. Likewise, when God says (Joel 2.28.), “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions,” we must not understand it literally, as though his Spirit were like water, capable of being poured out or poured in, but as God's promise to give them prophetic dreams and visions. To use infused literally of God's graces is an abuse of the word: those graces are virtues, not bodies that can be carried from place to place and poured into men as into barrels.\n\nIn the same way, to take inspiration literally, or to say that good spirits entered men to make them prophesy, or evil spirits entered those who became frenzied, lunatic, or epileptic, is not to take the word in the sense Scripture gives it. There spirit means the power of God working through causes unknown to us. Likewise (Acts 2.2.) the wind said to fill the house where the Apostles had gathered on the day of Pentecost must not be understood as the Holy Spirit, which is the Deity itself, but as an outward sign of God's special work on their hearts, producing within them the graces and holy virtues he thought necessary for carrying out their apostleship.\n\nCHAPTER XXXV. ON THE MEANING IN SCRIPTURE OF KINGDOM OF GOD, HOLY, SACRED, AND SACRAMENT\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXV, 1\n\nON THE MEANING IN SCRIPTURE OF KINGDOM OF GOD, HOLY, SACRED, AND SACRAMENT\n\nIn the writings of divines, and particularly in sermons and devotional treatises, the Kingdom of God most commonly means eternal happiness after this life in the highest Heaven, which they also call the Kingdom of Glory. Sometimes it means sanctification, the pledge of that happiness, which they call the Kingdom of Grace. But it never means a monarchy: God's Sovereign Power over subjects, acquired by their own consent, which is the proper meaning of kingdom.\n\nOn the contrary, I find that in most passages of Scripture the KINGDOM OF GOD means a kingdom properly so called, established in a distinctive way by the votes of the people of Israel. In it they chose God as their King by a Covenant made with him in return for God's promise to give them possession of the land of Canaan. Only rarely is the expression metaphorical, and then it means dominion over sin (and only in the New Testament), because every subject will have such dominion in the Kingdom of God without encroaching on the Sovereign.\n\nFrom the very Creation, God not only reigned naturally over all men by his might, but also had particular subjects whom he commanded by a voice, as one man speaks to another. In this way he reigned over Adam and commanded him to abstain from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam disobeyed: by tasting its fruit he presumed to be like God, judging Good and Evil not by his Creator's command but by his own senses. His punishment was the loss of the state of eternal life in which God had first created him. Afterwards God punished his descendants for their vices with a universal flood, sparing only eight persons; and those eight constituted the Kingdom of God at that time.\n\nAfter this, God chose to speak to Abraham and (Gen. 17.7,8.) to make a Covenant with him in these words: “I will establish my Covenant between me and you and your offspring after you through their generations, for an everlasting Covenant, to be a God to you and to your offspring after you; and I will give you and your offspring after you the land where you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.” As a memorial and sign of this Covenant he ordained (verse 11.) the Sacrament of Circumcision. This is what is called the Old Covenant, or Testament, and it contains a contract between God and Abraham. By it Abraham binds himself and his descendants in a particular way to be subject to God's positive Law; for he was already bound to the Moral Law, as by an oath of allegiance. Although God has not yet been given the name of King, nor Abraham and his offspring that of Kingdom, the reality is the same: God's particular Sovereignty over Abraham's offspring, established by agreement. When Moses renewed this same Covenant at Mount Sinai, it was expressly called a particular Kingdom of God over the Jews. And it is of Abraham, not Moses, that St. Paul says (Rom. 4.11.) he is the “Father of the Faithful”: that is, of those who remain loyal and do not break the allegiance sworn to God, then through Circumcision and later, in the New Covenant, through Baptism.\n\nThis Covenant was renewed by Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai (Exod. 19.5.), where the Lord commands Moses to tell the people: “If you will indeed obey my voice and keep my Covenant, then you shall be a peculiar people to me, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a priestly Kingdom and a holy Nation.” For “a peculiar people,” the common Latin version has Peculium De Cunctis Populis; the English translation made at the beginning of the reign of King James has “a peculiar treasure to me above all Nations”; and the Geneva French has “the most precious Jewel of all Nations.” But the first translation is the most accurate, as St. Paul himself confirms (Tit. 2.14.) when, alluding to that passage, he says that our blessed Savior “gave himself for us, that he might purify us for himself, a peculiar (that is, an extraordinary) people.” For the Greek word is periousios, commonly opposed to epiousios: as the latter means ordinary, quotidian, or (as in the Lord's Prayer) for daily use, so the former means what is in excess, stored up, and enjoyed in a special manner, which the Latins call Peculium. This interpretation is confirmed by the reason God gives immediately afterward, when he adds, “For all the earth is mine,” as though to say, “All the nations of the world are mine; but you are mine in a special manner.” For they are all his by reason of his Power, whereas these people will be his by their own consent and Covenant, which adds to his ordinary claim upon all nations.\n\nThe same point is again confirmed expressly in the same text: “You shall be to me a priestly Kingdom and a holy Nation.” The common Latin version has Regnum Sacerdotale, agreeing with the translation of that passage (1 Pet. 2.9.), Sacerdotium Regale, a royal priesthood. It also agrees with the institution itself, by which no man except the High Priest could enter the Sanctum Sanctorum—that is, no one else could inquire of God directly what his will was. The English translation mentioned above, following the Geneva version, has “a Kingdom of Priests.” This must refer either to the succession of one High Priest after another, or it does not agree with St. Peter or with the exercise of the High Priesthood. For none but the High Priest alone was to inform the people of God's will, nor was any assembly of Priests ever permitted to enter the Sanctum Sanctorum.\n\nAgain, the title of a Holy Nation confirms the same point. For holy means something belonging to God by a special, not a general, right. All the earth, as the text says, belongs to God; but not all the earth is called holy, only what has been set apart for his special service, as the Jewish nation was. It is therefore clear enough from this one passage that the Kingdom of God properly means a Common-wealth established (by the consent of those who were to be subject to it) for their civil government and for regulating their conduct, not only toward God their King, but also toward one another in matters of justice, and toward other nations in both peace and war. It was properly a Kingdom: God was its King, and after Moses' death the High Priest was to be his sole Viceroy, or Lieutenant.\n\nBut many other passages clearly prove the same. First (1 Sam. 8.7.), when the Elders of Israel, distressed by the corruption of Samuel's sons, demanded a King, Samuel was displeased and prayed to the Lord. The Lord answered, “Listen to the voice of the people, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, so that I should not reign over them.” This makes evident that God himself was then their King; Samuel did not command the people, but only conveyed to them whatever God directed him to say from time to time.\n\nAgain (1 Sam. 12.12.), Samuel says to the people, “When you saw that Nahash, King of the Children of Ammon, came against you, you said to me, No, a King shall reign over us, when the Lord your God was your King.” It is plain that God was their King and governed the civil state of their Common-wealth.\n\nAnd after the Israelites had rejected God, the Prophets foretold the restoration of his rule, as in (Isaiah 24.23.): “Then the Moon shall be confounded, and the Sun ashamed when the Lord of Hosts shall reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem.” He speaks expressly of his reign in Zion and Jerusalem: that is, on earth. And (Micah 4.7.), “And the Lord shall reign over them on Mount Zion.” This Mount Zion is in Jerusalem on earth. And (Ezek. 20.33.), “As I live, says the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and with fury poured out, I will rule over you”; and (verse 37.) “I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the Covenant.” That is, I will reign over you and make you abide by the Covenant you made with me through Moses and broke in your rebellion against me in Samuel's days and in your election of another King.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXV, 2\n\nAnd in the New Testament the angel Gabriel says of our Savior (Luke 1.32,33), “He shall be great, and be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord shall give him the throne of his father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his Kingdom there shall be no end.” This too is a Kingdom on earth. For claiming it, as an enemy of Caesar, he was put to death; the title on his cross was Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews; he was crowned in mockery with thorns; and of the disciples who proclaimed him it is said (Acts 17.7.) “That they all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another King, one Jesus.” The Kingdom of God, therefore, is a real and not a metaphorical Kingdom; and it is understood so not only in the Old Testament but in the New. When we say, “For yours is the Kingdom, the Power, and Glory,” we must understand God's Kingdom by virtue of our Covenant, not by the Right of God's Power; for God always has such a Kingdom. Thus it would be superfluous to say in our prayer, “Your Kingdom come,” unless we meant the restoration through Christ of that Kingdom of God which the Israelites' revolt had interrupted when they elected Saul. Nor would it have been fitting to say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” or to pray, “Your Kingdom come,” if it had continued without interruption.\n\nThere are so many other passages confirming this interpretation that it would be surprising it has attracted no greater attention, were it not that it gives Christian kings too much light by which to see their right to ecclesiastical government. These men have taken care to translate a priestly Kingdom instead as a Kingdom of priests; yet they might as well translate a royal priesthood (as it is called in St. Peter) as a priesthood of kings. And where they put a precious jewel or treasure for a peculiar people, one might just as well call the special regiment or company of a general that general's precious jewel or his treasure.\n\nIn short, the Kingdom of God is a civil Kingdom. It consisted first in the obligation of the people of Israel to those laws Moses would bring them from Mount Sinai, and which afterward the High Priest of the time would deliver to them from before the cherubim in the Sanctum Sanctorum. The prophets foretold that this Kingdom, cast off at the election of Saul, would be restored by Christ. For its restoration we pray daily when we say in the Lord's Prayer, “Your Kingdom come”; its Right we acknowledge when we add, “For yours is the Kingdom, the Power, and Glory, forever and ever, Amen”; and its proclamation was the preaching of the apostles. The teachers of the Gospel prepare people for it. To embrace that Gospel—that is, to promise obedience to God's government—is to be in the Kingdom of Grace, because God has freely granted such people the power to become subjects, that is, children, of God hereafter, when Christ comes in majesty to judge the world and actually to govern his own people: this is called the Kingdom of Glory. If the Kingdom of God, called also the Kingdom of Heaven because of the splendor and marvelous height of its throne, were not a Kingdom that God exercised on earth through his lieutenants or vicars, who deliver his commandments to the people, there would not have been so much contention and war over who it is through whom God speaks to us; nor would so many priests have concerned themselves with spiritual jurisdiction, or any king have denied it to them.\n\nFrom this literal interpretation of the Kingdom of God arises also the true interpretation of the word HOLY. For in God's Kingdom it answers to what people in their kingdoms call public, or the king's.\n\nThe king of any country is the public person, or representative, of all his own subjects. And God, the King of Israel, was the Holy One of Israel. A nation subject to one earthly Sovereign belongs to that Sovereign, that is, to the public person. So the Jews, who were God's nation, were called (Exod. 19.6.) “a holy nation.” For holy always means either God himself or what belongs specifically to God, just as public always means either the person of the Common-wealth itself or something belonging so exclusively to the Common-wealth that no private person can claim ownership of it.\n\nTherefore the Sabbath (God's day) is a holy day; the Temple (God's house) a holy house; sacrifices, tithes, and offerings (God's tribute) holy duties; priests, prophets, and anointed kings under Christ (God's ministers) holy men; the celestial ministering spirits (God's messengers) holy angels; and so on. Wherever the word holy is used properly, it still signifies something of ownership acquired by consent. In saying “Hallowed be your name,” we simply pray for God's grace to keep the first commandment, to “have no other Gods but Him.” Mankind is God's nation by right of ownership; but the Jews alone were a holy nation. Why? Because by Covenant they became his own.\n\nAnd profane in Scripture usually means the same as common; consequently their opposites, holy and proper, must also mean the same thing in the Kingdom of God. Figuratively, however, those people too are called holy whose godly lives suggest they have abandoned every worldly design and wholly devoted and given themselves to God. In its proper sense, something made holy by God's appropriating or setting it apart for his own use is said to be sanctified by God, as the seventh day in the fourth commandment; and as the elect in the New Testament were said to be sanctified when endowed with the spirit of godliness. What is made holy by human dedication and given to God for use only in his public service is also called SACRED and said to be consecrated: temples and other houses of public prayer and their utensils, priests and ministers, sacrificial victims, offerings, and the outward matter of sacraments.\n\nThere are degrees of holiness: some things set apart for God's service can be set apart again for a closer and more particular service. The entire nation of Israel was a people holy to God; yet among the Israelites the tribe of Levi was holy, among the Levites the priests were holier still, and among the priests the High Priest was holiest. So the land of Judea was the Holy Land, but the Holy City where God was to be worshiped was holier; the Temple was holier than the City, and the Sanctum Sanctorum holier than the rest of the Temple.\n\nA SACRAMENT is the setting apart of some visible thing from common use and its consecration to God's service as a sign either of our admission into the Kingdom of God, to join the number of his peculiar people, or of remembrance of that admission. In the Old Testament the sign of admission was circumcision; in the New Testament, baptism. Its commemoration in the Old Testament was eating the Passover lamb at a fixed annual time, recalling the night on which they were delivered from bondage in Egypt; in the New Testament it is the celebration of the Lord's Supper, recalling our deliverance from the bondage of sin through our blessed Savior's death on the cross. Sacraments of admission are used only once, because one admission is enough; but because we must often be reminded of our deliverance and our allegiance, sacraments of commemoration must be repeated. These are the principal sacraments, and are, as it were, the solemn oaths of our allegiance. There are also other consecrations that may be called sacraments, insofar as the word means only consecration to God's service; but insofar as it implies an oath or promise of allegiance to God, there were no others in the Old Testament but circumcision and the Passover, and none in the New but baptism and the Lord's Supper.\n\nCHAPTER XXXVI. OF THE WORD OF GOD, AND OF PROPHETS\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 1\n\nOF THE WORD OF GOD, AND OF PROPHETS\n\nWhen the Word of God, or of man, is mentioned, it does not mean a part of speech such as grammarians call a noun or a verb, or any single utterance without other words joined to it to give it meaning. It means a complete speech or discourse in which the speaker affirms, denies, commands, promises, threatens, wishes, or asks a question. In this sense the word signifying a Word is not vocabulum but sermo (in Greek, logos): a speech, discourse, or saying.\n\nAgain, if we say the Word of God or of man, it may refer sometimes to the speaker, as when we speak of words God or a person has spoken. In this sense, when we say the Gospel of St. Matthew, we understand St. Matthew to be its writer. At other times it refers to the subject: when we read in the Bible, “The words of the days of the Kings of Israel, or Judah,” the acts performed in those days are the subject of those words. In Greek, which retains many Hebraisms in Scripture, the Word of God often means not what God has spoken but what is spoken concerning God and his government: that is, the doctrine of religion. Thus to say Logos Theou is the same as to say Theologia, the doctrine we usually call divinity, as the following passages show. (Acts 13.46.) “Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold, and said, It was necessary that the Word of God should first have been spoken to you, but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.” What is here called the Word of God was the doctrine of the Christian religion, as the preceding account plainly shows. And (Acts 5.20.) where an angel tells the apostles, “Go stand and speak in the Temple all the Words of this life,” the Words of this life mean the doctrine of the Gospel, as their actions in the Temple show, and as the last verse of that chapter expressly says: “Daily in the Temple, and in every house they did not cease to teach and preach Christ Jesus.” Clearly Jesus Christ was the subject of this Word of Life; or, equivalently, the subject of the Words of the Eternal Life our Savior offered them. So (Acts 15.7.) the Word of God is called the Word of the Gospel because it contains the doctrine of the Kingdom of Christ; and this same Word (Rom. 10.8,9.) is called the Word of Faith: that is, as the passage explains, the doctrine of Christ's coming and rising from the dead. Likewise (Mat. 13. 19.), “When anyone hears the Word of the Kingdom” means the doctrine of the Kingdom taught by Christ. Again, the same Word is said (Acts 12. 24.) “to grow and to multiply”; this is easily understood of the evangelical doctrine, but is hard and strange if understood of God's voice or speech. In the same sense, the doctrine of devils does not mean words spoken by any devil, but the doctrine of pagans concerning demons and the phantoms they worshiped as gods. (1 Tim. 4.1.)\n\nConsidering these two meanings of the WORD OF GOD in Scripture, it is plain that in the latter sense, meaning the doctrine of the Christian religion, all Scripture is the Word of God; but not in the former sense. For example, although God spoke to Moses the words “I am the Lord your God, etc.” and the rest of the Ten Commandments, the preface, “God spoke these words and said,” must be understood as the words of the writer of the sacred history. The Word of God, when it means something he has spoken, is understood sometimes properly and sometimes metaphorically. Properly, it means the words he spoke to his prophets. Metaphorically, it means his wisdom, power, and eternal decree in making the world. In this sense the commands “Let there be light,” “Let there be a firmament,” “Let us make man,” etc. (Gen. 1.) are the Word of God. In the same sense it is said (John 1.3.), “All things were made by it, and without it nothing was made that was made”; and (Heb. 1.3.), “He upholds all things by the word of his Power,” meaning by the power of his Word, that is, by his Power; and (Heb. 11.3.), “The worlds were formed by the Word of God”; and there are many other passages to the same effect. Similarly, among the Latins, the name fate, properly meaning the spoken word, is used in this sense.\n\nSecondly, it means the effect of his Word: the very thing affirmed, commanded, threatened, or promised by his Word. Thus (Psalm 105.19.) Joseph is said to have been kept in prison “until his Word came”; that is, until what he had foretold (Gen. 40.13.) to Pharaoh's butler concerning the latter's restoration to office came to pass. For “his Word came” there means that the event itself came to pass. Likewise (1 King. 18.36.) Elijah says to God, “I have done all these your Words,” rather than “I have done all these things at your Word,” or command. And (Jer. 17.15.), “Where is the Word of the Lord?” stands for “Where is the evil he threatened?” And (Ezek. 12.28.), “None of my Words shall be delayed any more”: by Words are meant the things God promised his people. And in the New Testament (Mat. 24.35.), “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my Words shall not pass away” means that nothing I have promised or foretold will fail to come to pass. It is in this sense that St. John the Evangelist—and, I think, St. John alone—calls our Savior himself in the flesh “the Word of God,” as in Joh. 1.14., “the Word was made Flesh.” That is, the Word or promise that Christ would come into the world, “which in the beginning was with God,” was God's purpose as Father to send God the Son into the world to enlighten humanity about the way to eternal life; but it was not until then carried out and actually incarnated. Thus our Savior is called “the Word” not because he was the promise but because he was what was promised. Those who take this passage as an occasion to call him the Verb of God merely make the text more obscure. They might as well call him the Noun of God: for people understand a noun and a verb alike as nothing but a part of speech, an utterance or sound that neither affirms nor denies, commands nor promises, and has no substance, bodily or spiritual; therefore it cannot be said to be either God or man, whereas our Savior is both. And this Word, which St. John says in his Gospel was with God, is called (in his 1 Epistle, verse 1.) “the Word of Life,” and (verse 2.) “The eternal life, which was with the Father.” He can therefore be called the Word only in the same sense in which he is called Eternal Life: that is, “he who has procured eternal life for us” by coming in the flesh. Likewise (Apocalypse 19.13.) the apostle says of Christ, clothed in a garment dipped in blood, that his name is “the Word of God”; as though he had said that his name was “He who came according to God's purpose from the beginning, and according to his Word and promises delivered by the prophets.” There is nothing here about the incarnation of a word, but about the incarnation of God the Son, called the Word because his incarnation fulfilled the promise; just as the Holy Ghost is called the Promise. (Acts 1.4. Luke 24.49.)\n\nThere are also passages of Scripture in which the Word of God means words consonant with reason and equity, even when spoken neither by a prophet nor by a holy person. Pharaoh Necho was an idolater, yet the words he sent through messengers to advise the good King Josiah not to oppose his march against Carchemish are said to have come from the mouth of God; and Josiah, not heeding them, was killed in battle, as we read in 2 Chron. 35. vers. 21,22,23. It is true that when the same history is told in the first book of Esdras, Jeremiah, not Pharaoh, speaks these words to Josiah from the mouth of the Lord. But we must credit canonical Scripture, whatever is written in the Apocrypha.\n\nThe Word of God must also be taken to mean the dictates of reason and equity when Scripture says it is written in the human heart, as in Psalm 36.31. Jerem. 31.33. Deut.30.11, 14. and many similar places.\n\nThe name PROPHET in Scripture sometimes means a spokesman, one who speaks from God to man or from man to God; sometimes a predictor, one who foretells future things; and sometimes one who speaks incoherently, as distracted people do. It is most often used of someone speaking from God to the people. Thus Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others were prophets. And in this sense the High Priest was a prophet, for he alone entered the Sanctum Sanctorum to inquire of God and was to declare his answer to the people. Therefore, when Caiaphas said that it was expedient for one man to die for the people, St. John says (chap. 11.51.) that “He did not say this of himself, but being High Priest that year, he prophesied that one man should die for the nation.” Those who taught the people in Christian congregations (1 Cor. 14.3.) are also said to prophesy. In the same sense God says to Moses (Exod. 4.16.) concerning Aaron, “He shall be your spokesman to the people; he shall be a mouth for you, and you shall be to him in place of God.” What is called spokesman here is called prophet (chap.7.1.): “See,” says God, “I have made you a God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet.” In the sense of speaking from man to God, Abraham is called a prophet (Genes. 20.7.), where God speaks thus to Abimelech in a dream: “Now therefore restore the man his wife, for he is a prophet, and shall pray for you.” From this we may also gather that the name prophet may fittingly be given to those called to say public prayers for the congregation in Christian churches. In this same sense the prophets who came down from the high place (or hill of God) with a psaltery, a tambourine, a pipe, and a harp (1 Sam. 10.5,6.), and Saul among them (vers. 10.), are said to prophesy because in this manner they praised God publicly. In the same sense Miriam (Exod. 15.20.) is called a prophetess. So too it should be understood in (1 Cor. 11.4,5.), where St. Paul says, “Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered, etc., and every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered.” For prophesying here means nothing more than praising God in psalms and holy songs, which women could do in church although they were not permitted to address the congregation. And in this sense the pagan poets who composed hymns and other poems honoring their gods were called vates (prophets), as everyone familiar with the books of the Gentiles knows; and as is evident in (Tit. 1.12.), where St. Paul says that a prophet of the Cretans' own called them liars. This is not because St. Paul regarded their poets as prophets, but because he acknowledged that the word prophet was commonly used for people who celebrated the honor of God in verse.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 2\n\nWhen prophecy means prediction, or the foretelling of future contingencies, prophets include not only those who spoke on God's behalf and foretold to others what God had foretold to them, but also all the impostors who pretend, through the help of familiar spirits or through superstitious divination of past events from false causes, to foretell similar events to come. As I have already explained in the 12. chapter of this discourse, there are many kinds of these impostors. Among ordinary people, one chance event that can be twisted to suit their purpose gains them a greater reputation for prophecy than countless failures can take away. Prophecy is not an art, nor, when understood as prediction, a constant vocation; it is an extraordinary and temporary employment from God, most often of good people but sometimes also of the wicked. The woman of Endor, who is said to have had a familiar spirit and thereby to have raised a phantom of Samuel and foretold Saul's death, was not for that reason a prophetess. She had no knowledge by which she could raise such a phantom, nor does it appear that God commanded it to be raised; he merely directed her imposture to become a means of Saul's fear and discouragement, and consequently of the defeat in which he fell. As for incoherent speech, the Gentiles took it to be one kind of prophecy because the prophets of their oracles, intoxicated by a spirit or vapor from the cave of the Pythian oracle at Delphi, were for a time truly mad and spoke like madmen. Their unconnected words could be made to fit any event, in the same way that all bodies are said to be made from materia prima. I find it understood thus in Scripture as well (1 Sam. 18. 10.): “And the evil spirit came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the middle of the house.”\n\nAlthough prophet has so many meanings in Scripture, it most frequently denotes someone to whom God speaks immediately, telling the prophet what to say on his behalf to another person or to the people. This raises a question: in what manner does God speak to such a prophet? Can God properly be said to have a voice and language, some may ask, when he cannot properly be said to have a tongue or other organs like a human being? The prophet David reasons thus: “Shall he who made the eye not see? or he who made the ear not hear?” But this may be said not, as is commonly supposed, to signify God's nature, but to signify our intention to honor him. Seeing and hearing are honorable attributes and may be given to God to express his almighty power so far as our understanding can conceive it. If the statement were taken in its strict and proper sense, one could also argue from his creation of every part of the human body that he put those parts to the same uses we do—many of which are so unbecoming that ascribing them to him would be the greatest insult in the world. We should therefore understand God's speaking immediately to people as whatever way God makes his will known to them. The ways he does this are many and must be sought only in Holy Scripture. Although it is often said there that God spoke to one person or another without specifying the manner, many other passages do tell of the signs by which people recognized his presence and command; from these we may understand how he spoke to many of the rest.\n\nThe manner in which God spoke to Adam, Eve, Cain, and Noah is not stated, nor is the manner in which he spoke to Abraham before Abraham left his own country for Sichem in the land of Canaan. Then (Gen. 12.7.) God is said to have appeared to him. One way, then, in which God made his presence known was by apparition or vision. Again (Gen. 15.1.), the Word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision: something appeared as a sign of God's presence, like his messenger, to speak to him. Again, the Lord appeared to Abraham (Gen. 18. 1.) in the apparition of three angels; to Abimelech (Gen. 20. 3.) in a dream; to Lot (Gen. 19. 1.) through the apparition of two angels; to Hagar (Gen. 21. 17.) through the apparition of one angel; and again to Abraham (Gen. 22. 11.) through the apparition of a voice from heaven. He appeared (Gen. 26. 24.) to Isaac at night, that is, in sleep or in a dream; to Jacob (Gen. 18. 12.) in a dream—that is, as the text says, “Jacob dreamed that he saw a ladder, etc.”—and (Gen. 32. 1.) in a vision of angels; and to Moses (Exod. 3.2.) in the apparition of a flame of fire in the midst of a bush. After Moses, whenever the manner in which God spoke immediately to a person in the Old Testament is specified, he always spoke by vision or dream: to Gideon, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the rest of the prophets. He often did the same in the New Testament: to Joseph, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John the Evangelist in the Apocalypse.\n\nOnly to Moses did he speak in a more extraordinary manner on Mount Sinai and in the Tabernacle, and to the High Priest in the Tabernacle and in the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Temple. But Moses, and the High Priests after him, were prophets of higher standing and greater favor with God. God himself declares expressly that he spoke to other prophets in dreams and visions, but to his servant Moses as a man speaks to his friend. These are his words (Numb. 12. 6,7,8.): “If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known to him in a vision, and will speak to him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all my house; with him I will speak mouth to mouth, plainly, not in dark sayings; and he shall behold the likeness of the Lord.” And (Exod. 33. 11.), “The Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” Yet even God's speech to Moses was mediated by an angel or angels, as is expressly shown in Acts 7. ver. 35. and 53. and Gal. 3. 19.; therefore it was a vision, though a clearer one than those given to other prophets. Correspondingly, when God says (Deut. 13. 1.), “If there arises among you a prophet, or dreamer of dreams,” the latter expression merely interprets the former. And (Joel 2. 28.), “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions”: here again prophecy is explained through dreams and visions. Likewise God spoke to Solomon in promising him wisdom, riches, and honor; for the text says (1 Kings 3. 15.), “And Solomon awoke, and behold it was a dream.” Thus, in general, the extraordinary prophets of the Old Testament learned of the Word of God only from their dreams or visions: the images they experienced in sleep or ecstasy. In every true prophet these images were supernatural; in false prophets they were either natural or fabricated.\n\nThese same prophets were nevertheless said to speak by the Spirit; as (Zach. 7. 12.), where the prophet says of the Jews, “They made their hearts hard as adamant, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of Hosts sent in his Spirit by the former prophets.” Clearly speaking by the Spirit, or inspiration, was not a particular way in which God spoke distinct from vision, when those said to speak by the Spirit were extraordinary prophets who required a particular commission—or, equivalently, a new dream or vision—for every new message.\n\nTo Prophets of Perpetual Calling, and Supreme, God Spoke in the Old Testament from the Mercy Seat, in a Manner Not Explained in Scripture. Of those who were prophets by a perpetual calling in the Old Testament, some were supreme and some subordinate. First Moses was supreme, and after him each High Priest in his own time, as long as the priesthood was royal. After the Jewish people rejected God's reign over them, those kings who submitted to God's government were also his chief prophets, and the High Priest's office became ministerial. When God was to be consulted, the priests put on their sacred vestments and inquired of the Lord as the king commanded them, and were removed from office when the king thought fit. For King Saul (1 Sam. 13. 9.) ordered the burnt offering to be brought, and (1 Sam. 14. 18.) ordered the priest to bring the Ark near him, and then (ver. 19.) to leave it alone because he saw an advantage over his enemies. In the same chapter Saul seeks God's counsel. Likewise King David, after his anointing but before he possessed the Kingdom, is said to “inquire of the Lord” (1 Sam. 23. 2.) whether he should fight the Philistines at Keilah; and (verse 10.) David commands the priest to bring him the ephod to inquire whether he should remain in Keilah. And King Solomon (1 Kings 2. 27.) took the priesthood from Abiathar and gave it (verse 35.) to Zadoc. Therefore Moses, the High Priests, and the pious kings who inquired of God on all extraordinary occasions how they should act or what the outcome would be, were all Sovereign Prophets. But the manner in which God spoke to them is not clear. To say that when Moses went up to God on Mount Sinai he had a dream or vision such as other prophets had contradicts the distinction God made between Moses and other prophets in Numb. 12. 6,7,8. To say God spoke or appeared as he is in his own nature is to deny his infinity, invisibility, and incomprehensibility. To say he spoke through inspiration or the infusion of the Holy Spirit, meaning by Holy Spirit the Deity, is to make Moses equal to Christ, in whom alone, as St. Paul says (Col. 2.9.), the Godhead dwells bodily. Finally, to say he spoke through the Holy Spirit understood as the graces or gifts of the Holy Spirit is to attribute nothing supernatural to him. For God disposes people toward piety, justice, mercy, truth, faith, and every sort of moral and intellectual virtue through instruction, example, and various natural, ordinary occasions.\n\nAnd just as these ways cannot be applied to God's speech to Moses on Mount Sinai, neither can they be applied to his speech to the High Priests from the Mercy Seat. Therefore the manner in which God spoke to those Sovereign Prophets of the Old Testament whose office was to consult him is unintelligible. In the time of the New Testament there was no Sovereign Prophet but our Savior, who was both the God who spoke and the prophet to whom he spoke.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 3\n\nTo Prophets of Perpetual Calling, but Subordinate, God Spoke by the Spirit. For subordinate prophets with a perpetual calling, I find no passage proving that God spoke to them supernaturally, but only that he spoke in the way he naturally inclines other Christian people toward piety, belief, righteousness, and other virtues. Although this way consists in constitution, instruction, education, and the opportunities and inducements people have for Christian virtues, it is rightly attributed to the operation of the Spirit of God, or Holy Spirit (which in our language we call the Holy Ghost); for every good inclination is God's work. But these operations are not always supernatural. Therefore, when a prophet is said to speak in the Spirit, or by the Spirit of God, we should understand only that he speaks according to God's will as declared by the supreme prophet. For the most common meaning of spirit is a person's intention, mind, or disposition.\n\nIn Moses' time there were seventy men besides Moses who prophesied in the camp of the Israelites. The manner in which God spoke to them is described in Numbers 11, verse 25: “The Lord came down in a cloud, and spoke to Moses, and took of the Spirit that was upon him, and gave it to the seventy elders. And it came to pass, when the Spirit rested upon them, they prophesied, and did not cease.” This shows, first, that their prophesying to the people served and was subordinate to Moses' prophesying, since God took of Moses' Spirit to place upon them. Thus they prophesied as Moses wanted them to; otherwise they would not have been permitted to prophesy at all. For (verse 27.) a complaint against them was brought to Moses, and Joshua wanted Moses to forbid them. He did not, but told Joshua, “Do not be jealous on my behalf.” Secondly, the Spirit of God in this passage means nothing but the mind and disposition to obey and assist Moses in administering the government. For if it meant that the substantial Spirit of God, that is, the divine nature, had been breathed into them, they would have possessed it no less fully than Christ himself, in whom alone the Spirit of God dwelt bodily. It therefore means God's gift and grace, directing them to cooperate with Moses, from whom their spirit was derived. And it appears (verse 16.) that they were people Moses himself was to appoint as elders and officers of the people: “Gather to me seventy men, whom you know to be elders and officers of the people.” Here “you know” means “you appoint” or “you have appointed to such offices.” For we are told earlier (Exod. 18.) that Moses, following the advice of his father-in-law Jethro, appointed as judges and officers over the people persons who feared God; and those seventy were selected from them. By putting Moses' spirit upon them, God inclined them to help Moses administer the Kingdom. In this sense the Spirit of God is said (1 Sam. 16. 13, 14.) to have come upon David and left Saul immediately after David was anointed: God gave his graces to the man he chose to govern his people and took them from the man he rejected. The Spirit therefore means an inclination to God's service, not a supernatural revelation.\n\nGod also often spoke through the results of lots, cast under the direction of those he had placed in authority over his people. Thus we read that, through the lots Saul ordered to be drawn (1 Sam. 14. 43.), God revealed Jonathan's offense of eating a honeycomb contrary to the oath the people had taken. And (Josh. 18. 10.) God divided the land of Canaan among the Israelites through the “lots that Joshua cast before the Lord in Shiloh.” It seems that God revealed Achan's crime in the same way (Joshua 7.16., etc.). These are the ways God declared his will in the Old Testament.\n\nHe used all these ways in the New Testament as well: he spoke to the Virgin Mary through a vision of an angel; to Joseph in a dream; to Paul on the road to Damascus in a vision of our Savior; to Peter in the vision of a sheet let down from heaven containing various kinds of flesh, from clean and unclean animals, and in prison through a vision of an angel; to all the apostles and writers of the New Testament through the graces of his Spirit; and again to the apostles, when they chose Matthias to take the place of Judas Iscariot, through a lot.\n\nSince, then, all prophecy presupposes a vision or dream (which, when natural, are the same thing), or some special gift of God so rarely seen in human beings that its appearance inspires wonder; and since both such gifts and even the most extraordinary dreams and visions may proceed from God not only through his immediate, supernatural operation but also through his natural operation and the mediation of secondary causes, reason and judgment are needed to distinguish natural from supernatural gifts and natural from supernatural visions or dreams. Consequently, people must be very circumspect and cautious about obeying anyone who claims to be a prophet and, in God's name, requires them to obey God in what he calls the path to happiness. For whoever claims to teach people the way to so great a happiness claims to govern them—that is, to rule and reign over them. As all people naturally desire such power, his claim deserves suspicion of ambition and imposture, and everyone should examine and test it before yielding obedience—unless they have already yielded it in establishing a Common-wealth, as when the prophet is the civil Sovereign or is authorized by the civil Sovereign. If everyone among the people were not allowed to examine prophets and spirits in this way, it would have been pointless to set out the marks by which each person could distinguish whom they should follow from whom they should not. Since such marks are provided (Deut. 13. 1, etc.) for recognizing a prophet, and (1 John 4.1. etc.) for recognizing a spirit; since the Old Testament contains so much prophesying and the New Testament so much preaching against prophets; and since false prophets ordinarily far outnumber true ones, everyone must beware of obeying their directions at their own peril. That there were many more false prophets than true ones appears, first, from Ahab's consultation (1 Kings 12.) of four hundred prophets, all of them false impostors except Michaiah alone. Shortly before the Captivity the prophets were generally liars. “The prophets,” says the Lord through Jerem. cha. 14. verse 14., “prophesy lies in my name. I did not send them, neither have I commanded them nor spoken to them; they prophesy to you a false vision, a worthless thing, and the deceit of their heart.” Accordingly, God commanded the people through the prophet Jeremiah (chap. 23. 16.) not to obey them: “Thus says the Lord of Hosts, do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you. They make you vain; they speak a vision of their own heart, and not from the mouth of the Lord.”\n\nSince, then, in Old Testament times there were such quarrels among visionary prophets, one challenging another and asking, “When did the Spirit depart from me to go to you?” as Michaiah and the other four hundred did; since they called one another liars, as in Jerem. 14.14.; and since there are such controversies today among the spiritual prophets of the New Testament, everyone was then, and is now, obliged to use natural reason to apply to all prophecy the rules God has given us for distinguishing the true from the false. In the Old Testament one rule was that the doctrine should conform to what Moses, the Sovereign Prophet, had taught them; the other was the miraculous power to foretell what God would bring to pass, as I have already shown from Deut. 13. 1. etc. In the New Testament there was only one mark: preaching the doctrine that Jesus Is the Christ, that is, the King of the Jews promised in the Old Testament. Whoever denied that article was a false prophet, whatever miracles he seemed to work; and whoever taught it was a true prophet. For St. John (1 Epist, 4. 2, etc.), speaking expressly of the means of testing spirits to see whether they are of God, after telling his readers that false prophets would arise, says: “By this you know the Spirit of God. Every Spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God”; that is, is approved and recognized as a prophet of God—not because confessing, professing, or preaching that Jesus is the Christ makes him a godly man or one of the elect, but because it makes him an acknowledged prophet. For God sometimes speaks through prophets whose persons he has not accepted, as he did through Balaam, and as he foretold Saul's death through the witch of Endor. Again, in the next verse: “Every Spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of Christ. And this is the Spirit of Antichrist.” Thus the rule holds on both sides: whoever preaches that the Messiah has already come in the person of Jesus is a true prophet; whoever denies his coming and looks for him in a future impostor who will falsely claim that honor is a false one, and the apostle properly calls that impostor Antichrist. Everyone should therefore consider who is the Sovereign Prophet: that is, who is God's vice-regent on earth and, immediately under God, has authority to govern Christian people. They should take as their rule the doctrine he commands to be taught in God's name, and thereby examine and test the truth of any doctrines that would-be prophets advance, whether with miracles or without them. If they find the doctrines contrary to that rule, they should act as those did who came to Moses complaining that some were prophesying in the camp without an authority they could be sure of, and leave it to the Sovereign, as those people left it to Moses, to uphold or forbid the prophets as he sees cause. If he disavows them, they must no longer obey their voice; if he approves them, they must obey them as people to whom God has given a share of their Sovereign's Spirit. For when Christians do not take their Christian Sovereign to be God's prophet, they must either take their own dreams for the prophecy by which they intend to be governed, and the swelling of their own hearts for the Spirit of God; or else let themselves be led by some foreign prince, or by fellow subjects who can, through slander of the government, bewitch them into rebellion, with no miracle to confirm their calling beyond occasional extraordinary success and impunity. By this means they destroy all laws, divine and human, and reduce every order, government, and society to the first chaos of violence and civil war.\n\nCHAPTER XXXVII. OF MIRACLES, AND THEIR USE\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVII, 1\n\nOF MIRACLES, AND THEIR USE\n\nMiracles signify the marvelous works of God; they are therefore also called wonders. And because they are performed for the most part to signify his command, on occasions when without them people are apt to doubt, following their private natural reasoning, what he has commanded and what he has not, they are commonly called signs in Holy Scripture, in the same sense as the Latins call them Ostenta and Portenta: things that show and foretell what the Almighty is about to bring to pass.\n\nTo understand, then, what a miracle is, we must first understand which works people wonder at and call marvelous. Only two things cause people to wonder at an event. One is that it is strange: nothing like it has ever happened, or has happened only very rarely. The other is that, when it happens, we cannot imagine its having been brought about by natural means, but only by the immediate hand of God. Yet when we see a possible natural cause of it, however rarely anything like it has happened, or when anything like it has often happened, however impossible it may be to imagine a natural means for it, we cease to wonder or regard it as a miracle.\n\nThus, if a horse or cow should speak, it would be a miracle: the thing would be strange and its natural cause hard to imagine. So too would the sight of nature taking some strange turn in producing a new form of living creature. But when a man or another animal begets its like, though we know no more how that happens than we know how the other thing happens, its being usual makes it no miracle. Likewise, if a man were transformed into a stone or a pillar, it would be a miracle because it is strange; but if a piece of wood were so transformed, the frequency with which we see it happen makes it no miracle. Yet we know no more by what operation of God the one is accomplished than the other.\n\nThe first rainbow ever seen was a miracle, because it was the first and therefore strange; and it served as a sign from God, set in heaven to assure his people that there would be no more universal destruction of the world by water. But today, because rainbows are frequent, they are miracles neither to those who know their natural causes nor to those who do not. Again, human skill produces many rare works; yet when we know they are made by such skill, and thereby know the means by which they are made, we do not count them miracles. They are made not by the immediate hand of God but through human industry.\n\nFurthermore, since marveling and wonder depend on the knowledge and experience with which people are endowed, some more and some less, the same thing may be a miracle to one person and not to another. Hence ignorant and superstitious people make great wonders of works that others know to proceed from nature—the ordinary, not the immediate, work of God—and do not marvel at all. Thus the common people have taken eclipses of the sun and moon for supernatural works, though others, knowing their natural causes, could have foretold the very hour at which they would occur. Or a man, through conspiracy and secret intelligence, may learn the private actions of an ignorant, unwary person and then tell that person what he has done in the past. To the person so addressed it seems miraculous; but among wise and cautious people such miracles cannot readily be performed.\n\nAgain, it belongs to the nature of a miracle that it be performed to win credibility for God's messengers, ministers, and prophets, so that people may know they have been called, sent, and employed by God, and thus be more inclined to obey them. Accordingly, although the creation of the world and the subsequent destruction of all living creatures in the universal flood were marvelous works, they are not customarily called miracles, for they were not done to win credibility for any prophet or other minister of God. However marvelous a work may be, what inspires wonder is not that it could be done—for people naturally believe the Almighty can do all things—but that he does it at the prayer or word of a man. God's works in Egypt by the hand of Moses, however, were miracles properly so called, for their purpose was to persuade the people of Israel that Moses had come to them not to advance his own interests but as one sent by God. Thus after God had commanded him to deliver the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, when Moses said (Exod 4.1. &c.), “They will not believe me, but will say, the Lord has not appeared to me,” God gave him power to turn the rod in his hand into a serpent and then back into a rod; to put his hand into his bosom and make it leprous, then draw it out and make it whole again. This was to make the children of Israel believe, as verse 5. says, that the God of their fathers had appeared to him. If that were not enough, God gave him power to turn their waters into blood. And when Moses performed these miracles before the people, it is said (verse 41.) that “they believed him.” Nevertheless, for fear of Pharaoh they did not yet dare to obey him. Thus all the other works done to plague Pharaoh and the Egyptians tended to make the Israelites believe in Moses, and were miracles properly so called. Likewise, if we consider all the miracles performed by the hand of Moses and all the other prophets down to the Captivity, and those of our Savior and his apostles afterward, we shall find that their aim was always to produce or confirm belief that these men came not of their own initiative but were sent by God. We may further observe in Scripture that miracles were intended to produce belief not universally in all people, elect and reprobate alike, but only in the elect: those whom God had determined should become his subjects. For the miraculous plagues of Egypt were not intended to convert Pharaoh. God had told Moses beforehand that he would harden Pharaoh's heart so that he would not let the people go; and when Pharaoh at last let them go, he was compelled by the plagues, not persuaded by the miracles. So too it is written of our Savior (Mat. 13. 58.) that he performed few miracles in his own country because of their unbelief; and in (Mark 6.5.), instead of “he performed few,” it says “he could perform none.” This was not for lack of power—to say so would be blasphemy against God—nor because miracles were not intended to convert unbelievers to Christ. The aim of all the miracles of Moses, the prophets, our Savior, and his apostles was to add people to the Church. Rather, their miracles were intended to add to the Church not all people but those who would be saved: those whom God had elected. Since, therefore, our Savior was sent by his Father, he could not use his power to convert those whom his Father had rejected. Those who interpret this passage of St. Mark by saying that “He could not” stands for “He would not” do so without precedent in Greek (where “would not” is sometimes used for “could not” of inanimate things, which have no will, but “could not” is never used for “would not”). They thereby place a stumbling block before weak Christians, as though Christ could perform miracles only among the credulous.\n\nFrom what I have set out here about the nature and use of a miracle, we may define it thus: “A MIRACLE is a work of God, apart from his operation through the course of nature established at the Creation, performed to make manifest to his elect the mission of an extraordinary minister for their salvation.”\n\nAnd from this definition we may infer, first, that in every miracle the work done is not the effect of any power in the prophet, because it is the effect of the immediate hand of God: God has performed it without using the prophet as a subordinate cause.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVII, 2\n\nSecond, no devil, angel, or other created spirit can perform a miracle. For such a thing must be done either through some natural science or through incantation, that is, through the power of words. If enchanters do it by their own independent power, there exists a power that does not proceed from God, which everyone denies. And if they do it by a power given to them, the work does not come from the immediate hand of God, but is natural, and consequently no miracle.\n\nThere are passages of Scripture that seem to attribute to certain arts of magic and incantation a power to perform wonders equal to some of the immediate miracles performed by God himself. For example, after the rod of Moses, cast on the ground, became a serpent, we read (Exod. 7. 11.) that “the magicians of Egypt did the same by their enchantments.” And after Moses had turned the water of the Egyptian streams, rivers, ponds, and pools to blood, (Exod. 7. 22.) “the magicians of Egypt did likewise with their enchantments.” And after Moses, by God's power, brought frogs upon the land, (Exod. 8. 7.) “the magicians also did the same with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt.” Will a person not be inclined to attribute miracles to enchantments—that is, to the effectiveness of the sound of words—and think this well proved by these and similar passages? Yet nowhere does Scripture tell us what an enchantment is. If enchantment is not, as many suppose, the production of strange effects by spells and words, but imposture and deception brought about by ordinary means—so far from supernatural that impostors need not even study natural causes, but only exploit the ordinary ignorance, stupidity, and superstition of mankind—then passages that seem to countenance the power of magic, witchcraft, and enchantment must have a different sense from the one they appear at first sight to bear.\n\nFor it is evident enough that words have no effect except on those who understand them, and even then have no effect other than to signify the speaker's intentions or passions and thereby produce hope, fear, or other passions or conceptions in the hearer. Therefore, when a rod seems a serpent, or water seems blood, or any other miracle seems to have been done by enchantment, if it is not for the edification of God's people, neither the rod nor the water nor anything else has been enchanted—that is, acted on by words. It is the spectator who has been acted on. Thus the whole miracle consists in the enchanter's having deceived someone, which is no miracle but a very easy thing to do.\n\nFor such is people's general ignorance and susceptibility to error, especially among those who know little about natural causes or about human nature and interests, that countless easy tricks can deceive them. Before the science of the motions of the stars was known, what reputation for miraculous power might a man have gained by telling people that the sun would darken at a particular hour or on a particular day? If the manipulation of cups and other trinkets by a juggler were not now commonly practiced, he would be thought to work his wonders at least by the power of the devil. A man who has practiced speaking while drawing in his breath (people of this sort were called Ventriloqui in ancient times), making the weakness of his voice seem to arise not from a feeble impulse of the organs of speech but from a distance, can make very many people believe that whatever he chooses to say to them is a voice from heaven. It is not difficult, either, for a crafty man who has inquired into the secrets and familiar confidences that people ordinarily share with one another concerning their past actions and adventures to repeat those accounts to them. Yet many gain in this way a reputation as conjurers. It would take too long to enumerate the various sorts of people whom the Greeks called Thaumaturgi, meaning workers of wonders; yet all that these people do they accomplish by their own dexterity alone. If we consider impostures performed by accomplices, however, nothing is so impossible to perform that it is impossible to make people believe it has been performed. Two men conspiring, one to appear lame and the other to cure him with a charm, will deceive many; but many conspiring—one to appear lame, another to cure him, and all the rest to bear witness—will deceive many more.\n\nAgainst this human readiness to put too hasty a faith in alleged miracles, there can be no better precaution, nor, I think, any other, than the one God prescribed first through Moses, as I said in the preceding chapter, at the beginning of the 13. and the end of the 18. chapter of Deuteronomy: we must not accept as prophets those who teach a religion other than the one established by God's lieutenant (who at that time was Moses), nor anyone whose prediction we do not see come to pass, even if he teaches the same religion. Therefore Moses in his time, Aaron and his successors in theirs, and the sovereign governor of God's people next under God himself—that is, the head of the Church in every age—must be consulted about what doctrine he has established before we give credence to an alleged miracle or prophet. Having done so, we must both see the supposed miracle performed and use every possible means to consider whether it was really performed; and not only that, but whether it is something no one could do by natural power, requiring the immediate hand of God. In this too we must have recourse to God's lieutenant, to whom in all doubtful cases we have submitted our private judgments. For example, if a man claims that after certain words are spoken over a piece of bread God immediately makes it no longer bread, but a God, or a man, or both, and yet it still looks exactly as much like bread as ever, no one has reason to think that this has really happened, or consequently to fear him, until he inquires of God through God's vicar or lieutenant whether it has happened or not. If the lieutenant says no, then what Moses says follows (Deut. 18. 22.): “he has spoken presumptuously; you shall not fear him.” If he says it has happened, he must not be contradicted. Likewise, if we do not see a miracle but only hear of one, we must consult the lawful Church—that is, its lawful head—about how far to trust those who report it. This is chiefly the situation of those who now live under Christian Sovereigns. For in these times I know no one who has ever seen a wondrous work performed by a man's charm, word, or prayer that a person endowed with even moderate reason would consider supernatural. The question is no longer whether something we see performed is a miracle; it is whether a miracle we hear or read about was a real work rather than the act of a tongue or a pen—or, plainly, whether the report is true or a lie. In deciding this question, each of us must make the judge not our own private reason or conscience but the public reason: the reason of God's supreme lieutenant. Indeed, we have already made him judge if we have given him sovereign power to do all that is necessary for our peace and defense. A private person always remains free, since thought is free, to believe or disbelieve inwardly acts reported as miracles, according to his judgment of what benefit those who claim or support them may gain from people's belief, and hence whether they are miracles or lies. But when it comes to professing that faith, private reason must submit to public reason—that is, to God's lieutenant. Who this lieutenant of God and head of the Church is will be considered in its proper place below.\n\nCHAPTER XXXVIII. OF THE MEANING IN SCRIPTURE OF ETERNAL LIFE, HELL, SALVATION, THE WORLD TO COME, AND REDEMPTION\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 1\n\nOF THE MEANING IN SCRIPTURE OF ETERNAL LIFE, HELL, SALVATION, THE WORLD TO COME, AND REDEMPTION\n\nThe preservation of civil society depends on justice, and justice on the power of life and death, and of other lesser rewards and punishments, held by those who have the sovereignty of the Common-wealth. Thus a Common-wealth cannot endure where anyone other than the Sovereign has the power to give a reward greater than life or inflict a punishment greater than death. Since eternal life is a greater reward than our present life, and eternal torment a greater punishment than natural death, it is worth careful consideration by all who wish to avoid the calamities of disorder and civil war by obeying authority what Holy Scripture means by eternal life and eternal torment; for what offenses, committed against whom, people are to be eternally tormented; and for what deeds they are to obtain eternal life.\n\nFirst we find that Adam was created in such a condition that, had he not broken God's command, he would have enjoyed life forever in the Paradise of Eden. For there stood the tree of life, from which he was allowed to eat as long as he refrained from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which he was forbidden to eat. Thus, as soon as he ate from the latter tree, God drove him from Paradise “lest he should put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and live forever” (Gen. 3. 22.). From this it seems to me—with submission, both here and in all questions whose resolution depends on Scripture, to the interpretation of the Bible authorized by the Common-wealth of which I am a subject—that if Adam had not sinned he would have had eternal life on earth; and that mortality came upon him and his descendants through his first sin. It was not actual death that then came upon him, for had he died then he could never have had children; instead, he lived long afterward and saw numerous descendants before he died. But where it is said, “On the day you eat of it, you shall surely die,” what is meant must be his mortality and the certainty of his death. Since eternal life was lost by Adam's forfeiture through sin, whoever canceled that forfeiture would thereby recover that life. Now Jesus Christ has made satisfaction for the sins of all who believe in him, and has therefore restored to all believers the ETERNAL LIFE lost through Adam's sin. In this sense the comparison made by St. Paul holds (Rom. 5.18, 19.): “As by the offense of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men to justification of life.” He says it again more clearly (1 Cor. 15.21,22): “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.”\n\nAs to the place where people shall enjoy the eternal life Christ has obtained for them, the passages just cited seem to put it on earth. For if in Adam all die—that is, forfeit Paradise and eternal life on earth—and likewise in Christ all shall be made alive, then all shall be made to live on earth; otherwise the comparison would not be apt. The Psalmist appears to agree (Psal. 133.3.): “Upon Zion God commanded the blessing, even life forevermore”; for Zion is in Jerusalem, on earth. So too does St. John (Rev. 2.7.): “To him that overcomes I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.” This was the tree of Adam's eternal life, but his life was to have been on earth. The same point seems again confirmed by St. John (Rev. 21.2.), where he says: “I John saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband”; and again, to the same effect, in v. 10. It is as though he said that at Christ's return the new Jerusalem, the Paradise of God, would descend from heaven to God's people, not that they would ascend to it from earth. Nor does this differ from what the two men in white clothing—that is, the two angels—said to the apostles as they watched Christ ascend (Acts 1.11.): “This same Jesus, who is taken up from you into heaven, shall come as you have seen him go up into heaven.” It sounds as though they said that he would descend to govern them here eternally under his Father, not carry them up to be governed by him in heaven. This accords with the restoration of the Kingdom of God instituted under Moses, which was a political government of the Jews on earth. Again, our Savior's saying (Mat. 22.30.) that “in the Resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” describes an eternal life resembling what we lost in Adam with regard to marriage. For since Adam and Eve, had they not sinned, would have lived eternally on earth as individuals, it is plain that they would not have gone on continually procreating. If immortal people reproduced as mankind does now, the earth would soon be unable to give them room to stand. The Jews who asked our Savior, concerning a woman who had married many brothers, whose wife she would be in the Resurrection did not know the consequences of immortality: there will be no procreation and therefore no marriage, any more than there is marriage or procreation among the angels. The comparison between the eternal life Adam lost and that our Savior recovered by his victory over death holds also in this: just as Adam lost eternal life through his sin yet lived for some time afterward, so the faithful Christian has recovered eternal life through Christ's Passion though he dies a natural death and remains dead for a time, namely until the Resurrection. As death is reckoned from Adam's condemnation, not its execution, so life is reckoned from the absolution, not the Resurrection, of those elected in Christ.\n\nThat the place where people are to live eternally after the Resurrection is the heavens—meaning those parts of the world most remote from earth, where the stars are, or beyond them in another, higher heaven called Caelum Empyreum, for which there is neither mention in Scripture nor basis in reason—is not readily drawn from any passage I can find. By the Kingdom of Heaven is meant the Kingdom of the King who dwells in heaven; and his Kingdom was the people of Israel, whom he ruled through the prophets, his lieutenants: first Moses, then Eleazar and the sovereign priests, until in Samuel's day they rebelled and demanded a mortal king after the custom of other nations. And when our Savior Christ, through the preaching of his ministers, has persuaded the Jews to return and called the Gentiles to obey him, there shall be a new Kingdom of Heaven, because our King shall then be God, whose throne is heaven. Yet nothing evident in Scripture requires humanity to ascend for its happiness above God's footstool, the earth. On the contrary, we find it written (John 3.13.) that “no man has ascended into heaven, but he who came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven.” I observe in passing that these words, unlike those immediately preceding them, are not our Savior's but St. John's own; for Christ was then not in heaven but on earth. Something similar is said of David (Acts 2.34.), where St. Peter, seeking to prove Christ's Ascension, cites the Psalmist's words (Psal. 16.10.), “You will not leave my soul in Hell, nor suffer your Holy One to see corruption.” He says they were spoken not of David but of Christ and adds this reason as proof: “For David has not ascended into heaven.” A person might readily answer that although their bodies would not ascend until the general day of Judgment, their souls went to heaven as soon as they departed from their bodies. This seems also to be supported by our Savior's words (Luke 20.37,38.) when, proving the Resurrection from Moses' words, he says: “That the dead are raised, even Moses showed, at the bush, when he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for they all live to him.” But if these words are understood only of the immortality of the soul, they do not prove what our Savior intended to prove: the Resurrection of the body, that is, the immortality of the human being. Our Savior therefore means that those patriarchs were immortal not through a property of the essence and nature of mankind but through the will of God, who graciously chose to bestow eternal life on the faithful. And although at that time the patriarchs and many other faithful people were dead, they lived to God, as the passage says: they were written in the Book of Life among those absolved of their sins and appointed to eternal life at the Resurrection. That the human soul is by its own nature eternal, and a living creature independent of the body, or that any mere human being is immortal except through the Resurrection on the last day (apart from Enos and Elias), is a doctrine not apparent in Scripture. The whole 14. chapter of Job, spoken by Job himself and not by his friends, laments this natural mortality, without contradicting immortality at the Resurrection. “There is hope for a tree,” he says (verse 7.), “if it is cut down. Though its root grows old and its stump dies in the ground, yet when it scents the water it will bud and put forth boughs like a plant. But man dies and wastes away; man gives up the ghost, and where is he?” And (verse 12.): “man lies down, and does not rise until the heavens are no more.” When will the heavens be no more? St. Peter tells us: at the general Resurrection. For in his 2. Epistle, 3. chapter, 7. verse, he says “the heavens and the earth that now exist are reserved for fire against the day of Judgment and the destruction of ungodly people”; and (verse 12.): “looking for and hastening the coming of God, in which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, according to the promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.” Thus when Job says that man does not rise until the heavens are no more, it is as though he said that immortal life—and soul and life usually signify the same thing in Scripture—does not begin in man until the Resurrection and day of Judgment. Its cause is not his nature as a species or his birth, but the Promise. For St. Peter does not say, “We look for new heavens and a new earth from Nature,” but from Promise.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 2\n\nLastly, it has already been proved from several clear passages of Scripture in the 35. chapter of this book that the Kingdom of God is a civil Common-wealth in which God himself is Sovereign, first by virtue of the Old Covenant and afterward by the New, and in which he reigns through his vicar or lieutenant. Those same passages therefore also prove that after our Savior comes again in majesty and glory to reign in fact and forever, the Kingdom of God will be on earth. But because this doctrine, though proved from many passages of Scripture that are far from obscure, will strike most people as novel, I merely propose it. I maintain nothing about this or any other paradox of religion, but await the outcome of that contest of arms over authority, not yet decided among my countrymen: the authority by which all doctrines are to be approved or rejected, and whose commands in speech and writing must be obeyed by everyone who expects protection under its laws, whatever private opinions people may hold. For doctrines concerning the Kingdom of God have too great an influence on the kingdoms of men to be determined by anyone but those who hold sovereign power under God.\n\nJust as the Kingdom of God and eternal life appear in Scripture to have their place on earth, so too do God's enemies and their torments after Judgment. The place where all remain until the Resurrection who have been buried or swallowed by the earth is commonly called in Scripture by words meaning under the ground, generally rendered Infernus and Inferni by the Latins, and Hades by the Greeks: a place where people cannot see, encompassing the grave as well as any deeper place. But the location of the damned after the Resurrection is not determined by any description of position in either the Old or the New Testament, but only by the company they keep. They are said to be where the wicked whom God destroyed from the face of the earth in former times by extraordinary and miraculous means are: for example, in Inferno, in Tartarus, or in the bottomless pit, because Corah, Dathan, and Abirom were swallowed alive by the earth. This does not mean that the writers of Scripture would have us believe that within the globe of the earth, which is not only finite but of negligible size compared with the height of the stars, there could be a bottomless pit: a hole of infinite depth such as the Greeks in their demonology, their doctrine concerning demons, and the Romans after them called Tartarus, of which Virgil says,\n\nTwice as far it plunges down beneath the shades\n\nAs the gaze rises to heaven's ethereal Olympus:\n\nFor the proportion of earth to heaven cannot accommodate such a thing. Rather, we are to believe that the damned are there, wherever those people are on whom God inflicted that exemplary punishment.\n\nAgain, those mighty people of the earth who lived in Noah's day before the flood—called heroes by the Greeks and giants by Scripture, both of which say they were conceived by the union of the children of God with the children of men—were destroyed in the general flood for their wicked lives. Thus the place of the damned is sometimes identified by the company of those dead giants, as in Proverbs 21.16.: “The man who wanders from the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the giants”; and Job 26.5.: “Behold, the giants groan under the water, and those who dwell with them.” Here the place of the damned is under water. And Isaiah 14.9.: “Hell is stirred to meet you”—that is, the king of Babylon—“and will rouse the giants for you.” Here again, if the meaning is literal, the place of the damned is under water.\n\nThird, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed for their wickedness with fire and brimstone by the extraordinary wrath of God, and the surrounding country became with them a stinking bituminous lake. Therefore the place of the damned is sometimes expressed by fire and a fiery lake, as in the Apocalypse, ch.21.8.: “But the fearful, unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.” Thus it is clear that hellfire, here expressed in a metaphor drawn from the real fire of Sodom, signifies no particular kind or location of torment but must be understood generally as destruction. So it is in the 20. chapter, at the 14. verse, where “Death and Hell were cast into the lake of fire”: that is, they were abolished and destroyed, as though after the day of Judgment there would be no more dying and no more descent into Hell, or Hades (the word from which our word Hell may perhaps be derived), which is the same as no more dying.\n\nFourth, from the plague of darkness inflicted on the Egyptians, of which it is written (Exod. 10.23.), “They did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days; but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings,” the place of the wicked after Judgment is called outer darkness, or, as in the original, darkness outside. So it is expressed in Mat. 22.13., where the king commands his servants “to bind hand and foot the man who did not have on his wedding garment, and to cast him out,” Eis To Skotos To Exoteron, external darkness, or darkness outside. Although this is translated “utter darkness,” it does not signify how great the darkness is but where it is to be: outside the dwelling place of God's elect.\n\nLastly, there was a place near Jerusalem called the Valley of the Children of Hinnon, part of which was called Tophet. There the Jews had committed the most grievous idolatry, sacrificing their children to the idol Moloch; there God had also afflicted his enemies with the most grievous punishments; and there Josias had burned the priests of Moloch upon their own altars, as appears at length in the 2 of Kings, chap. 23. The place afterward served to receive the refuse and garbage carried out of the city, and fires were lit there from time to time to cleanse the air and remove the stench of carrion. From this abominable place the Jews thereafter used the name Gehenna, or Valley of Hinnon, for the place of the damned. And Gehenna is the word now commonly translated HELL; from the fires that burned there from time to time we derive the idea of everlasting and unquenchable fire.\n\nNow nobody interprets Scripture to mean that after the day of Judgment all the wicked will be punished forever in the Valley of Hinnon, or that they will rise again only to remain forever beneath the ground or water, or that after the Resurrection they will no longer see one another or move from place to place. It follows, necessarily, I think, that what is said of hellfire is metaphorical; and so we must seek a literal sense, since every metaphor has some real ground that can be expressed in literal words, both for the place of Hell and for the nature of its torments and tormentors.\n\nFirst, the tormentors' nature and properties are conveyed exactly and literally by the names the Enemy, or Satan; the Accuser, or Diabolus; and the Destroyer, or Abbadon. These meaningful names—Satan, Devil, Abbadon—do not identify any individual as proper names do; they indicate only an office or quality, and so are common nouns. They ought not to have been left untranslated, as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles, since this makes them appear to be the proper names of demons and makes people more easily persuaded to believe the doctrine of devils, which was then the religion of the Gentiles and contrary to that of Moses and Christ.\n\nAnd since the Enemy, the Accuser, and the Destroyer mean the enemy of those who will be in the Kingdom of God, if that Kingdom after the Resurrection is on earth, as I showed in the preceding chapter to be indicated by Scripture, the Enemy and his kingdom must also be on earth. For that is how things stood before the Jews deposed God: God's Kingdom was in Palestine, and the surrounding nations were the kingdoms of the Enemy. Consequently Satan means any earthly enemy of the Church.\n\nThe torments of Hell are expressed sometimes as “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” as in Mat. 8.12.; sometimes as “the worm of conscience,” as in Isa.66.24. and Mark 9.44, 46, 48; sometimes as fire, as in the passage just quoted, “where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched,” and many others; and sometimes as “shame and contempt,” as in Dan. 12.2.: “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” All these passages represent metaphorically the grief and discontent of mind that arise from seeing others enjoy the eternal happiness one has lost through one's own unbelief and disobedience. And because they can feel that happiness in others only by comparison with their own actual misery, they must also suffer such bodily pains and calamities as befall people who not only live under evil and cruel governors but have as their enemy the eternal King of the saints, God Almighty. Among these bodily pains must also be reckoned a second death for every wicked person. For although Scripture is clear that there will be a universal Resurrection, we do not read that eternal life is promised to any of the reprobate. When St. Paul, answering the question of what bodies people will rise with, says (1 Cor. 15.42, 43.) that “the body is sown in corruption, and is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power,” glory and power cannot be applied to the bodies of the wicked. Nor can the name of second death be applied to those who can die only once. And though, metaphorically speaking, an everlasting life of calamity may be called an everlasting death, it can hardly be understood as a second death. The fire prepared for the wicked is an everlasting fire: that is, the state in which no one can exist without torture of both body and mind after the Resurrection shall endure forever. In that sense the fire will be unquenchable and the torments everlasting. But it does not follow that the person cast into that fire, or subjected to those torments, will endure and withstand them so as to be burned and tortured eternally, yet never destroyed or killed. Though many passages affirm everlasting fire and torments, into which people may successively be cast one after another forever, I find none that affirms the eternal life of any individual person within them. On the contrary, they affirm an everlasting death, which is the second death: (Apoc. 20. 13,14.) “For after Death and the Grave have delivered up the dead within them, and every man has been judged according to his works, Death and the Grave shall also be cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.” It is evident, then, that everyone condemned on the day of Judgment is to undergo a second death, after which he shall die no more.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 3\n\nThe joys of eternal life are all comprehended in Scripture under the name of SALVATION, or being saved. To be saved is to be secured either against particular evils or, absolutely, against every evil, including want, sickness, and death itself. And because man was created immortal, not subject to corruption or anything tending to the dissolution of his nature, and fell from that happiness through Adam's sin, it follows that to be saved from sin is to be saved from all the evils and calamities sin has brought upon us. Thus in Holy Scripture the remission of sin and salvation from death and misery are the same thing, as appears from the words of our Savior. Having cured a man sick with palsy by saying (Mat. 9.2.), “Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you,” and knowing that the scribes thought it blasphemy for a man to claim to forgive sins, he asked them (v.5.), “Which is easier to say, Your sins are forgiven you, or, Arise and walk?” He thus signified that, as far as saving the sick man was concerned, “Your sins are forgiven” and “Arise and walk” amounted to the same thing; he used the former expression only to show that he had the power to forgive sins. Reason also makes it evident that, since death and misery were punishments for sin, release from sin must also be release from death and misery: that is, absolute salvation, such as the faithful shall enjoy after the day of Judgment through the power and favor of Jesus Christ, who for this reason is called our SAVIOR.\n\nOf particular salvations, such as are meant in 1 Sam. 14.39., “as the Lord lives, who saves Israel,” that is, from its temporary enemies; and 2 Sam. 22.4., “You are my Savior; you save me from violence”; and 2 Kings 13.5., “God gave the Israelites a Savior, and so they were delivered from the hand of the Assyrians”; and similar passages, I need say nothing. There is neither difficulty nor any interest at work to corrupt the interpretation of texts of this kind.\n\nBut general salvation must be in the Kingdom of Heaven, and its location presents a great difficulty. On one hand, since a kingdom is a state established by men for their lasting security against enemies and want, it seems that this salvation should be on earth. For salvation is presented to us as the glorious reign of our King through conquest, not as safety won by escape. Wherever we expect salvation, therefore, we must also expect triumph; and before triumph, victory; and before victory, battle—none of which can readily be supposed to take place in heaven. Yet however sound this reasoning may be, I will not trust it without very clear passages of Scripture. The state of salvation is described at length in Isaiah, 33. ver. 20,21,22,23,24.\n\n“Look upon Zion, the city of our solemn assemblies: your eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tent that shall not be taken down; not one of its stakes shall ever be removed, nor shall any of its cords be broken.\n\nBut there the glorious Lord will be to us a place of broad rivers and streams, where no galley with oars shall go, nor shall any splendid ship pass by.\n\nFor the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; he will save us.\n\nYour tackle is loosened; they could not firmly secure their mast or spread the sail. Then the prey of a great spoil is divided; even the lame take the prey.\n\nAnd the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick; the people who dwell there shall be forgiven their iniquity.”\n\nThese words give us the place from which salvation shall proceed: “Jerusalem, a quiet habitation”; its eternity: “a tent that shall not be taken down,” and so forth; its Savior: “the Lord, their Judge, their Lawgiver, their King; he will save us”; the salvation itself: “the Lord shall be to them like a broad moat of swift waters,” and so forth; the condition of their enemies: “their tackle is loose, their masts weak, the lame shall take their spoil”; and the condition of the saved: “The inhabitants shall not say, I am sick.” Finally, all this is included in the forgiveness of sin: “The people who dwell there shall be forgiven their iniquity.” It is therefore evident that salvation shall be on earth when God shall reign in Jerusalem at Christ's return, and that from Jerusalem shall proceed the salvation of the Gentiles who shall be received into God's Kingdom. The same prophet declares this still more expressly in Chap. 66.20, 21.: “And they”—that is, the Gentiles who had any Jew in bondage—“shall bring all your brethren as an offering to the Lord out of all nations, on horses, in chariots, in litters, on mules, and on swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the Lord, as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into the House of the Lord. And I will also take some of them for Priests and Levites, says the Lord.” This shows plainly that the chief seat of God's Kingdom, the place from which the salvation of us who were Gentiles shall proceed, shall be Jerusalem. Our Savior confirms this in his discussion with the woman of Samaria about the place of God's worship. He tells her (John 4.22.) that the Samaritans worship what they do not know, while the Jews worship what they know, “For salvation is of the Jews” (Ex Judais, that is, it begins with the Jews). It is as though he said: You worship God but do not know through whom he will save you, whereas we know it will be one of the tribe of Judah, a Jew, not a Samaritan. Accordingly the woman's reply was to the point: “We know the Messiah shall come.” Thus our Savior's saying, “Salvation is from the Jews,” is the same as Paul's (Rom. 1.16,17.): “The Gospel is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith”—from the faith of the Jew to the faith of the Gentile. In the same sense the prophet Joel, describing the day of Judgment (chap. 2.30,31.), says God would “show wonders in heaven and on earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun should be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes”; and he adds in verse 32., “And it shall come to pass that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be salvation.” Obadiah, verse 17, says the same: “Upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance; and there shall be holiness, and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions”—that is, the possessions of the heathen. He specifies these more fully in the following verses as the Mount of Esau, the land of the Philistines, the fields of Ephraim and of Samaria, Gilead, and the cities of the South, and concludes, “The Kingdom shall be the Lord's.” All these passages place salvation and the Kingdom of God after the day of Judgment upon earth. On the other hand, I have found no text that can plausibly be used to prove that the saints ascend into heaven—that is, into any Coelum Empyreum or other ethereal region—except that it is called the Kingdom of Heaven. It may bear this name because God, the King of the Jews, governed them through commands sent from heaven by angels to Moses to restore their obedience, and shall send him again from there to rule both them and all other faithful people everlastingly from the day of Judgment. Or it may be because the throne of our great King is in heaven, while the earth is only his footstool. But that God's subjects should have a place as high as his throne, or higher than his footstool, seems unbecoming to the dignity of a king, and I can find no clear text for it in Holy Scripture.\n\nFrom what has been said of the Kingdom of God and salvation, it is not hard to interpret what is meant by the WORLD TO COME. Three worlds are mentioned in Scripture: the Old World, the Present World, and the World to Come. Of the first St. Peter says (2 Pet. 2.5.), “If God did not spare the Old World, but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing the flood upon the world of the ungodly,” and so forth. The First World, then, lasted from Adam until the general Flood. Of the Present World our Savior says (John 18.36.), “My Kingdom is not of this World.” For he came only to teach men the way of salvation and to renew his Father's Kingdom through his doctrine. Of the World to Come St. Peter says (2 Pet. 3. 13.), “Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth.” This is the WORLD in which Christ, descending from heaven in the clouds with great power and glory, shall send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds and from the farthest parts of the earth, and thereafter reign over them under his Father everlastingly.\n\nThe salvation of a sinner presupposes a prior REDEMPTION. Whoever has once become guilty of sin is liable to its penalty and must pay—or have another pay for him—the ransom demanded by the one offended, who holds him in his power. Since the one offended is Almighty God, in whose power all things lie, the ransom God sees fit to require must be paid before salvation can be obtained. By this ransom I do not mean satisfaction for sin equivalent to the offense: no sinner can ever make such satisfaction for himself, nor can a righteous man make it for another. A man may make amends for the harm he does another by restitution or compensation, but sin cannot be taken away by compensation; that would make the liberty to sin something that could be bought and sold. Sins may, however, be pardoned for the repentant, either freely or upon such penalty as God sees fit to accept. In the Old Testament what God usually accepted was a sacrifice or offering. To forgive sin is not an act of injustice, even when punishment has been threatened. Even among men, although a promise of good binds its maker, threats—that is, promises of evil—do not; still less can they bind God, who is infinitely more merciful than men. Our Savior Christ, therefore, did not redeem us by satisfying for men's sins in the sense that his death of its own power could make it unjust for God to punish sinners with eternal death. Rather, at his first coming he made that sacrifice and offering of himself which God was pleased to require for the salvation at his second coming of those who in the meantime should repent and believe in him. And although Scripture does not always call this act of our redemption a sacrifice or offering, but sometimes calls it a price, we must not understand by price something whose value entitled him to claim our pardon as a right from his offended Father, but the price which God the Father was pleased in his mercy to demand.\n\nCHAPTER XXXIX. ON THE MEANING IN SCRIPTURE OF THE WORD CHURCH\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIX\n\nON THE MEANING IN SCRIPTURE OF THE WORD CHURCH\n\nThe word Church (Ecclesia) has several meanings in the books of Holy Scripture. Sometimes, though seldom, it means God's House: a temple where Christians assemble to perform holy duties in public, as in 1 Cor. 14. ver. 34., “Let your women keep silence in the Churches.” Here, however, it is used metaphorically for the congregation assembled there, and has since come to be used for the building itself, to distinguish Christian temples from those of idolaters. The Temple of Jerusalem was God's House and the House of Prayer; in the same way, any building Christians dedicate to the worship of Christ is Christ's House. The Greek Fathers accordingly call it Kuriake, the Lord's House; hence in our language it came to be called Kyrke, and Church.\n\nWhen Church does not mean a building, it means the same as Ecclesia did in the Greek Common-wealths: a congregation or assembly of citizens summoned to hear a magistrate address them. In the Roman Common-wealth this was called Concio, just as the speaker was called Ecclesiastes and Concionator. When summoned by lawful authority (Acts 19.39.), it was Ecclesia Legitima, a lawful Church, Ennomos Ecclesia. But when stirred up by tumultuous and seditious cries, it was a confused Church, Ecclesia Sugkechumene.\n\nSometimes the word also means those who have the right to be part of the congregation, though they are not actually assembled: the entire multitude of Christians, however widely dispersed, as in Act. 8.3., where it is said that “Saul made havoc of the Church.” It is in this sense that Christ is called Head of the Church. Sometimes it means a particular group of Christians, as in Col. 4.15., “Greet the Church that is in his house”; sometimes only the elect, as in Ephes. 5.27., “A glorious Church, without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish”—meaning the Church Triumphant, or the Church to Come. And sometimes it means an assembled congregation of people professing Christianity, whether their profession is genuine or false, as in Mat. 18.17.: “Tell it to the Church, and if he refuses to hear the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile or a publican.”\n\nOnly in this last sense can the Church be taken as one person: that is, be said to have the power to will, pronounce, command, receive obedience, make laws, or perform any other act. For unless authorized by a lawful congregation, any action performed by a crowd is the particular action of each person present who helped to perform it, not the action of them all collectively as one body, still less of those who were absent or, though present, did not want it done. In this sense I define a CHURCH as “A company of people professing the Christian religion, united in the person of one Sovereign, at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.” And because in every Common-wealth an assembly held without the civil Sovereign's warrant is unlawful, any Church assembling in a Common-wealth that has forbidden its assembly is likewise an unlawful assembly.\n\nIt also follows that on earth there is no universal Church which all Christians are bound to obey, because there is no earthly power to which all other Common-wealths are subject. Christians live under various princes and states, but each is subject to the Common-wealth of which he is a member, and consequently cannot be subject to the commands of another person. A Church capable of commanding, judging, absolving, condemning, or performing any other act is therefore identical with a civil Common-wealth consisting of Christians. It is called a civil state because its subjects are human beings, and a Church because its subjects are Christians. Temporal and Spiritual Government are merely two terms introduced into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful Sovereign. It is true that the bodies of the faithful after the Resurrection shall be not only spiritual but eternal; in this life, however, they are material and perishable. There is therefore no government in this life, whether of state or religion, except temporal government; nor may any subject lawfully teach doctrine which the governor of both state and religion forbids to be taught. And that governor must be one, or faction and civil war must follow in the Common-wealth: between Church and State, Spiritualists and Temporalists, the Sword of Justice and the Shield of Faith; and, more than this, within every Christian's own breast, between the Christian and the human being. The teachers of the Church are called pastors; so too are civil Sovereigns. But unless pastors are subordinate to one another, with one chief pastor, people will be taught contrary doctrines, of which both may be false and one must be. Who that one chief pastor is according to the Law of Nature has already been shown: namely, the civil Sovereign. To whom Scripture assigns that office we shall see in the following chapters.\n\nCHAPTER XL. ON THE RIGHTS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN ABRAHAM, MOSES, HIGH PRIESTS, AND THE KINGS OF JUDAH\n\n### Part III, Chapter XL, 1\n\nON THE RIGHTS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN ABRAHAM, MOSES, HIGH PRIESTS, AND THE KINGS OF JUDAH\n\nThe father of the faithful, and the first to enter the Kingdom of God by Covenant, was Abraham. For with him the Covenant was first made, by which he bound himself and his descendants to acknowledge and obey God's commands: not only those they could discover through the light of Nature, such as the moral laws, but also those God would deliver to him in a special way through dreams and visions. They were already bound by the moral law and needed no further agreement secured by the promise of the land of Canaan. Nor could any contract add to or strengthen the obligation by which they, like all other people, were naturally bound to obey Almighty God. Abraham's Covenant with God was therefore to accept as God's command whatever was commanded to him in God's name through a dream or vision, to communicate it to his family, and to cause them to observe it.\n\nIn this agreement between God and Abraham we may observe three points with important consequences for the government of God's people. First, when the Covenant was made, God spoke to Abraham alone. He therefore contracted with Abraham's family and descendants only insofar as their wills, which constitute the essence of every Covenant, were already included in Abraham's will before the agreement was made; Abraham was thus presumed to have lawful power to make them fulfill everything he covenanted on their behalf. Accordingly God says (Gen 18.18, 19.), “All the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him; for I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord.” From this we may conclude, first, that those to whom God has not spoken directly must receive his positive commands from their Sovereign, as Abraham's family and descendants received them from Abraham, their father, lord, and civil Sovereign. Consequently, in every Common-wealth those who have no supernatural revelation to the contrary ought to obey their own Sovereign's laws in the outward acts and profession of religion. As for people's inward thoughts and beliefs, of which human governors can have no knowledge—for only God knows the heart—they are not voluntary or produced by laws, but by the unrevealed will and power of God; consequently they cannot be placed under obligation.\n\nFrom this follows another point: it was not unlawful for Abraham to punish any of his subjects who claimed a private vision, spirit, or other revelation from God in support of a doctrine Abraham forbade, or who followed or adhered to anyone making such a claim. Consequently, a Sovereign may now lawfully punish anyone who sets his private spirit against the laws, for the Sovereign holds in the Common-wealth the place Abraham held in his family.\n\nA third point also follows: just as no one but Abraham in his family could determine what was or was not the Word of God, so no one but the Sovereign in a Christian Common-wealth can do so. For God spoke only to Abraham; only Abraham could know what God had said and interpret it to his family. Thus those who hold Abraham's place in a Common-wealth are the sole interpreters of what God has spoken.\n\nThe same Covenant was renewed with Isaac and afterward with Jacob, but not again until the Israelites were freed from Egypt and came to the foot of Mount Sinai. It was then renewed through Moses, as I have said before in chap. 35., in such a way that from that time onward they became God's particular Kingdom. Moses was God's lieutenant during his own lifetime, and succession to that office was settled on Aaron and his heirs after him, making them a priestly Kingdom under God forever.\n\nBy this arrangement a Kingdom was acquired for God. But Moses had no authority to govern the Israelites as a successor to Abraham's right, since he could not claim that right by inheritance. It does not yet appear, then, that the people were obliged to accept him as God's lieutenant any longer than they believed God spoke to him. His authority, despite their Covenant with God, still depended entirely on their opinion of his sanctity, the reality of his conversations with God, and the truth of his miracles. If that opinion changed, they were no longer obliged to accept as God's law anything he proposed to them in God's name. We must therefore consider what other basis there was for their obligation to obey him. God's command could not itself oblige them, because God did not speak directly to them, but through Moses himself. Our Savior says of himself (John 5. 31.), “If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.” Much less should Moses's testimony about himself be accepted, particularly when claiming kingly power over God's people. His authority, therefore, like that of every other prince, must rest on the people's consent and their promise to obey him. And so it did: for “the people” (Exod. 20.18.), “when they saw the thunderings and the lightnings, and heard the sound of the trumpet, and saw the mountain smoking, drew back and stood far off. And they said to Moses, Speak with us, and we will hear; but do not let God speak with us, lest we die.” This was their promise of obedience; by it they bound themselves to obey whatever he delivered to them as God's command.\n\nAlthough the Covenant established a priestly Kingdom hereditary to Aaron, that must be understood to refer to the succession after Moses's death. Whoever organizes and establishes the government as the first founder of a Common-wealth, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, must hold Sovereign Power over the people while he is doing so. Scripture plainly affirms that Moses held this power throughout his lifetime. First, the passage just quoted says that the people promised obedience not to Aaron, but to Moses. Second (Exod. 24.1, 2.), “And God said to Moses, Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. And Moses alone shall come near the Lord, but they shall not come near, nor shall the people go up with him.” It is plain from this that Moses, alone called up to God—not Aaron, the other priests, the seventy elders, or the people, who were forbidden to come up—was the only one who represented God's person to the Israelites; that is, he was their sole Sovereign under God. Though it is later said (verse 9.), “Then Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel, and beneath his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone,” and so forth, this did not happen until Moses had already been with God and brought the people the words God had spoken to him. He alone went on the people's business; the others, like nobles in his retinue, were admitted as an honor to a special favor denied the people: to see God and live, as the next verse makes clear. “God did not lay his hand upon them; they saw God and ate and drank”—that is, they lived—but brought back no command from him for the people. Again, throughout the affairs of government, as in the ordering of religious ceremonies in Chapters 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31 of Exodus and throughout Leviticus, it is everywhere said, “The Lord spoke to Moses,” and seldom to Aaron. Moses threw the calf Aaron had made into the fire. Finally, in the dispute over Aaron's authority occasioned by his and Miriam's rebellion against Moses, God himself decided for Moses (Numbers 12.). Likewise, when Corah, Dathan, and Abiram, with two hundred and fifty leaders of the assembly, “gathered themselves together” (Numbers 16. 3) “against Moses and Aaron, and said to them, ‘You take too much upon yourselves, seeing that the whole congregation is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why do you raise yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?’” God caused the earth to swallow Corah, Dathan, and Abiram alive with their wives and children, and consumed the two hundred and fifty leaders with fire. Therefore neither Aaron, the people, nor any aristocracy of their principal leaders, but Moses alone held Sovereignty over the Israelites next under God. This was so not only in matters of civil government but also in religion; for Moses alone spoke with God, and therefore he alone could tell the people what God required of them. No one, on pain of death, could presume to approach the mountain where God spoke with Moses. “You shall set bounds” (says the Lord, Exod 19. 12.) “for the people round about, and say, Take care that you do not go up the mountain or touch its edge; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death.” And again (verse 21.), “Go down and charge the people, lest they break through to the Lord to gaze.” We may conclude from this that whoever holds Moses's place in a Christian Common-wealth is God's sole messenger and the interpreter of his commands. Accordingly, no one should go beyond the bounds set by the respective Sovereigns in interpreting Scripture. For the Scriptures, in which God now speaks, are Mount Sinai, and the bounds around them are the laws of those who represent God's person on earth. People may look upon the Scriptures, behold God's wonderful works in them, and learn to fear him. But to interpret them—that is, to pry into what God says to the person he appoints to govern under him, and set themselves up as judges of whether he governs as God commands—is to cross the bounds God has set us and gaze irreverently upon God.\n\nThere was no prophet in Moses's time, nor anyone claiming the Spirit of God, except those Moses had approved and authorized. Only seventy men in his time are said to have prophesied by God's Spirit, and Moses chose every one of them. Concerning them God says to Moses (Numb. 11.16.), “Gather to me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be elders of the people.” God imparted his Spirit to these men, but it was not a different Spirit from Moses's, for it is said (verse 25.), “God came down in a cloud and took of the Spirit that was upon Moses and gave it to the seventy elders.” But as I have shown before (chap. 36.), Spirit means mind; the passage therefore means no more than that God endowed them with minds in agreement with, and subordinate to, the mind of Moses. Thus they could prophesy—that is, speak to the people in God's name—in a way that advanced, as Moses's ministers and by his authority, doctrine consistent with Moses's doctrine. For they were only ministers. When two of them prophesied in the camp, it was thought novel and unlawful; as the 27. and 28. verses of that chapter tell us, they were accused of it, and Joshua advised Moses to forbid them, not knowing that they prophesied by Moses's Spirit. This makes it clear that no subject ought to claim prophecy or the Spirit in opposition to the doctrine established by the person God has placed in Moses's position.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XL, 2\n\nWhen Aaron died, and Moses after him, the Kingdom, being a priestly Kingdom, descended by virtue of the Covenant to Aaron's son Eleazar, the High Priest. God declared Eleazar Sovereign next under himself at the same time that he appointed Joshua general of their army. For God says expressly of Joshua (Numb. 27.21.), “He shall stand before Eleazar the Priest, who shall ask counsel for him before the Lord; at his word they shall go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he and all the children of Israel with him.” The supreme power to make war and peace, therefore, rested with the Priest. The supreme judicial power also belonged to the High Priest, for the Book of the Law was in the priests' keeping, and only priests and Levites were subordinate judges in civil cases, as appears in Deut. 17.8, 9, 10. And no one ever doubted that the High Priest had supreme authority over the manner of God's worship until the time of Saul. Civil and ecclesiastical power were thus united in the same person, the High Priest, and ought to be so united in whoever governs by Divine Right, that is, by authority received directly from God.\n\nBetween Joshua's death and the time of Saul, the Book of Judges frequently observes “that in those days there was no King in Israel,” sometimes adding that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Where it says “there was no King,” we should understand “there was no Sovereign Power” in Israel. And this was true if we consider the action and exercise of such power. For after the deaths of Joshua and Eleazar, “another generation arose” (Judges 2.10.) “that did not know the Lord or the works he had done for Israel, but did evil in the sight of the Lord and served Baalim.” The Jews had the trait St. Paul notes, “to seek a sign,” not only before submitting to Moses's government, but even after obliging themselves by that submission. Yet the purpose of signs and miracles was to secure faith, not to prevent people from breaking it once given: they are already bound to keep it by the Law of Nature. But if we consider the right to govern rather than its exercise, Sovereign Power still belonged to the High Priest. Therefore whatever obedience was paid to any of the Judges, men chosen extraordinarily by God to rescue his rebellious subjects from their enemies, it cannot be taken as evidence against the High Priest's right to Sovereign Power in all matters of government and religion. Neither the Judges nor even Samuel had an ordinary calling to govern: theirs was extraordinary. The Israelites obeyed them not from duty but from reverence for the favor they enjoyed with God, manifest in their wisdom, courage, or success. Thus far, then, the rights to regulate both government and religion remained inseparable.\n\nKings succeeded the Judges; and just as all authority in religion and government formerly belonged to the High Priest, so now it belonged to the King. For the people, with God's own consent, cast off the Sovereignty over them previously vested, both by divine power and by the Israelites' particular pact, in God and next under him in the High Priest as his representative on earth. When they said to Samuel (1 Sam. 8.5.), “Make us a King to judge us, like all the nations,” they signified that they would no longer be governed by commands laid upon them by the Priest in God's name, but by one who would command them as other nations were commanded. Thus in removing the High Priest from royal authority, they removed God's special government over them. Yet God consented, saying to Samuel (verse 7.), “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Since they had rejected God, in whose right the priests governed, the priests retained only such authority as the King chose to allow them, more or less according as the Kings were good or evil. Civil government, plainly, was entirely in the King's hands. For in verse 20. of the same chapter, the people say that they will be like the other nations: their King shall judge them, go before them, and fight their battles; that is, he shall have full authority in both peace and war. This includes the ordering of religion, for at that time there was no Word of God to regulate religion other than the Law of Moses, which was also their civil law. Moreover, we read (1 Kings 2.27.) that Solomon “removed Abiathar from being Priest before the Lord.” He therefore had authority over the High Priest as over any other subject, a strong sign of supremacy in religion. We also read (1 Kings 8.) that he dedicated the Temple, blessed the people, and personally uttered that excellent prayer used in the consecration of all churches and houses of prayer: another strong sign of supremacy in religion. Again, we read (2 Kings 22.) that when a question arose about the Book of the Law found in the Temple, it was not decided by the High Priest. Josiah sent him and others to inquire of Hulda the prophetess about it: another sign of supremacy in religion. Lastly, we read (1 Chro. 26.30.) that David appointed Hashabiah and his brothers, Hebronites, as officers of Israel in the western territories, “in all the business of the Lord and in the service of the King.” Likewise (verse 32.), he appointed other Hebronites “rulers over the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh”—the rest of Israel living beyond the Jordan—“for every matter pertaining to God and affairs of the King.” Is this not full power, both temporal and spiritual, as those who would divide it call them? In conclusion, from the first institution of God's Kingdom until the Captivity, supremacy in religion rested in the same hands as civil Sovereignty; and after Saul was chosen, the priest's office was not magisterial but ministerial.\n\nAlthough government in both public affairs and religion was united by right, first in the High Priests and later in the Kings, the same sacred history shows that the people did not understand this. A large proportion of them, probably the greater part, gave sufficient credit to Moses's reputation or the conversations between God and the priests only while they saw great miracles, or what amounts to a miracle: great ability or great success in their governors' undertakings. Whenever their governors displeased them, they seized upon objections to government at one time and to religion at another to change the government or abandon their obedience as they pleased. From this arose, time and again, the nation's civil troubles, divisions, and calamities. For example, after Eleazar and Joshua died, the next generation had not seen God's wonders and was left to its own weak reason. Unaware that the Covenant of a priestly Kingdom bound them, they paid no heed to the Priest's commands or any law of Moses; each did what was right in his own eyes. In civil affairs they obeyed whichever men they thought capable, from time to time, of delivering them from the neighboring nations that oppressed them. Instead of consulting God, as they ought to have done, they consulted men or women whom they guessed to be prophets because they predicted things to come; and though they kept an idol in their chapel, they thought that if they had a Levite for their chaplain, they were worshipping the God of Israel.\n\nLater, when they demanded a King like those of other nations, they did not intend to abandon the worship of God their King. Rather, despairing of justice from Samuel's sons, they wanted a King to judge them in civil matters, but did not mean to allow their King to change the religion they believed Moses had commended to them. Thus they always kept a pretext of either justice or religion ready to release themselves from obedience whenever they hoped to prevail. Samuel was displeased that the people wanted a King, for God was already their King and Samuel held authority only under him. Yet when Saul did not follow his counsel to destroy Agag as God had commanded, Samuel anointed another King, David, to take the succession from Saul's heirs. Rehoboam was no idolater, but when the people thought him an oppressor, that civil pretext led ten tribes away from him to the idolater Jeroboam. Throughout the history of the Kings of Judah and Israel, prophets continually rebuked the Kings for breaches of religion, and sometimes for errors of state as well. Thus (2 Chro. 19. 2.) the prophet Jehu reproved Jehosaphat for aiding the King of Israel against the Syrians, and Isaiah reproved Hezekiah for showing his treasures to the ambassadors of Babylon. All this shows that, although power in both state and religion rested with the Kings, none of them exercised it without challenge except those who won favor through their natural abilities or good fortune. The practice of those times therefore provides no argument against the Kings' right to supremacy in religion, unless we place that right in the prophets. We would have to conclude that because Hezekiah, praying to the Lord before the cherubim, was not answered there and then, but later through the prophet Isaiah, Isaiah was supreme Head of the Church; or that because Josiah consulted the prophetess Hulda about the Book of the Law, neither he nor the High Priest but Hulda held supreme authority in matters of religion. I do not think any teacher holds that opinion.\n\nDuring the Captivity the Jews had no Common-wealth at all. After their return, though they renewed their Covenant with God, they made no promise of obedience to Esdras or anyone else. Soon afterward they became subjects of the Greeks, whose customs and demonology, together with the doctrine of the Cabalists, greatly corrupted their religion. Nothing about supremacy in state or religion can therefore be inferred from their confusion in both. So far as the Old Testament is concerned, then, we may conclude that whoever held Sovereignty over the Jewish Common-wealth also held supreme authority over God's outward worship and represented God's person: that is, the person of God the Father, though he was not called Father until he sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to redeem humankind from sin and bring them into his everlasting Kingdom, to be saved forever. Of this we shall speak in the following chapter.\n\nCHAPTER XLI. ON THE OFFICE OF OUR BLESSED SAVIOR\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLI, 1\n\nOF THE OFFICE OF OUR BLESSED SAVIOR\n\nIn Holy Scripture we find three parts to the office of the Messiah: first, that of Redeemer or Savior; second, that of Pastor, Counselor, or Teacher—that is, a Prophet sent from God to convert those whom God has elected to salvation; third, that of King, an eternal King, though under his Father, as Moses and the High Priests were in their respective times. These three parts correspond to three times. He accomplished our redemption at his first coming, by the sacrifice in which he offered himself for our sins upon the cross; our conversion he accomplished partly then in his own person, and partly accomplishes now through his ministers, and will continue to accomplish until he comes again. After his return will begin his glorious reign over his elect, which will last eternally.\n\nTo the office of a Redeemer, one who pays the ransom for sin (and that ransom is death), it belongs that he should be sacrificed and thereby bear upon his own head and carry away from us our iniquities, in the manner God required. Not that the death of one man, though sinless, could satisfy strict justice for the offenses of all, but that God in his mercy ordained sacrifices for sin which he was pleased to accept. Under the old Law (as we read in Leviticus 16), the Lord required that once every year atonement be made for the sins of all Israel, priests and others alike. For this Aaron alone was to sacrifice a young bull for himself and the priests, and for the rest of the people to receive two young goats from them. He was to sacrifice one; upon the head of the other, the scapegoat, he was to lay his hands, confessing the people's iniquities and laying them all upon that head, and then have some suitable man lead the goat into the wilderness, where it would escape, carrying away the people's iniquities. As the sacrifice of one goat was a sufficient price for the ransom of all Israel, because it was acceptable, so the Messiah's death is a sufficient price for the sins of all humankind, because nothing further was required. The sufferings of our Savior Christ seem to be figured here as clearly as in the offering of Isaac, or any other prefiguration of him in the Old Testament. He was both the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted (Isa. 53.7.); he opened not his mouth; he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep is silent before the shearer, so he opened not his mouth.” Here he is the sacrificed goat. “He has borne our griefs (ver. 4.) and carried our sorrows”; and again (ver. 6.), “the Lord has laid upon him the iniquities of us all”: here he is the scapegoat. “He was cut off from the land of the living (ver. 8.) for the transgression of my people”: again he is the sacrificed goat. And again (ver. 11.), “he shall bear their sins”: he is the scapegoat. Thus the Lamb of God is equivalent to both goats: sacrificed in that he died, and escaping in his resurrection, when he was raised at the appointed time by his Father and removed from human habitation in his ascension.\n\nSince the one who redeems has no title to the thing redeemed before redemption is made and the ransom paid, and since that ransom was the Redeemer's death, it is clear that our Savior, as man, was not King of those he redeemed before he suffered death—that is, while he lived bodily upon the earth. I mean he was not then King in actuality by virtue of the covenant the faithful make with him in baptism. Nevertheless, by renewing their covenant with God in baptism, they were obliged to obey him as King, under his Father, whenever he should choose to assume the Kingdom. Accordingly our Savior himself expressly says (John 18.36.), “My Kingdom is not of this world.” Scripture speaks of only two worlds: this present one, which will remain until the day of Judgment (therefore called the Last Day), and the world of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Christ's Kingdom, then, will not begin until the general Resurrection. This is what our Savior says (Mat. 16.27.): “The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.” Rewarding everyone according to their works is the exercise of a King's office, and this will not occur until he comes with his angels in his Father's glory. When our Savior says (Mat. 23.2.), “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat; therefore observe and do all that they bid you,” he plainly assigns kingly power at that time not to himself but to them. He does the same when he says (Luke 12.14.), “Who made me a judge or divider over you?” and (John 12.47.), “I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” Yet our Savior came into this world so that he might be a King and a Judge in the world to come. For he was the Messiah, that is, the Christ, the anointed Priest and sovereign Prophet of God: he was to possess all the power held by Moses the Prophet, by the High Priests who succeeded Moses, and by the Kings who succeeded the Priests. And St. John expressly says (chap. 5. ver. 22.), “The Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment to the Son.” This does not conflict with the other passage, “I came not to judge the world”: the latter concerns the present world, the former the world to come. So too it is said of Christ's second coming (Mat. 19.28.): “You who have followed me in the Regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit upon the throne of his glory, you shall also sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”\n\nIf Christ had no Kingdom in this world while he was on earth, what was the purpose of his first coming? It was to restore to God, by a new Covenant, the Kingdom that had been his under the Old Covenant but had been severed by the Israelites' rebellion in electing Saul. To do this, he had to proclaim to them that he was the Messiah, the King promised them by the Prophets; offer himself as a sacrifice for the sins of those who would submit to him in faith; and, if the nation as a whole rejected him, call to obedience those among the Gentiles who believed in him. Thus our Savior's office while he dwelt upon earth had two parts: to proclaim himself the Christ, and, by teaching and working miracles, to persuade and prepare people to live so as to be worthy of the immortality believers would enjoy when he came in majesty to take possession of his Father's Kingdom. This is why he often calls the time of his preaching the Regeneration. It is not properly a Kingdom, nor therefore a warrant to deny obedience to the magistrates then in office (for he commanded obedience to those who sat in Moses' chair and payment of tribute to Caesar), but only a pledge of the Kingdom of God to come for those to whom God had given the grace to be his disciples and believe in him. For this reason the godly are said to be already in the Kingdom of Grace, as citizens naturalized in that heavenly Kingdom.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLI, 2\n\nSo far, then, Christ has done or taught nothing that tends to diminish the civil right of the Jews or of Caesar. As for the Common-wealth then existing among the Jews, both rulers and ruled expected the Messiah and the Kingdom of God; they could not have expected him if their laws had forbidden him, upon his arrival, to reveal and declare himself. Since he did nothing but seek to prove by preaching and miracles that he was that Messiah, he did nothing contrary to their laws. The Kingdom he claimed belonged to another world. Meanwhile, he taught everyone to obey those who sat in Moses' seat, permitted payment of Caesar's tribute, and refused to take on the office of judge. How, then, could his words or deeds be seditious, or tend to overthrow their existing civil government? But God, having ordained his sacrifice to restore his elect to the obedience they had covenanted, used their malice and ingratitude as the means of accomplishing it. Nor was he acting against Caesar's laws. Though Pilate himself delivered him to be crucified to gratify the Jews, before doing so he declared publicly that he found no fault in him. And as the title of his condemnation Pilate wrote not, as the Jews demanded, “that he claimed to be King,” but simply, “that he was King of the Jews”; and despite their clamor he refused to change it, saying, “What I have written, I have written.”\n\nAs for the third part of his office, that of King, I have already shown that his Kingdom was not to begin before the Resurrection. But then he will be King not only as God—in which sense he is already, and always will be, King of all the earth by virtue of his omnipotence—but especially of his own elect, by virtue of the covenant they make with him in baptism. Thus our Savior says (Mat. 19.28.) that his Apostles shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel “when the Son of man shall sit upon the throne of his glory,” signifying that he will then reign in his human nature; and (Mat. 16.27.), “The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and then he shall reward every man according to his works.” We read the same in Mark 13.26. and 14.26., and an even more explicit statement of the time in Luke 22.29, 30.: “I appoint to you a Kingdom, as my Father has appointed to me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Clearly, then, the Kingdom appointed to Christ by his Father will not begin before the Son of Man comes in glory and makes his Apostles judges of the twelve tribes of Israel. But someone may ask whether people will then eat and drink, since there is no marriage in the Kingdom of Heaven; what eating is meant here? Our Savior explains this (John 6.27.) when he says, “Labor not for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give you.” To eat at Christ's table, then, means to eat of the Tree of Life: to enjoy immortality in the Kingdom of the Son of Man. From these and many other passages it is evident that our Savior will exercise his Kingdom in his human nature.\n\nMoreover, he will then be King only as subordinate to God the Father, or his viceroy, as Moses was in the wilderness, as the High Priests were before Saul's reign, and as the Kings were afterward. For one prophecy concerning Christ says he will resemble Moses in office: “I will raise them up a Prophet (says the Lord, Deut. 18.18.) from among their brothers, like you, and will put my words into his mouth.” This likeness to Moses also appears in our Savior's own actions during his life on earth. As Moses chose twelve princes of the tribes to govern under him, our Savior chose twelve Apostles who will sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel. And as Moses authorized Seventy Elders to receive the Spirit of God and prophesy to the people—that is, as I have said, to speak to them in God's name—our Savior likewise appointed seventy Disciples to preach his Kingdom and salvation to all nations. When Moses received a complaint against those among the Seventy who prophesied in the camp of Israel, he vindicated them because their actions served his government. Likewise, when St. John complained to our Savior about a man casting out devils in his name, our Savior vindicated him, saying (Luke 9.50.), “Do not forbid him, for he who is not against us is on our side.”\n\nOur Savior also resembled Moses in instituting sacraments both for admission into the Kingdom of God and for commemoration of his deliverance of his elect from their wretched condition. Before Moses' time, the children of Israel had circumcision as the sacrament of their reception into the Kingdom of God. This rite was omitted in the wilderness but restored as soon as they entered the promised land. Similarly, before our Savior's coming, the Jews had a rite of baptism—that is, washing with water—for Gentiles who embraced the God of Israel. St. John the Baptist used this rite in receiving all who enlisted themselves with the Christ whom he preached as already come into the world; our Savior instituted it as a sacrament for all who believed in him. Scripture does not formally state where baptism's rite first arose, but it may plausibly be thought an imitation of the law of Moses concerning leprosy. Under that law a leprous man was ordered to remain outside the camp of Israel for a certain time; afterward, once the Priest judged him clean, he was admitted into the camp following a solemn washing. This may accordingly be a model of the washing of baptism, through which people cleansed by faith of the leprosy of sin are received into the Church with a solemn baptism. Another conjecture comes from a Gentile ceremony practiced in a rare circumstance: if a man thought dead happened to recover, other people hesitated to associate with him, just as they would hesitate to associate with a ghost, unless washing restored him to the company of human beings, as newborn children were washed clean of the uncleanness of birth. This was a kind of new birth. That Greek ceremony might plausibly have entered the religion of the Jews when Judea was under the dominion of Alexander and his Greek successors. But since our Savior would be unlikely to endorse a heathen rite, baptism most likely originated in the lawful ceremony of washing after leprosy. As for the other sacrament, the eating of the Passover lamb is plainly imitated in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. There the breaking of bread and pouring of wine commemorate our deliverance from the misery of sin by Christ's Passion, as eating the Passover lamb commemorated the deliverance of the Jews from bondage in Egypt. Since Moses' authority was subordinate, and he was no more than God's lieutenant, Christ's authority as man, being like Moses', was likewise subordinate to his Father's authority. This is signified still more expressly by his teaching us to pray, “Our Father, let your Kingdom come” and “For yours is the Kingdom, the power and the glory”; by the statement that “He shall come in the glory of his Father”; and by St. Paul's words (1 Cor. 15.24.), “Then comes the end, when he shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even the Father”; and by many other entirely explicit passages.\n\nOur Savior, therefore, both in teaching and reigning, represents the Person of God, as Moses did. God is called the Father from that time onward, but not before; and though he remains one and the same substance, he is one Person as represented by Moses and another Person as represented by his Son, the Christ. For since Person is a term relative to a representative, a plurality of representatives entails a plurality of Persons, though the substance remains one and the same.\n\nCHAPTER XLII. OF ECCLESIASTICAL POWER\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 1\n\nOF ECCLESIASTICAL POWER\n\nTo understand ecclesiastical power—what it is, and who possesses it—we must divide the period since our Savior's ascension into two parts: one before the conversion of Kings and others endowed with sovereign civil power, and the other after their conversion. For a long time passed after the ascension before any King or civil sovereign embraced and publicly authorized the teaching of the Christian religion.\n\nDuring the intervening time, ecclesiastical power clearly belonged to the Apostles, and after them to those whom they ordained to preach the Gospel, convert people to Christianity, and direct the converts along the way to salvation. These in turn handed the power to others whom they ordained, laying hands upon them as a sign that they gave the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of God, to those they appointed ministers of God to advance his Kingdom. The laying on of hands, then, was nothing other than the seal of their commission to preach Christ and teach his doctrine; and giving the Holy Spirit by this ceremony imitated what Moses had done. For Moses used the same ceremony for his minister Joshua, as we read in Deuteronomy 34. ver. 9.: “And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the Spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands upon him.” Between his resurrection and ascension, our Savior gave his Spirit to the Apostles, first by “breathing on them and saying” (John 20.22.), “Receive the Holy Spirit”; and after his ascension (Acts 2.2, 3.) by sending upon them a “mighty wind and divided tongues of fire”; not by laying on of hands, any more than God laid his hands on Moses. His Apostles afterward passed on the same Spirit by laying on of hands, as Moses did to Joshua. Thus it is evident in whom ecclesiastical power continually resided in those earliest times, when there was no Christian Common-wealth: in those who received it from the Apostles through successive laying on of hands.\n\nHere we have the Person of God borne for a third time. Moses and the High Priests were God's representatives in the Old Testament, and our Savior himself as man during his life on earth; so the Holy Spirit—that is, the Apostles and their successors in the office of preaching and teaching, who had received the Holy Spirit—have represented him ever since. But a Person, as I have shown before [chapt. 16.], is the one represented whenever he is represented. Therefore God, who has been represented (that is, personated) three times, may properly be said to be three Persons, though neither Person nor Trinity is attributed to him in the Bible. St. John indeed says (1 Epist. 5.7.), “There are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one.” But this does not disagree with the existence of three Persons in the proper sense of Persons—one who is represented by another—and fits it well. God the Father as represented by Moses is one Person; as represented by his Son, another Person; and as represented by the Apostles and the teachers who taught with authority derived from them, a third Person; yet each Person here is the Person of one and the same God. Someone may ask what it was to which these three bore witness. St. John tells us (verse 11.) that their testimony is that “God has given us eternal life in his Son.” If we ask how that testimony appears, the answer is easy: God testified to it through the miracles he worked first through Moses, second through his Son himself, and last through his Apostles who had received the Holy Spirit. All of these in their own times represented God's Person and either prophesied or preached Jesus Christ. For the twelve first and great Apostles, bearing witness to his resurrection was the defining mark of apostleship. This appears expressly in Acts 1. ver. 21,22., where St. Peter, when a new Apostle was to be chosen in the place of Judas Iscariot, says: “Of these men who have accompanied us all the time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning with the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us, one must be appointed to witness with us to his resurrection.” These words explain the bearing witness mentioned by St. John. The same passage mentions another trinity of witnesses on earth. For (ver. 8.) he says, “There are three who bear witness on earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one”: that is, the graces of God's Spirit and the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, which agree in a single testimony assuring the consciences of believers of eternal life. Of this testimony he says (verse 10.), “He who believes in the Son of man has the witness in himself.” In this earthly trinity, the unity is not of the thing itself, since the Spirit, the water, and the blood are not the same substance, though they give the same testimony. In the heavenly Trinity, however, the Persons are the persons of one and the same God, though represented at three different times and on different occasions. In short, as far as it may be gathered directly from Scripture, the doctrine of the Trinity amounts to this: God, always one and the same, was the Person represented by Moses, the Person represented by his incarnate Son, and the Person represented by the Apostles. Represented by the Apostles, the Holy Spirit by which they spoke is God; represented by his Son, who was God and man, the Son is that God; represented by Moses and the High Priests, the Father—that is, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—is that God. From this we can gather why the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, signifying the Godhead, are never used in the Old Testament: they are Persons, and so take their names from representation, which could not happen until different men had represented God's Person in ruling or directing under him.\n\nThus we see how our Savior left ecclesiastical power to the Apostles and how they were endowed with the Holy Spirit to exercise it more effectively. In the New Testament this Spirit is sometimes called Paracletus, meaning a helper, or one called upon for help, though it is commonly translated Comforter. Let us now consider the power itself, what it was and over whom it extended.\n\nCardinal Bellarmine, in his third general Controversy, has addressed many questions concerning the ecclesiastical power of the Pope of Rome, beginning with whether it ought to be monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic. Each of these forms of power is sovereign and coercive. But suppose it should appear that our Savior left them no coercive power, only the power to proclaim Christ's Kingdom and persuade people to submit to it, and by precept and good counsel to teach those who have submitted what they must do to be received into the Kingdom of God when it comes; and that the Apostles and other ministers of the Gospel are our schoolmasters, not our commanders, and their precepts are not laws but sound counsel. Then all such disputants argue in vain.\n\nI have already shown in the preceding chapter that Christ's Kingdom is not of this world; neither, therefore, can his ministers require obedience in his name, unless they are Kings. For if the supreme King does not exercise his royal power in this world, by what authority can his officers demand obedience? “As my Father sent me,” says our Savior, “so I send you.” But our Savior was sent to persuade the Jews to return to his Father's Kingdom and invite the Gentiles to receive it, not to reign in majesty, not even as his Father's lieutenant, until the day of Judgment.\n\nThe period between the ascension and the general Resurrection is called not a reign but a Regeneration: the preparation of people for Christ's second, glorious coming on the day of Judgment. This appears in our Savior's words, Mat. 19.28.: “You who have followed me in the Regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit upon the throne of his glory, you shall also sit upon twelve thrones”; and in St. Paul's (Ephes. 6.15.): “Having your feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace.”\n\nOur Savior also compares it to fishing: winning people to obedience not by coercion and punishment, but by persuasion. Therefore he did not tell his Apostles he would make them so many Nimrods, hunters of men, but fishers of men. It is also compared to leaven, the sowing of seed, and the growth of a mustard seed. All these exclude compulsion, and consequently there can be no actual reign during that time. The work of Christ's ministers is evangelization: the proclamation of Christ and preparation for his second coming, as the evangelization of John the Baptist prepared for his first.\n\nAgain, the office of Christ's ministers in this world is to bring people to belief and faith in Christ. But faith has no relation to, and no dependence upon, compulsion or command; it depends only on the certainty or probability of arguments drawn from reason or from something people already believe. Therefore Christ's ministers in this world have no power by virtue of that title to punish anyone for not believing or for contradicting what they say. As Christ's ministers, I say, they have no power to punish such people; but if by political institution they have sovereign civil power, they may indeed lawfully punish any contradiction of their laws whatsoever. And St. Paul says expressly of himself and the other preachers of the Gospel at that time (2 Cor. 1.24.), “We have no dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy.”\n\nAnother argument that Christ's ministers in this present world have no right to command may be drawn from the lawful authority Christ has left to all princes, Christian and unbeliever alike. St. Paul says (Col. 3.20.), “Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is pleasing to the Lord.” And ver. 22.: “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with service performed only under their eyes, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.” This is addressed to people whose masters were unbelievers, and yet they are commanded to obey them in all things. Concerning obedience to princes, again (Rom. 13. the first 6. verses), exhorting us “to be subject to the higher powers,” he says “that all power is ordained by God,” and “that we ought to be subject to them, not only for” fear of their “wrath, but also for conscience's sake.” And St. Peter says (1 Epist. chap. 2e ver. 13, 14, 15.), “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether to the King as supreme or to governors, as those sent by him to punish evildoers and praise those who do well; for this is the will of God.” St. Paul says again (Tit. 3.1.), “Remind people to be subject to principalities and powers, and to obey magistrates.” The princes and powers of whom St. Peter and St. Paul speak here were all unbelievers; how much more, then, must we obey Christians whom God has ordained to hold sovereign power over us. How can we, therefore, be obliged to do anything contrary to the command of the King, or other sovereign representative of the Common-wealth to which we belong and from whom we expect protection? Plainly, Christ has left his ministers in this world no authority to command others, unless they also possess civil authority.\n\nBut what if, someone may object, a King, Senate, or other sovereign Person forbids us to believe in Christ? Such a prohibition has no effect, I answer, because belief and unbelief never follow human commands. Faith is God's gift, which no human being can give or take away by promises of reward or threats of torture. And if someone asks further, What if our lawful prince commands us to say aloud that we do not believe—must we obey? Spoken profession is merely an outward thing, no more than any other gesture by which we signify obedience. A Christian who firmly holds faith in Christ within his heart has in this respect the same liberty that the prophet Elisha allowed Naaman the Syrian. Naaman was converted in his heart to the God of Israel, for he says (2 Kings 5.17.), “Your servant will henceforth offer neither burnt offering nor sacrifice to other gods, but to the Lord. In this matter may the Lord pardon your servant: when my master goes into the house of Rimmon to worship there and leans upon my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, may the Lord pardon your servant when I bow myself in the house of Rimmon.” The prophet approved this and told him, “Go in peace.” Naaman believed in his heart, yet by bowing before the idol Rimmon he denied the true God in deed as fully as if he had done so with his lips. What, then, shall we answer to our Savior's saying, “Whoever denies me before men, I will deny him before my Father who is in Heaven”? We may say that whatever a subject such as Naaman is compelled to do in obedience to his sovereign, and does not by his own judgment but by the laws of his country, is an action not of the subject but of the sovereign. In this case it is not the subject who denies Christ before men but his governor and the law of his country. If anyone condemns this doctrine as contrary to true and sincere Christianity, I ask him this: suppose a subject in a Christian Common-wealth were inwardly, in his heart, of the Muslim religion, and his sovereign commanded him, on pain of death, to attend divine service in the Christian Church. Does he think that Muslim obliged in conscience to suffer death for that reason rather than obey his lawful prince? If he says the man ought to suffer death, he authorizes all private persons to disobey their princes in defense of their religion, true or false. If he says the man ought to obey, he grants himself what he denies another, contrary to our Savior's words, “Whatever you would have people do to you, do that to them,” and contrary to the Law of Nature, the unquestionable eternal Law of God: “Do not do to another what you would not have him do to you.”\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 2\n\nBut what, then, shall we say of all those Martyrs in the history of the Church—did they needlessly throw away their lives? In answer we must distinguish among those put to death for this cause. Some received a calling to preach and openly profess the Kingdom of Christ; others had no such calling, and nothing more was required of them than their own faith. If those of the former kind were put to death for bearing witness that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, they were true Martyrs. For a Martyr, to give the word its true definition, is a witness to the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Only those who lived with him on earth and saw him after he rose can be such witnesses: a witness must have seen what he testifies to, or else his testimony is not sound. That no others can properly be called Martyrs of Christ is plain from St. Peter's words, Acts 1.21, 22.: “Therefore, of these men who accompanied us all the time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us, one must be appointed to be a Martyr (that is, a witness) with us to his resurrection.” We may observe that whoever witnesses to the truth of Christ's resurrection—that is, the truth of the fundamental article of the Christian religion, that Jesus was the Christ—must be a disciple who lived with him and saw him before and after his resurrection. Such a witness must therefore be one of his original disciples; those who were not can testify only that their predecessors said so. They witness to other people's testimony, and are only secondary Martyrs, or Martyrs of Christ's witnesses.\n\nA man who, to maintain every doctrine he draws for himself from the account of our Savior's life or from the Acts or Epistles of the Apostles, or which he believes on a private individual's authority, opposes the laws and authority of the civil state is very far from being a Martyr of Christ or of his Martyrs. There is only one article for which dying merits so honorable a name: that Jesus is the Christ—he who has redeemed us and will return to give us salvation and eternal life in his glorious Kingdom. No one is required to die for every tenet that serves the ambition or profit of the clergy. Nor is it the witness's death but his testimony that makes him a Martyr: the word means nothing but a person who bears witness, whether or not he is put to death for it.\n\nMoreover, someone not sent to preach this fundamental article, who undertakes it on his own authority, may be a witness and consequently a Martyr—either a primary witness of Christ or a secondary witness of his Apostles, Disciples, or their successors—but he is not obliged to suffer death for it. He has not been called to do so, and it is not required of him; nor ought he to complain if he loses the reward he expected from people who never set him to work. Therefore no one can be a Martyr of either degree without a commission to preach Christ come in the flesh: none but those sent to convert unbelievers. For no one is a witness to a person who already believes and needs no witness, but to those who deny, doubt, or have not heard. Christ sent his Apostles and his Seventy Disciples with authority to preach, not all believers; and he sent them to unbelievers: “I send you,” he says, “as sheep among wolves,” not as sheep to other sheep.\n\nLastly, none of the terms of their commission expressly set down in the Gospel gives them authority over the congregation.\n\nFirst, we find (Mat. 10.) that the twelve Apostles were sent “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” and commanded to preach “that the Kingdom of God was at hand.” Now the original word for preaching refers to the public proclamation of a King by a crier, herald, or other officer. But a crier has no right to command anyone. And (Luke 10.2.) the seventy Disciples are sent “as laborers, not as lords of the harvest,” and are told (verse 9.) to say, “The Kingdom of God has come near you.” Here Kingdom means not the Kingdom of Grace but the Kingdom of Glory; for they are told to announce it (ver. 11.) as a threat to the cities that will not receive them, saying it will be more tolerable on that day for Sodom than for such a city. And (Mat. 20.28.) our Savior tells his Disciples, who sought precedence, that their office was to serve, just as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve. Preachers, therefore, have not the power of masters but of ministers: “Do not be called masters,” says our Savior (Mat. 23.10.), “for one is your Master, Christ.”\n\nAnother term of their commission is to teach all nations, as in Mat. 28.19., or, as St. Mark puts it (16.15.), “Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature.” Teaching, therefore, and preaching are the same thing. Those who proclaim the coming of a King must also make known by what right he comes, if they want people to submit to him. St. Paul did so with the Jews of Thessalonica when, “for three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and showing that Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus is Christ.” But teaching from the Old Testament that Jesus was Christ—that is, King—and had risen from the dead is not saying that, once people believe it, they are bound to obey those who tell them, against the laws and commands of their sovereigns. It means that they will act wisely if they await Christ's future coming in patience and faith while obeying their present magistrates.\n\nAnother term of their commission is to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” What is baptism? Immersion in water. But what does it mean to immerse someone in water in the name of anything? The words of baptism mean this: the baptized person is immersed or washed as a sign of becoming a new person and a loyal subject of that God whose Person was represented long ago by Moses and the High Priests when he reigned over the Jews; and of Jesus Christ, his Son, God and man, who redeemed us and, in his human nature, will represent his Father's Person in his eternal Kingdom after the Resurrection; and as a sign of acknowledging the Apostles' doctrine as the sole, sure way to that Kingdom, for the Apostles, assisted by the Spirit of the Father and the Son, were left as guides to bring us there. This is our promise in baptism; and the authority of earthly sovereigns will not be abolished before the day of Judgment. St. Paul expressly affirms it (1 Cor. 15. 22, 23, 24.), saying, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the first fruits, afterward those who are Christ's, at his coming; then comes the end, when he shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” It is therefore clear that in baptism we do not establish another authority over ourselves to govern our outward actions in this life, but promise to take the Apostles' doctrine as our guide on the way to eternal life.\n\nThe power to remit and retain sins, also called the power to loose and bind and sometimes the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, follows from the authority to baptize or refuse baptism. For baptism is the sacrament of allegiance for those who are to be received into the Kingdom of God—that is, into eternal life, or the remission of sin. As eternal life was lost by committing sins, it is restored by their remission. The aim of baptism is the remission of sins; hence St. Peter, when those converted by his sermon on the day of Pentecost asked what they should do, advised them to “repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus, for the remission of sins.” Since baptizing declares the reception of people into God's Kingdom, and refusing baptism declares their exclusion, it follows that the same Apostles, their deputies, and successors were given the power to declare people expelled from it or retained within it. Thus, after our Savior breathed upon them and said (John 20.22.), “Receive the Holy Ghost,” he added in the next verse, “Whose sins you remit are remitted to them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” These words do not confer authority to forgive or retain sins simply and absolutely, as God forgives or retains them, knowing the human heart and the truth of a person's repentance and conversion; rather, the forgiveness is conditional upon repentance. If the absolved person's repentance is only feigned, this forgiveness or absolution becomes void without any further act or sentence from the one who absolved him. It has no effect toward salvation but instead aggravates his sin. The Apostles and their successors must therefore rely solely on outward signs of repentance. When these appear, they have no authority to deny absolution; when they do not, they have no authority to grant it. The same holds for baptism: the Apostles had no power to deny it to a converted Jew or Gentile, or to grant it to someone unrepentant. But since no one can discern the truth of another's repentance beyond outward signs in words and deeds, which may be hypocritical, a further question arises: who is appointed judge of these signs? Our Savior himself decides it (Mat. 18. 15, 16, 17.): “If your brother trespasses against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone; if he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear you, take one or two more with you. And if he neglects to hear them, tell it to the Church; let him be to you as a heathen and a publican.” It is plain from this that judgment concerning the truth of repentance belonged not to one individual but to the Church: the assembly of the faithful or those authorized to represent them. Besides judgment, however, the pronouncement of the sentence is also needed. This always belonged to the Apostle or a pastor of the Church acting as its spokesman; our Savior speaks of it in verse 18: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” St. Paul's practice agrees with this (1 Cor. 5.3, 4, & 5.), when he says, “For I, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already decided, as though I were present, concerning the man who has done this deed: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together and my spirit is with you, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such a one to Satan”; that is, to cast him out of the Church as a person whose sins are not forgiven. Paul pronounces the sentence here, but the assembly first had to hear the case, since St. Paul was absent, and consequently to condemn the man. In the same chapter (ver. 11, 12.) judgment in such a case is assigned even more expressly to the assembly: “But now I have written to you not to associate with any man called a brother who is a fornicator, &c.; not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those within?” The Apostle or pastor thus pronounced the sentence excluding someone from the Church, but the Church judged the merits of the case: that is, before the conversion of Kings and others with sovereign authority in the Common-wealth, the assembly of Christians residing in the same city—at Corinth, for example, the assembly of Corinthian Christians.\n\nThat part of the power of the keys by which people were driven from the Kingdom of God is called excommunication. To excommunicate is, in the original, Aposunagogon Poiein, “to cast out of the synagogue,” that is, out of the place of divine service. The word comes from the Jewish custom of expelling from their synagogues those they thought contagious in conduct or doctrine, as lepers were separated from the congregation of Israel under Moses' Law until the Priest pronounced them clean.\n\nBefore civil power reinforced it, the use and effect of excommunication extended no further than requiring those who were not excommunicated to avoid the company of those who were. It was not enough to treat the latter as heathens who had never been Christians, for Christians could eat and drink with such people, but not with the excommunicated. This appears from St. Paul's words (1 Cor. 5. ver. 9, 10, &c.), where he says he had earlier forbidden them “to associate with fornicators”; but since doing so altogether would require leaving the world, he restricts the prohibition to fornicators and other vicious people among the brothers. “With such a one,” he says, they should not associate, “not even to eat.” This is no more than our Savior says (Mat. 18.17.): “Let him be to you as a heathen and as a publican.” For publicans—that is, farmers and collectors of the Common-wealth's revenues—were so hated and detested by the Jews obliged to pay them that publican and sinner were treated as equivalent terms. Thus when our Savior accepted an invitation from Zacchaeus the publican, even though his purpose was to convert him, it was held against him as a crime. By adding publican to heathen, therefore, our Savior forbade them to eat with an excommunicated person.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 3\n\nAs for excluding them from their synagogues or places of assembly, they had no power to do so except the power of the owner of the place, whether Christian or heathen. And because all places lie by right within the dominion of the Common-wealth, the excommunicated person, no less than someone never baptized, might enter them by commission of the civil magistrate; just as Paul, before his conversion, entered their synagogues at Damascus (Acts 9.2.) to seize Christians, men and women, and carry them bound to Jerusalem, by commission of the high priest.\n\nFrom this it appears that, for a Christian who became an apostate in a place where the civil power persecuted the Church or gave it no assistance, excommunication brought neither harm in this world nor terror. It brought no terror because of his unbelief, and no harm because it restored him to the favor of the world; and in the world to come he would be no worse off than those who had never believed. The harm fell rather upon the Church, since casting such people out provoked them to carry out their malice more freely.\n\nExcommunication therefore had an effect only on those who believed that Jesus Christ would return in glory to reign over and judge the living and the dead, and would therefore refuse entry into his Kingdom to those whose sins were retained—that is, those excommunicated by the Church. This is why St. Paul calls excommunication a delivery of the excommunicated person to Satan. For outside the Kingdom of Christ, all other kingdoms after Judgment are included within the kingdom of Satan. This is what the faithful feared while they remained excommunicated, that is, in a state in which their sins were not forgiven. We may therefore understand that when the Christian religion was not authorized by the civil power, excommunication was used only to correct conduct, not errors of opinion. It is a punishment that none could feel except those who believed in and awaited the return of our Savior to judge the world; and those who believed this needed nothing beyond uprightness of life to be saved.\n\nExcommunication is prescribed for injustice, as in (Mat. 18.): if your brother offends you, tell him privately; then tell him with witnesses; finally tell the Church; and if he will not listen, “Let him be to you as a heathen man and a tax collector.” Excommunication is also prescribed for a scandalous life, as in (1 Cor. 5. 11.): “If anyone called a brother is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a drunkard, or an extortioner, you must not eat with such a person.” But Scripture offers no authority, nor the Apostles any example, for excommunicating someone who holds to this foundation, that Jesus was the Christ, over a difference of opinion on other points that do not destroy that foundation. There is, indeed, a passage in St. Paul (Titus 3.10.) that seems to say otherwise: “Reject a man who is a heretic after a first and second admonition.” A heretic is someone who, while a member of the Church, teaches a private opinion forbidden by the Church; and St. Paul advises Titus to reject such a person after a first and second warning. But “reject” here does not mean excommunicate the man: it means stop admonishing him, leave him alone, set aside debate with him, as one who can be convinced only by himself. The same Apostle says (2 Tim. 2.23.), “Avoid foolish and ignorant questions.” “Avoid” here and “reject” in the former passage are the same word in the original, paraitou; yet foolish questions can be set aside without excommunication. And again (Tit. 3.93), “Avoid foolish questions,” where the original periistaso, “set them aside,” is equivalent to the earlier word “reject.” There is no other passage that could even plausibly be used to support casting faithful people out of the Church—people who believe its foundation—merely for a distinctive structure of beliefs of their own, perhaps arising from a good and pious conscience. On the contrary, all the passages commanding us to avoid such disputes teach pastors, such as Timothy and Titus, not to create new articles of faith by deciding every minor controversy, burdening consciences needlessly or provoking people to break the Church's unity. The Apostles themselves observed this lesson well. Though the dispute between St. Peter and St. Paul was serious (as we may read in Gal. 2.11.), they did not cast each other out of the Church. Nevertheless, even in the Apostles' time there were other pastors who did not observe it: Diotrephes (3 John 9. &c.), out of his pride in preeminence, cast from the Church people whom St. John himself thought should be received into it. So early had vanity and ambition found entrance into the Church of Christ.\n\nFor a person to be liable to excommunication, many conditions are required. First, he must belong to a community, that is, a lawful assembly or Christian Church with the power to judge the cause for which he is to be excommunicated. Where there is no community there can be no excommunication; and where there is no power to judge, there can be no power to pronounce sentence. It follows that one Church cannot be excommunicated by another. Either the two have equal power to excommunicate each other, in which case excommunication is not discipline or an act of authority but schism and a dissolution of charity; or one is subordinate to the other, so that both have only one voice and are therefore one Church, while the excommunicated part is no longer a Church but a dispersed collection of individuals.\n\nAnd because the sentence of excommunication advises people not to associate, or even eat, with the excommunicated, the sentence has no effect if a sovereign prince or assembly is excommunicated. All subjects are bound by the Law of Nature to attend and be present with their own Soveraigne when required; they cannot lawfully expel him from any place in his dominion, sacred or secular, or leave his dominion without permission, much less refuse to eat with him if he calls them to that honor. As for other princes and states, since they are not members of the same congregation, they need no sentence to keep them from associating with the excommunicated state. The very institution that unites many people into one community also separates one community from another. Excommunication is therefore unnecessary to keep kings and states apart and has no effect beyond what belongs to the nature of government itself, unless it is to incite princes to war against one another.\n\nNor has excommunication any effect on a Christian subject who obeys the laws of his own Soveraigne, whether Christian or heathen. For if he believes that “Jesus is the Christ, he has the Spirit of God” (1 Joh. 4.1.) and “God dwells in him, and he in God” (1 Joh. 4.15.). But someone who has the Spirit of God, dwells in God, and has God dwelling in him can suffer no harm from the excommunication of men. Therefore whoever believes Jesus is the Christ is free from all the dangers threatened against excommunicated persons. Whoever does not believe this is no Christian. Thus a true and sincere Christian is not liable to excommunication; nor is a professing Christian until his hypocrisy appears in his conduct—that is, until his behavior violates his Soveraigne's law, the rule of conduct to which Christ and his Apostles have commanded our submission. For the Church can judge conduct only by outward actions, and those actions cannot be unlawful unless they violate the law of the Common-wealth.\n\nIf someone's father, mother, or master is excommunicated, the children are not forbidden to associate or eat with them. That would, in most cases, require the children not to eat at all, since they have no means of obtaining food, and would authorize them to disobey their parents and masters, contrary to the Apostles' command.\n\nIn sum, the power of excommunication cannot extend beyond the purpose for which the Apostles and pastors of the Church have their commission from our Savior: not to rule by command and coercion, but to teach and direct people along the way to salvation in the world to come. A master of a science may abandon a student who stubbornly neglects to practice his rules, but cannot accuse him of injustice, since the student was never bound to obey him. In the same way a teacher of Christian doctrine may abandon disciples who persist stubbornly in an unchristian life, but cannot say they have wronged him, because they have no obligation to obey him. To a teacher who complains in this fashion, God's answer to Samuel on a similar occasion may be applied (1 Sam. 8.): “They have not rejected you, but me.” Excommunication, then, when it lacks the aid of civil power—as it does when a Christian state or prince is excommunicated by a foreign authority—has no effect and consequently should cause no terror. The name Fulmen Excommunicationis, or “Thunderbolt of Excommunication,” arose from the fancy of the bishop of Rome who first used it: he imagined himself King of Kings, as the heathen made Jupiter King of the Gods and gave him in their poems and pictures a thunderbolt to subdue and punish giants who dared deny his power. That fancy rested on two errors: first, that the Kingdom of Christ is of this world, contrary to our Savior's own words, “My Kingdom is not of this world”; second, that the bishop is Christ's vicar not only over his own subjects but over every Christian in the world—a claim without foundation in Scripture, whose contrary will be proved in its proper place.\n\nWhen St. Paul came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue, (Acts 17.2, 3.) “As was his custom, he went in to them, and on three Sabbath days reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and showing that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom he preached was the Christ.” The Scriptures mentioned here were the Scriptures of the Jews, that is, the Old Testament. Those to whom he had to prove that Jesus was the Christ and had risen from the dead were also Jews, and already believed those Scriptures to be the Word of God. Thus, as verse 4 says, some of them believed; and, as verse 5 says, others did not. Why, if all believed Scripture, did they not all believe alike? Why did some accept and others reject St. Paul's interpretation of the passages he cited, with each interpreting them for himself? The reason was this: St. Paul came to them without any legal commission, as someone seeking not to command but to persuade. To do this he had either to work miracles, as Moses did before the Israelites in Egypt, so that they could see his authority in God's works, or to reason from Scriptures they already accepted, so that they could see the truth of his doctrine in God's Word. But anyone who persuades by reasoning from written principles makes the person addressed the judge both of their meaning and of the force of his inferences from them. If these Jews of Thessalonica were not the judges, who else judged St. Paul's arguments from Scripture? If it was St. Paul, why did he need to quote passages to prove his doctrine? It would have been enough to say, “I find it so in Scripture”—in other words, “in your laws, which I am sent by Christ to interpret.” There could therefore be no interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation the Jews of Thessalonica were bound to accept: each could believe or not believe according as the citations appeared to him to agree or disagree with the meaning of the passages cited. In general, in every worldly case, whoever offers a proof makes the person he addresses the judge of that proof. As for the Jews in particular, they were bound by explicit words (Deut. 17.) to accept the decisions on all difficult questions of the priests and judges of Israel then in office. But this applies to Jews who had not yet converted.\n\nFor the conversion of the Gentiles, there was no use citing Scriptures in which they did not believe. The Apostles therefore worked by reason to refute their idolatry; then, by their testimony to Christ's life and resurrection, they sought to persuade them to believe in him. There could as yet be no dispute about authority to interpret Scripture, since no one while still an unbeliever was obliged to follow another person's interpretation of any Scripture, except his Soveraigne's interpretation of the laws of his country.\n\nLet us now consider conversion itself, and see what in it could give rise to such an obligation. People were converted only to belief in what the Apostles preached. And the Apostles preached nothing but that Jesus was the Christ: the King who would save them and reign over them eternally in the world to come; and, consequently, that he was not dead but had risen from the dead and ascended into Heaven, and would one day return to judge the world—which would also rise again for judgment—and reward everyone according to his works. None of the Apostles preached that he himself, or any other Apostle, was an interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation all Christians had to accept as law. For interpreting laws is part of the administration of a present kingdom, which the Apostles did not possess. They, and all pastors ever since, prayed, “Let your Kingdom come,” and urged their converts to obey their heathen princes of the time. The New Testament had not yet been published as one body of writings. Each evangelist interpreted his own Gospel, and each Apostle his own Epistle. As for the Old Testament, our Savior himself tells the Jews (John 5. 39.), “Search the Scriptures; for in them you think you have eternal life, and they are the ones that testify about me.” If he had not meant them to interpret the Scriptures, he would not have instructed them to take from them the proof that he was the Christ. He would either have interpreted them himself or referred them to the priests' interpretation.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 4\n\nWhen a difficulty arose, the Apostles and elders of the Church assembled and decided what should be preached and taught, and how they should interpret the Scriptures to the people; but they did not deprive the people of the freedom to read and interpret those Scriptures for themselves. The Apostles sent various letters and other writings to the churches for their instruction, which would have been pointless if they had not allowed them to interpret—that is, consider the meaning of—what they read. What was true in the Apostles' time must remain true until there are pastors able to authorize an interpreter whose interpretation must be generally accepted. But this could not happen until kings were pastors, or pastors kings.\n\nThere are two senses in which a writing can be called canonical. A canon means a rule, and a rule is a precept that guides and directs a person in any action whatsoever. Precepts given by a teacher to a student, or a counselor to a friend, without power to compel observance are nevertheless canons, because they are rules. But when they are given by someone whom the recipient is bound to obey, those canons are not merely rules but laws. The question here, therefore, concerns the power to make the Scriptures—the rules of Christian faith—into laws.\n\nThe first part of Scripture to become law was the Ten Commandments, written on two tablets of stone and delivered by God himself to Moses, who made them known to the people. Before then there was no written law of God: for God had not yet chosen a people as his own particular Kingdom, and had given humankind no law except the Law of Nature, that is, the precepts of natural reason written in every person's heart. Of these two tablets, the first contains the law of sovereignty. 1. They must not obey or honor the gods of other nations: “Non habebis Deos alienos coram me,” that is, “You shall not have as gods the gods worshiped by other nations, but only me.” They were thereby forbidden to obey or honor as their King and Governor any God but the one who spoke to them then through Moses and afterward through the high priest. 2. They “must not make any image to represent him”: they must not choose for themselves any representative imagined by themselves, whether in heaven or on earth, but must obey Moses and Aaron, whom he appointed to that office. 3. They “must not take God's name in vain”: they must not speak rashly of their King or dispute his Right or the commissions of Moses and Aaron, his lieutenants. 4. “On every seventh day they must abstain from their ordinary work” and spend the time in giving him public honor. The second tablet contains each person's duty to others: “Honor your parents; do not kill; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not corrupt judgment by false testimony”; and finally, “Do not even plan in your heart to injure another.” The question now is who gave these written tablets the binding force of laws. There is no doubt God himself made them laws. But a law does not bind anyone, nor is it law to anyone, unless he acknowledges it as the act of the Soveraigne. How, then, could the people of Israel, forbidden to approach the mountain to hear what God said to Moses, be bound to obey all the laws Moses presented to them? Some, indeed, were Laws of Nature, such as the entire second tablet, and were therefore to be acknowledged as God's laws by all peoples, not only by the Israelites. But the question remains about those peculiar to Israel, such as the laws of the first tablet—except that immediately after Moses presented them, the people bound themselves to obey him in these words (Exod. 20.19.): “Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” Thus only Moses, and afterward the high priest, whom God declared through Moses would administer his particular Kingdom, possessed on earth the power to make this short Scripture of the Decalogue law in the Common-wealth of Israel. But Moses, Aaron, and the succeeding high priests were the civil Soveraigns. Up to this point, therefore, canonizing Scripture, or making it law, belonged to the civil Soveraigne.\n\nThe judicial law—that is, the laws God prescribed to Israel's magistrates to govern their administration of justice and the judgments they would deliver in disputes between persons—and the Levitical law—that is, God's rule concerning the rites and ceremonies of the priests and Levites—were all delivered to them through Moses alone. They therefore became laws by virtue of the same promise to obey Moses. The text does not say whether these laws were written at the time or were dictated orally by Moses to the people after his forty days with God on the mountain. But they were all positive laws, equivalent to holy Scripture, and made canonical by Moses, the civil Soveraigne.\n\nWhen the Israelites reached the plains of Moab opposite Jericho and were ready to enter the promised land, Moses added various laws to the former ones. These are therefore called Deuteronomy, that is, Second Laws. They are, as written in Deut. 29.1., “the words of a Covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel, besides the Covenant he made with them in Horeb.” For after explaining the earlier laws at the beginning of Deuteronomy, Moses adds others, beginning in chapter 12. and continuing to the end of chapter 26. of that book. They were commanded (Deut. 27.1.) to write this law on large plastered stones as they crossed the Jordan. Moses himself also wrote it in a book, delivered it into the hands of the “priests and the elders of Israel” (Deut. 31.9.), and commanded (verse 26.) that it “be placed beside the Ark”; for the Ark itself contained only the Ten Commandments. This was the law of which Moses (Deuteronomy 17.18.) commanded the kings of Israel to keep a copy. And this was the law which, after being lost for a long time, was found again in the Temple under Josiah and received by his authority as the law of God. But Moses when he wrote it and Josiah when he recovered it both held civil sovereignty. Thus far, then, the power to make Scripture canonical belonged to the civil Soveraigne.\n\nApart from this Book of the Law, no book from the time of Moses until after the Captivity was received among the Jews as the law of God. For most of the prophets lived during the Captivity itself, and the others lived only a little before it. Their prophecies were so far from being generally received as laws that the prophets themselves were persecuted, partly by false prophets and partly by kings led astray by them. And this very book, which Josiah confirmed as the law of God, together with the whole history of God's works, was lost during the Captivity and the sack of Jerusalem, as appears in 2 Esdras 14.21.: “Your Law has been burned; therefore no one knows the things you have done, or the works that shall begin.” Before the Captivity, between the loss of the law—which Scripture does not mention, though it may plausibly be placed in Rehoboam's time, when Shishak king of Egypt plundered the Temple (1 Kings 14.26.)—and its rediscovery under Josiah, they had no written Word of God. They governed by their own judgment or followed the guidance of those whom they individually considered prophets.\n\nFrom this we may infer that the Scriptures of the Old Testament as we have them today were neither canonical nor law for the Jews until their Covenant with God was renewed on their return from the Captivity and their Common-wealth was restored under Esdras. From then onward they were regarded as the law of the Jews, translated as such into Greek by Seventy elders of Judaea, deposited in Ptolemy's library at Alexandria, and approved as the Word of God. Since Esdras was the high priest, and the high priest was their civil Soveraigne, it is clear that Scripture was never made law except by the sovereign civil power.\n\nThe New Testament began to be canonical under Christian Soveraigns. From the writings of the fathers who lived before the Christian religion was received and authorized by Constantine the Emperor, we can see that Christians of that time regarded the books we now have in the New Testament as the dictates of the Holy Ghost, and consequently as the canon or rule of faith. There were a few exceptions, whose small number led to the others' being called the Catholic Church and themselves heretics. Such was the reverence and esteem Christians had for their teachers; indeed, in every field, disciples ordinarily hold the first masters from whom they receive their teaching in no small reverence. There is therefore no doubt that when St. Paul wrote to churches he had converted, or any other Apostle or disciple of Christ wrote to those who had embraced Christ, they received those writings as true Christian doctrine. But at that time it was the faith of the hearer, not the power or authority of the teacher, that led him to receive it. Thus the Apostles did not make their own writings canonical; each convert made them so for himself.\n\nBut our question is not what any Christian made a law or canon for himself—for by the same right he accepted it, he might reject it again—but what was made a canon for Christians in such a way that they could not act contrary to it without injustice. For the New Testament to be canonical in this sense—that is, to be law wherever the law of the Common-wealth had not made it law—is contrary to the nature of law. A law, as already shown, is the command of the man or assembly to whom we have given sovereign authority to establish whatever rules he thinks fit to guide our actions, and to punish us when we act against them. Thus when anyone else offers us rules not prescribed by the sovereign ruler, these are only counsel and advice. Whether good or bad, the person advised may refuse to follow them without injustice; and if they conflict with established laws, he cannot follow them without injustice, however good he considers them. I mean that in this case he cannot follow them in his actions or in his speech with others, though he may without blame believe his private teachers and wish that he were free to follow their advice and that it were publicly accepted as law. For inward faith is by nature invisible and consequently beyond all human jurisdiction; whereas words and actions proceeding from it, when they breach our civil obedience, are injustice before both God and man. Since our Savior has denied that his Kingdom is of this world, and has said that he came not to judge the world but to save it, he has not subjected us to laws other than those of the Common-wealth: the Jews to the law of Moses (which, he says in Mat. 5., he came not to destroy but to fulfill), other nations to the laws of their respective Soveraigns, and all people to the Laws of Nature. Both he and his Apostles taught us to observe those laws as a necessary condition of admission on the last day into his eternal Kingdom, where there will be protection and everlasting life. Since, therefore, our Savior and his Apostles left us no new laws binding us in this world, but new doctrine to prepare us for the next, the books of the New Testament containing that doctrine were not obligatory canons, or laws, until obedience to them was commanded by those to whom God had given legislative power on earth. They were only good and safe advice to guide sinners toward salvation, which each person might accept or refuse at his own peril without committing injustice.\n\nAgain, our Savior Christ commissioned his Apostles and disciples to proclaim his Kingdom, not as present but as yet to come; to teach all nations; to baptize those who believed; to enter the houses of those who received them; and, where they were not received, to shake the dust from their feet against the inhabitants. He did not commission them to call down fire from heaven to destroy those people or to compel their obedience by the sword. In all this there is no power, only persuasion. He sent them as sheep among wolves, not as kings among subjects. Their commission was not to make laws but to obey and teach obedience to laws already made. Consequently they could not make their writings obligatory canons without the assistance of the sovereign civil power. Thus the Scripture of the New Testament is law only where lawful civil power has made it so. There, too, the king or Soveraigne makes it law for himself, thereby subjecting himself not to the teacher or Apostle who converted him, but to God himself and his Son Jesus Christ, as directly as the Apostles themselves did.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 5\n\nWhat might seem to give the New Testament the force of law for those who had embraced Christian doctrine in times and places of persecution is the decrees they made among themselves in synods. For in (Acts 15.28.) we read the declaration of the council of the Apostles, elders, and whole Church: “It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things, &c.” This language suggests a power to impose a burden on those who had received their doctrine. Now “to lay a burden on another” seems to mean the same as “to oblige”; and thus the acts of that council would be laws for Christians of the time. Nevertheless, they were no more laws than these other precepts: “Repent; be baptized; keep the commandments; believe the Gospel; come to me; sell all you have; give it to the poor”; and “follow me.” These are not commands but invitations and calls to Christianity, like that in Esay 55.1.: “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; come, buy wine and milk without money.” First, the Apostles' power was no other than our Savior's: to invite people to embrace the Kingdom of God, which they themselves acknowledged was not a present Kingdom but one to come; and those who have no Kingdom can make no laws. Second, if the acts of their council were laws, they could not be disobeyed without sin. But nowhere do we read that those who did not receive Christ's doctrine thereby sinned; rather, they died in their sins—that is, their offenses against laws they were obliged to obey were not pardoned. Those laws were the Laws of Nature and the civil laws of the state, to which every Christian had submitted by Covenant. Hence the burden the Apostles might place on their converts must be understood not as laws, but as conditions proposed to those seeking salvation. They might accept or reject these at their own peril, without a new sin, though not without the risk of condemnation and exclusion from the Kingdom of God for past sins. Accordingly, St. John does not say of unbelievers that the wrath of God “will come” upon them, but that “the wrath of God remains upon them”; nor that they will be condemned, but that “they are condemned already” (John 3.36, 3.18). Nor can we conceive that the benefit of faith “is forgiveness of sins” unless we also conceive that the harm of unbelief is the retention of those same sins.\n\nBut why, someone may ask, should the Apostles and later pastors of the Church meet to agree what doctrine of faith and conduct should be taught if nobody was obliged to follow their decrees? The answer is that the Apostles and elders at that council, simply by joining it, bound themselves to teach the doctrine agreed and decreed there, insofar as it conflicted with no earlier law they were bound to obey. But this did not oblige every other Christian to observe what they taught. Though they could deliberate about what each of them should teach, they could not deliberate about what others must do, unless their assembly possessed legislative power; and only civil Soveraigns could possess that power. For although God is Soveraigne of the whole world, we are not bound to accept as his law everything anyone puts forward in his name, nor anything contrary to the civil law, which God has expressly commanded us to obey.\n\nSince, then, the acts of the Apostles' council were not laws but counsels, still less are the acts of any later teachers or councils laws if they meet without the civil Soveraigne's authority. Consequently, although the books of the New Testament are the most perfect rules of Christian doctrine, only the authority of kings or sovereign assemblies could make them laws.\n\nNo record survives of the first council that made the Scriptures we now possess canonical. For the collection attributed to the first bishop of Rome after St. Peter is open to question: although it lists the canonical books, its words “Sint vobis omnibus Clericis & Laicis Libris venerandi, &c.” distinguish clergy from laity, a distinction not in use so close to St. Peter's time. The first surviving council to settle the canonical Scriptures was that of Laodicea, Can. 59. It forbids the reading of other books in churches, but its command is addressed not to every Christian, only to those authorized to read anything publicly in church—that is, to church officers alone.\n\nAmong church officers in the Apostles' time, some held teaching offices and others serving offices. The teaching offices included preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to unbelievers, administering the sacraments and divine service, and teaching rules of faith and conduct to converts. The serving office belonged to deacons, appointed to administer the Church's material needs when its members lived from a common fund raised by the faithful's voluntary contributions.\n\nAmong the teaching officers, the first and chief were the Apostles. At first there were only twelve, chosen and appointed by our Savior himself. Their office was not only to preach, teach, and baptize, but also to be martyrs—that is, witnesses of our Savior's resurrection. This testimony was the specific and essential mark distinguishing apostleship from other church offices: an Apostle had to have seen our Savior after his resurrection or have lived with him before it, witnessed his works, and seen other evidence of his divinity, so that he could be accepted as a sufficient witness. Accordingly, at the election of a new Apostle to replace Judas Iscariot, St. Peter says (Acts 1.21,22.): “From the men who accompanied us all the time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, from the baptism of John to the day he was taken up from us, one must be appointed to witness his resurrection with us.” The word “must” implies that accompanying the first and foremost Apostles while our Savior appeared in the flesh was a necessary qualification for an Apostle.\n\nMatthias made Apostle by the congregation.\n\nThe first Apostle not appointed by Christ during his life on earth was Matthias, chosen as follows. About 120 Christians were assembled at Jerusalem (Acts 1.15.). They nominated two, Joseph the Just and Matthias (verse 23.), and had lots drawn; “and (verse 26.) the lot fell on Matthias, and he was numbered with the Apostles.” We thus see that this Apostle's ordination was the act of the congregation, not of St. Peter or the eleven except as members of the assembly.\n\nAfter Matthias, no others were ordained Apostles except Paul and Barnabas. This took place, as we read in Acts 13.1,2,3., in this way: “In the church at Antioch there were certain prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen, who had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ And after they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands upon them, they sent them away.”\n\nIt is clear from this that, although the Holy Ghost called them, their calling was declared to them and their mission authorized by the particular Church of Antioch. Their calling was to the apostleship, as is evident from the fact that both are called Apostles in Acts 14.14. St. Paul makes clear (Rom. 1.1.) that it was by this act of the Church of Antioch that they became Apostles, since he uses the word the Holy Ghost used at his calling: he calls himself “an Apostle set apart for the Gospel of God,” echoing “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul, &c.” But since an Apostle's work was to witness Christ's resurrection, someone may ask how St. Paul, who had not lived with our Savior before his Passion, could know that he had risen. The answer is simple: after his Ascension, our Savior himself appeared to Paul from Heaven on the road to Damascus and “chose him as a vessel to bear his name before the Gentiles, kings, and children of Israel.” Having seen the Lord after his Passion, Paul was therefore a competent witness of his resurrection. Barnabas, for his part, was a disciple before the Passion. It is therefore evident that Paul and Barnabas were Apostles, yet chosen and authorized not by the first Apostles alone but by the Church of Antioch, just as Matthias was chosen and authorized by the Church of Jerusalem.\n\nBishop, a word formed in our language from the Greek Episcopus, means an overseer or superintendent of any activity, and particularly a pastor or shepherd. From there it was used metaphorically, not only among the Jews, who were originally shepherds, but also among the heathen, to signify the office of a king or any other ruler or guide of a people, whether he ruled by laws or by doctrine. So the Apostles were the first Christian bishops, instituted by Christ himself; in this sense the apostleship of Judas is called his bishopric (Acts 1.20.). Later, when elders were appointed in Christian churches to guide Christ's flock through their doctrine and advice, these elders were also called bishops. Timothy was an elder—the word “elder” in the New Testament names an office as well as an age—yet he was also a bishop. Bishops, moreover, were content with the title of elder. Even St. John himself, the Apostle beloved of our Lord, opens his Second Epistle with the words, “The elder to the elect lady.” It is clear, then, that in the Apostles' time bishop, pastor, elder, and doctor—that is, teacher—were different names for the same office. For there was as yet no government by coercion, only by doctrine and persuasion. The Kingdom of God was yet to come, in a new world; there could therefore be no authority to compel within any church until the Common-wealth embraced the Christian faith. Consequently, although their duties differed, their authority did not.\n\nApart from these teaching employments in the Church—Apostles, bishops, elders, pastors, and doctors—whose calling was to proclaim Christ to Jews and unbelievers, and to direct and teach believers, we read of no others in the New Testament. The names “evangelists” and “prophets” signify not offices but distinct gifts by which different people served the Church. Evangelists served by writing about our Savior's life and acts, as did the Apostles St. Matthew and St. John, the disciples St. Mark and St. Luke, and whoever else wrote on the subject (as St. Thomas and St. Barnabas are said to have done, though the Church has not accepted the books circulated under their names). Prophets served through their gift of interpreting the Old Testament, and sometimes by reporting their particular revelations to the Church. Neither these gifts, nor the gift of languages, of casting out devils, of curing other diseases, or any other gift made anyone an officer of the Church. Only a proper calling and election to the charge of teaching could do that.\n\nJust as the Apostles Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas were not appointed by our Savior himself but elected by the Church—that is, the assembly of Christians: Matthias by the Church of Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas by the Church of Antioch—so presbyters and pastors in other cities were elected by the churches of those cities. For proof, let us first consider how St. Paul proceeded in ordaining presbyters in the cities where he had converted people to the Christian faith, soon after he and Barnabas received their apostleship. We read in Acts 14.23. that “they ordained elders in every church.” At first this may seem to mean that Paul and Barnabas themselves chose and authorized them. But the original text makes clear that they were chosen and authorized by the Christian assembly of each city. Its words are “cheirotonesantes autoispresbuterous kat ekklesian,” that is, “When they had ordained elders for them by the raising of hands in every congregation.” It is well known that in all these cities magistrates and officers were chosen by a plurality of votes; and because the ordinary way to distinguish affirmative from negative votes was by raised hands, ordaining an officer in any city meant no more than assembling the people to elect him by a plurality of votes. These might be raised hands, voices, balls, beans, or small stones, of which each person dropped one into a vessel marked affirmative or negative, for cities differed in their customs on this point. It was therefore the assembly that elected its elders. The Apostles merely presided, calling the assembly together for the election, announcing who had been elected, and giving the blessing now called consecration. For this reason the presiding officers of assemblies, as the elders were in the Apostles' absence, were called proestotes, or in Latin Antistities. These words mean the leading person of the assembly, whose office was to count votes and declare who was elected; and, if votes were equal, to settle the question by adding his own vote—the office of a president in council. Because all churches ordained presbyters in the same way, where Scripture says “appoint,” as in Titus 1.5., “ina katasteses kata polin presbuterous,” “For this reason I left you in Crete, that you should appoint elders in every city,” we must understand the same procedure: he was to assemble the faithful and ordain presbyters by a plurality of votes. It would have been strange if, in a town where people perhaps had never seen a magistrate chosen except by an assembly, converts to Christianity had even thought of another way to elect their teachers and guides—that is, their presbyters, otherwise called bishops—rather than the plurality of votes implied by St. Paul's word Cheirotonesantes (Acts 14.23.). Nor, before emperors found it necessary to regulate bishops to preserve peace among them, were bishops ever chosen otherwise than by the assemblies of Christians in each individual town.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 6\n\nThe same point is confirmed by the continuing practice, even today, in electing the bishops of Rome. For if the bishop of one place had the right to choose a successor to the pastoral office in any city when he left it to establish that office elsewhere, still more would he have had the right to appoint his successor in the place where he last lived and died. Yet we find no bishop of Rome who ever appointed his successor. For a long time the people chose them, as we may see from the riot over the election between Damascus and Ursinicus. Ammianus Marcellinus says it grew so fierce that Juventius the prefect, unable to keep the peace between them, had to leave the city, and more than a hundred men were found dead in the church itself. Though they were later chosen first by all the clergy of Rome and afterward by the cardinals, none was ever appointed to succeed by his predecessor. If, then, they claimed no right to appoint their successors, I think I may reasonably conclude that they had no right to establish this new power. No one could take it from the Church and bestow it on them except someone with lawful authority not only to teach but to command the Church; and no one could do that except the civil sovereign.\n\nThe original word for minister, diakonos, means someone who voluntarily attends to another person's business. A minister differs from a servant only in this: servants are bound by their condition to do what they are commanded, whereas ministers are bound only by their undertaking, and therefore to no more than they have undertaken. Thus those who teach the Word of God and those who manage the secular affairs of the Church are both ministers, but of different persons. The pastors of the Church, called (Acts 6.4.) “ministers of the Word,” are ministers of Christ, whose Word it is. But the ministry of a deacon, called (verse 2. of the same chapter) “serving tables,” is service to the Church or congregation. Therefore neither an individual nor the whole Church could ever properly call its pastor its minister. A deacon, however, the whole congregation could properly call its minister, whether his undertaking was to serve tables; to distribute support to Christians when they lived in each city on a common fund or on collections, as they did at first; to care for the house of prayer or its revenue; or to manage any other worldly business of the Church.\n\nFor as deacons their work was to serve the congregation, though when occasion arose they also preached the Gospel and upheld the doctrine of Christ, each according to his gifts, as St. Stephen did; and preached and baptized, as Philip did. For the Philip who preached the Gospel in Samaria (Acts 8. 5.) and baptized the eunuch (verse 38.) was Philip the deacon, not Philip the apostle. It is clear (verse 1.) that when Philip preached in Samaria the apostles were in Jerusalem, and that (verse 14.) “when they heard that Samaria had received the Word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.” Through the laying on of their hands, those who had been baptized (verse 15.) received the Holy Spirit, which they had not received through Philip's baptism. For the Holy Spirit could be conferred only if baptism was administered or confirmed by a minister of the Word, not by a minister of the Church. So, to confirm the baptism of those Philip the deacon had baptized, the apostles sent Peter and John from their own number in Jerusalem to Samaria. They conferred on those who had previously only been baptized the graces that were signs of the Holy Spirit, which then accompanied all true believers. What these signs were may be understood from what St. Mark says (chap. 16.17.): “These signs follow those who believe in my name: they shall cast out devils; they shall speak in new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” These gifts Philip could not confer, but the apostles could, and, as this passage shows, effectively did confer on everyone who truly believed and was baptized by a minister of Christ himself. Either Christ's ministers in this age cannot confer that power, or there are very few true believers, or Christ has very few ministers.\n\nThat the first deacons were chosen not by the apostles but by a congregation of disciples—that is, Christian people of every kind—is evident from Acts 6. We read there that the Twelve, when the number of disciples had grown, called them together and said that it was not fitting for the apostles to leave the Word of God to serve tables. They told them (verse 3.), “Brothers, select from among yourselves seven men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.” Evidently, though the apostles declared them elected, the congregation chose them. This is said still more plainly (verse 5.), where we read that “the proposal pleased the multitude, and they chose seven, etc.”\n\nUnder the Old Testament, only the tribe of Levi was eligible for the priesthood and the other lesser offices of the Church. The land was divided among the other tribes, except Levi; with the division of the tribe of Joseph into Ephraim and Manasses, they still numbered twelve. Certain cities and their surrounding pasturelands were assigned to the tribe of Levi for their habitation and cattle; as their portion, however, they were to receive a tenth of the produce of their brothers' land. The priests, in turn, received for their support a tenth of that tenth, along with a portion of the offerings and sacrifices. For God had said to Aaron (Numb. 18. 20.), “You shall have no inheritance in their land, nor any portion among them; I am your portion and your inheritance among the children of Israel.” God was then King and had appointed the tribe of Levi his public ministers. He therefore provided for their support from the public revenue, that is, the portion God had reserved for himself: tithes and offerings. This is what God means by saying, “I am your inheritance.” Thus the Levites could appropriately be called clergy, from kleros, meaning lot or inheritance—not because they were heirs to the Kingdom of God more than others, but because God's inheritance supported them. Since God himself was then their King, and Moses, Aaron, and the succeeding high priests were his lieutenants, it is clear that the right to tithes and offerings was established by the civil power.\n\nAfter they rejected God by asking for a king, the Levites still received the same revenue; but their right to it came from the fact that the kings never took it away. For public revenue was at the disposal of whoever was the public person, and until the Captivity that person was the king. Again, after the return from the Captivity, they paid their tithes as before to the priest. Up to this point, then, the civil sovereign determined the Church's means of support.\n\nOf the support of our Savior and his apostles, we read only that they had a purse, carried by Judas Iscariot; that some apostles who were fishermen sometimes practiced their trade; and that when our Savior sent the Twelve to preach, he forbade them “to carry gold, silver, or brass in their purses, for the worker is worthy of his wages” (Mat. 10. 9,10.). From this it is probable that their usual support suited their employment: their work was (verse 8.) “to give freely, because they had freely received,” and their support was the free gift of those who believed the good news they brought of the coming of the Messiah, their Savior. We may add the gifts of gratitude from people whom our Savior had healed of disease. Among them are mentioned “certain women (Luke 8. 2,3.) who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary Magdalene, from whom seven devils had gone out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward; Susanna; and many others, who supported him from their own resources.”\n\nAfter our Savior's Ascension, the Christians in each city lived communally (Acts 4. 34.) on the money raised by selling their lands and possessions and laid at the apostles' feet—freely, not from duty. For “while the land remained,” St. Peter says to Ananias (Acts 5.4.), “was it not yours? And after it was sold, was it not in your power?” This shows that he need not have tried to save either his land or his money by lying, since he was under no obligation to contribute anything unless he wished. As in the time of the apostles, so throughout the period down to the time after Constantine the Great, we find that bishops and pastors of the Christian Church were supported solely by the voluntary contributions of those who had embraced their doctrine. Tithes were not yet mentioned. But in the time of Constantine and his sons Christians were so devoted to their pastors that Ammianus Marcellinus, describing the riot between Damasus and Ursinicus over the bishopric, says the office was worth fighting for: the bishops of those days, through the generosity of their flocks and especially of women of rank, lived splendidly, rode in coaches, and enjoyed luxurious food and clothing.\n\nThe Ministers of the Gospel Lived on the Generosity of Their Flocks. But someone may ask whether the pastor was then obliged to live on voluntary contributions as on alms. “For who,” says St. Paul (1 Cor. 9. 7.), “goes to war at his own expense? Or who tends a flock and does not drink the flock's milk?” Again (1 Cor. 9. 13.), “Do you not know that those who minister in holy things live from the things of the Temple, and those who serve at the altar share in what is offered at the altar?” That is, they receive part of the offerings for their support. He then concludes, “So too the Lord has ordained that those who preach the Gospel should live from the Gospel.” We can indeed infer from this that the Church's pastors ought to be supported by their flocks, but not that pastors may determine the amount or kind of their own allowance and, so to speak, carve out their own portions. Their allowance must therefore be determined either by the gratitude and generosity of each member of their flock or by the whole congregation. It could not be determined by the whole congregation, because its acts were not then laws. Before emperors and civil sovereigns made laws to establish it, then, the support of pastors was nothing but voluntary generosity. Those who served at the altar lived on what was offered. In what court could they sue for it, having no tribunals? Or if they had arbitrators among themselves, who could enforce their judgments when they had no power to arm their officers? It follows that no fixed support could be assigned to any pastor of the Church except by the whole congregation, and only when its decrees had the force not merely of canons but of laws. Such laws could be made only by emperors, kings, or other civil sovereigns. The right to tithes under the law of Moses could not be applied to the ministers of the Gospel at that time, because Moses and the high priests were the people's civil sovereigns under God, whose Kingdom among the Jews was present; whereas the Kingdom of God through Christ is yet to come.\n\nSo far I have shown what the pastors of the Church are; the terms of their commission—that they were to preach, teach, baptize, and preside over their several congregations; what ecclesiastical censure is, namely excommunication: where civil laws forbade Christianity, removing themselves from the company of the excommunicated, and where civil law required Christianity, removing the excommunicated from Christian congregations; who elected the Church's pastors and ministers—the congregation; who consecrated and blessed them—the pastor; and what revenue was due to them—nothing but their own possessions, their own labor, and the voluntary contributions of devout and grateful Christians. We must now consider the office of those who, being civil sovereigns, have also embraced the Christian faith.\n\nFirst we must remember that in every Commonwealth the right to judge what doctrines are conducive to peace and should be taught to subjects is inseparably attached, as already proved (chap. 18.), to the civil sovereign power, whether it belongs to one man or to an assembly. Even the simplest mind can see that people's actions spring from their opinions about the good or evil those actions will bring them. Consequently, people once convinced that obedience to the sovereign power will harm them more than disobedience will break the laws, overthrow the Commonwealth, and bring in confusion and civil war—the very things all civil government was instituted to prevent. Thus in all heathen Commonwealths sovereigns have been called pastors of the people, because no subject could lawfully teach the people without their permission and authority.\n\nThat right of heathen kings cannot be thought to have been taken from them by their conversion to faith in Christ. Christ never ordained that kings who believed in him should be deposed—that is, subjected to anyone but himself—or, what amounts to the same thing, deprived of the power necessary to preserve peace among their subjects and defend them against foreign enemies. Christian kings therefore remain the supreme pastors of their people and have the power to appoint whatever pastors they please to teach the Church, that is, the people entrusted to their care.\n\nAgain, suppose that the right to choose pastors lies with the Church, as it did before the conversion of kings, and indeed in the time of the apostles themselves, as I have already shown in this chapter. Even then the right belongs to the Christian civil sovereign. As a Christian he permits the teaching; as sovereign—which is to say, as the Church represented—his choice of teachers is the Church's choice. When an assembly of Christians chooses its pastor in a Christian Commonwealth, the sovereign chooses him, because the assembly acts by his authority, just as when a town chooses its mayor, the choice is the act of the holder of sovereign power. For every act is the act of the person without whose consent it would be invalid. Thus any historical examples of pastors elected by the people or by the clergy provide no argument against the right of a civil sovereign, since those who elected them did so by his authority.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 7\n\nSince, then, in every Christian Commonwealth the civil sovereign is the supreme pastor, entrusted with the whole flock of his subjects, and since all other pastors are appointed by his authority and empowered to teach and perform every other pastoral duty, it follows that all other pastors derive from him their right to teach, preach, and perform the other functions of that office. They are simply his ministers, just as town magistrates, judges in courts, and army commanders are all ministers of the one who is magistrate of the whole Commonwealth, judge of all causes, and commander of the entire military force: always the civil sovereign. The reason is not that the teachers are his subjects, but that the learners are. Suppose, then, that a Christian king entrusts another king with authority to ordain pastors in his dominions, as several Christian kings allow the pope to do. By this he does not establish a pastor over himself or a sovereign pastor over his people. That would strip him of civil power, which depends on people's opinions of their duty to him and their fear of punishment in another world; his power would then depend on the competence and loyalty of teachers, who are as liable as anyone to ambition and ignorance. Where a foreigner has authority to appoint teachers, therefore, that authority is given him by the sovereign whose dominions they teach in. Christian teachers are our schoolmasters in Christianity, but kings are heads of households: they may accept schoolmasters for their subjects on a foreigner's recommendation, not at his command—especially when poor instruction would bring a great and obvious profit to the one recommending them. Nor need kings keep those teachers longer than the public good requires, for they remain responsible for the public good as long as they retain any other essential right of sovereignty.\n\nIf, therefore, someone asked a pastor carrying out his office, as the chief priests and elders of the people asked our Savior (Mat. 21.23.), “By what authority do you do these things, and who gave you this authority?” his only rightful answer would be that he acts by the authority of the Commonwealth, granted him by the king or assembly representing it. All pastors except the supreme pastor perform their duties by the right, that is, the authority, of the civil sovereign: jure civili. But a king, and every other sovereign, performs the office of supreme pastor by immediate authority from God—that is, in God's right, or jure divino. Kings alone, therefore, may include in their titles, as a sign of submission to God alone, Dei Gratia Rex, etc. Bishops ought to begin their mandates, “By the favor of His Majesty the King, Bishop of such a diocese,” or, as civil ministers, “In His Majesty's name.” For when they say Divina Providentia, which is Dei Gratia in disguise, they deny having received their authority from the civil state and slyly slip the collar of civil subjection, against the unity and defense of the Commonwealth.\n\nBut if every Christian sovereign is the supreme pastor of his own subjects, it seems he has authority not only to preach, which perhaps no one will deny, but also to baptize, administer the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and consecrate both temples and pastors to God's service. Most people deny this, partly because sovereigns do not ordinarily do these things, and partly because administering sacraments and consecrating persons and places to sacred uses requires the laying on of hands by men ordained to the same ministry through successive impositions of hands from the time of the apostles. To show, then, that Christian kings have power to baptize and consecrate, I must explain both why they do not ordinarily do so and how, without the customary ceremony of laying on hands, they become capable of doing so whenever they wish.\n\nThere is no doubt that a king skilled in the sciences could, by virtue of the same office that gives him authority to authorize university lecturers, deliver lectures on those sciences himself. Yet because the whole business of the Commonwealth takes all his time, it would be inappropriate for him to attend to that particular task in person. A king may also, if he pleases, sit in judgment to hear and decide every kind of case, just as he may authorize others to do so in his name. But the burden of command and government obliges him to stay constantly at the helm and delegate ministerial offices to those under him. In the same way our Savior, who certainly had power to baptize, baptized no one himself, but sent his apostles and disciples to baptize (John 4.2.). So too St. Paul, because he had to preach in many distant places, baptized few: of all the Corinthians he baptized only Crispus, Cajus, and Stephanus (1 Cor.1.14,16.). His reason was that his principal charge was to preach (1 Cor. 1.17.). It is thus clear that a greater charge, such as governing the Church, excuses one from a lesser task. This plainly explains why Christian kings do not ordinarily baptize, and why few people today are baptized by bishops, and fewer still by the pope.\n\nAs for whether the laying on of hands is necessary to authorize a king to baptize and consecrate, we may consider the matter as follows.\n\nThe laying on of hands was an ancient public ceremony among the Jews, used to identify and make certain the person or other thing intended in someone's prayer, blessing, sacrifice, consecration, condemnation, or other declaration. Thus when Jacob blessed Joseph's children (Gen. 48.14.), he “laid his right hand on Ephraim, the younger, and his left hand on Manasseh, the firstborn.” He did this deliberately, though Joseph had presented them in a way that forced Jacob to cross his arms, in order to indicate to whom he intended the greater blessing. Likewise, at the sacrifice of a burnt offering Aaron is commanded (Exod. 29.10.) “to lay his hands on the bull's head,” and (verse 15.) “to lay his hand on the ram's head.” The same is said again in Levit. 1.4. & 8.14. Likewise, when Moses appointed Joshua captain of the Israelites, consecrating him to God's service, he (Numb. 27.23.) “laid his hands on him and gave him his charge,” identifying beyond doubt the man whom they were to obey in war. For the consecration of the Levites (Numb. 8.10.), God commanded that “the children of Israel should put their hands upon the Levites.” And when the man who had blasphemed the Lord was condemned (Levit. 24.14.), God commanded that “all who heard him should lay their hands on his head, and the whole congregation should stone him.” Why were only those who had heard him to lay hands on him, rather than a priest, Levite, or other minister of justice? Because no one else could point out to the congregation's eyes precisely who had blasphemed and ought to die. To indicate a person or thing by hand to the eye leaves less room for error than indicating it by name to the ear.\n\nThis ceremony was observed so carefully that, even when blessing the entire congregation at once, which cannot be done by laying on hands, “Aaron (Levit. 9.22.) raised his hand toward the people as he blessed them.” We also read of a similar ceremony for consecrating temples among the heathen: the priest laid his hands on a post of the temple while uttering the words of consecration. So natural is it, in matters of God's public service, to indicate a particular thing by hand for the assurance of the eyes rather than by words for the information of the ear.\n\nThe ceremony was therefore not new in our Savior's time. Jairus (Mark 5.23.), whose daughter was sick, begged our Savior not merely to heal her but “to lay his hands on her, so that she might be healed.” And (Matth. 19.13.) “they brought little children to him so that he would put his hands on them and pray.”\n\nIn keeping with this ancient rite, the apostles, presbyters, and presbytery itself laid hands on those they ordained as pastors and prayed that they might receive the Holy Spirit. They did this not only once, but sometimes again when a new occasion arose. The purpose remained the same: to mark out the person precisely and solemnly, whether appointed to the pastoral charge generally or to a particular mission. Thus (Acts 6.6.) “the apostles prayed and laid their hands” on the seven deacons. This was not to give them the Holy Spirit, since they were already full of the Holy Spirit before their election, as verse 3. makes plain, but to designate them for that office. After Philip the deacon had converted certain people in Samaria, Peter and John went there (Acts 8.17.) “and laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” This power belonged not only to apostles but to presbyters: St. Paul advises Timothy (1 Tim. 5.22.), “Do not lay hands on anyone hastily,” that is, do not appoint anyone rashly to the office of pastor. The whole presbytery laid hands on Timothy, as we read in 1 Tim. 4.14.; but we should understand that some did this on behalf of the presbytery, most likely its proestos, or spokesman, who may have been St. Paul himself. For in his 2 Epistle to Timothy, verse 6., he tells him, “Stir up the gift of God within you through the laying on of my hands.” Note in passing that by the Holy Spirit here are meant not the third Person of the Trinity but the gifts necessary to the pastoral office. We read also that hands were laid on St. Paul twice: first by Ananias at Damascus (Acts 9.17,18.) at the time of his baptism, and again (Acts 13.3.) at Antioch, when he was first sent out to preach. The purpose of this ceremony in ordaining pastors was thus to designate the person to whom the power was given. But if a person had already held the power of teaching before becoming a Christian, his baptism—that is, making him a Christian—would not have given him any new power, but only led him to preach true doctrine and so use his power rightly. Laying on hands would therefore have been unnecessary; baptism itself would have sufficed. Every sovereign before Christianity had the power to teach and appoint teachers. Christianity therefore gave sovereigns no new right, but only directed them in teaching the truth. Consequently they needed no laying on of hands, apart from what is done at baptism, to authorize them to exercise any part of the pastoral function, including baptism and consecration. In the Old Testament, though only the priest had the right to consecrate while sovereignty rested with the high priest, this was not so when sovereignty rested with the king. For we read (1 Kings 8.) that Solomon blessed the people, consecrated the Temple, and pronounced that public prayer which is now the model for consecrating all Christian churches and chapels. This shows that he had the right not only to govern ecclesiastical affairs but also to perform ecclesiastical functions.\n\nFrom this union of political and ecclesiastical right in Christian sovereigns it is evident that they possess every kind of power over their subjects that can be granted to a human being for governing people's outward actions, in both civil and religious affairs. They may make whatever laws they themselves judge best for governing their subjects both as the Commonwealth and as the Church, for state and Church consist of the same people.\n\nThey may therefore, if they please, entrust the governance of their subjects in religious matters to the pope, as many Christian kings now do. But then the pope is their subordinate in this matter and exercises his charge in another's dominion jure civili, by the right of the civil sovereign, not jure divino, by God's right. He may therefore be dismissed from that office whenever the sovereign thinks it necessary for the good of his subjects. Sovereigns may also entrust religious affairs to one supreme pastor or to an assembly of pastors, granting them whatever power over the Church or over one another they judge most suitable, and whatever titles of honor they choose—bishop, archbishop, priest, or presbyter. They may make laws for their support, through tithes or otherwise, as they please, provided they act from a sincere conscience, of which God alone is judge. The civil sovereign appoints the judges and interpreters of the canonical Scriptures, for he is the one who makes them laws. He also gives force to excommunications; without laws and punishments that can humble stubborn libertines and bring them back into union with the rest of the Church, excommunications would be scorned. In short, he holds supreme power in all causes, ecclesiastical and civil alike, insofar as they concern actions and words, for only these can be known and made grounds for accusation. Of what cannot be accused, there is no judge but God, who knows the heart. These rights belong to all sovereigns, whether monarchs or assemblies: those who represent a Christian people represent the Church, for a Church and a Commonwealth of Christian people are the same thing.\n\nAlthough what I have said here and elsewhere in this book seems clear enough to establish the supreme ecclesiastical power of Christian sovereigns, the pope of Rome's claim to that power universally has been defended chiefly—and, I think, as forcefully as possible—by Cardinal Bellarmine in his controversy De Summo Pontifice. I have therefore thought it necessary to examine, as briefly as I can, the grounds and strength of his argument.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 8\n\nOf the five books he has written on this subject, the first deals with three questions. One asks which form of government is best in itself—monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy—and concludes that none is, but rather a government mixed from all three. Another asks which is the best government for the Church, and concludes that it is the mixed form, though with the largest share of monarchy. The third asks whether St. Peter occupied the place of monarch in this mixed monarchy. As for his first conclusion, I have already sufficiently proved (chap. 18.) that all governments which people are bound to obey are simple and absolute. In a monarchy only one man is supreme; all other people who exercise any power in the state hold it by his commission, at his pleasure, and exercise it in his name. In aristocracy and democracy only one assembly is supreme, holding the same power that belongs to the monarch in a monarchy; this is not a mixed but an absolute sovereignty. Which of the three kinds is best is not a matter for dispute where one has already been established. The existing government must always be preferred, upheld, and regarded as best, because both the Law of Nature and positive divine law forbid doing anything tending to overthrow it. Besides, unless a pastor holds civil sovereignty, the best kind of government has no bearing on his power. His calling is not to govern people by commands, but to teach and persuade them with arguments, leaving them to consider whether to accept or reject the doctrine taught. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy designate three kinds of sovereigns, not pastors; or, we might say, three kinds of heads of households, not three kinds of schoolmasters for their children.\n\nHis second conclusion, therefore, about the best form of government for the Church, has nothing to do with the question of the pope's power outside his own dominions. For in all other Commonwealths his power, if he has any, is the schoolmaster's alone, not the household head's.\n\nFor his third conclusion, that St. Peter was monarch of the Church, his chief argument is the passage in St. Matthew (chap. 16.18, 19.): “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, etc. And I will give you the keys of Heaven; whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven.” Properly considered, this passage proves nothing more than that Christ's Church has only one article as its foundation: the article Peter professed on behalf of all the apostles, prompting our Savior to speak the words quoted. To understand this clearly, we must consider that our Savior, John the Baptist, and his apostles preached nothing but this article of faith: “that he was the Christ.” All other articles require faith only insofar as they rest on this one. John began first (Mat. 3.2.), preaching only, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Then our Savior himself preached the same (Mat. 4.17.). And when he commissioned his Twelve Apostles (Mat. 10.7.), no other article is mentioned for them to preach. This was the fundamental article, the foundation of the Church's faith. Later, when the apostles returned, he asked them all (Mat. 16.13), not Peter alone, “Who do people say I am?” They answered that “some say John the Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremias or one of the prophets.” Then (verse 15.) he asked them all again, not Peter alone, “Who do you say I am?” Peter therefore answered for all of them, “You are Christ, the Son of the living God.” This, as I said, is the foundation of the faith of the whole Church. Our Savior took this as the occasion to say, “Upon this stone I will build my Church,” plainly meaning by the Church's foundation stone the fundamental article of its faith. But why, someone may object, does our Savior insert the words “You are Peter”? If the original text had been translated strictly, the reason would readily appear. We must consider that the apostle Simon was surnamed Stone, the meaning of the Syriac word Cephas and the Greek word Petrus. Thus after the confession of that fundamental article, our Savior alluded to his name and said, as it would be in English, “You are Stone, and upon this Stone I will build my Church.” That is to say, the article “I am the Christ” is the foundation of all the faith I require of those who are to be members of my Church. Nor are such allusions to a name unusual in ordinary speech. But it would have been a strange and obscure thing to say, if our Savior had meant to build his Church on the person of St. Peter, “You are a Stone, and upon this Stone I will build my Church,” when he could so easily and unambiguously have said, “I will build my Church on you,” preserving the same allusion to his name.\n\nAs for the following words, “I will give you the keys of Heaven, etc.,” they grant no more than our Savior also granted all his other disciples (Matth. 18.18.): “Whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven.” However this is interpreted, there can be no doubt that the power granted belongs to all supreme pastors, as all Christian civil sovereigns are in their own dominions. Even if St. Peter, or our Savior himself, had converted any such sovereign to belief in him and acknowledgment of his Kingdom, his Kingdom is not of this world. He would therefore have left the supreme care of converting that sovereign's subjects to the sovereign alone; otherwise he would have deprived him of sovereignty, to which the right to teach is inseparably attached. This is enough to refute Bellarmine's first book, in which he tries to prove that St. Peter was universal monarch of the Church—that is, of all Christians in the world.\n\nThe second book offers two conclusions: that St. Peter was bishop of Rome and died there, and that the popes of Rome are his successors. Both have been disputed by others. But even supposing them true, if by bishop of Rome is meant either monarch or supreme pastor of the Church, that bishop was not Silvester but Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Like Constantine, all other Christian emperors were by right supreme bishops of the Roman Empire. I say of the Roman Empire, not of all Christendom, since other Christian sovereigns possessed the same right in their respective territories, as an office inherently attached to their sovereignty. This will serve as my answer to his second book.\n\nIn his third book he considers whether the pope is Antichrist. For my part, I see no argument that proves he is, in the sense Scripture gives that name. Nor will I use the nature of Antichrist as an argument against the authority the pope now exercises, or previously exercised, within the dominions of another prince or state.\n\nClearly the prophets of the Old Testament foretold, and the Jews expected, a Messiah—that is, a Christ—who would restore among them the Kingdom of God which they had rejected in Samuel's day when they demanded a king like those of other nations. This expectation left them vulnerable to impostors ambitious enough to try to seize the kingdom and clever enough to deceive the people by counterfeit miracles, hypocritical lives, or plausible speeches and doctrines. Our Savior and his apostles therefore warned people against false prophets and false Christs. False Christs are those who claim to be the Christ but are not; properly speaking, they are Antichrists, in the same sense that, when a schism arises in the Church through the election of two popes, each calls the other Antipapa, or false pope. Antichrist in its proper meaning therefore has two essential marks: he denies that Jesus is Christ, and he professes that he himself is Christ. St. John states the first mark in his 1 Epistle, chapter 4, verse 3: “Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God; and this is the spirit of Antichrist.” The other mark is expressed in our Savior's words (Mat. 24.5.): “Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ”; and again, “If anyone says to you, Look, Christ is here, or Christ is there, do not believe it.” Thus an Antichrist must be a false Christ, one who claims to be Christ himself. From the two marks, “to deny that Jesus is the Christ” and “to affirm that he himself is the Christ,” it follows also that he must be an “adversary of the true Christ,” another common meaning of the word Antichrist. But among these many Antichrists there is one particular one, O Antichristos, the Antichrist: one definite person, not indefinitely an Antichrist. Since the pope of Rome neither claims to be Christ himself nor denies that Jesus is the Christ, I cannot see how he can be called Antichrist. The word means not someone who falsely claims to be Christ's lieutenant or vicar-general, but someone who claims to be Christ himself. There is also some indication of when this particular Antichrist will come: when (Mat. 24.15.) the abominable destroyer spoken of by Daniel (Dan. 9. 27.) stands in the holy place, and there is such tribulation as the world has never known and never will again, so great that if it lasted long (verse 22.) “no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened,” made fewer. Yet that tribulation has not come. It is to be followed immediately (verse 29.) by the darkening of sun and moon, the falling of stars, the shaking of the heavens, and the glorious return of our Savior in the clouds. Thus the Antichrist has not yet come, whereas many popes have come and gone. True, by undertaking to give laws to all Christian kings and nations, the pope usurps a kingdom in this world, which Christ did not assume. But he does so not as Christ, but for Christ; in that there is nothing of the Antichrist.\n\nIn the fourth book, to prove that the pope is supreme judge in every question of faith and morals—which amounts to making him absolute monarch of all Christians in the world—he advances three propositions. First, that the pope's judgments are infallible; second, that he can make actual laws and punish those who do not obey them; third, that our Savior conferred all ecclesiastical jurisdiction on the pope of Rome.\n\nFor the infallibility of his judgments he cites Scripture, first Luke 22.31.: “Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and when you are converted, strengthen your brothers.” According to Bellarmine's interpretation, Christ here gave Simon Peter two privileges: that his faith would not fail, and that neither he nor any of his successors would ever define any point of faith or morals erroneously or contrary to the definition of a former pope. This is a strange and highly strained interpretation. Anyone who reads that chapter carefully will find no passage in all Scripture more opposed to the pope's authority than this very one. The priests and scribes were seeking to kill our Savior at Passover; Judas had resolved to betray him; and the day for killing the Passover lamb had arrived. Our Savior celebrated the feast with his apostles, saying he would not do so again until the Kingdom of God had come, and also told them one of them would betray him. They began to ask which of them it would be. And since the next Passover their master would celebrate would be when he was King, they also fell to arguing over who among them would then be the greatest. Our Savior therefore told them that the kings of the nations ruled over their subjects and were called by a name that in Hebrew means beneficent. But I cannot be so to you: you must seek to serve one another. I ordain a Kingdom for you, but it is such a Kingdom as my Father has ordained for me—a Kingdom I must now purchase with my blood and shall not possess until my second coming. Then you shall eat and drink at my table and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Turning then to St. Peter, he said: Simon, Simon, Satan seeks to weaken your faith in the future Kingdom by suggesting dominion in the present; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail. So when you are converted—and note this—and understand my Kingdom to belong to another world, confirm your brothers in that same faith. St. Peter answered, as a man who no longer expected authority in this world, “Lord, I am ready to go with you not only to prison but to death.” Plainly, St. Peter was given no jurisdiction in this world; instead, he was charged to teach the other apostles that they too would have none. As for the infallibility of St. Peter's definitive judgment in matters of faith, this text establishes no more than that Peter would persist in believing one point: that Christ would return and possess the Kingdom on the day of Judgment. The text does not grant that constancy to all his successors, for we see them claiming the Kingdom in this present world.\n\nThe second passage is Matth. 16.: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” As I have already shown in this chapter, this proves no more than that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against Peter's confession which prompted those words, namely: Jesus is Christ, the Son of God.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 9\n\nThe third text is John 21, verses 16,17: “Feed my sheep,” which conveys nothing more than a commission to teach. If we grant that the other Apostles are included among those sheep, then it conveys the supreme power of teaching; but only while there were no Christian Sovereigns already possessed of that supremacy. I have already proved, however, that Christian Sovereigns are the supreme pastors in their own dominions, appointed to that office by virtue of their baptism, even without any further laying on of hands. Such a laying on of hands is a ceremony for designating the person, and is needless when that person has already been designated, by his institution as absolute ruler of his subjects, to the power of teaching whatever doctrine he chooses. As I have proved before, Sovereigns are supreme teachers in general by virtue of their office, and therefore bind themselves by baptism to teach the doctrine of Christ. When they allow others to teach their people, they do so at the peril of their own souls: God will require an account of the instruction of children and servants from the heads of families. It is of Abraham himself, not of a hired servant, that God says (Gen. 18.19), “I know that he will command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, and to do justice and judgment.”\n\nThe fourth passage is Exod. 28.30: “You shall put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim.” He says the Septuagint interprets these as delosin kai aletheian, that is, Evidence and Truth, and concludes from this that God gave Evidence and Truth—almost infallibility—to the high priest. But whether Evidence and Truth themselves were given, or merely an admonition that the priest should strive to inform himself clearly and judge uprightly, what was given to the high priest was given to the civil Sovereign. For in the Common-wealth of Israel the high priest stood immediately below God. The passage therefore argues for Evidence and Truth, that is, for the ecclesiastical supremacy of civil Sovereigns over their own subjects, against the Pope’s alleged power. These are all the texts he offers for the infallibility of the Pope’s judgment in matters of faith.\n\nFor the infallibility of his judgment concerning conduct he offers one text, John 16.13: “When the Spirit of truth has come, he will lead you into all truth.” Here, he says, All Truth means at least All Truth Necessary to Salvation. But with this qualification he attributes no more infallibility to the Pope than to anyone who professes Christianity and is not to be damned. For if anyone errs on a point on which freedom from error is necessary to salvation, he cannot be saved: only that without which salvation is impossible is necessary to salvation. I shall set out from Scripture in the following chapter what these points are. Here I say only that even if we granted that the Pope could not possibly teach any error at all, that would give him no jurisdiction in another prince’s dominions, unless we also say that conscience obliges a man always to hire the best workman, even when he has already promised the job to someone else.\n\nBesides citing texts, he argues from reason as follows: if the Pope could err in matters necessary to salvation, Christ would not have made sufficient provision for the Church’s salvation, since he has commanded her to follow the Pope’s directions. But this reasoning fails unless he shows when and where Christ gave such a command, or even took any notice of a Pope. Indeed, grant that whatever was given to St. Peter was given to the Pope: since Scripture commands no one to obey St. Peter, no one can act justly in obeying him when his commands conflict with those of his lawful Sovereign.\n\nFinally, neither the Church nor the Pope himself has declared that he is the civil Sovereign of all Christians throughout the world; therefore all Christians are not bound to acknowledge his jurisdiction in matters of conduct. Civil sovereignty and supreme judgment in disputes about conduct are the same thing. The makers of civil laws not only declare but also establish which actions are just and unjust; nothing in human conduct makes actions righteous or unrighteous except their conformity to the Sovereign’s law. Thus, when the Pope claims supremacy in disputes about conduct, he teaches men to disobey the civil Sovereign—an erroneous doctrine contrary to the many precepts of our Savior and his Apostles delivered to us in Scripture.\n\nTo prove that the Pope has power to make laws, he cites many passages. First is Deut. 17.12: “The man who acts presumptuously and will not listen to the priest who stands there to minister before the Lord your God, or to the judge, that man shall die; and you shall put away evil from Israel.” In answer, we must remember that the high priest, immediately below God, was the civil Sovereign, and all judges were appointed by him. The cited words therefore mean: “The man who presumes to disobey the civil Sovereign of the time, or any of his officers in the exercise of their offices, shall die,” and so forth. This plainly supports civil sovereignty against the Pope’s universal power.\n\nSecond, he cites Matth. 16, “Whatever you shall bind,” and so forth, interpreting this as the sort of binding attributed to the scribes and Pharisees (Matth. 23.4): “They bind heavy burdens, grievous to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders.” By this, he says, is meant making laws; hence he concludes that the Pope can make laws. But this too supports only the legislative power of civil Sovereigns. The scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses’ chair, and Moses, immediately below God, was Sovereign of the people of Israel. Thus our Savior commanded the people to do everything the scribes and Pharisees said, but not everything they did: to obey their laws, but not follow their example.\n\nThe third passage is John 21.16, “Feed my sheep.” This gives no power to make laws, but commands one to teach. Making laws belongs to the head of the family, who at his own discretion chooses a chaplain, and likewise a schoolmaster to teach his children.\n\nThe fourth passage, John 20.21, goes against him. Its words are, “As my Father sent me, so I send you.” But our Savior was sent to redeem by his death those who would believe, and through his own preaching and that of his Apostles to prepare them to enter his Kingdom. He himself says that Kingdom is not of this world, and has taught us to pray for its coming hereafter, though he refused (Acts 1.6,7) to tell his Apostles when it would come. When it comes, the twelve Apostles will sit on twelve thrones—each perhaps as high as St. Peter’s—to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. Since God the Father did not send our Savior to make laws in this present world, we may conclude from the text that our Savior did not send St. Peter to make laws here either, but to persuade men to await his second coming with steadfast faith; meanwhile, if they are subjects, to obey their princes, and if princes, both to believe this themselves and to do their best to bring their subjects to the same belief. This is a bishop’s office. The passage therefore argues most strongly for uniting ecclesiastical supremacy with civil sovereignty, the opposite of what Cardinal Bellarmine cites it to prove.\n\nThe fifth passage is Acts 15.28: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from food offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from fornication.” He takes the phrase laying burdens to indicate legislative power. But who, reading this text, can say that the Apostles’ manner of speaking is not as fitting for giving counsel as for making laws? A law says, We command; We think it good is the ordinary language of those who merely advise. Those who give advice do lay a burden, though a conditional one: it applies if those they advise want to attain their ends. Such is the burden of abstaining from things strangled and from blood: not absolute, but conditional upon their wishing to avoid error. I have shown before (chap. 25) that law differs from counsel in this: a law derives its reason from the purpose and benefit of the one who prescribes it, while counsel derives its reason from the purpose and benefit of the one who receives it. Here the Apostles seek only the benefit of the converted Gentiles, namely their salvation, not their own benefit; for once they have done their best, they will have their reward whether or not they are obeyed. Thus the acts of this council were not laws but counsels.\n\nThe sixth passage is Rom. 13: “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God.” He says this means not only secular but also ecclesiastical princes. I answer first that there are no ecclesiastical princes except those who are also civil Sovereigns, and their principalities extend no farther than their civil sovereignty. Beyond those bounds they may be received as teachers, but cannot be acknowledged as princes. If the Apostle had meant that we should be subject both to our own princes and to the Pope, he would have taught a doctrine Christ himself has told us is impossible: “to serve two masters.” And though the Apostle says elsewhere, “I write these things while absent, lest when present I should use severity, according to the power the Lord has given me,” he was not claiming power to put any of them to death, imprison, banish, whip, or fine them—all of which are punishments—but only to excommunicate. Without civil power, excommunication is no more than leaving their company and having no more to do with them than with a heathen or a tax collector; on many occasions this might hurt the one who excommunicates more than the one excommunicated.\n\nThe seventh passage is 1 Cor. 4.21: “Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love and a spirit of gentleness?” Again, the rod means not a magistrate’s power to punish offenders, but only the power of excommunication. This is not in itself a punishment, but a pronouncement of the punishment Christ will inflict when he takes possession of his Kingdom on the day of judgment. Even then it will not properly be punishment inflicted on a subject who has broken the law, but vengeance on an enemy or rebel who denies our Savior’s right to the Kingdom. Therefore this passage does not prove the legislative power of any bishop who lacks civil power.\n\nThe eighth passage is Timothy 3.2: “A bishop must be the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober,” and so forth; he says this was a law. I had thought no one but St. Peter, monarch of the Church, could make a law in the Church. But suppose this precept was issued on St. Peter’s authority. I still see no reason to call it a law rather than advice: Timothy was not St. Paul’s subject but his disciple, and the flock in Timothy’s charge were not his subjects in a kingdom but his pupils in the school of Christ. If all the precepts Paul gives Timothy are laws, why is this not a law as well: “No longer drink water, but use a little wine for your health”? And why are the precepts of good physicians not also so many laws? It is not an imperative manner of speaking that makes a precept a law, but absolute subjection to the person who gives it.\n\nLikewise, the ninth passage, 1 Tim. 5.19, “Do not receive an accusation against an elder except before two or three witnesses,” is a wise precept, but not a law.\n\nThe tenth passage is Luke 10.16: “Whoever hears you hears me, and whoever despises you despises me.” Certainly whoever despises the counsel of those sent by Christ despises Christ’s own counsel. But who now are sent by Christ except those ordained as pastors by lawful authority? And who is lawfully ordained except one ordained by the supreme pastor? And in a Christian Common-wealth, who is ordained by the supreme pastor except by the authority of its Sovereign? It follows from this passage that whoever hears his Christian Sovereign hears Christ, and whoever despises the doctrine authorized by his Christian king despises the doctrine of Christ. This is not what Bellarmine intends to prove here, but the opposite. Yet none of this amounts to a law. Indeed, a Christian king, as pastor and teacher of his subjects, does not thereby make his doctrines laws. He cannot compel men to believe, though as civil Sovereign he can make laws consistent with his doctrine, obliging men to certain actions, sometimes even actions they would not otherwise perform and which he ought not to command. Nevertheless, once commanded, they are laws; and the outward actions performed in obedience to them, without inward approval, are the Sovereign’s actions and not the subject’s. In that case the subject is merely an instrument without any motion of his own, because God has commanded obedience to Sovereigns.\n\nThe eleventh consists of every passage where the Apostle, while giving counsel, uses a word by which people commonly signify a command, or calls the following of his counsel obedience. Thus they cite 1 Cor. 11.2: “I commend you for keeping my precepts as I delivered them to you.” The Greek says, “I commend you for keeping the things I delivered to you as I delivered them.” That is far from implying that these were laws, or anything other than good counsel. They cite also 1 Thess. 4.2: “You know what commandments we gave you.” Here the Greek phrase paraggelias edokamen is equivalent to paredokamen, “what we delivered to you,” as in the preceding passage; it does not prove that the Apostles’ traditions were anything more than counsels. This holds even though, as the 8th verse says, “whoever despises them despises not man, but God.” Our Savior himself came not to judge—that is, to be king in this world—but to sacrifice himself for sinners and leave teachers in his Church to lead men, not drive them, to Christ. Christ never accepts forced actions, which are all that law produces, but seeks the inward conversion of the heart, which is the work not of laws but of counsel and doctrine.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 10\n\nAnd they cite 2 Thess. 3.14: “If anyone does not obey our word in this letter, mark that man and have no company with him, so that he may be ashamed.” From the word obey he would infer that this letter was a law to the Thessalonians. The emperors’ letters were indeed laws; if St. Paul’s letter was also a law, the Thessalonians had two masters to obey. But the Greek word for obey, upakouei, means to heed or put into practice not only what is commanded by someone entitled to punish, but also what is offered as counsel for our good. Accordingly, St. Paul does not tell them to kill, beat, imprison, or fine the disobedient man, as legislators may do, but to avoid his company so that he may be ashamed. Evidently what Christians stood in awe of was not an Apostle’s dominion but his reputation among the faithful.\n\nThe last passage is Heb. 13.17: “Obey your leaders and submit yourselves to them, for they watch over your souls as those who must give account.” Here too obedience means following their counsel. The reason for our obedience is drawn not from our pastors’ will and command but from our own benefit: they watch over the salvation of our souls, not the increase of their own power and authority. If this meant that everything they teach is law, not just the Pope but every pastor in his parish would have legislative power. Moreover, those bound to obey their pastors would have no power to examine their commands. What then shall we say to St. John, who bids us (1 Epist., chap. 4, verse 1), “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world”? It is therefore evident that we may dispute the doctrine of our pastors, though no one can dispute a law. The commands of civil Sovereigns are universally acknowledged to be laws. If anyone besides the Sovereign can make a law, all Common-wealth, and consequently all peace and justice, must cease, contrary to all laws, divine and human. Nothing in these or any other passages of Scripture, therefore, can prove that the Pope’s decrees are laws where he does not also hold civil sovereignty.\n\nOn the Pope’s Temporal Power\n\nThe Question of Superiority Between the Pope and Other Bishops. The last point he seeks to prove is “that our Savior Christ has committed ecclesiastical jurisdiction immediately to none but the Pope.” Here he treats not the question of supremacy between the Pope and Christian kings, but that between the Pope and other bishops. First he says it is agreed that bishops’ jurisdiction is at least, in general, de jure divino, that is, by divine right. In support he cites St. Paul, Ephes. 4.11, who says that Christ, after his ascension into heaven, “gave gifts to men, some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers.” He infers that bishops do indeed hold their jurisdiction by God’s right, but refuses to grant that they receive it immediately from God, claiming instead that it comes through the Pope. But if someone can be said to hold jurisdiction de jure divino without receiving it immediately, what lawful jurisdiction, even civil jurisdiction, in a Christian Common-wealth is not likewise de jure divino? Christian kings have their civil power immediately from God, while the magistrates below them exercise their several offices by the king’s commission. What these magistrates do is no less de jure divino mediato than what bishops do under the Pope’s ordination. All lawful power comes from God, immediately to the supreme governor and mediately to those authorized under him. Bellarmine must therefore either concede that every constable in the state holds office by divine right, or deny that any bishop besides the Pope himself holds office by that right.\n\nBut this whole dispute over whether Christ left jurisdiction solely to the Pope or also to other bishops, if considered outside the places where the Pope holds civil sovereignty, is a quarrel over goat’s wool: none of them has any jurisdiction at all where they are not Sovereigns. Jurisdiction is the power to hear and determine disputes between people; it can belong only to one who has power to prescribe rules of right and wrong, that is, to make laws, and with the sword of justice to compel obedience to decisions pronounced by himself or by judges he appoints. No one but the civil Sovereign can lawfully do this.\n\nThus when Bellarmine cites Luke 6, where our Savior called his disciples together and chose twelve of them to name Apostles, he proves that Christ chose them—all except Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas—and gave them power and a command to preach, but not to judge disputes between people. Christ himself refused to assume that power, saying, “Who made me a judge or an arbitrator among you?” and elsewhere, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” Whoever has no power to hear and decide disputes between people cannot be said to possess jurisdiction. Yet this does not prevent our Savior from having given them power to preach and baptize throughout the world, provided their own lawful Sovereigns did not forbid them: Christ himself and his Apostles have expressly commanded us in various places to obey our own Sovereigns in all things.\n\nHis arguments purporting to prove that bishops receive their jurisdiction from the Pope are all in vain, since the Pope himself has no jurisdiction in the dominions of other princes. Yet I will recount them, because they prove instead that bishops, when they have jurisdiction, receive it from their civil Sovereigns.\n\nThe first comes from Numbers 11. Moses, unable to bear alone the whole burden of administering the affairs of the people of Israel, was commanded by God to choose Seventy elders; God took a portion of Moses’ spirit and placed it upon those Seventy elders. This does not mean that God weakened Moses’ spirit, which would not have eased his burden at all, but that all the elders derived their authority from him. Bellarmine interprets the passage truly and candidly here. Yet since Moses held the entire sovereignty of the Jewish Common-wealth, the passage clearly signifies that the elders received authority from the civil Sovereign. It therefore proves that bishops in every Christian Common-wealth derive their authority from the civil Sovereign, and from the Pope only in his own territories, not in those of any other state.\n\nThe second argument comes from the nature of monarchy, in which all authority rests in one man and others derive theirs from him; Bellarmine says the government of the Church is monarchical. This too favors Christian monarchs: they are truly monarchs over their own people, that is, their own Church, since a Church is the same thing as a Christian people. The Pope’s power, even were he St. Peter, is neither monarchy nor anything else involving rule or coercion; it is only teaching. For God accepts willing obedience, not forced obedience.\n\nThe third comes from St. Cyprian’s description of the See of St. Peter as the Head, Source, Root, and Sun from which bishops’ authority derives. But by the Law of Nature, which is a better principle of right and wrong than the word of any teacher who is only human, the civil Sovereign in every Common-wealth is the Head, Source, Root, and Sun from which all jurisdiction derives. Bishops’ jurisdiction therefore derives from the civil Sovereign.\n\nThe fourth is taken from the inequality of bishops’ jurisdictions. If God, Bellarmine says, had conferred jurisdiction immediately on them, he would have given them equality of jurisdiction as well as equality of order. Yet we see some are bishops of only one town, others of a hundred towns, and still others of many entire provinces. These differences were not fixed by God’s command; their jurisdiction therefore comes not from God but from man, and one has more while another has less, as the prince of the Church pleases. Had Bellarmine first proved that the Pope possessed universal jurisdiction over all Christians, this argument would serve his purpose. But since he has not proved that, and it is notoriously known that the Pope’s extensive jurisdiction was given to him by those who possessed it, namely the Roman emperors—the Patriarch of Constantinople claimed equality with him on the same grounds, as bishop of the empire’s capital and seat of the emperor—it follows that all other bishops receive jurisdiction from the Sovereigns of the places where they exercise it. And just as their authority is not de jure divino for this reason, neither is the Pope’s, except where he is also the civil Sovereign.\n\nHis fifth argument is this: “If bishops receive their jurisdiction immediately from God, the Pope cannot take it away, for he can do nothing contrary to God’s ordinance.” This consequence is sound and well established. “But,” he says, “the Pope can do this and has done it.” This too is granted, provided he does it in his own dominions, or in those of another prince who has granted him that power; not universally, by right of the papacy. The power belongs to every Christian Sovereign within his empire and is inseparable from sovereignty. Before the people of Israel, at God’s command to Samuel, set a king over themselves after the manner of other nations, the high priest held civil government; no one else could appoint or depose a lesser priest. Afterward that power belonged to the king, as this same argument of Bellarmine’s can prove. For if a priest, whether high priest or another, held jurisdiction immediately from God, the king could not take it from him, “for he could do nothing contrary to God’s ordinance.” Yet King Solomon (1 Kings 2.26) certainly removed Abiathar the high priest from office and installed Zadok in his place (verse 35). Kings may therefore likewise appoint and remove bishops as they think fit for the good government of their subjects.\n\nHis sixth argument is this: if bishops hold jurisdiction de jure divino, that is, immediately from God, those who maintain this claim should offer some word of God to prove it; but they can offer none. This is a sound argument, and I have nothing to say against it. Yet it is just as sound an argument that the Pope himself has no jurisdiction in the dominions of another prince.\n\nLastly he offers as evidence the testimony of two Popes, Innocent and Leo. I do not doubt that he could have cited with equal reason almost every Pope since St. Peter. Given the love of power naturally implanted in mankind, whoever became Pope would be tempted to maintain that opinion. But then they would only be doing what Innocent and Leo did: bearing witness on their own behalf, and their testimony would therefore be invalid.\n\nIn his fifth book he reaches four conclusions. The first is “that the Pope is not lord of all the world”; the second, “that the Pope is not lord of all the Christian world”; the third, “that the Pope, outside his own territory, has no temporal jurisdiction directly.” These three are readily granted. The fourth is “that the Pope has, in the dominions of other princes, supreme temporal power indirectly.” This is denied, unless indirectly means that he acquired it by indirect means; in that case it too is granted. But I understand him to mean that this temporal jurisdiction belongs to the Pope by right, though the right follows from his pastoral authority, which he could not exercise without temporal jurisdiction. Supreme civil power is therefore, he claims, necessarily attached to the pastoral power he calls spiritual; by it the Pope has a right to transfer kingdoms, granting them to one person and taking them from another, whenever he believes this serves the salvation of souls.\n\nBefore I consider the arguments with which he seeks to prove this doctrine, it will be useful to lay bare its consequences, so that the princes and states holding civil sovereignty in their respective Common-wealths may consider whether admitting it is convenient for them and benefits their subjects, for whom they must give account on the day of judgment.\n\nWhen it is said that the Pope has no supreme civil power directly in other states’ territories, we must understand that he does not claim it, as other civil Sovereigns do, from the original submission of those to be governed. For it is evident, and has been sufficiently demonstrated already in this treatise, that the right of all Sovereigns originally derives from the consent of each person to be governed. This holds whether those who choose a Sovereign do so for common defense against an enemy, agreeing among themselves to appoint one man or an assembly to protect them, or do so to save their lives by submitting to a conquering enemy. Thus, in disclaiming supreme civil power directly over other states, the Pope denies only that his right comes to him in this way. He still claims it in another way: without the consent of those to be governed, through a right given him by God upon his accession to the papacy, which he calls indirectly. But however he claims it, the power is the same. If granted as his right, it enables him to depose princes and states whenever the salvation of souls calls for it—that is, whenever he wishes, since he also claims the sole power to judge whether something serves men’s salvation. This doctrine is taught not only by Bellarmine here and by many other teachers in their sermons and books, but has also been decreed by certain councils and Popes, and put into practice by Popes when occasion favored them. The fourth Council of Lateran, held under Pope Innocent the third, has this canon in its third chapter, De Haereticis: “If a king, after the Pope’s admonition, does not purge his kingdom of heretics, and, being excommunicated for this, fails to make satisfaction within a year, his subjects are released from their obedience.” Its practice has been seen on various occasions: the deposition of Chilperic, King of France; the transfer of the Roman Empire to Charlemagne; the oppression of John, King of England; the transfer of the Kingdom of Navarre; and, in recent years, the league against Henry the third of France, among many others. I think few princes fail to see this as unjust and dangerous, but I wish they would all resolve to be either kings or subjects. Men cannot serve two masters. They should therefore ease the minds of those willing to obey, either by keeping the reins of government wholly in their own hands or by surrendering them wholly to the Pope, so that obedience may enjoy protection. The distinction between temporal and spiritual power is merely words. Sharing power with another who possesses indirect power divides it just as truly, and with just as much danger in every respect, as sharing it with one who possesses direct power. But now to his arguments.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 11\n\nThe first is this: “Civil power is subject to spiritual power. Therefore whoever holds supreme spiritual power has the right to command temporal princes and dispose of their temporal possessions for spiritual ends.” As for this distinction between temporal and spiritual power, let us consider what it can intelligibly mean to say that temporal, or civil, power is subject to spiritual power. These words can have only two meanings. When we say one power is subject to another, we mean either that the holder of the first is subject to the holder of the second, or that the first power serves the second as a means serves an end. We cannot understand one power as exercising power over another power, or having a right to command it. Subjection, command, right, and power are properties of persons, not of powers. One power may be subordinate to another as the saddler’s craft is to the rider’s craft. Even if civil government is ordained as a means to bring us to spiritual happiness, it does not follow that, when a king holds civil power and the Pope spiritual power, the king must obey the Pope any more than every saddler must obey every rider. As the subordination of one craft does not entail the subjection of its practitioner, so the subordination of one kind of government does not entail the subjection of its governor. Thus, when he says civil power is subject to spiritual power, he means that the civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign. His argument then stands as follows: “The civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign; therefore the spiritual prince may command temporal princes.” The conclusion is identical to the premise he needed to prove. To prove it, he first offers this reason: “Kings and Popes, clergy and laity, make up only one Common-wealth, that is, only one Church; in every body the members depend on one another; spiritual things do not depend on temporal things; therefore temporal things depend on spiritual things and are subject to them.” This argument contains two gross errors. One is the claim that all Christian kings, Popes, clergy, and other Christians make up one Common-wealth. Clearly France is one Common-wealth, Spain another, Venice a third, and so forth. They consist of Christians and are therefore distinct bodies of Christians, that is, distinct Churches. Their respective Sovereigns represent them, making them capable, like a natural person, of commanding and obeying, acting and suffering. No general or universal Church can do these things until it has a representative, and it has none on earth. If it had one, all Christendom would undoubtedly be a single Common-wealth whose Sovereign, that representative, ruled in both spiritual and temporal affairs. To make himself such a representative, the Pope lacks three things our Savior has not given him: the powers to command, to judge, and to punish, except by excommunication—turning away from those who refuse to learn from him. Even were the Pope Christ’s sole vicar, he could not exercise Christ’s government until our Savior’s second coming; and then the judges of the world will not be the Pope but St. Peter himself and the other Apostles.\n\nThe other error in this first argument is his claim that the members of every Common-wealth depend on one another as the members of a natural body do. They do indeed hold together, but depend only on the Sovereign, who is the soul of the Common-wealth. When that soul fails, the Common-wealth dissolves into civil war, with no person even holding fast to another because they lack a common dependence on a recognized Sovereign. So too the members of a natural body dissolve into earth when they lack a soul to hold them together. The analogy therefore gives no grounds for inferring that the laity depend on the clergy, or temporal officers on spiritual officers, but rather that both depend on the civil Sovereign. He should indeed direct his civil commands toward the salvation of souls, but is subject to none but God himself. We can thus see the elaborate fallacy of this first argument, designed to deceive those who do not distinguish between the subordination of actions as means to an end and the subjection of persons to one another in administering those means. For every end, the means are determined by nature or supernaturally by God himself; but the power to compel men to use those means has been entrusted in every nation to the civil Sovereign under the Law of Nature, which forbids men to break their pledged faith.\n\nHis second argument is this: “Every Common-wealth, being supposed perfect and sufficient in itself, may command another Common-wealth not subject to it and force it to change the administration of its government, even deposing its prince and installing another, if it cannot otherwise defend itself against the injuries he intends to do it. How much more may a spiritual Common-wealth command a temporal one to change the administration of its government, and depose princes and install others, when it cannot otherwise defend the spiritual good.”\n\nIt is quite true, as I have sufficiently demonstrated already, that a Common-wealth may lawfully do everything described here in defense against injury. And if it were also true that there now existed in this world a spiritual Common-wealth distinct from a civil one, its prince could, in response to injury or to a lack of assurance against future injury, seek redress and security through war—in short, by deposing, killing, subduing, or any other hostile act. But by the same reasoning it would be no less lawful for a civil Sovereign, in the face of like injuries suffered or feared, to wage war against the spiritual Sovereign. I believe this is more than Cardinal Bellarmine intended to infer from his own proposition.\n\nBut there is no spiritual Common-wealth in this world. Such a Common-wealth is the Kingdom of Christ, which Christ himself says is not of this world, but will exist in the next, at the resurrection. Then those who lived justly and believed him to be the Christ, though they died with natural bodies, will rise with spiritual bodies; then our Savior will judge the world, conquer his adversaries, and establish a spiritual Common-wealth. Meanwhile, since no one on earth has a spiritual body, there can be no spiritual Common-wealth among men still in the flesh, unless we call preachers commissioned to teach and prepare men for entry into Christ’s Kingdom at the resurrection a Common-wealth. I have proved they are not one.\n\nThe third argument is this: “It is unlawful for Christians to tolerate an infidel or heretical king if he endeavors to draw them into his heresy or unbelief. But it belongs to the Pope to judge whether a king is drawing his subjects into heresy. Therefore the Pope has the right to decide whether a prince should or should not be deposed.”\n\nI answer that both assertions are false. Christians—or people of any religion—who refuse to tolerate their king, whatever law he makes, even in matters of religion, break their pledged faith in violation of divine law, both natural and positive. Nor has any subject a judge of heresy other than his own civil Sovereign. For “heresy is nothing but a private opinion obstinately maintained against the opinion that the public person, that is, the representative of the Common-wealth, has commanded to be taught.” Thus an opinion publicly appointed to be taught cannot be heresy, nor can the Sovereign princes who authorize it be heretics. Heretics are only private persons who stubbornly defend a doctrine prohibited by their lawful Sovereigns.\n\nTo prove that Christians need not tolerate infidel or heretical kings, he cites Deut. 17, where God forbids the Jews, when they set a king over themselves, to choose a foreigner. From this he infers that it is unlawful for a Christian to choose a non-Christian king. It is true that a Christian—one who has already bound himself to receive our Savior as his king when he comes—tempts God greatly by choosing for his king in this world someone he knows will seek, by terror and persuasion alike, to make him break his faith. But, Bellarmine says, there is the same danger in choosing a non-Christian king as in failing to depose him once chosen. I answer that the question concerns not the danger of failing to depose him, but the justice of deposing him. Choosing him may in some cases be unjust; deposing him once chosen is never just. It always breaks faith and thus violates the Law of Nature, God’s eternal law. Nor do we read that any such doctrine was thought Christian in the Apostles’ time, or under the Roman emperors until the Popes acquired civil sovereignty over Rome. Bellarmine replies that the early Christians did not depose Nero, Diocletian, Julian, or Valens, an Arian, only because they lacked temporal force. Perhaps so. But did our Savior, who could have summoned twelve legions of immortal, invulnerable angels to his aid, lack force to depose Caesar, or at least Pilate, who without finding fault in him unjustly handed him over to the Jews to be crucified? Or if the Apostles lacked temporal force to depose Nero, did they have to teach newly converted Christians in their letters, as they did, to obey the powers established over them, Nero among them at that time, and to obey not merely for fear of their wrath but for conscience’s sake? Shall we say that for lack of strength they not only obeyed but taught what they did not mean? Christians must therefore tolerate their heathen princes, or princes authorizing the teaching of an error—for I cannot call anyone whose doctrine is the public doctrine a heretic—not for lack of strength but for conscience’s sake. In further support of the Pope’s temporal power, Bellarmine cites St. Paul (1 Cor. 6), claiming that he appointed judges under the heathen princes of the time who had not been ordained by those princes. This is untrue. St. Paul merely advises them to have some of their brethren resolve their disputes as arbitrators rather than go to law against one another before heathen judges. This wholesome and charitable precept is fit for practice even in the best Christian Common-wealths. As for the danger to religion that may arise when subjects tolerate a heathen or mistaken prince, a subject is not competent to judge it; or if he is, the Pope’s temporal subjects may likewise judge the Pope’s doctrine. For every Christian prince, as I have proved already, is no less the supreme pastor of his own subjects than the Pope is of his.\n\nThe fourth argument is drawn from the baptism of kings. To become Christians, they submit their scepters to Christ and promise to preserve and defend the Christian faith. This is true: Christian kings are no more than Christ’s subjects. Yet they can still be the Pope’s equals, for they are the supreme pastors of their own subjects, and the Pope himself is no more than king and pastor, even in Rome.\n\nThe fifth argument comes from our Savior’s words, “Feed my sheep.” These, he says, bestowed all powers necessary to a pastor: the power to drive away wolves, meaning heretics; the power to confine rams that have gone mad or butt the other sheep with their horns, meaning wicked kings even if Christian; and the power to provide the flock with suitable food. From this he infers that Christ gave St. Peter all three powers. I answer that the last is no more than the power, or rather the command, to teach. For the first, driving away wolves or heretics, the passage he cites is Matth. 7.15: “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” But heretics are not false prophets, or prophets at all. Even if the wolves meant there were heretics, the Apostles were commanded not to kill them or, if they were kings, to depose them, but to beware of, flee, and avoid them. Moreover, this counsel to beware of false prophets was given neither to St. Peter nor to any of the Apostles, but to the multitude of Jews who followed Christ up the mountain, most of whom had not yet been converted. If it conferred a power to drive out kings, that power was conferred not merely on private individuals but on people who were not even Christians. As for separating and confining fierce rams, by which Bellarmine means Christian kings who refuse to submit to the Roman pastor, our Savior himself refused to assume that power in this world, and advised leaving the wheat and weeds to grow together until the day of judgment. Much less did he give it to St. Peter, and St. Peter cannot pass it on to the Popes. St. Peter and all other pastors are told to regard Christians who disobey the Church—that is, the Christian Sovereign—as heathens and tax collectors. Since no one claims authority for the Pope over heathen princes, no one should claim it over those who must be regarded as heathens.\n\nYet from the power to teach alone Bellarmine also infers the Pope’s coercive power over kings. A pastor, he says, must give his flock suitable food; therefore the Pope may, and must, compel kings to do their duty. It follows that the Pope, as pastor of Christian men, is king of kings. Christian kings should indeed either confess this or else themselves assume the supreme pastoral charge, each in his own dominion.\n\nHis sixth and last argument is drawn from examples. I answer, first, that examples prove nothing; second, that the examples he cites do not even establish a likelihood of right. Jehoiada’s killing of Athaliah (2 Kings 11) was either done by the authority of King Joash, or it was a horrible crime by the high priest, who since the election of King Saul had been merely a subject. St. Ambrose’s excommunication of the Emperor Theodosius, if he really did it, was a capital crime. As for the Popes Gregory 1, Gregory 2, Zachary, and Leo 3, their judgments are void because they judged their own cause; their acts in accordance with this doctrine, especially Zachary’s, are among the greatest crimes human nature can commit. So much for ecclesiastical power. I would have been briefer and refrained from examining these arguments of Bellarmine’s had they been offered by him as a private man, rather than as the champion of the papacy against all other Christian princes and states.\n\nCHAPTER XLIII. OF WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR A MAN’S RECEPTION INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 1\n\nOF WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR A PERSON’S RECEPTION INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN\n\nFor a long time the most frequent pretext for sedition and civil war in Christian Commonwealths has arisen from a difficulty not yet sufficiently resolved: how to obey both God and man when their commands conflict. It is plain enough that when a person receives two contrary commands and knows that one is God’s, he ought to obey that one rather than the other, even if the other is the command of his lawful Sovereign (whether monarch or sovereign assembly), or of his father. The difficulty, then, is that when people are commanded in God’s name, they often do not know whether the command comes from God or whether the person commanding is merely abusing God’s name for private ends. For just as there were in the Jewish Church many false prophets who sought standing with the people through feigned dreams and visions, so at every time in the Church of Christ there have been false teachers who seek standing with the people through fantastic and false doctrines, and use that standing—as ambition naturally does—to govern them for private gain.\n\nBut for those able to distinguish what is and is not necessary for their reception into the Kingdom of God, this difficulty in obeying both God and the civil Sovereign on earth is of no consequence. If the civil Sovereign’s command can be obeyed without forfeiting eternal life, it is unjust to disobey it; and the apostle’s precepts apply: “Servants, obey your masters in all things,” and “Children, obey your parents in all things”; as does our Savior’s precept: “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ chair; therefore observe and do everything they tell you.” But if the command cannot be obeyed without incurring eternal death, then obeying it would be madness, and our Savior’s counsel applies (Mat. 10. 28.): “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Therefore everyone wishing to avoid both the punishments inflicted in this world for disobedience to an earthly Sovereign and those inflicted in the world to come for disobedience to God must learn to distinguish carefully what is and is not necessary to eternal salvation.\n\nAll that is NECESSARY to salvation is contained in two virtues: faith in Christ and obedience to laws. The latter would suffice for us if it were perfect. But since we are all guilty of disobedience to God’s law, not only originally in Adam but also through our own actual transgressions, what is required of us now is not merely obedience for the remainder of our lives but also remission of past sins; that remission is the reward of our faith in Christ. That nothing else is necessarily required for salvation is evident from this: the Kingdom of Heaven is closed to none but sinners—that is, the disobedient, the transgressors of the law—and not even to them if they repent and believe all the articles of Christian faith necessary to salvation.\n\nThe obedience God requires of us, accepting in all our actions the will for the deed, is an earnest endeavor to obey him; and it is also called by all the names that signify such endeavor. Thus obedience is sometimes called charity and love, since these imply a will to obey; and our Savior himself makes our love of God and of one another the fulfillment of the whole law. Sometimes it is called righteousness, for righteousness is simply the will to give everyone what is his own—that is, the will to obey the laws. And sometimes it is called repentance, because to repent implies turning away from sin, which is the same as the will’s return to obedience. Therefore whoever sincerely desires to fulfill God’s commandments, or truly repents of his transgressions, or loves God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself, has all the obedience necessary for reception into the Kingdom of God. For if God demanded perfect innocence, no living person could be saved.\n\nBut what commandments has God given us? Are all the laws given to the Jews through Moses commandments of God? If so, why are Christians not taught to obey them? If not, what commandments are there besides the law of nature? For our Savior Christ gave us no new laws, but counseled us to observe the laws to which we are subject—that is, the laws of nature and the laws of our respective Sovereigns. Nor did he make any new law for the Jews in his Sermon on the Mount; he only expounded the laws of Moses, to which they were already subject. Therefore the laws of God are nothing other than the laws of nature, chief among them the command not to break our word—that is, the command to obey the civil Sovereigns whom we have established over ourselves by mutual agreement with one another. And this law of God, commanding obedience to civil law, consequently commands obedience to all the precepts of the Bible, which (as I proved in the preceding chapter) is law only where the civil Sovereign has made it so; elsewhere it is counsel, which a person may refuse to obey without injustice, though at his own peril.\n\nHaving established what obedience is necessary to salvation, and to whom it is owed, we must next consider faith: whom we believe and why, and what articles or points must necessarily be believed by those who will be saved. First, as to the person we believe: since it is impossible to believe anyone before we know what he says, it must be someone we have heard speak. Thus the person Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets believed was God himself, who spoke to them supernaturally; and the person the apostles and disciples who associated with Christ believed was our Savior himself. But of those to whom neither God the Father nor our Savior ever spoke, it cannot be said that the person they believed was God. They believed the apostles, and after them the pastors and teachers of the Church, who commended the history of the Old and New Testaments to their faith. Thus Christians’ faith ever since our Savior’s time has rested first on the standing of their pastors, and afterward on the authority of those who caused the Old and New Testaments to be accepted as the rule of faith. None but Christian Sovereigns could do this; they are therefore the supreme pastors, and the only persons whom Christians now hear speak on God’s behalf, except for those to whom God speaks supernaturally in our own day. But since many false prophets have “gone out into the world,” others must test such spirits (as St. John advises us, 1 Epistle, Chap. 4. ver.1.) “whether they are of God or not.” And since the testing of doctrines belongs to the supreme pastor, the person whom all without special revelation must believe is, in every Commonwealth, the supreme pastor—that is, the civil Sovereign.\n\nThe reasons people believe a Christian doctrine vary. Faith is God’s gift, and he produces it in each person by whatever means he sees fit. The most usual immediate reason we believe any point of Christian faith is that we believe the Bible to be God’s word. But why we believe the Bible to be God’s word is much disputed, as all ill-posed questions are bound to be. For the question people ask is not “Why do we believe it?” but “How do we know it?”—as though believing and knowing were the same thing. Consequently, while one party grounds its knowledge on the infallibility of the Church and the other on the testimony of a private spirit, neither establishes what it claims. For how can anyone know that the Church is infallible without first knowing that Scripture is infallible? Or how can anyone know that his own private spirit is anything other than a belief founded on his teachers’ authority and arguments, or on an assumption about his own gifts? Besides, nothing in Scripture implies the infallibility of the Church, much less that of any particular church, and least of all that of any particular person.\n\nIt is clear, therefore, that Christians do not know but only believe that Scripture is God’s word, and that the means God ordinarily chooses to bring them to this belief follows the course of nature: they learn it from their teachers. St. Paul’s doctrine concerning Christian faith in general is (Rom. 10.17.), “Faith comes by hearing”—that is, by hearing our lawful pastors. He also says (ver. 14,15. of the same Chapter), “How shall they believe in one of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?” Evidently, then, the ordinary cause of believing that the Scriptures are God’s word is the same as the cause of believing all the other articles of our faith: hearing those whom the law permits and appoints to teach us, such as our parents in their homes and our pastors in the churches. Experience makes this clearer still. Why else would nearly everyone in Christian Commonwealths believe, or at least profess, that Scripture is God’s word, while hardly anyone in other Commonwealths does, except that people in Christian Commonwealths are taught so from infancy, and elsewhere are taught otherwise?\n\nBut if teaching causes faith, why does not everyone believe? Faith is surely God’s gift, and he gives it to whomever he wills. Nevertheless, because he gives it to its recipients through teachers, hearing is the immediate cause of faith. In a school where many are taught but some progress and others do not, the teacher is the cause of learning in those who progress; yet one cannot conclude from this that learning is not God’s gift. All good things come from God, but not all who possess them can say they are inspired: inspiration implies a supernatural gift and God’s immediate hand. Whoever claims it claims to be a prophet, and is subject to examination by the Church.\n\nBut whether people know, believe, or grant that the Scriptures are God’s word, if I show from their unambiguous passages which articles of faith are necessary, and alone necessary, for salvation, those people must likewise know, believe, or grant the same conclusion.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 2\n\nThe One Necessary Article of Christian Faith, the (Unum Necessarium) one article of faith that Scripture makes absolutely necessary for salvation, is this: JESUS IS THE CHRIST. By Christ is meant the King whom God had previously promised through the prophets of the Old Testament to send into the world, to reign eternally under God over the Jews and over those of other nations who would believe in him, and to give them the eternal life lost through Adam’s sin. Once I have proved this from Scripture, I shall go on to show when, and in what sense, certain other articles may also be called necessary.\n\nTo prove that belief in the article Jesus Is the Christ is all the faith required for salvation, my first argument comes from the purpose of the evangelists: by describing our Savior’s life they sought to establish this one article, Jesus Is the Christ. The substance of St. Matthew’s Gospel is that Jesus descended from David and was born of a virgin, the marks of the true Christ; that the Magi came to worship him as King of the Jews; that Herod sought to kill him for that very reason; that John the Baptist proclaimed him; that he and his apostles preached that he was that King; that he taught the law not like a scribe but with authority; that he cured diseases by his word alone and performed many other miracles foretold of the Christ; that he was hailed as King when he entered Jerusalem; that he warned people against all others who would claim to be Christ; that he was arrested, accused, and put to death for saying he was King; and that the charge inscribed on the cross was JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. All of these serve one end alone: that people should believe Jesus Is the Christ. That, then, was the purpose of St. Matthew’s Gospel. But the purpose of all the evangelists, as a reading of them shows, was the same. Therefore the purpose of the whole Gospel was to establish that single article. And St. John states it explicitly in his conclusion, John 20. 31.: “These things are written so that you may know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.”\n\nMy second argument comes from the subject of the apostles’ sermons, both while our Savior lived on earth and after his ascension. In our Savior’s lifetime the apostles were sent, Luke 9.2., to preach the Kingdom of God. Neither there nor at Mat. 10.7. does he give them any other commission than this: “As you go, preach, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is near”; that is, Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the King who was to come. That their preaching after his ascension had the same subject is clear from Acts 17.6.: “They dragged,” says St. Luke, “Jason and certain brothers before the rulers of the city, crying, ‘These men who have turned the world upside down have come here too, and Jason has received them. They all act against Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another King, one Jesus.’” It is also clear from the 2.&3. verses of the same chapter, which say that St. Paul “as was his custom, went in to them, and for three Sabbath days reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and maintaining that Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom he preached is Christ.”\n\nThe third argument comes from passages of Scripture declaring that all the faith required for salvation is easy. For if inward assent to all the doctrines now taught concerning Christian faith—most of them disputed—were necessary for salvation, nothing in the world would be harder than being a Christian. The thief on the cross, though repentant, could not have been saved for saying, “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom”; with these words he testified to belief in no article but that Jesus was the King. Nor could it be said (as at Mat. 11. 30.) that “Christ’s yoke is easy and his burden light”; nor that “little children believe in him,” as at Matth. 18.6. Nor could St. Paul have said (1 Cor. 1. 21.), “It pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.” Nor could St. Paul himself have been saved, still less have become so great a teacher of the Church so suddenly, when perhaps he never thought of transubstantiation or purgatory or many other articles now imposed on us.\n\nThe fourth argument comes from explicit passages that admit no dispute about their interpretation. First, John 5. 39.: “Search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and they are what testify about me.” Our Savior here speaks only of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, since the Jews at that time could not search the Scriptures of the New Testament, which had not yet been written. But the Old Testament says nothing of Christ except the marks by which people might recognize him when he came: that he would descend from David, be born in Bethlehem and of a virgin, perform great miracles, and the like. Therefore to believe that this Jesus was he sufficed for eternal life. What is more than sufficient is not necessary; consequently no other article is required. Again, (John 11. 26.), “Whoever lives and believes in me shall not die eternally.” Thus believing in Christ is faith sufficient for eternal life, and consequently no more faith than this is necessary. But believing in Jesus and believing that Jesus is the Christ are one and the same, as the immediately following verses show. For when our Savior (verse 26.) asked Martha, “Do you believe this?” she answered (verse 27.), “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.” Thus this article alone is faith sufficient for eternal life, and more than sufficient is not necessary. Third, John 20. 31.: “These things are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life through his name.” Here belief that Jesus Is the Christ is faith sufficient for obtaining life; therefore no other article is necessary. Fourth, 1 John 4. 2.: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” And 1 Joh. 5. 1.: “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” And verse 5.: “Who overcomes the world but one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” Fifth, Act. 8. ver. 36, 37.: “Look,” says the eunuch, “here is water; what prevents me from being baptized? And Philip said, ‘If you believe with all your heart, you may.’ And he answered and said, ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’” Therefore belief in this article, Jesus Is the Christ, suffices for baptism—that is, for our reception into the Kingdom of God—and consequently is the only article necessary. And generally, wherever our Savior tells someone, “Your faith has saved you,” he says it because of a confession that directly or by implication expresses the belief that Jesus Is the Christ.\n\nThe last argument comes from the passages in which this article is made the foundation of faith: whoever holds to the foundation will be saved. The first is Mat. 24.23.: “If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is Christ,’ or ‘There,’ do not believe it, for false Christs and false prophets shall arise and display great signs and wonders, etc.” Here we see that the article Jesus Is the Christ must be held to even if a person teaching the contrary performs great miracles. The second is Gal. 1. 8.: “Though we, or an angel from Heaven, preach to you any other Gospel than the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” But the Gospel Paul and the other apostles preached was only this article, that Jesus Is the Christ. Thus for the sake of belief in this article we must reject even an angel from heaven’s authority, much more that of any mortal who teaches the contrary. This, then, is the fundamental article of Christian faith. A third passage is 1 Joh. 4.1.: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit. By this you shall know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” This makes clear that this article is the measure and rule for judging and testing all other articles, and is therefore the only fundamental one. A fourth is Matt. 16.18., where St. Peter, having professed this article by saying to our Savior, “You are Christ, the Son of the living God,” receives our Savior’s reply, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” From this I infer that this is the article on which all the other doctrines of the Church are built, as on their foundation. A fifth is (1 Cor. 3. ver. 11, 12, &c.): “No one can lay any other foundation than the one laid: Jesus is the Christ. Now if anyone builds on this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, each person’s work shall be made manifest. For the Day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall test what kind of work each person has done. If anyone’s work built on it survives, he shall receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet as through fire.” Some of these words are plain and easy to understand, while others are allegorical and difficult. From what is plain we may infer that pastors who teach this foundation, that Jesus Is the Christ, may nevertheless be saved even if they draw false conclusions from it (as everyone sometimes does); much more may those be saved who are not pastors but hearers, and believe what their lawful pastors teach them. Therefore belief in this article is sufficient, and consequently no other article of faith is necessarily required for salvation.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 3\n\nNow for the allegorical part, such as “the fire shall test each person’s work,” and “they shall be saved, yet as through fire,” or “through fire” (for the original is dia puros): none of it contradicts the conclusion I have drawn from the other, plain words. Nevertheless, since an argument for the fire of purgatory has been taken from this passage, I shall offer my own conjecture about what is meant by this testing of doctrines and the saving of people as through fire. Here the apostle seems to allude to the words of the prophet Zechariah, Ch. 13. 8,9., who, speaking of the restoration of the Kingdom of God, says: “Two parts within it shall be cut off and die, but the third shall remain there; and I will bring the third part through the fire, and refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested; they shall call on the name of the Lord, and I will hear them.” The day of judgment is the day of the restoration of the Kingdom of God; and St. Peter tells us (2 Pet. 3. v.7, 10, 12.) that on that day the world will be consumed by fire and the wicked will perish. But the remnant God will save shall pass unharmed through that fire and shall there be tested and cleansed of their idolatry (as silver and gold are cleansed of dross by fire), and brought to call upon the name of the true God. Alluding to this, St. Paul says here that the Day—that is, the Day of Judgment, the great day of our Savior’s coming to restore the Kingdom of God in Israel—shall test every person’s doctrine, judging which are gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or stubble. Those who have built false conclusions on the true foundation shall then see their doctrines condemned; nevertheless they themselves shall be saved, pass unharmed through this universal fire, and live eternally to call upon the name of the true and only God. Under this interpretation nothing conflicts with the rest of Holy Scripture, and there is not a glimpse of the fire of purgatory.\n\nBut one might ask here whether it is not as necessary for salvation to believe that God is omnipotent and Creator of the world, that Jesus Christ has risen, and that all other people shall rise from the dead at the last day, as to believe that Jesus Is the Christ. I answer that these things are necessary, as are many other articles; but they are contained in this one article and may be deduced from it with greater or lesser difficulty. For who does not see that those who believe Jesus to be the Son of the God of Israel, and the God of Israel to be the omnipotent Creator of all things, thereby also believe that God is the omnipotent Creator of all things? Or how could someone believe that Jesus is the King who shall reign eternally without also believing that he has risen from the dead? A dead man cannot perform a king’s office. In short, whoever holds to this foundation, Jesus Is the Christ, explicitly holds everything he sees to follow rightly from it, and implicitly holds everything that follows from it even if he cannot discern the connection. It therefore remains true that belief in this one article is faith sufficient to obtain remission of sins for the penitent, and consequently to bring them into the Kingdom of Heaven.\n\nNow that I have shown that all the obedience required for salvation consists in the will to obey God’s law—that is, in repentance—and that all the faith required for it is contained in belief in the article Jesus Is the Christ, I shall cite further Gospel passages showing that everything necessary for salvation is contained in these two together. The people to whom St. Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, immediately after our Savior’s ascension, asked him and the other apostles (Act. 2.37.), “Men and brothers, what shall we do?” St. Peter answered (in the next verse), “Repent, and let each of you be baptized for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Therefore repentance and baptism—that is, believing that Jesus Is the Christ—are all that is necessary for salvation. Again, when a certain ruler asked our Savior (Luke 18.18.), “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” he answered (verse 20), “You know the commandments: Do not commit adultery; do not kill; do not steal; do not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother.” When the ruler said that he had observed them, our Savior added, “Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come, follow me”—which was as much as to say, Trust in me as the King. Thus fulfilling the law and believing that Jesus is the King are all that is required to bring a person to eternal life. Third, St. Paul says (Rom. 1.17.), “The just shall live by faith”—not everyone, but the just. Thus faith and justice (that is, the will to be just, or repentance) are all that is necessary for eternal life. And (Mark 1.15.) our Savior preached, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is near; repent and believe the Gospel”—that is, the good news that the Christ had come. Therefore repentance and belief that Jesus is the Christ are all that salvation requires.\n\nSince both faith and obedience (implied by repentance) must come together for our salvation, the dispute about which of the two justifies us is beside the point. Nevertheless, it is worth making clear how each contributes to salvation, and in what sense we are said to be justified by one and by the other. First, if by righteousness we mean the justice of works themselves, no one can be saved, for no one has failed to transgress God’s law. Thus when we are said to be justified by works, this must be understood of the will, which God always accepts in place of the work itself in both good and evil people. Only in this sense is a person called just or unjust, and does his justice justify him—that is, give him the title of just in God’s estimation and make him capable of living by his faith, which he could not do before. So justice justifies in the sense that to justify means to call a person just, not in the sense of discharging the law, which would make the punishment of his sins unjust.\n\nA person is also said to be justified when his plea is accepted despite being insufficient in itself: for instance, when we plead our will and our endeavor to fulfill the law and repent of our failures, and God accepts these in place of fulfillment itself. And since God accepts the will for the deed only in the faithful, it is faith that makes our plea good. In this sense faith alone justifies. Thus faith and obedience are both necessary for salvation, though each is said to justify in a different sense.\n\nHaving thus shown what is necessary for salvation, we can readily reconcile it with obedience to the civil Sovereign, whether he is Christian or an unbeliever. If he is Christian, he permits belief in the article Jesus Is the Christ and in all the articles contained in it or evidently deduced from it; this is all the faith necessary for salvation. And because he is a Sovereign, he requires obedience to all his own laws—that is, to all civil laws—which also contain all the laws of nature, or all the laws of God. For besides the laws of nature and the laws of the Church, which are part of civil law (since the Church that can make laws is the Commonwealth), there are no other divine laws. Whoever obeys his Christian Sovereign, therefore, is not thereby prevented from either believing in or obeying God. But suppose a Christian king should draw false conclusions from the foundation Jesus Is the Christ—that is, build structures of hay or stubble upon it—and command that they be taught. Since St. Paul says the king will be saved, all the more will someone who teaches those things at his command be saved; and still more someone who does not teach but simply believes his lawful teacher. And if the civil Sovereign forbids a subject to profess certain opinions of his own, on what grounds can the subject disobey? Christian kings may err when drawing a conclusion, but who is to judge? Shall a private person judge when his own obedience is at issue? Or shall anyone judge but the person appointed to do so by the Church—that is, by the civil Sovereign who represents it? Or, if the Pope or an apostle judges, can he not err in drawing a conclusion? Did not one of the two, St. Peter or St. Paul, err in what he built on the foundation when St. Paul opposed St. Peter to his face? There can therefore be no contradiction between the laws of God and those of a Christian Commonwealth.\n\nAnd when the civil Sovereign is an unbeliever, any of his subjects who resists him sins against God’s laws (for the laws of nature are such laws), and rejects the apostles’ counsel, which urges all Christians to obey their princes and all children and servants to obey their parents and masters in all things. As for their faith, it is inward and invisible; they have the liberty Naaman had, and need not endanger themselves for it. But if they do, they ought to expect their reward in Heaven and not complain of their lawful Sovereign, still less wage war against him. For a person who does not welcome any just occasion for martyrdom does not possess the faith he professes, but merely feigns it to lend a semblance of legitimacy to his own defiance. Yet what unbelieving king would be so unreasonable as to put to death or persecute a subject who, as the king knows, awaits Christ’s second coming after the present world is burned, intending then to obey him (which is what believing Jesus to be the Christ means), and meanwhile considers himself bound to obey that unbelieving king’s laws (as all Christians are obliged in conscience to do)?\n\nThis will suffice concerning the Kingdom of God and ecclesiastical government. I do not claim here to advance any position of my own, but only to show what consequences seem to me deducible from the principles of Christian politics—the Holy Scriptures—in support of the power of civil Sovereigns and the duty of their subjects. In citing Scripture I have sought to avoid passages of obscure or disputed interpretation, and to cite none except in the sense most plain and most consistent with the harmony and purpose of the whole Bible, which was written for the reestablishment of the Kingdom of God in Christ. For it is not bare words but the writer’s purpose that supplies the true light in which any writing must be interpreted. Those who insist on isolated passages without considering the chief design can derive nothing clearly from them. Instead, by tossing particles of Scripture like dust before people’s eyes, they make everything more obscure than it is: a familiar artifice of those who seek not truth but their own advantage.\n\nPART IV. OF THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 1\n\nOF SPIRITUAL DARKNESS ARISING FROM MISINTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE\n\nBesides the sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have spoken so far, Scripture mentions another power: (Eph. 6. 12.) “the rulers of the darkness of this world,” (Mat. 12. 26.) “the kingdom of Satan,” and (Mat. 9. 34.) “the principality of Beelzebub over demons,” that is, over phantoms appearing in the air. For this reason Satan is also called (Eph. 2. 2.) “the prince of the power of the air,” and, because he rules in the darkness of this world, (Joh. 16. 11.) “the prince of this world.” Accordingly, those under his dominion, in contrast with the faithful, who are the children of the light, are called the children of darkness. Since Beelzebub is prince of phantoms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness and these demons, phantoms, or spirits of illusion signify allegorically the same thing. Considered in this light, the kingdom of darkness, as Scripture presents it here and elsewhere, is nothing other than a “confederacy of deceivers who, to gain dominion over men in this present world, endeavor through dark and erroneous doctrines to extinguish in them the light both of nature and of the Gospel, and thus unfit them for the Kingdom of God to come.”\n\nPeople born utterly deprived of bodily sight have no idea of light; and no one can imagine a light greater than any he has at some time perceived with his outward senses. So it is also with the light of the Gospel and of understanding: no one can conceive a greater degree of it than he has already attained. Hence men have no means of recognizing their own darkness except by reasoning from the unforeseen mishaps they encounter on their way. The darkest part of Satan’s kingdom lies outside the Church of God, among those who do not believe in Jesus Christ. Yet we cannot therefore say that the Church, like the land of Goshen, enjoys all the light necessary to perform the work God has commanded us. Why, almost since the Apostles’ time, have people throughout Christendom jostled one another out of their places by foreign and civil war? Why do they stumble over the slightest roughness in their own fortunes and the slightest elevation in another’s? Why do they take such different paths toward the same goal, happiness, unless it is night among us, or at least mist? We are therefore still in the dark.\n\nThe enemy has come in the night of our natural ignorance and sown the weeds of spiritual error. He has done so first by misusing and extinguishing the light of Scripture: for we err because we do not know the Scriptures. Second, by introducing the demonology of the heathen poets—their fabulous teaching about demons, which are merely idols or phantoms of the brain, with no real nature apart from human imagination, such as the ghosts of dead men, fairies, and other stuff of old wives’ tales. Third, by mixing into Scripture various relics of Greek religion and much of the Greeks’ vain and erroneous philosophy, especially Aristotle’s. Fourth, by mingling with both of these false or uncertain traditions and fabricated or uncertain history. Thus we fall into error by “giving heed to seducing spirits” and to the demonology of those who “speak lies in hypocrisy”—or, as it stands in the original, 1 Tim. 4.1,2., “of those who play the part of liars”—“with a seared conscience,” that is, against their own knowledge. I intend to speak briefly in this chapter of the first of these methods: seducing men through the misuse of Scripture.\n\nThe greatest and chief misuse of Scripture, on which almost all the rest depend or which they serve, is to twist it into proof that the Kingdom of God, so often mentioned in Scripture, is the present Church, whether the multitude of Christians now living or those who, having died, will rise again on the last day. In fact, the Kingdom of God was first instituted through Moses’ ministry over the Jews alone, who were therefore called his peculiar people. It ended when Saul was chosen: they refused any longer to be governed by God and demanded a king after the fashion of the nations, to which God himself consented, as I have shown more fully in the 35. Chapter. After that time there was no other Kingdom of God in the world, established by covenant or otherwise, beyond God’s eternal kingship over all men and all creatures, whom he governs according to his will by his infinite power. Nevertheless, through his prophets he promised to restore his government over them when the time appointed in his secret counsel had fully come and when they had turned back to him in repentance and reformed their lives. More than this, he invited the Gentiles too to enter and enjoy the happiness of his reign on the same conditions of conversion and repentance. He promised also to send his Son into the world to expiate the sins of them all by his death and prepare them by his teaching to receive him at his second coming. Since that second coming has not yet occurred, the Kingdom of God has not yet come, and we are now subject by covenant to no kings but our civil sovereigns. The sole qualification is that Christians are already in the kingdom of grace, inasmuch as they already have the promise of admission when he comes again.\n\nFrom the error that the present Church is Christ’s kingdom follows the supposed need for some one man or assembly through whose mouth our Savior, now in heaven, speaks and gives law, and who represents his person to all Christians—or for several men or assemblies to do the same for different parts of Christendom. This royal power under Christ is claimed universally by the Pope and, within particular Commonwealths, by assemblies of local pastors, though Scripture grants it to none but civil sovereigns. The dispute over it grows so passionate that it puts out the light of nature and casts men’s understanding into such darkness that they cannot see to whom they have pledged obedience.\n\nFrom the Pope’s claim to be Christ’s vicar general in the present Church, supposedly the kingdom to which the Gospel summons us, follows the doctrine that a Christian king must receive his crown from a bishop, as though it were through that ceremony that he derived the words Dei Gratia in his title, and as though only when crowned by the authority of God’s universal viceroy on earth were he made king by God’s favor. It follows also that every bishop, whoever his sovereign may be, takes at his consecration an oath of absolute obedience to the Pope. From the same claim comes the doctrine of the fourth Council of Lateran, held under Pope Innocent the third (Chap. 3. De Haereticis.): “If a king, upon the Pope’s admonition, does not purge his kingdom of heresies, and, having been excommunicated for it, does not make satisfaction within a year, his subjects are released from their obligation of obedience.” By heresies are meant all opinions the Church of Rome has forbidden men to maintain. Thus, whenever the Pope’s political designs conflict with those of other Christian princes, as they often do, such a mist rises among their subjects that they cannot distinguish a stranger who thrusts himself onto their lawful prince’s throne from the prince they themselves placed there. In this darkness of mind they are made to fight one another, unable to tell enemies from friends, under the guidance of another man’s ambition.\n\nFrom the same opinion that the present Church is the Kingdom of God comes the practice by which pastors, deacons, and all other ministers of the Church take for themselves the name clergy, giving other Christians the name laity, meaning simply the people. For clergy means those whose maintenance comes from the revenue God reserved for himself during his reign over the Israelites and assigned as an inheritance to the tribe of Levi, who were to be his public ministers and, unlike their brothers, received no land to live on. The Pope, then, pretending that the present Church is, like the realm of Israel, the Kingdom of God, claimed a like revenue as God’s inheritance for himself and his subordinate ministers; the name clergy suited that claim. Hence ecclesiastics have long demanded and taken from Christians tithes and other payments made to the Levites among the Israelites as God’s right, claiming them Jure Divino, that is, by God’s right. The people were thus everywhere obliged to pay two tributes, one to the state and another to the clergy. The clergy’s share, a tenth of their income, is twice what a king of Athens, regarded as a tyrant, exacted from his subjects to meet every public expense: he demanded no more than a twentieth, yet maintained the Commonwealth abundantly with it. And in the kingdom of the Jews, during God’s priestly reign, tithes and offerings made up the entire public revenue.\n\nFrom the same confusion of the present Church with the Kingdom of God arose the distinction between civil and canon law: civil law consists of the acts of sovereigns in their own dominions, canon law of the Pope’s acts within those same dominions. These canons were only canons—that is, proposed rules, accepted voluntarily by Christian princes—until the transfer of the Empire to Charlemagne. Afterwards, as papal power increased, they became commanded rules, and the emperors themselves, to avoid greater evils into which a blinded people might be led, were forced to let them pass as laws.\n\nHence, in all dominions where the Pope’s ecclesiastical power is fully accepted, the Roman Church tolerates Jews, Turks, and Gentiles in their religions, so long as their practice and profession do not offend the civil power; yet for a Christian, even a foreigner, not to belong to the Roman religion is a capital offense, because the Pope claims all Christians as his subjects. Otherwise it would be as contrary to the law of nations to persecute a foreign Christian for professing the religion of his own country as to persecute an unbeliever, or more so, since those who are not against Christ are with him.\n\nHence also in every Christian state certain men are exempt, by ecclesiastical liberty, from the taxes and courts of the civil state. The secular clergy enjoy this exemption, as do monks and friars, who in many places form so large a proportion of the common people that, should the need arise, an army sufficient for any war the Church militant might wage against its own or other princes could be raised from them alone.\n\nA second general misuse of Scripture is to turn consecration into conjuration, or enchantment. In Scripture, to consecrate is to offer, give, or dedicate a person or anything else to God in pious and fitting words and gestures, separating it from common use. That is, it is to sanctify it, to make it God’s, for use only by those whom God has appointed his public ministers, as I proved at length in the 35. Chapter. Consecration changes not the thing consecrated but only its use, from profane and common to holy and set apart for God’s service. But when words are supposed to change the nature or quality of the thing itself, this is not consecration but either an extraordinary work of God or a vain and impious conjuration. And since claims of a change of nature in their consecrations are so frequent that they cannot be counted extraordinary works, they are nothing but conjuration or incantation. By these means they would have men believe in a change of nature that does not occur, against the testimony of sight and all their other senses. For example, instead of consecrating bread and wine to God’s special service in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper—which is simply setting them apart from common use to signify, and thus remind men of, their redemption through Christ’s Passion, his body broken and blood shed on the cross for our transgressions—the priest claims that by speaking our Savior’s words, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” the bread’s nature is no longer present and his very body is there. Yet the recipient sees or senses nothing that was not evident before consecration. The Egyptian conjurers said to have turned their rods into serpents and water into blood are thought to have deceived spectators’ senses with false appearances, and are therefore called enchanters. But what would we have thought if their rods had shown nothing like serpents, and the enchanted water nothing like blood or anything other than water, and they had nevertheless insisted to the king’s face that these were serpents that looked like rods and blood that looked like water? That would have been enchantment and lying together. And yet the priests do precisely the same in their daily rite, turning holy words into a kind of charm that produces nothing perceptible to the senses. They insist to our faces that it has turned bread into a man—indeed, into a God—and demand that men worship it as if it were our Savior himself, present as God and man, thereby committing the grossest idolatry. If saying it is no longer bread but God is enough to excuse such idolatry, why would the same excuse not serve the Egyptians if they had the nerve to say the leeks and onions they worshiped were not actual leeks and onions but a divinity beneath their appearance or likeness? The words “This is my body” are equivalent to “This signifies, or represents, my body,” an ordinary figure of speech; to take them literally is an abuse. Even if they were taken literally, they could extend no further than the bread Christ himself consecrated with his own hands. For he never said that any bread whatsoever, over which any priest whatsoever should say “This is my body” or “This is Christ’s body,” would instantly be transubstantiated. Nor did the Church of Rome establish this transubstantiation until the time of Innocent the third, no more than 500. years ago, when papal power stood at its height and the darkness of the age had grown so deep that men could not recognize the bread given them to eat—especially when it was stamped with Christ’s figure upon the cross, as though they were meant to believe it had been transubstantiated not only into Christ’s body but also into the wood of his cross, and that they ate both together in the sacrament.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 2\n\nA similar incantation in place of consecration is used in the sacrament of baptism. There the misuse of God’s name in each distinct person and in the whole Trinity, accompanied by the sign of the cross at each name, completes the charm. First, when making holy water, the priest says, “I conjure you, creature of water, in the name of God the Father Almighty, and in the name of Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and by the power of the Holy Ghost, that you become conjured water, to drive away all the powers of the enemy, and to root out and displace the enemy, etc.” Likewise, in the blessing of the salt to be mixed with it: “That you become conjured salt, that all phantoms and the knavery of the devil’s fraud may flee and depart from the place where you are sprinkled; and that every unclean spirit be conjured by Him who shall come to judge the living and the dead.” Likewise in the blessing of the oil: “That all the power of the enemy, all the host of the devil, all the assaults and phantoms of Satan, may be driven away by this creature of oil.” The infant to be baptized is subjected to many charms. First, at the church door the priest blows three times in the child’s face and says, “Come out of him, unclean spirit, and make room for the Holy Ghost the Comforter.” As though every child were possessed by demons until a priest had breathed on it! Again, before the child enters the church, he says as before, “I conjure you, etc., to come out and depart from this servant of God.” And the same exorcism is repeated once more before baptism. These are among the incantations and consecrations used in administering the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in which everything serving those holy men, except the priest’s unconsecrated spittle, has its own prescribed form of exorcism.\n\nNor are other rites, such as marriage, extreme unction, visiting the sick, and consecrating churches and churchyards, free of charms. In them too enchanted oil and water are used, together with the misuse of the cross and David’s holy words “Asperges me Domine Hyssopo,” as though these had power to drive away phantoms and imaginary spirits.\n\nAnother general error comes from misinterpreting the words eternal life, everlasting death, and the second death. Holy Scripture plainly tells us that God created Adam capable of living forever, on condition that he did not disobey God’s command. This was not an essential property of human nature but a consequence of the power of the tree of life, from which he was free to eat so long as he had not sinned. After he sinned he was driven out of Paradise lest he eat from it and live forever. Scripture also tells us that Christ’s Passion releases from sin all who believe in him and consequently restores eternal life to all the faithful, and to them alone. Yet the doctrine now, and for a long time, has been quite different: that every man has eternal life by nature because his soul is immortal. Thus the flaming sword at the entrance to Paradise, though it prevents a man from reaching the tree of life, does not prevent him from retaining the immortality God took from him for his sin, nor leave him needing Christ’s sacrifice to recover it. Consequently, not only the faithful and righteous but the wicked and heathen too will enjoy eternal life without any death at all, much less a second and everlasting death. To mend this contradiction, it is said that a second and everlasting death means a second and everlasting life, but in torments—a figure of speech never used except in this very case.\n\nThis whole doctrine rests solely on some of the more obscure passages of the New Testament, which, when the whole scope of Scripture is considered, are clear enough in a different sense and are not necessary to Christian faith. Suppose that when a man dies nothing remains of him but his corpse. Cannot God, who by his word raised lifeless dust and clay into a living creature, just as easily raise a dead corpse to life again and keep him alive forever, or by another word make him die again? In Scripture, soul always signifies either life or a living creature, and body and soul together signify a living body. On the fifth day of creation God said, “Let the water produce Reptile Animae Viventis,” a creeping thing with a living soul; the English renders this “that has life.” Again, God created whales “& omnem animam viventem,” rendered in English “every living creature.” Likewise, God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed the breath of life into his face, “& factus est Homo in animam viventem,” that is, “and man became a living creature.” After Noah came out of the ark, God said he would no longer strike down “omnem animam viventem,” that is, “every living creature.” And Deut. 12.23. says, “Do not eat the blood, for the blood is the soul,” that is, “the life.” If soul in these passages meant an incorporeal substance existing apart from the body, that conclusion could be drawn as readily about every other living creature as about man. But I think I have already proved sufficiently from Scripture, in the 38. Chapter, that the souls of the faithful will remain in their bodies from the Resurrection to eternity, not by their own nature but by God’s special grace. And when passages of the New Testament say that a man will be cast body and soul into hellfire, they mean no more than body and life: he will be cast alive into the perpetual fire of Gehenna.\n\nThrough this opening enters the dark doctrine, first, of eternal torments and, afterwards, of purgatory. With these come the belief that the ghosts of dead men roam abroad, especially in consecrated, solitary, or dark places; the claims of exorcising and conjuring phantoms; the invocation of the dead; and the doctrine of indulgences, or exemption for a time or forever from the fire of purgatory, where these incorporeal substances are supposedly purified by burning and made fit for heaven. Long before our Savior’s time, men were generally infected by Greek demonology with the belief that human souls were substances distinct from their bodies. They therefore supposed that after the body died, every soul, godly or wicked, must continue to exist somewhere through its own nature, without any supernatural gift of God. The doctors of the Church long disputed where such souls should dwell until reunited with their bodies at the Resurrection; for a while they supposed them to lie under the altars. Later the Church of Rome found it more profitable to build purgatory as their dwelling place, though some other churches have demolished it in this later age.\n\nLet us now consider the texts of Scripture that seem to offer the strongest support for the three general errors I have discussed. I have already answered the passages Cardinal Bellarmine cites in favor of a present Kingdom of God administered by the Pope—no passages offer a better appearance of proof—and shown clearly that the Kingdom of God instituted by Moses ended with Saul’s election. After that the priest never deposed a king by his own authority. What the high priest did to Athaliah, he did not in his own right but in the right of the young King Joash her Son. Solomon, on the other hand, deposed the high priest Abiathar in his own right and installed another in his place. The most difficult passage that can be brought to prove Christ’s Kingdom already exists in this world is cited not by Bellarmine or anyone else in the Church of Rome, but by Beza, who would have it begin with Christ’s Resurrection. I do not know, however, whether he means thereby to invest the presbytery with supreme ecclesiastical power in the Commonwealth of Geneva, and consequently every presbytery in every other Commonwealth, or to give it to princes and other civil sovereigns. For wherever they have that form of church government, presbyteries have claimed the power to excommunicate their own kings and to serve as supreme authorities in religion, no less than the Pope claims that power everywhere.\n\nThat Christ’s Kingdom Began at the Resurrection. The words are (Marke 9.1.): “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power.” Taken grammatically, these words make it certain either that some of those standing beside Christ then are still alive or that the Kingdom of God must exist now in the present world. And there is another, more difficult passage. When, after our Savior’s Resurrection and immediately before his Ascension, the Apostles asked him (Acts.1.6.), “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” he answered, “It is not for you to know the times and the seasons that the Father has placed in his own power. But you shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, and you shall be my (martyrs) witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judaea, in Samaria, and to the farthest part of the earth.” In effect he said: My kingdom has not yet come, nor will you know in advance when it will come, for it will come like a thief in the night. But I will send you the Holy Ghost, and through him you will have power, by preaching, to bear witness to the whole world of my Resurrection, the works I have done, and the doctrine I have taught, so that people may believe in me and expect eternal life when I come again. How can this agree with Christ’s kingdom coming at the Resurrection? And St. Paul says (1 Thessal. 1.9, 10.) that “they turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven.” To wait for his Son from heaven is to wait for his coming to reign in power; there would be no need to wait if that kingdom were already present. Again, if the Kingdom of God began at the Resurrection, as Beza would have it in his reading of Mark 9.1., why have Christians since the Resurrection continued to pray, “Let your kingdom come”? Clearly, then, St. Mark’s words must not be interpreted this way. “There are some standing here,” says our Savior, “who shall not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power.” If this kingdom were to come at Christ’s Resurrection, why say “some of them” instead of all? All lived until after Christ had risen.\n\nBut let those who demand an exact interpretation of this passage first interpret our Savior’s similar words to St. Peter about St. John (chap. 21.22.): “If I wish him to remain until I come, what is that to you?” These words gave rise to a report that John would not die; yet that report was neither confirmed as well founded nor refuted as ill founded upon the words, but left as a saying not understood. The passage in St. Mark presents the same difficulty. If we may conjecture its meaning from what follows immediately, both here and in St. Luke, where it is repeated, it is not unlikely that the words refer to the Transfiguration, described in the verses immediately following: “After six days Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him”—some of his disciples, not all—“and leads them up a high mountain apart, by themselves, and is transfigured before them. His clothes became shining, whiter than snow, beyond what any fuller on earth could whiten. And Elijah appeared to them with Moses, and they were speaking with Jesus, etc.” Thus they saw Christ in the glory and majesty in which he is to come, so much so that “they were deeply afraid.” Our Savior’s promise was thus fulfilled by means of a vision. That it was a vision may be reasonably inferred from St. Luke, who tells the same story (ch. 9. ve. 28.) and says Peter and his companions were heavy with sleep; it is established most certainly by Matth. 17.9., where the story is again told, for our Savior instructed them, “Tell no one the vision until the Son of man has risen from the dead.” However this may be, nothing in the passage can serve as an argument that the Kingdom of God begins before the day of Judgment.\n\nAs for other texts offered as proof of the Pope’s power over civil sovereigns, besides Bellarmine’s—as when Christ and his Apostles’ two swords are taken to mean the spiritual and temporal swords, supposedly given to St. Peter by Christ; or when the greater of the two lights is said to signify the Pope and the lesser the king—one could as readily infer from the Bible’s first verse that heaven signifies the Pope and earth the king. This is not reasoning from Scripture but a wanton insult to princes, fashionable once the Popes felt so secure in their greatness that they could despise every Christian king; and, treading on emperors’ necks, mock both them and Scripture with the words of the 91. Psalm: “You shall tread upon the lion and the adder; the young lion and the dragon you shall trample under your feet.”\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 3\n\nAs for rites of consecration, although they depend for the most part on the discretion and judgment of the Church’s governors rather than on Scripture, those governors must still be guided by what the action itself requires: its ceremonies, words, and gestures should be fitting and meaningful, or at least suited to the action. When Moses consecrated the Tabernacle, the altar, and their vessels (Exod. 40.), he anointed them with the oil God had ordered to be made for that purpose, and they became holy. Nothing was exorcised to drive away phantoms. When the same Moses, Israel’s civil sovereign, consecrated Aaron the high priest and his sons, he washed them with water—not exorcised water—clothed them in their garments, and anointed them with oil. Thus they were sanctified to serve the Lord as priests: he simply and fittingly cleansed and adorned them before presenting them to God as his servants. When King Solomon, Israel’s civil sovereign, consecrated the Temple he had built (2 Kings 8.), he stood before the whole congregation of Israel, blessed them, and thanked God for placing in his father’s heart the desire to build it and giving him the grace to complete it. Then he prayed that God would accept the house, though it could not match his infinite greatness, and hear the prayers of his servants who prayed within it or, if absent, toward it. Lastly he offered a peace offering, and the house was dedicated. There was no procession; the king remained where he stood. There was no exorcised water, no Asperges Me, no irrelevant use of words spoken on another occasion, but a fitting and rational address, wholly suited to presenting God with his newly built house. We do not read that St. John exorcised the water of the Jordan, or Philip the water of the river in which he baptized the eunuch, or that any pastor in the Apostles’ time put his own spittle to a person’s nose before baptism and said “In odorem suavitatis,” that is, “for a sweet savor to the Lord.” Neither the spittle, for its uncleanness, nor the application of those words of Scripture, for its frivolity, can be justified by any human authority.\n\nTo prove that a soul separated from its body lives eternally—not merely the souls of the elect by special grace, through restoration of the eternal life Adam lost by sin and our Savior restored to the faithful by sacrificing himself, but also the souls of the reprobate as a property naturally belonging to human nature, without any grace of God beyond what is given to everyone—various passages at first sight seem quite sufficient. But when I compare them with what I have previously cited from the 14 of Job (Chapter 38.), they seem to me much more open to another interpretation than Job’s words.\n\nFirst are Solomon’s words (Ecclesiastes 12.7.): “Then the dust shall return to dust as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it.” If no other text directly opposes it, this may readily mean that only God, not man, knows what becomes of a man’s spirit when he dies. Solomon himself gives a statement in this sense in the same book (Chap. 3. ver. 20,21.): “All go”—man and beast—“to the same place; all come from dust and all return to dust. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward, and the spirit of the beast downward to the earth?” That is, none but God knows. Nor is it unusual to say of things we do not understand, “God knows what” or “God knows where.” The words in Gen. 5.24., “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him,” are explained in Heb. 13.5.: “He was taken away so that he would not die, and was not found because God had taken him. Before he was taken away he had this testimony, that he pleased God.” This is as much evidence for the immortality of the body as for that of the soul, and proves that being taken away was peculiar to those who please God, not shared by the wicked, and depends on grace rather than nature. On the contrary, what interpretation can we give besides the literal sense of Solomon’s words (Eccles. 3.19.): “What happens to the sons of men happens to beasts; the same thing happens to them all. As one dies, so dies the other; indeed, they all have one breath”—one spirit—“so that a man has no advantage over a beast, for all is vanity”? Literally this implies no natural immortality of the soul, yet does not conflict with the eternal life the elect will enjoy by grace. And (chap. 4. ver.3.) “Better than either is the one who has not yet been,” that is, better than those now living or who have lived. If the souls of all who have lived were immortal, this would be hard to say: having an immortal soul would then be worse than having no soul at all. And again (Chapt. 9.5.): “The living know they shall die, but the dead know nothing,” that is, by nature and before the body’s resurrection.\n\nAnother passage that seems to favor the soul’s natural immortality is our Savior’s statement that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living. But he speaks of God’s promise and of the certainty that they will rise again, not of a life then actually being lived. In the same sense God told Adam that on the day he ate the forbidden fruit he would certainly die: from that moment he was a dead man under sentence, though the sentence was not executed until almost a thousand years later. Likewise Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alive by promise when Christ spoke, but are not actually alive until the Resurrection. Nor does the story of Dives and Lazarus count against this, if we take it for what it is, a parable.\n\nOther passages of the New Testament, however, seem directly to attribute immortality to the wicked. Clearly they will all rise for Judgment. Moreover, it is said in many places that they will enter “everlasting fire, everlasting torments, everlasting punishments,” and that the worm of conscience never dies. All of this is included in the phrase everlasting death, ordinarily interpreted as everlasting life in torments. Yet nowhere can I find a statement that anyone shall live in torment everlastingly. It also seems hard to say that God, the Father of Mercies, who does whatever he wills in heaven and earth, who holds all men’s hearts in his power, who works within men both the will and the act, and without whose free gift a man has neither inclination to good nor repentance for evil, would punish men’s transgressions without end and with every extremity of torture men can imagine, and more. We must therefore consider what everlasting fire and similar phrases of Scripture mean.\n\nI have shown already that the Kingdom of God under Christ begins on the day of Judgment; that on that day the faithful will rise again with glorious and spiritual bodies, becoming his subjects in his eternal kingdom; that they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, nor eat and drink as they did in their natural bodies, but will live forever as individual persons, without the perpetuation of their kind by generation; and that the reprobate will also rise again to receive punishment for their sins. I have shown as well that those among the elect who are then alive in their earthly bodies will have their bodies suddenly changed and made spiritual and immortal. But there is no passage of Scripture proving that the bodies of the reprobate, who make up the kingdom of Satan, will also be glorious or spiritual, or that they will be like God’s angels, neither eating, drinking, nor procreating, or that they will live eternally as individual persons, as every faithful man will, or as Adam would have done if he had not sinned. Only the passages concerning eternal torments might be offered as proof, and they admit another interpretation.\n\nWe may therefore infer that, just as the elect after the Resurrection will be restored to the condition Adam enjoyed before his sin, the reprobate will be in the condition Adam and his descendants entered after the sin was committed—except that God promised a redeemer to Adam and to those of his seed who would trust in him and repent, but not to those who die in their sins, as the reprobate do.\n\nConsidered in this way, the texts mentioning eternal fire, eternal torments, or the worm that never dies do not contradict the doctrine of a second and everlasting death in the proper and natural sense of death. The fire or torments prepared for the wicked in Gehenna, Tophet, or wherever else may continue forever, and there may never be any lack of wicked men to suffer in them, though no individual man suffers eternally. For the wicked, left in the condition they occupied after Adam’s sin, may rise and live as before, marry and be given in marriage, and have coarse and corruptible bodies like all mankind now. Consequently they may beget children perpetually after the Resurrection as they did before; no passage of Scripture says otherwise. St. Paul, when speaking of the Resurrection (1 Cor. 15.), means only resurrection to eternal life, not resurrection to punishment. Of the former he says that the body is “sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, raised in honor; sown in weakness, raised in power; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body.” Nothing of the kind can be said of those raised for punishment. The passage is Luke 20. Verses 34,35,36., a fertile passage: “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage; but those counted worthy to obtain that world and the Resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are children of God, being children of the Resurrection.” The children of this world, living in the condition Adam left them, shall marry and be given in marriage; that is, they shall decay and produce succeeding generations. This gives immortality to the kind, not to individual persons. They are not worthy to be numbered among those who obtain the next world and a complete resurrection from the dead, but stay there briefly, like temporary residents, solely to receive the punishment their obstinacy deserves. The elect alone are children of the Resurrection, the sole heirs to eternal life. Only they can die no more; they, and not the reprobate, are equal to the angels and are the children of God. For the reprobate there remains after the Resurrection a second and eternal death. Between that Resurrection and their second and eternal death there is only a period of punishment and torment; through the succession of sinners entering it, this punishment shall last as long as the human kind endures through procreation, which is forever.\n\nOn this doctrine of the natural eternity of separated souls rests, as I said, the doctrine of purgatory. For if eternal life comes only by grace, there is no life but bodily life and no immortality until the Resurrection. Bellarmine’s texts for purgatory from the canonical Scripture of the Old Testament are first David’s fasting for Saul and Jonathan, mentioned in (2 Kings, 1. 12.), and again his fasting for Abner’s death in (2 Sam. 3. 35.). David fasted, Bellarmine says, to obtain some benefit for them from God after their deaths, since, after fasting to secure his own child’s recovery, he called for food as soon as he knew the child was dead. If the soul exists apart from the body, and fasting cannot obtain anything for souls already in heaven or hell, it follows that some souls of the dead are neither in heaven nor hell and so must be in a third place: purgatory. Thus by harshly straining the texts he has twisted them into proof of purgatory. Yet it is clear that mourning and fasting for the death of people whose lives brought the mourners no benefit are practiced to honor the dead, while mourning those whose lives benefited them comes from their personal loss. So David honored Saul and Abner by fasting, but consoled himself for his own child’s death by returning to his usual food.\n\nIn the other passages he cites from the Old Testament, there is not even an appearance or pretense of proof. He brings in every text containing the words anger, fire, burning, purging, or cleansing, provided some of the Fathers have applied it rhetorically in a sermon to the already accepted doctrine of purgatory. The first verse of Psalme, 37. reads, “O Lord, do not rebuke me in your wrath, nor chastise me in your hot displeasure.” What would this have to do with purgatory if Augustine had not applied wrath to hellfire and displeasure to purgatory’s fire? And what has purgatory to do with Psalme, 66. 12., “We went through fire and water, and you brought us to a moist place,” or with other such texts, which the doctors of those times used to adorn or expand their sermons and commentaries, then dragged by sheer ingenuity into service of their purposes?\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 4\n\nBut he cites other passages of the New Testament that are not so easily answered. The first is Matth. 12.32: “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of man shall be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven, either in this world or in the world to come.” Here he would have Purgatory be the world to come, where some sins may be forgiven that were not forgiven in this world. Yet it is plain that there are only three worlds: one from the Creation to the Flood, destroyed by water and called in Scripture the old world; another from the Flood to the day of Judgment, the present world, to be destroyed by fire; and a third, everlasting, from the day of Judgment onward, called the world to come. In this last, all agree, there shall be no Purgatory. The world to come and Purgatory are therefore incompatible. But what, then, can our Savior's words mean? I confess they are very difficult to reconcile with all the doctrines now unanimously received. Nor is it shameful to confess that Scripture is too profound for the limits of human understanding to sound. Nevertheless, I may offer for more learned divines to consider what the text itself suggests. First, since to speak against the Holy Ghost, as the third Person of the Trinity, is to speak against the Church in which the Holy Ghost resides, the comparison seems to lie between our Savior's readiness to bear offenses against himself while he was on earth, and the severity of the pastors after him toward those who should deny their authority, derived from the Holy Ghost. It is as if he were to say: You who deny my power—even you who crucify me—shall be pardoned by me whenever you turn to me in repentance. But if you deny the power of those who shall afterward teach you by virtue of the Holy Ghost, they will be inexorable and will not forgive you. They will persecute you in this world and leave you without absolution, even if you turn to me, unless you turn to them as well, and so, as far as lies in their power, leave you to the punishments of the world to come. Thus the words may be read as a prophecy, or prediction, concerning the course of affairs in the Christian Church. Or, if this is not their meaning—for I am not dogmatic about such difficult passages—perhaps after the Resurrection some sinners may yet have room for repentance. Another passage also seems to agree with this. For when we consider St. Paul's words (1 Cor. 15. 29.), “What shall they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise at all? Why are they baptized for the dead?” we may plausibly infer, as some have done, that in St. Paul's time there was a custom of receiving baptism on behalf of the dead. Just as believers today stand as sponsors and guarantors for the faith of infants incapable of believing, so people undertook on behalf of deceased friends that they would be ready to obey and receive our Savior as their King at his return. In that case forgiveness of sins in the world to come requires no Purgatory. But both these interpretations contain so much that is paradoxical that I do not rely on them. I submit them instead to those deeply versed in Scripture, to inquire whether any clearer passage contradicts them. Only this much I see clearly supported by Scripture: neither the word Purgatory nor the thing itself appears in this or any other text, nor anything that proves the necessity of a place for the soul without the body—whether for the soul of Lazarus during the four days he lay dead, or for the souls the Roman Church claims are now tormented in Purgatory. For God, who could give life to a piece of clay, has the same power to restore life to a dead man and renew his lifeless, decayed carcass as a glorious, spiritual, immortal body.\n\nAnother passage is 1 Cor. 3., where it is said that those who build stubble, hay, and the like upon the true foundation will lose their work, but “they themselves shall be saved, yet as through fire.” He would have this fire be the fire of Purgatory. As I have said before, these words allude to Zach. 13. 9.: “I will bring the third part through the fire, refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested.” This speaks of the Messiah's coming in power and glory: that is, of the day of Judgment and the burning of the present world, in which the Elect shall not be consumed but refined. They shall put away their erroneous doctrines and traditions, having them, as it were, singed off, and afterward call upon the name of the true God. Likewise, the Apostle says that those who, holding to this foundation, Jesus is the Christ, build upon it other doctrines that are erroneous will not be consumed in the fire that renews the world. They shall pass through it to salvation, but only upon recognizing and relinquishing their former errors. The builders are the pastors; the foundation, that Jesus is the Christ; the stubble and hay, false conclusions drawn from it through ignorance or frailty; the gold, silver, and precious stones, their true doctrines; and their refining or purging, the relinquishing of their errors. None of this offers the least grounds for burning incorporeal—that is, incapable-of-suffering—souls.\n\nA third passage is the previously mentioned 1 Cor. 15., concerning baptism for the dead. From it he concludes, first, that prayers for the dead are not useless; and from that, that there is a fire of Purgatory. But neither conclusion follows rightly. Among many interpretations of baptism, the one he approves first is that baptism means, metaphorically, a baptism of penance, and that people are baptized in this sense when they fast, pray, and give alms. Thus baptism for the dead and prayer for the dead become the same thing. But this metaphor has no example in Scripture or in any other use of language, and it conflicts with the harmony and purpose of Scripture. The word baptism is used (Mar. 10. 38. & Luk. 12. 59.) for being dipped in one's own blood, as Christ was on the Cross, and as most of the Apostles were in bearing witness to him. But it is hard to say that prayer, fasting, and alms have any likeness to dipping. The word is also used in Mat. 3. 11. (which may seem to lend some support to Purgatory) for a purging with fire. Yet clearly the fire and purging mentioned there are those of which the prophet Zachary speaks (chap. 13. v. 9.): “I will bring the third part through the fire, and refine them, etc.” So too St. Peter (1 Epist. 1. 7.): “That the trial of your faith, much more precious than gold that perishes though it be tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ”; and St. Paul (1 Cor. 3. 13.): “The fire shall test every man's work, of what sort it is.” But St. Peter and St. Paul speak of the fire at Christ's second appearing, and the prophet Zachary of the day of Judgment. This passage of St. Matthew may therefore be interpreted in the same way; and then there is no need for the fire of Purgatory.\n\nAnother interpretation of baptism for the dead is the one I mentioned earlier, which he ranks second in probability; from this too he infers the usefulness of prayer for the dead. For if after the Resurrection those who have not heard of Christ, or have not believed in him, may be received into Christ's Kingdom, it is not in vain that their friends should pray for them after their death, until they rise. But even granting that God, at the prayers of the faithful, may convert to himself some who have not heard Christ preached and consequently cannot have rejected Christ, and granting that human charity in this matter cannot be blamed, it proves nothing about Purgatory. To rise from death to life is one thing; to rise from Purgatory to life is another, a rising from life to life, from a life of torment to a life of joy.\n\nA fourth passage is Mat. 5. 25.: “Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are on the way with him, lest the adversary deliver you to the officer and you be cast into prison. Truly I say to you, you shall by no means come out until you have paid the last farthing.” In this allegory the offender is the sinner; both the adversary and the judge are God; the way is this life; the prison is the grave; and the officer is death. From there the sinner shall not rise to eternal life but to a second death, until he has paid the last farthing, or Christ pays it for him through his Passion, which is a full ransom for every sort of sin, lesser sins as much as greater crimes, both made equally pardonable by Christ's Passion.\n\nThe fifth passage is Matth. 5. 22.: “Whoever is angry with his brother without cause shall be liable to judgment. Whoever says to his brother, RACHA, shall be liable to the council. But whoever says, You fool, shall be liable to hell fire.” From these words he infers three kinds of sin and three kinds of punishment; that only the last of these sins shall be punished by hell fire; and consequently that after this life lesser sins are punished in Purgatory. But no interpretation yet given of these words lends the least support to that inference. Will there be distinct courts of justice after this life, as there were among the Jews in our Savior's time, to hear and decide different sorts of crime—the judges and the council? Will not all judgment belong to Christ and his Apostles? We must therefore read this text not in isolation but alongside what precedes and follows it. In this chapter our Savior interprets the Law of Moses, which the Jews thought they had fulfilled if they did not break its grammatical wording, however much they violated the lawgiver's meaning. Thus they supposed that the Sixth Commandment was broken only by killing a man, and the Seventh only by sleeping with a woman who was not one's wife. Our Savior tells them that a man's inward anger against his brother, if without just cause, is homicide. You have heard, he says, the Law of Moses: “You shall not kill,” and “Whoever kills shall be condemned before the judges,” or before the Session of the Seventy. But I say to you, to be angry with one's brother without cause, or call him Racha or Fool, is homicide, and shall be punished with hell fire on the day of Judgment by the Session of Christ and his Apostles. These words were not used to distinguish different crimes, courts, and punishments. Rather, they rebuke the distinction the Jews drew between one sin and another, not from any difference in the will to obey God, but from the differences between their temporal courts of justice. They show that a person who wills to hurt his brother, even if the result goes no further than abuse or produces no outward result at all, shall be cast into hell fire by the judges and the Session, which on the day of Judgment shall be the same court, not different ones. With this considered, I cannot imagine what in this text could support Purgatory.\n\nThe sixth passage is Luke 16. 9.: “Make friends for yourselves by the unrighteous mammon, so that when you fail they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.” He cites this to prove the invocation of departed saints. But its meaning is plain: we should use our riches to make friends of the poor, and so obtain their prayers while they live. “He who gives to the poor lends to the Lord.” The seventh is Luke 23. 42.: “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” Therefore, he says, sins are remitted after this life. But the conclusion does not follow. Our Savior forgave the man then; and when he comes again in glory, he will remember to raise him again to eternal life.\n\nThe eighth is Acts 2. 24., where St. Peter says of Christ “that God raised him up and loosed the pains of death, because it was impossible for him to be held by it.” He interprets this as Christ's descent into Purgatory to release some souls there from their torments. Yet plainly it was Christ who was released, Christ who could not be held by death or the grave, not the souls in Purgatory. And if we pay due attention to what Beza says in his notes on this passage, everyone will see that in place of pains it should read bonds; then there is no further reason to look for Purgatory in this text.\n\nCHAPTER XLV. OF DEMONOLOGY, AND OTHER REMNANTS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 1\n\nOF DEMONOLOGY, AND OTHER REMNANTS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES\n\nThe impression made upon the organs of sight by luminous bodies, whether along one direct line, along many lines reflected from opaque bodies, or refracted as they pass through transparent ones, produces in living creatures to whom God has given such organs an image of the object from which the impression comes. This image is called sight; and it seems not merely an image but the body itself outside us. In the same way, when someone presses his eye violently, a light appears before him outside, visible to no one else, because nothing of the kind is actually outside him. It is only a motion in the inner organs, pressing outward against resistance, that makes him think so. The motion caused by this pressure, continuing after the object that caused it is removed, is what we call imagination and memory, or, during sleep and sometimes when sickness or violence gravely disturbs the organs, a dream. I have already spoken briefly of these matters in the second and third Chapters.\n\nThe ancient claimants to natural knowledge never discovered this nature of sight; still less did those who gave no thought to matters so remote from immediate use as such knowledge is. It was therefore hard for people to conceive of the images of fancy and sense as anything other than things actually existing outside us. Some, because these images vanish without our knowing how or where, hold them to be altogether incorporeal, that is, immaterial: forms without matter, color and figure without any colored or figured body. They say these forms can put on airy bodies like garments whenever they choose to become visible to our bodily eyes. Others say they are bodies and living creatures, but made of air or other finer, ethereal matter, which they condense when they wish to be seen. Both parties, however, agree in giving them the common name DEMONS. It is as though the dead of whom people dreamed inhabited the air, heaven, or hell, rather than their own brains; as though they were ghosts rather than phantasms. They might as reasonably claim to see their own ghost in a mirror, or the ghosts of the stars in a river; or call the ordinary appearance of the sun, about a foot across, the demon or ghost of that great sun which lights the whole visible world. Thus people came to fear these beings as possessing unknown and therefore unlimited powers to help or harm them. This in turn enabled the rulers of heathen Common-wealths to regulate that fear by establishing DEMONOLOGY—in which poets, as chief priests of heathen religion, were especially employed or honored—as necessary to public peace and the obedience of subjects on which peace depends. They made some demons good and others evil: the former a spur to obedience, the latter reins to restrain violations of the laws.\n\nWhat kinds of things were called demons can be seen partly in the genealogy of their gods written by Hesiod, one of the oldest Greek poets, and partly in other histories, a few of which I have already noted in the 12. Chapter of this discourse.\n\nThrough colonies and conquest the Greeks carried their language and writings into Asia, Egypt, and Italy, and necessarily with them their demonology, or, as St. Paul calls it, “their doctrines of devils.” From there the contagion spread also to Jews in Judaea, Alexandria, and other lands where they had dispersed. Unlike the Greeks, however, the Jews applied the name demon only to evil spirits, not to good and evil alike. Good demons they called the Spirit of God, and regarded those into whose bodies they entered as prophets. In short, every remarkable quality, if good, they ascribed to the Spirit of God; if evil, to some demon, a kakodaimen, an evil demon or devil. Thus they called those we call mad or lunatic, or those subject to epilepsy, demoniacs, or people possessed by the devil. They said the same of anyone whose words they thought absurd because they could not understand them. They would say, too, that a notoriously unclean person had an unclean spirit; that a mute man had a mute devil; and that John the Baptist (Math. 11. 18.) had a devil because his fasting was extraordinary. Of our Savior, because he said that whoever kept his words would not see death In Aeternum (John 8. 52.), they said, “Now we know you have a devil; Abraham is dead, and the prophets are dead.” Again, when he said (John 7. 20.) “They are trying to kill me,” the people answered, “You have a devil; who is trying to kill you?” Plainly the Jews shared the same opinion about phantasms: that they were not phantasms, images of the brain, but real things independent of the fancy.\n\nIf this doctrine is false, someone may ask, why did our Savior not contradict it and teach the opposite? Indeed, why did he so often speak in ways that seem to confirm it? I answer, first, that when Christ says, “A spirit has not flesh and bone,” though he shows that spirits exist, he does not deny that they are bodies. When St. Paul says, “We shall rise spiritual bodies,” he acknowledges the existence of spirits, but of spirits that are bodily; this is not hard to understand. Air and many other things are bodies, though not flesh and bone or any other coarse body visible to the eye. But when our Savior speaks to the devil and commands him to leave a man, is this not improper language if by devil he means a disease such as frenzy or lunacy, or a corporeal spirit? Can diseases hear? And could a corporeal spirit inhabit a body of flesh and bone already full of vital and animal spirits? Must there not, then, be spirits that have no bodies and yet are more than mere imaginings? To the first question I answer that our Savior's address to the madness or lunacy he cures is no more improper than his rebuke to a fever, or to wind and sea; these do not hear either. Nor is it more improper than God's commands to light, the firmament, the sun, and the stars to come into being, since they could not hear before they existed. These expressions are not improper, for they signify the power of God's Word. It is likewise proper to command madness or lunacy to leave a person's body under the name of devils, as they were commonly understood at the time. To the second question, concerning their incorporeal nature, I have not yet found any passage of Scripture suggesting that anyone was ever possessed by a corporeal spirit other than his own, by which his body is naturally moved.\n\nImmediately after the Holy Ghost descended upon our Savior in the form of a dove, St. Matthew (Chapt. 4. 1.) says that he was “led by the Spirit into the wilderness”; and Luke (Luke 4. 1.) relates the same event in these words: “Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness.” Evidently Spirit here means the Holy Ghost. This cannot be interpreted as possession, for Christ and the Holy Ghost are one and the same substance; one substance or body cannot be possessed by another when they are the same. And when the verses that follow say that he was “taken by the devil into the Holy City and set on a pinnacle of the Temple,” must we conclude that the devil possessed him or carried him there by force? Again, he was “carried from there by the devil to an exceedingly high mountain, from which the devil showed him all the Kingdoms of the world.” We must not believe that he was possessed or forced by the devil, or that any mountain is high enough, in the literal sense, to show him even an entire hemisphere. What else can this passage mean, then, but that he went into the wilderness of his own accord, and that his being carried back and forth from the wilderness to the city and from there to a mountain was a vision? St. Luke's phrasing agrees with this: Jesus was led into the wilderness not by but in the Spirit; yet Luke speaks of his being taken to the mountain and to the pinnacle of the Temple as St. Matthew does. Such language suits a vision.\n\nAgain, where St. Luke says of Judas Iscariot that “Satan entered into him,” and that he then went and conferred with the chief priests and captains on how to betray Christ to them, the entry of Satan—that is, the Enemy—may be understood to mean Judas's hostile and treacherous intention to sell his Lord and Master. For just as Scripture frequently uses Holy Ghost to mean the graces and good inclinations given by the Holy Ghost, so the entry of Satan may mean the wicked thoughts and designs of Christ's adversaries and his disciples' adversaries. It is hard to say the devil entered Judas before he formed any hostile design; and it is pointless to say that Judas first became Christ's enemy in his heart and that the devil entered him afterward. The entry of Satan and his wicked purpose were therefore one and the same thing.\n\nBut if there are no immaterial spirits, and no corporeal spirit possesses human bodies, one may again ask why our Savior and his Apostles did not teach the people this in words so clear as to leave no doubt. Such questions are more curious than necessary to a Christian's salvation. We might equally ask why Christ, who could have given everyone faith, piety, and every moral virtue, gave them only to some; why he left the search for natural causes and sciences to human reason and industry instead of revealing them supernaturally to all people, or to anyone; and many questions of the same kind. Probable and pious reasons may nonetheless be offered. When God brought the Israelites into the Promised Land, he did not secure them by subduing all the surrounding nations, but left many there like thorns in their sides, to rouse their piety and industry from time to time. Likewise our Savior, in guiding us toward his heavenly Kingdom, did not remove every difficulty of natural inquiry, but left such difficulties to exercise our industry and reason. The sole purpose of his preaching was to show us this plain and direct road to salvation: belief “that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himself for our sins, and at his return to reign in glory over his Elect and save them from their enemies forever.” The belief in possession by spirits or phantasms does not block that road, though for some it offers an occasion to leave it and follow their own inventions. If we demand that Scripture answer every question that might trouble us as we perform God's commands, we might as well complain that Moses did not record the time when such spirits were created, along with the creation of earth, sea, people, and beasts. In conclusion, I find in Scripture that there are angels and spirits, good and evil; but not that they are incorporeal, as are the apparitions people see in darkness, dreams, or visions, which the Latins call spectra and took for demons. I find too that there are corporeal spirits, though subtle and invisible; but not that they possess or inhabit anyone's body. Such, moreover, shall be the bodies of the saints: spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.\n\nNevertheless, the contrary doctrine, that there are incorporeal spirits, has prevailed so strongly in the Church that exorcism—the expulsion of devils by conjuration—has been built upon it, and, though practiced rarely and feebly, has not yet been wholly abandoned. That there were many demoniacs and few mad people or sufferers from other unusual diseases in the early Church, whereas today we hear of and see many mad people and few demoniacs, arises not from a change in nature but from a change of names. Why the Apostles and, for a time after them, the pastors of the Church cured these unusual diseases when pastors are not now seen to do so is another question. So is why every true believer now lacks the power to do all that the faithful then did: as we read (Mark 16. 17.), “In Christ's name to cast out devils, speak with new tongues, take up serpents, drink deadly poison without harm, and cure the sick by laying hands upon them,” all with no words other than “in the name of Jesus.” It is probable that these extraordinary gifts were given to the Church only for as long as people trusted wholly in Christ and sought their happiness only in his coming Kingdom. When they sought authority and riches instead, relying upon their own subtlety for a kingdom of this world, those supernatural gifts of God were taken from them again.\n\nAnother remnant of paganism is the worship of images. It was established neither by Moses in the Old Testament nor by Christ in the New. Nor was it newly introduced from the Gentiles; it remained among them after they had taken Christ's name. Before our Savior preached, the Gentiles generally worshipped as gods the appearances left in the brain by external bodies impressing themselves upon the organs of sense. These appearances are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, or conceptions, since they represent the external bodies that cause them but possess no more reality of their own than the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. This is why St. Paul says, “We know that an idol is nothing.” He did not mean that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing. He meant that the thing honored or feared in that image and held to be a god was a mere fabrication, with no place, dwelling, motion, or existence except in the motions of the brain. To worship these with divine honor is what Scripture calls idolatry and rebellion against God. For God was King of the Jews, and his lieutenant was first Moses and afterward the High Priest. If the people had been allowed to worship and pray to images—the representations of their own fancies—they would have depended no longer on the true God, to whom nothing can be likened, or on his chief ministers, Moses and the High Priests. Each would have governed himself according to his own appetite, utterly overthrowing the Common-wealth and bringing destruction on themselves for lack of union. God's first Law, therefore, was “not to take for gods ALIENOS DEOS, the gods of other nations, but only the true God, who consented to speak with Moses and through him give them laws and directions for their peace and their deliverance from their enemies.” The second was “not to make for themselves any image of their own invention to worship.” For a king is equally deposed when his subjects submit to another king, whether that king is set up by a neighboring nation or by the subjects themselves.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 2\n\nThe passages of Scripture alleged to countenance setting up images to worship them, or setting them up at all where God is worshipped, are, first, two examples: the cherubim above God's Ark and the bronze serpent; second, certain texts commanding us to worship creatures because of their relation to God, as when we are told to worship his footstool; and, lastly, other texts authorizing religious honor to holy things. But before examining whether these passages prove what is claimed, I must explain what is meant by worship, and what by images and idols.\n\nI have already shown in the 20 Chapter of this discourse that to honor is to value a person's power highly, and that we measure this value by comparing the person with others. But since nothing can be compared with God in power, to value him at less than infinity is not to honor but to dishonor him. Honor is thus, by its very nature, secret and inward, residing in the heart. Yet people's inward thoughts show themselves outwardly in words and actions; the signs of our honoring someone are called WORSHIP, in Latin CULTUS. Therefore to pray to someone, swear by him, obey him, and serve him diligently and attentively—in short, all words and actions that signify fear of offending or desire to please—constitute worship, whether sincere or feigned. And because they appear to signify honor, they too are commonly called honor.\n\nThe worship we offer those whom we regard as merely human, such as kings and people in authority, is civil worship; the worship we offer whatever we believe to be God is divine worship, whatever words, ceremonies, gestures, or other actions it may involve. To prostrate oneself before a king, if one regards him as only a man, is merely civil worship; someone who only removes his hat in a church because he thinks it God's house worships with divine worship. Those who seek the difference between divine and civil worship not in the worshipper's intention but in the words douleia and latreia deceive themselves. For there are two kinds of servants. The first are wholly under their masters' power, as prisoners of war and their descendants are: their bodies do not belong to themselves, their lives depend on their masters' will and may be forfeited for the least disobedience, and they are bought and sold like beasts. These were called Douloi, properly meaning slaves, and their service Douleia. The others serve voluntarily, for wages or in hope of some benefit from their masters, and are called Thetes, or domestic servants; their masters have no right to their service beyond the Covenants made between them. Both kinds of servants have this in common: someone else assigns their labor, whether they are slaves or voluntary servants. Latris is the general name for both, meaning one who works for another, slave or voluntary servant alike. Latreia therefore means service in general; Douleia means only the service of bondmen and the condition of slavery. Scripture uses both words interchangeably for our service to God: Douleia because we are God's slaves, Latreia because we serve him. All kinds of service include not just obedience but worship too—that is, actions, gestures, and words signifying honor.\n\nAn IMAGE, in the strictest sense of the word, is the likeness of something visible. In this sense only the fantastic forms, apparitions, or seeming appearances of visible bodies to the eye are images: for example, the appearance of a person or other thing in water by reflection or refraction, or the appearance of the sun or stars seen directly through the air. Nothing real in the things seen, or in the place where they seem to be, corresponds to these appearances; nor are their size and shape the same as those of the object. They change with variations in the organs of sight or with the use of lenses, and often appear in our imagination and dreams when the object is absent; they may take on other colors and shapes, being dependent entirely upon the fancy. These are the images originally and most properly called ideas and IDOLS, words derived from the Greeks, for whom Eido means to see. They are also called PHANTASMS, meaning apparitions in the same language. It is from these images that one faculty of human nature is called imagination. Clearly, then, no image can be made of anything invisible.\n\nIt is also evident that there can be no image of anything infinite. All the images and phantasms made by the impression of visible things have a figure; but a figure is a quantity bounded on every side. Therefore there can be no image of God, of the human soul, or of spirits, but only of visible bodies—that is, bodies having light of their own or illuminated by such bodies.\n\nA person may also imagine shapes he has never seen, combining parts of different creatures to make a figure, as poets devise their centaurs, chimeras, and other monsters no one has seen. He can then give these shapes material form, making them in wood, clay, or metal. They too are called images, not because they resemble anything corporeal, but because they resemble certain imagined inhabitants of their maker's brain. Yet there is a likeness between these idols as they first exist in the brain and as they are painted, carved, molded, or cast in matter. In virtue of that likeness the material body fashioned by art may be called the image of the fantastic idol fashioned by nature.\n\nIn a broader sense, image includes any representation of one thing by another. An earthly Sovereign may thus be called the image of God, and a subordinate magistrate the image of an earthly Sovereign. Often in Gentile idolatry little attention was paid to whether a material idol resembled the idol in the worshippers' fancy, yet it was still called its image. An uncut stone, for instance, has been set up as Neptune; many other forms bore little likeness to the shapes people imagined for their gods. Today we see many images of the Virgin Mary and other saints that differ from one another and correspond to no single person's fancy. Yet they serve the purpose for which they were erected: merely to represent by name the persons mentioned in the story, to whom each viewer attaches a mental image of his own making, or none at all. An image in the broadest sense, then, is either a likeness or a representation of something visible, or, as is usually the case, both together.\n\nBut in Scripture the term idol extends further still, to signify the sun or a star or any other creature, visible or invisible, when it is worshipped as a god.\n\nHaving explained worship and images, I shall now consider them together and examine the IDOLATRY forbidden in the Second Commandment and elsewhere in Scripture.\n\nTo worship an image is voluntarily to perform outward acts signifying honor either to the material of the image—wood, stone, metal, or some other visible creature—or to the phantasm in the brain for which the material has been formed into a likeness or representation; or to both together, taken as a single living body composed of material and phantasm as of body and soul.\n\nTo uncover one's head before a person of power and authority, before a prince's throne, or in some other place designated by him for that purpose in his absence is to offer that person or prince civil worship. It signifies honor to the person, not to the seat or place, and is no idolatry. But if the person doing this supposed the prince's soul to be inside the seat, or addressed a petition to the seat, that would be divine worship and idolatry.\n\nTo petition a king for what he is able to do for us, even if we prostrate ourselves before him, is merely civil worship, for we acknowledge in him no power beyond the human. But voluntarily to petition him for fair weather, or for anything else only God can provide, is divine worship and idolatry. On the other hand, if a king compels someone to do so by the threat of death or another severe bodily punishment, it is not idolatry. Worship that the Sovereign commands for himself under the terror of his laws does not signify that the person who obeys inwardly honors him as a god, but that the person desires to escape death or a wretched life. What does not signify inward honor is no worship and therefore no idolatry. Nor can it be said that the person who complies gives scandal or puts a stumbling block before his brother. However wise or learned that person may be, others cannot infer from such an act that he approves of it, only that he acts from fear, and that the act is not his own but the Sovereign's.\n\nTo worship God in a particular place, or while facing an image or a particular place, is not to worship or honor that place or image. It is to acknowledge it as holy—that is, to acknowledge that the image or place has been set apart from common use, for that is what holy means. It implies no new quality in the place or image, only a new relation through its appropriation to God, and thus is no idolatry. No more was it idolatry to worship God before the bronze serpent; for Jews away from their country to face the Temple in Jerusalem when they prayed; or for Moses to remove his shoes before the burning bush on the ground belonging to Mount Sinai, where God chose to appear and give his Laws to the people of Israel. That ground was holy not by any inherent sanctity but because it was set apart for God's use. Nor is it idolatry for Christians to worship in churches solemnly dedicated to God for that purpose by the authority of the king or another true representative of the Church. But to worship God as animating or inhabiting such an image or place—that is, to worship an infinite substance as dwelling in a finite place—is idolatry. Such finite gods are only idols of the brain, nothing real, and Scripture commonly calls them Vanity, Lies, and Nothing. It is also idolatry to worship God not as animating or present in a place or image, but for the sake of being reminded of him or of some of his works, when the place or image has been dedicated or set up by private authority rather than by those who are our Sovereign Pastors. For the Commandment is, “You shall not make for yourself any graven image.” God commanded Moses to set up the bronze serpent; Moses did not make it for himself, so it did not violate the Commandment. But Aaron and the people made the golden calf without authority from God, and that was idolatry: not only because they held it to be God, but because they made it for religious use without warrant either from God their Sovereign or from Moses his lieutenant.\n\nThe Gentiles worshipped Jupiter and others as gods, though perhaps they had once been living people who had done great and glorious deeds; and they worshipped various men and women as children of God, supposing them to have been begotten by an immortal deity and a mortal person. This was idolatry, for they made these figures into gods for themselves without authority from God, either in his eternal Law of Reason or in his positive, revealed Will. But although our Savior was a man whom we also believe to be immortal God and the Son of God, that belief is no idolatry: it rests not upon our own fancy or judgment, but upon the Word of God revealed in Scripture. As for the adoration of the Eucharist: if Christ's words “This is my Body” mean that he himself and the apparent bread in his hand are the same, and not only that, but that every apparent morsel of bread consecrated by priests ever since, or to be consecrated hereafter, is one of so many bodies of Christ that are nevertheless all one body, then such adoration is no idolatry, for our Savior authorizes it. But if that text does not mean this—and no other can be cited for it—then, being worship instituted by human beings, it is idolatry. It is not enough to say that God can transubstantiate bread into Christ's body. The Gentiles too held God to be omnipotent, and on that ground might just as readily excuse their idolatry by claiming, as others do, the transubstantiation of their wood and stone into God Almighty.\n\nThose who claim that divine inspiration consists in the supernatural entry of the Holy Ghost into a person, rather than the acquisition of God's grace through doctrine and study, seem to me caught in a very dangerous dilemma. If they do not worship those they believe inspired in this way, they fall into impiety by failing to adore God's supernatural presence. But if they worship them, they commit idolatry, for the Apostles would never allow themselves to be worshipped so. The safest course is therefore to believe that the dove's descent upon the Apostles, Christ's breathing upon them when he gave them the Holy Ghost, and the conferral of the Holy Ghost by laying on of hands are signs God has chosen to use, or appointed others to use, of his promise to assist these persons in studying to preach his Kingdom and in conducting themselves so that they edify rather than scandalize others.\n\nBesides the idolatrous worship of images there is also a scandalous worship of them: this too is a sin, though not idolatry. Idolatry is worship by signs of inward and genuine honor, whereas scandalous worship merely appears to be worship. It may even accompany heartfelt inward loathing both of the image and of the fantastic demon or idol to which it is dedicated, arising solely from fear of death or some other grievous punishment. Yet it remains a sin in those whose actions others look to as guiding lights, for people who follow their example cannot help stumbling and falling in matters of religion. The example of those whom we do not regard, by contrast, has no effect on us; it leaves us to our own diligence and caution, and so does not cause our fall.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 3\n\nIf, then, a pastor lawfully called to teach and direct others, or anyone else held in high esteem for his knowledge, outwardly honors an idol out of fear, he scandalizes his brother by appearing to approve of idolatry, unless he makes his fear and unwillingness as plain as the act of worship. For his brother reasons from the conduct of his teacher, or of someone whose knowledge he greatly esteems, that the act is lawful in itself. This scandal is a sin, and a scandal given. But if someone who is neither a pastor nor a person eminent for knowledge of Christian doctrine does the same, and another follows his example, no scandal has been given: the other had no reason to follow it, but takes up a pretense of scandal as an excuse before men. For an unlearned man under the power of an idolatrous king or state, if commanded on pain of death to worship before an idol, does well if he detests the idol in his heart, though he would do better if he had the courage to die rather than worship it. But if a pastor, who as Christ's messenger has undertaken to teach Christ's doctrine to all nations, should do the same, it would be not only a sinful scandal to the consciences of other Christians but a faithless abandonment of his charge.\n\nThe sum of what I have said so far about the worship of images is this: whoever worships in an image, or any creature, either its matter, or a fancy of his own that he thinks inhabits it, or both together; or believes such things hear his prayers or see his devotions without ears or eyes, commits idolatry. Whoever feigns such worship for fear of punishment commits a sin if his example carries weight among his brethren. But whoever worships the Creator of the world before an image, or in a place, that he has not fashioned or chosen for himself but has taken from the command of God's Word—as the Jews did when they worshipped God before the cherubim, before the bronze serpent for a time, and in or toward the Temple of Jerusalem, also for a time—commits no idolatry.\n\nAs for the worship of saints, images, relics, and other things practiced today in the Church of Rome, I say that it is not sanctioned by the Word of God, nor was it introduced into the Church of Rome by the doctrine taught there. In part it was left there at the first conversion of the Gentiles, and afterward it was supported, confirmed, and increased by the bishops of Rome.\n\nAs for the proofs alleged from Scripture, namely the examples of images that God commanded to be set up: they were not set up for the people, or anyone else, to worship, but for them to worship God himself before them, as before the cherubim above the Ark and the bronze serpent. For we do not read that the priest or anyone else worshipped the cherubim. On the contrary, we read (2 Kings 18.4.) that Hezekiah broke to pieces the bronze serpent Moses had set up, because the people burned incense to it. Nor are those examples given for our imitation, so that we too should set up images under the pretense of worshipping God before them. The words of the second Commandment, “You shall not make for yourself any graven image, etc.,” distinguish images God commanded to be set up from those we set up for ourselves. Therefore the inference from the cherubim or bronze serpent to images devised by men, and from worship commanded by God to worship devised at men's will, is unsound. We should consider, too, that just as Hezekiah broke the bronze serpent to pieces because the Jews worshipped it, so that they would do so no longer, Christian Sovereigns also ought to tear down images their subjects have been accustomed to worship, to remove the occasion for such idolatry. For today, where images are worshipped, the ignorant people truly believe there is divine power in them; their pastors tell them that some images have spoken and bled and worked miracles. The people understand these acts to be done by the saint, whom they suppose to be either the image itself or present in it. When the Israelites worshipped the calf, they thought they worshipped the God who brought them out of Egypt. Yet it was idolatry, because they thought the calf either was that God or contained him within it. And though someone may think it impossible for people to be so foolish as to believe an image is God or a saint, or to worship it as such, Scripture plainly shows otherwise: when the golden calf was made, the people said (Exod. 32. 2.), “These are your gods, O Israel”; and the images of Laban (Gen. 31.30.) are called his gods. Daily experience also shows us, among all sorts of people, that those who devote themselves only to food and ease would rather believe any absurdity than take the trouble to examine it. They hold their faith as though it were an inalienable inheritance, except where an express new law changes it.\n\nBut from certain other passages they infer that it is lawful to paint angels, and even God himself: from God's walking in the Garden, Jacob's seeing God at the top of the ladder, and other visions and dreams. Yet visions and dreams, whether natural or supernatural, are only phantasms. Whoever paints an image of one of them makes not an image of God but of his own phantasm: he makes an idol. I do not say it is a sin to draw a picture from the imagination; but once it is drawn, to regard it as a representation of God is contrary to the second Commandment, and can serve no purpose but worship. The same may be said of images of angels and the dead, except when they serve as memorials of friends or of people worthy of remembrance. Such use of an image is not worship of the image but civil honor paid to a person who was, not one who is. But when we pay honor to an image we make of a saint only because we believe he hears our prayers and is pleased by the honor we pay him, though he is dead and without sensation, we attribute to him more than human power; and that is idolatry.\n\nSince neither the Law of Moses nor the Gospel authorizes the religious worship of images or other representations of God that men set up for themselves, or the worship of the image of any creature in heaven, on earth, or beneath the earth; and since Christian kings, who are living representatives of God, must not be worshipped by their subjects through any act signifying a higher estimate of their power than mortal human nature can bear, we cannot imagine that the religious worship now practiced entered the Church through misunderstanding Scripture. It remains, then, that it survived there because the images themselves were not destroyed when the Gentiles who worshipped them were converted.\n\nThe reason was the excessive value and price placed on their craftsmanship. Their owners, though converted from worshipping them religiously as demons, kept them in their houses under the pretense of honoring Christ, the Virgin Mary, the apostles, and other pastors of the early Church. It was easy, simply by renaming them, to turn what had perhaps been an image of Venus and Cupid into one of the Virgin Mary and her Son our Savior, to make a Barnabas of Jupiter and a Paul of Mercury, and so forth. As worldly ambition gradually crept among the pastors, it led them both to try to please the newly converted Christians and to welcome this kind of honor for themselves after death, as others had already won it. Thus the worship of images of Christ and his apostles grew ever more idolatrous, except that some time after Constantine various emperors, bishops, and general councils recognized and opposed its unlawfulness—but too late, or too feebly.\n\nThe canonization of saints is another relic of Gentile religion. It comes neither from a misunderstanding of Scripture nor from a new invention of the Roman Church, but from a custom as old as the Common-wealth of Rome itself. The first ever canonized at Rome was Romulus, on the account of Julius Proculus, who swore before the Senate that he had spoken with Romulus after his death and had been assured by him that he lived in heaven, was called Quirinius there, and would favor the state of their new city. On this basis the Senate gave public testimony to his sanctity. Julius Caesar and later emperors received the same testimony: that is, they were canonized as saints, as the term is now defined; it is the same as the apotheosis practiced by the heathens.\n\nIt is also from the Roman heathens that the popes received the title and power of PONTIFEX MAXIMUS. In the ancient Common-wealth of Rome this was the title of the man who, under the Senate and people, held supreme authority to regulate all ceremonies and doctrines concerning their religion. When Augustus Caesar changed the state into a monarchy, he claimed for himself no more than this office and that of tribune of the people—that is to say, supreme power in both state and religion—and succeeding emperors held the same. But when Constantine lived, the first emperor to profess and authorize the Christian religion, it agreed with his profession that he should have religion regulated, under his authority, by the bishop of Rome. It does not appear, however, that those bishops so soon bore the title of pontiff. Rather, their successors seem to have taken it for themselves to lend authority to the power they exercised over the bishops of the Roman provinces. It was no privilege of St. Peter's, but a privilege of the city of Rome, which the emperors were always willing to sustain, that gave them such authority over other bishops. This is clear from the bishop of Constantinople's claim to equality with the bishop of Rome when the emperor made Constantinople the seat of the empire. At last the pope prevailed, though not without contention, and became the Pontifex Maximus, but only by right of the emperor, not beyond the bounds of the empire, nor anywhere after the emperor lost his power in Rome—even though it was the pope himself who took that power from him. From this we may observe in passing that there is no place for the pope's superiority over other bishops except in territories where he himself is the civil Sovereign, or where an emperor with civil Sovereign Power has expressly chosen the pope as chief pastor, under himself, of his Christian subjects.\n\nCarrying images about in procession is another relic of the religion of the Greeks and Romans. They too carried their idols from place to place in a kind of chariot devoted specifically to that use, which the Latins called Thensa and Vehiculum Deorum; the image was placed in a frame or shrine called Ferculum. What they called Pompa is what is now called a procession. Accordingly, among the divine honors the Senate granted Julius Caesar was this: at the procession at the Circaean games, he was to have Thensam & Ferculum, a sacred chariot and a shrine. That amounted to being carried about as a god, just as popes today are carried by Swiss guards beneath a canopy.\n\nThese processions also included burning torches and candles borne before images of the gods, among both Greeks and Romans. The Roman emperors later received the same honor: we read that when Caligula assumed the empire, he was carried from Misenum to Rome amid a throng of people, the roads lined with altars, animals for sacrifice, and burning torches. Caracalla was received into Alexandria with incense, scattered flowers, and Dadouchiais, that is, torches; for Dadochoi were the people who carried lighted torches in the processions of Greek gods. In time the devout but ignorant people often honored their bishops with similar pomp of wax candles, and continually honored images of our Savior and the saints with them in the church itself. Thus the use of wax candles arose and was also established by some ancient councils.\n\nThe heathens also had their Aqua Lustralis, that is, holy water. The Church of Rome imitates them in holy days as well. They had their Bacchanalia, and we have our corresponding wakes; they had their Saturnalia, and we our carnivals and the freedom granted to servants on Shrove Tuesday. They had their procession of Priapus, and we our fetching, raising, and dancing around Maypoles; and dancing is a kind of worship. They had the procession called Ambarvalia, and we our procession around the fields in Rogation Week. Nor do I think these are all the ceremonies left in the Church from the first conversion of the Gentiles. They are only those I can recall at present. If someone were to attend closely to what histories tell us about the religious rites of the Greeks and Romans, I have no doubt he would find many more of these old, empty bottles of Gentile religion, which the doctors of the Roman Church, through negligence or ambition, have refilled with the new wine of Christianity—a wine that in time will surely burst them.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 1\n\nOF DARKNESS FROM VAIN PHILOSOPHY AND FABULOUS TRADITIONS\n\nBy philosophy I mean “knowledge acquired by reasoning from the way a thing is generated to its properties, or from its properties to a possible way of generating it, in order to produce, as far as matter and human power allow, the effects human life requires.” Thus a geometer reasons from the construction of figures to discover many of their properties, and from those properties to discover new ways to construct them, in order to measure land and water and serve countless other purposes. So an astronomer studies the rising, setting, and movement of the sun and stars in different regions of the heavens, and discovers the causes of day and night and the seasons of the year, thereby keeping account of time. The same holds for other sciences.\n\nFrom this definition it is plain that the original knowledge called experience, in which prudence consists, is not to be counted a part of philosophy. Experience is not acquired by reasoning but belongs to brute beasts as well as man; it is only a memory of past sequences of events, in which the omission of the smallest circumstance can change the outcome and defeat even the most prudent expectation. Correct reasoning, by contrast, produces only general, eternal, immutable truth.\n\nNor should we give the name of philosophy to false conclusions: anyone who reasons correctly with words he understands can never conclude an error.\n\nNor Supernatural Revelation\n\nNor should we give it to what anyone knows by supernatural revelation, since that is not acquired by reasoning.\n\nNor should we give it to what is obtained by reasoning from the authority of books, since that is not reasoning from cause to effect or effect to cause; it is not knowledge but faith.\n\nBecause the faculty of reasoning follows upon the use of speech, some general truths must have been discovered through reasoning almost as long ago as language itself. The indigenous peoples of America have some sound moral maxims; they also have enough arithmetic to add and divide numbers that are not too large. Yet that does not make them philosophers. Just as small quantities of grain and grapes grew scattered through fields and woods before people knew their value, used them as food, or planted them separately in fields and vineyards—when they ate acorns and drank water—so there have been various true, general, and useful reflections from the beginning, growing naturally from human reason. At first, however, these were few. People lived by crude experience, without method: there was no sowing and cultivating knowledge separately from the weeds and wild growth of error and conjecture. The cause was their lack of leisure amid the work of securing life's necessities and defending themselves against their neighbors; until great Common-wealths arose, it could not be otherwise. Leisure is the mother of philosophy; the Common-wealth is the mother of peace and leisure. Philosophy was first studied where great, flourishing cities first appeared. The gymnosophists of India, the magi of Persia, and the priests of Chaldea and Egypt are reckoned the earliest philosophers, and their countries were the earliest kingdoms. Philosophy had not yet arisen among the Greeks and the other peoples of the West, whose Common-wealths—perhaps no larger than Lucca or Geneva—never had peace except when they feared each other equally, or leisure to observe anything but each other. At length, when war united many smaller Greek cities into fewer, larger ones, Seven Men from different parts of Greece began to win a reputation for wisdom: some through moral and political sayings, others through the astronomy and geometry learned from the Chaldeans and Egyptians. Yet we hear of no schools of philosophy at this point.\n\nAfter the Athenians had defeated the Persian armies and gained dominion of the sea and thus of all the islands and maritime cities of the Archipelago, in Asia as well as Europe, they grew wealthy. Those without employment at home or abroad had little to do except, as St. Luke says (Acts 17.21.), “tell and hear news,” or discuss philosophy publicly with the city's young people. Each master chose a place for the purpose: Plato, certain public walks called Academia after one Academus; Aristotle, the walk at the temple of Pan called Lycaeum; others, the Stoa, or covered walk where merchants' goods were landed; still others, other places. There they passed their leisure teaching or disputing their opinions; some spoke wherever they could gather the city's youth to listen. Carneades did the same at Rome while serving as ambassador, prompting Cato to advise the Senate to send him away quickly lest he corrupt the morals of the young men who delighted in hearing him say what they thought were fine things.\n\nHence the place where any of them taught and disputed was called Schola, which in their language means leisure; and their disputes were called Diatribae, or passing the time. Some philosophers also took the names of their sects from their schools: followers of Plato's doctrine were called Academics; followers of Aristotle, Peripatetics, after the walk where he taught; and Zeno's pupils, Stoics, after the Stoa. It is as though we named men after Moorfields, St. Paul's Church, and the Exchange because they often meet there to prattle and idle.\n\nNevertheless, this custom appealed to people so strongly that it spread in time throughout Europe and most of Africa, with schools publicly established and maintained for lectures and disputations in almost every Common-wealth.\n\nThere were schools among the Jews, too, in ancient times, both before and after our Savior; but these were schools of their Law. Although called synagogues, meaning congregations of the people, they were no different in nature from public schools, only in name, since every Sabbath the Law was read, expounded, and debated there. They existed not only in Jerusalem but in every Gentile city inhabited by Jews. There was such a school at Damascus, which Paul entered to persecute; there were others at Antioch, Iconium, and Thessalonica, which he entered to dispute. Such too was the synagogue of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and those of Asia: the school of Libertines and of Jews who were strangers in Jerusalem. Members of this school disputed with Saint Stephen.\n\nBut what benefit have these schools brought? What science has been acquired today through their readings and disputes? For geometry, the mother of all natural science, we owe nothing to the schools. Plato, the best philosopher among the Greeks, forbade entry to his school to anyone without some prior knowledge of geometry. Many studied that science to humanity's great advantage; yet we hear nothing of their schools, and there was no sect of geometers, nor were they then called philosophers. The natural philosophy of the schools was a dream rather than a science, expressed in senseless, meaningless language. That cannot be avoided by those who would teach philosophy without first gaining substantial knowledge of geometry: nature works by motion, whose ways and degrees cannot be known without understanding the proportions and properties of lines and figures. Their moral philosophy is merely a description of their own Passions. For the rule of conduct without civil government is the Law of Nature, and within it, the civil law determines what is honorable or dishonorable, just or unjust, and, generally, good or evil. They instead make their own likes and dislikes the rules of good and bad. Amid such diversity of taste, nothing is generally agreed upon; everyone does whatever seems good in his own eyes, so far as he dares, to the ruin of the Common-wealth. Their logic, which ought to be a method of reasoning, consists only of snares laid with words and devices for perplexing those who try to question them. In short, there is nothing so absurd that some ancient philosopher has not upheld it, as Cicero—himself one of them—says. And I believe that scarcely anything in natural philosophy can be more absurd than what is now called Aristotle's Metaphysics; anything more hostile to government than much of what he says in his Politics; or anything more ignorant than a large part of his Ethics.\n\nThe Jewish school was originally a school of the Law of Moses, who commanded (Deut. 31.10.) that at the end of every seventh year, at the Feast of Tabernacles, it be read to all the people, so that they might hear and learn it. The reading of the Law every Sabbath, practiced after the Captivity, ought therefore to have had no purpose beyond acquainting the people with the commandments they were to obey and explaining to them the writings of the prophets. But our Savior's many rebukes show plainly that they corrupted the text of the Law with false commentaries and vain traditions. They understood the prophets so poorly that they acknowledged neither Christ nor the works he performed, of which the prophets had prophesied. Through lectures and disputes in their synagogues, then, they turned the doctrine of their Law into a fantastic sort of philosophy about the incomprehensible nature of God and spirits. They compounded it from the vain philosophy and theology of the Greeks, mixed with their own imaginings drawn from the darker passages of Scripture, those easiest to twist to their purpose, and from the fabulous traditions of their ancestors.\n\nWhat is now called a university is a union of many public schools in one town or city, incorporated under a single government. Its chief schools were established for the three professions: the Roman religion, Roman law, and medicine. Philosophy has a place there only as handmaid to the Roman religion; and since only Aristotle's authority is accepted there, its study is not properly philosophy, whose nature does not depend on authors, but Aristotelity. Geometry had no place there at all until very recently, since it serves nothing but uncompromising truth. Anyone who attained any proficiency in it through his own native ingenuity was commonly thought a magician and his art diabolical.\n\nNow, coming to the particular tenets of vain philosophy passed from the universities into the Church, partly from Aristotle and partly from blindness of understanding, I shall consider their principles first. There is a certain First Philosophy on which all other philosophy ought to depend. It consists chiefly in setting correct limits on the meanings of the most universal terms or names, limits that prevent ambiguity and equivocation in reasoning and are commonly called definitions. Such are the definitions of body, time, place, matter, form, essence, subject, substance, accident, power, act, finite, infinite, quantity, quality, motion, action, passion, and many other terms needed to explain our conceptions of the nature and generation of bodies. Explaining—that is, settling the meanings of—these and similar terms is commonly called metaphysics in the schools, because it is part of Aristotle's philosophy bearing that title. But his title has another meaning: it signifies “books written or placed after his natural philosophy.” The schools, however, take the title to mean books of supernatural philosophy, for the word metaphysics permits both meanings. Indeed, most of what is written there is so far beyond the possibility of comprehension, and so contrary to natural reason, that anyone who thinks it means anything must think it supernatural.\n\nFrom these metaphysics, mingled with Scripture to make school divinity, we are told there are certain essences in the world separated from bodies, called abstract essences and substantial forms. Interpreting this jargon requires more than ordinary attention here, and I ask pardon of those unused to this sort of discourse for addressing myself to those who are. The world—I do not mean merely the earth, whose lovers are called worldly men, but the universe, the entire mass of everything that exists—is corporeal: it is body, with the dimensions of magnitude, namely length, breadth, and depth. Every part of a body is likewise body and has the same dimensions; consequently every part of the universe is body, and what is not body is no part of the universe. Since the universe is all, what is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere. It does not follow that spirits are nothing: they have dimensions and are therefore truly bodies, although ordinary speech reserves that name for bodies that can be seen or touched, those with some degree of opacity. Yet people call spirits incorporeal, a more honorable name that may therefore be more piously attributed to God himself. In his case, we consider not which attribute best expresses his nature, which is incomprehensible, but which best expresses our desire to honor him.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 2\n\nTo understand the grounds on which they claim that abstract essences, or substantial forms, exist, we must consider what those words properly mean. Words serve to record our own thoughts and conceptions and reveal them to others. Some words name the things conceived: all kinds of bodies that act upon the senses and leave an impression in the imagination. Others name the imaginings themselves: the ideas, or mental images, we have of everything we see or remember. Others again name names, or different kinds of speech: universal, plural, singular, negation, true, false, syllogism, interrogation, promise, and Covenant name certain forms of speech. Still others show that one name follows from, or conflicts with, another. When someone says, “A man is a body,” he means that the name body necessarily follows from the name man, since they are different names for the same thing, man; their joining by the word is signifies this consequence. Just as we use the verb is, so the Latins use their verb est and the Greeks their esti, in all its forms. Whether all the other nations of the world have a corresponding word in their languages I cannot say, but I am certain they have no need of one. Placing two names in order could signify their connection, if that were the custom—for custom gives words their force—just as well as is, be, are, and similar words.\n\nIf there were a language without any verb answering to est, is, or be, those who spoke it would be no less capable of inference, conclusion, and every kind of reasoning than the Greeks and Latins. But what, then, would become of the terms entity, essence, essential, essentially, and many more derived from or dependent on that verb, in their most common uses? They are not names of things, but signs by which we indicate that we conceive one name or attribute to follow from another. When we say, “A man is a living body,” we do not mean that the man is one thing, the living body another, and the is, or being, a third. We mean that the man and the living body are the same thing, because “If he is a man, he is a living body” is a true consequence, signified by the word is. Therefore to be a body, to walk, to be speaking, to live, to see, and similar infinitives, as well as corporeality, walking, speaking, life, sight, and the like—which signify exactly the same things—are names of nothing, as I have explained more fully elsewhere.\n\nBut what purpose, someone may ask, does such subtlety serve in a work that professes to deal only with what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It serves to keep people from being deceived any longer by those who, through this doctrine of separated essences founded on Aristotle's vain philosophy, would frighten them out of obeying the laws of their country with empty names, just as people frighten birds from grain with an empty coat, a hat, and a crooked stick. On this foundation they say that when a man is dead and buried, his soul—that is, his life—can walk apart from his body and be seen at night among the graves. On the same foundation they say that the shape, color, and taste of a piece of bread are present where, according to them, no bread is present. On the same foundation they say that faith, wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes poured into a man, sometimes blown into him from heaven, as though virtuous people and their virtues could be separated. They make many other claims, too, that weaken subjects' dependence on their country's Sovereign Power. For who will strive to obey the laws if he expects obedience to be poured or blown into him? Who will not obey a priest who can make God rather than obey his Sovereign—or even God himself? And who, fearing ghosts, will fail to show great respect to people who can make the holy water that drives them away? Let this suffice as an example of the errors brought into the Church from Aristotle's entities and essences. Perhaps he knew his philosophy was false but wrote it because it accorded with and reinforced his people's religion, fearing Socrates' fate.\n\nOnce they have fallen into the error of separated essences, they are necessarily entangled in many further absurdities. Since they insist these forms are real, they must assign them a place. But they hold them incorporeal, without any quantitative dimensions, while everyone knows that place has dimensions and can be filled only by something corporeal. To preserve their credit they resort to a distinction: these forms are not anywhere circumscriptively, they say, but definitively. These terms are mere words, meaningless in this context, and pass only in Latin, which conceals their emptiness. Circumscribing a thing means nothing but determining or defining its place, so the two sides of the distinction mean the same. In particular, they affirm that a man's essence—which they call his soul—is entirely present in his little finger and entirely present in every other part of his body, however small, while the whole body has no more soul than any one of those parts. Can anyone believe God is served by such absurdities? Yet those who would believe in the existence of an incorporeal soul separated from the body must believe all this.\n\nWhen asked to explain how an incorporeal substance can feel pain and be tormented in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, they have no answer at all except that we cannot know how fire can burn souls.\n\nAgain, since motion is a change of place, and incorporeal substances cannot occupy a place, they have difficulty making it appear possible for a soul to travel without its body from here to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, or for the ghosts of men—and, I might add, of the clothes they appear in—to walk at night through churches, churchyards, and other burial places. I do not know what answer they can give unless they say that ghosts walk definitively rather than circumscriptively, or spiritually rather than temporally; for distinctions so extravagant can be applied to absolutely any difficulty.\n\nAs for eternity, they refuse to have it mean an endless succession of time. Otherwise they could not explain how God's will and his preordination of future things would not precede his foreknowledge of those same things, as an efficient cause precedes its effect or an agent its action; nor could they explain many other bold opinions of theirs about the incomprehensible nature of God. Instead, they teach that eternity is the present time standing still, a Nunc-stans, as the schools call it. Neither they nor anyone else understands this any more than they would understand a Hic-stans as infinite greatness of place.\n\nWhen people divide a body in thought by counting its parts, they also count the parts of the place it filled. If we make many parts, then, we must make many places for them, so no one can conceive more or fewer parts than there are places for them. Yet they would have us believe that by God's almighty power one body can occupy many places at the same time, and many bodies one place at the same time, as if it honored divine power to say that what exists does not exist, or that what has happened has not happened. These are only a small portion of the absurdities forced upon them by disputing philosophically about the divine and incomprehensible nature instead of admiring and adoring it. God's attributes cannot signify what he is; they ought to signify our desire to honor him with the best names we can devise. But those who venture to reason about his nature from these attributes of honor lose their understanding on the first attempt, and fall from one difficulty into another, endlessly and without number. They resemble a man unfamiliar with court ceremony who enters the presence of someone grander than anyone he is used to addressing. Stumbling as he enters, he drops his cloak to keep from falling; trying to retrieve it, he drops his hat; and one mishap after another betrays his bewilderment and awkwardness.\n\nAs for physics, the knowledge of subordinate and secondary causes of natural events, they offer no causes at all, only empty words. If you ask why some kinds of bodies naturally sink toward the earth and others naturally rise away from it, the schools will tell you, following Aristotle, that the sinking bodies are heavy, and that heaviness makes them descend. But if you ask what they mean by heaviness, they define it as an endeavor to move toward the earth's center. Thus the cause of sinking is an endeavor to be below—which amounts to saying that bodies sink or rise because they do. Or they will tell you that the earth's center is the place of rest and preservation for heavy things, and therefore they strive to reach it: as though stones and metals could desire, or could discern where they wanted to be as a person does; or loved rest, as a person does not; or as though a piece of glass were less safe in a window than falling into the street.\n\nIf we ask why the same body seems larger at one time than another without anything being added to it, they say it is condensed when it seems smaller and rarefied when it seems larger. What are condensation and rarefaction? Condensation, they say, is when the very same matter contains less quantity than before; rarefaction, when it contains more. As though matter could lack a determinate quantity, when quantity is nothing but the determination of matter—that is, body—by which we say one body exceeds or falls short of another by this much or that. Or as though a body were first made without any quantity whatsoever, and more or less quantity were added later according to the density desired.\n\nFor the cause of the human soul, they say, Creatur Infundendo, and Creando Infunditur: that is, “It is created by being poured in,” and “poured in by being created.”\n\nFor the cause of sense they offer an omnipresence of species, that is, appearances of objects. When these appear to the eye, there is sight; to the ear, hearing; to the palate, taste; to the nostril, smell; and to the rest of the body, touch.\n\nAs the cause of willing some particular act, called Volitio, they assign the faculty—that is, people's general capacity to will now one thing and now another—called Voluntas. Thus they make the power the cause of the act, as though one could explain people's good or evil acts by citing their ability to do them.\n\nAnd often they pass off their ignorance as the cause of natural events, merely disguising it in other words. They say fortune causes contingent things, meaning things whose cause they do not know. They attribute many effects to occult qualities, meaning qualities unknown to them and therefore, they suppose, to anyone else. They appeal to sympathy, antipathy, antiperistasis, specific qualities, and similar terms that signify neither the agent producing the effects nor the operation by which they are produced.\n\nIf metaphysics and physics of this kind are not vain philosophy, nothing ever was, and St. Paul had no need to warn us to avoid it.\n\nTheir moral and civil philosophy contains equally great or greater absurdities. If a man commits an injustice, that is, an act contrary to the law, they say God is the primary cause of the law and also the primary cause of that act and every other act, yet not at all a cause of the injustice, which is the act's failure to conform to the law. This is vain philosophy. One might as well say that one person makes both a straight line and a crooked one, while another makes the mismatch between them. Such is the philosophy of everyone who settles his conclusions before knowing his premises, professing to comprehend the incomprehensible, and turning attributes of honor into attributes of nature. This distinction was made to uphold the doctrine of free will: a human will not subject to the will of God.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 3\n\nAristotle and other pagan philosophers define good and evil by human appetite; and rightly enough, so long as we consider each person governed by his own law. For among people who have no law but their own appetites, there can be no general rule for good and evil actions. But in a Commonwealth this measure is false: not private appetites but the law, which is the will and appetite of the state, is the measure. Yet this doctrine is still practiced: people judge the goodness or wickedness of their own actions, of others’ actions, and of the actions of the Commonwealth itself, by their own passions. No one calls anything good or evil except what appears so in his own eyes, without regard to public laws—except monks and friars, who are bound by vow to the simple obedience to their superior to which every subject ought to consider himself bound, by the Law of Nature, to the civil Sovereign. This private measure of good is a doctrine not only vain but harmful to the public state.\n\nIt is also vain and false philosophy to say that the act of marriage is opposed to chastity or continence, and thereby to make marriage a moral vice, as those do who invoke chastity and continence as grounds for denying marriage to the clergy. For they admit that it is merely a church ordinance that requires those in holy orders who continually attend the altar and administer the Eucharist to abstain continually from women, under the name of perpetual chastity, continence, and purity. Thus they call the lawful enjoyment of wives a lack of chastity and continence, and make marriage a sin, or at least something so impure and unclean as to make a man unfit for the altar. If the law was made because relations with wives are incontinence and contrary to chastity, all marriage is vice. If it was made because such relations are too impure and unclean for a man consecrated to God, then still more should other natural, necessary, daily acts performed by everyone disqualify men from being priests, since they are more unclean.\n\nBut the hidden foundation of this prohibition of marriage to priests is unlikely to have rested so lightly on errors in moral philosophy, or on the preference for single life over matrimony. That preference came from the wisdom of St. Paul, who saw how inconvenient it would be for preachers of the Gospel, forced in those days of persecution to flee from country to country, to be burdened with the care of wife and children. Rather, the foundation lay in the design of later popes and priests to make themselves the clergy—that is, the sole heirs of the Kingdom of God in this world. For this it was necessary to deny them marriage, because our Savior says that at the coming of his Kingdom the children of God shall “neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the angels in heaven”; that is, spiritual. Having taken the name spiritual upon themselves, they could not, without inconsistency, have allowed themselves wives when there was no need.\n\nFrom Aristotle’s civil philosophy they learned to call every form of Commonwealth except popular government—such as Athens then had—a tyranny. They called all kings tyrants, and called the aristocracy of the thirty governors established at Athens by the Lacedaemonians who conquered it the thirty tyrants; they also called the people’s condition under democracy liberty. Originally, tyrant meant simply monarch. But when that form of government was later abolished in most of Greece, the name came to signify not only what it had signified before, but also the hatred popular states bore it. Similarly, the name king became hateful after the kings were deposed in Rome: it is natural for people to suppose that an epithet used in contempt against a great enemy must signify some great fault. And when these same people grow discontented with those who administer a democracy or aristocracy, they have no trouble finding disgraceful names to express their anger: they readily call one anarchy, the other oligarchy, or the tyranny of a few. What offends the people is simply that they are governed not as each of them personally wishes, but as the public representative, whether one man or an assembly, thinks fit—that is, by arbitrary government. For this they give their superiors evil names, never realizing (perhaps until shortly after a civil war) that without such arbitrary government war must be perpetual, and that men and arms, not words and promises, give the laws their force and power.\n\nAnother error in Aristotle’s Politics, therefore, is that in a well-ordered Commonwealth the laws, not men, should govern. What person of natural sense, even one unable to read or write, does not find himself governed by those he fears and believes can kill or hurt him if he disobeys? Who believes the law can hurt him—that is, words and paper without the hands and swords of men? This is among the harmful errors: whenever people dislike their governors, it leads them to side with those who call them tyrants and to think it lawful to wage war against them. Yet the clergy often encourage these errors from the pulpit.\n\nAnother error in their civil philosophy, learned neither from Aristotle nor Cicero nor any other pagan, extends the power of the law—which regulates actions only—to people’s very thoughts and consciences, through examination and inquisition into what they believe, even when their words and actions conform to the law. Thus people are either punished for answering truthfully about their thoughts or compelled, for fear of punishment, to answer falsely. A civil magistrate wishing to appoint a minister to teach may certainly ask whether he is willing to preach certain doctrines and, if he refuses, deny him the appointment. But to force him to accuse himself of opinions when his actions are not forbidden by law is against the Law of Nature, especially when done by those who teach that a man dying with a false opinion about an article of Christian faith will be damned to eternal and extreme torments. For who, knowing the danger of error is so great, is not compelled by natural concern for himself to stake his soul on his own judgment rather than on that of another man who has no stake in his damnation?\n\nIt is another error in politics for a private person, without the authority of the Commonwealth—that is, without its representative’s permission—to interpret the law by his own spirit. This error is not drawn from Aristotle or any other pagan philosopher. None of them denies that the power to make laws includes the power to explain them when necessary. And wherever the Scriptures are law, are they not made law by the Commonwealth’s authority, and consequently part of the civil law?\n\nIt is an error of the same kind when anyone but the Sovereign restricts a power in a person that the Commonwealth has not restricted. This is what those do who reserve preaching the Gospel to a particular order of men where the laws have left it open. If the state permits me to preach or teach—that is, does not forbid me—no one else can forbid me. If I find myself among the idolaters of America, should I, a Christian though not ordained, think it a sin to preach Jesus Christ before receiving orders from Rome? Or, after preaching, should I not answer their questions and explain the Scriptures to them—that is, should I not teach? Someone may say that in these cases, as also in administering the sacraments to them, necessity is held to provide sufficient authorization. This is true. But it is equally true that wherever necessity warrants an exemption, no exemption is needed if there is no law forbidding the act. To deny these functions to people to whom the civil Sovereign has not denied them is therefore to take away a lawful liberty, contrary to the doctrine of civil government.\n\nMore instances of vain philosophy brought into religion by the doctors of scholastic theology could be given; others may observe them for themselves if they wish. I shall add only that the writings of scholastic theologians are for the most part nothing but meaningless chains of strange and barbarous words, or words used otherwise than they are in ordinary Latin—words that would baffle Cicero, Varro, and all the grammarians of ancient Rome. Anyone who wants proof should see, as I have said before, whether he can translate any scholastic theologian into a modern language, French, English, or another language rich in expression; for what cannot be made intelligible in most such languages is not intelligible in Latin. Though I cannot call this meaninglessness of language false philosophy, it has the power both to hide the truth and to make people think they possess it and stop looking further.\n\nLastly, among errors introduced from false or uncertain history, what is the whole legend of invented miracles in the lives of the saints? What are all the stories of apparitions and ghosts alleged by doctors of the Roman Church to establish their doctrines of hell and purgatory, the power of exorcism, and other doctrines warranted neither by reason nor Scripture? What are all the traditions they call the unwritten Word of God, if not old wives’ tales? Though they find traces of these scattered in the writings of the ancient Fathers, those Fathers were men who could too easily believe false reports. Citing their opinions as testimony to the truth of their beliefs has no other effect among those who, following the counsel of St. John (1 Epist. chap. 4. verse 1.), test the spirits: in everything concerning the power of the Roman Church, whose abuse they either did not suspect or profited by, their too-ready belief in reports discredits their testimony. Even the most sincere men, without great knowledge of natural causes—as the Fathers were—are especially prone to such belief; for the best people are naturally the least suspicious of fraud. Pope Gregory and St. Bernard have some stories of apparitions of ghosts that said they were in purgatory, as does our Bede; but nowhere, I believe, except at second hand. If they or anyone else relate such stories from their own knowledge, they will not thereby confirm these vain reports, but expose their own weakness or fraud.\n\nTo the introduction of false philosophy we may add the suppression of true philosophy by men qualified to judge the truth neither by lawful authority nor by adequate study. Our own voyages make it plain, and everyone learned in the human sciences now acknowledges, that there are antipodes. Every day it becomes more apparent that years and days are determined by motions of the Earth. Nevertheless, ecclesiastical authorities have punished men merely for supposing such a doctrine in their writings as an occasion to present arguments for and against it. What reason is there for this? Is it that such opinions conflict with true religion? If they are true, that cannot be. Let competent judges examine their truth first, or let those claiming to know the contrary refute them. Is it that they conflict with the established religion? Then let the laws of those to whom their teachers are subject silence them—that is, the civil laws. For those who teach even true philosophy in defiance of the laws may lawfully be punished for disobedience. Is it that they tend to disorder in government, by supporting rebellion or sedition? Then let them be silenced and their teachers punished by the power of the one charged with maintaining public peace: the civil authority. For whatever power ecclesiastics assume in their own right, in any place where they are subject to the state, is usurpation, even if they call it God’s right.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVII, 1\n\nON THE BENEFIT THAT COMES FROM SUCH DARKNESS, AND WHO RECEIVES IT\n\nCicero speaks with honor of one of the Cassii, a stern judge among the Romans, for his custom in criminal cases, when the witnesses’ testimony was insufficient, of asking the accusers, Cui bono?—that is, what profit, honor, or other satisfaction the accused gained or expected from the deed. For among grounds of suspicion, none points so clearly to the author of an act as its benefit. By this same rule I intend here to examine who may have kept the people of this part of Christendom so long under the sway of doctrines hostile to the peaceful societies of humankind.\n\nFirst, the error that the present Church, now militant on earth, is the Kingdom of God—that is, the Kingdom of Glory or the Promised Land, rather than the Kingdom of Grace, which is only a promise of that land—brings these worldly benefits. To begin with, pastors and teachers of the Church acquire by it, as God’s public ministers, a title to govern the Church and consequently, because Church and Commonwealth consist of the same people, to direct and govern the Commonwealth. By this title the pope persuaded the subjects of all Christian princes that disobeying him was disobeying Christ himself; and, in every dispute between him and other princes, he induced them, charmed by the words spiritual power, to abandon their lawful Sovereigns. This amounts to a universal monarchy over all Christendom. They themselves acknowledge that Christian emperors first invested them, under those emperors and within the limits of the Roman Empire, with the right to be supreme teachers of Christian doctrine under the title Pontifex Maximus, an officer subject to the civil state. Yet after the empire was divided and dissolved, it was not difficult to impose another title on a people already subject to them: the right of St. Peter. By this means they not only preserved their supposed power intact but extended it over the same Christian provinces, though these were no longer united in the Roman Empire. The benefit of universal monarchy, given the human desire to rule, is sufficient grounds to presume that the popes who claimed and long enjoyed it originated the doctrine by which they gained it: that the Church now on earth is the Kingdom of Christ. Grant this, and it follows that Christ must have some lieutenant among us to tell us his commands.\n\nOnce certain churches had renounced this universal power of the pope, one might reasonably expect the civil Sovereigns of all those churches to recover that portion of it which was theirs by right and in their hands before they unwisely surrendered it. In England this effectively happened, except that those through whom the kings governed religion, by claiming their office as theirs by God’s right, appeared to usurp, if not supremacy, at least independence from civil power. It was only an apparent usurpation, insofar as they acknowledged the king’s right to remove them from the exercise of their functions at his pleasure.\n\nBut wherever the presbytery took over that office, although many other doctrines of the Roman Church were forbidden, the doctrine that Christ’s Kingdom had already come, beginning at our Savior’s resurrection, was retained. But Cui bono? What profit did they expect? What the popes expected: sovereign power over the people. What does it mean for men to excommunicate their lawful king but to bar him from every place of public worship of God in his own kingdom and resist him by force when he tries by force to correct them? And what does it mean to excommunicate anyone without authority from the civil Sovereign but to take away that person’s lawful liberty—that is, to usurp unlawful power over their brethren? The authors of this darkness in religion, then, are the Roman and Presbyterian clergy.\n\nUnder this heading I include all the doctrines that help them retain this spiritual sovereignty once acquired. First is the doctrine that the pope in his public capacity cannot err. Who, believing this true, will not readily obey whatever he commands?\n\nSecond, the doctrine that every other bishop, whatever his Commonwealth, holds his right neither directly from God nor indirectly from his civil Sovereign, but from the pope. This creates in every Christian Commonwealth many powerful men—for bishops are such men—who depend on the pope and owe him obedience though he is a foreign prince. He is thus able, as he has often done, to raise civil war against a state that will not submit to rule according to his pleasure and interests.\n\nThird is the exemption of bishops, of all other priests, and of all monks and friars from the civil laws. A large part of every Commonwealth thereby enjoys the benefit of the laws and the protection of the civil state’s power, yet pays none of the public expenses and is not subject, like other subjects, to the penalties due for its crimes. They consequently fear no one but the pope and adhere to him alone to uphold his universal monarchy.\n\nFourth is giving their priests—who in the New Testament are only presbyters, that is, elders—the name sacerdotes, or sacrificers, which was the title of the civil Sovereign and his public ministers among the Jews while God was their king. Likewise, making the Lord’s Supper a sacrifice helps persuade the people that the pope has over all Christians the power that Moses and Aaron had over the Jews: all power, civil as well as ecclesiastical, as the high priest then possessed.\n\nFifth, teaching that matrimony is a sacrament gives the clergy judgment over the legality of marriages and hence over which children are legitimate and who has the right of succession to hereditary kingdoms.\n\nSixth, denying marriage to priests secures this power of the pope over kings. If a king is a priest, he cannot marry and pass his kingdom to his descendants. If he is not a priest, the pope claims ecclesiastical authority over him and his people.\n\nSeventh, through confession in private they gain, to secure their power, better intelligence about the designs of princes and prominent figures in the civil state than those figures can gain about the designs of the ecclesiastical state.\n\nEighth, by canonizing saints and declaring who are martyrs they secure their power, inducing simple people to resist the laws and commands of their civil Sovereigns obstinately, even to death, if the pope’s excommunication declares those Sovereigns heretics or enemies of the Church—that is, as they interpret it, of the pope.\n\nNinth, they secure it likewise through the power they attribute to every priest to make Christ, to prescribe penance, and to remit or retain sins.\n\nTenth, the doctrine of purgatory, of justification through outward works, and of indulgences enriches the clergy.\n\nEleventh, through their demonology and the use of exorcism and related practices, they keep—or think they keep—the people more in awe of their power.\n\nLastly, Aristotle’s metaphysics, ethics, and politics, together with the frivolous distinctions, barbarous terms, and obscure language of the schoolmen, taught in universities all founded and regulated by papal authority, serve to prevent these errors from being exposed and to make people mistake the will-o’-the-wisp of vain philosophy for the light of the Gospel.\n\nIf these did not suffice, one could add other dark doctrines whose profit plainly goes toward establishing unlawful power over the lawful Sovereigns of Christian peoples, maintaining that power once established, or bringing worldly wealth, honor, and authority to those who sustain it. By the rule stated above, Cui bono?, we may therefore justly name as authors of all this spiritual darkness the pope and Roman clergy, together with all others who seek to implant in people’s minds the erroneous doctrine that the Church now on earth is that Kingdom of God mentioned in the Old and New Testament.\n\nYet the emperors and other Christian Sovereigns under whose government these errors and similar ecclesiastical encroachments upon their office first crept in, disturbing their possessions and the peace of their subjects, may be considered accomplices in their own and the public’s injury. Though they allowed it for lack of foresight about the outcome and insight into their teachers’ designs, no seditious doctrine could initially have been preached in public without their authority. I say they could have stopped it at the outset; but once these spiritual men had taken hold of the people, no human remedy anyone could devise was possible. As for remedies God might provide—who never fails in his own good time to destroy all human designs against the truth—we must await his pleasure. He often allows his enemies’ prosperity and ambition to rise to such a height that their very excess opens the eyes that their predecessors’ caution had kept closed, and their grasping too much makes people lose everything, as Peter’s net was broken by the struggles of too many fish. By contrast, the impatience of those who tried to resist the encroachment before their subjects’ eyes were opened only increased the power they resisted. I do not therefore blame Emperor Frederick for holding the stirrup for our countryman Pope Adrian: his subjects were then so disposed that had he refused, he was unlikely to have succeeded to the empire. But I blame those who, when their power was still whole, let such doctrines be forged in the universities of their own dominions and thereby held the stirrup for every succeeding pope as the popes mounted the thrones of all Christian Sovereigns, to ride and exhaust both rulers and people at their pleasure.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVII, 2\n\nBut as human inventions are woven together, so they can be unraveled: the path is the same, but the order reversed. The web begins with the first elements of power: the wisdom, humility, sincerity, and other virtues of the apostles, whom the people they converted obeyed out of reverence, not obligation. Their consciences were free, and their words and actions subject to none but civil power. Later, as Christ’s flocks grew, the presbyters assembled to consider what they should teach, binding themselves to teach nothing contrary to the decrees of their assemblies. This gave rise to the belief that the people were thereby bound to follow their doctrine; and when people refused, the presbyters refused to associate with them—what was then called excommunication—not as unbelievers, but as disobedient people. This was the first knot tied in their liberty. As the number of presbyters grew, those of the chief city or province gained authority over parish presbyters and reserved for themselves the name bishops. That was a second knot in Christian liberty. Lastly, the bishop of Rome, by virtue of his imperial city, assumed authority over all the empire’s other bishops—partly by the emperors’ own choice and under the title Pontifex Maximus, and ultimately, when the emperors grew weak, through the privileges of St. Peter. That was the third and final knot, completing the construction of papal power.\n\nIts analysis or dissolution therefore proceeds along the same path, beginning with the knot tied last, as we can see in the dissolution of church government outside the civil constitution in England.\n\nFirst, Queen Elizabeth entirely dissolved the popes’ power. Bishops who had previously exercised their functions by the pope’s right now exercised them by the right of the queen and her successors, although their retention of the phrase jure divino made people think they claimed their authority directly from God. Thus the first knot was untied. Later, the Presbyterians in England succeeded in abolishing the office of bishop, and the second knot came loose. Almost at the same time, power was taken from the Presbyterians as well. We have thus returned to the independence of the earliest Christians: each may follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, as he likes best. Provided this happens without contention and without measuring Christ’s doctrine by our affection for his minister—the fault the apostle rebuked in the Corinthians—it is perhaps the best arrangement. First, because nothing ought to have power over human consciences but the Word itself, which works faith in each person, not always according to the purpose of those who plant and water, but according to God himself, who gives the increase. Second, because it is unreasonable for those who teach that every little error is so dangerous to demand that a person endowed with reason of his own follow another man’s reason, or the vote of the majority; that is scarcely better than staking his salvation on a coin toss. Nor should those teachers resent the loss of their former authority. For no one should know better than they that power is preserved by the virtues by which it is won: wisdom, humility, clarity of doctrine, and sincerity of life. It is not preserved by suppressing the natural sciences or the morality of natural reason; nor by obscure language; nor by claiming more knowledge than they show; nor by pious frauds; nor by other faults that, in pastors of God’s Church, are not only faults but scandals likely, sooner or later, to trip people into casting off their authority.\n\nBut once the world accepted the doctrine “that the Church now militant is the Kingdom of God spoken of in the Old and New Testament,” ambition and competition for its offices—above all the great office of Christ’s lieutenant—and the pomp of those who attained its chief public posts grew so conspicuous that they gradually lost the inward reverence due to pastoral service. The wisest people with power in the civil state needed only their princes’ authority to refuse them any further obedience. For from the time the bishop of Rome gained recognition as universal bishop under the pretext of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or Kingdom of Darkness, may aptly be compared to the kingdom of fairies: the old wives’ tales in England about ghosts and spirits and their exploits by night. Anyone considering the origin of this great ecclesiastical dominion will readily see that the papacy is nothing other than the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon its grave. It rose suddenly from the ruins of that pagan power.\n\nTheir language in churches and public proceedings is Latin, a language no nation now commonly speaks. What is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?\n\nThe fairies, in whatever nation they dwell, have only one universal king, called by some of our poets King Oberon, but by Scripture Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics too, wherever their dominions lie, acknowledge only one universal king: the pope.\n\nThe ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. Fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts live in darkness, lonely places, and graves. Ecclesiastics move through obscurity of doctrine, monasteries, churches, and churchyards.\n\nThe ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which, in whatever towns they are raised, have the power, by holy water and certain spells called exorcisms, to make those towns into cities—that is, seats of empire. The fairies too have enchanted castles and gigantic ghosts that rule the lands around them.\n\nFairies cannot be seized and made to answer for the harm they do. So too ecclesiastics vanish from the courts of civil justice.\n\nEcclesiastics deprive young men of their reason with spells compounded of metaphysics, miracles, traditions, and misused Scripture, so that they are fit for nothing but carrying out the clergy’s commands. Fairies likewise are said to take young children from their cradles and turn them into natural fools, whom ordinary people therefore call elves, apt to do mischief.\n\nThe old wives have not established in which workshop fairies practice their enchantment. But the clergy’s workshops are well known: the universities that received their discipline from papal authority.\n\nWhen fairies are displeased with anyone, they are said to send their elves to pinch him. When ecclesiastics are displeased with a civil state, they too send their elves—that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects—to pinch its princes by preaching sedition; or they enchant one prince with promises to pinch another.\n\nFairies do not marry, but among them are incubi, who have intercourse with flesh and blood. Priests likewise do not marry.\n\nEcclesiastics take the cream of the land through gifts from ignorant people who stand in awe of them, and through tithes. So too, in fairy tales, fairies enter dairies and feast on the cream they skim from the milk.\n\nWhat money passes in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story. But when ecclesiastics receive payment, they accept the same money as we do, though when it is their turn to pay, they offer canonizations, indulgences, and masses.\n\nTo these and similar resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies, one may add this: fairies exist only in the fancies of ignorant people, born of the traditions of old wives or old poets; and likewise the pope’s spiritual power, beyond the bounds of his own civil dominion, consists only in the fear that deceived people feel of his excommunication after hearing false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of Scripture.\n\nIt was therefore not very difficult for Henry 8. to cast them out by his exorcism, or for Queen Elizabeth by hers. But who knows whether this spirit of Rome, now gone out and wandering on missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, which yield him little fruit, may not return? Or rather, whether an assembly of spirits worse than he may not enter and inhabit this house swept clean, making its end worse than its beginning? For the Roman clergy are not alone in claiming that the Kingdom of God belongs to this world and that they therefore have a power in it distinct from the civil state’s. This is all I meant to say concerning the doctrine of politics. Once I have reviewed it, I shall willingly submit it to the judgment of my country.\n\nA REVIEW AND CONCLUSION\n\n### Review and Conclusion, 1\n\nA REVIEW AND CONCLUSION\n\nThe apparent opposition between certain natural faculties of the mind, and between certain passions, together with their bearing on social life, has been used to argue that no one person can be suitably disposed to every kind of civil duty. Severity of judgment, they say, makes people censorious and reluctant to pardon others’ errors and weaknesses; quickness of imagination, by contrast, makes thought less steady than exact discrimination between right and wrong requires. Again, sound reasoning is necessary in every deliberation and every legal pleading: without it, people’s decisions are rash and their judgments unjust. Yet without powerful eloquence that wins attention and assent, reason has little effect. But these faculties are opposed: the former is grounded in principles of truth, the latter in opinions already accepted, whether true or false, and in people’s differing, changeable passions and interests.\n\nAmong the passions, courage—by which I mean contempt for wounds and violent death—inclines people to private revenge and sometimes to attempts to unsettle the public peace. Fearfulness, on the other hand, often inclines them to desert the public defense. These two, they say, cannot coexist in one person.\n\nAnd considering the opposition between people’s opinions and habits in general, they say it is impossible to sustain a lasting civic friendship with everyone with whom worldly business compels us to deal, for that business consists almost entirely of perpetual competition for honor, wealth, and authority.\n\nMy answer is that these are indeed great difficulties, but not impossibilities: education and discipline can, and sometimes do, reconcile them. Judgment and imagination may both have a place in the same person, but take their turns as the end he aims at requires. As the Israelites in Egypt were sometimes bound to the labor of making bricks and at other times ranged about gathering straw, so judgment may at one time fix itself upon a single consideration and imagination at another roam the world. Reason and eloquence too, though perhaps not in the natural sciences, can readily coexist in moral matters. Wherever there is room to embellish and promote error, there is far more room to embellish and promote truth, if one has truth to embellish. Nor is there any conflict between fearing the laws and being unafraid of a public enemy, or between refraining from doing injury and forgiving injury in others. Human nature is therefore not so incompatible with civil duties as some suppose. I have known clarity of judgment and breadth of imagination, strength of reason and graceful eloquence, courage for war and fear of the laws, all eminently united in one man: my most noble and honored friend Mr. Sidney Godolphin. Hating no one and hated by none, he was unhappily killed at the beginning of the recent civil war, in the public cause, by an unseen and unseeing hand.\n\nTo the Laws of Nature stated in the 15. Chapter I would add this: “Every person is bound by nature, as far as he is able, to defend in war the authority by which he himself is protected in peace.” For a person who claims a Right of Nature to preserve his own body cannot claim a Right of Nature to destroy the one whose strength preserves him: that is an evident self-contradiction. Though this law may be derived from some of those already mentioned there, the times demand that it be stressed and remembered.\n\nAnd because I find from various English books recently printed that the civil wars have not yet taught people at what moment a subject becomes bound to a conqueror, what conquest is, or how it binds people to obey the conqueror’s laws, I shall explain further. A person becomes the subject of a conqueror at the moment when, having the freedom to submit to him, he consents, by express words or another adequate sign, to become his subject. I have shown at the end of the 21. Chapter when a person has the freedom to submit. For someone whose only obligation to his former Sovereign is that of an ordinary subject, it is when the means of his livelihood come under the enemy’s guards and garrisons; for then his former Sovereign no longer protects him, and the opposing party protects him in return for his contribution. Since such a contribution is everywhere considered lawful as unavoidable, though it assists the enemy, complete submission, which likewise merely assists the enemy, cannot be considered unlawful. Besides, those who submit assist the enemy with only part of their property, whereas those who refuse assist him with the whole. There is thus no reason to call their submission or negotiated settlement assistance; rather, it is a loss to the enemy. But if someone, besides the obligation of a subject, has undertaken the further obligation of a soldier, he is not free to submit to a new power while the former power still holds the field and provides him the means of subsistence in its armies or garrisons. In that case he cannot complain of a lack of protection and the means of a soldier’s livelihood. But when that too fails, a soldier may seek protection wherever he has the best hope of finding it, and may lawfully submit to a new master. So much for when he may lawfully do so, should he choose. If he does, he is unquestionably bound to be a faithful subject: a contract lawfully made cannot lawfully be broken.\n\nThis also lets us understand when people may be said to have been conquered, and what conquest and the conqueror’s right consist in, for that submission encompasses them all. Conquest is not victory itself, but the acquisition through victory of a right over people. A person killed, therefore, is overcome but not conquered. A person captured and put in prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome: he remains an enemy and may save himself if he can. But a person granted life and liberty upon promising obedience is then conquered and a subject, and not before. The Romans used to say their general had pacified a province—that is, in English, conquered it—and that victory had pacified the country when its people promised Imperata Facere, or “to do what the Roman people commanded them”: this was to be conquered. The promise may be express or tacit: express by a spoken promise, tacit by other signs. For example, a person not called upon to make an express promise, perhaps because his power is insignificant, nevertheless implicitly submits to the government if he lives openly under its protection. If he lives there secretly, however, he is liable to whatever may be done to a spy and enemy of the state. I do not say that he commits an injustice—for acts of open hostility are not called that—but that he may justly be put to death. Likewise, someone outside his country when it is conquered has not himself been conquered and is not a subject; but if he submits to the government upon returning, he is bound to obey it. Conquest, then, to define it, is the acquisition of the right of Sovereignty by victory. That right is acquired through the people’s submission, by which they contract with the victor, promising obedience in return for life and liberty.\n\nIn the 29th Chapter I set down among the causes of the dissolution of Commonwealths their imperfect formation, consisting in the absence of an absolute and discretionary legislative power. For lack of it, the civil Sovereign must wield the sword of justice uncertainly, as if it were too hot to hold. One reason, which I did not mention there, is that they all seek to justify the war by which they first won their power and on which, they think, their right depends, instead of resting it on possession. Suppose, for example, the right of the kings of England depended on the justice of William the Conqueror’s cause and on their direct descent from him through the straightest line. There might then be no bond obliging subjects to obey their Sovereign anywhere in the world today. In needlessly attempting to justify themselves this way, rulers justify every successful rebellion that ambition may ever raise against them and their successors. I therefore count it among the most effective seeds of a state’s death when conquerors demand not only that people submit to their actions henceforth, but also that they approve all their past actions, when scarcely a Commonwealth in the world can conscientiously justify its beginnings.\n\nAnd since the name tyranny means neither more nor less than the name Sovereignty, whether held by one person or many, except that those who use the former name are understood to be angry with those they call tyrants, I think tolerating an avowed hatred of tyranny is tolerating hatred of Commonwealth in general: another evil seed, little different from the previous one. To justify a conqueror’s cause one must generally reproach the cause of the conquered; yet neither is necessary to bind the conquered. This is what I thought fit to say in reviewing the first and second parts of this discourse.\n\nIn the 35th Chapter I have shown sufficiently from Scripture that, in the Commonwealth of the Jews, God himself was made Sovereign by covenant with the people. They were therefore called his special people, to distinguish them from the rest of the world, over whom God reigned not by their consent but by his own power. I showed too that in this Kingdom Moses was God’s lieutenant on earth and that it was he who told them what laws God had ordained. I did not then consider who was to carry out executions, especially capital punishments, a matter of such importance as I have since discovered. We know that in Commonwealths generally, the execution of bodily punishments was assigned either to guards or other soldiers of the Sovereign power, or to people whose poverty, disregard for honor, and hardness of heart combined to make them seek such an office. Among the Israelites, however, it was a positive law of God their Sovereign that a person convicted of a capital crime be stoned to death by the people: the witnesses were to cast the first stone, and the rest of the people after them. This law designated the executioners, but did not authorize anyone to throw a stone before conviction and sentence where the congregation was judge. The witnesses still had to be heard before the execution, unless the deed occurred in the congregation’s presence or in sight of lawful judges; in those cases the judges themselves were sufficient witnesses. Yet this procedure, not being fully understood, has given rise to the dangerous opinion that a person may in certain cases kill another by a right of zeal, as though executions of offenders in the Kingdom of God of old proceeded not from a Sovereign command but from the authority of private zeal. A consideration of the texts that seem to favor this opinion shows precisely the opposite.\n\n### Review and Conclusion, 2\n\nFirst, when the Levites fell upon the people who had made and worshipped the golden calf, and killed three thousand of them, they acted on the command of Moses, received from the mouth of God, as is clear from Exod. 32.27. And when the son of an Israelite woman blasphemed God, those who heard him did not kill him, but brought him before Moses, who held him in custody until God should pronounce sentence against him, as appears in Levit. 25.11, 12. Again, when Phinehas killed Zimri and Cosbi (Numbers 25.6, 7.), he did not do so by a right of private zeal. Their crime was committed in sight of the assembly; no witness was needed; the law was known; and he was heir apparent to the sovereignty. Most importantly, the lawfulness of his act depended entirely on its subsequent ratification by Moses, of which he had no reason to doubt. Such an expectation of future ratification is sometimes necessary for the safety of a Commonwealth: in a sudden rebellion, for instance, anyone able to suppress it by his own power in the region where it begins may lawfully do so, and arrange to have his action ratified or pardoned while it is being done or after it is done. Also, Numb. 35.30. expressly says, “Whoever shall kill the murderer shall kill him on the testimony of witnesses.” But witnesses presuppose a formal court, and therefore rule out this claim of Jus Zelotarum. The law of Moses concerning someone who entices others to idolatry—that is, in the Kingdom of God, to renounce their allegiance—(Deut. 13.8.) forbids concealing him, and commands the accuser to cause him to be put to death and to cast the first stone at him, but not to kill him before he is condemned. And in Deut. 17. ver.4, 5, 6. the procedure against idolatry is laid out precisely: God there speaks to the people as judge, commanding them, when a man is accused of idolatry, to inquire diligently into the deed and, if they find the charge true, then to stone him; still, the witness's hand casts the first stone. This is not private zeal but public condemnation. Likewise, when a father has a rebellious son, the law (Deut. 21. 18.) requires him to bring the son before the town's judges, and all the people of the town to stone him. Lastly, it was under a claim based on these laws that St. Stephen was stoned, not under a claim of private zeal: before he was led away to execution, he had pleaded his cause before the high priest. Nothing here, nor anywhere else in the Bible, lends support to executions by private zeal, which is often no more than ignorance joined to passion, and is opposed alike to the justice and the peace of a Commonwealth.\n\nIn the 36th Chapter I said that it is not declared in what manner God spoke supernaturally to Moses. I did not mean that he never spoke to him by dreams and visions, or by a supernatural voice, as he did to other prophets. For the manner in which he spoke to him from the mercy seat is expressly described (Numbers 7.89.) in these words: “From that time onward, when Moses entered the Tabernacle of the Congregation to speak with God, he heard a voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat, which is above the Ark of the Testimony; from between the cherubim he spoke to him.” What is not declared is in what way the manner of God's speech to Moses excelled his speech to other prophets, such as Samuel and Abraham, to whom he also spoke by a voice (that is, by a vision), unless the difference lay in the clarity of the vision. For “face to face” and “mouth to mouth” cannot be understood literally of the infinite and incomprehensible divine nature.\n\nAs for the whole doctrine, I still see no reason to doubt that its principles are true and fitting, and its reasoning sound. For I ground the civil right of sovereigns, and both the duty and the liberty of subjects, on the known natural inclinations of mankind and on the articles of the Law of Nature, of which no one who claims enough reason to govern his own family ought to be ignorant. And as for the ecclesiastical power of those same sovereigns, I ground it on texts both evident in themselves and consistent with the purpose of the whole Scripture. I am therefore persuaded that anyone who reads it solely in order to be informed will be informed by it. But those who, by writing or public discourse or their prominent actions, have already committed themselves to maintaining contrary opinions will not be so readily satisfied. For in such cases it is natural for people, even as they continue reading, to lose their attention in searching for objections to what they have read before. And in a time when people's interests are changing—since much of the doctrine that serves to establish a new government must be contrary to what contributed to the dissolution of the old—there cannot fail to be very many such objections.\n\nIn the part that treats of a Christian Commonwealth there are some new doctrines which, perhaps, in a state where the contrary had already been fully settled, it would be a fault for a subject to publish without permission, as an usurpation of the teacher's place. But at this time, when people call not only for peace but also for truth, to offer doctrines I believe to be true and plainly conducive to peace and loyalty for the consideration of those still deliberating is merely to offer new wine for new casks, so that both may be preserved together. And I suppose that, when novelty can breed no trouble or disorder in a state, people are not generally so devoted to revering antiquity that they would prefer ancient errors to new and well-proven truth.\n\nThere is nothing I distrust more than my expression; yet I am confident that, barring accidents of the press, it is not obscure. My neglect of the ornament of quoting ancient poets, orators, and philosophers, contrary to the custom of recent times—whether I have done well or badly in this—proceeds from my considered judgment, based on many reasons. First, the truth of any doctrine depends either on reason or on Scripture; these confer authority on many writers but receive it from none. Secondly, the matters at issue are not matters of fact but of right, for which witnesses have no place. There is scarcely one of those old writers who does not sometimes contradict both himself and others, rendering their testimony insufficient. Fourthly, opinions accepted solely on the authority of antiquity are not truly the judgments of those who cite them, but words passed from mouth to mouth like a yawn. Fifthly, men often pursue a fraudulent design when they stud their corrupt doctrine with the cloves of other men's wit. Sixthly, I do not find that the ancients they cite considered it an ornament to do the same with those who wrote before them. Seventhly, it is a sign of indigestion when unchewed Greek and Latin sentences come up again, as they commonly do, unchanged. Lastly, though I revere those people of ancient times who either wrote the truth clearly or set us on a better path to discover it for ourselves, I think nothing is owed to antiquity itself. For if it is age we are to revere, the present is the oldest. If it is the age of the writer, I am not sure that those generally accorded such honor were older when they wrote than I am as I write. But considered carefully, the praise of ancient authors springs not from reverence for the dead, but from the rivalry and mutual envy of the living.\n\nTo conclude, as far as I can perceive, there is nothing in this entire discourse, or in what I wrote earlier on the same subject in Latin, contrary to the Word of God, to good morals, or to public tranquility. Therefore I think it may profitably be printed, and still more profitably taught in the universities, if those to whom such judgment belongs think so too. For the universities are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine. Preachers and the gentry draw whatever water they find there and sprinkle it on the people, both from the pulpit and in conversation; surely great care must therefore be taken to keep it pure of both the venom of heathen politicians and the enchantments of deceiving spirits. In this way most people, knowing their duties, will be less inclined to serve the ambition of a few discontented persons in their designs against the state; they will resent less the contributions necessary for their peace and defense; and governors themselves will have less cause to maintain at public expense an army any larger than is necessary to secure the public liberty against the invasions and encroachments of foreign enemies.\n\nAnd thus I bring to an end my discourse on civil and ecclesiastical government, prompted by the disorders of the present time, without partiality, without personal application, and with no design other than to set before people's eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience. Both the condition of human nature and the laws of God, natural and positive alike, require that relation to be inviolably observed. And though, amid the revolutions of states, truths of this kind can scarcely be born under a favorable constellation—facing the angry gaze of those who dissolve an old government and seeing only the backs of those who establish a new one—I cannot believe that this work will now be condemned either by the public judge of doctrine or by anyone who desires the continuance of public peace. In this hope I return to my interrupted study of natural bodies; and there, if God grants me the health to finish it, I hope novelty will please as much as it commonly offends in the doctrine of this artificial body. For truth that opposes no one's profit or pleasure is welcome to all.\n\nTHE END","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/leviathan/translations/trn_leviathan_mouseia.txt"},{"id":"trn_leviathan_plain","translator":"Mouseia","kind":"plain","note":"Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the complete 1651 English text (introduction, forty-seven chapters, review and conclusion). Hobbes’s marginal summaries are omitted.","text":"### Introduction\n\nNature is the art by which God made and governs the world. Human art imitates nature in many ways, including by making an artificial animal. Life is only the movement of limbs, beginning in some principal part inside the body. So why shouldn't we say that all automata—machines that move themselves by springs and wheels, like a watch—have artificial life? The heart is a spring, the nerves are strings, and the joints are wheels. Together they move the whole body as its maker intended. Human art goes further and imitates nature's most excellent rational work: the human being. Art creates that great Leviathan called a Common-wealth, or state (in Latin, civitas). It is an artificial human being, larger and stronger than a natural one, which it was meant to protect and defend. In it, sovereignty is an artificial soul, because it gives the whole body life and movement. Magistrates and other officers who judge and enforce judgments are artificial joints. Rewards and punishments are the nerves: attached to the seat of sovereignty, they move every joint and member to do its duty, as nerves do in a natural body. The wealth and riches of all its individual members are its strength. Salus Populi (the people's safety) is its business. Counselors who bring it everything it needs to know are its memory. Equity and laws are its artificial reason and will. Agreement is health; rebellion is sickness; civil war is death. Finally, the pacts and Covenants that first made, assembled, and united the parts of this political body resemble God's command at creation, “Let us make man.”\n\nTo describe the nature of this artificial human being, I will consider:\n\nFirst, its material and its maker, both of which are human beings.\n\nSecond, how it is made and by what Covenants; what Rights and rightful power or authority belong to a Sovereign; and what preserves and dissolves it.\n\nThird, what a Christian Common-wealth is.\n\nLastly, what the Kingdom of Darkness is.\n\nOn the first subject, there is a saying often repeated lately: wisdom comes not from reading books but from reading people. Accordingly, people who generally have no other proof of their wisdom love to show what they think they have read in others by making unkind judgments behind their backs. But there is another saying, little understood lately, that could teach them to read one another if they took the trouble: Nosce Teipsum, “Read yourself.” It was not meant, as people now use it, to justify powerful people's brutal treatment of those below them or to encourage lower-ranking people to behave insolently toward those above them. It was meant to teach us this: because one person's thoughts and Passions resemble another's, anyone who looks into himself and considers what he does when he thinks, forms opinions, reasons, hopes, fears, and so on, and on what grounds he does it, can thereby understand the thoughts and Passions of other people in similar circumstances. I mean that the Passions themselves are alike in everyone—desire, fear, hope, and the rest. I do not mean that their objects, the things people desire, fear, or hope for, are alike. Individual makeup and particular upbringing vary these so much, and the objects are so easy to hide, that the marks of the human heart, blurred and confused by concealment, lies, pretense, and mistaken teachings, can be read only by the one who searches hearts. People's actions sometimes disclose their plans. But if we try to read those actions without comparing them to our own and without distinguishing every circumstance that could change the case, we are deciphering without a key. We will usually be misled by too much trust or too much suspicion, depending on whether we ourselves are good or bad.\n\nEven if someone reads another's actions perfectly, that knowledge helps only with the few people he knows. Whoever must govern a whole nation has to read in himself not this or that individual but humankind. That is hard to do—harder than learning any language or science. But once I have set out my own reading clearly and in order, another person's only remaining task will be to consider whether he finds the same things in himself. There is no other way to prove this kind of teaching.\n\nPART I. OF MAN\n\n### Part I, Chapter I\n\nOF SENSE\n\nI will consider human thoughts first one at a time and then in a series, as they depend on one another. Each thought taken alone is a representation or appearance of some quality or other property of a body outside us, commonly called an object. The object acts on the eyes, ears, and other parts of a person's body. Its different actions produce different appearances.\n\nThe origin of all thoughts is what we call sense. No idea in a person's mind has not first arisen, in whole or in part, through the sense organs. Everything else comes from this origin.\n\nKnowing the natural cause of sense is not very important to my present subject, and I have written about it at length elsewhere. Still, to make this part of my account complete, I will explain it briefly here.\n\nThe cause of sense is an external body, or object, that presses the organ appropriate to each sense. It presses directly in taste and touch, or indirectly in sight, hearing, and smell. This pressure passes inward through the nerves and other fibers and membranes of the body to the brain and heart. There it causes resistance, a counterpressure, an effort by the heart to free itself. Because that effort is directed outward, it seems to be something outside us. This seeming, or mental image, is what people call sense. For the eye it consists of light or color in a shape; for the ear, sound; for the nose, smell; for the tongue and palate, taste; and for the rest of the body, heat, cold, hardness, softness, and other qualities we detect by touch. All these qualities called sensible are, in the object that causes them, only different movements of matter, pressing on our organs in different ways. In us who are pressed, too, they are nothing other than different movements: movement produces only movement. But they appear to us as mental images, whether we are awake or dreaming. Pressing, rubbing, or striking an eye makes us imagine a light, and pressing an ear makes a noise. In the same way, the bodies we see and hear produce such effects by their strong action, even though we do not notice the action. If colors and sounds actually existed in the bodies or objects that cause them, they could not be separated from those objects. Yet we see them separated by reflection in mirrors and echoes: we know the thing seen is in one place and its appearance in another. At a certain distance the actual object may seem clothed in the image it produces in us. Even then, the object is one thing and the image or mental picture is another. Sense, then, is always simply the first mental image caused, as I said, by the pressure—that is, the movement—of external things against our eyes, ears, and other organs designed for sensing.\n\nBut the schools of philosophy throughout the universities of Christendom teach something else, based on certain passages in Aristotle. They say that, for sight to occur, the thing seen sends out in every direction a “visible species”—in English, a visible show, appearance, aspect, or “being seen.” The eye receives it, and that is seeing. To explain hearing, they say that the thing heard sends out an “audible species,” meaning an audible aspect or audible “being seen,” which enters the ear and makes hearing happen. Indeed, even to explain understanding, they say that the thing understood sends out “intelligible species,” meaning an intelligible “being seen,” which comes into the understanding and makes us understand. I do not say this because I disapprove of universities. But later I must discuss their role in a Common-wealth, so whenever the occasion arises I must show you what needs correcting in them. One such problem is their frequent use of words that mean nothing.\n\nCHAPTER II. OF IMAGINATION\n\n### Part I, Chapter II\n\nOF IMAGINATION\n\nNo one doubts that if something is at rest, it will remain at rest forever unless something else moves it. But people are less willing to accept that a moving thing will keep moving forever unless something else stops it, although the reason is the same: nothing can change itself. People judge not only other people but everything else by themselves. Because they feel pain and tiredness after moving, they think everything else grows tired of moving and seeks rest on its own. They hardly consider whether their own desire for rest might itself consist of some other movement. This is why the schools say that heavy bodies fall downward because they want rest and want to preserve their nature in the place most suitable for them. Absurdly, they give lifeless things desires and knowledge of what is good for their preservation—more knowledge than human beings have.\n\nOnce a body is moving, it moves forever unless something else gets in its way. Whatever obstructs it cannot completely stop its movement in an instant, but only gradually over time. We see that when the wind stops, waves keep rolling on for a long while. The same happens to the movement inside us when we see, dream, and so on. After an object has gone or an eye is closed, we still retain an image of what we saw, though a dimmer one than when we see it. The Latins call this imagination, from the image produced by sight, and they apply the name to the other senses as well, though strictly it does not fit. The Greeks call it fancy, meaning appearance, a word just as suitable for any sense as for sight. Imagination, then, is only fading sense. Human beings and many other living creatures have it both asleep and awake.\n\nIn waking people, the fading of sense does not mean that the movement produced in sensing fades away. Instead, the movement is obscured, as sunlight obscures starlight, although the stars exercise their visible power just as much by day as by night. Among the many impacts that external bodies make on our eyes, ears, and other organs, we sense only the dominant one. Because sunlight is dominant, we do not feel the effect of the stars. Similarly, when an object leaves our sight, its impression remains in us. But other, more immediate objects follow it and affect us. They dim and weaken our imagination of what has passed, just as daytime noise drowns out a person's voice. It follows that the more time passes after we see or otherwise sense an object, the weaker our imagination of it becomes. The continual changes in a person's body eventually destroy the parts moved in sensing. So distance in time and distance in space have the same effect on us. At a distance in space, what we look at appears dim, with its smaller parts indistinct, and voices grow faint and hard to make out. At a distance in time, likewise, our imagination of the past weakens: we lose, for example, many particular streets from cities we have seen and many particular circumstances from actions we remember. When we mean the mental image itself, I call this fading sense imagination, as I said before. But when we mean its fading and point out that the sense is growing faint, old, and past, we call it memory. Imagination and memory are therefore the same thing, given different names when considered in different ways.\n\nA great deal of memory, or memory of many things, is called experience. Imagination can only concern things previously sensed, either as a whole at once or in parts at different times. Imagining an entire object as it appeared to the senses is simple imagination, as when someone imagines a person or horse seen before. The other kind is combined imagination. For example, we may see a person at one time and a horse at another, then picture a centaur. Or someone may join an image of himself to an image of another person's actions, imagining himself to be a Hercules or an Alexander, as often happens to people who love reading romances. That is combined imagination, and strictly speaking it is just a fiction of the mind. Other images arise in people even when awake because a sensory impression is strong. If we stare at the sun, its impression leaves an image of the sun before our eyes for a long time afterward. If someone studies geometrical figures intently for a long time, he may see images of lines and angles in the dark, even while awake. This kind of mental image has no special name, since people do not commonly talk about it.\n\nThe imaginings of sleeping people are what we call dreams. Like all other imaginings, they first existed in sense, either whole or in parts. During sleep the brain and nerves, which are necessary organs of sense, are so numbed that external objects cannot easily move them. So no image, and therefore no dream, can arise in sleep except through movements of the inner parts of the body. When those parts are disturbed, their connection to the brain and other organs keeps those organs moving. This makes earlier images appear as if the person were awake. But the sense organs are now numb, so no new object can overpower and obscure these images with a stronger impression. In this quiet of the senses, a dream must be clearer than our waking thoughts. This is why it is hard—and many think impossible—to distinguish sense from dreaming exactly. As for me, I consider that in dreams I do not often or regularly think about the same people, places, objects, and actions as I do when awake. Nor do I remember a chain of connected thoughts as long while dreaming as at other times. When awake, I often notice how absurd dreams are, but I never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts. This convinces me that when I am awake, I know I am not dreaming, though in a dream I think I am awake.\n\nSince dreams arise from disturbances in some inner parts of the body, different disturbances must cause different dreams. Lying in the cold thus produces frightening dreams and raises the thought and image of something frightening. Movement between the brain and the inner parts goes both ways. When we are awake, anger heats some parts of the body. So when we sleep, too much heat in those same parts causes anger and raises an image of an enemy in the brain. Likewise, natural affection when we are awake causes desire, and desire heats certain other parts of the body. Too much heat in those parts while we sleep raises an image of affection being shown. In short, our dreams reverse our waking imaginings: the movement starts at one end while we are awake, and at the other while we dream.\n\nIt is hardest to distinguish a dream from waking thought when we fail for some reason to notice that we have slept. This easily happens to someone whose thoughts are full of fear and whose conscience is deeply troubled, if he falls asleep without going to bed or taking off his clothes, perhaps dozing in a chair. Someone who deliberately goes to bed and makes an effort to sleep is unlikely to mistake a strange and excessive image for anything but a dream. We read of Marcus Brutes, whose life Julius Caesar spared and who was Caesar's favorite but nonetheless murdered him. At Phillipi, the night before he fought Augustus Caesar, he saw a frightening apparition. Historians commonly describe it as a vision. But from the circumstances, we can easily judge that it was only a short dream. He was sitting in his tent, troubled and brooding over the horror of his rash deed. As he dozed in the cold, it was easy for him to dream of what frightened him most. As his fear gradually woke him, the apparition must also have gradually faded. Because he did not know he had slept, he had no reason to think it a dream rather than a vision. This is not very rare. Even people who are fully awake may be fearful and superstitious, filled with frightening stories and alone in the dark. They may have similar mental images and believe they see spirits and dead people's ghosts walking in churchyards. What they see is either their imagination alone or a trick by people who take advantage of such superstitious fear to move in disguise at night to places they do not want to be known to visit.\n\nMost of the ancient Gentiles' religion arose from not knowing how to tell dreams and other strong imaginings from visions and sense. They worshiped satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and the like. The same ignorance explains what uneducated people today believe about fairies, ghosts, goblins, and the power of witches. I do not think witches have any real magical power. Yet I think their punishment is just, because they falsely believe they can cause such harm and intend to cause it if they can. Their trade is closer to a new religion than to a craft or science. I think belief in fairies and wandering ghosts has been deliberately taught, or at least left unchallenged, to maintain the reputation of exorcisms, crosses, holy water, and other such inventions of religious men. Of course God can make unnatural apparitions. But it is not part of Christian faith that he does this so often that people should fear them more than they fear him stopping or changing the ordinary course of nature, which he can also do. Bad people use God's ability to do anything as an excuse to say anything that suits them, even when they believe it is false. Wise people should believe them only as far as sound reason makes their claims credible. If we removed this superstitious fear of spirits, along with predictions from dreams, false prophecies, and the many related devices by which cunning, ambitious people take advantage of ordinary people, we would be much better prepared for civil obedience.\n\nThe schools ought to do this work, but instead they encourage such teachings. Since they do not know what imagination or the senses are, they teach whatever they have received. Some say mental images arise by themselves, without a cause. Others say they usually arise from the will, or that God blows good thoughts into a person and the Devil blows in bad ones, or that God pours in good thoughts and the Devil pours in bad ones. Some say the senses receive the “species” of things and hand them to common sense, which hands them to imagination, which hands them to memory, which hands them to judgment. It is as if they were passing objects from hand to hand. They use many words without making anything clear.\n\nThe imagination raised in a human being, or any other creature capable of imagining, by words or other voluntary signs is what we generally call understanding. Human beings and animals both have it. Through habit a dog understands its master's call or scolding, and many other animals do too. The understanding peculiar to human beings concerns not just another person's wishes but that person's ideas and thoughts, expressed by putting the names of things together in affirmations, denials, and other forms of speech. I will speak later about this kind of understanding.\n\nCHAPTER III. OF THE CONSEQUENCE OR TRAIN OF IMAGINATIONS\n\n### Part I, Chapter III\n\nOF THE CONSEQUENCE OR TRAIN OF IMAGINATIONS\n\nBy a consequence, or train, of thoughts, I mean one thought following another. To distinguish it from discourse in words, this is called mental discourse.\n\nWhatever a person thinks about, the next thought is not as random as it seems. Not every thought can follow every other thought equally. We cannot imagine anything unless we have first sensed it, either as a whole or in parts. In the same way, we cannot pass from one image to another unless we have previously experienced a similar transition through our senses. Here is why. All mental images are movements within us, traces of movements made during sensing. Movements that followed one another closely in sense remain connected afterward. When the earlier movement returns and becomes dominant, the later one follows because the matter moved is connected. It is like water spread over a flat table: guide one part of it with a finger, and the rest is drawn in that direction. But when we sense any one thing, different things may follow it on different occasions. In time, therefore, we cannot be sure what we will imagine next when we imagine something. We can be sure only that the next thing will be something that followed it before at some time.\n\nThere are two kinds of train of thought, or mental discourse. The first is unguided, without a purpose, and changeable. No thought charged with a Passion directs the following thoughts toward itself as the aim of a desire or other Passion. In this case, thoughts wander and seem unrelated, as they do in a dream. People often think this way when they are not only alone but also free of any concern. Their thoughts are as busy as ever, but they lack harmony, like a lute that sounds out of tune to anyone, or a tuned lute played by someone who cannot play it. Even in this wandering of the mind, we can often see its course and how one thought depends on another. For example, while we were talking about our present civil war, someone asked what a Roman penny was worth. What could seem less relevant? Yet the connection was plain enough to me. Thinking of the war led to thinking of the surrender of the King to his enemies. That led to the betrayal of Christ, and that to the 30 pence paid for the betrayal. From there the spiteful question followed easily. All this happened in a moment, for thought moves fast.\n\nThe second kind of train is more steady because a desire and a purpose guide it. Things we desire or fear make a strong, lasting impression, or one that quickly returns after fading for a while. Sometimes it is strong enough to interrupt our sleep. Desire makes us think of a way we have seen something like our goal achieved. That leads us to think of a way to carry out that step, and so on, until we reach a starting point within our own power. Since the goal is so strongly impressed on us, it often comes back to mind. If our thoughts wander, they quickly return to the right course. One of the seven wise men noticed this and gave the now worn-out advice, Respice Finem, meaning “Keep your goal in view.” In all your actions, look often at what you want. It directs all your thoughts toward getting it.\n\nGuided trains of thought have two kinds. In one, we imagine an effect and seek the causes or means that produced it. Human beings and animals both do this. In the other, we imagine something and look for every possible effect it could produce: we think about what we could do with it if we had it. I have seen signs of this only in human beings. Such curiosity hardly belongs to a creature with no Passions except bodily ones, such as hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and anger. In short, purpose-driven mental discourse is nothing but searching, or the ability to discover, which the Latins call sagacitas and solertia. It is hunting for the causes of a present or past effect or for the effects of a present or past cause. Sometimes someone looks for something lost. Starting with the place and time where he notices it missing, his mind goes back through places and times to discover where and when he last had it. That gives him a definite, limited time and place from which to start a methodical search. Then his thoughts retrace the same places and times to find an action or other event that might have caused the loss. We call this remembering, or calling to mind. The Latins call it reminiscentia, as if it meant going over our former actions again.\n\nSometimes someone knows a particular area in which he must search. His thoughts then go through all its parts, as he might sweep a room looking for a jewel, or as a spaniel searches a field until it picks up a scent, or as someone runs through the alphabet to find a rhyme.\n\nSometimes someone wants to know the outcome of an action. He thinks of a similar action in the past, then of its results one after another, assuming similar actions will have similar results. Someone trying to predict what will happen to a criminal recalls what he has seen follow a similar crime. His thoughts run through the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows. This kind of thought is called foresight, prudence, providence, and sometimes wisdom. But such guesses are often wrong, because it is hard to observe every circumstance. One thing is certain: the more experience someone has of the past compared with another person, the more prudent he is, and the less often his expectations fail. Only the present exists in nature. The past exists only in memory; things to come do not exist at all. The future is a fiction made by the mind, which applies the results of past actions to present actions. The person with the most experience does this most reliably, though never with enough certainty. When the outcome matches what we expected, we call this prudence, but by its nature it is only presumption. Foresight of things to come—providence—belongs only to the one by whose will they will come to pass. Prophecy comes only from him and by supernatural means. The best natural prophet is the best guesser, and the best guesser is the person most familiar with and most practiced in the matters he guesses about. He has the most signs to guide his guess.\n\nAn earlier event is a sign of a later event, and a later event is a sign of an earlier one, when we have observed a similar sequence before. The more often we have observed it, the more reliable the sign. So whoever has the most experience in a line of business has the most signs to use in guessing about the future and is therefore the most prudent. He is more prudent than a newcomer by an amount that no gift of quick, natural intelligence can make up for, although many young people may think otherwise.\n\nStill, prudence does not distinguish human beings from animals. At one year old, some animals observe and pursue what benefits them more prudently than a ten-year-old child does.\n\nPrudence is an assumption about the future drawn from experience of the past. We also make assumptions about past things based on other past things, not on the future. For example, someone who has seen the stages by which a prosperous state first fell into civil war and then into ruin will see the ruins of another state and guess that a similar war and similar stages occurred there. But this guess is almost as uncertain as a guess about the future. Both rest only on experience.\n\nI cannot recall another act of the human mind that is naturally present and needs nothing more for its exercise than being born human and living with the use of the five senses. The other abilities I will soon discuss, which seem unique to human beings, are acquired and developed through study and effort. Most people learn them through teaching and discipline. All arise from the invention of words and speech. Apart from sense, thoughts, and the train of thoughts, the human mind has no other movement. Yet speech and method can improve these same abilities so much that they distinguish human beings from all other living creatures.\n\nEverything we imagine is finite. So we have no idea or conception of anything we call infinite. No one can picture an infinitely large thing or conceive the ends and boundaries of the thing so named. We conceive only our own inability, not the thing itself. We therefore use the name GOD not to form an idea of him—for he cannot be understood, and we cannot conceive his greatness and power—but to honor him. Also, as I said before, everything we conceive was first sensed, either whole or in parts. So no one can have a thought that represents something beyond the reach of the senses. We cannot conceive anything without conceiving it in some place, with a particular size, and divisible into parts. Nor can we conceive one thing as wholly in one place and wholly in another at the same time, or two or more things occupying exactly the same place at once. None of these things has ever been, or can be, experienced by the senses. They are meaningless and absurd expressions accepted on the authority of philosophers who have been deceived and schoolmen who have either been deceived or are deceiving others.\n\nCHAPTER IV. OF SPEECH\n\n### Part I, Chapter IV, 1\n\nOF SPEECH\n\nPrinting was an ingenious invention, but it is not especially important compared with the invention of letters. No one knows who first discovered how to use letters. People say Cadmus, the son of Agenor, King of Phaenicia, first brought them to Greece. Letters are a useful invention. They preserve the memory of the past and connect people scattered across the many distant parts of the earth. They were also hard to invent. Their invention required careful observation of the different movements of the tongue, palate, lips, and other organs of speech, so that corresponding differences between written characters could be made and remembered. But the noblest and most useful invention of all was speech, made of names or terms and the ways they are connected. With speech, people record their thoughts, recall them after they have passed, and communicate them to each other for mutual benefit and conversation. Without speech there would be no Common-wealth, society, contract, or peace among human beings, any more than there is among lions, bears, and wolves. GOD himself first made speech: he taught Adam to name the creatures he brought before him. Scripture says no more about this. But that was enough to guide Adam to add more names as his experience with the creatures and his use of them gave him reason to do so. He could gradually join those names together to make himself understood. In time, he could acquire as much language as he found useful, though not as much as an orator or philosopher needs. I find nothing in Scripture that directly says, or implies, that Adam was taught the names of all shapes, numbers, measurements, colors, sounds, mental images, and relations. Still less does it say he was taught names for words and types of speech, such as general, specific, affirmative, negative, interrogative, optative, and infinitive, all of which are useful. Least of all does it say he learned such school terms as entity, intentionality, and quiddity, or other terms the schools consider meaningful.\n\nBut all the language Adam and his descendants had acquired and developed was lost again at the tower of Babel. God punished each person for rebelling by making them forget their former language. Forced by this to scatter across different parts of the world, they gradually developed the various languages that exist today, as need—the mother of all inventions—taught them. Over time, languages everywhere grew richer.\n\nThe general purpose of speech is to turn our mental discourse into spoken discourse, our train of thoughts into a train of words. This offers two benefits. First, we can record how our thoughts follow from one another. We easily forget those connections and then have to work them out again, but words used to mark them allow us to recall them. So names first serve as marks, or aids to memory. Second, when several people use the same words, their order and connections let them communicate what each thinks about a subject, and also what each wants, fears, or feels through another Passion. For this purpose, words are called signs. Speech has four particular uses. First, we record the causes of present or past things that we discover by thinking, and the effects that present or past things may produce. In short, this is how we acquire practical knowledge. Second, we show others what we have learned: we advise and teach one another. Third, we tell others our wishes and purposes so that we can help one another. Fourth, we harmlessly please and entertain ourselves and others by playing with words for enjoyment or decoration.\n\nThese four uses have four corresponding abuses. First, people record their thoughts wrongly when the meanings of their words shift. They then record as their ideas things they never conceived, and so deceive themselves. Second, they use words metaphorically, with meanings other than their intended ones, and so deceive others. Third, they use words to claim they want something they do not want. Fourth, they use words to hurt one another. Nature has armed some living creatures with teeth, some with horns, and some with hands to hurt an enemy. Using the tongue to hurt an enemy is an abuse of speech, unless we have a duty to govern that person. In that case, the aim is not to hurt but to correct and improve.\n\nSpeech helps us remember how causes and effects follow one another by giving things names and connecting those names.\n\nSome names are proper and refer to just one thing, such as Peter, John, this man, and this tree. Others are common to many things, such as man, horse, and tree. Each is a single name, but it names several individual things. In relation to all of them together it is called universal. Only names are universal in the world. Every thing named is individual and particular.\n\nWe apply one universal name to many things because they resemble one another in some quality or other property. A proper name brings to mind just one thing, but a universal name can bring to mind any of the many things it names.\n\nSome universal names cover more things and some fewer. The broader names include the narrower ones, while some names cover exactly the same things and include each other. For example, body has a broader meaning than man and includes it. Man and rational have the same range and include each other. But note that a name does not always mean just one word, as it does in grammar. Sometimes several words together make one name. All these words, “the person who follows the laws of his country in his actions,” form one name equivalent to the single word “just.”\n\nGiving names broader or narrower meanings changes the way we work out the consequences of things we imagine. It becomes a way of working out the consequences of names instead. For example, a person who cannot use speech at all, having been born and remained completely deaf and unable to speak, might see a triangle beside two right angles, like the corners of a square. By thinking about them, he may find that the three angles of this triangle equal those two right angles. But if someone shows him a differently shaped triangle, he cannot know whether its three angles have the same sum without working it out again. Someone who can use words notices that this equality depends not on the lengths of the triangle's sides or on any other particular feature, but only on its straight sides and its three angles—the very features that make him call it a triangle. He can then confidently conclude that the equality applies to every triangle. He records his discovery in general terms: “Every triangle has three angles equal to two right angles.” A conclusion found in a single case is thus recorded and remembered as a universal rule. We no longer have to do the mental calculation again for every time and place. Apart from the first effort, the mind is spared the work. What was found true here and now becomes true at all times and in all places.\n\nThe value of words for recording our thoughts is nowhere clearer than in counting. A person with a natural intellectual disability who has never learned the order of number words, such as one, two, and three, may notice every strike of a clock, nod at each, or say “one, one, one.” But he can never know what hour it strikes. There seems to have been a time before number words existed, when people had to use the fingers of one or both hands to count things. Perhaps this explains why the words for numbers run only to ten in every nation, and in some nations only to five, before they start again. Even someone who knows how to count to ten will lose track and not know when he has finished if he says the words out of order. Still less can he add, subtract, or carry out other operations of arithmetic. Without words, then, counting numbers is impossible, much less measuring size, speed, force, and the other things that must be calculated if humankind is to survive or thrive.\n\nWhen two names are joined to form a consequence or statement, as in “A man is a living creature” or “If he is a man, he is a living creature,” the statement or consequence is true if the second name, living creature, refers to everything the first name, man, refers to. Otherwise it is false. True and false describe speech, not things. Where there is no speech, there is neither truth nor falsehood. There can be error, as when we expect something that will not happen or suspect something happened when it did not. But in neither case can we accuse a person of saying something untrue.\n\n### Part I, Chapter IV, 2\n\nSince truth consists in putting names in the right order in our statements, anyone seeking exact truth must remember what each name he uses stands for and place it accordingly. Otherwise he will get caught in words like a bird on sticky twigs: the more it struggles, the more stuck it becomes. This is why people working in geometry—the only science God has so far chosen to give humanity—begin by fixing the meanings of their words. They call these fixed meanings definitions and put them at the start of their calculations.\n\nThis shows how necessary it is for anyone seeking true knowledge to examine earlier authors' definitions. He must correct them if they are careless, or make his own. Mistakes in definitions multiply as a calculation proceeds. They lead people into absurdities that they eventually recognize but cannot escape without calculating again from the start, where the mistakes lie. People who trust books are like people who combine many small sums into a larger total without checking whether the small sums were correct. When the error finally becomes obvious, they do not suspect their starting figures and cannot see how to put things right. They spend their time fluttering through their books, like birds that have entered through a chimney and are trapped in a room. They flutter toward the false light of a glass window because they do not think to retrace their way in. So the first use of speech—the acquisition of science—rests on the correct definition of names. Wrong definitions, or no definitions, are its first abuse. They give rise to every false and senseless doctrine. They put those who learn from the authority of books instead of their own thinking as far below ignorant people as people with true science stand above them. Ignorance lies midway between true science and mistaken doctrines. Natural sensation and imagination are not subject to absurdity. Nature itself cannot be wrong. As people acquire more language, they grow either wiser or more foolish than usual. Without written language, no one can become exceptionally wise, or exceptionally foolish unless illness or a defect in the organs has damaged his memory. For the wise use words as counters with which to calculate. Fools treat words as money whose value comes from the authority of Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas, or any other teacher who is merely a human being.\n\nAnything that can enter into a calculation or be considered in one, added to something else to make a total or subtracted to leave a remainder, is a subject for names. The Romans called accounts of money rationes and the act of accounting ratiocinatio. What we call items in bills or account books they called nomina, meaning names. That seems to be why they extended the word ratio to the ability to calculate in every other field. The Greeks have just one word, logos, for both speech and reason. They did not think speech was impossible without reason; they thought reasoning was impossible without speech. They called the act of reasoning syllogism, meaning the summing up of the consequences of one statement for another. Since the same things can enter a calculation under different aspects, their names are changed in different ways to show the difference. These varieties of names fall under four general headings.\n\nFirst, a thing may enter a calculation as matter or body. Examples are living, capable of sensation, rational, hot, cold, moving, and still. Each of these names implies the word matter or body. All such names are names of matter.\n\nSecond, a thing may enter a calculation, or be considered, in terms of an attribute or quality that we conceive it to have: its being in motion, being so long, being hot, and so on. By changing the name of the thing a little, we make a name for the attribute under consideration. Instead of living, we count life; instead of moving, motion; instead of hot, heat; and instead of long, length. All these are names of the attributes and properties that distinguish one piece of matter or one body from another. They are called abstract names because they are separated, not from matter itself, but from the calculation of matter.\n\nThird, we bring into the calculation those properties of our own bodies by which we make these distinctions. When we see something, for example, we count not the thing itself but the sight, the color, and the image of it in our imagination. When we hear something, we count not the thing but the hearing or sound alone, our imagined conception of it through the ear. These are names of mental images.\n\nFourth, we also count, consider, and name names themselves and forms of speech. General, universal, particular, and ambiguous are names of names. Statement, question, command, narrative, syllogism, sermon, speech, and many others are names of forms of speech.\n\nThese are all the varieties of positive names. They mark something that exists in nature or can be imagined by the human mind: bodies that exist or can be conceived as existing, properties of bodies that exist or can be imagined, or words and speech.\n\nThere are also negative names. They indicate that a word is not the name of the thing in question. Examples include nothing, no man, infinite, unteachable, and three lack four. Although these do not name any thing, they help us calculate and correct our calculations. They bring our former thoughts to mind by making us reject names used incorrectly.\n\nAll other names are meaningless sounds. There are two kinds. One consists of new names whose meanings have not yet been explained by definitions. Scholars and confused philosophers have coined plenty of these.\n\nThe other arises when people make a single name out of two names whose meanings contradict each other. An example is incorporeal body, or its equivalent, incorporeal substance; there are many more. Whenever a statement is false, joining the two names that compose it into a single name produces a phrase that means nothing. If it is false to say, “A quadrangle is round,” then “round quadrangle” means nothing. It is mere sound. Likewise, if virtue cannot be poured or blown from place to place, “poured-in virtue” and “blown-in virtue” are as absurd and meaningless as “round quadrangle.” This is why almost every senseless and meaningless word you encounter is made up of Latin or Greek names. A French person seldom hears our Savior called Parole, but often hears him called Verbe. Yet Verbe and Parole differ only because one comes from Latin and the other is French.\n\nWhen someone hears a statement and has the thoughts that its words and their connections were designed to convey, we say he understands it. Understanding is simply the conception produced by speech. If speech belongs only to human beings, as far as I know it does, then understanding belongs only to them too. Therefore a universal statement that is absurd or false cannot be understood. Many people think they understand one when they merely repeat its words softly or rehearse them in their minds.\n\nI will discuss the kinds of speech that express the desires, aversions, and Passions of the human mind, and how they are used and abused, when I discuss the Passions themselves.\n\nThe names of things that affect us—things we like or dislike—have unstable meanings in ordinary conversation. Different people react differently to the same thing, and the same person reacts differently at different times. Every name is assigned to express a conception, and all our feelings are conceptions. When we conceive the same thing differently, it is hard to avoid naming it differently. The thing conceived may be the same, but we receive it differently because our bodies differ and our opinions carry different prejudices. Our differing Passions color everything. So in reasoning we must watch our words. Besides conveying what we imagine about things, some words also disclose the speaker's nature, disposition, and interests. Names for virtues and vices are examples: one person calls wisdom what another calls fear; one calls cruelty what another calls justice; one calls extravagance what another calls generosity; and one calls seriousness what another calls stupidity. Such names can never serve as sound foundations for reasoning. Nor can metaphors and figures of speech. These are less dangerous, however, because they openly show their shifting meanings, while the others do not.\n\nChapter V. Of Reason and Science.\n\n### Part I, Chapter V\n\nOf Reason and Science\n\nWhen someone reasons, all he does is conceive a total by adding parts together, or conceive a remainder by subtracting one sum from another. When he does this with words, he conceives how the names of all the parts lead to the name of the whole, or how the names of the whole and one part lead to the name of the other part. With numbers, people also speak of multiplying and dividing, as well as adding and subtracting. But these are the same operations. Multiplication adds equal quantities together; division repeatedly subtracts a quantity as many times as possible. These operations apply not just to numbers but to every kind of thing that can be added together or subtracted from another. Arithmetic teaches addition and subtraction with numbers. Geometry teaches them with lines, figures both solid and flat, angles, proportions, times, degrees of speed, force, power, and the like. Logic does the same with the consequences of words: it joins two names to make a statement, two statements to make a syllogism, and many syllogisms to make a proof. It subtracts one proposition from a syllogism's sum or conclusion to find the other. Writers on politics combine agreements to discover people's duties. Lawyers combine laws and facts to determine right and wrong in the actions of private people. In short, wherever things can be added and subtracted, reason has a place. Where they cannot, reason has nothing to do.\n\nFrom all this we can define, or settle, what the word reason means when we count it among the mind's abilities. Reason, in this sense, is nothing more than calculating—that is, adding and subtracting—the consequences of general names that people have agreed to use to mark and express their thoughts. I say that we mark our thoughts when we calculate for ourselves. We express them when we show or establish our calculations for others.\n\nIn arithmetic, beginners necessarily make mistakes, and even experts may often calculate incorrectly. Likewise, even the most able, attentive, and practiced people can deceive themselves and draw false conclusions in any other field of reasoning. This does not mean reason itself is ever anything but correct reason, any more than arithmetic ceases to be a sure and reliable art. But no single person's reason, or that of any group, guarantees certainty. An account is not correct merely because many people have unanimously approved it. When people dispute an account, they must agree to accept an arbitrator or judge whose reasoning will count as correct and whose decision both sides will abide by. Otherwise they must either fight or leave their dispute unsettled, since nature has not appointed a standard of correct reason. The same holds in every kind of debate. Some people consider themselves wiser than everybody else and loudly demand correct reason as their judge, but want everything decided by their own reasoning alone. This is as intolerable in human society as letting a card player, after the trump suit has been set, declare whichever suit he holds most of to be trump whenever he pleases. People who demand that each of their Passions, as it takes control of them, count as correct reason in their own disputes are doing exactly this. Their claim itself reveals their lack of correct reason.\n\nThe use and aim of reason is not to find the sum and truth of one or a few consequences far removed from the first definitions and established meanings of names. It is to start with these and proceed from consequence to consequence. We cannot be certain of the final conclusion unless we are certain of every statement and denial on which it rests. Consider a head of a household checking the accounts. Suppose he totals all the expense bills but does not check how the people who submitted them totaled each bill, or even what he is paying for. He gains no more than he would by accepting the whole account at once on trust in the skill and honesty of each accountant. The same is true of reasoning about anything else. Someone who accepts authors' conclusions on trust instead of tracing them back to the first items in every calculation—the meanings of names fixed by definitions—wastes his effort. He knows nothing; he merely believes.\n\nSomeone can calculate without words when dealing with particular things. Seeing something, for instance, we can guess what probably came before it or what will probably follow. If the expected event does not follow, or the supposed earlier event did not occur, that is called error. Even the most prudent people make such mistakes. But when we reason in general words and reach a false general conclusion, that is not really an error, though it is commonly called one. It is an absurdity, or meaningless speech. An error is a mistaken expectation about the past or future when the supposed event, though it did not or will not occur, was not recognizably impossible. But when we make a general claim that is untrue, we cannot even conceive its possibility. Words from which we conceive nothing beyond their sound are what we call absurd, meaningless, or nonsense. So if someone talked to me about a round quadrangle, the attributes of bread in cheese, immaterial substances, a free subject, a free will, or anything free in a sense other than unhindered by opposition, I would not call him mistaken. I would say his words have no meaning: they are absurd.\n\nI said earlier, in the second chapter, that human beings surpass other animals in this ability: whenever a person conceives anything, he tends to ask what will follow from it and what effects he can produce with it. I now add another degree of that same advantage. Through words, he can turn the consequences he discovers into general rules called theorems or aphorisms. In other words, he can reason, or calculate, not just with numbers but with anything whose parts can be added to or subtracted from one another.\n\nBut this privilege comes with another: the privilege of absurdity, which no living creature other than a human being possesses. Among human beings, those who claim to be philosophers are most prone to it. Cicero was quite right to say somewhere that nothing is too absurd to be found in philosophers' books. The reason is clear. Not one of them begins reasoning with definitions or explanations of the names he will use. This method has been used only in geometry, which is why its conclusions cannot be disputed.\n\nI attribute the first cause of absurd conclusions to a lack of method. People fail to begin their reasoning with definitions—that is, with fixed meanings for their words—as though they could calculate without knowing the value of the number words one, two, and three.\n\nAs I mentioned in the preceding chapter, bodies can be counted under several different aspects. When people give these aspects different names and then confuse the names or join them badly in statements, various absurdities result. Therefore:\n\nI attribute the second cause of absurd statements to giving names for bodies to their attributes, or names for attributes to bodies. People do this when they say faith is poured in or breathed in, though only a body can be poured or breathed into anything. They do it when they say extension is a body, or images are spirits, and so on.\n\nThe third cause is giving the names of attributes of bodies outside us to attributes of our own bodies. Examples include saying that color is in the body and sound is in the air.\n\nThe fourth cause is giving names for bodies to names or forms of speech. Examples include saying that there are universal things, or that a living creature is a genus, or a general thing.\n\nThe fifth cause is giving names for attributes to names and forms of speech. People do this when they say the nature of a thing is in its definition or a person's command is his will.\n\nThe sixth cause is using metaphors, other figures, and rhetorical language in place of precise words. In everyday speech it is fine to say, for instance, “The road goes or leads here or there,” or “The proverb says this or that.” Roads cannot go anywhere and proverbs cannot speak, however. Such expressions should not be admitted when calculating and seeking the truth.\n\nThe seventh cause is the use of names that mean nothing but are learned by rote from the schools: hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-now, and similar scholarly jargon.\n\nSomeone who avoids these things is unlikely to fall into absurdity, unless a calculation is so long that he forgets an earlier step. Everyone by nature reasons equally and reasons well from sound principles. Who could make a mistake in geometry and then persist in it when someone else points it out?\n\nThis shows that reason is not something we are born with, like sensation and memory. Nor do we get it from experience alone, as we do prudence. We acquire it through work: first by assigning names properly, and second by developing a good, orderly method. We proceed from the elements, which are names, to statements made by joining one name with another, then to syllogisms made by joining one statement with another. Finally we gain knowledge of all the consequences of the names relevant to the subject. People call this science. Sensation and memory give us knowledge only of facts, which are past and cannot be changed. Science gives us knowledge of consequences and of how one fact depends on another. It lets us use what we can do now to learn how to do something else whenever we want, or how to do the same thing on another occasion. Once we see how something happens, from which causes and by what process, we can produce the same effects when similar causes are in our power.\n\nChildren have no reason at all until they learn to speak. We call them rational creatures because they clearly may be able to reason later. Most adults can reason a little, as in counting up to a point, but find little use for it in ordinary life. They manage their lives more or less well according to differences in experience, speed of memory, and the ends they seek, and especially according to good or bad fortune and one another's errors. They have so little science, or certain rules for their actions, that they do not even know what it is. They have thought geometry was magic. As for other sciences, people who have not been taught their starting points and enough of their development to see how they arise and are acquired resemble children who know nothing about reproduction and believe women who tell them their brothers and sisters were found in the garden rather than born.\n\nYet people with no science are in a better and more honorable condition when they use their natural prudence than people who reason badly, or trust bad reasoners, and arrive at false and absurd general rules. Ignorance of causes and rules does not lead people as far astray as reliance on false rules and the mistaken belief that things opposed to their aims are causes that advance those aims.\n\nTo conclude, clear words are the light of human minds, once exact definitions have trimmed the wick and removed ambiguity. Reason sets the pace; growing scientific knowledge is the road; and the benefit of humanity is the destination. Metaphors and senseless or ambiguous words, by contrast, are like deceptive marsh lights. To reason with them is to wander among countless absurdities. The result is conflict, rebellion, or contempt.\n\nJust as extensive experience is prudence, extensive science is wisdom. Though we usually use the single word wisdom for both, the Romans always distinguished prudentia from sapientia, applying the first to experience and the second to science. To see the distinction more clearly, imagine one person naturally very skilled at handling his weapons. Imagine another who has that same skill and has also learned the science of where he can strike an opponent, or be struck by him, in every possible stance or guard. The first person's skill stands to the second's as prudence stands to scientific wisdom. Both are useful, but the second is reliable. People who rely solely on the authority of books and blindly follow blind guides are like someone who trusts the false rules of a fencing master and rashly faces an opponent who kills or humiliates him.\n\nSome signs of science are certain and reliable; others are uncertain. A certain sign is that someone claiming knowledge can teach it—that is, can clearly demonstrate its truth to someone else. An uncertain sign is that some particular events turn out as he predicted, even if many do. All signs of prudence are uncertain, for no one can observe through experience and remember every circumstance that could change the result. When someone lacks certain science to guide him in a matter, it is foolish to abandon his own natural judgment for general sayings from authors that admit many exceptions. People commonly mock this as pedantry. Even among people who like to show off their reading of politics and history in councils of the Common-wealth, very few do so in household matters where their own interests are at stake. They have enough prudence for their private concerns. In public matters, though, they care more about their reputation for cleverness than about success in someone else's business.\n\nChapter VI. Of the Internal Beginnings of Voluntary Motions Commonly Called the Passions, and the Speech That Expresses Them.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VI, 1\n\nOf the Internal Beginnings of Voluntary Motions Commonly Called the Passions, and the Speech That Expresses Them\n\nAnimals have two kinds of motion peculiar to them. One is called vital motion. It begins when an animal is conceived and continues without interruption throughout its life. The circulation of blood, the pulse, breathing, digestion, nutrition, and excretion are examples. These motions need no help from imagination. The other is animal motion, also called voluntary motion: walking, speaking, and moving our limbs in ways we first imagine in our minds. I said in the first and second chapters that sensation is motion in the organs and inner parts of the human body, caused by the action of things we see, hear, and so on. Imagination is the remainder of that same motion after sensation has ended. Walking, speaking, and similar voluntary motions always depend on a prior thought about where to go, which way to move, or what to do. So imagination is clearly the first internal beginning of every voluntary motion. People who have not studied the matter cannot conceive of any motion where the moving thing is invisible or moves too short a distance to be noticed. But the motion exists all the same. However tiny a distance is, anything moving across a longer distance that includes it must first cross that tiny distance. These small beginnings of motion inside the human body, before they appear as walking, speaking, striking, or other visible acts, are commonly called endeavor.\n\nWhen this endeavor is directed toward what causes it, it is called appetite or desire. Desire is the general term; appetite is often restricted to the desire for food and drink, or hunger and thirst. When endeavor moves away from something, it is generally called aversion. Appetite and aversion are Latin words for the motions of approaching and withdrawing. The equivalent Greek words, orme and aphorme, mean the same things. Nature often presses truths on people that they later stumble over when they look for something beyond nature. The schools claim that a mere desire to go or move contains no actual motion. Because they must acknowledge some motion, however, they call it metaphorical motion. That is absurd: words can be metaphorical, but bodies and motions cannot.\n\nWe also say people love what they desire and hate what they feel aversion to. Desire and love are the same thing, except that desire always refers to an absent object, while love usually refers to one that is present. Likewise, aversion refers to an absent object, while hate refers to one that is present.\n\nSome appetites and aversions are inborn: the appetite for food, the urge to excrete and to relieve the body—which might more accurately be called aversions to something felt within it—and a few others. The remaining appetites, for particular things, come from experience and from testing their effects on us or on other people. When we know nothing about something or do not believe it exists, we can desire no more than to sample and test it. But we can feel aversion not only toward things we know have hurt us, but also toward things we do not know to be safe.\n\nWhen we neither desire nor hate something, we are said to hold it in contempt. Contempt is simply the heart's stillness or resistance to the action of certain things. It occurs because stronger objects already move the heart in another direction or because we have no experience of those things.\n\nThe state of a person's body is always changing. The same things therefore cannot always produce the same desires and aversions in him. It is even less possible for everyone to agree in desiring almost any single object.\n\nWhatever anyone desires is what he, for his own part, calls good. What he hates or feels aversion to he calls evil, and what he holds in contempt he calls worthless or insignificant. The words good, evil, and contemptible always refer to the person using them. Nothing is good or evil simply and absolutely. There is no shared rule of good and evil drawn from the nature of objects themselves. Where there is no Common-wealth, that rule comes from the individual. Within a Common-wealth it comes from the person who represents it, or from an arbitrator or judge whom people who disagree agree to appoint, accepting his judgment as their rule.\n\nLatin has two words close in meaning to good and evil, but not precisely the same: pulchrum and turpe. The first means what shows signs promising good; the second, what promises evil. English has no names as general as these. For pulchrum we say, depending on the thing, fair, beautiful, handsome, splendid, honorable, becoming, or lovable. For turpe we say foul, deformed, ugly, base, nauseating, and the like. In each proper use, these words mean only an appearance or expression that promises good or evil. Thus there are three kinds of good: good in promise, or pulchrum; good in effect, as the desired end, called jucundum or delightful; and good as a means, called utile or useful. There are likewise three kinds of evil: evil in promise, called turpe; evil in effect or as an end, called molestum, unpleasant or troublesome; and evil as a means, called inutile, useless or harmful.\n\nAs I have said before, what actually happens within us when we sense something is only motion caused by an external object. But what appears to us is light and color to the eye, sound to the ear, smell to the nose, and so on. Likewise, when an object's action continues from the eyes, ears, and other organs to the heart, its real effect there is only motion or endeavor: appetite toward the object or aversion from it. What this motion appears or feels like is what we call delight or mental trouble.\n\nThe motion called appetite, which appears to us as delight or pleasure, seems to strengthen and help vital motion. So people quite reasonably called things that cause delight jucunda, from the Latin for helping or strengthening. They called the opposite molesta, or offensive things, because these obstruct and disturb vital motion.\n\nPleasure or delight, then, is the appearance or feeling of good. Trouble or displeasure is the appearance or feeling of evil. Consequently every appetite, desire, and love comes with some degree of delight, and every hatred or aversion with some degree of displeasure or offense.\n\nSome pleasures and delights come from sensing an object that is present. We can call these pleasures of sense. The word sensual, as used only by those who condemn these pleasures, has no place until laws exist. This category includes all the body's filling and emptying, and everything pleasant to sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch. Other pleasures arise from expecting something because we foresee the end or consequence of things, whether or not the things themselves please us when sensed. These are pleasures of the mind of the person who works out the consequences. They are generally called joy. In the same way, some displeasures are felt through the senses and called pain, while others concern expected consequences and are called grief.\n\nThese simple Passions—appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief—receive different names under different circumstances. First, when one follows another, their names vary according to what people think their chances are of getting what they desire. Second, names vary with what is loved or hated. Third, they vary when several Passions are considered together. Fourth, they vary with the change or succession itself.\n\nHope—Desire combined with a belief that we will obtain its object is called hope.\n\nDespair—The same desire without that belief is despair.\n\nFear—Aversion accompanied by an expectation of harm from its object is fear.\n\nCourage—The same aversion, joined with the hope of avoiding harm through resistance, is courage.\n\nAnger—Sudden courage is anger.\n\nConfidence—Steady hope is confidence in ourselves.\n\nLack of confidence—Steady despair is lack of confidence in ourselves.\n\nIndignation—Anger over great harm done to another, when we believe the harm is an injustice, is indignation.\n\nBenevolence—The desire for someone else's good is benevolence, goodwill, or charity. When directed toward people in general, it is good nature.\n\nCovetousness—The desire for riches is covetousness. This name always carries blame because people competing for riches resent others who obtain them. But the desire itself deserves blame or approval according to the means used to seek riches.\n\nAmbition—The desire for office or precedence is ambition. This name also carries blame, for the reason just given.\n\nSmall-mindedness—Desiring things that do little to advance our aims, and fearing things that do little to obstruct them, is small-mindedness.\n\nGreatness of mind—Disregarding minor helps and obstacles is greatness of mind.\n\nValor—Greatness of mind when facing death or wounds is valor or fortitude.\n\nGenerosity—Greatness of mind in the use of riches is generosity.\n\nMiserliness—Small-mindedness in the use of riches is wretchedness, miserliness, or thrift, depending on whether people dislike or approve of it.\n\nKindness—Love of people for the sake of their company is kindness.\n\nNatural lust—Love of people solely for sensory pleasure is natural lust.\n\nLuxury—Love of the same sort arising from dwelling in the imagination on pleasure experienced before is luxury.\n\nThe passion of love; jealousy—Loving one person alone, with a desire to be loved exclusively in return, is the passion of love. If accompanied by fear that the love is not returned, it is jealousy.\n\nRevengefulness—The desire to hurt someone in order to make him condemn something he has done is revengefulness.\n\nCuriosity—The desire to know why and how is curiosity. No living creature but a human being has it. Thus humans differ from other animals not only in reason but also in this special Passion. In other animals, the stronger appetite for food and other pleasures of sense crowds out any concern to know causes. Curiosity is a desire of the mind. Through lasting pleasure in the continuous and tireless production of knowledge, it surpasses the brief intensity of any bodily pleasure.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VI, 2\n\nReligion; superstition; true religion—Fear of an invisible power imagined by the mind, or conceived from stories accepted publicly, is religion. If those stories are not publicly accepted, it is superstition. When the power imagined really is as we imagine it, it is true religion.\n\nPanic terror—Fear without awareness of its cause or object is panic terror. The name comes from stories that attribute such fears to Pan. In fact, the first person frightened always has some idea of the cause. Others flee by following his example, each assuming someone else knows why. This Passion therefore occurs only in a crowd or large group.\n\nWonder—Joy at the perception of something new is wonder. It is peculiar to human beings because it stirs their desire to know the cause.\n\nGlory; vainglory—The joy that comes from imagining our own power and ability is the mental elation called glorying. If it rests on our experience of our previous actions, it is the same as confidence. If it rests on other people's flattery, or on something we merely imagine about ourselves because its consequences please us, it is called vainglory. This is an apt name. Well-founded confidence leads people to make an attempt, while imagining that they have power does not, making such glory vain.\n\nDejection—Grief at the belief that one lacks power is called dejection of mind.\n\nYoung men are especially prone to the kind of vainglory that consists in pretending or imagining that we have abilities we know we lack. Stories or fictional accounts of impressive people nourish it. Age and work often correct it.\n\nSudden glory; laughter—Sudden glory is the Passion that produces the facial contortions called laughter. It comes either from an unexpected act of one's own that gives pleasure, or from suddenly noticing something misshapen in another person and praising oneself by comparison. It occurs most often in people who know they have few abilities of their own. They must keep a good opinion of themselves by noticing other people's faults. Frequent laughter at others' defects is therefore a sign of small-mindedness. One of the proper tasks of great minds is to help others and spare them scorn. Great-minded people compare themselves only with the most able.\n\nSudden dejection; weeping—Conversely, sudden dejection is the Passion that causes weeping. It comes from events that abruptly take away an intense hope or a support for one's power. Those who mainly depend on outside help, such as women and children, are most subject to it. Some weep over the loss of friends; others over friends' unkindness; others when reconciliation suddenly puts a stop to their thoughts of revenge. In every case, laughter and weeping are sudden responses that habit takes away. Nobody laughs at old jokes or weeps over a misfortune long past.\n\nShame; blushing—Grief at the discovery that one lacks some ability is shame, a Passion that shows itself in blushing. It involves the awareness of something dishonorable. In young men, shame shows a concern for a good reputation and is praiseworthy. In old men it shows the same concern, but it comes too late to deserve praise.\n\nShamelessness—Disregard for a good reputation is called shamelessness.\n\nPity—Grief over someone else's misfortune is pity. It arises from imagining that the same thing could happen to oneself, and is therefore also called compassion or, in current language, fellow-feeling. The best people feel least pity for a misfortune caused by great wickedness. Likewise, those who consider themselves least liable to a particular misfortune feel the least pity for it.\n\nCruelty—Disregard for, or little feeling about, other people's misfortunes is what people call cruelty. It comes from feeling secure about one's own fortune. I cannot conceive that anyone would enjoy great harm to others without some further aim of his own.\n\nEmulation; envy—Grief over a competitor's success in wealth, honor, or another good is emulation if it comes with an effort to develop our own abilities to match or surpass his. If it comes with an effort to undermine or obstruct the competitor, it is envy.\n\nDeliberation—Sometimes our minds alternate between desires and aversions, hopes and fears, concerning the same thing. The various good and evil consequences of doing or not doing it enter our thoughts in succession. At one moment we want to do it; at another we feel aversion to it. Sometimes we hope we can do it; sometimes we despair or fear even to try. The entire sequence of desires, aversions, hopes, and fears, continuing until the thing is done or judged impossible, is what we call deliberation.\n\nWe cannot deliberate about the past, since it clearly cannot be changed. Nor can we deliberate about things we know or think are impossible, because we know or think that deliberating would be pointless. But we can deliberate about impossible things we think are possible, since we do not know it is pointless. This is called deliberation because it ends the freedom we had to do or omit an action according to our desires or aversions.\n\nOther living creatures experience this same alternation of desires, aversions, hopes, and fears no less than human beings do. So animals also deliberate.\n\nDeliberation is said to end when the matter under consideration is either done or judged impossible. Until then, we remain free to do or omit it according to our desires or aversions.\n\nDuring deliberation, the final desire or aversion immediately preceding an action or its omission is what we call the will: the act of willing, not a faculty of will. Animals that deliberate must therefore have a will too. The usual definition given in the schools, that will is a rational appetite, is not sound. If it were, no voluntary action could go against reason. A voluntary action is one that proceeds from the will, and no other action is voluntary. But if instead of rational appetite we say an appetite arising from prior deliberation, the definition is the same as mine. Will, then, is the last desire in deliberation. In ordinary conversation we may say that someone once wanted to do something but decided not to. Strictly speaking, that earlier desire was merely an inclination and did not make any action voluntary. The action depends on the last inclination or desire, not the earlier one. If the desires that came in between made an action voluntary, the aversions that came in between would likewise make the same action involuntary. One action would then be both voluntary and involuntary.\n\nClearly, then, voluntary actions include not only actions arising from covetousness, ambition, lust, and other desires for what is proposed. They also include actions arising from aversion or fear of the consequences of failing to act.\n\nSome forms of speech that express the Passions are the same as those that express our thoughts, and some differ. Generally, every Passion can be expressed with an indicative statement: “I love,” “I fear,” “I rejoice,” “I deliberate,” “I will,” or “I command.” But some have expressions of their own, which are not statements unless they also allow us to draw conclusions beyond the Passion that produced them. Deliberation is expressed with conditional speech, which states suppositions and their consequences: “If this happens, that will follow.” It differs from the language of reasoning only because reasoning uses general words while deliberation mostly concerns particular things. Desire and aversion speak through imperatives such as “Do this” and “Do not do that.” If the person addressed is obliged to act or refrain, the imperative is a command. Otherwise it is a request or advice. Vainglory, indignation, pity, and revengefulness speak through expressions of wishes. The desire for knowledge has its own form of expression, a question: “What is it?”, “When will it happen?”, “How is it done?”, or “Why is that?” I find no other language of the Passions. Cursing, swearing, insults, and the like convey meaning not as speech but as actions of a tongue used to behaving that way.\n\nAs I have said, these forms of speech voluntarily express or indicate our Passions, but they are not certain signs of them. People can use them at will whether they feel those Passions or not. The best signs of present Passions are a person's facial expression, bodily movements, actions, and the ends or aims we otherwise know that person has.\n\nIn deliberation, desires and aversions arise from foreseeing the good and evil results of the action being considered. Whether the action does good or evil depends on foreseeing a long chain of consequences, whose end very few people can see. But as far along that chain as someone can see, if the good outweighs the evil, writers call the chain as a whole apparent or seeming good. If the evil outweighs the good, they call it apparent or seeming evil. The person whose experience or reason gives him the widest and surest view of consequences deliberates best for himself and can, when he wishes, give others the best advice.\n\nContinued success in obtaining the things we desire from time to time—in other words, continued prosperity—is what people call happiness. I mean happiness in this life. There is no lasting peace of mind as long as we live here. Life itself is motion, and it can no more exist without desire or fear than without sensation. No one will know what kind of happiness God has prepared for those who devoutly honor him until he experiences it. Those joys are now as impossible to comprehend as the schoolmen's phrase beatific vision is impossible to understand.\n\nThe form of speech that expresses a person's belief about the goodness of something is praise. Speech expressing its power and greatness is magnifying. The Greeks called speech expressing one's opinion of a person's happiness makarismos, for which English has no name. That is enough about the Passions for the present purpose.\n\nChapter VII. Of the Ends or Resolutions of Discourse\n\n### Part I, Chapter VII\n\nOf the Ends or Conclusions of Reasoning\n\nEvery line of reasoning driven by a desire for knowledge eventually ends, either because we reach an answer or because we give up. Wherever the chain of reasoning breaks off, it has ended for the time being.\n\nWhen reasoning takes place only in the mind, our thoughts alternate: something will happen, then it will not; or something happened, then it did not. So wherever you interrupt someone's chain of thought, you leave that person assuming either that it will or will not happen, or that it did or did not happen. All these assumptions are opinions. In deliberation about good and evil, desires alternate. In investigating the truth about the past and future, opinions alternate in the same way. The final desire in deliberation is called the will. In the same way, the final opinion in a search for truth about the past or future is called the judgment, the reasoner's settled and final verdict. The whole sequence of alternating desires about good and bad is deliberation. Likewise, the whole sequence of alternating opinions about true and false is doubt.\n\nNo reasoning can end in absolute knowledge of a fact, past or future. Knowledge of a fact begins in the senses and afterward exists in memory. Knowledge of consequences, which I have already called science, is conditional, not absolute. Reasoning cannot tell someone absolutely that a particular thing exists, existed, or will exist. It can only tell them that if this exists, that exists; if this happened, that happened; and if this will happen, that will happen. This is conditional knowledge. Moreover, it concerns not the consequence of one thing from another, but the consequence of one name for a thing from another name for that same thing.\n\nWhen reasoning is expressed in speech, it starts with definitions of words. It then combines those words into general statements and combines the statements into syllogisms. Its final result is called the conclusion. The thought expressed by the conclusion is conditional knowledge, or knowledge of the consequences of words, commonly called science. But if such reasoning does not start with definitions, or if the definitions are not properly joined in syllogisms, its conclusion is again only opinion. It is an opinion about the truth of something said, even if that thing is sometimes put in absurd, senseless words that cannot be understood. When two or more people know about the same fact, they are said to be conscious of it together: they share knowledge of it. Because they make the best witnesses to each other's actions, or to a third person's, it has always been considered deeply wrong to speak against one's conscience, or to corrupt or force another person to do so. That is why appeals to conscience have always received close attention. Later people used the same word figuratively for their knowledge of their own secret acts and thoughts. Thus the saying that conscience is a thousand witnesses is a figure of speech. Finally, people passionately attached to their own new opinions, however absurd, and determined to defend them, gave those opinions the respected name of conscience too. They wanted it to seem wrong to change or contradict them. They claimed to know their opinions were true when, at most, they knew only that they held them.\n\nIf someone's reasoning does not start from definitions, it starts either from another thought of their own, in which case its result is still called opinion, or from someone else's statement. In the second case, they have no doubt about that person's ability to know the truth or honesty in telling it. Their reasoning then concerns the person more than the subject. Its conclusion is called belief and faith: faith in the person, and belief both in the person and in the truth of what that person says. Belief therefore contains two opinions, one about what the person says and one about that person's character. To have faith in, trust, or believe a person all mean the same thing: to consider that person truthful. To believe what is said means only to think the statement true. But notice that the expression “I believe in,” like the Latin “Credo In” and the Greek “Pisteno Eis,” appears only in the writings of theologians. Other writings instead say “I believe him,” “I have faith in him,” or “I rely on him”; in Latin, “Credo Illi” and “Fido Illi”; in Greek, “Pisteno Anto.” This special church use of the word has caused many disputes over the proper object of Christian faith.\n\nBut “believing in,” as used in the Creed, means confessing and acknowledging its doctrine, not trusting a person. Christians are not alone in believing God in the sense of accepting everything they hear him say as true, whether or not they understand it. People of every kind can do that. This is the fullest faith and trust anyone can have in any person. Yet they do not all believe the doctrine of the Creed.\n\nIt follows that when we believe a statement because of the authority and good opinion of the speaker, rather than arguments from the matter itself or principles of natural reason, the speaker is the object of our faith. It is that person we believe and trust and whose word we accept. That person alone receives the honor of being believed. Consequently, if we believe the Scriptures are the word of God without any direct revelation from God himself, our belief, faith, and trust are placed in the Church. We accept its word and rest on it. People who believe what a prophet tells them in God's name accept the prophet's word. They honor and trust him about what he reports, whether he is a true prophet or a false one. The same applies to all other history. If I disbelieved everything historians wrote about the glorious deeds of Alexander or Caesar, I doubt either man's ghost would have good reason to be offended. Only the historian might. If Livy says the gods once made a cow speak and we do not believe him, it is Livy we distrust, not God. Clearly, whatever we believe solely on the authority of human beings and their writings, whether or not they were sent by God, is faith in human beings alone.\n\nChapter VIII. Of the Qualities Commonly Called Intellectual Virtues, and Their Opposite Defects\n\n### Part I, Chapter VIII, 1\n\nOf the Qualities Commonly Called Intellectual Virtues, and Their Opposite Defects\n\nVirtue, in anything, is a quality valued because it stands out. It depends on comparison. If everyone had everything equally, nothing would be prized. Intellectual virtues are the abilities of the mind that people praise, value, and want for themselves. They are commonly called good wit, though “wit” is also used for one particular ability among them.\n\nThese virtues are either natural or acquired. By natural I do not mean what a person has from birth. That is merely the senses, in which human beings differ so little from each other, or from animals, that they cannot count as virtues. I mean the wit gained simply through use and experience, without a method, training, or instruction. natural wit chiefly consists of two things: quick imagination, meaning a swift succession of thoughts, and steady direction toward an approved goal. By contrast, slow imagination is the mental defect commonly called dullness or stupidity, along with other names suggesting slow movement or difficulty in getting started.\n\nDifferences in quickness come from differences in people's passions. People love or dislike different things, so their thoughts go in different directions. They notice and dwell on different things passing through their minds. In the succession of thoughts, we can notice only how things resemble each other, how they differ, what they are useful for, or how they serve some purpose. People who notice resemblances others seldom notice are said to have good wit; here that means a good imagination. Those who notice differences and distinctions, and can judge between things where that is difficult, have good judgment. In conversation and business, where we must distinguish times, places, and people, this virtue is called discretion. Imagination without the help of judgment is not praised as a virtue. Judgment and discretion, however, are praised in themselves even without imagination. Good imagination also needs discretion about times, places, and people. Beyond that, it needs a person to keep applying their thoughts to a goal, that is, to some practical use. A person who does this can readily find comparisons that please. These comparisons explain their argument, adorn it with fresh and fitting metaphors, and surprise people with their originality. But without steadiness and direction toward a goal, a powerful imagination is a kind of madness. Some people enter a discussion and then let every passing thought drag them away. Their digressions and side remarks become so many and so long that they lose their way entirely. I know no special name for this folly. Sometimes it comes from lack of experience, which makes something seem new and unusual to one person when others see nothing special in it. Sometimes it comes from timidity, which makes something seem important when others think it trivial. Anything that seems new or important, and thus worth mentioning, gradually pulls the speaker away from the intended subject.\n\nA good epic or dramatic poem, sonnet, epigram, or other piece needs both judgment and imagination. But imagination should stand out more. Such works please by their freedom and inventiveness, though poor discretion must not make them displeasing.\n\nIn a good history, judgment must stand out. Its quality depends on its method, its truth, and its choice of the actions most useful to know about. Imagination has no role except to adorn the style.\n\nIn speeches of praise and attacks on people, imagination dominates. The aim is not truth but honor or dishonor, achieved by flattering or degrading comparisons. Judgment only identifies the circumstances that make an action praiseworthy or blameworthy.\n\nIn speeches urging action and in legal arguments, judgment or imagination is most needed according to whether truth or disguise best serves the speaker's purpose.\n\nIn demonstrations, counsel, and every rigorous search for truth, judgment does all the work. Sometimes a good comparison helps someone understand, and imagination is useful to that extent. But metaphors must be excluded entirely here. They openly present one thing as another, and admitting them into counsel or reasoning would plainly be foolish.\n\nIn any discussion, if a lack of discretion is obvious, even the most brilliant imagination will make the discussion seem witless. When discretion is obvious, no amount of ordinary imagination has that effect.\n\nA person's private thoughts move freely among all things: sacred and profane, clean and obscene, serious and light. There is no shame or blame in that. But a person cannot speak about them all unless judgment finds the time, place, and audience appropriate. An anatomist or doctor may speak or write about unclean matters because the point is to help, not to entertain. Another person writing playful and extravagant fantasies about them is like someone who has rolled in the dirt and then presented himself in polite company. Lack of discretion makes the difference. Again, in a relaxed mood among familiar people, someone may play with sounds and double meanings, sometimes with exceptional inventiveness. But in a sermon, in public, or before strangers or people we ought to respect, any such wordplay will be judged foolish. Again, lack of discretion makes the difference. So when someone lacks wit, what is missing is not imagination but discretion. Judgment without imagination is wit; imagination without judgment is not.\n\nSuppose someone pursuing a goal thinks about many things and notices how they might help reach it, or what other goals they might serve. If those observations are unusual and hard to make, this ability is called prudence. It depends on extensive experience and memory of similar things and their earlier results. People differ less in prudence than in imagination or judgment. People of the same age have roughly equal amounts of experience, though their opportunities differ, since each has private goals. Managing a household well and managing a kingdom well require different kinds of business, not different degrees of prudence. Likewise, painting a small picture and painting one life-size or larger require different kinds of work, not different degrees of art. An ordinary farmer is more prudent in running his own home than a privy counselor would be in managing another person's affairs.\n\nAdd unjust or dishonest means to prudence, such as fear or need often prompts, and you have the crooked wisdom called craft. It shows a lack of courage, since greatness of spirit means rejecting unjust or dishonest help. There is also what the Latin writers call versutia, or “shifting”: escaping a present danger or difficulty by taking on a greater one, as when someone robs one person to pay another. This is merely short-sighted craft. Versutia comes from versura, which means borrowing money at interest to pay interest immediately due.\n\nAs for acquired wit, meaning wit gained by method and instruction, there is only reason. It rests on using speech correctly and produces the sciences. I have already discussed reason and science in the fifth and sixth chapters.\n\nDifferences in wit come from the passions. Differences in passions arise partly from bodily constitution and partly from education. If differences in wit came from the brain's makeup or from the organs of the outward or inward senses, people would differ as much in sight, hearing, and their other senses as they do in imagination and discretion. So the difference comes from the passions, which vary both with people's constitutions and with their customs and education.\n\nThe passions chiefly responsible for differences in wit are the varying desires for power, wealth, knowledge, and honor. All can be reduced to the first, desire for power. Wealth, knowledge, and honor are kinds of power.\n\nSomeone with no strong passion for any of these things, who is, as people say, indifferent, may be a good person to the extent of offending no one. But such a person cannot have a powerful imagination or much judgment. Thoughts serve desires like scouts and spies sent out to find a path to what we want. All the mind's steadiness and quickness come from desire. To have no desire is to be dead. Weak passions make one dull. To be equally passionate about everything produces giddiness and distraction. To have passions more forceful than is normally seen in others is what people call madness.\n\nThere are nearly as many kinds of madness as passions. Sometimes an unusually excessive passion comes from damaged or poorly constituted bodily organs. Sometimes a violent or long-lasting passion itself damages those organs. In either case the madness is the same in nature.\n\nThe passion whose intensity or duration leads to madness is either great vain glory, commonly called pride and self-importance, or profound dejection.\n\nPride makes people prone to anger. Extreme anger is the madness called rage or fury. An excessive desire for revenge, if it becomes habitual, harms the organs and becomes rage. Excessive love combined with jealousy also becomes rage. An excessive opinion of one's own divine inspiration, wisdom, learning, beauty, or anything similar becomes distraction and giddiness. Combine that opinion with envy and it becomes rage. A fierce conviction that something is true, when others contradict it, becomes rage too.\n\nDejection leaves a person vulnerable to groundless fears. This is the madness commonly called melancholy. It takes many forms, including frequenting lonely places and graves, behaving superstitiously, and fearing one particular thing or another. In short, all passions that produce strange and unusual behavior are generally called madness. Anyone willing to take the trouble could list a legion of its different kinds. If their extremes are madness, then passions tending toward evil must themselves be lesser degrees of it.\n\n### Part I, Chapter VIII, 2\n\nFor example, someone convinced that they are inspired may not always do anything so strange that their folly is visible. But when many such people join together, the fury of the crowd is obvious. What clearer sign of madness could there be than shouting at our best friends, striking them, and throwing stones at them? Yet a crowd like this will do still worse. They will shout at, fight, and destroy the very people who have protected them from harm all their lives. If the crowd is mad, each person in it is mad too. In the middle of the sea, someone may hear no sound from the water immediately beside them. Yet that water contributes just as much to the sea's roar as any equal amount elsewhere. Likewise, even if we notice little disturbance in one or two people, we can be sure that each person's passions contribute to the rebellious uproar of a troubled nation. Even if nothing else revealed their madness, their claim to such inspiration would be enough. Suppose a man in Bedlam spoke calmly with you. As you left, you asked who he was so that you could repay his kindness another time, and he answered that he was God the Father. I think you would not need to wait for strange behavior to know he was mad.\n\nThis belief in inspiration, commonly called a private spirit, often begins when someone happens to find an error that most people accept. The person cannot explain or remember the reasoning that led to this supposedly unique truth, though what they found may often be false. So they immediately admire themselves and think God Almighty has specially favored them by revealing it supernaturally through his Spirit.\n\nThe effects of wine also show that madness is simply passion showing itself too strongly. Wine has the same effects as a bad condition of the organs. People who drink too much behave in the same varied ways as mad people: some rage, some become affectionate, and some laugh. All do so excessively, according to their ruling passions. Wine only takes away their ability to hide these passions and stops them from seeing how ugly the passions are. I believe even the most sober people, when walking alone with nothing to occupy their minds, would not want the vain and extravagant thoughts they then have to be made public. This admits that unguided passions are usually nothing but madness.\n\nIn ancient and more recent times, people have held two opinions about the cause of madness. Some traced it to the passions. Others blamed demons or spirits, good or bad, which they thought could enter a person, possess them, and move their organs in the strange ways mad people move. The first group called such people mad. The second sometimes called them demoniacs, meaning possessed by spirits, and sometimes energumeni, meaning driven or moved by spirits. In Italy today, they are called not only pazzi, or mad people, but also spiritati, or possessed people.\n\nOnce, a large crowd gathered in Abdera, a Greek city, to watch a performance of the tragedy Andromeda on an extremely hot day. Many spectators developed fevers. The heat and the play together left them doing nothing but reciting iambic verse with the names Perseus and Andromeda. When winter came, the fever and this condition ended. People thought the madness came from the passion stirred by the tragedy. In another Greek city, a bout of madness affected only young women and caused many to hang themselves. Most people then thought the Devil had done it. But someone suspected that their disregard for life came from a mental passion and assumed they still cared about their honor. He advised the magistrates to strip the women who hanged themselves and leave their bodies hanging naked. According to the story, this cured the madness. On the other hand, the same Greeks often attributed madness to the Eumenides, or Furies, and sometimes to Ceres, Phoebus, and other gods. They attributed so much to imagined apparitions that they thought these were living bodies made of air and generally called them spirits. The Romans shared the Greeks' view, and so did the Jews. The Jews called mad people prophets or demoniacs, depending on whether they thought the spirits were good or bad. Some called prophets and demoniacs alike mad, and some called the same person both a demoniac and mad. This is unsurprising among the non-Jewish peoples, who named and worshipped diseases and health, vices and virtues, and many natural events as demons. For them a demon might even mean a fever as well as a devil. But it is rather strange that the Jews held this view. Neither Moses nor Abraham claimed to prophesy because a spirit possessed them. They received God's voice, a vision, or a dream. Nothing in their moral or ceremonial law taught them about such inspiration or possession. When God is said in (Numb. 11. 25.) to take some of the Spirit in Moses and give it to the 70 elders, God's Spirit, if understood as God's substance, is not being divided. In speaking of God's Spirit within a person, the Scriptures mean that person's own spirit, inclined toward godliness. Likewise, in (Exod. 28. 3.), “Whom I have filled with the Spirit of wisdom to make garments for Aaron,” the meaning is not that a garment-making spirit entered them. It means their own minds had skill in that work. Similarly, a person's spirit is commonly called an unclean spirit when it produces unclean actions. The same applies to other spirits, though not always: it is used when the virtue or vice named is unusually strong. Nor did the other Old Testament prophets claim to be possessed or say that God spoke inside them. He spoke to them through a voice, vision, or dream. The Burden of the Lord was a command, not a possession. How, then, did the Jews come to believe in possession? I can think of only a reason common to all people: they lack curiosity about natural causes and seek happiness in gross pleasures of the senses and the things that most directly bring those pleasures. When people see an unusual ability or defect of mind without also seeing a likely cause, they find it hard to think it natural. If it is not natural, they think it supernatural. Then what could it be but God or the Devil inside the person? Thus, when our Savior was surrounded by a crowd (Mark 3.21.), his family thought he was mad and went to restrain him. The scribes said he had Beelzebub and used him to cast out devils, as though a greater madman had subdued lesser ones. Some said (John 10. 20.), “He has a devil and is mad.” Others, believing him a prophet, said, “These are not the words of someone who has a devil.” Likewise in the Old Testament, the man who came to anoint Jehu (2 Kings 9.11.) was a prophet, yet some of Jehu's companions asked, “Why did that madman come?” Clearly, then, Jews thought anyone who behaved unusually was possessed by a good or evil spirit. The Sadducees were the exception: they went so far in the opposite direction that they believed there were no spirits at all, a view very close to outright atheism. Perhaps this prompted other Jews all the more to call such people demoniacs rather than mad.\n\nBut why did our Savior treat them as if they were possessed rather than mad? My only answer is the kind given to those who similarly cite Scripture against the earth's motion. Scripture was written to show people the kingdom of God and prepare their minds to obey him as subjects. It leaves the physical world and its philosophy for people to debate using their natural reason. Whether the earth's motion or the sun's causes day and night, and whether unusual human actions arise from passion or from the Devil, makes no difference to obedience and submission to God Almighty, provided we do not worship the Devil. That obedience is why Scripture was written. As for our Savior speaking to the disease as if it were a person, everyone who cures by words alone speaks that way, as Christ did and as enchanters claim to do, whether or not they address a devil. Is Christ not also said (Math. 8.26.) to have rebuked the winds? Is he not said (Luk. 4. 39.) to have rebuked a fever? That does not make a fever a devil. And when many of these devils are said to confess Christ, the passage can simply mean that the mad people confessed him. Our Savior also speaks (Math. 12. 43.) of an unclean spirit leaving a person, wandering through dry places in search of rest, finding none, and returning with seven worse spirits. This is plainly a parable about someone who tries briefly to give up his desires but is overcome by their strength and becomes seven times worse. I therefore see nothing in Scripture requiring us to believe demoniacs were anything but mad people.\n\nThere is one more fault in some people's reasoning that may count as a kind of madness. I spoke of this misuse of words in chapter five and called it absurdity. It occurs when people string together words that, taken together, mean nothing. Some fall into this habit because they misunderstand words they learned and repeat by rote. Others do it deliberately to deceive through obscurity. This happens only among people who discuss incomprehensible subjects, such as the schoolmen, or obscure philosophical questions. Ordinary people rarely speak without meaning anything, though these distinguished thinkers therefore call them idiots. If you want examples to prove that the thinkers' words correspond to nothing in their minds, pick up a schoolman's work. Try to translate a chapter about a difficult question, such as the Trinity, the Deity, Christ's nature, transubstantiation, or free will, into any modern language so that it makes sense. Or try translating it into acceptable Latin of the kind spoken when Latin was an everyday language. What do these words mean? “The first cause does not necessarily send anything into the second by virtue of the essential subordination of secondary causes, through which it might help the second to act.” This translates the title of chapter six in the first book of Suarez's Of the Concourse, Motion, and Help of God. Are people who write whole volumes of this material not mad, or trying to drive others mad? Consider transubstantiation in particular. Some say that after certain words are spoken, whiteness, roundness, magnitude, quality, and corruptibility—all of which are incorporeal—leave the wafer and enter the body of our blessed Savior. Do they not thereby turn all these “-nesses,” “-tudes,” and “-ties” into spirits possessing his body? By spirits they always mean incorporeal things that can nonetheless move from one place to another. So this absurdity can rightly be listed among the many kinds of madness. Whenever clear thoughts of their worldly desires make these people stop writing or arguing in this way, they are merely having lucid intervals. That is enough about intellectual virtues and defects.\n\nChapter IX. Of the Different Subjects of Knowledge\n\n### Part I, Chapter IX\n\nOf the Different Subjects of Knowledge\n\nKnowledge has two kinds. One is knowledge of fact, and the other is knowledge of how one statement follows from another. The first consists only of the senses and memory. It is absolute knowledge, such as seeing an act take place or remembering it afterward. This is the knowledge required of a witness. The second kind is called science and is conditional. For example, if the figure shown is a circle, then any straight line through its center divides it into two equal parts. This is the knowledge required of a philosopher, meaning someone who claims to reason.\n\nThe record of knowledge of facts is called history. There are two kinds. Natural history records facts or natural effects that do not depend on human will, such as the histories of metals, plants, animals, and regions. Civil history records people's voluntary actions in Common-wealths.\n\nThe records of science are books demonstrating how one statement follows from another. They are usually called books of philosophy. There are many kinds, according to their subject matter. They can be divided as in the following table.\n\nI. Science, or knowledge of consequences, also called philosophy\n\nA. Consequences of the properties of natural bodies: natural philosophy\n\n1. Consequences of the properties common to all natural bodies: quantity and motion\n\na. Consequences of quantity and motion considered without specifying them. These are the principles, or first foundations, of philosophy: Philosophia Prima.\n\nFirst philosophy\n\nb. Consequences of specified motion and quantity\n\n1) Consequences of quantity and motion specified by shape and number\n\n1] Mathematics\n\nGeometry\n\nArithmetic\n\n2) Consequences of the motion and quantity of particular kinds of bodies\n\na) Consequences of the motion and quantity of the great parts of the world, such as the earth and stars\n\n1] Cosmography\n\nAstronomy\n\nGeography\n\nb) Consequences of the motion of particular kinds and shapes of bodies\n\n1] Mechanics, the study of weight\n\nThe sciences of\n\nEngineering\n\nArchitecture\n\nNavigation\n\n2. Physics, or consequences of qualities\n\na. Consequences of the qualities of transient bodies, which sometimes appear and sometimes vanish\n\nMeteorology\n\nb. Consequences of the qualities of enduring bodies\n\n1) Consequences of the qualities of stars\n\na) Consequences of starlight. Together with the sun's motion, this produces the science of\n\nSciography\n\nb) Consequences of the influence of stars\n\nAstrology\n\n2) Consequences of the qualities of liquid bodies filling the space between stars, such as air or ethereal substance\n\n3) Consequences of the qualities of earthly bodies\n\na) Consequences of parts of the earth without senses\n\n1] Consequences of the qualities of minerals, such as stones and metals, etc.\n\n2] Consequences of the qualities of plants\n\nb) Consequences of the qualities of animals\n\n1] Consequences of the qualities of animals in general\n\na] Consequences of vision\n\nOptics\n\nb] Consequences of sounds\n\nMusic\n\nc] Consequences of the other senses\n\n2] Consequences of the qualities specific to humans\n\na] Consequences of human passions\n\nEthics\n\nb] Consequences of speech\n\ni) In praising, disparaging, etc.\n\nPoetry\n\nii) In persuading\n\nRhetoric\n\niii) In reasoning\n\nLogic\n\niv) In making contracts\n\nThe science of\n\njust and unjust\n\nB. Consequences of the properties of political bodies: politics and civil philosophy\n\n1. Consequences of establishing Common-wealths for the rights and duties of the political body, or Soveraigne\n\n2. Consequences of that same establishment for the duties and rights of subjects\n\nChapter X. Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honor, and Worthiness\n\n### Part I, Chapter X, 1\n\nOf Power, Worth, Dignity, Honor, and Worthiness\n\nA person's power, understood generally, consists of the means they currently have to gain some future good that appears desirable. It is either original or instrumental.\n\nNatural power is an outstanding ability of body or mind, such as exceptional strength, beauty, prudence, skill, eloquence, generosity, or noble birth. Instrumental powers are acquired through those abilities or through fortune. They are means to gain further powers, such as wealth, reputation, friends, and God's hidden workings, which people call good luck. In this respect power is like fame: it grows as it spreads. It is also like a falling heavy body, which goes faster the farther it falls.\n\nThe greatest human power combines the powers of many people who agree to place them in the hands of one person, whether an individual or a legal person. This person can use all their powers according to one will, as in the power of a Common-wealth. If their use instead depends on each individual's will, it is the power of a faction or an alliance of factions. Having servants is therefore power. Having friends is power too: both unite people's strength.\n\nWealth joined with generosity is power because it wins friends and servants. Without generosity it is not power in the same way. Instead of protecting the owner, wealth exposes that person to envy as a target for attack.\n\nA reputation for power is itself power because it attracts people who need protection.\n\nSo is a reputation for loving one's country, called popularity, for the same reason.\n\nAny quality that makes many people love or fear someone is power. So is a reputation for such a quality, because it can bring the help and service of many people.\n\nSuccess is power. It creates a reputation for wisdom or good fortune, which makes people either fear a person or depend on them.\n\nWhen someone already powerful is friendly and approachable, their power increases because they win affection.\n\nA reputation for prudence in handling peace or war is power. We are more willing to entrust our government to prudent people than to others.\n\nNoble birth is power only in Common-wealths where it brings privileges, because those privileges are the source of its power.\n\nEloquence is power because it gives the appearance of prudence.\n\nBeauty is power because it promises good things and wins the favor of women and strangers.\n\nThe sciences give little power because they do not stand out, and so people do not recognize them in anyone. Only a few people have scientific knowledge, and each knows only a few subjects. Only someone who has acquired a fair amount of a science can even recognize its presence in another person.\n\nSkills useful to the public, such as building fortifications, engines, and other weapons of war, are power because they help with defense and victory. Their real mother is science, namely mathematics. But craftspeople bring them into view with their hands, so people think the skills are their offspring. Ordinary people mistake the midwife for the mother.\n\nA person's value, or worth, is like the value of anything else: their price, or what another person would pay to use their power. It is therefore not fixed but depends on someone else's needs and judgment. A capable commander has a high price during a war or when war is near, but not in peacetime. A learned and honest judge is worth a great deal in peace, but less in war. With people as with other things, the buyer, not the seller, determines the price. People may set their own value as high as they can, as most do. Yet their actual value is no more than others think it is.\n\nThe way we show how much we value one another is commonly called honoring and dishonoring. To value someone highly is to honor them; to value them little is to dishonor them. Here “highly” and “little” are measured against the value each person places on themselves.\n\nA person's public worth, the value the Common-wealth places on them, is commonly called dignity. The Common-wealth shows that value through positions of command, judicial office, public employment, or names and titles introduced to mark such standing.\n\nAsking another person for help of any kind is to honor them. It shows we think they have the power to help, and the harder the help would be to give, the greater the honor.\n\nObedience is honor, because nobody obeys someone they think has no power to help or harm them. Disobedience is therefore dishonor.\n\nGiving someone large gifts honors them: it buys protection and acknowledges their power. Giving small gifts dishonors them: it is only charity and suggests they need small assistance. Working hard to advance someone else's interests, or flattering them, honors them because it shows we seek their protection or help. Neglecting them dishonors them.\n\nGiving another person priority or a place in anything desirable honors them, since it admits they have greater power. Claiming priority over them dishonors them.\n\nShowing any sign of love or fear for another person honors them, because love and fear both show that we value them. Showing contempt, or loving or fearing them less than they expect, dishonors them by undervaluing them.\n\nPraising someone, speaking highly of them, or calling them fortunate honors them. We value goodness, power, and happiness. Insulting, mocking, or pitying them dishonors them.\n\nSpeaking to someone carefully, and behaving decently and humbly in their presence, honors them. It shows we fear offending them. Speaking carelessly to them, or behaving indecently, sloppily, or shamelessly in front of them, dishonors them.\n\nBelieving, trusting, or relying on someone honors them. It shows that we think them virtuous and powerful. Distrusting or disbelieving them dishonors them.\n\nListening to someone's advice or speech of any kind honors them. It shows that we think them wise, eloquent, or clever. Sleeping, leaving, or talking while they speak dishonors them.\n\nDoing things for another person that they see as signs of honor, or that law or custom makes signs of honor, honors them. By accepting the honor others give them, they acknowledge the power others recognize in them. Refusing these acts dishonors them.\n\nAgreeing with someone honors them because it shows approval of their judgment and wisdom. Disagreeing dishonors them. It implies that they are mistaken and, if the disagreement covers many subjects, foolish.\n\nImitating someone honors them because it strongly expresses approval. Imitating their enemy dishonors them.\n\nHonoring people someone else honors is a way of honoring that person, because it approves of their judgment. Honoring their enemies dishonors them.\n\nSeeking someone's help with advice or difficult actions honors them. It shows we think them wise or powerful in some other way. Denying such work to a person who seeks it dishonors them.\n\nAll these ways of honoring are natural and occur both inside and outside Common-wealths. But a Common-wealth has other honors as well. Its supreme authority can make whatever it chooses count as a sign of honor.\n\nA Soveraigne honors a subject with any title, office, employment, or act that the Soveraigne wants understood as a sign of an intention to honor that subject.\n\nThe king of Persia honored Mordecay when he ordered him led through the streets wearing the king's clothes, riding one of the king's horses, with a crown on his head and a prince going ahead proclaiming, “This is what shall be done for the man the king wishes to honor.” Yet another Persian king, or the same king at another time, let someone who had asked to wear one of the king's robes as a reward for a great service do so. He added that the man must wear it as the king's fool. It then became a dishonor. So civil honors depend on what the authority intends by them. These include magistracies, offices, titles, and, in some places, painted coats of arms and shields. People honor their holders because these things show favor in the Common-wealth, and that favor is power.\n\nAny possession, action, or quality that shows a person's power is honorable.\n\nTherefore being honored, loved, or feared by many is honorable, since these are signs of power. Being honored by few people, or by none, is dishonorable.\n\n### Part I, Chapter X, 2\n\nGood fortune, if it lasts, brings honor because it is a sign of God's favor. Bad fortune and losses bring dishonor. Wealth brings honor because it gives power. Poverty brings dishonor. Greatness of spirit, generosity, hope, courage, and confidence bring honor because they come from knowing one has power. Smallness of spirit, stinginess, fear, and lack of confidence bring dishonor.\n\nMaking a decision in time about what to do brings honor. It shows that one is not deterred by small difficulties and dangers. Indecision brings dishonor because it shows that one places too much weight on minor obstacles and advantages. If someone has weighed the alternatives as long as time allows and still cannot decide, their relative weight must differ only slightly. Failure to decide then means placing too much weight on small things, which shows smallness of spirit.\n\nActions and words that come, or seem to come, from much experience, knowledge, judgment, or wit bring honor. All these qualities give power. Actions and words that come from error, ignorance, or foolishness bring dishonor.\n\nA serious manner brings honor if it seems to come from having one's mind on something else, since being occupied is a sign of power. But it brings dishonor if it seems intended merely to give an impression of seriousness. The first kind of seriousness resembles the steadiness of a ship loaded with merchandise. The second resembles the steadiness of a ship weighted with sand and other junk.\n\nBeing prominent—that is, known for wealth, office, great deeds, or any outstanding good quality—brings honor. It signals the power for which the person is known. Being unknown, by contrast, brings dishonor.\n\nHaving well-known parents brings honor, because their descendants can more easily gain the help and friendship of their ancestors' associates. Coming from an obscure family, by contrast, brings dishonor.\n\nActing fairly despite a loss brings honor because it shows greatness of spirit, which is a sign of power. Deceit, evasiveness, and disregard for fairness bring dishonor.\n\nWhether a deed is just or unjust makes no difference to the honor it brings, provided it is great and difficult and thus shows great power. Honor depends solely on what people think of someone's power. That is why the ancient pagans thought they were greatly honoring the gods, not dishonoring them, when their poems showed the gods committing rape, theft, and other great but unjust or indecent acts. Nothing is celebrated more in Jupiter than his adulteries, or in Mercury than his frauds and thefts. Indeed, in a hymn by Homer, Mercury's greatest praise is that he was born in the morning, invented music at noon, and before nightfall stole Apollo's cattle from their herdsmen.\n\nLikewise, before large Common-wealths were established, people did not consider piracy or highway robbery dishonorable. They regarded both as lawful trades, among the Greeks and other peoples alike, as ancient histories show. Today, in this part of the world, private duels are considered honorable, though illegal. They always will be until honor is given to those who refuse a challenge, and disgrace to those who issue one. Duels sometimes do result from courage, which always rests on strength or skill, both forms of power. But most result from reckless speech and fear of dishonor in one or both combatants. Having committed themselves rashly, they are driven into the fighting ground to avoid disgrace.\n\nHereditary shields and coats of arms bring honor when they carry important privileges, but not otherwise. Their power lies in those privileges, or in wealth, or in something else honored equally in other people. This kind of honor, commonly called gentility, came from the ancient Germans. It was never known where German customs were unknown, and it is not in use now where Germans have never settled. Ancient Greek commanders painted their shields with designs of their own choosing when they went to war. An unpainted shield was a sign of poverty and of an ordinary soldier. But they did not pass their designs down as inheritances. Romans passed down their families' identifying marks, but these were images of their ancestors, not their designs. Nothing like hereditary coats of arms exists or ever existed among the peoples of Asia, Africa, and America. This was solely a German custom. It spread from them to England, France, Spain, and Italy when large numbers of Germans either helped the Romans or made conquests of their own in these western regions.\n\nIn ancient times Germany, like every country at its beginning, was divided among countless minor lords or heads of families. They were constantly at war with one another. These lords painted their armor, shields, or coats with images of animals or other things. They also put a prominent visible mark on their helmets' crests. Their chief purpose was to be recognizable to their followers while covered in armor, but they also wanted decoration. The decoration of both shield and crest passed to their children: unchanged to the eldest, and to the others with some distinguishing feature chosen by the old master, called the Here-alt in Dutch. When many such families combined into a larger monarchy, the herald's task of distinguishing shields became a separate official position. The descendants of these lords make up the great and ancient gentry. Most of their coats of arms show living creatures known for courage and predation, or castles, battlements, belts, weapons, bars, palisades, and other symbols of war. At that time only military excellence brought honor. Later, kings and popular Common-wealths alike granted various kinds of coats of arms to people going to war or returning from it, to encourage or reward their service. A careful reader can find all this in the ancient Greek and Latin histories that describe the German people and their customs in those times.\n\nTitles of honor, such as Duke, Count, Marquis, and Baron, bring honor. They show the value the Soveraigne power of the Common-wealth places on their holders. In earlier times these were titles of office and command, some derived from Romans, others from Germans and French people. Dukes, or Duces in Latin, were generals in war. Counts, or Comites, were those who accompanied a general as his friends and were left in charge of governing and defending conquered, pacified places. Marquises, or Marchiones, were counts who governed the marches, or borders, of the empire. The titles Duke, Count, and Marquis entered the empire around the time of Constantine the Great from the practices of the German military. Baron seems to have been a title from Gaul, meaning a great man: one of a king's or prince's men kept near him for war. It seems to derive from Vir, which became Ber and Bar, words with the same meaning in the language of the Gauls that Vir had in Latin. These in turn became Bero and Baro, so that such men were called Berones, later Barones, and, in Spanish, Varones. Anyone seeking more detail about the origins of titles of honor can find it, as I did for this account, in Mr. Selden's excellent treatise on the subject. Over time, because of troubles and for reasons of good and peaceful government, these honorable offices turned into mere titles. Their main function became to distinguish subjects' precedence, rank, and order within the Common-wealth. Men were made Dukes, Counts, Marquises, and Barons of places over which they had neither possession nor command. Other titles were invented for the same purpose.\n\nWorthiness differs from a person's worth or value, and also from merit or desert. It consists of having a particular power or ability for whatever the person is said to be worthy of. That particular ability is commonly called fitness or aptitude.\n\nThe person most worthy to be a commander, a judge, or the holder of any other responsibility is the one whose qualities best equip them to carry it out well. The person most worthy of riches has the qualities best suited to using them well. Someone who lacks any of these qualities can still be a worthy person, valuable for something else. Moreover, a person can be worthy of riches, office, or employment without having a claim to receive them ahead of anyone else. So that person cannot be said to merit or deserve them. Merit presupposes a right, and assumes that what is deserved is owed by promise. I will say more about this later when discussing contracts.\n\nCHAPTER XI. ON THE DIFFERENCE OF MANNERS\n\n### Part I, Chapter XI\n\nON THE DIFFERENCE OF MANNERS\n\nBy manners I do not mean etiquette, such as how one person should greet another or how a person should clean their mouth or pick their teeth in company. Those are minor rules of behavior. I mean the human qualities that affect our ability to live together in peace and unity. To understand these, we must consider that happiness in this life does not consist in a satisfied mind at rest. There is no final goal, or greatest good, of the sort described in the books of the old moral philosophers. A person whose desires have ended can no more go on living than someone whose senses and imagination have stopped. Happiness is a continual movement of desire from one thing to another. Getting one thing only opens the way to the next. The reason is that people do not merely want to enjoy something once, for a moment. They want to secure a lasting way to satisfy their future desires. That is why everyone's voluntary actions and inclinations aim not only to obtain a satisfying life but to make it secure. People differ only in how they pursue it. This difference comes partly from the variety of their passions, and partly from their different knowledge or beliefs about what causes the results they want.\n\nFirst, then, I propose that all human beings have a general tendency: a constant and restless desire for more and more power, which ends only in death. This is not always because someone hopes for more intense pleasure than they already have, or cannot be content with a moderate amount of power. It is because people cannot secure the power and means they now have for living well without gaining more. Thus kings, who have the most power, try to secure it at home through laws and abroad through wars. Once they have done so, new desires follow. Some desire fame through new conquests, some want leisure and bodily pleasure, and others want admiration or flattery for excellence in an art or some other mental ability.\n\nCompetition for wealth, honor, command, or any other power leads to conflict, hostility, and war. One competitor can get what they want by killing, subduing, displacing, or repelling the other. Competition for praise in particular encourages respect for the distant past. People compete with the living, not the dead, so they give the dead more credit than they deserve in order to dim the glory of the living.\n\nThe desire for ease and bodily pleasure inclines people to obey a common power. A person pursuing these pleasures gives up the protection that their own effort and labor might provide.\n\nFear of death and injury has the same effect for the same reason. By contrast, needy and hardy people who are unhappy with their present condition tend to keep the causes of war alive and stir up trouble and rebellion. So do people who seek military command. There can be no military honor without war. And the best hope of improving a bad hand is to get the cards shuffled again.\n\nThe desire for knowledge and the arts of peace inclines people to obey a common power. It includes a desire for leisure and, therefore, for protection by a power other than their own.\n\nThe desire for praise encourages commendable actions, meaning actions that please those whose judgment one values. We also dismiss praise from people we look down on. Wanting fame after death has the same effect. After death we cannot sense the praise people give us on earth. Its pleasures are either overwhelmed by heaven's indescribable joys or wiped out by hell's extreme torments. Yet posthumous fame is not pointless. People take pleasure now in imagining it and the benefit it may bring to their descendants. Although they cannot yet see those benefits, they can imagine them. Whatever gives pleasure when sensed can also give pleasure when imagined.\n\nWhen someone we consider our equal gives us greater benefits than we can hope to repay, we tend to pretend to love them while secretly hating them. We are like a desperate debtor who avoids seeing a creditor and silently wishes the creditor somewhere they will never meet again. Benefits create obligations, and being under an obligation to an equal feels like bondage and inspires hatred. But receiving benefits from someone we recognize as our superior inclines us to love them, because the obligation does not newly lower our position. Gladly accepting such benefits, which people call gratitude, honors the giver and is generally accepted as repayment. Receiving benefits from an equal or an inferior also encourages love as long as repayment remains possible. The receiver then intends the obligation to involve mutual aid and service. Each tries to outdo the other in giving benefits. No competition is more noble or useful: the winner enjoys winning, and the other gets even by acknowledging the win.\n\nWhen someone has harmed another person more than they can or are willing to make up for, they tend to hate the person they harmed. They must expect either revenge or forgiveness, and both are hateful to them.\n\nFear of oppression makes a person act first or seek help through an alliance. There is no other way to secure one's life and freedom.\n\nDuring riots and rebellions, people who distrust their own cleverness are more likely to win than those who think themselves wise or crafty. The latter want to discuss what to do. The former fear being outmaneuvered and strike first. In a rebellion, people are always on the verge of battle. Staying together and using every advantage of force is a better strategy than anything cleverness can devise.\n\nSome vain people enjoy imagining themselves brave, though they know they have no great ability. They are inclined to show off but not to make an attempt. When danger or difficulty appears, they expect only to have their inadequacy exposed.\n\nOther vain people judge their ability by others' flattery or by the luck of some past action. They lack a firm basis for hope grounded in real self-knowledge. They tend to take reckless risks and then withdraw, if they can, when danger or difficulty draws near. Unable to see a safe way forward, they would rather risk their honor, which an excuse might repair, than their lives, for which there is no remedy.\n\nPeople who think very highly of their wisdom in government tend to be ambitious. Without a public role as counselors or magistrates, their wisdom gains them no honor. Eloquent speakers therefore tend to be ambitious, since eloquence seems like wisdom both to them and to others.\n\nSmallness of spirit makes people indecisive, causing them to miss the right occasions and best opportunities to act. Suppose they have deliberated until the time for action is near, but it is still not clear which course is best. This means the reasons for choosing either course are not very different in weight. Failing to decide at that point means losing the opportunity by weighing trifles. That is smallness of spirit.\n\nFrugality is a virtue in poor people, but it leaves someone ill-equipped to accomplish things requiring the combined strength of many people. It weakens their efforts, which need rewards to sustain and energize them.\n\nTrusting others because one does not know the signs of wisdom and kindness: Eloquence and flattery incline people to trust those who possess them. Eloquence seems like wisdom, and flattery seems like kindness. Add a military reputation, and people are inclined to follow and submit to those who have all three. The first two make people feel safe from the person they follow; the last makes them feel safe from others.\n\nLack of scientific knowledge, meaning ignorance of causes, inclines people—or rather forces them—to depend on other people's advice and authority. Everyone concerned with the truth must rely either on their own opinion or on that of someone they regard as wiser, whom they see no reason to suspect of deception.\n\nIgnorance of what words mean—that is, a lack of understanding—makes people accept on trust not only truths they do not know, but also the errors and, worse, the nonsense of people they trust. Without a thorough understanding of words, they cannot detect either error or nonsense.\n\nThat same ignorance leads people to give different names to the same thing according to their passions. Those who approve of an individual's belief call it an opinion, while those who dislike it call it heresy. Yet heresy means nothing more than an individual's belief, though the word has a stronger tone of anger.\n\nThat same ignorance also prevents people, without careful study and considerable understanding, from distinguishing between a single act of many people and many separate acts by people in a crowd. Consider the difference between the single act of all the senators of Rome in killing Catiline and the separate acts of a number of senators in killing Caesar. People are therefore inclined to call something an act of the people when it is actually a collection of acts by many people, perhaps persuaded by just one person.\n\nFollowing custom because one does not understand right and wrong: Ignorance of the causes and original basis of right, fairness, law, and justice makes people use custom and example as rules for their actions. They think an act unjust if it has customarily been punished. They think an act just if they can point to an example of it going unpunished and being approved—or to a precedent, as lawyers who use only this faulty measure of justice barbarously call it. They resemble small children, whose only rule for good and bad behavior is whether their parents and teachers punish them. But children stick to their rule, while adults do not. Once grown strong and stubborn, adults appeal from custom to reason and from reason to custom whenever it suits them. They reject custom when their interests demand it and oppose reason whenever reason opposes them. This is why right and wrong are constantly debated with both pen and sword, while lines and figures are not. People do not care which claims about geometry are true, because the subject does not threaten anyone's ambition, profit, or desire. But I have no doubt that, if the claim that the three angles of a triangle equal two angles of a square had conflicted with any person's right to rule or the interests of rulers, it would have been disputed. Or, if not disputed, it would have been suppressed by burning every geometry book, so far as the person concerned had the power to do so.\n\nFollowing private individuals because one does not know the causes of peace: Ignorance of distant causes inclines people to attribute every event to its immediate, instrumental causes. These are the only causes they notice. So people everywhere who resent payments to the public direct their anger at tax officials: the contractors, collectors, and other public revenue officers. They side with critics of the government. Once they have committed themselves too far to justify their actions, they attack the supreme authority too, fearing punishment or the shame of accepting a pardon.\n\nIgnorance of natural causes makes people gullible, and often leads them to believe impossible things. They know nothing that rules out the things they hear and cannot recognize their impossibility. Gullibility in turn leads to lying, because people like to be listened to in company. Thus ignorance alone, without malice, can make someone believe lies, tell them, and sometimes even invent them.\n\nAnxiety about the future leads people to investigate the causes of things. Knowing the causes helps them arrange present matters to their best advantage.\n\nCuriosity, or the love of knowing causes, leads a person from considering an effect to searching for its cause, and then for the cause of that cause. Eventually they must conclude that there is a cause with no earlier cause, which has existed eternally. People call this cause God. So no one can investigate natural causes deeply without being led toward belief in one eternal God, though they cannot form a mental picture of him that matches his nature. Imagine someone born blind who hears people speak of warming themselves by a fire and is brought close enough to warm themselves. They can easily understand and be sure that something called fire is there, causing the heat they feel. But they cannot picture what it looks like or have the mental image of it that sighted people have. Likewise, seeing the things of this world and their remarkable order, one can understand that they have a cause called God without having a picture or image of him in one's mind.\n\nOther people investigate natural causes little or not at all. They do not know what has the power to do them great good or harm, and that ignorance itself makes them afraid. They are therefore inclined to imagine various kinds of invisible powers and to fear what they themselves have imagined. They call on these powers when in distress and thank them when they expect success, making gods of the creations of their own imagination. Because imaginations vary without limit, people have created countless kinds of gods in the world. Fear of invisible things is the natural seed of what each person calls religion in themselves, but calls superstition in those who worship or fear that power differently.\n\nMany people have noticed this seed of religion. Some who noticed it were inclined to nurture it, shape it, and turn it into laws. They added their own invented explanations of what causes future events, choosing those they thought would best enable them to govern others and make the greatest use of their powers.\n\nCHAPTER XII. ON RELIGION\n\n### Part I, Chapter XII, 1\n\nON RELIGION\n\nOnly humans show signs or results of religion. So there is no reason to doubt that the seed of religion exists only in humans as well. It consists of some quality unique to us, or at least of an especially high degree of a quality not found to the same extent in other living creatures.\n\nFirst, people naturally ask about the causes of events they see. Some ask more than others, but everyone is curious enough to search for the causes of their own good and bad fortune.\n\nSecond, when people see something that had a beginning, they also think it had a cause that determined why it began at that particular time rather than earlier or later.\n\nThird, animals find happiness only in enjoying their daily food, comfort, and sexual pleasures. They have little or no foresight, because they do not observe and remember the order, sequence, and dependence of things they see. People, by contrast, observe how one event produces another and remember which comes before and which follows. When they cannot be sure of the real causes of things—and the causes of good and bad fortune are usually invisible—they suppose that the causes are whatever their imaginations suggest. Or they trust the authority of others whom they consider their friends and think wiser than themselves.\n\nThe natural cause of religion: anxiety about the future. The first two qualities create anxiety. People are sure that everything that has happened or will happen has a cause. Someone constantly trying to protect themselves from the bad things they fear and secure the good things they want must therefore always worry about the future. Everyone, especially those who plan too far ahead, is like Prometheus. His name means the prudent man. He was bound to Mount Caucasus, with its wide view, where an eagle fed on his liver and ate by day as much as grew back by night. Similarly, someone who looks too far ahead in worrying about the future has their heart gnawed all day by fear of death, poverty, or other disasters. Only sleep offers a rest from that anxiety.\n\nThis constant fear accompanies people when they do not know the causes of things and are, so to speak, in the dark. It must be directed at something. When they can see nothing to blame for their good or bad fortune, they blame some invisible power or agent. Perhaps this is what certain ancient poets meant when they said that human fear first created the gods. That is true of the gods they meant: the many gods of the pagans. But belief in one eternal, infinite, all-powerful God is more easily traced to people's desire to know the causes and distinct powers and workings of natural bodies than to fear of their own future. A person who starts with an observed effect and reasons back to its immediate cause, then to the cause of that cause, and pursues causes deeply enough, will finally conclude—as even the pagan philosophers admitted—that there must be one First Mover: the first and eternal cause of everything. That is what people mean by God. This reasoning needs no concern about personal fortune. Such concern encourages fear and keeps people from investigating other causes, thus giving them reason to invent as many gods as there are people to invent them.\n\nAs for the matter or substance of these imagined invisible agents, natural thought gave people no model except the human soul. They supposed that the soul had the same substance as the figure someone sees in a dream while asleep or in a mirror while awake. Not knowing that such appearances are products of the imagination, people took them for real substances outside themselves. So they called them ghosts; the Latins called them Imagines and Umbrae. They considered them spirits, meaning thin, airy bodies, and pictured the invisible agents they feared in the same way, except that these agents appeared and vanished whenever they chose. But no one could arrive naturally at the idea that such spirits were bodiless or immaterial. People can combine words with contradictory meanings, such as spirit and incorporeal, but cannot imagine anything corresponding to the combination. Therefore those who come by their own reflection to recognize one infinite, all-powerful, eternal God prefer to admit that he is beyond their understanding. They prefer that to defining his nature as an incorporeal spirit and then admitting that their definition is unintelligible. Or, if they give him such a title, they do so not to make a dogmatic claim that explains the divine nature, but out of reverence: they honor him with descriptions as far removed as possible from the coarse nature of visible bodies.\n\nNext, consider how people thought these invisible agents produced their effects: what immediate causes they used to bring things about. People who do not understand what we mean by causation—and that is nearly everyone—have no way to guess except by observing and remembering what they have seen happen before a similar effect on one or more earlier occasions. They do not see any dependence or connection between the earlier event and the later one. Consequently, they expect similar past events to be followed by similar future events. Superstitiously, they expect good or bad luck from things that play no part in causing it. For instance, the Athenians asked for another Phormio for their war at Lepanto, and Pompey's faction wanted another Scipio for their war in Africa. Others have done the same on many later occasions. Likewise, people attribute their fortunes to a bystander, a lucky or unlucky place, or spoken words, especially words containing God's name. This is the practice of charming and conjuring—the liturgy of witches. They even believe that such acts can turn stone into bread, bread into a person, or any thing into any other thing.\n\nThird, the worship people naturally offer invisible powers can only consist of the signs of respect they would show people: gifts, requests, thanks, bodily submission, thoughtful ways of addressing them, restrained behavior, words chosen in advance, and oaths that invoke them to assure each other of promises. Reason suggests nothing beyond this. People must either stop there or rely on those they think wiser than themselves to supply further ceremonies.\n\nLastly, people are naturally at a loss about how these invisible powers tell them what will happen later, especially what their general fortune will be or whether a particular undertaking will succeed or fail. They are accustomed to guessing the future from the past. So after just one or two coincidences, they readily take chance events as signs predicting similar events forever afterward. They are also ready to believe similar predictions from anyone of whom they have formed a good opinion.\n\nThese four things—the belief in ghosts, ignorance of intermediate causes, devotion toward what people fear, and the treatment of chance events as predictions—make up the natural seed of religion. Because people's imaginations, judgments, and passions differ, this seed has grown into such different ceremonies that those practiced by one person usually seem ridiculous to another.\n\nTwo kinds of people have cultivated these seeds. One has nurtured and organized them according to its own inventions. The other has done so by God's command and direction. Both have sought to make the people who relied on them more inclined to obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society. The first kind of religion is therefore a part of human politics. It teaches some of the duties that earthly kings require of their subjects. The second kind is divine politics. It gives instructions to those who have made themselves subjects in the Kingdome of God. The first kind includes all the founders of Common-wealths and the lawgivers of the pagan nations. The second includes Abraham, Moses, and our blessed Savior, through whom we received the laws of the Kingdome of God.\n\nAs for religious beliefs about the nature of invisible powers, there is almost nothing with a name that pagans somewhere have not regarded as a god or devil, or that their poets have not portrayed as living, inhabited, or possessed by a spirit.\n\nThe unformed matter of the world was a god named Chaos.\n\nThe heavens, the ocean, the planets, fire, earth, and winds were all gods.\n\nMen, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, and a leek were made gods. People also filled nearly every place with spirits called Daemons: plains with Pan and Panises or Satyrs; woods with Fauns and Nymphs; the sea with Tritons and other Nymphs; every river and fountain with a ghost bearing its name and with Nymphs; every house with its Lares, or household spirits; every person with their Genius; hell with ghosts and spirit officers such as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and all places at night with Larvae, Lemures, ghosts of the dead, and an entire realm of fairies and frightening spirits. They even treated mere occurrences and qualities as divine and built temples to them: Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, Conflict, Virtue, Honor, Health, Rust, Fever, and the like. When people prayed for or against these things, they prayed to them as though ghosts with those names hovered overhead, granting or withholding the good or evil they prayed about. They also invoked their own intelligence as the Muses, their ignorance as Fortune, their sexual desire as Cupid, their rage as the Furies, and their genitals as Priapus. They blamed sexual emissions on Incubi and Succubae. In short, there was nothing a poet could turn into a character in a poem that they did not make a god or a devil.\n\nThe same founders of pagan religion saw the second basis of religion: people's ignorance of causes. This ignorance made people apt to assign their fortunes to things with no apparent causal connection to them. So the founders took advantage of that ignorance and offered a class of lesser, ministering gods in place of intermediate causes. They credited Venus with fertility, Apollo with the arts, Mercury with cleverness and craft, Aeolus with storms and tempests, and other gods with other effects. Among the pagans there were almost as many kinds of gods as there were kinds of activity.\n\nThe same pagan lawgivers added painted and sculpted images to the kinds of worship people naturally thought suitable for their gods, such as offerings, prayers, thanks, and the other practices already mentioned. They wanted the less informed people—that is, the majority—to think the gods depicted by the images really lived inside them, and therefore to fear them more. They gave these idols land, buildings, officials, and income reserved from every other human use. They consecrated caves, groves, woods, mountains, and whole islands to them. They assigned the idols shapes, some human, some animal, and some monstrous. They also gave them the abilities and passions of humans and animals: perception, speech, sex, sexual desire, and reproduction. They imagined gods mating not only with one another to produce more gods, but also with human men and women to produce mixed offspring, mere lodgers in heaven, like Bacchus, Hercules, and others. They gave the gods anger, revenge, and other animal passions, along with the actions that come from those passions: fraud, theft, adultery, sodomy, and any vice that might be taken as a sign of power or a source of pleasure. These were all vices that people regarded as violations of law rather than of honor.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XII, 2\n\nFinally, there were predictions about the future. Natural predictions are only guesses based on past experience, while supernatural ones are divine revelations. The same people who created the religions of the Gentiles added countless superstitious methods of divination, based partly on supposed experience and partly on supposed revelation. They led people to believe they could discover their fortunes in many ways. Sometimes they looked to the vague or senseless replies of priests at Delphi, Delos, Ammon, and other famous oracles. Those replies were deliberately vague so they could fit either outcome, or nonsensical because of the intoxicating fumes often found in sulfurous caves. Sometimes they looked in the leaves of the Sibyls. Some books of their prophecies were respected during the Roman Republic, though, as with those of Nostradamus perhaps, the surviving fragments seem to have been invented later. Sometimes they listened to the meaningless words of people thought to be mad and possessed by a divine spirit. They called this possession enthusiasm, and counted these methods of foretelling events as theomancy, or prophecy. Sometimes they examined the arrangement of the stars at their birth. This was called horoscopy and considered part of judicial astrology. Sometimes they relied on their own hopes and fears, called thumomancy, or premonition. Sometimes they listened to witches who claimed to speak with the dead. This was called necromancy, conjuring, or witchcraft, but it is only sleight of hand and organized fraud. Sometimes they watched the chance flight or feeding of birds, called augury, or examined the entrails of a sacrificed animal, called aruspicina. Sometimes they relied on dreams, the cawing of ravens, or the chatter of birds. Sometimes they studied the features of the face, called metoposcopy, or the lines of the hand in palmistry. They read chance words as omens. Sometimes they looked to strange creatures or unusual events, such as eclipses, comets, rare meteors, earthquakes, floods, and unusual births. They called these portents and signs because they believed them to foretell some great disaster. Sometimes they used sheer chance, such as tossing a coin, counting holes in a sieve, or randomly choosing verses in Homer and Virgil. There were countless other such empty inventions. People are easily led to believe anything by someone they trust who skillfully and gently takes advantage of their fear and ignorance.\n\nThe aims of the founders of heathen religion: The first founders and lawmakers of Common-wealths among the Gentiles aimed only to keep people obedient and at peace. So everywhere they took care, first, to make people believe that their religious rules came not from their own invention but from the commands of some god or other spirit. Alternatively, they claimed to be more than ordinary mortals, so that their laws would be accepted more easily. Thus Numa Pompilius claimed that he received the ceremonies he established among the Romans from the nymph Egeria. The first king and founder of the Kingdom of Peru claimed that he and his wife were children of the sun. Mahomet claimed to speak with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove when founding his new religion. Second, these founders made people believe that the gods disliked the same things that the laws forbade. Third, they prescribed ceremonies, prayers, sacrifices, and festivals that people believed could appease the gods' anger. They taught that military defeat, widespread disease, earthquakes, and each person's private misfortunes resulted from the gods' anger. They said this anger arose from neglecting worship or forgetting or getting some required ceremony wrong. Among the ancient Romans, people were allowed to deny the poets' accounts of pain and pleasure after death. Several highly respected and serious public figures openly mocked those accounts in their speeches. Even so, belief in them was always encouraged more than disbelief.\n\nThrough these and similar practices, the founders achieved their aim of peace in the Common-wealth. Ordinary people blamed their misfortunes on neglected or mistaken ceremonies or on their own disobedience to the laws. They were therefore less likely to rebel against their rulers. Festivals and public games honoring the gods entertained them with spectacle and amusement. Beyond this they needed only bread to keep them from discontent, complaint, and unrest against the state. The Romans, who had conquered most of the known world, had no objection to allowing any religion in Rome itself, unless it was incompatible with civil government. We read of no religion forbidden there except that of the Jews. They regarded themselves as God's own Kingdom and thought it unlawful to submit to any mortal king or state. This shows how the Gentiles' religion was part of their political system.\n\nTrue religion and the laws of God's Kingdom are the same: Wherever God himself established religion by supernatural revelation, he also established a special Kingdom for himself. He gave laws governing how people should behave toward him and toward each other. In the Kingdom of God, then, political government and civil laws are part of religion. The distinction between temporal and spiritual rule has no place there. God is indeed king of the whole earth, but he can also be king of a particular chosen nation. There is nothing more inconsistent about this than about an army commander having a regiment or company of his own. God rules the whole earth by his power, but he rules his chosen people by Covenant. I have set aside another part of this discussion to speak more fully about the Kingdom of God, both by nature and by Covenant.\n\nThe way religion spreads also makes it easy to understand why it can dissolve back into its original seeds or principles. These are simply the belief in a deity and in invisible, supernatural powers. Such beliefs can never be eliminated from human nature so completely that influential people cannot cultivate them into new religions.\n\nEvery established religion first rests on the faith of many people in one person. They believe this person is wise, works for their happiness, and is holy, with God revealing his will to him supernaturally. So if the people who govern a religion come to be suspected of lacking wisdom, sincerity, or love, the religion they uphold must also come under suspicion. The same happens if they cannot show any credible sign of divine revelation. Without fear of the civil sword, people will challenge and reject it.\n\nA person who creates or enlarges a religion loses a reputation for wisdom by demanding belief in contradictions. Both sides of a contradiction cannot be true. Demanding belief in both shows ignorance, which discredits that person's other claims to supernatural revelation. Someone may receive revelation about many things beyond natural reason, but not about anything contrary to it.\n\nA person loses a reputation for sincerity by saying or doing things that suggest he does not believe what he asks others to believe. Such acts and words are called scandals because they make people stumble on the path of religion. Examples include injustice, cruelty, irreverence, greed, and excessive luxury. Who could believe that someone who habitually acts from these motives really fears the invisible power with which he frightens others over lesser faults?\n\nA person loses a reputation for love when his private interests are exposed. This happens when the beliefs he asks others to hold help, or seem to help, him in particular to gain power, wealth, status, or secure pleasure. When people benefit from something themselves, others assume they do it for their own sake, not out of love for anyone else.\n\nFinally, the only evidence people can give of a divine calling is miracles, true prophecy—which is also a miracle—or extraordinary success. When people who cannot prove their calling by a miracle add religious teachings to those received from people who performed miracles, their additions win only as much belief as local customs and laws have instilled in their followers. In natural matters, sensible people require natural signs and arguments. In supernatural matters, they require supernatural signs, namely miracles, before they believe sincerely and wholeheartedly.\n\nAll these causes of declining faith are clear in the following examples. First, consider the children of Israel. Moses had proved his calling with miracles and had successfully led them out of Egypt. Yet after he had been absent for only 40 days, they abandoned the worship of the true God that he had taught them. They made a golden calf their god (Exod.32 1,2), returning to the idolatry of the Egyptians from whom they had so recently been freed. Later, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and the generation that had seen God's great works in Israel died. A new generation arose and served Baal (Judges 2 11). When the miracles stopped, faith stopped too.\n\nAgain, Samuel appointed his sons judges in Bersabee. They took bribes and gave unjust judgments (1 Sam.8.3). The people of Israel then refused to have God as their king in any way different from his rule over other peoples. They demanded that Samuel choose them a king like other nations had. So when justice failed, faith failed too. They even removed God as their ruler.\n\nWhen Christianity was being established, the oracles ceased throughout the Roman Empire. Christians grew remarkably numerous everywhere, every day, through the preaching of the apostles and evangelists. Much of their success can reasonably be attributed to the contempt that Gentile priests had brought upon themselves. These priests behaved indecently, were greedy, and schemed with princes. For some of the same reasons, the religion of the Church of Rome was abolished in England and many other parts of Christendom. When pastors lack virtue, people lose faith. Another reason was that the Schoolmen brought Aristotle's philosophy and teachings into religion. This produced so many contradictions and absurdities that the clergy gained a reputation for both ignorance and fraud. People were inclined to break away from them, against their rulers' wishes in France and Holland, and with their rulers' wishes in England.\n\nFinally, among the beliefs the Church of Rome declares necessary for salvation, many plainly benefit the Pope and his spiritual subjects living in other Christian rulers' lands. Without rivalry among those rulers, they could exclude all foreign authority without war or difficulty, as easily as it has been excluded in England. Who cannot see who benefits from the belief that a king does not receive his authority from Christ unless a bishop crowns him? Or that a king cannot marry if he is a priest? Or that authorities in Rome must decide whether a prince was born within lawful marriage? Or that subjects may be released from their allegiance if the court of Rome judges their king a heretic? Or that a pope, such as Pope Zachary, may depose a king, such as Chilperique of France, for no reason and give his Kingdom to one of his subjects? Or that clergy and members of religious orders, in any country, are exempt from their king's authority in criminal cases? Who cannot see who profits from fees for private Masses and payments for release from Purgatory? These and other signs of private interest could extinguish even the strongest faith if civil government and custom did not support it more than people's belief in their teachers' holiness, wisdom, or honesty. So I can trace all changes of religion in the world to the same cause: priests whom people find objectionable. That includes not only Catholics, but even the church that most strongly claims to have been reformed.\n\nCHAPTER XIII. ON THE NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND, INCLUDING THEIR HAPPINESS AND MISERY\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIII\n\nON THE NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND, INCLUDING THEIR HAPPINESS AND MISERY\n\nNature has made people so equal in their physical and mental abilities that, although one person is sometimes plainly stronger or quicker-minded than another, the overall difference is not large enough for anyone to claim an advantage that others cannot claim too. Even the weakest person is strong enough to kill the strongest, either by a secret plan or by joining with others who face the same danger.\n\nMental abilities are even more equal than physical strength. I set aside skills based on words, especially science, which uses general and reliable rules. Very few people have this skill, and then only in a few fields. It is not an ability we are born with, nor do we acquire it, as we acquire practical judgment, while pursuing something else. Practical judgment is simply experience, and equal time gives equal experience to people who pay equal attention to the same things. What can make this equality seem unbelievable is people's inflated opinion of their own wisdom. Almost everyone thinks they have more of it than ordinary people—that is, everyone except themselves and a few people they admire for their fame or for agreeing with them. People may admit that many others are wittier, more eloquent, or better educated. But they will hardly believe that many are as wise as they are. They see their own intelligence close up and others' from a distance. This is evidence of equality rather than inequality. Usually the best sign that something has been distributed equally is that everyone is satisfied with their share.\n\nEqual ability leads to equal hope of achieving our goals. When two people want something that they cannot both have, they become enemies. In pursuing their goal—mainly self-preservation, though sometimes only pleasure—they try to destroy or subdue each other. Suppose someone plants crops, sows seeds, builds, or occupies a good place, and an attacker need fear only that person's individual strength. Others can be expected to join forces and arrive ready to take not only the fruits of that person's work but also his life or freedom. The attacker faces the same danger from yet another attacker.\n\nBecause people distrust one another, the most reasonable way for anyone to make himself safe is to strike first. By force or cunning, he gains control over as many people as he can until no one else is powerful enough to endanger him. This goes no further than self-preservation requires and is generally permitted. Some people, however, enjoy displaying their power through conquest and keep going beyond what their safety requires. If people who would otherwise happily live within modest limits did not also expand their power by attacking, they could not survive for long by defense alone. Increasing their power over other people is therefore necessary for their survival and must be permitted.\n\nPeople also take no pleasure in one another's company without a power strong enough to keep them all in check. Instead, they feel considerable distress. Each expects others to value him as highly as he values himself. At any sign of contempt or disrespect, he naturally tries to force his critics to show more respect by harming them, and to make an example for everyone else. He does this as far as he dares. Among people with no common power to keep the peace, that can mean destroying each other.\n\nWe thus find three main causes of conflict in human nature: competition, distrust, and glory.\n\nCompetition makes people attack for gain; distrust, for safety; and glory, for reputation. For gain, they use violence to seize other people's bodies, wives, children, and livestock. For safety, they use it to defend these. For reputation, they use it over trivial things: a word, a smile, a different opinion, or any other sign of disrespect. The slight may be aimed at them directly or indirectly, through their relatives, friends, nation, profession, or name.\n\nIt is therefore clear that when people live without a common Power to keep them all in check, they are in a condition called war: a war of every person against every person. War is not just a battle or an act of fighting. It is a period when people's willingness to fight is sufficiently clear. Time therefore matters to the nature of war, just as it does to weather. Bad weather is not defined by one or two showers, but by a tendency toward rain over many days. Likewise, war is not defined by actual fighting, but by a known readiness to fight for as long as there is no assurance that fighting will not occur. Any other time is peace.\n\nEverything that follows from a time of war, when everyone is everyone's enemy, also follows when people have no security except what their own strength and ingenuity provide. In this condition, there is no place for productive work because no one can be sure of its results. As a result, there is no cultivation of the land, no navigation or use of goods imported by sea, no comfortable buildings, no machinery for moving heavy things, no knowledge of the earth's geography, no tracking of time, no arts, no writing, and no society. Worst of all, there is constant fear and danger of violent death. Human life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.\n\nSomeone who has not thought carefully about this may find it strange that nature should separate people and make them likely to attack and destroy one another. Unconvinced by an argument drawn from the Passions, he may want it confirmed by experience. Let him consider what he himself does. Before a journey he arms himself and seeks companions. Before sleep he locks his doors. Even at home he locks his chests, despite knowing that laws exist and armed public officers will punish anyone who harms him. What does carrying weapons say about his opinion of his fellow subjects? What do his locked doors say about his fellow citizens, and his locked chests about his children and servants? Does he not accuse humanity by his actions as much as I do by my words? Yet neither of us is condemning human nature itself. Human desires and other Passions are not sinful in themselves. Nor are the acts that follow from them sinful before people know a law forbidding them. They cannot know such a law until laws are made, and no law can be made until they have agreed on who will make it.\n\nPerhaps someone will think that there was never a time or condition of war like this. I believe it never existed everywhere in the world at once, but in many places people live this way now. The peoples called savage in many parts of America have no government apart from small family groups held together by natural desire. To this day they live in the brutish way I described. In any case, we can see what life would be like without a common Power to fear from the life into which people once governed peacefully tend to fall during a civil war.\n\nEven if individuals had never lived in a state of war with one another, kings and people with Soveraigne authority have always been suspicious of one another because they are independent. They are like gladiators, weapons pointed and eyes fixed on each other. Their forts, garrisons, and guns stand at the borders of their Kingdoms, and they keep spies watching their neighbors. This is a posture of war. But because they can still sustain their subjects' work, this condition does not bring the misery caused by the unrestricted liberty of individuals.\n\nThe war of everyone against everyone has another consequence: nothing can be unjust. Right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there. Without a common Power there is no law, and without law there is no injustice. Force and fraud are the two chief virtues in war. Justice and injustice are not physical or mental abilities. If they were, a person alone in the world could possess them, just as he could possess senses and Passions. They are qualities of people living together, not of someone living alone. Another result of this condition is that there is no property, no established control over things, and no clear distinction between mine and yours. Each person owns only what he can take, and only for as long as he can keep it. That is the bad condition nature actually puts humanity in. People can nevertheless escape it, partly through their Passions and partly through reason.\n\nThe Passions that lead people toward peace are fear of death, desire for what they need to live comfortably, and hope of getting these things by their work. Reason suggests useful terms of peace on which people can agree. These terms are also called the Laws of Nature. I will discuss them more fully in the next two chapters.\n\nCHAPTER XIV. ON THE FIRST AND SECOND LAWS OF NATURE, AND ON CONTRACTS\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIV, 1\n\nON THE FIRST AND SECOND LAWS OF NATURE, AND ON CONTRACTS\n\nThe Right of Nature, commonly called Jus Naturale by writers, is each person's freedom to use his own power as he chooses to preserve his own nature—that is, his life. He may therefore do whatever his own judgment and reason tell him is best for preserving it.\n\nLiberty, in the word's strict sense, means the absence of outside obstacles. Such obstacles can often take away part of a person's power to do what he wants. They cannot stop him from using whatever power he has left as his judgment and reason direct.\n\nA Law of Nature, or Lex Naturalis, is a rule discovered through reason. It forbids a person to do anything that destroys his life or takes away his means of preserving it. It also forbids him to neglect whatever he thinks will best preserve his life. Writers on this subject often confuse jus and lex, Right and law, but these should be kept distinct. A Right is freedom to do something or not do it, while a law settles the choice and binds a person to one course. Law and Right thus differ as obligation and liberty do. In the same matter, these are incompatible.\n\nAs explained in the previous chapter, humanity's natural condition is a war of everyone against everyone. Each person follows his own reason, and anything he can use may help him stay alive against his enemies. So in that condition each person has a Right to everything, even another person's body. As long as everyone keeps this natural Right to everything, no one, however strong or wise, can be sure of living as long as people normally live.\n\nReason therefore gives us this general rule: “Everyone should seek peace as far as he hopes to achieve it. When he cannot achieve it, he may seek and use every means and advantage of war.” The first part is the first and fundamental Law of Nature: “Seek peace and pursue it.” The second sums up the Right of Nature: “Defend ourselves by every means we can.”\n\nThe fundamental Law of Nature commands people to seek peace. From it follows a second law: “A person should be willing, when others are willing too, to give up his right to everything insofar as he thinks this necessary for peace and his own defense. He should accept only as much liberty against others as he would allow them against himself.” As long as everyone keeps the Right to do whatever he likes, everyone remains in a state of war. But if others will not give up their Right too, no one has reason to give up his own. That would leave him open to attack, which no one is required to do, instead of putting him on the path to peace. This is the law of the Gospel: “Whatever you require others to do to you, do to them.” And it is the universal rule, “Quod tibi feiri non vis, alteri ne feceris.”\n\nTo give up one's Right to something is to give up the freedom to prevent another person from using his own Right to it. Someone who renounces or transfers a Right does not give anyone else a Right they lacked before, because by nature everyone had a Right to everything. He merely steps aside so that the other person can use his original Right without interference from him, though others may still interfere. When one person gives up a Right, the benefit to another is simply that he faces fewer obstacles in using the Right he already had.\n\nA person gives up a Right either by renouncing it outright or by transferring it to someone else. He renounces it outright when he does not care who benefits. He transfers it when he means a particular person or group to benefit. Once he has given away his Right in either way, he is obliged, or bound, not to prevent those people from enjoying it. He has a duty not to undo his own voluntary act. To interfere would be injustice and injury, or sine jure, because he has already renounced or transferred the Right. Injury or injustice in ordinary disputes resembles what scholars call an absurdity in an argument. An argument is absurd if someone contradicts the position he first defended. In ordinary life, it is unjust or injurious to undo voluntarily what one first did voluntarily. A person renounces or transfers his Right by declaring or indicating, through one or more adequate voluntary signs, that he is doing so or has done so to someone who accepts it. Those signs can be words, actions, or, most often, both. These are the bonds that oblige people. Their strength comes not from their own nature—for nothing is easier to break than a person's word—but from fear of bad consequences if the bonds are broken.\n\nWhenever someone transfers or renounces a Right, he does so either in return for a Right transferred to him or for some other good he hopes to gain. This is a voluntary act, and the aim of everyone's voluntary actions is some good for himself. Some Rights therefore cannot be understood to have been surrendered or transferred, whatever words or other signs a person uses. First, no one can give up the right to resist someone who attacks him by force to take his life. No one could be understood to hope for any good from doing that. The same holds for wounds, chains, and imprisonment. Enduring these brings no benefit, unlike allowing someone else to be wounded or imprisoned. Also, when people use violence against a person, he cannot know whether they intend to kill him. Finally, the whole purpose of giving up and transferring Rights is to keep a person safe in his life and in the means of preserving it without becoming weary of living. If someone's words or other signs seem to strip him of the very goal those signs were meant to serve, we should not understand him to mean or want that. Rather, he did not understand how his words and actions would be interpreted.\n\nThe mutual transfer of Rights is called a contract.\n\nTransferring a Right to a thing is different from transferring, or delivering, the thing itself. The thing can be delivered along with the Right, as when buying and selling for immediate payment or exchanging goods or land. It can also be delivered later.\n\nOne party to a contract may deliver the thing he agreed to give and trust the other to perform his part at a set later time. In that case, the contract is called a pact or Covenant from the first party's perspective. Alternatively, both parties may agree now to perform later. In either case, someone trusted to perform later is said to keep his promise, or keep faith, when he performs. If he deliberately fails, he violates faith.\n\nSometimes a transfer of Rights is not mutual. One person gives a Right hoping to gain friendship or service from another person or that person's friends, to gain a reputation for charity or generosity, to ease his own distress at another's suffering, or to gain a reward in heaven. This is not a contract but a gift, free gift, or act of grace. These terms mean the same thing.\n\nSigns of a contract may be explicit or inferred. Explicit signs are words spoken with an understanding of their meaning. Such words may refer to the present or past: “I give,” “I grant,” “I have given,” “I have granted,” or “I want this to be yours.” They may refer to the future: “I will give” or “I will grant.” Words referring to the future are called promises.\n\nAn inferred sign may come from words, silence, actions, or refraining from action. More generally, anything that sufficiently shows a party's intention is an inferred sign of a contract.\n\nWords alone that refer to the future and make a bare promise are not enough to show a free gift and do not create an obligation. If I say, “Tomorrow I will give,” this shows that I have not yet given anything. My Right has therefore not passed to anyone else and remains mine until I transfer it by another act. But if I speak of the present or past, saying, “I have given, or now give, what will be delivered tomorrow,” I give up tomorrow's Right today. The words alone can do that, even without any other evidence of my intention. There is a great difference between Volos Hoc Tuum Esse Cras and Cros Dabo—that is, between “I want this to be yours tomorrow” and “I will give it to you tomorrow.” In the first sentence, “I want” describes a present act of will. In the second, it promises a future act of will. So the first transfers a future Right now, while the second promises something in the future and transfers nothing now. But when signs besides words show an intention to transfer a Right, words about the future can transfer it even when the gift is free. For example, someone offers a prize to the first person to finish a race. This is a free gift, and his words refer to the future, yet the Right passes to the winner. If he did not mean his words to be understood that way, he should not have let the contestants run.\n\nWords referring to the past, present, and future can all be signs of a contract: In a contract, a Right passes not only with words referring to the present or past, but also with words referring to the future. Every contract is a mutual transfer or exchange of Rights. Someone who promises after receiving the benefit for which he promises is therefore understood to intend the Right to pass. Otherwise the other party would not have performed first. For this reason, in buying, selling, and other contracts, a promise is equivalent to a Covenant and creates an obligation.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XIV, 2\n\nIn a contract, the person who performs first is said to earn what the other party must give in return. It is due to him. Suppose a prize is offered to many people but only the winner will receive it, or money is thrown among a crowd for whoever catches it. Although this is a free gift, winning or catching it earns the prize, which is then due. The Right passes when the prize is offered or the money thrown, though the outcome of the competition determines who receives it. But these two kinds of earning differ. In a contract, I earn through my own ability and the other party's need. With a free gift, I can earn only because the giver is generous. In a contract, I earn a claim that the other party give up his Right. With a gift, I do not earn a claim that the giver give up his Right; instead, once he has given it up, I earn a claim that the gift be mine rather than someone else's. I think this is what the schools mean by their distinction between Meritum Congrui and Meritum Condigni. God Almighty has promised Paradise to people who, despite being blinded by bodily desires, make their way through this world according to his prescribed rules and limits. The schools say that someone who lives that way earns Paradise Ex Congruo. But no one can claim it as a Right based on his own righteousness or any other power within himself. It comes only through God's free grace. So they say no one can earn Paradise Ex Condigno. This is what I think their distinction means. But debaters do not agree on the meanings of their own technical terms any longer than agreement serves their purposes, so I will make no firm claim about their meaning. I will say only that when a gift is offered to anyone who meets a condition, as with a prize in a contest, the winner earns it and may claim it as due.\n\nSuppose people make a Covenant in which neither performs immediately, but each trusts the other. In the natural condition, a war of everyone against everyone, any reasonable suspicion makes it void. But if a common Power stands over both parties, with the Right and strength to compel performance, the Covenant is not void. The person who performs first has no assurance that the other will perform later. Words alone are too weak to restrain people's ambition, greed, anger, and other Passions unless they fear a power that can force them to comply. No such power can be assumed in the natural condition, where everyone is equal and judges whether his own fears are justified. So whoever performs first merely gives himself up to his enemy. That goes against the Right he can never give up: the Right to defend his life and means of living.\n\nIn a civil state, however, there is a Power that can compel people who might otherwise break their word. There is no longer reasonable cause for that fear. So the party who has agreed by Covenant to perform first must do so.\n\nFor fear to invalidate such a Covenant, its cause must always be something arising after the Covenant was made, such as a new action or another sign that the other party will not perform. Otherwise it cannot make the Covenant void. Something that did not stop a person from promising should not be accepted as a reason not to perform.\n\nWhoever transfers a Right also transfers the means of using it, as far as he can. Someone who sells land is understood to transfer the grass and whatever grows on it. Someone who sells a mill cannot divert the stream that runs it. And those who give a person the Right to rule with Soveraignty are understood to give him the Right to raise money to maintain soldiers and appoint magistrates to administer justice.\n\nIt is impossible to make a Covenant with animals. They do not understand our words and therefore cannot understand or accept a transfer of Rights. Nor can they transfer a Right to someone else. Without mutual acceptance there is no Covenant.\n\nIt is impossible to make a Covenant with God except through someone to whom God speaks by supernatural revelation, or through his representatives who govern under him and in his name. Otherwise we cannot know whether he accepts our Covenants. People therefore make vows in vain when they vow something contrary to any Law of Nature, because fulfilling such a vow would be unjust. If what they vow is required by a Law of Nature, the law, not their vow, binds them.\n\nThe subject of a Covenant must always be something a person can deliberate about. Making a Covenant is an act of the will: the final act of deliberation. It must therefore concern something yet to happen that the person making the Covenant judges possible to perform.\n\nSo a promise to do something known to be impossible is not a Covenant. But if something once thought possible later proves impossible, the Covenant remains valid. It then binds the person, if not to the thing itself, to its value. If even that is impossible, he must sincerely try to perform as much as he can. No one can be bound to do more.\n\nPeople are released from Covenants in two ways: by performing or by being forgiven. Performance is the natural end of an obligation. Forgiveness restores liberty by transferring back the Right that was given up in accepting the obligation.\n\nCovenants made out of fear in the natural condition are binding. Suppose I make a Covenant with an enemy to pay a ransom or provide service in return for my life. I am bound by it. This is a contract in which one party receives the benefit of staying alive and the other is to receive money or service. Where no other law forbids performance, as in the natural condition, the Covenant is valid. Prisoners of war who are trusted to pay their ransom must therefore pay it. A weaker prince who makes an unfavorable peace with a stronger prince out of fear must keep it, unless, as noted above, some new and justified cause of fear arises that warrants resuming the war. Even in Common-wealths, if a thief forces me to promise him money to buy my freedom, I must pay until civil law releases me from the obligation. Whatever I may legally do without being bound, I may legally promise to do out of fear. I cannot legally break a Covenant I have legally made.\n\nAn earlier Covenant makes a later one void. A person who transfers his Right to someone today does not still have that Right to transfer to someone else tomorrow. The later promise transfers no Right and is invalid.\n\nA Covenant not to defend myself against force with force is always void. As I showed earlier, no one can transfer or surrender the Right to save himself from death, injury, and imprisonment. Avoiding these is the only purpose of giving up any Right. So a promise not to resist force transfers no Right in any Covenant and creates no obligation. A person can make this Covenant: “If I do not do this or that, kill me.” But he cannot make this one: “If I do not do this or that, I will not resist you when you come to kill me.” A person naturally chooses the lesser evil, the risk of dying while resisting, over the greater evil, certain and immediate death if he does not resist. Everyone acknowledges this by using armed guards to take criminals to prison and execution, even though the criminals consented to the law under which they were convicted.\n\nA Covenant to accuse oneself without assurance of pardon is also invalid. In the natural condition everyone is his own judge, so there is no place for accusation. In a civil state, accusation leads to punishment, which is an act of force a person has no obligation not to resist. The same applies to accusing people whose conviction would bring him misery, such as his father, wife, or benefactor. Testimony from such an accuser, if not freely given, is presumed to be distorted by natural affection and should not be accepted. Where a person's testimony should not be believed, he has no duty to give it. Accusations extracted under torture should not count as testimony either. Torture should be used only to gather clues for further examination and investigation of the truth. A person confesses under torture to relieve his own suffering, not to inform those torturing him. So such a confession should not be accepted as sufficient testimony. Whether his accusation is true or false, he makes it under his Right to preserve his own life.\n\nAs I noted earlier, words are too weak by themselves to hold people to their Covenants. Human nature offers only two ways to strengthen them: fear of the consequences of breaking one's word, or the pride of appearing not to need to break it. The second is a generosity too rare to count on, especially among those seeking wealth, power, or physical pleasure, who make up most of humanity. The Passion we can rely on is fear. It has two very common objects: the power of invisible spirits, and the power of the people a person would wrong by breaking his word. Although the first power is greater, fear of the second is usually stronger. Fear of invisible powers is each person's own religion, which exists in human nature before civil society. Fear of other people does not exist to a sufficient degree before civil society to make people keep their promises. In the natural condition, differences in power cannot be known until battle settles them. So before civil society exists, or when war interrupts it, only one thing can strengthen a Covenant of peace against greed, ambition, lust, and other powerful desires: fear of the invisible Power each person worships as God and fears as an avenger of broken faith. When two people are not subject to civil Power, therefore, all they can do is ask each other to swear by the God he fears. Swearing an oath means adding a statement to a promise in which the person promising declares that, if he does not perform, he gives up his God's mercy or calls on God to punish him. The heathen formula was, “Otherwise let Jupiter kill me, as I kill this animal.” Ours is, “I shall do this and that, so help me God.” Each person adds the rites and ceremonies of his own religion to increase his fear of breaking faith.\n\nAn oath taken using a form or rite other than the one belonging to the person swearing it is pointless and is no oath at all. No one can swear by anything he does not consider God. People have sometimes sworn by their kings from fear or flattery, but in doing so they meant to attribute divine honor to them. Swearing by God unnecessarily merely profanes his name. Swearing by other things in everyday conversation is not really swearing at all, but an irreverent habit acquired through speaking too heatedly.\n\nAn oath also adds nothing to an obligation. A lawful Covenant binds a person before God just as much without an oath as with one. An unlawful Covenant does not bind at all, even if confirmed by an oath.\n\nCHAPTER XV. ON OTHER LAWS OF NATURE\n\n### Part I, Chapter XV, 1\n\nOn other Laws of Nature\n\nFrom the Law of Nature requiring us to give up rights that would obstruct peace if we kept them, a third law follows: people must keep the Covenants they have made. Without this rule, Covenants are useless words. Everyone still has a right to everything, and we remain in a state of war.\n\nThis Law of Nature is the source of justice. Where no Covenant has come first, nobody has given up any right. Everyone has a right to everything, so no action can be unjust. But once a Covenant has been made, breaking it is unjust. Injustice means nothing more than failing to keep a Covenant. Whatever is not unjust is just.\n\nJustice and ownership begin when a Common-wealth is established. As I said in the previous chapter, Covenants based on mutual trust are invalid when either side fears the other will not perform. So although justice originates in making Covenants, there can be no actual injustice until the cause of that fear is removed. This cannot happen while people remain in the natural state of war. Before we can call anything just or unjust, there must be a power that can force everyone equally to keep their Covenants. It must threaten a punishment worse than any benefit from breaking them. It must also secure the ownership people acquire by mutual agreement in return for giving up their universal right. No such power exists before a Common-wealth is established. The standard definition taught in the schools supports this: “Justice is the steady will to give each person what belongs to him.” Where nothing belongs to anyone, there is no ownership and no injustice. Where there is no power to enforce rules—no Common-wealth—there is no ownership, since everyone has a right to everything. So where there is no Common-wealth, nothing is unjust. Justice consists in keeping valid Covenants. Covenants become valid only when a civil power strong enough to enforce them is established. Ownership begins then too.\n\nThe fool has said in his heart that justice does not exist, and sometimes says so aloud. He argues seriously that each person must look after his own safety and satisfaction. Why, then, should anyone not do whatever he thinks will help him? Making or refusing Covenants, and keeping or breaking them, would not be unreasonable if it benefited him. He does not deny that Covenants exist, that some are kept and some broken, or that we can call keeping them justice and breaking them injustice. He asks whether injustice, leaving aside fear of God (for this same fool has said in his heart that there is no God), may sometimes agree with the reason that directs each person toward his own good. This might especially seem true when it brings a benefit so great that he need not care about other people's criticism, insults, or even their power. The Kingdome of God is won by force. But suppose it could be won by unjust force: would taking it that way be unreasonable if no harm could come to the victor? If it is not unreasonable, it is not unjust—or else justice cannot be praised as good. Thinking this way has made successful wrongdoing seem like virtue. Some who condemn breaking promises in every other case approve it when it wins a kingdom. The pagans believed Jupiter overthrew his father Saturn, yet also believed Jupiter punished injustice. There is a similar point in Coke's Commentaries on Littleton. Coke says that even if the rightful heir to the Crown is convicted of treason, the Crown passes to him, and Eo Instante, at that instant, the conviction becomes void. These examples might tempt someone to conclude that if the heir apparent to a kingdom kills its current ruler, even his own father, the act may be called injustice or anything else but cannot be unreasonable. After all, people act voluntarily for their own benefit, and the most reasonable actions best achieve their aims. This attractive argument is false.\n\nThe question is not about mutual promises with no guarantee on either side, such as promises made when no civil power governs the parties. Those promises are not Covenants. The question arises when one party has already performed, or when there is a power that can compel performance. Is keeping the Covenant then contrary to the other party's own interests—in other words, contrary to reason? I say it is not. First, consider a person who does something that, by everything he could foresee and take into account, tends to destroy him. An unexpected event might turn the act to his advantage, but that does not make the choice reasonable or wise. Second, in a state of war everyone is everyone else's enemy because there is no common power to restrain them. Nobody can hope to protect himself from destruction by his strength or intelligence alone, without allies. Each ally expects as much protection from the alliance as anyone else. Therefore, someone who openly holds that it is reasonable to deceive his helpers can reasonably expect only the protection he can provide for himself. A man who breaks his Covenant and thereby declares that he thinks breaking it reasonable cannot join a society organized for peace and defense unless its members make a mistake in accepting him. Once admitted, he cannot remain unless they fail to see that mistake's danger. He cannot reasonably count on such errors to keep him safe. If excluded or expelled, he perishes. If he survives inside the society, it is thanks to other people's errors, which he could not foresee or count on. His choice is therefore contrary to the reason that favors his survival. Anyone who does not help destroy him spares him only because they do not know what is best for themselves.\n\nThe example of winning secure, everlasting happiness in heaven by any possible means is beside the point. There is only one imaginable way to reach it, and that is keeping a Covenant, not breaking one.\n\nAs for winning Soveraignty by rebellion, even if the attempt succeeds, success could not reasonably have been expected. Failure was more likely. Moreover, taking power that way teaches others to take it in the same way. So the attempt is contrary to reason. Justice, or keeping Covenants, is a rule of reason that forbids us to do anything destructive to our lives. It is therefore a Law of Nature.\n\nSome go further. They say the Laws of Nature are not rules for preserving human life on earth but rules for gaining eternal happiness after death. They think breaking a Covenant can help achieve that happiness and can therefore be just and reasonable. Among them are those who think it meritorious to kill, depose, or rebel against the Soveraigne Power they themselves agreed to establish. But we have no natural knowledge of what happens to people after death, much less of any reward there for breaking faith. There is only belief in the words of people who say they know through supernatural means, or know people who knew people who knew others who did. Breaking faith cannot therefore be called a command of reason or nature.\n\nOthers agree that keeping faith is a Law of Nature but make exceptions for certain people, such as heretics and those who habitually break their Covenants with others. This, too, is contrary to reason. If someone's fault is enough to release us from a Covenant, it should also have been enough reason not to make that Covenant in the first place.\n\nCalling people just or unjust is different from calling actions just or unjust. For people, the words describe whether their character and habits agree with reason. For actions, they describe whether specific acts, rather than a whole way of life, agree with reason. A just person does everything he can to make all his actions just; an unjust person neglects that duty. We more often call such people righteous and unrighteous, though the meaning is the same. A righteous person does not lose that description because of one or a few unjust acts arising from sudden Passions or from a mistake about people or circumstances. An unrighteous person does not lose his character because fear makes him act justly or refrain from injustice. His choices are guided by apparent advantage, not justice. What gives human actions a just character is a rare kind of noble courage: a refusal to rely on fraud or broken promises for satisfaction in life. This justice of character is what we mean when we call justice a virtue and injustice a vice.\n\nBut just actions make someone innocent rather than a just person. Unjust actions, also called injuries, make him guilty.\n\nAgain, an unjust character is a tendency or readiness to injure others. It is unjust before the person acts, even when no particular victim is identified. An unjust act, or injury, requires a particular injured person: the one to whom the Covenant was made. Thus one person often suffers the injury while another suffers the loss. Suppose a master orders his servant to give money to a stranger. If the servant fails, he injures the master, whom he had agreed to obey. The stranger suffers the loss but is not injured by the servant, who owed him nothing. Likewise, in Common-wealths, private people may forgive one another's debts, but they may not forgive robberies or other violent acts that harm them. Withholding a debt injures the private person; robbery and violence injure the person of the Common-wealth.\n\nNothing done to a person in accordance with a wish he has expressed to the doer injures him. If the doer has not already surrendered his original right to do as he likes by Covenant, he breaks no Covenant and commits no injury. If he has surrendered it, the other person's expressed wish releases him from the Covenant, so again he commits no injury.\n\nWriters divide justice in actions into commutative and distributive justice. They say the first depends on arithmetic proportion and the second on geometric proportion. They locate commutative justice in equal values for things exchanged by contract, and distributive justice in equal rewards for people of equal merit. On that account it would be unjust to sell something for more than we paid or give a person more than he deserves. But the value of anything exchanged is measured by the desires of the people exchanging it. The just price is what they agree to pay. Apart from merit established by a Covenant, where one side's performance earns the other's performance and belongs to commutative rather than distributive justice, merit creates no claim under justice. It is rewarded only as a favor. The usual explanation of this division is therefore wrong. Strictly speaking, commutative justice is the justice of someone making an agreement: keeping a Covenant in buying and selling, hiring and renting, lending and borrowing, exchanging, bartering, and other contracts.\n\nDistributive justice is the justice of an arbitrator: deciding what is just. The parties trust him to make that decision. If he honors their trust, he gives each person what belongs to him. This is a just distribution. It may be called distributive justice, though that is not the most accurate name; equity is more accurate. Equity is also a Law of Nature, as I will show later.\n\nAs justice depends on an earlier Covenant, gratitude depends on an earlier act of generosity, that is, a gift freely given. Gratitude is the fourth Law of Nature: “Someone who receives a benefit freely given by another must try to give the giver no reasonable cause to regret his goodwill.” Nobody gives without hoping for some good for himself. Giving is voluntary, and each person's own good is the aim of all his voluntary acts. If givers see that they will be disappointed, goodwill and trust will never begin. Neither will mutual help or reconciliation. People will remain in a state of war, against the first and fundamental Law of Nature, which commands them to seek peace. Breaking this law is called ingratitude. It relates to a free gift as injustice relates to an obligation created by a Covenant.\n\n### Part I, Chapter XV, 2\n\nA fifth Law of Nature is accommodation: “Everyone must try to get along with others.” To understand this, consider that people's different Passions make them differently suited to living together, much as building stones have different shapes. A rough, irregular stone may take up more room than it fills. If it is too hard to smooth and blocks the work, builders throw it away as useless and troublesome. Likewise, someone may stubbornly insist on keeping things he does not need but others do need. If his Passions are too stubborn to correct, society must leave him out or cast him out as a burden. Everyone is assumed to try, both by right and by natural necessity, to obtain what is needed to survive. Someone who obstructs that effort for the sake of things he does not need is responsible for the resulting war. He thus violates the fundamental Law of Nature, which commands us to seek peace. Those who follow this law may be called sociable (the Latin word is Commodi); those who break it, stubborn, unsociable, difficult, and unmanageable.\n\nA sixth Law of Nature says: “If those who have wronged someone repent and ask to be forgiven, he must forgive them once they give assurances about their future conduct.” Forgiveness is an offer of peace. Offering it to people who remain hostile does not create peace but shows fear. Refusing it to those who offer assurances for the future shows hostility to peace and is therefore contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nA seventh law says: “In taking revenge—that is, returning harm for harm—people must consider not how great the past wrong was but how much good the response will bring in the future.” Thus we must not punish for any purpose other than correcting the offender or guiding others. This law follows from the previous one, which requires forgiveness when there is security about future conduct. Revenge taken without regard for its example or future benefit is simply triumph over another person's suffering. It achieves nothing, since an aim is always something to come. Taking pride in something that achieves nothing is empty pride and contrary to reason. Inflicting harm without reason leads to war, violates the Law of Nature, and is commonly called cruelty.\n\nEvery sign of hatred or contempt provokes a fight. Most people would rather risk their lives than leave such an insult unanswered. So an eighth Law of Nature says: “Nobody may show hatred or contempt for another person by action, words, facial expression, or gesture.” Breaking this law is commonly called an insult.\n\nIn the purely natural condition, it makes no sense to ask who is the better person. As I showed earlier, all people are equal. The inequality we now find was introduced by civil laws. In the first book of his Politics, Aristotle bases his teaching on the claim that some people are naturally more fit to command—the wise, such as he thought himself because he was a philosopher—while others are naturally fit to serve, having strong bodies but no philosophical wisdom. This treats master and servant as products of different intelligence rather than human agreement. It contradicts both reason and experience. Very few people are so foolish that they would prefer to be governed by others rather than govern themselves. And when those who consider themselves wise fight those less confident of their own wisdom, the self-declared wise do not always win, or even often win, or win almost ever. If nature made people equal, we must acknowledge that equality. Even if nature made them unequal, people who regard themselves as equal will accept peace only on equal terms. We must therefore recognize equality. My ninth Law of Nature is: “Everyone must acknowledge everyone else as his equal by nature.” Breaking this rule is pride.\n\nAnother law follows: “When negotiating peace, nobody may demand to keep a right that he is not willing to let everyone else keep.” All who seek peace must give up some Rights of Nature, meaning their freedom to do anything they wish. But people must keep certain rights in order to live: the right to control their own bodies, to use air and water, to move and travel from place to place, and to have everything else needed to live or live well. If someone negotiating peace claims something for himself that he would deny to others, he violates the preceding rule of natural equality and thus the Law of Nature. Those who follow this rule are called modest; those who break it are arrogant. The Greeks call the violation pleonexia, meaning wanting more than one's share.\n\nAnother rule of the Law of Nature says: “If someone is trusted to judge a dispute between people, he must treat them equally.” Otherwise their disputes can be settled only by war. A biased judge does what he can to discourage people from using judges and arbitrators. Against the fundamental Law of Nature, he thus causes war.\n\nFollowing this law means distributing to each person equally what reason says belongs to him. This is called equity, and, as I have said, distributive justice. Breaking it is favoring certain people, or Prosopolepsia.\n\nAnother law follows: “Things that cannot be divided must be shared if possible, without limits if there is enough for everyone; otherwise they must be shared in proportion to the number of people with rights to them.” Any other distribution is unequal and contrary to equity.\n\nSome things can neither be divided nor shared. The Law of Nature that requires equity then says: “Give the entire right, or the first turn if use can alternate, by lot.” Equal distribution is required by the Law of Nature, and there is no other imaginable way to distribute such things equally.\n\nThere are two kinds of lot: arbitrary and natural. An arbitrary lot is one agreed on by those competing. A natural lot is either inheritance by the firstborn—called Kleronomia in Greek, which means “given by lot”—or taking possession first.\n\nThings that cannot be shared or divided should therefore go to whoever possesses them first, and in some cases to the firstborn, as though awarded by lot.\n\nIt is also a Law of Nature that “everyone who acts as a mediator for peace must be given safe conduct.” The law that commands peace as the goal also commands mediation as a means to that goal, and safe conduct is needed for mediation.\n\nEven when people are willing to obey these laws, they can still dispute an action. They can ask, first, whether it happened, and second, if it did, whether it broke the law. The first is a question of fact, the second a question of right. Unless the parties agree by Covenant to accept someone else's decision, they remain as far from peace as ever. This other person, whose decision they accept, is an arbitrator. It is therefore a Law of Nature that “people in a dispute submit their claims to an arbitrator's judgment.”\n\nSince everyone is assumed to act for his own benefit, nobody is a suitable arbitrator in his own case. Even if he were otherwise well suited, equity gives each party an equal advantage. If one party may judge, the other must be allowed to judge too. Then the dispute, and the cause of war, remain, contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nFor the same reason, nobody should act as arbitrator in a case if one party's victory will plainly bring him more profit, honor, or pleasure than the other's. He has received a bribe, even if he could not avoid it, and nobody is obliged to trust him. The dispute and the state of war thus remain, contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nIn a dispute about facts, a judge must not believe one party more than the other without further evidence. He must believe a third person, or a third and fourth, or more. Otherwise the question remains unsettled and is left to force, contrary to the Law of Nature.\n\nThese Laws of Nature prescribe peace as a way to preserve groups of people. Only these laws belong to the study of civil society. Other behaviors, such as drunkenness and every other form of excess, can destroy individual people. They may therefore also count among things the Law of Nature forbids. But they need not be listed here and are not sufficiently relevant to this subject.\n\nThis reasoning about the Laws of Nature may seem too subtle for everyone to grasp. Most people are too busy finding food, and the rest too inattentive. But nobody needs an excuse for failing to understand, because these laws can be reduced to a single easy rule that even someone with little understanding can grasp: “Do not do to another person what you would not want done to yourself.” To learn the Laws of Nature, all one must do is compare other people's actions with one's own. If their actions seem worse, imagine switching their places on the scales with one's own, so that one's own Passions and self-love add no weight. Every Law of Nature will then seem reasonable.\n\nThe Laws of Nature bind us inwardly, to want them to be put into practice. But they bind us outwardly, to act on them, only when there is security. Someone who is modest, cooperative, and faithful to every promise when nobody else is will make himself easy prey and ensure his own ruin. That would violate the basis of every Law of Nature, which is self-preservation. Conversely, someone who follows these laws toward a person who does not follow them seeks war rather than peace, and so risks his own violent destruction.\n\nAny law that binds us inwardly can be broken not only by an action against it but also by an action that follows it, if the person believes that action breaks it. The outward act may comply, but the person's inward intention does not.\n\nThe Laws of Nature are unchanging and eternal. Injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride, unfairness, favoritism, and the rest can never become lawful. War can never preserve life while peace destroys it.\n\nThese laws are easy to follow because they require only a desire and an effort to comply—an honest, steady effort. Someone who makes that effort fulfills them, and someone who fulfills the law is just.\n\nKnowledge of these laws is the true and only moral philosophy. Moral philosophy studies good and evil in human relationships and society. Good and evil name what we desire and avoid, and these differ with people's temperaments, customs, and beliefs. People disagree not just about what pleases or displeases their senses of taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight. They also disagree about what agrees with reason in ordinary life. The same person changes his mind over time, praising as good at one time what he condemns as evil at another. From this come disagreements, disputes, and finally war. While people remain in the purely natural condition, a state of war, each person's own desires measure good and evil. Yet everyone agrees that peace is good. They must also agree that its means—justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, and the other Laws of Nature described above—are good. These are the moral virtues, while their opposites are evil vices. The study of virtues and vices is moral philosophy. So the true teaching of the Laws of Nature is true moral philosophy. Writers on moral philosophy recognize the same virtues and vices, but they do not see why the virtues are good or why people praise them as ways to live peacefully, sociably, and comfortably. Instead, they place virtue in a moderate degree of Passion, as though courage depended on how much someone dared rather than why he dared, or generosity on the size of a gift rather than the reason for it.\n\nPeople commonly call these rules of reason laws, but that is not quite accurate. They are conclusions, or principles, about what helps people preserve and defend themselves. Strictly speaking, a law is the word of someone who has the right to command others. But if we consider these same principles as expressed in the word of God, who has the right to command everything, then they are properly called laws.\n\nCHAPTER XVI. ON PERSONS, AUTHORS, AND THINGS REPRESENTED\n\n### Part I, Chapter XVI\n\nOn persons, authors, and things represented\n\nWhat a person is\n\nA person is someone “whose words or actions are considered either his own or a representation of the words or actions of another person, or of anything else to which they are attributed, whether truly or in fiction.”\n\nWhen the words and actions are his own, he is called a natural person. When they represent another's words and actions, he is called a fictional or artificial person.\n\nThe word person comes from Latin. The Greek equivalent is Prosopon, meaning “face,” while the Latin Persona means the disguise or outward appearance of a person portrayed onstage. Sometimes it means more specifically the part covering the face, such as a mask or visor. From theater, the word came to refer to anyone representing speech and action, in courts as well as theaters. A person, then, is an actor both onstage and in ordinary life. To personate is to act as or represent oneself or someone else. Someone acting for another is said to bear that person's identity or act in that person's name. Cicero uses it in this sense when he says, “Unus Sustineo Tres Personas; Mei, Adversarii, & Judicis, I bear three persons: my own, my opponent's, and the judge's.” Depending on the circumstances, such a person is called a representative, lieutenant, vicar, attorney, deputy, agent, actor, or something similar.\n\nSome artificial persons have their words and actions accepted as their own by those they represent. The person acting is then the actor, while the one who accepts responsibility for the words and actions is the AUTHOR. The actor acts by authority. In speaking of goods and property, we call the person to whom they belong an owner, or Dominus in Latin and Kurios in Greek. In speaking of actions, we call the corresponding person an author. Just as the right to possess something is called ownership, the right to perform an action is called AUTHORITY. Authority always means the right to act. An act done by authority is done with a commission or permission from the person who holds that right.\n\nIt follows that when an actor makes a Covenant under an authority granted to him, he binds the author just as fully as the author would bind himself. He also makes the author subject to all its consequences. Everything said earlier (Chap. 14) about Covenants between people acting on their own behalf also applies to Covenants made by actors, representatives, or agents who have received authority from them. But it applies only within the limits of the authority given.\n\nAnyone who makes a Covenant with an actor or representative without knowing what authority the actor has does so at his own risk. Nobody is bound by a Covenant he has not authorized, including a Covenant made against or beyond the authority he granted.\n\nSuppose an actor is commanded by the author to do something against the Law of Nature, and an earlier Covenant obliges the actor to obey. In that case the author, not the actor, breaks the Law of Nature. The action may violate the law, but it is not the actor's own act. On the contrary, the actor would violate the Law of Nature against breaking Covenants if he refused to do it.\n\nA person may make a Covenant with an author through an actor without knowing how much authority the actor has, relying only on the actor's word. If the authority is not demonstrated when requested, that person is no longer bound. A Covenant with the author is invalid without the author's confirmation. But if the person making the Covenant knew from the start that the actor's word was the only assurance available, the Covenant is valid, because in this case the actor makes himself its author. Thus, when the authority is clear, the Covenant binds the author rather than the actor. When the authority is made up, it binds only the actor, who is himself the only author.\n\nFew things are incapable of being represented by fiction. A rector, director, or supervisor may represent an inanimate thing, such as a church, hospital, or bridge. But inanimate things cannot be authors and therefore cannot give actors authority. The owners or managers of such things can, however, authorize actors to obtain what is needed to maintain them. So such things cannot be represented before some form of civil government exists.\n\nLikewise, guardians or caretakers may represent children, people lacking understanding, and people who have lost their reason. During that time, those people cannot authorize their guardians' actions unless, when they regain reason, they judge those actions reasonable. Still, while they lack reason, whoever has the right to govern them may authorize the guardian. Again, this is possible only in a civil society. Before one exists, nobody has authority over other persons.\n\nAn idol or something existing only in the imagination can be represented. The pagan gods were represented by officials appointed by the state. They held property, goods, and rights that people dedicated and consecrated to them over time. But idols cannot be authors, because an idol is nothing. The authority came from the state. Before civil government was established, the pagan gods could not be represented.\n\nThe true God can be represented. He was represented, first, by Moses, who governed the Israelites—God's people, not his own—in God's name. Moses said not Hoc Dicit Moses, “Thus says Moses,” but Hoc Dicit Dominus, “Thus says the Lord.” Second, he was represented by the son of man, his own Son, our blessed Savior Jesus Christ. Christ came to bring the Jews back and to bring all nations into his Father's Kingdome. He came not on his own behalf but because his Father sent him. Third, God was represented by the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, who spoke and worked through the Apostles. The Holy Ghost did not come on his own but was sent and proceeded from both the Father and the Son.\n\nA group of people becomes one person when one person or representative speaks and acts for them with the individual consent of every member. The unity of the representative, not of the people represented, makes the person one. The representative bears a single person's identity. There is no other way to understand unity in a group.\n\nA group is naturally many people, not one. They must therefore be considered many authors, not one author, of everything their representative says or does in their name. Each person individually authorizes their shared representative and accepts responsibility for all his actions if the authority was unlimited. If they limit what he may do and how far he may represent them, each is responsible only for actions within the limits he authorized.\n\nIf the representative consists of several people, the majority's vote must count as the vote of the whole. Suppose the minority votes yes and the majority votes no. There are more than enough no votes to cancel the yes votes. The remaining no votes, unanswered, are therefore the representative's only decision.\n\nA representative made up of an even number of people, especially a small number, will often divide equally between opposing votes. It can then make no decision or take no action. Yet in some cases an equal number of opposing votes does settle a question. In a trial, a tie means there is no conviction, and thus the accused is acquitted. It does not mean there is a conviction because the accused has not been affirmatively acquitted. Once a case has been heard, declining to convict means acquitting, but declining to acquit does not mean convicting. Likewise, if the question is whether to act immediately or delay, a tie that fails to approve immediate action decides in favor of delay.\n\nSuppose the representative instead has an odd number, three or more, of members or assemblies, each with a veto that can cancel everyone else's votes in favor. This group is no representative either. People's differing views and interests frequently prevent it from deciding anything, including matters of great importance. It is unsuited to governing a group, especially during war, as well as to many other tasks.\n\nThere are two kinds of authors. The first is an author in the simple sense already defined: someone who accepts full responsibility for another's action. The second accepts another's action or Covenant only on a condition. He undertakes to perform if the other person has not done so by a specified time. These conditional authors are generally called guarantors, or Fidejussores and Sponsores in Latin. A guarantor of a debt is specifically called Praedes, and a guarantor of someone's appearance before a judge or magistrate is called Vades.\n\nPART II. ON THE COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVII\n\nOn the causes, formation, and definition of a Common-wealth\n\nPeople naturally love freedom and power over others. Why, then, do they accept the restraints they live under in a Common-wealth? Their ultimate aim is to protect themselves and live more comfortably. They want to escape the miserable state of war that, as I have shown, necessarily follows from people's natural Passions when no visible power keeps them in check. Without that power, fear of punishment cannot make them keep their Covenants or obey the Laws of Nature set out in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters.\n\nThe Laws of Nature include justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in short, treating others as we would want them to treat us. By themselves, without fear of a power that will enforce them, these laws run against our natural Passions, which lead us to favoritism, pride, revenge, and the like. Covenants without the sword are only words and give nobody any security. So even though the Laws of Nature exist, if there is no established power, or none strong enough to protect us, everyone will and may rightfully rely on his own strength and skill to guard against others. A person obeys the Laws of Nature when he wants to obey them and can safely do so. Wherever people have lived in small family groups, robbing and plundering one another has been their occupation. They did not think it broke the Law of Nature; the greater the spoils, the greater the honor. The only rules they followed were rules of honor: do not be cruel, and leave people their lives and their tools for farming. Cities and kingdoms today are like larger families. Just as small families acted then, these states expand their territories for security. They claim threats of attack, invasion, or help to invaders as reasons. With no other protection, they rightly do all they can to conquer or weaken their neighbors, openly by force or secretly by cunning. Later generations remember them with honor for it.\n\nJoining together in a small group does not provide security. A small addition to either side can create such a large difference in strength that it decides the battle and encourages an attack. The number needed to give us confidence in our safety is not fixed. It depends on the size of the enemy we fear. We have enough people when the enemy's advantage is not so plain and decisive that it encourages him to attack.\n\nEven a very large group cannot expect protection from a shared enemy or from its own members' injuries if its members act according to their individual judgments and desires. They disagree about the best use of their combined strength. Instead of helping one another, they get in one another's way, and their conflicts reduce their strength to nothing. Then even a few people acting together can easily conquer them. When there is no shared enemy, they fight one another over their private interests. If we could suppose that a large group would all follow justice and the other Laws of Nature without a common power to restrain them, we could suppose the same of all humanity. There would then be no civil government or Common-wealth, and no need for one: people would have peace without a ruler.\n\nFor the lasting security people want throughout their lives, it is not enough to place themselves under one leadership for a limited time, such as one battle or one war. A united effort might win against a foreign enemy. But afterward they may have no shared enemy, or some may regard a person as an enemy whom others regard as a friend. Their differing interests will then split them apart and lead them back into war with one another.\n\nIt is true that some living creatures, such as bees and ants, live together peacefully. Aristotle therefore classifies them as political creatures. Yet each creature follows only its own judgment and desires, without speech to tell others what it thinks will benefit the group. Someone might ask why human beings cannot live together the same way. My answer is this:\n\nFirst, people constantly compete for honor and rank, while these creatures do not. This competition produces envy and hatred among people, and eventually war. It does not do so among these creatures.\n\nSecond, these creatures' common good does not differ from their private good. In seeking their own good, they benefit the whole group. People, however, find pleasure in comparing themselves with others and are satisfied only when they stand out.\n\nThird, these creatures do not reason as people do. They see no faults, and do not even think they see faults, in how their shared affairs are managed. Many people, by contrast, think they are wiser and better able to run public affairs than others. Each tries to change things in a different way. Their efforts divide the community and bring civil war.\n\nFourth, these creatures use sounds to tell one another what they want and feel. But they lack the skill with words that lets some people present good as evil and evil as good, or make goods and evils appear greater or smaller than they are. People can use that skill whenever they like to stir up dissatisfaction and disturb the peace.\n\nFifth, creatures without reason cannot tell the difference between an injury and a loss. As long as they are comfortable, they do not quarrel with one another. People, on the other hand, are most troublesome when most comfortable. That is when they like to display their wisdom and criticize how the Common-wealth is governed.\n\nFinally, these creatures agree together by nature, but people agree only by Covenant, which is an artificial arrangement. It is no surprise that people need something more than a Covenant to keep their agreement stable and lasting. They need a common power to keep them in check and guide their actions toward the shared good.\n\nThere is only one way to create a common power strong enough to defend people against foreign invasion and one another's injuries, so that they can support themselves through their work and the fruits of the earth and live contentedly. They must give all their power and strength to one person or to one assembly. That person or assembly can bring their different wishes into one decision through a majority vote. In other words, they must appoint one person or assembly to represent them. Every person must accept responsibility as the author of whatever the representative does, or has done, in matters of common peace and safety. Each must submit his will and judgment to the representative's will and judgment. This is more than consent or agreement. It makes them all into a single real person through a Covenant that each makes with every other, as if each said to each: “I authorize this person, or this assembly, to govern me, and give him my right to govern myself, on the condition that you give him the same right and authorize everything he does as I do.” Once this is done, the group united into one person is called a COMMON-WEALTH, or CIVITAS in Latin. This is how that great LEVIATHAN comes into being—or, to speak with more respect, that mortal God to which, under the immortal God, we owe our peace and defense. Every individual in the Common-wealth gives this representative authority. As a result, he can command so much power and strength that the fear of it enables him to direct everyone's will toward peace at home and mutual help against enemies abroad.\n\nThe representative is the essence of the Common-wealth, which may be defined as “one person whose acts every member of a great group has made himself the author through mutual Covenants, so that this person may use the strength and resources of them all as he thinks best for their peace and common defense.”\n\nThe one who represents this person is called the SOVERAIGNE and is said to hold Soveraigne Power. Everyone else is his SUBJECT.\n\nSoveraigne Power can be gained in two ways. One is by natural force: someone may make his children and their children submit to his rule because he can destroy them if they refuse. Or he may conquer enemies in war and spare their lives on the condition that they obey him. The other way is for people to agree freely among themselves to submit to one person or assembly because they trust that representative to protect them from everyone else. The second may be called a political Common-wealth, or a Common-wealth by institution. The first is a Common-wealth by acquisition. I will discuss a Common-wealth by institution first.\n\nCHAPTER XVIII. ON THE RIGHTS OF SOVERAIGNES BY INSTITUTION\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVIII, 1\n\nOf the Rights of Sovereigns by Institution\n\nA Commonwealth is instituted when a group of people agrees by covenant, each with every other, to authorize a representative. The majority chooses a man or assembly of men to represent everyone. Each person, whether they voted for or against that choice, agrees to authorize every action and judgment of that man or assembly as if it were their own. They do this so that they can live peacefully with one another and be protected from other people.\n\nFrom this institution of a Commonwealth come all the rights and powers of the person or persons who receive sovereign power by the consent of the assembled people.\n\nFirst, because they make this covenant, we must understand that no earlier covenant binds them to anything inconsistent with it. Once people have instituted a Commonwealth, their covenant binds them to accept the actions and judgments of one representative. So they cannot lawfully make another covenant among themselves to obey anyone else in any matter without that representative's permission. Subjects of a monarch therefore cannot cast off monarchy without his consent and return to the disorder of a divided crowd. Nor can they transfer their collective person from the man who represents it to another man or assembly. Every person has agreed with every other person to accept and be regarded as the author of everything their existing sovereign does or judges appropriate. If even one person dissented, the others would break their covenant with that person. That would be unjust. Each has also given sovereignty to the person who represents them. To depose him would be to take what belongs to him, which would again be unjust. Further, if someone tries to depose his sovereign and the sovereign kills or punishes him for it, that person is the author of his own punishment. By the institution, he is the author of everything his sovereign does. It is unjust to do anything for which one may be punished by one's own authority, so he is unjust on this ground too. Some people claim that a new covenant made with God, rather than with other people, excuses their disobedience to their sovereign. That too is unjust. No one can covenant with God except through someone who represents God; only God's lieutenant, who holds sovereignty under God, can do that. This claimed covenant with God is so plainly a lie, even to the people making the claim, that it shows not just injustice but a base and cowardly character.\n\nSecond, the right to represent everyone is given to the sovereign by the people's covenants with one another, not by a covenant between the sovereign and any of them. So the sovereign cannot break that covenant, and no subject can claim that a supposed forfeiture has released them from subjection. Clearly, someone who becomes sovereign makes no covenant with his subjects beforehand. He would have to make it either with the entire multitude as one party or separately with each person. He cannot make it with the whole multitude as one party, because they are not yet one person. If he makes separate covenants with each person, those covenants become void once he has sovereignty. Any action that one of them alleges to be a breach is also that person's action and everyone else's, because it was done in their name and by each one's authority. Besides, suppose some subjects claim that the sovereign broke a covenant made at his institution, while other subjects, or even just one other subject, or the sovereign himself, deny it. There is then no judge to decide the dispute. They return to fighting, and everyone regains the right to defend themselves by their own strength. That defeats their purpose in establishing the Commonwealth. It is therefore pointless to grant sovereignty on the basis of a prior covenant. The belief that a monarch receives power by covenant, or on conditions, comes from failing to understand a simple truth. Covenants are only words and breath. Their ability to bind, restrain, compel, or protect anyone comes entirely from the public sword: the unrestricted power of the man or assembly holding sovereignty. Everyone acknowledges that sovereign's actions, which are carried out by the combined strength of all. Yet when an assembly becomes sovereign, no one imagines such a covenant was made when it was instituted. No one would be foolish enough to say, for example, that the People of Rome made a covenant with the Romans to hold sovereignty on certain conditions and that the Romans could lawfully depose the Roman People if those conditions were not met. Some fail to see that the reasoning is the same for monarchy as for popular government because of ambition. They favor government by an assembly in which they hope to take part, rather than monarchy, which they have no hope of holding.\n\nThird, because the majority has declared a sovereign by voting for one, anyone who disagreed must now agree with the rest. That means accepting responsibility for all the sovereign's actions; otherwise the others may justly destroy the dissenter. By voluntarily joining the people assembled, a person sufficiently showed a willingness, and so silently covenanted, to abide by whatever the majority decided. Refusing to do so, or protesting any of its decrees, violates that covenant and is therefore unjust. Whether a person joined the assembly or not, and whether their consent was requested or not, they must either submit to its decrees or be left in the state of war they occupied before. In that state anyone could destroy them without committing an injustice.\n\nFourth, by this institution every subject is the author of all the instituted sovereign's actions and judgments. So nothing the sovereign does can wrong any of his subjects, and none of them should accuse him of injustice. Someone who acts on another's authority cannot wrong the person who authorized the act. Every person in a Commonwealth is the author of everything its sovereign does. A person who complains of injury by the sovereign therefore complains about an action of their own. They should blame no one but themselves, and cannot even blame themselves for doing themselves an injury, because it is impossible to injure oneself. Those who hold sovereign power may indeed do wrong in a moral sense, but they cannot commit injustice or injury in the strict sense.\n\nFifth, as a result, no person holding sovereign power can justly be executed or punished in any other way by their subjects. Since every subject is the author of the sovereign's actions, a subject who punishes the sovereign punishes someone else for actions the subject committed.\n\nThe aim of instituting a Commonwealth is the peace and defense of all its people. Whoever has a right to an end has a right to the means. So any man or assembly holding sovereignty has the right to judge what brings about peace and defense and what obstructs or disturbs them. The sovereign may do whatever he thinks necessary to preserve peace and security in advance by preventing domestic conflict and foreign attack, and to restore them after they are lost. Consequently:\n\nSixth, sovereignty includes the right to judge which opinions and doctrines threaten peace and which support it. It also includes deciding when, how far, and on what subjects people may be trusted to speak to crowds, and who will examine the doctrines in every book before publication. People's actions grow out of their opinions. Governing opinions well is therefore necessary to govern people's actions toward peace and harmony. In questions of doctrine, we should consider only truth. But the regulation of doctrine for the sake of peace does not conflict with truth. A doctrine opposed to peace can no more be true than peace and harmony can violate the Law of Nature. Admittedly, in a Commonwealth where negligent or unskilled governors and teachers have allowed false doctrines to gain general acceptance over time, the opposing truths may offend people generally. But even the quickest and roughest introduction of a new truth never breaks the peace; sometimes it only awakens a war already present. People who are so weakly governed that they dare take up arms to defend or introduce an opinion are already at war. What they have is not peace but a ceasefire caused by mutual fear; they live continually as though on the verge of battle. It is therefore the sovereign's responsibility to judge opinions and doctrines, or appoint all their judges. This is necessary to preserve peace and prevent conflict and civil war.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XVIII, 2\n\nSeventh, sovereignty includes full power to set the rules that tell each person what goods they may enjoy and what actions they may take without interference from other subjects. This is what people call property. Before sovereign power was established, as I have shown, everyone had a right to everything, and that necessarily caused war. Property is needed for peace and depends on sovereign power. So establishing it is an act of that power for the sake of public peace. These rules about what is mine and yours, and about what is good, bad, lawful, and unlawful for subjects to do, are the civil laws. That means the particular laws of each Commonwealth, though the term “civil law” is now limited to the ancient civil laws of the city of Rome. Rome once ruled much of the world, so its laws were the civil law in these regions at that time.\n\nEighth, sovereignty includes the right to judge: to hear and settle all disputes about civil or natural law or about matters of fact. Without a decision on disputes, one subject has no protection against injury by another. The laws distinguishing mine from yours are useless. Each person, driven by the natural need to preserve their life, keeps the right to defend themselves by their own strength. That is the state of war, the opposite of the purpose for which every Commonwealth is established.\n\nNinth, sovereignty includes the right to make war and peace with other nations and Commonwealths. This includes judging when war or peace serves the public good, how large an armed and paid force to assemble for the purpose, and how much money to raise from subjects to pay its expenses. The power to defend the people lies in their armies. An army's strength depends on bringing its forces together under one command. The instituted sovereign holds that command, because whoever commands the military, without any further act of institution, is sovereign. So whoever is appointed general of an army, the holder of sovereign power is always the supreme commander.\n\nTenth, sovereignty includes the choice of all counselors, ministers, magistrates, and officers in peace and in war. Since the sovereign is responsible for the goal of common peace and defense, he must also have the power to use whatever means he judges best to meet that responsibility.\n\nEleventh, the sovereign has the power to reward any subject with wealth or honor, and to punish them physically, financially, or by public disgrace. He does this according to a law he has already made. If there is no such law, he does it as he judges most useful for encouraging service to the Commonwealth or discouraging actions against it.\n\nFinally, consider how highly people naturally value themselves, how much respect they expect from others, and how little they value other people. This continually leads to rivalry, quarrels, factions, and ultimately war. They destroy one another and weaken themselves against a common enemy. So there must be laws governing honor, a public measure of the worth of those who have served the Commonwealth well or are able to serve it well, and someone with the force to enforce those laws. I have already shown that control of all the Commonwealth's armed forces and judgment of all disputes belong to sovereignty. The sovereign must therefore also award titles of honor, decide each person's rank and dignity, and determine what signs of respect people should show one another in public or private gatherings.\n\nThese rights make up the essence of sovereignty. They are the signs that show which man or assembly holds sovereign power. They cannot be shared or separated. A sovereign can transfer the power to mint money, to manage the property and persons of heirs who are children, to buy goods before others in markets, and every other privilege granted by statute, while retaining the power to protect subjects. But if he transfers control of the armed forces, his right to judge is useless because he cannot enforce the laws. If he gives up the power to raise money, the armed forces are useless. If he gives up control of doctrines, fear of spirits will frighten people into rebellion. Consider any one of these rights and it becomes clear that keeping all the others will not preserve peace and justice, the goal for which Commonwealths are established. It is this division of power that the saying refers to: “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.” Unless power is divided first, opposing armies cannot form. If most people in England had not first accepted the idea that these powers were divided among the King, the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people would never have split into sides and fallen into this civil war. The division began among people who disagreed about politics and then spread to those who disagreed about religious liberty. These conflicts have taught people so much about sovereign rights that few in England now fail to see that the rights are inseparable. People will generally acknowledge this when peace returns. They will continue to do so until they forget their suffering, but no longer than that, unless ordinary people are taught better than they have been so far.\n\nBecause these rights are essential and inseparable, a grant that appears to give any one of them away is void unless the sovereign explicitly gives up sovereign power itself and those receiving the grant no longer call the giver sovereign. However many rights he grants, if we grant sovereignty back to him, all those rights return with it, since they are inseparably attached to it.\n\nThis great authority cannot be divided or separated from sovereignty. There is therefore little basis for the claim that sovereign kings, though Singulis Majores, or more powerful than each subject individually, are Universis Minores, or less powerful than all subjects together. If “all together” means anything other than the entire body united as one person, it means the same as “every one,” and the claim is absurd. But if “all together” means one person, whom the sovereign represents, then the power of all together is the same as the sovereign's power. The claim is again absurd. People recognize this absurdity when sovereignty belongs to an assembly of the people, but not when it belongs to a monarch, even though sovereign power is the same whoever holds it.\n\nThe sovereign's honor, like his power, should be greater than that of any subject or of all subjects together. Sovereignty is the source of honor. The sovereign creates the titles of Lord, Earl, Duke, and Prince. Just as servants are equal and have no honor when their master is present, subjects stand equally before the sovereign. Some may shine more brightly than others when he is away, but in his presence they shine no more than stars in the light of the sun.\n\nSomeone may object that subjects are in a miserable position because they are exposed to the desires and other uncontrolled passions of whoever holds such unlimited power. People under a monarch usually blame monarchy for this. People under a democracy or another sovereign assembly blame their form of Commonwealth for every inconvenience. Yet sovereign power is the same in every form of government that is strong enough to protect its people. Such critics forget that human life always involves some hardship. Even the worst general hardship people can suffer under any form of government is barely noticeable next to the misery and terrible disasters of civil war, or life without a master, without laws and a power able to stop people from robbery and revenge. They also forget that the heaviest burdens sovereign governors impose do not come from any pleasure or profit they expect from harming or weakening their subjects: their own strength depends on the subjects' strength. Rather, subjects resist paying for their own defense, so governors must collect what they can during peacetime. Then they have resources to resist their enemies or take advantage of an opportunity if a sudden need arises. By nature, everyone has powerful magnifying glasses—their passions and self-love—which make every small payment look like a huge burden. But they lack the long-distance glasses of moral and civil knowledge, which would let them see the approaching misery that such payments prevent.\n\nChapter XIX. Of the Different Kinds of Commonwealth by Institution, and Succession to Sovereign Power\n\n### Part II, Chapter XIX, 1\n\nOf the Different Kinds of Commonwealth by Institution, and Succession to Sovereign Power\n\nCommonwealths differ according to who is sovereign: who represents every person in the multitude. Sovereignty belongs either to one person or to an assembly of several people. Either everyone has a right to join that assembly, or only certain people distinguished from the rest do. So there can be only three kinds of Commonwealth. The representative must be one person or more than one; if more, the assembly includes either everyone or only some people. If one person represents the people, the Commonwealth is a monarchy. If the representative is an assembly open to everyone who wants to attend, it is a democracy, or popular Commonwealth. If only some people make up the assembly, it is an aristocracy. There is no other kind: sovereign power, which I have shown cannot be divided, must belong in full to one, to some, or to all.\n\nHistories and books about politics use other names for governments, including tyranny and oligarchy. But these are not other forms of government. They are names people give to the same forms when they dislike them. People unhappy under a monarchy call it tyranny; those unhappy under an aristocracy call it oligarchy. People who suffer under democracy call it anarchy, meaning the absence of government. Yet I think no one believes the absence of government is a new kind of government. By the same reasoning, no one should believe that a government changes its kind depending on whether people approve of it or dislike it, or are oppressed by its rulers.\n\nPeople who enjoy complete freedom can choose to give one man the authority to represent every one of them, just as they can give it to any assembly. They can therefore choose to submit themselves as completely to a monarch as to any other representative. But once sovereign power has been established, no one else can represent the same people except for particular purposes limited by the sovereign. Another general representative would mean setting up two sovereigns. Each person's role would be performed by two representatives, whose conflict would divide a power that must remain undivided if people are to live in peace. This would return the multitude to a state of war, defeating the purpose of establishing sovereignty. Suppose a sovereign assembly asks its people to send deputies to report their advice or requests. It would be absurd to regard those deputies, rather than the assembly, as the people's absolute representative. It is just as absurd to do so under a monarchy. I do not know how such an obvious truth has lately been so little noticed. In a monarchy, a man inherited sovereignty through 600 years of succession. Every subject called him sovereign, addressed him as Majesty, and unquestionably accepted him as King. Yet no one considered him their representative. Instead, without objection, people gave that title to the men they sent at his command to deliver their petitions and, if he allowed it, advise him. Those who truly and fully represent a people should therefore teach people what that office means. If they intend to carry out the trust placed in them, they should be careful never to admit any other general representation for any reason.\n\nThe three kinds of Commonwealth do not differ in their power. They differ in how well suited they are to produce the peace and safety of the people, the purpose for which they were established. To compare monarchy with the other two kinds, consider first that anyone who represents the people, or belongs to an assembly that does so, is also an individual with a private life. A representative may work for the common good in a public capacity. But that person is at least as concerned, and often more concerned, with the private welfare of themselves, their family, relatives, and friends. When public and private interests conflict, most people put their private interests first, since passions are usually stronger than reason. So the public benefits most where private and public interests are most closely joined. In monarchy, the monarch's private interest is the same as the public interest. A monarch's wealth, power, and honor depend entirely on the wealth, strength, and reputation of the subjects. No king can be rich, honored, or secure if his subjects are poor, despised, or too weak through poverty or division to fight their enemies. But in a democracy or aristocracy, public prosperity often does less for the private fortune of a corrupt or ambitious member of the assembly than dishonest advice, betrayal, or civil war can do.\n\nSecond, a monarch can seek advice from whoever he wants, whenever and wherever he wants. He can hear from people experienced in the matter under consideration regardless of their rank. He can consult them as long before taking action as he likes, and as privately as he likes. When a sovereign assembly needs advice, however, only people with an existing right to participate may offer it. Most of these people have more experience gaining wealth than gaining knowledge. They offer their advice in long speeches that can, and often do, stir people to action but cannot guide their actions. Passion's heat never makes understanding clearer; it only dazzles it. Nor can an assembly, because of its size, find a place or time to consult in secret.\n\nThird, a monarch's decisions are subject only to the inconsistency found in human nature. An assembly is also subject to the inconsistency caused by its numbers. A few supporters of a decision may be absent through overconfidence, negligence, or personal difficulties. Or a few opponents may attend diligently. Either change can overturn today what the assembly decided yesterday.\n\nFourth, a monarch cannot oppose himself out of envy or self-interest. Members of an assembly can oppose one another for those reasons, even to the point of causing civil war.\n\nFifth, monarchy has this disadvantage: one person may use his power to strip a subject of everything they own in order to enrich a favorite or a flatterer. I admit that this is a serious and unavoidable disadvantage. But it can also happen under a sovereign assembly. Its power is the same. An assembly is as vulnerable to bad advice and persuasive speakers as a monarch is to flatterers. Its members can flatter one another and take turns serving one another's greed and ambition. Moreover, an assembly has many favorites and far more relatives of favorites than any monarch does. A monarch's favorite can help his friends as well as hurt his enemies. But influential speakers, the favorites of sovereign assemblies, have great power to harm and little power to save. Because of human nature, it takes less eloquence to accuse than to defend, and condemnation looks more like justice than acquittal does.\n\nSixth, another disadvantage of monarchy is that sovereignty may pass to a child or to someone unable to tell good from evil. The problem is that another person or assembly must exercise that person's power, governing in the sovereign's name and by the sovereign's right as guardians and protectors of the sovereign's person and authority. But to say it is a disadvantage to put the exercise of sovereign power in the hands of a person or assembly is to say that every government is worse than disorder and civil war. The only real danger that can be claimed here is a struggle among people competing for an office with such great honor and profit. To show that this problem is not caused by monarchy, consider two possibilities. The previous monarch may have appointed someone to care for his child successor, either expressly in a will or silently by leaving the accepted custom unchallenged. If trouble then arises, blame not monarchy but the ambition and injustice of subjects. That problem exists under every kind of government when people are poorly taught their duties and the rights of sovereignty. Or the previous monarch may have made no arrangements at all for the child's guardianship. In that case the Law of Nature provides a sufficient rule: guardianship goes to the person with the strongest natural interest in preserving the child's authority and the least to gain from the child's death or loss of power. Everyone naturally seeks their own advantage and advancement. Giving a child into the power of people who can advance themselves by destroying or harming the child would be betrayal, not guardianship. Since this rule answers every reasonable dispute about governing under a child, any struggle that disturbs public peace must be blamed on subjects' ambition and ignorance of duty, not on monarchy. On the other hand, every large Commonwealth governed by a large sovereign assembly is in the same position as one governed by a child when it comes to decisions about peace, war, and laws. A child cannot judge well enough to reject advice and must therefore follow the advice of the person or persons entrusted with the child. Likewise, an assembly cannot reject the advice of its majority, whether good or bad. A child needs a guardian or protector to preserve the child's person and authority. In times of great danger and disorder, a sovereign assembly in a large Commonwealth likewise needs Custodes Libertatis, or guardians of liberty: dictators or protectors of its authority. These are essentially temporary monarchs entrusted for a time with the full exercise of its power. At the end of that time such guardians have deprived assemblies of their power more often than protectors, regents, or other guardians have deprived child kings of theirs.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XIX, 2\n\nAs I have shown, there are only three kinds of sovereignty: monarchy, in which one person holds it; democracy, in which the general assembly of subjects holds it; and aristocracy, in which it belongs to an assembly of particular people chosen or otherwise set apart from the rest. Yet someone looking at the actual Commonwealths that have existed and still exist may find it hard to fit them into these three kinds. That person may think there are additional forms combining them. Consider elective kingdoms, where kings receive sovereign power for a time, or kingdoms where a king's power is limited. Most writers still call these governments monarchies. Or consider a popular or aristocratic Commonwealth that conquers an enemy's country and governs it through a president, procurator, or other official. At first this may look like democratic or aristocratic government. But it is not. Elected kings are not sovereigns but servants of the sovereign. Kings with limited power are likewise servants of whoever holds sovereign power. And provinces under another Commonwealth's democracy or aristocracy are not governed democratically or aristocratically; they are governed monarchically.\n\nFirst, take an elected king whose power lasts for his lifetime, as it does in many Christian countries today, or for a set number of years or months, as the power of Roman dictators did. If he has the right to appoint his successor, the office is hereditary rather than elective. If he cannot choose his successor, then either a known person or assembly can choose a new king after his death, or the Commonwealth dies and breaks apart with him, returning to the state of war. If we know who has the power to give sovereignty after his death, we also know that sovereignty already belonged to them. No one has the right to give away something they have no right to possess and keep, if they choose. But if no one has the right to grant sovereignty after the first elected king dies, then he has the power, and indeed a duty under the Law of Nature, to appoint a successor. He must keep the people who trusted him to govern from falling back into the misery of civil war. So when he was elected, he was an absolute sovereign.\n\nSecond, a king whose power is limited is not above the person or people who can limit it. Whoever is not above them is not supreme, and therefore is not sovereign. Sovereignty has always belonged to the assembly with the right to limit the king. The government is therefore a democracy or aristocracy, not a monarchy. This was once true in Sparta: kings had the privilege of leading the armies, but sovereignty belonged to the Ephori.\n\nThird, consider the time when the Roman People governed Judea, for example, through a president. Judea was not a democracy, because it was not governed by an assembly that any Judean had a right to join. Nor was it an aristocracy, because it was not governed by an assembly that anyone could join by election of the Judeans. Instead, one person governed Judea. From the Romans' viewpoint that person was an assembly of the people, a democracy. From the Judeans' viewpoint, since they had no right to participate in government, that person was a monarch. When people are governed by an assembly they choose from among themselves, the government is called a democracy or aristocracy. But when the assembly governing them is not their own choice, it is a monarchy—not the rule of one individual over another, but of one people over another people.\n\nEvery form of government is made of mortal people: not only monarchs but entire assemblies die. To preserve peace, people must provide a kind of artificial eternal life for their artificial person, the Commonwealth. Without it, those governed by an assembly would return to war in every generation, while those governed by one person would return to war as soon as their ruler died. People call this artificial eternity the right of succession.\n\nNo form of government is complete unless the present sovereign controls succession. If some other private person or private assembly controls it, that person or assembly is a subject, and the sovereign can take the power back whenever he wants. So the right still belongs to the sovereign. If no particular person holds it and a fresh choice must be made, then the Commonwealth dissolves and the right passes to whoever can seize it. That goes against the intention of its founders, who wanted lasting security, not temporary security.\n\nIn a democracy, the full assembly cannot disappear unless the multitude it governs disappears. So questions about the right of succession do not arise in that form of government.\n\nIn an aristocracy, when a member of the assembly dies, the assembly chooses a replacement. It is the sovereign, and choosing all counselors and officers belongs to the sovereign. Every subject is the author of what the representative does as their actor. The sovereign assembly may give others the authority to elect new people to fill vacancies in its body. Even then, the election takes place by the assembly's authority, and the assembly can withdraw that authority when the public interest requires it.\n\nThe Present Monarch Has the Right to Decide Succession. The greatest difficulty concerning the right of succession arises in a monarchy. At first it may not be clear who has the right to appoint a successor. Often it is not clear whom that person has appointed. Both questions demand closer reasoning than people usually practice. To determine who appoints the successor of a monarch who holds sovereign power—for elective kings and princes properly have only the use of sovereign power, not ownership of it—consider the alternatives. Either the present holder has the right to decide succession, or the right belongs to the multitude once it has dissolved. When the monarch who owns sovereign power dies, the multitude has no sovereign. It has no representative to unite it and enable it to act as one. It therefore cannot elect a new monarch. Each person has an equal right to submit to whoever seems best able to protect them, or to protect themselves by force if they can. That would mean returning to disorder and a war of everyone against everyone, the very condition monarchy was originally established to avoid. So the institution of monarchy always leaves the choice of successor to the judgment and will of the present monarch.\n\nA second question sometimes arises: whom has the current monarch chosen to inherit his power? His spoken or written declaration settles it, or else sufficiently clear signs that he has not stated directly.\n\nHe makes an express declaration when he states his choice in speech during his lifetime, viva voce, or in writing in a will. The first Emperors of Rome declared their heirs this way. The word “heir” does not necessarily mean a man's children or closest relatives. It means whoever he declares should inherit his estate. So if a monarch expressly names someone as his heir, orally or in writing, that person acquires the right to be monarch immediately upon the previous monarch's death.\n\nIf there is no will or express declaration, we must look for other natural signs of the monarch's wishes. One such sign is custom. If the custom is for the closest relative to succeed regardless of anything else, that relative has the right of succession. Had the previous holder wanted something else, he could easily have said so during his lifetime. Likewise, if custom gives the right to the closest male relative, that man has the right of succession for the same reason. The same applies if custom favors a female relative. A person's failure to overturn a custom that they could overturn with a word is a natural sign that they want it to continue.\n\nWhere there is neither a relevant custom nor a will, we should assume, first, that a monarch wishes government to remain monarchical, since he approved of that form by holding it himself. Second, we should assume that he prefers a child of his own, whether male or female, over anyone else. People are presumed naturally more willing to advance their own children than someone else's, and among their own children to prefer a male to a female, because men are naturally better suited to physically demanding and dangerous work. Third, if he has no children, we should assume he prefers a brother to a stranger, and generally a closer blood relative to a more distant one. We presume that closer relatives have stronger affection for one another. Clearly, too, a person gains more reflected honor from the standing of their closest relatives.\n\nSomeone might object that allowing a monarch to decide succession by a contract or a will has a serious disadvantage. He could sell or give his right to govern to a foreigner. Foreigners—people unused to living under the same government or speaking the same language—commonly undervalue one another, so this could lead to oppression of the subjects. This is indeed a serious disadvantage. But it does not necessarily result from being governed by foreigners. It comes from rulers who do not understand the true principles of politics. When the Romans conquered many nations, they made their government easier to accept by easing this grievance as much as they thought necessary. Sometimes they gave entire nations, and sometimes prominent people from each conquered nation, not only the privileges but also the name of Romans. They admitted many to the Senate and to positions of responsibility even in the city of Rome. Our very wise King, King James, pursued the same aim in seeking to unite his two kingdoms of England and Scotland. Had he achieved that union, it would very likely have prevented the civil wars now bringing misery to both kingdoms. A monarch therefore does no injury to the people by choosing a successor in his will, even though the faults of many princes have sometimes made this inconvenient. Another argument for its lawfulness is that marrying foreigners can also lead to a foreigner inheriting a kingdom and cause every disadvantage of giving it to one. Yet everyone considers such marriages lawful.\n\nChapter XX. Of Paternal and Despotic Dominion\n\n### Part II, Chapter XX, 1\n\nON PARENTAL AND MASTERLY RULE\n\nA commonwealth by acquisition is one in which sovereign power is gained by force. This happens when people, individually or together by a majority vote, authorize every act of a man or assembly that holds their lives and freedom in its power. They do so because they fear death or imprisonment.\n\nThis kind of rule, or sovereignty, differs from sovereignty established by agreement in only one respect. People who choose a sovereign that way do it because they fear one another, not the person they appoint. Here they submit to the person they fear. In both cases they act out of fear. Those who say that all covenants made from fear of death or violence are invalid should note this. If they were right, nobody in any kind of commonwealth could be obliged to obey. It is true that, once a commonwealth has been established or acquired, a promise made out of fear of death or violence is not a binding covenant if what is promised breaks the law. But that is not because the promise was made out of fear. It is because the person making it has no right to promise that thing. Also, when a person can lawfully carry out a promise and does not, it is not the covenant's invalidity that releases him. Only the sovereign's judgment does that. Otherwise, whenever a person makes a lawful promise, he breaks it unlawfully. But when the sovereign, who acts on behalf of the people, releases him, the person who demanded the promise releases him too, since that person authorized the sovereign's act.\n\nThe rights and consequences of sovereignty are the same in both cases. Sovereign power cannot be transferred to another without the sovereign's consent. The sovereign cannot forfeit it. Subjects cannot accuse the sovereign of injuring them or punish the sovereign. The sovereign decides what is necessary for peace and judges doctrines. The sovereign alone makes laws, and is the highest judge in disputes and in decisions about when to make war or peace. The sovereign chooses magistrates, counselors, commanders, and every other officer and minister. The sovereign determines rewards and punishments, honors, and ranks. The reasons are the same ones given in the previous chapter for these rights and consequences when sovereignty is established by agreement.\n\nRule over someone is acquired in two ways: through birth and through conquest. The right of rule through birth is the parent's right over a child, called parental rule. It does not arise simply from having conceived the child, as if that alone entitled a parent to rule. It comes from the child's consent, either stated openly or shown by other adequate signs. As for conception, God has given man a helper, and there are always two equally responsible parents. So rule over the child would belong to both equally, and the child would be equally subject to both. That is impossible, because nobody can obey two masters. Some have assigned rule to the man alone on the grounds that his sex is superior. They are mistaken. Men and women do not always differ enough in strength or good judgment for the right to be settled without war. In commonwealths, civil law settles the question. Usually, though not always, it decides for the father, because commonwealths have usually been founded by fathers rather than mothers of families. But the question here concerns the state of nature alone. We assume that there are no marriage laws or laws about raising children, only the Law of Nature and the natural attraction of the sexes to each other and to their children. In this state of nature the parents either settle rule over their child by contract or do not settle it at all. If they settle it, the right goes where the contract says. History tells us that the Amazons contracted with men in neighboring countries, whom they sought out to have children. Sons were to be sent back to the men, while daughters stayed with the women. Thus the mother ruled the daughters.\n\nIf there is no contract, rule belongs to the mother. In the state of nature without marriage laws, nobody can know who the father is unless the mother identifies him. So the right to rule the child depends on her choice and therefore belongs to her. Also, a baby is first in its mother's power. She can either feed it or abandon it. If she feeds it, it owes her its life and must obey her rather than anyone else. It follows that she rules it. But if she abandons it and someone else finds and feeds it, that person rules it. A person should obey whoever preserves his life. The purpose of submitting to another person is to preserve life, and everyone is presumed to promise obedience to someone who has the power to save or destroy him.\n\nIf the mother is subject to the father, the child is in the father's power. If the father is subject to the mother, as when a sovereign queen marries one of her subjects, the child is subject to the mother, because the father is also her subject.\n\nIf a man and woman who rule separate kingdoms have a child and make a contract about who will rule that child, the contract settles the right. If they do not, the right follows the ruler of the place where the child lives. The sovereign of each country rules everyone living there.\n\nWhoever rules a child also rules that child's children. A person who rules someone also rules all that belongs to that person. Otherwise, rule would be a title without any effect.\n\nThe right to inherit parental rule passes on in the same way as the right to inherit a monarchy. I have already said enough about that in the previous chapter.\n\nRule gained through conquest, or victory in war, is what some writers call masterly rule. Their word comes from despotes, meaning a lord or master. It is the master's rule over a servant. The victor gains this rule when the defeated person makes a covenant to avoid immediate death. In words or other adequate signs of his intention, he agrees that, as long as he is allowed to live and move freely, the victor may use his life and freedom as the victor pleases. Only after this covenant does the defeated person become a servant. Whether the word 'servant' comes from servire, meaning 'to serve,' or servare, meaning 'to save,' I leave to grammarians. It does not mean a captive held in prison or chains while the person who captured him, or bought him from his captor, decides what to do with him. Such captives, commonly called slaves, have no obligation at all. They may rightfully break their chains or escape prison, kill their master, or take him captive. A servant, instead, is someone who has been captured but allowed bodily freedom. His master trusts him on his promise not to run away or attack him.\n\nVictory itself does not give the victor the right to rule the defeated person. The defeated person's own covenant does. He is not obliged merely because he was beaten, captured, or driven away. He becomes obliged because he comes in and submits to the victor. Nor must a victor spare an enemy who surrenders without a promise that his life will be spared. An unconditional surrender binds the victor only as long as he thinks fit.\n\nWhen people ask for what is now called quarter, which the Greeks called zogria, 'taking alive,' they submit to escape the victor's immediate fury. They bargain for their lives by offering ransom or service. So a person who receives quarter has not been granted his life; the decision has only been postponed. He has surrendered at the victor's discretion, not on condition that he will live. His life is secure and his service is owed only when the victor trusts him with bodily freedom. Slaves who work in prisons or chains do not work from duty. They work to avoid their taskmasters' cruelty.\n\nThe servant's master is also master of everything the servant has and may demand its use whenever he thinks fit: his goods, his labor, his servants, and his children. The servant holds his life from the master under a covenant to obey. That means accepting and authorizing whatever the master does. If the servant refuses and the master kills him, puts him in chains, or otherwise punishes his disobedience, the servant has authorized that action himself. He cannot accuse the master of doing him an injury.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XX, 2\n\nIn short, parental rule and masterly rule have exactly the same rights and consequences as sovereignty established by agreement, for the reasons given in the previous chapter. Suppose a monarch rules several nations. In one, an assembled people appointed him sovereign; in another, he gained sovereignty by conquest when each person submitted to avoid death or imprisonment. It would show ignorance of sovereign rights to demand more from the conquered nation simply because it was conquered. The sovereign has equally complete power over both. Otherwise there is no sovereignty at all, and each person may lawfully defend himself with his own sword if he can. That is the condition of war.\n\nIt follows that a large family outside any commonwealth is itself a small monarchy as far as sovereign rights are concerned. The family may consist of a man and his children, a man and his servants, or all of them together. The father or master is sovereign over it. But a family is not properly a commonwealth unless its numbers or other advantages make it strong enough that it cannot be subdued without the risks of war. When a group is clearly too weak to defend itself together, each person may use his own judgment in danger to save his life, by fleeing or submitting to the enemy as he thinks best. Similarly, a very small company of soldiers surprised by an army may lay down its weapons and ask for quarter, or run away, rather than be killed. That is enough about what I can work out through reasoning from people's nature, needs, and purposes when they establish commonwealths and put themselves under monarchs or assemblies with enough power to protect them.\n\nNow consider what Scripture teaches about the same matter. The children of Israel say to Moses, (Exod. 20. 19) \"Speak to us yourself, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.\" This is complete obedience to Moses. On the rights of kings, God himself says through Samuel, (1 Sam. 8. 11, 12, &c.) \"This will be the right of the king you want to rule over you. He will take your sons and put them to work driving his chariots, riding as his horsemen, running before his chariots, gathering his harvest, and making his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to make perfumes and to be his cooks and bakers. He will take your fields, vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and wine and give it to his household officers and other servants. He will take your male and female servants and your finest young people and put them to work for him. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you will be his servants.\" This is unlimited power, summed up in the last words, \"you will be his servants.\" Even after hearing what power their king would have, the people agreed. They said, (Verse. 19 &c.) \"We will be like all the other nations. Our king will judge our cases, go before us, and lead us in our wars.\" This confirms the sovereign's right to command the armed forces and to judge all cases. Together those rights amount to as much power as one person can possibly hand to another. King Solomon also prayed to God, (1 Kings 3. 9) \"Give your servant understanding to judge your people and tell good from evil.\" So the sovereign is responsible for judging and setting the rules for telling good from evil. Those rules are laws, which means the sovereign holds legislative power. Saul sought David's life, but when David had a chance to kill Saul and his servants wanted to do it, David stopped them, saying (1 Sam. 24. 9) \"God forbid that I should do such a thing against my lord, God's anointed.\" On servants' obedience St. Paul says, (Coll. 3. 20) \"Servants, obey your masters in all things,\" and, (Verse. 22) \"Children, obey your parents in all things.\" People under parental or masterly rule owe complete obedience. Again, (Math. 23. 2,3) \"The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, so observe and do everything they tell you to observe.\" Here too obedience is complete. And St. Paul says, (Tit. 3. 2) \"Remind them to submit to rulers and those in authority, and to obey them.\" Again, that obedience is complete. Finally, our Savior himself recognizes that people should pay the taxes kings impose when he says, \"Give Caesar what belongs to Caesar.\" He paid such taxes himself. He also shows that a king's word is enough to take anything from a subject when it is needed, and that the king judges that need. As King of the Jews, he told his disciples to take a donkey and its colt so he could ride into Jerusalem, saying, (Mat. 21. 2,3) \"Go into the village opposite you. You will find a female donkey tied there, with her colt. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone asks what you are doing, say the Lord needs them, and they will let them go.\" They will not ask whether his need gives him a sufficient claim or whether he can judge that need. They will accept the Lord's will.\n\nWe can add these words from Genesis, (Gen. 3. 5) \"You will be like gods, knowing good and evil,\" and verse 11, \"Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I commanded you not to eat from?\" God forbade Adam to claim the power to judge good and evil, represented by the name of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That command tested Adam's obedience. The devil stirred up the woman's ambition. The fruit already looked beautiful to her, and he told her that eating it would make them like gods, knowing good and evil. After they both ate, they really did take on God's role of judging good and evil. But they gained no new ability to tell them apart correctly. Scripture says that after eating they saw they were naked. Nobody has taken this to mean they had been blind before and could not see their own skin. Clearly, this was the first time they judged their nakedness, in which God had chosen to create them, to be improper. By feeling shame they silently criticized God himself. So God asks, \"Have you eaten, and so on?\" It is as if he said, \"You owe me obedience. Are you taking it upon yourself to judge my commands?\" The allegory clearly means that subjects must not criticize or dispute the commands of those who have the right to command them.\n\nIn my view, both reason and Scripture clearly show that sovereign power is as great as people could possibly make it. This is true whether sovereignty belongs to one person in a monarchy or to an assembly in a democratic or aristocratic commonwealth. People may imagine many bad results from such unlimited power. Yet the results of lacking it are much worse: endless war between neighbors. Human life will never be free of difficulties. But no serious difficulty arises in a commonwealth except from subjects disobeying and breaking the covenants that created it. Anyone who thinks sovereign power too great and tries to reduce it must submit to a power able to limit it. That means submitting to an even greater power.\n\nThe strongest objection concerns actual practice. People ask where and when subjects have ever acknowledged this kind of power. But one could ask them when and where a kingdom has long remained free from rebellion and civil war. In nations whose commonwealths have lasted a long time and have been destroyed only by foreign war, subjects have never disputed sovereign power. In any case, the practice of people who have not examined commonwealths thoroughly or carefully reasoned about their causes and nature proves nothing. Those people suffer every day from their ignorance of the subject. Even if everyone in the world built houses on sand, that would not prove they should do so. Making and maintaining commonwealths depends on definite rules, like arithmetic and geometry. It does not depend only on practice, as playing tennis does. Poor people have no time to discover these rules. Those who have had time have so far lacked the curiosity or the method to find them.\n\nCHAPTER XXI. ON THE FREEDOM OF SUBJECTS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXI, 1\n\nON THE FREEDOM OF SUBJECTS\n\nLiberty, or freedom, properly means the absence of opposition. By opposition I mean outside obstacles to movement. The word applies to animals and lifeless things as much as to rational beings. When something is tied up or surrounded so that it cannot move beyond a certain space because another body blocks it, we say it is not free to go farther. We say the same about animals confined by walls or chains. We say it about water held in by banks or containers when it would otherwise spread farther: they are not free to move as they would without those outside obstacles. But if the obstacle to movement lies in a thing's own makeup, we do not say it lacks freedom. We say it lacks the power to move. A stone lying still and a person confined to bed by illness are examples.\n\nIn the proper, ordinary meaning of the word, a free person is \"someone who is not prevented from doing what he wants to do, when he has the strength and ability to do it.\" But it is a misuse to speak of freedom in anything other than bodies. Something that cannot move cannot be stopped from moving. So when we say, for example, that a road is free, we do not mean the road itself has freedom. We mean people can walk along it without being stopped. When we call a gift free, we mean not that the gift is free but that the giver was not required by law or covenant to give it. When we speak freely, the freedom belongs not to our voice or pronunciation but to the person, who is not legally required to speak differently. Finally, the term 'free will' does not show that a person's will, desires, or inclinations have freedom. It means the person has freedom to do what he wills, desires, or feels inclined to do, without anything stopping him.\n\nFear and freedom can coexist. Someone who throws his goods into the sea because he fears the ship will sink still does so willingly. He could refuse if he wanted. He is therefore acting freely. Sometimes a person pays a debt only because he fears prison. Nobody stopped him from keeping the money, so that too is the act of a free person. In general, people in commonwealths are free to omit any actions they perform because they fear the law.\n\nFreedom and necessity can coexist as well. Water is free to flow down a channel, yet it must flow down it. The same goes for voluntary human actions. They arise from people's will and are therefore free. Yet every act of will, desire, and inclination has a cause. Those causes form an unbroken chain whose first link is in the hand of God, the first cause of everything. Thus these actions also arise from necessity. Anyone who could see the connections between the causes would clearly see that all voluntary human actions are necessary. God sees and orders everything. He also sees that a person's freedom to do what he wants goes together with his necessarily doing exactly what God wills, no more and no less. People can do many things God does not command, and God is not therefore the author of those things. But they cannot have a feeling or appetite for anything unless God's will causes that appetite. If his will did not make the human will necessary, and with it everything depending on that will, human freedom would contradict and obstruct God's unlimited power and freedom. That is enough on the natural freedom that is the only proper kind of freedom, for our present purpose.\n\nTo gain peace and preserve themselves, people have made an artificial person called a commonwealth. They have also made artificial chains called civil laws. Through mutual covenants, they have fastened one end of these chains to the lips of the man or assembly they have given sovereign power. They have fastened the other end to their own ears. The bonds are weak in themselves, but the danger of breaking them, even if breaking them is easy, can make them hold.\n\nIt is only in relation to these bonds that I now discuss the freedom of subjects. No commonwealth in the world can regulate everything people do and say. That is impossible. It follows that when laws do not regulate an action, people are free to do whatever their own judgment suggests will benefit them most. If we use 'freedom' in its proper sense of bodily freedom, meaning freedom from chains and prison, it is absurd for people to clamor for a freedom they so plainly have. If we instead mean exemption from laws, it is just as absurd for people to demand the freedom that would allow everyone else to control their lives. Yet that is what they demand. They do not realize laws cannot protect them unless a person or group has a sword to enforce them. A subject's freedom therefore lies only in matters the sovereign has left unregulated. People are free to buy, sell, and make other contracts with one another; to choose where to live, what to eat, what work to do, and how to raise their children; and to make similar choices.\n\nBut this freedom does not remove or limit the sovereign's power over life and death. As I have already shown, nothing the sovereign representative does to a subject, on whatever grounds, can properly be called an injustice or injury to that subject. Each subject has authorized every act of the sovereign. The sovereign therefore always has the right to act, except where he himself is God's subject and must obey the Laws of Nature. A sovereign power may order a subject put to death, as Jephthah had his daughter sacrificed, and neither person wrongs the other. In that and similar cases the person put to death was free to perform the act for which he is killed without having been wronged. The same applies when a sovereign prince kills an innocent subject. Such an act breaks the Law of Nature because it is against fairness, as David's killing of Uriah was. But David wronged God, not Uriah. He did not wrong Uriah because Uriah himself had given David the right to act as he pleased. He wronged God because David was God's subject and the Law of Nature forbids all wrongdoing. David confirmed this distinction when he repented, saying, \"Against you alone have I sinned.\" Similarly, when the people of Athens banished their most powerful citizens for ten years, they did not think they were acting unjustly. They did not ask what crime a person had committed, only what harm he might do. They even ordered the banishment of people they had not yet identified. Each citizen brought an oyster shell to the marketplace with the name of the person he wanted banished, without actually accusing that person. They sometimes banished an Aristides for his reputation for fairness, and sometimes a crude joker like Hyperbolus as a joke. Yet nobody can say that the sovereign people of Athens lacked the right to banish them, or that an Athenian lacked the freedom to make jokes or be fair.\n\nThe freedom so often praised in the histories and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and by people who have learned all their politics from them, is not the freedom of individuals. It is the freedom of the commonwealth. That is the same freedom each person would have if there were no civil laws or commonwealth at all. Its effects are the same too. Among people with no common ruler, there is continual war between neighbors. No one has an inheritance to pass to a son or expect from a father. There is no ownership of goods or land and no safety, though each individual has complete freedom. Likewise, when states and commonwealths are independent of one another, each commonwealth, not each person, is completely free to do what it judges most helpful to itself. By 'it judges' I mean what the man or assembly representing it judges. These commonwealths, however, live in a state of continual war, always on the edge of battle. Their borders are armed and their cannons point toward all their neighbors. The Athenians and Romans were free in the sense that their commonwealths were free. This did not mean any individual was free to resist his own representative. Their representatives were free to resist or invade other peoples. To this day, the word LIBERTAS is written in large letters on the towers of the city of Luca. Nobody can conclude from this that an individual there has more freedom, or more exemption from serving the commonwealth, than an individual in Constantinople. The freedom is the same whether a commonwealth is ruled by a monarch or by the people.\n\nBut the appealing word 'freedom' easily deceives people. Through poor judgment, they confuse a right belonging only to the public with their own private inheritance and birthright. When respected writers on the subject reinforce this mistake, it is no surprise that it leads to rebellion and a change of government. In the western parts of the world, we learn our ideas about the establishment and rights of commonwealths from Aristotle, Cicero, and other Greeks and Romans. They lived in popular states. They did not derive those rights from the principles of nature. Instead, they copied them into their books from the practice of their own popular commonwealths. Grammarians likewise describe the rules of language from current usage, and the rules of poetry from the poems of Homer and Virgil. Athenians were taught that they were free people and everyone under a monarchy was a slave, to keep them from wanting a change of government. So Aristotle writes in his Politics,(lib.6.cap.2) \"In a democracy, freedom must be assumed, because people commonly think nobody is free under any other government.\" Like Aristotle, Cicero and other writers based their teaching about civil government on Roman opinions. Romans were first taught to hate monarchy by those who deposed their sovereign and divided the sovereignty of Rome among themselves, and later by their successors. Reading these Greek and Latin writers, people have from childhood become used to favoring riots and recklessly challenging what their sovereigns do, under the false appearance of freedom. They then challenge those who challenge the sovereigns. So much blood has been shed that I think I can truly say nothing has cost these western parts of the world more dearly than learning the Greek and Latin languages.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXI, 2\n\nNow let us look at the specific ways in which a subject is truly free. What can a subject refuse to do without acting unjustly, even if the sovereign commands it? We must consider what rights we give up when we create a commonwealth. In other words, what freedom do we give up when we authorize every action, without exception, of the man or assembly we make our sovereign? Both our duties and our freedom come from our act of submission. We must therefore work them out from that act. Nobody has a duty unless it arises from some action of his own, because all people are equally free by nature. Our reasoning must be based either on the explicit words, \"I authorize all his actions,\" or on the purpose of the person submitting to the sovereign's power. We can understand that purpose from the goal of submission. So the subject's duties and freedom must come either from those words, or equivalent ones, or from the goal of establishing sovereignty: peace among the subjects and defense against a common enemy.\n\nFirst, people establish sovereignty by making covenants with one another. When a sovereign acquires power, defeated people make covenants with the victor, or a child with a parent. So clearly every subject is free in matters where a right cannot be transferred by covenant. I showed earlier in the 14. Chapter that covenants not to defend one's own body are invalid. Therefore:\n\nIf a sovereign commands a person, even one rightly condemned, to kill, wound, or disable himself, or not to resist an attacker, or to go without food, air, medicine, or anything else needed for life, the person is still free to disobey.\n\nIf the sovereign or someone authorized by the sovereign questions a person about a crime he committed, the person is not obliged to confess without a guarantee of pardon. As I showed in the same chapter, no covenant can oblige a person to accuse himself.\n\nAlso, a subject gives consent to sovereign power in these words: \"I authorize, or take responsibility for, all his actions.\" They put no limit on the subject's previous natural freedom. By allowing the sovereign to kill me, I do not bind myself to kill myself when ordered to. Saying \"Kill me or my fellow person if you wish\" is one thing. Saying \"I will kill myself or my fellow person\" is another. It follows that:\n\nThe words themselves do not oblige anyone to kill himself or another person. So any duty to carry out a dangerous or dishonorable task at the sovereign's command depends not on the words of submission but on the purpose behind them. We understand that purpose from the goal of submission. If our refusal to obey would defeat the goal for which sovereignty was created, we are not free to refuse. Otherwise we are.\n\nFor this reason, a person ordered to fight the enemy as a soldier may in many cases refuse without acting unjustly, even though the sovereign has the right to punish that refusal with death. For example, he can send another capable soldier in his place, because he has then not abandoned the commonwealth's service. We must make allowances for natural fear, not just in women, from whom no such dangerous duty is expected, but also in men with what is called feminine courage. When armies fight, soldiers on one or both sides may run away. If they do it from fear rather than treachery, people consider their conduct dishonorable but not unjust. For the same reason, avoiding battle is cowardly but not unjust. But someone who enlists as a soldier or accepts an enlistment payment can no longer use a fearful nature as an excuse. He must not only go to battle but also stay there unless his captain allows him to leave. When defense of the commonwealth requires everyone able to bear arms at once, everyone must help. Otherwise the founding of a commonwealth they are unwilling or too afraid to preserve would have been pointless.\n\nNobody is free to resist the commonwealth's sword to defend another person, whether that person is guilty or innocent. Such freedom would take away the sovereign's means of protecting us and would destroy government itself. But suppose many people have already unjustly resisted sovereign power or committed a capital crime, and each expects to be put to death. Are they then free to join together and help defend one another? Certainly they are. They are defending their lives, which a guilty person has just as much right to do as an innocent one. Breaking their duty in the first place was unjust. Their taking up arms afterward, even to maintain what they did, is not a new injustice. If they act only to defend themselves, their action is not unjust at all. But an offer of pardon takes away the claim of self-defense from those offered it. If they keep helping or defending the others, they act unlawfully.\n\nOther freedoms depend on what the law leaves unsaid. Where the sovereign has set no rule, the subject is free to act or refrain according to his own judgment. These freedoms are greater in some places and smaller in others. They can also vary from one time to another, as those holding sovereign power think best. For example, a person in England was once free to enter his own land by force and drive out people who occupied it unlawfully. Later, a statute made by the king in Parliament removed that freedom of forcible entry. In some parts of the world, men are free to have several wives; elsewhere they are not.\n\nA subject may have a dispute with his sovereign over a debt, the right to possess land or goods, a service demanded from him, or a physical or financial penalty based on an earlier law. In that case he is just as free to sue for his right as if the dispute were with another subject. He can bring the case before judges appointed by the sovereign. When the sovereign makes a demand under an existing law rather than by sovereign power alone, he declares that he claims no more than the law will show is owed. So the lawsuit does not go against the sovereign's will. The subject is free to request a hearing and judgment under that law. But if the sovereign demands or takes something on the basis of sovereign power itself, no legal action is possible. Anything the sovereign does in that capacity is done with every subject's authority. A person who sues the sovereign for it would therefore be suing himself.\n\nSuppose a monarch or sovereign assembly grants freedom to some or all subjects, and honoring the grant would make it impossible to keep them safe. The grant is invalid unless the sovereign directly gives up sovereignty or transfers it to someone else. The sovereign could have plainly and openly given up or transferred power if that was the intention, but did not. We must understand the grant as the result of not realizing that such freedom conflicts with sovereign power. The sovereign keeps sovereignty and therefore all the powers needed to use it, including the power to make war and peace, judge cases, appoint officers and counselors, raise money, and exercise the other powers listed in the 18th Chapter.\n\nSubjects owe obedience to the sovereign only as long as the sovereign has the power to protect them. No covenant can make people give up their natural right to protect themselves when nobody else can. Sovereignty is the soul of the commonwealth. Once the soul leaves the body, the limbs no longer receive their movement from it. The purpose of obedience is protection. Wherever a person sees protection, whether in his own sword or another's, nature directs his obedience toward it and leads him to try to preserve it. The founders of sovereignty intend it to last forever. But by its nature it can die violently in a foreign war. Ignorance and human passions also plant many seeds of a natural death through internal conflict in it from the moment it is established.\n\nIf an enemy captures a subject in war, or holds him or his means of survival within its guarded territory, that person may accept an offer of life and bodily freedom on condition that he become subject to the victor. Once he accepts, he is the captor's subject, because he had no other way to save himself. The same applies if he is held on those terms in a foreign country. But if a person remains in prison or chains or is not trusted to move freely, he cannot be considered bound by a covenant of subjection. He may escape by any means he can.\n\nIf a monarch gives up sovereignty for both himself and his heirs, his subjects return to the complete freedom of nature. Nature may tell us who his sons and closest relatives are, but, as I said in the previous chapter, he decides who his heir is. If he wants no heir, there is no sovereignty and no subjection. The same applies if he dies without known relatives and without naming an heir. No heir can then be identified, so no obedience is owed.\n\nIf a sovereign banishes a subject, that person is no longer a subject during the banishment. Someone sent on an errand or given permission to travel remains a subject. But this follows from agreements between sovereigns, not from the covenant of subjection. Whoever enters someone else's territory is subject to all its laws unless granted a privilege by an agreement of friendship between the sovereigns or by special permission.\n\nIf a monarch defeated in war submits to the victor as a subject, his subjects are released from their former obligation and owe obedience to the victor. But if he is held prisoner or denied freedom to move his body, he has not given up his right of sovereignty. His subjects therefore must obey the magistrates he previously appointed. Those magistrates govern in his name, not their own. His right remains. The only question is who administers it, meaning which magistrates and officers serve. If he cannot appoint new ones, we assume he approves those he appointed earlier.\n\nCHAPTER XXII. ON SUBJECT POLITICAL AND PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXII, 1\n\nOF SYSTEMS OF SUBJECTS, POLITICAL AND PRIVATE\n\nI have described how a Common-wealth is formed, what form it takes, and what power it has. Next I will describe its parts. I will begin with systems, which resemble the similar parts, or muscles, of a natural body. By a system I mean any group of people joined by one interest or one undertaking. Some systems are regular and others irregular. A regular system has one person or an assembly appointed to represent the whole group. All others are irregular.\n\nSome regular systems are absolute and independent, subject only to their own representative. Only Common-wealths are like this. I discussed them in the 5 previous chapters. Others are dependent, or subordinate to a Sovereign Power. Each member and the representative are subject to that power.\n\nSome subordinate systems are political, and others private. Political systems, also called political bodies or persons in law, are formed under the authority of the Common-wealth's Sovereign Power. Private systems are formed by subjects among themselves or under the authority of someone from another country. Authority coming from a foreign power is private, not public, within another sovereign's territory.\n\nSome private systems are lawful, and others unlawful. Those allowed by the Common-wealth are lawful; all others are unlawful. Irregular systems have no representative and consist simply of people gathering. Such gatherings are lawful when the Common-wealth has not forbidden them and they have no bad purpose. People meeting at markets or shows, or for any other harmless purpose, are examples. But a gathering is unlawful if its purpose is bad or, when the number of people is substantial, unknown.\n\nThe representative's power in a political body is always limited. The Sovereign Power sets its limits, since unlimited power amounts to absolute Sovereignty. The Sovereign in every Common-wealth is the absolute representative of all its subjects. No one else can represent any of them except to the extent the Sovereign permits. If the Sovereign allowed a political body of subjects to have a representative with absolute power in every matter, the Sovereign would give up government over that part of the Common-wealth. This would divide its rule and work against the subjects' peace and defense. We cannot understand any grant as doing this unless it plainly and directly releases them from subjection. Implications drawn from words are not signs of the Sovereign's will when other implications point in the opposite direction. They are instead signs of error and miscalculation, to which everyone is prone.\n\nTwo things show the limits of the power given to the representative of a political body: its written authorization or letters from the Sovereign, and the law of the Common-wealth.\n\nAn independent Common-wealth formed by institution or conquest needs no written authorization. Its representative's power has no limits except those set by the unwritten Law of Nature. But subordinate bodies need many different limits on their activities, times, and places. People cannot remember all these without documents or know what they are unless those documents are public letters, available to read and sealed or otherwise marked with a lasting sign of Sovereign Authority.\n\nSuch limits are not always easy, or even possible, to describe in writing. Therefore, where the letters say nothing, the ordinary laws that apply to all subjects must determine what the representative may lawfully do. It follows that:\n\nIn a political body represented by one person, anything that person does on behalf of the body without authorization from its letters or the laws is that person's act alone. It is not the act of the body or any other member. Outside the limits set by the letters or laws, the person represents no one else. But an act done within those limits is the act of every member. Each person authorizes the acts of the Sovereign, who represents them without limit. An act by someone who stays within the Sovereign's letters is therefore an act of the Sovereign, authorized by every member of the body.\n\nIf an assembly represents the body, a decree unauthorized by its letters or the laws is the act of the assembly or political body and of everyone who voted for it. It is not the act of anyone present who voted against it, or of anyone absent unless that person voted by proxy. It is the assembly's act because the majority voted for it. If it is a crime, the assembly can be punished in whatever way is possible for it: by dissolution, by forfeiting its letters—which for such artificial, legal bodies amounts to death—or by a fine, if it has a common fund in which innocent members have no property. Political bodies cannot receive physical punishments. Those who did not vote for the decree are innocent because the assembly cannot represent them in matters its letters do not authorize. They are therefore not implicated by the votes.\n\nWhen one person represents the body, that person alone, not its members, is liable for money borrowed or owed under a contract. If the single representative of a political body borrows money from an outsider, someone who does not belong to the body, the debt is the representative's. No letters need to limit borrowing, since lenders can choose for themselves how much to lend. If the letters empowered the representative to make members pay what the representative borrows, that person would in effect be their Sovereign. The grant would therefore either be void, as a product of ordinary human error and insufficient evidence of the grantor's will, or, if the grantor confirmed it, the representative would be Sovereign. That would fall outside this discussion of subordinate bodies. No member is obliged to pay this debt except the representative. The outsider lending the money cannot know the body's letters or its conditions. The lender understands only those who have undertaken the debt to be debtors. Since the representative can commit only himself, he alone is the debtor. He must pay from the common fund, if there is one, or otherwise from his own property.\n\nThe same rule applies if he incurs a debt through a contract or a fine.\n\nWhen an assembly represents the body and the debt is owed to an outsider, everyone who voted to borrow the money, enter the contract that created the debt, or do the act that led to the fine is personally responsible for the entire debt. No one else is. By voting, each of them undertook to pay it. A person who authorizes borrowing owes the whole debt, although payment by any one of them releases the others.\n\nBut if the debt is owed to a member of the assembly, only the assembly owes payment, from its common fund if it has one. The member had a free vote. If he voted to borrow, he voted to repay. If he voted against borrowing, or was absent, his act of lending nevertheless amounted to a vote to borrow. He contradicted his earlier vote and is bound by his later decision. He is both borrower and lender and therefore cannot demand payment from any individual, only from the common treasury. If it has no money, he has no remedy and no one to blame but himself. He knew the assembly's actions and its ability to pay, was not forced to lend, and nevertheless foolishly lent it money.\n\nSometimes protest is lawful, but never against Sovereign Power. This shows that in subordinate political bodies, it is sometimes not just lawful but wise for a member to protest openly against a representative assembly's decrees and have the dissent recorded or witnessed. Otherwise that member may have to pay debts or answer for crimes committed by others. But no such right exists in a Sovereign Assembly. A person protesting there denies its Sovereignty. Moreover, for a subject, whatever the Sovereign Power commands is justified by that command, though it is not always justified in God's eyes. Every subject is the author of such a command.\n\nThere are almost infinitely many kinds of political bodies. They differ not only in the countless activities for which they are formed, but also in the limits on their duration, location, and number of members. Some are created to govern. For example, the government of a province might be entrusted to an assembly whose decisions depend on a majority vote. That assembly is a political body, and its commission limits its power. The word province means an assigned responsibility: someone gives another person a task to carry out under that person's authority. So when a Common-wealth contains different countries with distinct laws, or countries far apart, and entrusts their government to different people, the countries where the Sovereign does not live but governs through commissions are called provinces. There are few examples, though, of a province governed by an assembly based in the province itself. The Romans ruled many provinces but always governed them through presidents and praetors, not assemblies as they used to govern the city of Rome and nearby territories. Likewise, when England sent colonies to settle Virginia and the Sommer-Ilands, their government here was entrusted to assemblies in London. But those assemblies did not entrust local government to assemblies in the colonies. They sent a governor to each settlement. People naturally want to take part in government when they can be there themselves. When they cannot be there, they are also naturally inclined to put their shared interests under one ruler rather than under a government by many. This can also be seen among people with large private estates: if they do not want the trouble of managing them, they prefer to trust one servant rather than an assembly of friends or servants. Whatever actually happens, we can still suppose that an assembly is given the government of a province or colony. My point is that any debt it incurs and any unlawful act it orders belong only to those who agreed to them, not to dissenters or absentees, for the reasons already given. Also, an assembly based outside the colony it governs cannot seize the persons or property of colonists outside the colony to collect a debt or enforce another obligation. It has no jurisdiction or authority there and must use whatever remedy the law of that place allows. Even if the assembly has the right to fine members who break its laws, it has no right to enforce the fine outside the colony. The same principles concerning the rights of an assembly governing a province or colony apply to an assembly governing a town, university, college, church, or any other group of people.\n\nIn general, if a member of any political body believes the body itself has injured him, the Sovereign or judges appointed by the Sovereign, whether generally or for that particular case, must hear his claim. The body itself must not judge it, because the body is his fellow subject. A Sovereign Assembly is different: if the Sovereign cannot judge, even in its own case, there can be no judge at all.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXII, 2\n\nIn a political body set up to manage foreign trade, the most suitable representative is an assembly of all its members. Everyone who invests money should be able to attend every discussion and decision if they wish. To see why, consider why merchants who could buy, sell, export, and import goods as they choose nevertheless join a single corporation. Few merchants can buy enough goods at home to fill a ship for export, or buy enough abroad to fill one coming home. They therefore need to join in a society. Each can share the profits according to the size of his investment, or keep his own goods and sell what he exports or imports at the price he chooses. But that kind of society is not a political body. It has no common representative who can bind its members to rules beyond those applying to all other subjects. Merchants incorporate to increase their profits. They can do so by gaining exclusive rights to buy and sell, both at home and abroad. Granting a company of merchants the status of a corporation or political body thus grants it a double monopoly: it becomes the only buyer and the only seller. If a company is incorporated for trade with a particular foreign country, only its members may export goods that can be sold there. This gives them exclusive buying rights at home and exclusive selling rights abroad. There is only one buyer at home and one seller abroad. Both arrangements benefit the merchants, who can buy more cheaply at home and sell for more abroad. The company is also the only buyer of foreign goods abroad and the only seller of those goods at home. These arrangements likewise benefit its investors.\n\nOne part of this double monopoly harms people at home, and the other harms foreigners. Because the company alone exports, it can set the prices it chooses for the products of people's farming and labor at home. Because it alone imports, it can set the prices it chooses for all the foreign goods people need. Both harm the people at home. Conversely, the company alone sells domestic goods abroad and buys foreign goods in the country of origin. It can raise the prices of the former and lower those of the latter, harming foreigners. Goods cost more where there is only one seller and less where there is only one buyer. These corporations are simply monopolies. They would, however, greatly benefit a Common-wealth if they acted as one body in foreign markets while everyone at home remained free to buy and sell at whatever price they could get.\n\nThese merchant bodies are thus not set up for the common benefit of all their members. They have no common fund except what is taken from individual investments to build or buy ships, provision them, and hire crews. Their purpose is the individual profit of each investor. So it is reasonable for everyone to know how his own money is used and to see the accounts. Everyone should belong to the assembly that controls its use. The representative of such a body must therefore be an assembly whose discussions every member may attend if desired.\n\nIf a political body of merchants incurs a debt to an outsider through an act of its representative assembly, each member is personally liable for the whole amount. The outsider cannot know their private rules. He regards them as individuals each obliged to pay the entire sum, until payment by one releases the rest. But if the debt is owed to a member of the company, that creditor also owes the entire sum to himself. He can therefore claim repayment only from the common fund, if there is one.\n\nIf the Common-wealth taxes the body, the tax is understood to fall on each member in proportion to his investment in the company. In this case the body has no common fund other than what comes from individual investments.\n\nIf the body is fined for an unlawful act, only those whose votes ordered the act or whose help carried it out are liable. The other members have committed no offense except belonging to the body. And if belonging to it is an offense, since the Common-wealth authorized the body, the offense is not theirs.\n\nIf a member owes money to the body, the body may sue him. But it cannot seize his goods or imprison him by its own authority. Only the Common-wealth has that authority. If the body could take these steps itself, it could also decide for itself that the debt is owed. That would make it judge in its own case.\n\nBodies established to govern people or trade may last forever or for a period specified in writing. Other bodies have a duration limited simply by the nature of their work. For example, a Sovereign Monarch or Sovereign Assembly may instruct the towns and other parts of the territory to send deputies to report on subjects' circumstances and needs, to give advice about making good laws, or for another purpose. The deputies then consult with the Sovereign, who represents the whole country. At the appointed meeting place and time, those deputies form a political body representing every subject in the territory. But they represent the subjects only in matters put before them by the person or assembly whose Sovereign Authority summoned them. Once it is declared that no further matters will be proposed or discussed, the body dissolves. If they represented the people without any limits, they would be the Sovereign Assembly. Then the same people would have two Sovereign Assemblies, or two Sovereigns, which would be incompatible with peace. Once Sovereignty exists, only the Sovereign can represent the people without limits. The document summoning the deputies sets the limits of their authority to represent the people. The people cannot elect deputies for a purpose other than the one stated in the Sovereign's instructions to them.\n\nPrivate bodies that are regular and lawful are formed without letters or other written authority beyond the laws applying to all subjects. They are regular because they are united under one representative person. Families are an example: the father or master directs the whole family. He can bind his children and servants insofar as the law permits, but no further, because they do not have to obey him when the law forbids the act. In all other matters, while they live under household government, they are subject to their fathers and masters as their immediate Sovereigns. Before Common-wealths were established, fathers and masters were absolute Sovereigns within their families. Afterward, they lose only as much authority as the Common-wealth's law takes from them.\n\nPrivate bodies that are regular but unlawful unite under one representative person without any public authority. Examples include corporations of beggars, thieves, and Gypsies, formed to manage their begging and stealing more efficiently. Another example is a corporation of people who organize within someone else's territory under a foreign person's authority. They do this to spread doctrines more easily and build a faction against the Common-wealth's power.\n\nIrregular systems are by nature leagues or sometimes mere gatherings of people. They are not united around a particular purpose or bound to each other. They come together only because they have similar wishes and inclinations. Whether such a system is lawful depends on whether each person's purpose is lawful. The occasion reveals that purpose.\n\nLeagues among subjects are usually made for mutual defense. But in a Common-wealth, which itself is a league of all its subjects, they are mostly unnecessary. They suggest an unlawful purpose and are therefore unlawful. They are commonly called factions or conspiracies. A league binds people together by Covenants. If no person or assembly has power to compel them to keep their Covenants, as in the state of mere nature, the league lasts only until there is good reason to distrust one another. Thus leagues between Common-wealths, which are not restrained by any human power above them, are lawful and useful while they last. But subjects of one Common-wealth can each obtain their rights through the Sovereign Power. Their leagues are unnecessary for peace and justice, and unlawful if their purpose is bad or unknown to the Common-wealth. When private people join forces for a bad purpose, it is unjust. When their purpose is unknown, it endangers the public and is unjustly concealed.\n\nIf Sovereign Power belongs to a large assembly, and some of its members consult privately without authority to arrange how to control the rest, that is an unlawful faction or conspiracy. They fraudulently lead the assembly toward their private interests. But a person whose own interests are to be discussed and judged by the assembly commits no injustice by gathering as many friends as possible, because he is not part of the assembly in this case. Even if he pays those friends, it is not unjust unless a law expressly forbids it. Given people's behavior, justice sometimes cannot be obtained without money. Everyone may believe his own case is just until it has been heard and judged.\n\nIn any Common-wealth, it is an unlawful faction for a private person to keep more servants than are needed to manage his estate and carry out the lawful work he has for them. The Common-wealth protects him, so he has no need for a private force to defend himself. In nations that have not become fully civilized, many large families have remained hostile to one another and attacked one another with private force. Clearly, either they acted unjustly or they had no Common-wealth.\n\nFactions based on family ties are unjust. So are factions formed to control religion, such as those of Papists, Protestants, and others; and factions formed to control the state, such as the Patricians and Plebeians in ancient Rome or the supporters of aristocracy and democracy in ancient Greece. These factions undermine the people's peace and safety and take the sword from the Sovereign's hand.\n\nA gathering of people is an irregular system. Whether it is lawful depends on why they have gathered and how many are present. If the occasion is lawful and clear, the gathering is lawful. People meeting at church or a public show in the usual numbers provide examples. If the numbers are unusually large, however, the purpose is unclear. Anyone who cannot give a specific good reason for being among them should be judged to know of an unlawful, riotous purpose. A thousand people may lawfully join in signing a petition to a judge or magistrate. But if a thousand come to present it, the assembly is riotous: one or two people could deliver it. No fixed number makes a gathering unlawful in such cases. What matters is whether the number exceeds what the current officers can control and bring to justice.\n\nWhen an unusual number of people gather against someone they accuse, their gathering is an unlawful riot. One person or a few could deliver the accusation to the magistrate. This happened to St. Paul at Ephesus. Demetrius and many others brought two of Paul's companions before the magistrate, crying out together, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” This was their way of asking for justice against the companions for teaching doctrines opposed to their religion and trade. Under that people's laws, their complaint was justified. But their gathering was judged unlawful, and the magistrate rebuked them in these words (Acts 19. 40): “If Demetrius and the other workers accuse anyone of anything, the courts and deputies are available. Let them bring charges against one another. And if you want anything else, your case can be decided in a lawfully called assembly. For we are in danger of being accused of sedition over what happened today, because there is no cause that anyone can give as a reason for this gathering of people.” He calls a gathering that has no just explanation sedition, for which they could not answer. That is all I have to say about systems and assemblies of people. As I said, they can be compared to the similar parts of a human body: lawful systems to muscles, and unlawful systems to growths, boils, and abscesses produced by an unnatural gathering of harmful fluids.\n\nCHAPTER XXIII. OF THE PUBLIC MINISTERS OF SOVEREIGN POWER\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIII\n\nOF THE PUBLIC MINISTERS OF SOVEREIGN POWER\n\nIn the last chapter I described the similar parts of a Common-wealth. Here I will describe its organs, which are public ministers.\n\nA public minister is someone the Sovereign, whether a monarch or an assembly, employs in an activity with authority to represent the Common-wealth in that work. Every person or assembly holding Sovereignty represents two persons, or, as people more commonly say, acts in two capacities: one natural and one political. A monarch represents both the Common-wealth and an individual human being. A Sovereign Assembly represents both the Common-wealth and the assembly itself. Those serving sovereigns in their natural capacity are not public ministers. Only those who serve in the management of public business are. Thus ushers, sergeants, and other officers who attend an assembly merely for the convenience of its members in an aristocracy or democracy are not public ministers. Neither are the stewards, chamberlains, treasurers, or other household officers of a monarch in a monarchy.\n\nSome public ministers are entrusted with general administration of the whole territory or part of it. For example, the predecessor of a child king may appoint a protector or regent to administer the whole kingdom while the king is underage. Subjects must obey such a regent's ordinances and commands insofar as they are issued in the king's name and do not conflict with the king's Sovereign Power. A monarch or Sovereign Assembly may also give a governor, lieutenant, prefect, or viceroy general charge of a province. People in that province must obey everything this minister does in the Sovereign's name that is consistent with the Sovereign's Right. Protectors, viceroys, and governors have no rights except those depending on the Sovereign's will. No commission given to them can be read as expressing a will to transfer Sovereignty unless it says so explicitly and clearly. These public ministers resemble the nerves and tendons that move the different limbs of a natural body.\n\nOther ministers carry out specific duties, at home or abroad. At home, first, there is the management of the Common-wealth's finances. People authorized to collect, receive, pay out, or audit the treasury's revenues, including tributes, taxes, rents, fines, and any other public income, are public ministers. They are ministers because they serve the representative person and can do nothing without that person's authority or against that person's command. They are public because they serve the representative in a political capacity.\n\nSecond, there are those with authority over the military: to guard weapons, forts, and ports; recruit, pay, or lead soldiers; or provide anything needed for war by land or sea. They are public ministers. But an ordinary soldier with no command does not represent the Common-wealth merely by fighting for it. There is no one to whom that soldier represents it. A commander represents the Common-wealth only to the people under that command.\n\nPeople authorized to teach, or to authorize others to teach, the people their duty toward the Sovereign Power are also public ministers. They teach people what is just and unjust, helping them live in godliness and peace with each other and resist public enemies. They are ministers because they act under someone else's authority, not their own. They are public because the authority they use, or should use, comes only from the Sovereign. Only the monarch or Sovereign Assembly receives immediate authority from God to teach and instruct the people. Only the Sovereign receives power simply Dei Gratia, meaning through the favor of God alone. Everyone else receives power through God's favor and providence and through their Sovereign's favor. In a monarchy, their authority comes Dei Gratia & Regis, or Dei Providentia & Voluntate Regis.\n\nThose given jurisdiction are also public ministers. On the bench they represent the Sovereign, and their sentence is the Sovereign's sentence. As I have explained, all judicial authority belongs by its nature to Sovereignty. Every other judge is a minister of whoever holds Sovereign Power. Disputes may concern either facts or law, and decisions may therefore concern facts or law. A single dispute may accordingly have two judges: one for the facts and another for the law.\n\nIn either kind of dispute, another dispute may arise between the person being judged and the judge. Because both are subjects of the Sovereign, fairness requires their dispute to be decided by people they both agree on: no one can judge his own case. Both parties have already agreed to the Sovereign as judge. The Sovereign should therefore hear and decide the matter personally or appoint a judge on whom they both agree. Such agreement can be established in different ways. First, the defendant may be allowed to object to judges whose interests make them seem biased. The complainant has already chosen his own judge, and the judges the defendant does not object to count as his choice. Second, if the defendant appeals to another judge, he cannot appeal further, because that appeal was his choice. Third, if he appeals to the Sovereign personally, and the Sovereign gives judgment either directly or through delegates agreed on by both parties, the judgment is final. The defendant has been judged by judges of his own choosing, which amounts to being judged by himself.\n\nConsidering these features of fair and reasonable judgment, I must point out how well the courts of justice in England are organized for both common and public pleas. By common pleas I mean cases where both complainant and defendant are subjects. By public pleas, also called pleas of the Crown, I mean cases where the Sovereign is the complainant. There were two orders of people, Lords and Commons. The Lords had the privilege of being judged in all capital cases by Lords alone, with as many attending as wished to do so. This was always recognized as a privilege granted in their favor, so their judges were people they had asked for. In all disputes, every subject, and the Lords too in civil disputes, was judged by people from the country where the dispute arose. The defendant could object to them until Twelve people to whom he had no objection had been agreed on. Those twelve then judged him. Because he had judges of his own choosing, he could give no reason why their sentence should not be final. These public persons who are authorized by the Sovereign Power to instruct or judge people can be compared to the organs of speech in a natural body.\n\nPublic ministers also include everyone authorized by the Sovereign to enforce judgments, announce Sovereign commands, put down riots, arrest and imprison offenders, and do other things that preserve peace. Every act they perform under this authority is an act of the Common-wealth. Their work is like the work of the hands in a natural body.\n\nPublic ministers abroad represent their own Sovereign to foreign states. They include ambassadors, messengers, agents, and heralds sent by public authority on public business.\n\nBut people sent only under the authority of a private party in a troubled state are not public or private ministers of the Common-wealth, even if they are received. The Common-wealth authorizes none of their acts. Likewise, an ambassador a prince sends to offer congratulations or condolences or to attend a ceremony is a private person. The authority for the visit is public, but its purpose is private and concerns the prince in his natural capacity. If someone is secretly sent to another country to investigate its plans and strength, both the authority and the business are public. But since no one recognizes him as acting for any person other than himself, he is only a private minister, though still a minister of the Common-wealth. He can be compared to an eye in a natural body. People appointed to receive petitions or other information from the people act as the public ear. They are public ministers and represent their Sovereign in that role.\n\nA counselor or council of state is not a public person if it has no power to judge or command and can only give the Sovereign advice, whether asked for or not. Advice is addressed to the Sovereign alone. No one else can represent the Sovereign to the Sovereign in the Sovereign's own presence. A body of counselors, however, always has some other authority, whether to judge or to administer directly. In a monarchy they represent the monarch when passing the monarch's commands to public ministers. In a democracy, the council or senate presents the results of its deliberations to the people in its capacity as a council. But when it appoints judges, hears cases, or receives ambassadors, it acts as a minister of the people. In an aristocracy the council of state is itself the Sovereign Assembly, and its members give advice only to themselves.\n\nCHAPTER XXIV. OF THE NOURISHMENT AND REPRODUCTION OF A COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIV\n\nOn the nourishment and reproduction of a commonwealth\n\nThe nourishment of a commonwealth consists of goods\n\nFrom sea and land\n\nA commonwealth is nourished by having enough materials to sustain life and by distributing them. It must also process or prepare them. Once prepared, it must carry them through suitable channels for public use.\n\nThe supply of materials is limited by nature to the goods that God usually gives us freely, or sells us in return for labor, from land and sea, the two breasts of our common mother.\n\nThese materials are animals, plants, and minerals. God has placed them freely before us, in or near the surface of the earth. All that remains is the work and effort of gathering them. So, after God's favor, the supply depends entirely on human work and effort.\n\nThese materials, commonly called goods, are partly domestic and partly foreign. Domestic goods come from within a commonwealth's territory. Foreign goods are imported from outside. Unless a territory ruled by one commonwealth is very large, it cannot produce everything needed to maintain and move its whole body. Yet few territories produce nothing beyond what they need. Their surplus is no longer surplus when it is used to meet needs at home through imports obtained by exchange, just war, or labor. A person's labor is a good that can be exchanged for benefits, like anything else. Some commonwealths have had no more land than they needed to live on. Yet they have maintained and even increased their power, partly by trading from place to place and partly by selling manufactured goods made with materials brought from elsewhere.\n\nDistributing these materials means establishing what is mine, yours, and his—in one word, property. In every kind of commonwealth, this belongs to the sovereign power. Where there is no commonwealth, as I have already shown, everyone is constantly at war with their neighbors. Anything belongs to whoever can seize and hold it by force. This is neither private property nor common ownership, but uncertainty. The point is so clear that even Cicero, an ardent defender of liberty, said in a public speech that all property depends on civil law: “Once civil law is abandoned, or even carelessly guarded, let alone suppressed, no one can be sure of receiving anything from an ancestor or leaving anything to their children.” And again: “Take away civil law, and no one knows what is their own and what belongs to another.” Property comes into being through a commonwealth, which can act only through the person representing it. Establishing property is therefore the sovereign's act alone. It consists of laws, which only someone with sovereign power can make. People in ancient times understood this when they called what we call law nomos, meaning distribution, and defined justice as giving everyone what is their own.\n\nIn this distribution, the first law divides the land itself. The sovereign gives each person a portion according to what the sovereign, not any subject or group of subjects, judges fair and good for everyone. The children of Israel formed a commonwealth in the wilderness. But they lacked the goods of the earth until they took possession of the Promised Land. Its division was decided not by the people themselves but by Eleazar the priest and Joshua their general. They made the twelve tribes into thirteen by dividing the tribe of Joseph, yet made only twelve portions of land. They gave no land to the tribe of Levi, instead assigning it a tenth of all the produce. This division was therefore made at their discretion. A people who take land through war do not always wipe out its former inhabitants, as the Jews did. They may leave many, most, or all of them with their estates. But those people then hold their estates by the victors' allotment, just as the people of England held their land from William the Conqueror.\n\nWe can conclude that a subject's property in land gives that subject the right to keep all other subjects from using it, but not the sovereign, whether the sovereign is an assembly or a monarch. The sovereign is the commonwealth's representative and is understood to act only for the common peace and safety. Its distribution of land must therefore be understood as serving those purposes. Any distribution that harms them goes against the will of every subject who entrusted their peace and safety to the sovereign's judgment and conscience. By their will, such a distribution must therefore be considered void. A sovereign monarch, or the majority of a sovereign assembly, may indeed order many things in pursuit of their passions, against their consciences. That breaks trust and the Law of Nature. But it does not give any subject the authority to wage war on the sovereign, accuse the sovereign of injustice, or even speak ill of the sovereign. Subjects authorized all the sovereign's actions and, by granting sovereign power, made those actions their own. I will consider elsewhere the cases in which a sovereign's commands conflict with fairness and the Law of Nature.\n\nWhen land is divided, we might imagine that the commonwealth could keep a portion, hold it through its representative, and use it to pay all the necessary costs of public peace and defense. That would be true if we could imagine a representative free of human passions and weaknesses. But given human nature, setting aside public land or any fixed income for the commonwealth is useless. It leads to the collapse of government and a return to the natural condition of war as soon as sovereign power falls to a monarch or assembly that is either too careless about money or too willing to risk public funds in a long or costly war. Commonwealths cannot live on a fixed diet. Their costs are set not by their own appetites but by outside events and the appetites of their neighbors. Public wealth can therefore have no fixed limit other than what new needs require. In England, the Conqueror reserved various lands for his own use, along with forests and hunting grounds for recreation or to preserve timber. He also reserved various services from land he gave his subjects. But these seem to have supported him as a private person, not in his public role. He and his successors still imposed taxes at their discretion on all subjects' land whenever they thought it necessary. Or, if the public lands and services were meant to support the commonwealth adequately, this went against the purpose of setting them aside. Later taxes showed that they were inadequate, and recent income of the Crown shows that they could be sold off or reduced. So it is useless to allot land to the commonwealth. It can sell or give that land away, and does so when its representative sells or gives it away.\n\nJust as the division of land at home belongs to the sovereign, so does the decision about where subjects may trade abroad and which goods they may trade. If private people were free to decide for themselves, some would be drawn by profit to supply the enemy with means to harm the commonwealth. They might also harm it themselves by importing goods that please people's appetites but are harmful, or at least useless. Therefore only the commonwealth, meaning the sovereign, may approve or reject the places and goods involved in foreign trade.\n\nA commonwealth cannot be sustained merely by giving each person property in some land or a few goods, or by letting each person retain their natural ownership of a useful skill. Almost every skill is needed for nearly every person's survival or well-being. People therefore have to distribute what they can spare and transfer ownership to one another through exchange and mutual agreement. The commonwealth, meaning the sovereign, must therefore set the rules for making every kind of agreement between subjects, including buying, selling, exchanging, borrowing, lending, renting out, and hiring. It must also say what words and signs make these agreements valid. That is enough about the materials of nourishment and their distribution among the members of a commonwealth, given the plan of this work.\n\nBy processing, I mean converting goods that will not be consumed immediately, but are saved for later nourishment, into something of equal value that is also portable enough for people to move from place to place. In this way people can obtain whatever nourishment each place offers, wherever they are. This portable value is simply gold, silver, and money. Gold and silver happen to be highly valued in almost every country. They are therefore convenient measures of the value of other things in trade between nations. Money, whatever it is made of, is a sufficient measure of the value of other things among a commonwealth's subjects when its sovereign coins it. With these measures, movable and immovable goods can accompany people wherever they go, both inside and outside their usual home. The money passes from person to person throughout the commonwealth, nourishing each part as it circulates. In this sense, processing is like making blood for the commonwealth. Natural blood is likewise made from the earth's produce and nourishes every part of the human body as it circulates.\n\nBecause gold and silver owe their value to the material itself, they have a first advantage: one or a few commonwealths cannot change their value, since they provide a shared measure for goods everywhere. Inferior coinage, by contrast, can easily be raised or lowered in value. Their second advantage is that they allow commonwealths to move and reach out into foreign countries when needed. They can supply not only traveling private subjects but whole armies. Coins valued for their local stamp rather than their material cannot survive a change of air: they work only at home. Even there, changes in law can reduce their value, often harming the people who hold them.\n\nThere are two kinds of channels carrying this wealth for public use. One carries it into the public treasury; the other pays it out again for public expenses. Collectors, receivers, and treasurers belong to the first kind. Treasurers also belong to the second, along with officials assigned to pay various public or private servants. Here too the artificial person resembles a natural one. Veins collect blood from the body's parts and carry it to the heart. There it becomes life-giving, and the heart sends it through the arteries to give every part life and the power to move.\n\nA commonwealth's offspring are what we call settlements or colonies. These are groups of people sent from a commonwealth, under a leader or governor, to live in another country. That country may have been empty already or have been emptied by war. Once established, a colony may become its own commonwealth, released from obedience to the sovereign who sent it. Many ancient commonwealths did this. In that case, the state it came from is called its metropolis or mother. It asks no more of the colony than parents ask of children they free from household rule: honor and friendship. Or the colony may remain united with its metropolis, as the Roman people's colonies did. Then it is not a commonwealth of its own, but a province and part of the state that sent it. Thus the rights of colonies, apart from honor and their alliance with their metropolis, depend entirely on the license or letters by which their sovereign authorized them to settle.\n\nChapter XXV. On counsel\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXV, 1\n\nOn counsel\n\nOrdinary and shifting uses of words can mislead us about the nature of things. Nowhere is this clearer than in the confusion between advice and commands. Both use the imperative form, as do many other kinds of speech. “Do this” may be said by someone giving a command, giving advice, or urging someone on. Few people fail to see that these are very different acts when they know who is speaking, to whom, and in what situation. Yet readers sometimes find these phrases in books and either cannot or will not consider the circumstances. They mistake a counselor's instructions for commands, or commands for a counselor's instructions, whichever suits the conclusions they want to draw or the actions they favor. To prevent these mistakes and distinguish commanding, advising, and urging, I define them as follows.\n\nA command is when a person says, “Do this” or “Do not do this,” and gives no reason beyond that person's own will. Clearly, someone who commands claims a benefit for themselves. The only reason for the command is that person's will, and everyone wills some good for themselves.\n\nAdvice is when a person says, “Do this” or “Do not do this,” and gives reasons based on the benefit to the person addressed. Clearly, someone who gives advice claims to be seeking only the good of the person advised, whatever their actual intentions.\n\nOne major difference is that a command serves the speaker's benefit, while advice serves another person's. A second difference follows: someone can be obligated to do what they are commanded, for example when they have made a Covenant to obey. They cannot be obligated to do what they are advised, because they alone bear the harm if they ignore it. If they make a Covenant to follow the advice, however, it becomes a command. A third difference is that no one can claim a right to advise another person. A counselor is not supposed to claim a personal benefit. Demanding such a right suggests a wish to learn the other person's plans or gain some other benefit for oneself. As I said, this is what everyone naturally seeks.\n\nThere is something else about advice: whoever asks for it cannot fairly accuse or punish the person who gives it, whatever the advice may be. Asking someone for advice means allowing them to say what they think best. A person who advises the sovereign, whether monarch or assembly, at the sovereign's request therefore cannot fairly be punished for that advice. This holds whether or not it agrees with the majority's opinion, so long as it concerns the question under debate. If the assembly's view were known before the debate ended, its members should neither ask for nor receive more advice. The assembly's view is the decision that ends the debate and all deliberation. Generally, whoever requests advice is its author and therefore cannot punish it. No one else can punish what the sovereign cannot. But when one subject advises another to break the law, the commonwealth may punish that advice, whether it came from bad intentions or simple ignorance. Ignorance of the law is no good excuse when everyone is required to know the laws they live under.\n\nUrging and discouraging are forms of advice accompanied by signs that the speaker strongly wants the advice followed. In short, they are advice pressed forcefully. Someone urging an action does not work through its consequences by strict, sound reasoning. Instead, the speaker encourages the listener to act, while someone discouraging an action tries to hold the listener back. Their arguments appeal to common passions and opinions. They use comparisons, metaphors, examples, and other tools of persuasion to convince listeners that following their advice is useful, honorable, or just.\n\nSeveral things follow. First, urging or discouraging someone serves the good of the person giving advice, not the person asking for it. This goes against a counselor's duty, which by definition is to consider the other person's benefit rather than their own. The speaker's personal aim is clear from the long and forceful pressure, or from the artful way the advice is given. No one asked for this effort, so it comes from the speaker's own concerns. It primarily serves the speaker, and serves the listener only incidentally, if at all.\n\nSecond, urging and discouraging are useful only when speaking to a crowd. A single listener can interrupt and examine the speaker's reasons more closely. A crowd has too many people to debate one by one with someone speaking to everyone at once. Third, people asked to give advice who instead urge or discourage are corrupt counselors, as though bribed by their own interests. Their advice may be excellent. But they are no more good counselors than someone who gives a just verdict in exchange for payment is a just judge. Where someone may lawfully command, however, as a parent in a family or a commander in an army may, urging and discouraging are lawful, necessary, and praiseworthy. They are then not advice but commands. When such commands require difficult labor, necessity sometimes, and humanity always, call for encouragement and the gentler tone and wording of advice instead of harsh commands.\n\nScripture offers examples of the difference between commands and advice. “Have no other gods but me; make no carved image for yourself; do not take God's name in vain; keep the Sabbath holy; honor your parents; do not kill; do not steal,” and so on are commands. We obey them because God, our King, wills it, and we are obliged to obey him. But “Sell all you have; give it to the poor; and follow me” is advice. Its reason lies in our own benefit: we will have “treasure in Heaven.” “Go to the village across from you, and you will find a donkey tied up with her colt; untie her and bring her to me” is a command, because their reason for acting is their master's will. But “Repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus” is advice. God Almighty gains nothing from our doing so; he remains King however we rebel. We benefit, because we have no other way to escape the punishment awaiting us for our sins.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXV, 2\n\nI have explained how advice differs from a command by looking at the nature of advice. Advice shows the benefits or harms that must or may probably follow for the person advised from a proposed action. The same idea tells us what makes counselors suitable or unsuitable. Experience is only the memory of what followed similar actions in the past, and advice is how we communicate that experience to someone else. So the strengths and weaknesses of advice are the same as those of the intellect. Counselors serve as memory and thought for the person representing a commonwealth. Yet there is one important difference between a commonwealth and a human being. A person gains experience from things perceived by the senses, which have no passions or interests of their own. Those who advise the commonwealth's representative, by contrast, may have their own goals and passions, and often do. Their advice is therefore always open to suspicion and often untrustworthy. The first requirement for a good counselor is thus that their goals and interests do not conflict with those of the person they advise.\n\nSecond, a counselor's job when an action is being considered is to make its consequences clear, so the listener gets an accurate and clear picture. The advice must be presented in a way that makes the truth as clear as possible. It must use sound reasoning and precise, appropriate language, and be as brief as clarity permits. Hasty or unsupported conclusions are therefore out of place. So are conclusions drawn only from examples or the authority of books, which testify to facts or opinions but do not prove what is good or bad. Vague, confused, or ambiguous language is also out of place, as are metaphors intended to stir passions. Such reasoning and language serve only to deceive or lead the person advised toward goals other than their own. They have no place in a counselor's work.\n\nThird, skill at advising comes from experience and long study. No one can be assumed to know by experience everything necessary to govern a large commonwealth. A person can be considered a good counselor only on matters they have both dealt with extensively and thought about deeply. The commonwealth must protect its people at home and defend them against foreign invasion. This takes extensive knowledge of human nature, the rights of government, and the nature of equity, law, justice, and honor. These cannot be learned without study. It also takes knowledge of the strength, goods, and places of one's own country and its neighbors, along with the inclinations and plans of every nation that might harm it. This cannot be learned without extensive experience. Understanding the whole range of these matters, or even any one of them, takes years of observation and more than ordinary study. As I said before, the intelligence needed for giving advice is judgment. People's different abilities to judge come from different kinds of education, study, and work. When there are reliable rules for doing something, as geometry provides for machines and buildings, no amount of experience can equal the advice of someone who has learned or discovered the rule. When no such rule exists, the person with the most experience in that particular field has the best judgment and is the best counselor.\n\nFourth, anyone advising a commonwealth on a matter involving another commonwealth must know the intelligence and letters received from that state, along with all records of treaties and other dealings between the states. Only someone the representative considers suitable can have this access. Thus people who have not been asked to advise cannot properly force advice on the commonwealth in such cases.\n\nFifth, given the same number of counselors, it is better to hear them separately than in an assembly, for several reasons. First, separate meetings give you each person's advice. In an assembly, many express their view by saying yes or no, or moving their hands or feet. They may be following another's eloquence instead of their own judgment. They may fear upsetting a speaker or the whole assembly by disagreeing. Or they may fear appearing slower to understand than those who applauded the opposing view. Second, any large assembly is bound to include people whose interests oppose the public's. Their interests make them passionate, passion makes them eloquent, and eloquence draws others to their view. Separate people's passions burn moderately, like single pieces of burning wood. Together they are like a pile of burning wood setting one another alight, especially when speakers fan the flames. Under the pretense of advising the commonwealth, they can set it on fire. Third, when hearing each person separately, one can interrupt and challenge them as often as necessary. This lets one test the truth or likelihood of their reasons and the grounds for their advice. In an assembly, difficult questions instead produce so many speeches that the listener is stunned and confused rather than informed about what to do. Also, any large advisory assembly will include people eager to seem eloquent and learned in politics. Instead of focusing on the matter at hand, they give colorful speeches stitched together from passages by various authors to win applause. At the least, this wastes time needed for serious discussion. Private, separate advice easily avoids the problem. Fourth, public business often calls for secrecy. Advice from many people, especially in assemblies, is dangerous in those cases. Large assemblies therefore have to entrust such affairs to smaller groups of the most experienced and trusted people.\n\nIn closing, who admires the practice of taking advice from a large assembly of counselors so much that they would want or accept its efforts when deciding whom their children should marry, how to divide their land, how to run their household, or how to manage their private estate? This is especially unlikely if some members of the assembly wish them harm. The best way to manage one's business is with the help of many wise counselors, each consulted separately on a subject they know well. It is like using skilled partners in their proper positions in a tennis game. The next best way is to rely on one's own judgment, like playing without a partner. The worst is to have a formal council carry one back and forth through one's business. Such a council cannot move without a majority in agreement, and those who disagree often delay the decision's execution through envy or self-interest. It is like being carried toward the ball by good players in a wheelbarrow or some other cumbersome frame. The players pushing it also slow it down because their judgments and efforts do not agree. The more people push, the worse it gets, especially when one or more want the player to lose. It is true that many eyes see more than one. But that supports having many counselors only if one person makes the final decision. Otherwise, many eyes see the same object along different lines and tend to glance sideways at private gain. Those who want to hit their target may look around with two eyes, but they aim with only one. For this reason, no large popular commonwealth has ever survived through open deliberation in its assembly. It has survived instead because a foreign enemy united its people, one outstanding person had great authority, a few people advised secretly, or equally strong factions feared each other. As for very small commonwealths, whether popular or monarchical, no human wisdom can sustain them longer than their powerful neighbors remain wary of one another.\n\nChapter XXVI. On civil laws\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 1\n\nOn civil laws\n\nBy civil laws, I mean the laws people must obey because they are members of a commonwealth, not because they belong to one particular commonwealth. Knowing a particular country's laws is the business of those who study that country's law professionally. But anyone can understand civil law in general. The ancient law of Rome was called its civil law from civitas, meaning a commonwealth. Countries once governed by the Roman Empire and its law still call the parts they have kept “civil law,” to distinguish them from the rest of their own civil laws. That is not what I mean here. My aim is not to show what the law is in this or that place, but what law itself is. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and several others have pursued this question without claiming to practice or study a country's laws professionally.\n\nFirst, it is clear that law in general is not advice but a command. It is not a command from just anyone to anyone else. It is a command addressed by someone to a person already obliged to obey them. Civil law adds only the identity of the commander: persona civitatis, the person of the commonwealth.\n\nWith that in mind, I define civil law this way: “For each subject, civil law consists of the rules the commonwealth has commanded that subject, through speech, writing, or another sufficient sign of its will, to use in distinguishing right from wrong—that is, what is and is not against the rule.”\n\nEvery part of this definition is clear at first sight. Some laws address all subjects, some particular provinces, some particular occupations, and some particular people. They are laws for the people they address and no one else. Laws also set the rules for what is just or unjust: nothing counts as unjust unless it breaks some law. Only the commonwealth can make laws, since we owe obedience only to the commonwealth. Commands must also be communicated through adequate signs, or people would not know how to obey them. We should therefore accept whatever follows necessarily from this definition. Here are the conclusions I draw from it.\n\n1. In every commonwealth, the only legislator is the sovereign, whether that is one person in a monarchy or an assembly in a democracy or aristocracy. The legislator is the one who makes the law. Only the commonwealth sets and commands obedience to the rules called laws. So the commonwealth is the legislator. But the commonwealth is not itself a person and can act only through its representative, the sovereign. The sovereign is therefore the sole legislator. For the same reason, only the sovereign can repeal a law: a law can be repealed only by another law forbidding its enforcement.\n\n2. The sovereign of a commonwealth, whether an assembly or an individual, is not subject to civil laws. The sovereign can make and repeal laws, and can therefore escape any law that becomes troublesome by repealing it and making a new one. This means the sovereign was free of that law already, since anyone who can free themselves whenever they wish is free. Nor can a person be bound to themselves. Whoever can impose an obligation can release it, so someone bound only to themselves is not bound.\n\n3. When long practice takes on the authority of law, that authority does not come from the passage of time. It comes from the sovereign's will, expressed through silence, which can sometimes show consent. The practice remains law only while the sovereign stays silent about it. If a question arises about the sovereign's rights under earlier laws rather than the sovereign's present will, the passage of time cannot weaken those rights. The question must be judged by fairness. Many unjust actions and judgments have gone unchallenged longer than anyone can remember. Our lawyers say only reasonable customs count as law and bad customs must be abolished. But deciding what is reasonable and what must be abolished belongs to the lawmaker, the sovereign assembly or monarch.\n\n4. The Law of Nature and civil law each include the other and have the same scope. The Laws of Nature include fairness, justice, gratitude, and the other moral virtues depending on these. In the state of mere nature, as I said at the end of the 15th Chapter, they are not strictly laws. They are qualities that dispose people toward peace and obedience. Only when a commonwealth is established do they become actual laws, because they then become commands of the commonwealth and therefore civil laws. Sovereign power makes them binding. To settle disagreements between private people about what fairness, justice, or moral virtue requires, and to make these requirements binding, the sovereign must issue rules and establish penalties for breaking them. Those rules are part of civil law. Thus the Law of Nature is part of civil law in every commonwealth. Conversely, civil law is part of what nature commands. Justice means keeping a Covenant and giving each person what is their own, and it is commanded by the Law of Nature. Every subject has made a Covenant to obey civil law: either subjects agree among themselves to appoint a common representative, or those conquered by force individually promise obedience to the representative in return for their lives. So obedience to civil law is also part of the Law of Nature. Civil law and natural law are not different kinds of law but different parts of law. The written part is called civil; the unwritten part, natural. But civil law can limit the Right of Nature, a person's natural freedom. Indeed, the whole purpose of making laws is to limit that freedom. Without such limits there can be no peace. Law was introduced for no other reason than to limit individuals' natural freedom so they would help rather than hurt one another, and would unite against a common enemy.\n\n5. Suppose one commonwealth's sovereign conquers a people who have lived under different written laws, then continues to govern them under those same laws. Those laws are now the civil laws of the victorious commonwealth, not the defeated one. The legislator is not the person whose authority first created the laws, but the person whose authority now keeps them in force. So when a commonwealth rules several provinces with different laws, often called each province's customs, we should not think those customs have force simply because they are old. In the past, they were written laws or otherwise announced as the rules and statutes of earlier sovereigns. Now they are laws not because time gives them a claim to authority, but because their present sovereigns have adopted them. But if an unwritten law is generally followed in every province of a dominion, and no unfairness appears in its use, it can only be a Law of Nature, binding everyone equally.\n\n6. All laws, written or unwritten, get their authority and force from the will of the commonwealth's representative. That representative is the monarch in a monarchy and the sovereign assembly in other commonwealths. It is therefore surprising that prominent lawyers in various commonwealths write things that directly or indirectly place legislative power in the hands of private people or lower-ranking judges. For example, some say, “Nothing can overrule the common law except Parliament.” This is true only where Parliament has sovereign power and no one but Parliament itself can call or dissolve it. If someone else has the right to dissolve it, that person also has the right to overrule it, including its own rulings. If no one else has that right, the law's ultimate authority is not Parliament alone, but the king in Parliament, Rex In Parlamento. And if a Parliament is sovereign, its decision to call together people from the territories it rules, however numerous or wise they are and whatever its purpose, would not make anyone believe that this new assembly had gained legislative power. Another claim is that a commonwealth has two arms: force, held by the king, and justice, placed in Parliament's hands. But how could a commonwealth exist if justice lacked authority to command and govern whoever held force?\n\n7. Our lawyers agree that law can never conflict with reason. They also agree that the law is not its bare wording, open to every possible reading, but the meaning that fits the legislator's intention. That is true. The question is whose reason counts as law. It cannot be any individual's reason, or laws would contain as many disagreements as the schools do. Nor can it be, as Sr. Ed, Coke puts it (Sir Edward Coke, upon Littleton Lib.2. Ch.6 fol 97.b), “an artificial perfection of reason gained through long study, observation, and experience,” like his own. Long study can strengthen mistaken judgments. When people start from false assumptions, the more they build on them, the greater the collapse. Even people who study and observe for equal lengths of time and with equal care reach conflicting arguments and decisions, and will continue to do so. Law therefore comes not from the jurisprudence or wisdom of lower-ranking judges, but from the reason and command of our artificial person, the commonwealth. The commonwealth is one person through its representative, so its laws are unlikely to conflict. When they do, that same reason can resolve the conflict by interpreting or changing them. In every court, the sovereign, the person of the commonwealth, is the true judge. A lower-ranking judge must consider why the sovereign made a law and decide accordingly. The resulting judgment is the sovereign's; otherwise it is the judge's own, and unjust.\n\n8. A law is a command, and a command expresses the commander's will through speech, writing, or another adequate sign. It follows that the commonwealth's command is law only for people who can learn about it. People naturally unable to understand, children, and people suffering madness are no more subject to law than animals are. They cannot be called just or unjust, because they have never been able to make a Covenant or understand its consequences. So they have never undertaken to authorize a sovereign's actions, as people who establish a commonwealth must do. If nature or accident has deprived someone of the ability to know about laws generally, that person is exempt. The same holds for anyone who, through no fault of their own, is prevented by accident from learning of a particular law. That person is excused for not obeying it. Strictly speaking, it is not a law for them. We must therefore consider what evidence and signs adequately reveal what the law is, meaning what the sovereign wills, in monarchies and other forms of government alike.\n\nFirst, if a law binds every subject without exception but has not been written down or otherwise published where they can learn of it, it is a Law of Nature. When people must recognize something as law through their own reasoning, not through what others say, it must agree with everyone's reason. Only the Law of Nature can do that. Laws of Nature therefore need no publication or proclamation. They are summed up in one statement accepted throughout the world: “Do not do to another what you think it would be unreasonable for another to do to you.”\n\nSecond, suppose a law binds only people in a certain position, or a single person, but has not been written or publicly spoken. It too is a Law of Nature. It is known through the same evidence and signs that distinguish those people from other subjects. Any law not written or otherwise announced by its maker can be known only through the reason of the person who must obey it. So it is a natural as well as a civil law. For example, if the sovereign appoints a public official without written instructions, that official must follow what reason directs. If the sovereign appoints a judge, that judge must understand that the judgment must fit the sovereign's reason. Since this is always understood to be fair, the Law of Nature binds the judge to fairness. An ambassador, in all matters not covered by written instructions, must follow reason in choosing what best serves the sovereign's interests. The same goes for all other public and private officials serving the sovereign. All these instructions of natural reason can be called fidelity, which is a part of natural justice.\n\nApart from the Law of Nature, every law must be made known to everyone who is obliged to obey it. This must happen through speech, writing, or another act known to come from sovereign authority. We can understand another person's will only from their words or actions, or by inferring it from their aim and purpose. In the commonwealth's case, that purpose is always assumed to agree with fairness and reason. In ancient times, before writing was widely used, laws were often put into verse. People who were not educated could enjoy singing or reciting them and remember them more easily. For the same reason, Solomon advises a person to bind the ten Commandments (Prov. 7. 3) on their ten fingers. Concerning the law Moses gave the people of Israel when the Covenant was renewed (Deut. 11. 19), Moses tells them to teach it to their children. They should talk about it at home and while traveling, at bedtime and when getting up, and write it on their house's posts and doors. He also tells them (Deut. 31. 12) to gather men, women, and children to hear it read.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 2\n\nNor is it enough for a law to be written down and published. There must also be clear signs that it comes from the sovereign’s will. Private people who have, or think they have, enough force to carry out unjust plans and achieve their ambitions safely may publish whatever they please as laws, without the legislature’s authority or even against it. So a law needs not just to be announced. There must also be adequate signs of who made it and by what authority. In every commonwealth, its maker, or legislator, is assumed to be clear: the sovereign was established by everyone’s consent and is therefore assumed to be known to everyone. People are often so ignorant and careless that, once the memory of the founding of their commonwealth has faded, they do not consider whose power defends them from enemies, protects their work, and gives them justice when they are wronged. But anyone who thinks about it can have no doubt. Ignorance about where sovereignty lies is no excuse. Natural reason dictates, and the Law of Nature clearly requires, that no one should weaken the power whose protection he himself has asked for or knowingly accepted against others. So no one can doubt who the sovereign is without being at fault himself, whatever wicked people may suggest. The difficulty is proving authority delegated by the sovereign. Resolving that difficulty depends on knowing the public registers, public councils, public officials, and public seals. These provide sufficient verification of all laws.\n\nI say verification, not authorization. Verification is only testimony and a record. It is not the law’s authority, which consists only in the sovereign’s command.\n\nSuppose a person raises a question about an injury under the Law of Nature, that is, under common equity. A ruling by a judge authorized to hear such cases adequately verifies the Law of Nature for that particular case. Advice from someone who studies the law can help avoid disputes, but it remains only advice. After hearing the dispute, the judge must tell people what the law is.\n\nBut when a question about an injury or crime depends on a written law, anyone can look at the registers himself or ask someone else to do so. If he wishes, he can learn before acting whether the proposed act is an injury or crime. Indeed, he should do this. If someone doubts whether an act he is about to do is right or wrong, and could find out, it is unlawful for him to go ahead. Similarly, suppose someone thinks he has been wronged in a case governed by a written law that he could read and consider himself or through someone else. If he complains before consulting the law, he acts unjustly. He shows a wish to trouble other people rather than claim his rights.\n\nIf the question is whether to obey a public officer, seeing his commission with the public seal and hearing it read is enough to verify his authority. So is having the opportunity to learn about it if one wishes. Everyone is obliged to do his best to learn all written laws that may affect his future actions.\n\nEven when the legislator is known and the laws have been adequately published, either in writing or by the light of nature, one more important condition is needed to make them binding. The law is not its words but its intended meaning. That is its authentic interpretation, which expresses what the legislator means. Therefore the interpretation of every law depends on sovereign authority. The only interpreters are those appointed by the sovereign, to whom alone the subject owes obedience. Otherwise a clever interpreter could give the law a meaning contrary to the sovereign’s meaning and become the legislator himself.\n\nAll laws, written and unwritten, need interpretation. The unwritten Law of Nature is easy to understand for people who use their natural reason without bias or passion. Those who violate it therefore have no excuse. Yet very few people, perhaps none, are free from the blinding effect of self-love or some other passion in every case. Consequently, the Law of Nature has now become the most obscure of all laws and has the greatest need of capable interpreters. Short written laws can easily be misinterpreted because one or two words have several meanings. Long ones are still more obscure because many words have several meanings. No written law, whether short or long, can be properly understood without fully understanding the purposes for which it was made. The legislator knows those purposes. Thus he can untie any knot in the law, either by finding the purposes that resolve it or by choosing whatever purposes he wishes, as Alexander cut the Gordian knot with his sword. His legislative power lets him do what no other interpreter can.\n\nIn a commonwealth, interpreting the Laws of Nature does not depend on books of moral philosophy. A writer’s views do not become law through the writer’s authority alone, however true those views may be. What I have written in this treatise about the moral virtues and their necessity for establishing and maintaining peace is plainly true. But that does not itself make it law. It is law because it forms part of the civil law in every commonwealth in the world. Although it accords with natural reason, sovereign power makes it law. Otherwise it would be a serious mistake to call the Laws of Nature unwritten laws: so many volumes have been published about them, filled with contradictions both of one another and of themselves.\n\nAn interpretation of the Law of Nature is the ruling of a judge whom the sovereign authorizes to hear and decide disputes under it. The judge applies the law to the case at hand. In judging, he considers whether a party’s claim agrees with natural reason and equity. His ruling thus interprets the Law of Nature. That interpretation is authoritative not because it is his private opinion, but because he gives it by the sovereign’s authority. It thereby becomes the sovereign’s ruling, and is law for the parties in that case at that time.\n\nBut any lower judge, and even a sovereign, can make a mistake in judging equity. If later, in a similar case, he finds that the opposite ruling agrees better with equity, he must give that opposite ruling. No one’s mistake becomes a law binding him to repeat it. For the same reason, it does not bind other judges, even if they have sworn to follow it. If the sovereign knows and approves a mistaken judgment made under his authority, it can establish a new law for cases alike in every detail when the laws concerned can be changed. But the Laws of Nature cannot be changed. Such judgments therefore bind neither the same judge nor others in future similar cases. Princes succeed one another, and judges come and go. Heaven and earth will pass away, but not one part of the Law of Nature will pass away, for it is God’s eternal law. All the rulings of earlier judges together cannot make a law contrary to natural equity. Nor can their examples justify an unreasonable ruling or relieve a present judge of the effort to work out what equity requires in his case by using his own natural reason. For example, punishing an innocent person is against the Law of Nature. A person is innocent if he clears himself in court and the judge recognizes his innocence. Suppose someone charged with a capital crime sees how powerful and malicious an enemy is and how often judges are corrupt and biased. Afraid of the outcome, he flees. He is later caught and tried legally, clearly proves he did not commit the crime, and is acquitted. Yet he is ordered to forfeit his property. This plainly punishes an innocent person. I say no place in the world can treat this as an interpretation of the Law of Nature, or make it law through earlier judges’ similar rulings. The first judge who ruled this way ruled unjustly, and injustice cannot serve as a model for later judges. A written law may prohibit innocent people from fleeing and may punish them for fleeing. But after someone has been acquitted of the crime by a court, treating his flight from feared injury as a presumption of guilt contradicts the nature of a presumption. Presumptions have no place after judgment. Yet a great lawyer presents this as the common law of England: “If a man,” he says, “who is innocent is accused of felony and flees for fear of it, then even if he clears himself of the felony in court, if it is found that he fled because of the felony, he must forfeit all his goods, movable property, debts, and dues despite his innocence. In deciding their forfeiture, the law will accept no proof against the legal presumption based on his flight.” Here an innocent man, acquitted in court, is nevertheless condemned after his acquittal to lose everything he owns on a legal presumption, despite his innocence and although no written law forbade him to flee. If his flight creates a presumption that he committed the crime, which was a capital crime, the punishment should be capital. If it does not presume he committed the crime, why should he lose his property? This, then, is no law of England. The condemnation rests not on a legal presumption but on the judges’ presumption. It is also against the law to say that no evidence can be admitted against a legal presumption. All judges, sovereign or subordinate, refuse to do justice if they refuse to hear evidence. Even if their ruling happens to be just, judges who condemn without hearing the evidence offered are unjust judges. Their presumption is simply prejudice, which no one should bring to a court, whatever earlier judgments or examples he claims to follow. Trust in precedents has distorted judgments in other cases of this kind too. This example is enough to show that a judge’s ruling, though law for the parties to the case, is not law for a judge who later holds the same office.\n\nLikewise, when the question concerns the meaning of written laws, a person who writes a commentary on them is not their interpreter. Commentaries are usually even more open to dispute than the text. They would need further commentaries, and the process of interpretation would never end. Unless the sovereign authorizes an interpreter whose interpretation subordinate judges must follow, the only interpreters are the ordinary judges, just as with unwritten law. The parties must accept their rulings as law for their particular cases, but those rulings do not bind other judges to decide similar cases in the same way. A judge can make mistakes even in interpreting written laws. No mistake by a subordinate judge can change the law, which is the sovereign’s general ruling.\n\nWith written laws, people commonly distinguish between the letter and the meaning of the law. This distinction works if by “letter” they mean anything that can be drawn from the bare words. Almost all words are ambiguous, either in their ordinary meaning or in their use as metaphors. Arguments can draw many meanings from them, but the law has only one meaning. If by “letter” they mean the literal meaning, however, the letter and the law’s meaning or intention are the same. The literal meaning is the meaning assumed to be equitable because the legislator is always assumed to intend equity. It would be a serious insult for a judge to think otherwise of the sovereign. So if the words of a law do not fully support a reasonable ruling, the judge should supplement them with the Law of Nature. If the case is difficult, he should postpone judgment until he receives fuller authority. For example, a written law orders that someone forced out of his house must be restored to it by force. Suppose a man carelessly leaves his house empty, then returns and is forcibly kept out. There is no special law covering this case. Clearly it falls under the same law. Otherwise he has no remedy, which cannot be presumed to be the legislator’s intention. Again, suppose the law orders a judge to decide according to the evidence. Someone is falsely accused of an act the judge himself saw someone else commit. The judge must not follow the letter of the law to convict the innocent defendant. Nor can he rule against the witnesses’ evidence, because the letter of the law forbids it. Instead, he should ask the sovereign to appoint another judge and should himself testify as a witness. Thus a bad consequence of following the bare words of a written law can help a judge find the law’s intention and interpret it better. But no bad consequence can justify a ruling against the law. A judge of right and wrong is not necessarily a judge of what benefits or harms the commonwealth.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVI, 3\n\nA good interpreter of the law—that is, a good judge—does not need the same skills as a lawyer arguing a case, especially extensive study of the laws. The judge should learn the facts only from the witnesses. Likewise, he should learn the law only from the sovereign’s statutes and enactments cited during the case or explained to him by people whom the sovereign has authorized to do so. He need not decide in advance how to rule. Witnesses will tell him what to say about the facts. The people arguing the case will show him the law and interpret it with authority there and then. The lords of Parliament in England served as judges and heard and decided very difficult cases. Yet few had studied law much, and fewer still practiced it professionally. They consulted lawyers appointed to attend for that purpose, but only the lords had authority to give judgment. Similarly, in ordinary civil trials, twelve ordinary people are judges. They decide not just the facts but also the legal right, giving a simple verdict for the complainant or the defendant. In criminal cases they decide not only whether the act was done but whether it was murder, homicide, felony, assault, or something similar. Those are legal decisions. Because they are not expected to know the law on their own, someone authorized to explain it informs them about the particular case they are judging. Yet if they do not decide as he tells them, they face no penalty unless it is shown that they acted against their consciences or were bribed. A good judge or interpreter of the laws needs, first, a sound understanding of equity, that basic Law of Nature. This comes not from reading other people’s books but from the soundness of one’s own natural reason and reflection. People with the most time and inclination to reflect on it are expected to understand it best. Second, he needs to disregard unnecessary wealth and advancement. Third, he must be able to set aside all fear, anger, hatred, love, and compassion while judging. Fourth and finally, he needs patience in listening, close attention to what he hears, and the memory to retain, think through, and apply it.\n\nWriters have divided and classified laws in different ways according to their different methods. Such divisions do not come from nature. Each writer chooses a division that serves his purpose and method. In Justinian’s Institutes we find seven kinds of civil law.\n\n1. The prince’s edicts, enactments, and letters—that is, the emperor’s—because he held all the power of the people. The proclamations of the kings of England are similar.\n\n2. Decrees of the whole Roman people, including the Senate, when the Senate put a question to them. At first, these were laws because sovereign power lay with the people. Those that the emperors did not repeal remained laws by imperial authority. Any law that still binds people is understood to do so by the authority of whoever has the power to repeal it. England’s Acts of Parliament are somewhat similar.\n\n3. Decrees of the ordinary people, excluding the Senate, when their tribune put a question to them. Those that the emperors did not repeal remained laws by imperial authority. The orders of England’s House of Commons were similar.\n\n4. Senatus consulta, or orders of the Senate. When Rome’s population became too large to assemble conveniently, the emperor thought it best for people to consult the Senate instead. These resemble acts of a council to some extent.\n\n5. Edicts of praetors and, in some cases, aediles, officials like the chief justices in England’s courts.\n\n6. Responsa prudentum: the rulings and opinions of lawyers whom the emperor authorized to interpret the law and answer legal questions. Imperial enactments required judges to follow those answers in giving judgment. These would be like reports of decided cases if the law of England required other judges to follow those reports. Judges of England’s common law are not, strictly speaking, judges but juris consulti, legal advisers. The actual judges, whether lords or twelve local people, ask them for legal advice.\n\n7. Unwritten customs too, which by their nature imitate law, become real laws by the emperor’s tacit consent, provided they do not conflict with the Law of Nature.\n\nAnother division separates natural laws from positive laws. Natural laws have been laws from all eternity. They are called not only natural but also moral laws. They consist of moral virtues such as justice, equity, and all dispositions that promote peace and charity. I have already discussed these in Chapters fourteen and fifteen.\n\nPositive laws have not been laws for all eternity. They were made laws by the will of people holding sovereign power over others. They are either written down or made known through some other sign of the legislator’s will.\n\nPositive laws, in turn, are either human or divine. Human positive laws are either distributive or penal. Distributive laws define subjects’ rights. They tell each person how he acquires and holds ownership of land or goods, and what right or freedom of action he has. They address all subjects. Penal laws specify the penalties imposed on those who break laws. They address the officials appointed to enforce them. Everyone should know beforehand the penalties for breaking laws, but the command to inflict punishment is not directed at the offender, who cannot be expected to punish himself faithfully. It is directed at public officials appointed to carry out the penalty. Penal laws are usually written alongside distributive laws and are sometimes called judgments. Every law is a general judgment or ruling by the legislator. Likewise, each judgment in a particular case is law for the person whose case is judged.\n\nDivine positive laws are God’s commands that have not existed from all eternity or been addressed to everyone, but have been addressed only to particular people or persons. Natural laws, being eternal and universal, are all divine too. Divine positive laws are declared to be God’s commands by people whom God has authorized to declare them. But how can we know that someone has this authority to declare God’s positive laws? God may supernaturally command someone to deliver laws to others. Yet a law binds someone only if he can be sure of the authority of the person declaring it. We cannot know naturally that this authority comes from God. How, then, can someone without supernatural revelation be sure of a revelation received by the person making the declaration? And how can he be bound to obey it? The answer to the first question is that, without receiving a revelation of his own, he plainly cannot be sure of another person’s revelation. Miracles he sees that person perform might make him believe it. So might that person’s unusually holy life, exceptional wisdom, or extraordinary success in what he does. All these are signs of God’s special favor, but none is certain evidence of a particular revelation. Miracles are amazing deeds, but what amazes one person may not amaze another. Holiness can be faked. Even unusual worldly success is usually produced by God through natural, ordinary causes. No one can know infallibly by natural reason that another person has received a supernatural revelation of God’s will. He can only believe it, more or less firmly according to how strong its signs appear to him.\n\nThe second question, how he can be bound to obey those laws, is easier. If the declared law does not contradict the Law of Nature, which is certainly God’s law, and he commits himself to obey it, his own act binds him. He is bound to obey, I say, but not to believe. People’s beliefs and inner thoughts are not subject to commands. They are subject only to God’s action, ordinary or extraordinary. Faith in supernatural law is assent to it, not fulfillment of it. It is not a duty we perform for God but a gift God freely gives to whomever he wishes. Likewise, unbelief does not break any particular law of his. Rather, it rejects all his laws except the natural laws. What I mean will be clearer from examples and evidence in Holy Scripture. God made a covenant with Abraham supernaturally, saying (Gen. 17. 10), “This is the covenant you shall observe between me and you and your descendants after you.” Abraham’s descendants had received no revelation and did not yet exist. Nevertheless they were parties to the covenant and were bound to obey whatever Abraham told them was God’s law. This could only be because they already owed obedience to their parents. Parents, if subject to no other earthly power, as Abraham was in this case, hold sovereign power over their children and servants. Again, God says to Abraham, “In you all nations of the earth shall be blessed: for I know you will command your children and your household after you to keep the way of the Lord and to observe righteousness and judgment.” Clearly the obedience of his household, which had no revelation, rested on their prior duty to obey their sovereign. At Mount Sinai only Moses went up to God. The people were forbidden to approach on pain of death. Yet they had to obey everything Moses declared to them as God’s law. What was the basis for this except their own submission: “Speak to us and we will listen to you, but do not let God speak to us, or we will die”? These two passages show clearly that a subject in a commonwealth who has received no certain, personal revelation of God’s will must obey as God’s law what the commonwealth commands him to obey as such. If people were free to treat their own dreams and fantasies, or those of private individuals, as God’s commands, hardly two people would agree about what God commanded. Each would despise the commands of the commonwealth in comparison. I therefore conclude that, in everything that does not contradict the moral law—that is, the Law of Nature—all subjects are bound to obey as divine law whatever the laws of the commonwealth declare to be divine law. Reason also makes this clear. Whatever does not contradict the Law of Nature can be made law in the name of those who hold sovereign power. There is no reason people should be less bound by it when it is put forward in God’s name. Besides, nowhere in the world may people claim that God has given other commands than those the commonwealth declares to be his. Christian states punish those who abandon Christianity, and all other states punish those who establish a religion they forbid. When the commonwealth has not regulated a matter, equity—which is the Law of Nature and therefore God’s eternal law—requires that everyone have equal freedom in it.\n\nThere is also a division between fundamental and nonfundamental laws. But I have never seen an author explain what a fundamental law means. Still, it is quite reasonable to divide laws in this way.\n\nIn every commonwealth a fundamental law is one whose removal makes the commonwealth collapse and dissolve completely, like a building whose foundation is destroyed. A fundamental law therefore binds subjects to maintain every power given to the sovereign, whether a monarch or a sovereign assembly, without which the commonwealth could not stand. Such powers include making war and peace, judging cases, choosing officials, and doing whatever the sovereign considers necessary for the public good. A nonfundamental law can be repealed without dissolving the commonwealth, such as a law about disputes between subjects. That is enough about the divisions of laws.\n\nI find that even the most learned authors use Lex Civilis and Jus Civile—that is, civil law and civil right—as though they meant the same thing. They should not. Right is freedom, specifically the freedom civil law leaves us. Civil law is an obligation and removes freedom that the Law of Nature gave us. Nature gave everyone the right to secure himself by his own strength and to attack a neighbor he suspects may threaten him as a precaution. Civil law removes that freedom whenever one can safely wait for the law’s protection. Lex and jus are thus as different as obligation and freedom.\n\nPeople also use “laws” and “charters” as though they were the same thing. But charters are gifts from the sovereign, not laws; they are exemptions from laws. The wording of a law is Jubeo, Injungo, meaning “I command and order.” The wording of a charter is Dedi, Concessi, meaning “I have given, I have granted.” What is given or granted to someone is not forced on him by a law. A law can bind all the subjects of a commonwealth. A freedom or charter is granted only to one person or one part of the people. To say that all the people of a commonwealth have freedom in some matter simply means that no law has been made about it, or that a law once made has been repealed.\n\nCHAPTER XXVII. ON CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVII, 1\n\nON CRIMES, EXCUSES, AND MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES\n\nWhat Sin Is\n\nA sin is not only a violation of a law but also any contempt for the legislator. Such contempt breaks all his laws at once. So a sin may consist not only in doing something or saying words the law forbids, or in failing to do what the law commands. It may also consist in intending or planning to break the law. A plan to break it shows some contempt for the person responsible for enforcing it. Suppose someone merely enjoys imagining that he possesses another person’s property, servants, or wife, without intending to take them by force or fraud. This does not break the law that says, “You shall not covet.” Nor does someone sin by enjoying the thought or dream of the death of a person whose life promises him nothing but harm and trouble. But resolving to take some action toward bringing about that death is a sin. Enjoying an imaginary event that would please you if it really happened is a passion so deeply rooted in human nature, and in the nature of every other living creature, that calling it a sin would make it a sin to be human. This has led me to think that those who call the first stirrings of the mind sins, even when they are checked by fear of God, are too severe on themselves and others. I admit, though, that it is safer to err in their direction than the other.\n\nA crime is a sin committed by doing or saying what the law forbids, or by failing to do what it commands. Every crime is therefore a sin, but not every sin is a crime. Intending to steal or kill is a sin even if it never appears in words or deeds, for God sees a person’s thoughts and can hold him accountable. But until the intention appears in something said or done, by which it may become a crime, people cannot accuse him of it. The Greeks observed this distinction in the words amartema and egklema or aitia. The first, translated as “sin,” means any departure from the law. The other two, translated as “crime,” mean only a sin of which one person can accuse another. Human beings cannot accuse anyone of intentions that never show themselves in an outward act. Similarly, the Latin peccatum, meaning “sin,” describes every kind of departure from the law. But crimen, which they derive from cerno, meaning “to perceive,” means only sins that can be established before a judge, not mere intentions.\n\nFrom the relation of sin to law, and crime to civil law, several conclusions follow. First, where law ends, sin ends. But because the Law of Nature is eternal, breaking covenants, ingratitude, arrogance, and acts contrary to any moral virtue can never cease to be sins. Second, when civil law ends, crimes end. Only the Law of Nature remains, and no one can bring an accusation under it. Each person is his own judge, accused only by his conscience and cleared by the honesty of his intention. If his intention is right, his action is not a sin. If it is not right, his action is a sin but not a crime. Third, when sovereign power ends, crime also ends. Without that power the law cannot protect anyone, so everyone may protect himself by his own strength. In setting up sovereign power, no one can be assumed to give up his right to preserve his own body, since all sovereignty was established for that purpose. But this applies only to those who did not themselves help destroy the power that protected them. Helping to destroy it was a crime from the start.\n\nEvery crime comes from some failure of understanding, some error in reasoning, or some sudden surge of the passions. A failure of understanding is ignorance; faulty reasoning produces mistaken opinions. There are three kinds of ignorance: ignorance of the law, of the sovereign, and of the penalty. Ignorance of the Law of Nature excuses no one. Anyone old enough to reason is expected to know that he should not do to others what he would not want done to himself. Wherever someone goes, acting against that law is therefore a crime. Suppose someone comes here from the Indies and persuades people to accept a new religion or teaches anything that encourages disobedience to this country’s laws. However firmly he believes his teaching is true, he commits a crime and may justly be punished. His doctrine is false, and he also does something he would disapprove of in another person who traveled from here to the Indies and tried to change the religion there. But ignorance of a foreign country’s civil law excuses a visitor until the law is made known to him, because until then that civil law does not bind him.\n\nLikewise, if a person’s own country has not made a civil law known well enough for him to learn it if he wishes, and his act does not violate the Law of Nature, his ignorance is a valid excuse. In other cases, ignorance of civil law is no excuse.\n\nIgnorance of the sovereign power where someone usually lives is no excuse. He should know what power has protected him there.\n\nWhere a law has been made known, ignorance of its penalty excuses no one. When someone breaks the law, he incurs its penalty even if he does not know what it is. Without the prospect of a penalty, the law would be empty words rather than law. Anyone who willingly acts accepts all known consequences of his act. In every commonwealth punishment is a known consequence of breaking the laws. If the law has already fixed the punishment, that is the one he faces. If not, he is subject to a punishment set at the sovereign’s discretion. It is reasonable that someone who injures another without any limit but his own will should face punishment without any limit but the will of the person whose law he has broken.\n\nBut if the law itself sets a penalty for the crime, or a particular penalty has usually been imposed for similar crimes, the offender is excused from a greater penalty. If the known punishment is not severe enough to deter people, it invites them to commit the act. People naturally compare what they would gain from injustice with what they would lose through punishment and choose what looks best for themselves. So if they are punished more severely than the law had specified, or than others have been punished for the same crime, it is the law that tempted and deceived them.\n\nA law made after an act cannot make that act a crime. If the act violated the Law of Nature, the law already existed when the act occurred. A positive law, however, cannot be known before it is made and therefore cannot bind anyone earlier. But if a law forbidding an act was made before the act took place, the offender can be subjected to a penalty established afterward, provided that no lighter penalty had previously been made known, either in writing or by example. The reason is the one just given.\n\nErrors in reasoning lead people to break laws in three ways. First, they assume false principles. For instance, they see that in every place and age, those who commit injustices can make those acts appear lawful through force and victory. Powerful people break through their country’s laws like cobwebs, while the weaker and those whose plans fail are the only ones regarded as criminals. Some therefore adopt these principles for their reasoning: “Justice is just an empty word. Whatever someone can gain by his own work and risk belongs to him. A practice followed by all nations cannot be unjust. Past examples are good reasons to do the same thing again.” There are many similar principles. If these are accepted, no act is a crime in itself. Whether it is a crime depends not on the law but on whether those who commit it succeed. The same deed becomes virtuous or vicious according to fortune. What Marius calls a crime, Sylla calls praiseworthy, and Caesar calls a crime again, although the laws have not changed. This constantly disturbs the peace of the commonwealth.\n\nTeachers also lead people into error when they misinterpret the Law of Nature so that it appears to conflict with civil law, or teach their own doctrines or traditions from earlier times as laws even though they conflict with a subject’s duty.\n\nThird, people draw mistaken conclusions from true principles. This commonly happens to people who rush to decide what to conclude and do. They think highly of their own understanding and believe these matters require no time or study, only ordinary experience and good natural intelligence—qualities everyone thinks he has. Yet no one would claim knowledge of right and wrong, which is no less difficult, without extensive and prolonged study. None of these errors in reasoning can excuse a crime by anyone who claims to manage his own affairs, though some errors may lessen its seriousness. Still less can they excuse someone who takes on a public office. Such people claim to have the very reasoning ability whose absence they would use as an excuse.\n\nOne passion that frequently causes crime is vanity: an absurdly high opinion of one’s own worth. People may imagine that differences in worth come from intelligence, wealth, ancestry, or some other natural quality, rather than from the will of those who hold sovereign authority. They then presume that penalties imposed by law on all subjects should not be applied to them as strictly as to poor, unknown, ordinary people, whom they call the common crowd.\n\nThus people who measure their worth by their wealth often risk committing crimes in the hope that they can bribe public officials, or buy a pardon with money or other rewards, and escape punishment.\n\nLikewise, those with many powerful relatives, and popular figures with a reputation among the crowd, take courage to break the laws. They hope to overpower those responsible for enforcing them.\n\nThose who have a high but false opinion of their own wisdom start criticizing the actions of rulers and questioning their authority. Their public statements undermine the laws until nothing counts as a crime except what suits their own plans. Such people are also drawn to crimes involving trickery and deception of their neighbors, because they think their schemes are too clever to detect. These are all results of their mistaken belief in their own wisdom. Very few of those who first stir up disorder in a commonwealth—which cannot happen without civil war—live long enough to see their new plans established. The benefits of their crimes go instead to later generations and to people they would least have wanted to benefit. They were therefore not as wise as they thought. People who deceive others in the hope of remaining unseen usually deceive themselves. The darkness they think conceals them is only their own blindness. They are no wiser than children who close their eyes and think that everything is hidden.\n\nIn general, vain people, unless they are also fearful, are quick to anger. More than others, they take ordinary conversational freedom as an insult. Anger can give rise to almost every kind of crime.\n\nThere is little need to describe the crimes that hatred, lust, ambition, and greed are likely to produce. Everyone knows from experience and common sense. But these passions are weaknesses so closely tied to human nature and to that of all other living things that their effects can be stopped only by unusual use of reason or by consistently severe punishment. People continually feel troubled by what they hate, and they cannot avoid the trouble. Either their patience must last forever or they must remove the power of whatever troubles them. Endless patience is hard; removing that power often cannot be done without breaking a law. Ambition and greed are also constant, pressing passions, while reason is not always present to resist them. Whenever people see a chance to escape punishment, these passions have their effects. Lust does not last as long, but its intensity makes up for its short duration. It can outweigh any fear of a mild or uncertain penalty.\n\nOf all the passions, fear is the least likely to lead people to break laws. Indeed, except among some unusually generous people, it is the only thing that makes them obey when breaking the law seems profitable or pleasurable. Yet fear can also lead to crime in many cases.\n\nNot every fear justifies the action it causes. Only fear of physical harm, which we call bodily fear, can do so, and only if a person sees no way to escape that harm except by acting. Suppose someone is attacked and fears he will be killed immediately. He sees no escape except to wound his attacker. If he wounds him fatally, this is no crime. When a commonwealth is established, no one is assumed to give up the defense of his life or limbs where the law cannot come to his aid in time. But it is a crime to kill someone because his actions or threats lead me to think that he will kill me when he can, if I have time and means to seek protection from the sovereign power. Again, suppose someone receives insults or slight injuries for which the lawmakers set no penalty, considering them beneath the notice of a reasonable person. He fears that unless he gets revenge, others will despise him and expose him to more such injuries. He therefore breaks the law to frighten people with his private revenge and protect himself in the future. This is a crime. The harm he fears is imaginary rather than physical. Although a custom begun not many years ago among vain young men in this part of the world has made that harm feel real, it is so slight that a brave person confident of his courage cannot take notice of it. Someone may also fear spirits because of his own superstition or because he trusts too much in others’ accounts of strange dreams and visions. He may be led to believe the spirits will harm him unless he does or refrains from certain things, even though doing or refraining from them would break the laws. His fear does not excuse the act or omission: it is a crime. As I explained in Chapter two, dreams are naturally just images that remain during sleep from impressions received by our senses while awake. If people are uncertain whether they have slept, those images seem to be real visions. So a person who breaks the law because of his own or someone else’s dream or supposed vision, or because of a belief about invisible spirits that the commonwealth does not permit, abandons the Law of Nature. That is a certain wrong. Instead, he follows images produced in his own mind or another private person’s mind. He cannot know whether those images mean anything, or whether the person reporting the dream tells the truth. If every private person were free to do this, as the Law of Nature would require if any one of them were free to do it, no law could remain in force and every commonwealth would dissolve.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVII, 2\n\nThese different sources of crime already show that not all crimes are equally serious, as the ancient Stoics claimed. There is room for an excuse, which shows that something that seemed a crime was no crime at all. There is also room for a reduction in blame, which shows that a crime that seemed serious was less serious. All crimes equally deserve to be called unjust, just as every departure from a straight line is a crooked line. The Stoics were right about that. But it does not follow that all crimes are equally unjust, any more than all crooked lines are equally crooked. The Stoics missed this distinction. They held that illegally killing a hen was as serious a crime as killing one's father.\n\nOnly something that removes the obligation to obey a law can completely excuse an act and make it no crime. If the person who acted was bound by the law when acting against it, the act must be a crime.\n\nHaving no way to know a law is a complete excuse, because a law that someone has no way to learn does not bind that person. But failing to make the effort to find out is not the same as having no way to know. Anyone who claims enough reason to manage their own affairs has the means to know the Laws of Nature, because reason is how those laws are known. Only children and people who cannot reason are excused for offenses against the Law of Nature.\n\nIf someone is captured or in an enemy's power through no fault of their own, their obligation under the law ends. A person is in the enemy's power when the enemy controls either their body or their means of living. They must obey the enemy or die, so obeying is no crime. When the law fails to protect someone, it cannot require them to forgo the best means of protecting themselves.\n\nIf fear of immediate death forces someone to act against the law, that person is completely excused. No law can require a person to give up self-preservation. Even if such a law were binding, the person would reason: “If I refuse, I die now. If I do it, I die later. Doing it therefore gives me more time to live.” Nature thus compels the act.\n\nSuppose someone lacks food or something else needed to stay alive and can survive only by breaking the law. In a severe famine, for example, they may take food by force or in secret when they cannot get it through money or charity. Or they may seize another person's sword to defend their life. Such a person is completely excused for the reason just given.\n\nAn act against the law done on another person's authority is excused as against that author. No one should accuse an agent of carrying out an act that they themselves authorized. But the authority does not excuse the act as against a third person it harms. Both the author and the actor are criminals when the law is broken. It follows that if the person or assembly holding Soveraigne Power orders someone to do something contrary to an earlier law, the act is completely excused. The Soveraigne must not condemn the act, since the Soveraigne authorized it. No one else can justly punish what the Soveraigne cannot justly condemn. Besides, a Soveraigne's command against an earlier law repeals that law for this particular act.\n\nSuppose the person or assembly holding Soveraigne Power gives up a Right essential to Soveraignty. This grants a subject a liberty incompatible with Soveraigne Power, and therefore with the very existence of a Common-wealth. If the subject refuses an order that conflicts with this liberty, that refusal is nevertheless a sin and violates the subject's duty. The subject should recognize what is incompatible with Soveraignty, since they consented to establish it for their own defense. They should also recognize that the liberty was granted through ignorance of its harmful consequences. But if the subject not only disobeys but resists a public official carrying out the order, that resistance is a crime. The subject could have sought redress by complaining without breaking the peace.\n\nCrimes are measured on several scales. First comes the harmfulness of their source or cause; second, how likely their example is to spread; third, the harm caused by their effects; and fourth, the particular time, place, and people involved.\n\nThe same unlawful act is a greater crime if someone relies on strength, wealth, or friends to resist those enforcing the law than if they hope not to be discovered or hope to escape by fleeing. Expecting to escape punishment by force breeds contempt for all laws at every opportunity and temptation. Someone who flees out of fear of danger, on the other hand, is more likely to obey later. A crime committed with knowledge that it is a crime is greater than the same crime committed in the mistaken belief that it is lawful. A person who acts against their own conscience relies on their strength or some other power and is encouraged to do it again. Someone acting from error can obey the law once the error is pointed out.\n\nSomeone led into error by a publicly authorized teacher or interpreter of the law is less at fault than someone who stubbornly follows their own principles and reasoning. What a publicly authorized teacher teaches is taught by the Common-wealth and resembles law until the same authority corrects it. It completely excuses crimes that neither deny Soveraigne Power nor violate an obvious law. By contrast, someone who bases their actions on private judgment must stand or fall by whether that judgment is right or wrong.\n\nThe same act is a greater crime if others have consistently been punished for it than if many earlier offenders escaped punishment. Those examples of impunity amount to hopes of impunity given by the Soveraigne. Someone who gives an offender hope of mercy and encourages the offense shares in the fault. The Soveraigne cannot reasonably charge the offender with all of it.\n\nA crime arising from a sudden Passion is less serious than the same crime arising from prolonged thought. In the first case, ordinary human weakness reduces blame. A person who acts with premeditation has considered the law, the punishment, and the consequences for human society. In committing the crime, they disregard all three in favor of their desire. But even a sudden Passion is not a complete excuse. All the time between learning the law and committing the act counts as time for deliberation. A person should reflect on the law to bring their Passions under control.\n\nWhen a law is regularly read and explained publicly to everyone, breaking it is a greater crime than when people have no such instruction. Without it, they must seek information with difficulty and uncertainty, interrupting their work and relying on private individuals. Some of the fault can then be attributed to ordinary human weakness. In the first case, there is clear negligence, with some contempt for Soveraigne Power.\n\nSome acts are expressly condemned by law but tacitly approved by the lawmaker through other clear signs of their will. Such acts are lesser crimes than acts condemned both by the law and its maker. Because the lawmaker's will is law, two conflicting laws seem to exist here. This would completely excuse the offender if people were obliged to treat signs other than the Soveraigne's explicit commands as signs of approval. But people can be punished not only for breaking the law but also for obeying it. The lawmaker thus bears part of the responsibility for breaking it and cannot reasonably attribute the whole crime to the offender. For example, the law forbids duels and makes death the penalty. Yet someone who refuses a duel faces contempt and ridicule with no remedy. The Soveraigne may even consider that person unworthy of a military command or promotion. If that person then accepts a duel, they should not reasonably be punished harshly. Everyone may lawfully seek the good opinion of those holding Soveraigne Power, and the punisher bears part of the fault. I do not say this because I want to allow private revenge or any other disobedience. I say it so rulers will take care not to give indirect encouragement to what they directly forbid. The examples set by rulers have always had more influence over those who see them than the laws themselves. Our duty is to do what rulers say, not what they do. But people will not fulfill that duty unless God gives them extraordinary, supernatural grace to follow that rule.\n\nWe can also compare crimes by the harm their effects cause. First, the same act is a greater crime if it harms many people than if it harms only a few. An act that causes harm now and sets an example causing harm in the future is therefore greater than one that harms only now. The first is a fertile crime that multiplies harm; the second is barren. It is a greater offense for an authorized preacher than for a private person to teach doctrines against the religion established in the Common-wealth. The same is true of living without religious restraint, behaving without sexual restraint, or committing any other irreligious act. Similarly, it is a greater crime for a teacher of law than for someone else to teach a principle or do an act that weakens Soveraigne Power. When someone is so well regarded for wisdom that many follow their advice or imitate their actions, their unlawful act is a greater crime than the same act by someone else. Such people not only commit a crime but teach others to treat it as lawful. Generally, crimes become greater through the scandal they cause: they become obstacles for people who look less at their own path than at the light others hold out to guide them.\n\nHostile acts against the current government of a Common-wealth are also greater crimes than the same acts against private people, because they harm everyone. These include betraying the Common-wealth's defenses or revealing its secrets to an enemy. They also include attacks on its Representative, whether monarch or assembly, and attempts by words or deeds to reduce that Representative's authority now or in the future. The Latin term for these crimes is Crimina Laesae Majestatis. They involve a plan or act against a fundamental law.\n\nCrimes that make judgments ineffective are likewise greater than injuries to one or a few people. Taking money to give a false judgment or false testimony is a greater crime than cheating someone out of the same or a larger sum in another way. Such a judgment wrongs its victim, makes all judgments useless, and gives people reason to resort to force and private revenge.\n\nRobbing or embezzling public funds or revenue is also a greater crime than robbing or defrauding a private person. Robbing the public means robbing many people at once.\n\nLikewise, falsely assuming public office or counterfeiting public seals or coins is a greater crime than impersonating a private person or forging their seal. The fraud can harm many people.\n\nOf unlawful acts against private people, the greater crime is the one whose harm people generally feel most strongly. Therefore:\n\nUnlawful killing is a greater crime than any other injury, as long as the victim's life is preserved in the other case.\n\nKilling by torture is greater than killing without it.\n\nCutting off a limb is greater than taking someone's goods.\n\nTaking goods by threatening death or injury is greater than stealing them secretly.\n\nSecret theft is greater than obtaining goods through consent secured by fraud.\n\nViolating someone's chastity by force is greater than doing so by flattery.\n\nViolating a married woman's chastity is greater than violating an unmarried woman's.\n\nThese are the values people commonly place on these acts, though individuals feel the same offense more or less strongly. The law considers people's general inclinations, not each individual's response.\n\nFor this reason, Greek, Roman, and other ancient and modern Common-wealths have disregarded insults by words or gestures in their laws when they cause no harm beyond the immediate distress of the person insulted. They supposed that the real cause of this distress was not the insult, which has no hold on someone aware of their own virtue, but the offended person's lack of courage.\n\nA crime against a private person is also greatly aggravated by the person involved, the time, and the place. Killing a parent is a greater crime than killing another person. A parent should receive the honor due a Soveraigne, even if they have surrendered their power to civil law, because that power originally belonged to them by Nature. Robbing a poor person is a greater crime than robbing a rich one, because the poor person feels the loss more keenly.\n\nA crime committed at a time or place set aside for worship is greater than one committed elsewhere or at another time, because it shows greater contempt for the law.\n\nMany more examples of factors that increase or reduce a crime's seriousness could be added. But these examples allow anyone to judge how serious another proposed crime is.\n\nFinally, almost every crime injures both a private person and the Common-wealth. When the accusation is made in the name of the Common-wealth, it is called a public crime; when brought in a private person's name, it is a private crime. The corresponding legal proceedings are called public proceedings, Judicia Publica or pleas of the Crown, and private proceedings. In a murder case, for example, the proceeding is private if a private person brings the accusation and public if the Soveraigne brings it.\n\nCHAPTER XXVIII. OF PUNISHMENTS AND REWARDS\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVIII, 1\n\nOF PUNISHMENTS AND REWARDS\n\n“Punishment is harm imposed by public authority on a person who has done, or failed to do, something that the same authority judges to break the law. Its purpose is to make people more willing to obey.”\n\nBefore drawing conclusions from this definition, I must answer an important question: where did the Right or authority to punish come from? As I have explained, no one is considered bound by Covenant not to resist violence. We therefore cannot suppose that a person gave anyone else a right to use violence against them. In establishing a Common-wealth, each person gives up the right to defend another person, but not the right to defend themselves. Each also undertakes to help the Soveraigne punish others, but not to help punish themselves. Yet a Covenant to help the Soveraigne harm someone else gives the Soveraigne no Right to Punish unless the person making that Covenant already had the right to do such harm. Clearly, then, the Common-wealth's Right to Punish—that is, the right of its Representative—does not come from a grant or gift from the subjects. But I have also shown that, before the Common-wealth was established, everyone had a right to everything and to do whatever they thought necessary for their own preservation. This included overpowering, harming, or killing anyone for that purpose. This is the basis of the Right to Punish exercised in every Common-wealth. The subjects did not give this right to the Soveraigne. By laying down their own rights, they strengthened the Soveraigne's ability to use the Soveraigne's own right as they thought fit for everyone's protection. The right was thus left, not given, to the Soveraigne alone. Except for the limits imposed by the Law of Nature, it remains as complete as it was in the mere state of Nature, where everyone was at war with everyone else.\n\nFrom the definition of punishment, I conclude, first, that private revenge and injuries inflicted by private people are not properly called punishment. They do not come from public authority.\n\nSecond, being overlooked and not favored for promotion by the public is not punishment. No new harm is imposed; the person remains in their previous position.\n\nThird, harm imposed by public authority without an earlier public conviction is not punishment but a hostile act. Public authority must first judge the act for which someone is punished to be a violation of the law.\n\nFourth, harm imposed by someone who has seized power, or by judges who lack authority from the Soveraigne, is not punishment but a hostile act. The condemned person has not authorized the acts of someone who has seized power. Those acts therefore do not come from public authority.\n\nFifth, harm imposed with no intention or possibility of leading either the offender or other people, through the offender's example, to obey the laws is not punishment. It is a hostile act. Without that aim, the harm does not fit the definition.\n\nSixth, nature attaches harmful consequences to certain actions. Someone attacking another person may be killed or wounded themselves; someone committing an unlawful act may become sick. Since God made Nature, such harm can be said to come from God and thus to be divine punishment. But it is not punishment imposed by human beings, because no human authority imposes it.\n\nSeventh, if the harm imposed is less than the benefit or pleasure that normally comes from the crime, it does not fit the definition of punishment. It is more like the price of committing the crime or a payment for freedom from its penalty. Punishment aims to lead people to obey the law. If the harm is smaller than the benefit of breaking it, punishment fails at that aim and instead encourages disobedience.\n\nEighth, if the law specifies a punishment and a greater one is imposed after the crime, the excess is not punishment but a hostile act. Punishment aims not at revenge but at deterring people through fear. Announcing a lesser punishment removes the fear of an unknown, greater one, so an unexpected addition is not part of the punishment. But if the law specifies no punishment at all, whatever is imposed counts as punishment. Anyone who sets out to break a law with no stated penalty must expect an unspecified, discretionary punishment.\n\nNinth, harm imposed for an act done before a law forbade it is not punishment but a hostile act. Before the law existed, no one could violate it. Punishment presupposes an act judged to have violated a law. Harm imposed for an act done before the law was made is therefore not punishment.\n\nTenth, harm inflicted on the Representative of the Common-wealth is not punishment but a hostile act. Punishment must be imposed by public authority, and that authority belongs only to the Representative.\n\nFinally, harm inflicted on a declared enemy is not punishment. Such enemies were either never subject to the law, so could not violate it, or formerly were subject to it but now openly reject it and so deny that they can violate it. Any harm done to them is an act of hostility. In open hostilities, inflicting any harm is lawful. It follows that if a subject knowingly and deliberately denies the authority of the Common-wealth's Representative by word or deed, the Representative may lawfully inflict whatever suffering they choose, whatever penalty was previously prescribed for treason. By denying subjection, the person rejects the punishments set by law. They therefore suffer as an enemy of the Common-wealth, according to the Representative's will. The punishments in the law apply to subjects, not enemies. People who were once subjects by their own act but deliberately revolt and deny Soveraigne Power are enemies.\n\nThe broadest division of punishments is between divine and human punishment. I will discuss divine punishment later, where it is more appropriate.\n\nHuman punishments are imposed by human command. They take the form of bodily harm, loss of money or property, disgrace, imprisonment, exile, or a combination of these.\n\nBodily punishment directly affects the body, as intended by the person imposing it. Examples include blows, wounds, and being deprived of physical pleasures previously enjoyed lawfully.\n\nSome bodily punishments are capital, and some are not. Capital punishment is death, either without or with torture. Noncapital punishments include blows, wounds, chains, and any other bodily pain not inherently fatal. If the person imposing a punishment did not intend death, it is not considered capital even if an unforeseeable accident makes the harm fatal. In that case, the punishment hastened death but did not impose it.\n\nFinancial punishment includes losing not only a sum of money but also land or any other goods normally bought and sold for money. If a law imposing a payment is designed to collect money from those who violate it, that payment is not properly a punishment. It is the price of a privilege or an exemption from the law. Such a law does not absolutely forbid the act, but forbids it to those unable to pay. There is an exception if the law is a Law of Nature or a religious law. In that case, payment cannot exempt someone from the law; the act still breaks it. For example, if a law requires people who use God's name in vain to pay a fine, paying it is not the price of permission to swear. It is punishment for breaking a law that allows no exemption. Likewise, if the law orders someone to pay money to a person they have injured, the payment only makes up for that person's loss. It ends the injured person's claim, but not the offender's crime.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXVIII, 2\n\nDisgrace is the imposition of something made dishonorable, or the removal of something the Common-wealth has made honorable. Some things are honorable by Nature, such as the effects of courage, generosity of spirit, strength, wisdom, and other abilities of body and mind. The Common-wealth makes other things honorable, such as badges, titles, offices, and other special signs of the Soveraigne's favor. Natural abilities may be lost through nature or accident, but no law can take them away. Losing them is therefore not punishment. Honors granted by the Common-wealth, however, can be taken away by the public authority that granted them. Taking them away is properly punishment. Examples include stripping convicted people of badges, titles, and offices, or declaring them ineligible for such honors in the future.\n\nImprisonment means being deprived of liberty by public authority. It can serve either of two purposes: keeping an accused person safely in custody or causing a convicted person to suffer. The first is not punishment, since no one should be punished before being heard in court and found guilty. Before that hearing, making someone suffer through confinement or restraints beyond what is necessary to keep them in custody violates the Law of Nature. Confinement after conviction is punishment: public authority imposes harm for something it has judged to violate the law. By imprisonment I mean every restriction on movement caused by an external obstacle. It may be a building called a prison, an island to which someone is confined, or a workplace. In the past, people were sentenced to quarries; now they are sentenced to galleys. The obstacle may also be a chain or anything similar.\n\nExile, or banishment, means sentencing someone for a crime to leave the Common-wealth's territory, or some part of it, and not return for a specified time or forever. By itself, without other circumstances, exile does not seem to be punishment. It seems more like an escape or a public order to flee in order to avoid punishment. Cicero says that Rome never established exile as a punishment. He calls it a refuge for people in danger. If a banished person may keep their goods and the income from their land, simply moving to a different climate is no punishment. Nor does it achieve the purpose of punishment: encouraging people to obey the law for the Common-wealth's benefit. Exile may often harm the Common-wealth instead. A banished person is no longer its member and is therefore its lawful enemy. If the person also loses land or goods, the punishment lies in that loss, not in exile, and counts as financial punishment.\n\nEvery punishment of an innocent subject, large or small, violates the Law of Nature. Only a violation of law can be punished, and an innocent person has committed none. Punishing the innocent violates, first, the Law of Nature that requires any act of revenge to aim only at some future good. Punishing the innocent can bring no good to the Common-wealth. Second, it violates the law against ingratitude. Every subject originally consents to Soveraigne Power so that it will protect them as long as they obey. Punishing an innocent subject returns evil for good. Third, it violates the law requiring equity, or an equal distribution of justice, which is absent when innocent people are punished.\n\nBut imposing harm on an innocent person who is not a subject does not break the Law of Nature if it benefits the Common-wealth and violates no earlier Covenant. People who are not subjects are either enemies or have stopped being enemies through earlier Covenants. Under the original Right of Nature, the Common-wealth may wage war against enemies it judges capable of harming it. In war, the sword does not sit in judgment. The victor does not distinguish guilty from innocent people according to what they did in the past, nor show mercy except when it serves the victor's own people. On this basis, when subjects deliberately reject the authority of the established Common-wealth, retaliation can lawfully extend beyond the fathers to the third and fourth generations, even those not yet born. Those descendants are innocent of the fathers' act, yet can suffer for it. The offense consists in rejecting subjection and returning to a state of war; this is commonly called rebellion. Those who commit it suffer as enemies, not as subjects. Rebellion is simply war resumed.\n\nA REWARD is either a gift or something owed by contract. A contractual reward is called salary or wages: payment owed for service performed or promised. A gift is a benefit given freely to encourage people to serve or enable them to do so. Thus, when the Soveraigne of a Common-wealth sets a salary for a public office, the recipient is obliged by justice to carry out its duties. Without a salary, the person owes only an acknowledgment of the honor and an effort to repay the favor. People have no legal remedy if ordered to leave their private work and serve the public without reward or salary. But neither the Law of Nature nor the founding of the Common-wealth obliges them to do so unless the service cannot be performed otherwise. The Soveraigne is already understood to have the use of all their resources. Even an ordinary soldier may demand the wages of military service as a debt.\n\nWhen a Soveraigne gives a subject benefits out of fear that the subject has the power to harm the Common-wealth, these are not properly rewards. They are not salaries, since there is no contract here: everyone is already obliged not to harm the Common-wealth. They are not freely given favors either, since fear forces them from the Soveraigne, who should not be subject to that fear. Rather, they are sacrifices that the Soveraigne makes as a private person, not as the embodiment of the Common-wealth, to calm the discontent of someone thought more powerful. They do not encourage obedience. Instead, they encourage continued and greater extortion.\n\nSome salaries are fixed and paid from the public treasury. Others vary and come from carrying out the duties of the office. The latter can sometimes harm the Common-wealth, as in the courts. If judges and other court officers earn more as more cases come before them, two problems follow. First, lawsuits multiply because more cases mean more income. Second, courts fight over jurisdiction, each trying to take as many cases as possible. These problems do not occur in offices that carry out decisions, because their officers cannot increase their work through their own efforts. This is enough about punishment and reward. They are like the nerves and tendons that move the limbs and joints of a Common-wealth.\n\nSo far I have described human nature, whose pride and other Passions have driven people to submit to government. I have also described the great power of the ruler, whom I compared to Leviathan. I took that comparison from the last two verses of Job 41, where God describes Leviathan's great power and calls him King of the Proud: “Nothing on earth can be compared with him. He is made so that he fears nothing. He looks down on everything high, and he is king over all the children of pride.” But this ruler is mortal and subject to decay like every other earthly creature. And there is a power in heaven, though none on earth, that the ruler should fear and whose laws the ruler should obey. In the following chapters, I will discuss the diseases that cause this ruler's death and the Laws of Nature that bind him.\n\nCHAPTER XXIX. OF THINGS THAT WEAKEN A COMMON-WEALTH OR LEAD TO ITS DISSOLUTION\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIX, 1\n\nOF THINGS THAT WEAKEN A COMMON-WEALTH OR LEAD TO ITS DISSOLUTION\n\nThe dissolution of Common-wealths results from flaws in their founding.\n\nNothing made by mortal people can be immortal. Still, if people used the reason they claim to have, they could at least protect their Common-wealths from dying of internal diseases. By their nature, Common-wealths are designed to last as long as humanity, the Laws of Nature, or justice itself, which gives them life. So when internal disorder rather than outside violence dissolves them, the fault lies not in people as the material of which they are made, but in people as their founders and organizers. People eventually tire of pushing and hacking at one another without order, and they sincerely want to form one firm, lasting structure. Yet they lack both the skill to make suitable laws that will shape their conduct and the humility and patience to have the rough, awkward edges of their present power trimmed away. Without a very skilled architect, they can build only an unstable structure. It may barely last their own lifetimes and will certainly collapse on their descendants.\n\nAmong a Common-wealth's weaknesses, I will first count those caused by flaws in its founding. They resemble diseases of a living body caused by defects at conception.\n\nOne such flaw arises when a person accepts less power than is needed to keep the Common-wealth at peace and defend it in order to gain a kingdom. Later, the public safety may require the ruler to take up the power they set aside. Doing so looks unjust and makes large numbers of people ready to rebel when they get a chance. Similarly, children conceived by diseased parents may die early or develop boils and scabs as their bodies expel the unhealthy condition inherited at conception. Kings do not always give up necessary power because they misunderstand their office, though sometimes they do. Often they hope to take it back whenever they please. Their reasoning is poor. Foreign Common-wealths will support those who insist that kings keep their promises, since they rarely miss a chance to weaken neighboring states for their own subjects' benefit. Thus the Pope supported Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury, against Henry the Second. William the Conqueror had exempted church officials from subjection to the Common-wealth when he was received as ruler and took an oath not to infringe the Church's liberty. Similarly, the French supported the barons in their rebellion against King John. William Rufus had increased the barons' power to a level incompatible with Soveraigne Power to win their help in taking the succession from his elder brother. Nor does this happen only in monarchies. The ancient Roman Common-wealth was styled the Senate and People of Rome, but neither the Senate nor the people claimed all power. This first caused the uprisings of Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Gracchus, Lucius Saturnius, and others. It then caused wars between Senate and people under Marius and Sylla, and again under Pompey and Caesar, ending their democracy and establishing monarchy.\n\nThe people of Athens bound themselves against just one act: proposing to renew the war over the Island of Salamis was punishable by death. Yet if Solon had not spread word that he was mad, then dressed and acted like a madman and proposed renewal in verse to the people gathered around him, Athens would have had an enemy permanently ready at its very gates. Even a tiny limit on a Common-wealth's power forces such harm or such desperate workarounds.\n\nSecond, I observe diseases of a Common-wealth caused by poisonous doctrines that stir rebellion. One is the claim “Every private person can judge which actions are good and which are evil.” This is true in the mere state of Nature, where there are no civil laws. It is also true under civil government when the law has not settled a case. Otherwise, civil law is clearly the standard for judging good and evil actions. The judge is the lawmaker, who always represents the Common-wealth. This false doctrine encourages people to debate the Common-wealth's commands privately and challenge them. They then obey or disobey as their own judgment sees fit. This divides and weakens the Common-wealth.\n\nAnother doctrine at odds with civil society says, “Whatever a person does against their conscience is a sin.” It rests on the same assumption that a person may judge good and evil for themselves. A person's conscience is their judgment, and judgment can be mistaken. Someone subject to no civil law does sin whenever they act against their conscience, since they have no rule to follow other than their own reason. But someone living in a Common-wealth is different. The law is the public conscience by which that person has already agreed to be guided. Otherwise, private consciences, which are only private opinions, would conflict and tear the Common-wealth apart. No one would dare obey Soveraigne Power further than seemed right to them personally.\n\nAnother common teaching says, “Faith and holiness are acquired not through study and reason but through supernatural inspiration or an infusion from above.” If that were true, I see no reason why anyone should explain their faith, why every Christian should not also be a prophet, or why anyone should follow their country's law rather than their own inspiration. This brings us back to people claiming the right to judge good and evil themselves, or handing that judgment to private individuals who claim supernatural inspiration. The result is the dissolution of all civil government. Faith comes through hearing, and hearing depends on the circumstances that bring us into contact with people who speak to us. Almighty God arranges all these circumstances. They are not supernatural, though so many factors contribute to every outcome that we cannot trace them all. Faith and holiness are indeed uncommon, but they are not miracles. God brings them about in those he has chosen, when he thinks the time is right, through education, discipline, correction, and other natural means. In this part of the world, these three opinions that harm peace and government have spread chiefly through the speech and writing of unlearned theologians. They put words of Holy Scripture together in ways that conflict with reason and do all they can to persuade people that holiness and natural reason cannot coexist.\n\nA fourth opinion incompatible with a Common-wealth is “The holder of Soveraigne Power is subject to the civil laws.” It is true that all Soveraignes are subject to the Laws of Nature. Those laws are divine and no person or Common-wealth can repeal them. But a Soveraigne is not subject to laws the Soveraigne makes—that is, laws made by the Common-wealth. To be subject to those laws would mean being subject to the Common-wealth, and therefore to its Soveraigne Representative, which is oneself. That is not subjection but freedom from those laws. This error puts the laws above the Soveraigne. It therefore also puts a judge above the Soveraigne, with power to punish them, creating a new Soveraigne. The same reasoning would require a third to punish the second, and so on forever, bringing confusion and destroying the Common-wealth.\n\nA fifth doctrine leading to dissolution says, “Each private person has absolute ownership of their goods, excluding even the Soveraigne's Right.” Each person does have property rights that exclude every other subject. Those rights come only from Soveraigne Power. Without its protection, everyone else would have an equal Right to the same goods. But if ownership also excludes the Soveraigne's Right, the Soveraigne cannot carry out the task for which the subjects appointed them: defending people both from foreign enemies and from one another's injuries. The Common-wealth would then cease to exist.\n\nIf a subject's ownership of goods does not exclude the Soveraigne Representative's Right over those goods, it is even less possible for a subject to exclude that Right from judicial or executive offices, whose holders represent the Soveraigne.\n\nA sixth doctrine directly contradicts the essence of a Common-wealth: “Soveraigne Power can be divided.” Dividing a Common-wealth's power dissolves it, since divided powers destroy one another. These doctrines come chiefly from some who claim expertise in law and try to make law depend on their own learning instead of on legislative power.\n\nBesides false doctrine, the example of a neighboring country with a different kind of government often makes people want to change their own. The people of the Jews were stirred to reject God and ask the prophet Samuel for a king like the other nations had. The smaller Greek cities, too, were constantly disturbed by aristocratic and democratic factions. In nearly every Common-wealth, one faction wanted to imitate the Lacedaemonians and the other the Athenians. I have no doubt that many people welcomed the recent troubles in England because they wanted to imitate the Low Countries. They supposed that changing the form of government, as those countries had done, was all it took to grow rich. Human nature already makes people want novelty. When neighbors who have grown rich through change stir up that desire, people can hardly avoid welcoming those who urge a change. They love its beginnings even though continuing disorder hurts them. They are like people with hot blood who get an itch and scratch themselves with their nails until they can no longer bear the pain.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXIX, 2\n\nAs for rebellion against monarchy in particular, one of its most common causes is reading books on politics and the histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Young people and others without the protection of sound reasoning read about the great victories won by their generals. These accounts make a strong and pleasant impression on them. They then come to approve of everything else those generals did. They imagine that their great success came from the virtue of popular government, rather than from rivalry among particular men. They overlook the frequent rebellions and civil wars caused by defects in those governments. Such books, I say, have led people to try to kill their kings. Greek and Latin writers on politics say that anyone may rightly and honorably do so, provided that he calls the king a tyrant first. They do not say that regicide, the killing of a king, is lawful; they say that tyrannicide, the killing of a tyrant, is lawful. The same books lead people who live under a monarch to think that subjects in a popular Common-wealth are free, while subjects in a monarchy are all slaves. I say this is what people under monarchies think. People under popular governments do not think so, because they do not find it to be true. In short, I cannot imagine anything more harmful to monarchy than allowing such books to be read in public without immediately providing wise teachers to counteract their poison. I would compare this poison to the bite of a rabid dog, which produces the disease doctors call hydrophobia, or fear of water. Someone bitten in this way suffers constant thirst but cannot bear water. It is as though the poison were trying to turn him into a dog. Likewise, when writers in favor of democracy have deeply bitten a monarchy by constantly snarling at it, the monarchy needs nothing so much as a strong monarch. Yet from a kind of tyrannophobia, or fear of strong government, its people cannot stand him once they have him.\n\nSome teachers hold that a person has three souls. Similarly, some think that a Common-wealth can have more than one soul, that is, more than one Sovereign. They set up church supremacy against sovereignty, church rules against laws, and spiritual authority against civil authority. They influence people's minds with words and distinctions that mean nothing in themselves. Their obscurity only suggests that, as some think, another kingdom walks invisibly in the dark, like a fairy kingdom. But civil power and the power of the Common-wealth are plainly the same thing. Church supremacy, the power to make church rules, and the power to grant dispensations all imply the existence of a Common-wealth. So if one person is Sovereign and another supreme, and one can make laws while another makes church rules, the same subjects must belong to two Common-wealths. That is a kingdom divided against itself, which cannot stand. Calling the two powers temporal and spiritual is a meaningless distinction. They remain two kingdoms, and every subject must serve two masters. The spiritual power claims the right to say what is sin. It therefore claims the right to say what is law, since sin is simply breaking the law. The civil power also claims the right to say what is law. Every subject must then obey two masters, each of whom insists that his commands be observed as law. That is impossible. Or, if there is only one kingdom, either the civil power, which is the power of the Common-wealth, must be subordinate to the spiritual power, or the spiritual power must be subordinate to the temporal power. In the latter case, only the temporal power is supreme. When these powers oppose each other, the Common-wealth is therefore in serious danger of civil war and collapse. Civil authority is more visible and clearer to natural reason, so it will always attract a substantial part of the people. Spiritual authority operates in the darkness of academic distinctions and difficult words. Yet fear of darkness and ghosts is stronger than other fears, so it too will have enough supporters to disturb and sometimes destroy a Common-wealth. This disease can be compared to epilepsy, or the falling sickness, which the Jews considered a kind of possession by spirits. In a human body, an abnormal spirit or wind in the head obstructs the roots of the nerves and violently moves them. It takes away the motion they ought naturally to get from the soul's power in the brain, causing violent and irregular movements called convulsions. A person suffering a fit can fall into water or fire as if he had lost his senses. Likewise, in the political body, spiritual power may move the members of a Common-wealth through fear of punishments and hope of rewards, which are its nerves, in a way different from that prescribed by civil power, which is its soul. It chokes the people with strange, difficult words and either overwhelms the Common-wealth with oppression or throws it into the fire of civil war.\n\nEven a purely civil government can sometimes have more than one soul. The power to raise money, its faculty of nourishment, may belong to a general assembly. The power to lead and command, its faculty of motion, may belong to one man. And the power to make laws, its faculty of reason, may depend on whether those two and a third body happen to agree. This puts the Common-wealth in danger, sometimes because they cannot agree on good laws, but more often because it lacks the nourishment needed for life and movement. Few people realize that this arrangement is not government but the division of the Common-wealth into three factions, and they call it a mixed monarchy. In truth, it is not one independent Common-wealth but three independent factions. It has not one representative person but three. In the Kingdom of God there can be three independent Persons without dividing the unity of the God who reigns. That cannot be so when the rulers are human beings with differing opinions. If the king represents the people, a general assembly also represents the people, and another assembly represents part of the people, they are not one person or one Sovereign. They are three persons and three Sovereigns.\n\nI do not know what disease of the human body exactly matches this disorder in a Common-wealth. But I once saw a man with another man growing out of his side, with a head, arms, chest, and stomach of his own. If a third man had grown out of his other side, the comparison would have been exact.\n\nSo far I have named the diseases that pose the greatest and most immediate dangers to a Common-wealth. There are other, lesser diseases worth noticing. One is the difficulty of raising money for public needs, especially when war approaches. This comes from every subject's belief that his land and goods are his property to the exclusion of the Sovereign's right to use them. The sovereign power can foresee the Common-wealth's needs and dangers, but the people's refusal to let money reach the public treasury blocks it. Rather than extending its power to meet and prevent dangers at their beginning, it contracts for as long as it can. When it can contract no longer, it struggles with the people through legal tactics to obtain small sums. When those sums prove insufficient, it must finally force a way through for immediate funds or perish. Repeated crises either bring the people back to the proper disposition or destroy the Common-wealth. We can aptly compare this illness to a fever. In a fever, the fleshy parts are hardened or blocked by poisonous matter. The veins, which naturally empty into the heart, do not receive the blood they should from the arteries. First the limbs contract with cold and shake. Next the heart makes a hot, powerful effort to force a path for the blood. Before it can do so, it makes do with small refreshments that cool it for a while. If the body is strong enough, it finally breaks through the stubborn obstruction and expels the poison in sweat. If it is too weak, the patient dies.\n\nAnother disease in a Common-wealth resembles pleurisy. The public treasury's money leaves its proper course and accumulates in excessive amounts in the hands of one or a few private individuals, through monopolies or contracts to collect public revenues. Likewise, in pleurisy, blood enters the membrane of the chest and causes inflammation, fever, and painful stabbing sensations.\n\nThe popularity of a powerful subject is another dangerous disease, unless the Common-wealth has very good assurance of his loyalty. The people should take direction from the Sovereign's authority. Instead, flattery and the reputation of an ambitious man draw them away from obedience to the laws. They follow someone whose virtues and plans they know nothing about. This is usually more dangerous in a popular government than in a monarchy, since such a man can easily make people believe that he and his supporters are the people. Thus Julius Caesar, whom the people had set against the Senate, won his army's affection and made himself master of both the Senate and the people. This behavior by popular and ambitious men is outright rebellion and can be compared to the effects of witchcraft.\n\nAnother weakness of a Common-wealth is a town so large that it can supply a great army, with all its men and expenses, from its own territory. So is the existence of many corporations. They are smaller Common-wealths within a greater one, like worms in a person's intestines.\n\nWe may add the freedom claimed by would-be political experts to argue against absolute power. Most come from the lowest levels of society. False doctrines encourage them to meddle constantly with the fundamental laws and disturb the Common-wealth. They resemble the small worms doctors call ascarides.\n\nWe may also add an insatiable appetite, or bulimia, for expanding a realm, together with the incurable wounds often received from enemies as a result. There are also the tumors formed by conquests that are not united to the state. They are often a burden and can be lost with less danger than they can be kept. Add the sluggishness brought on by comfort, and the wasting sickness of extravagance and needless spending.\n\nFinally, if enemies win a decisive victory in a foreign or civil war, the Common-wealth's forces can no longer remain in the field or protect subjects who remain loyal. The Common-wealth is then dissolved. Each person is free to protect himself in whatever way he thinks best. The Sovereign is the public soul that gives the Common-wealth life and movement. Once that soul departs, it can no more govern the members than a person's departed, though immortal, soul can govern his corpse. Another person's actions cannot extinguish a sovereign monarch's right, but the members' obligation can end. Someone without protection may seek it anywhere. Once he receives it, he is obliged to defend his protector as long as he can. He cannot evade that duty by falsely claiming that he submitted only out of fear. But when an assembly's power has been suppressed, its right ends altogether. The assembly itself no longer exists, so its sovereignty cannot return.\n\nCHAPTER XXX. ON THE DUTY OF THE SOVEREIGN REPRESENTATIVE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 1\n\nON THE DUTY OF THE SOVEREIGN REPRESENTATIVE\n\nThe Sovereign's duty, whether the Sovereign is a monarch or an assembly, follows from the purpose for which sovereign power was entrusted to it: securing the safety of the people. The Law of Nature binds the Sovereign to do this, and the Sovereign must account for it to God, the author of that law, and to no one else. Safety here does not mean mere survival. It also includes all the other comforts of life that each person can obtain through lawful work without endangering or harming the Common-wealth.\n\nThis safety is not to be secured by looking after individuals, except by protecting them from injuries when they complain. It is to be secured through general oversight: public instruction in both teaching and example, and the making and enforcement of good laws that individuals can apply to their own cases.\n\nAs I explained in Chapter eighteenth, taking away the essential rights of sovereignty dissolves the Common-wealth. Everyone then returns to the condition and misery of war against everyone else, the worst thing that can happen in this life. The Sovereign must therefore preserve those rights intact. First, it is against his duty to transfer any of them to another or give any up. Anyone who abandons the means abandons the ends. A Sovereign abandons the means if he acknowledges that he is subject to civil laws, or gives up supreme authority to judge cases, make war or peace on his own authority, or judge the Common-wealth's needs. The same is true if he gives up the power to raise money and soldiers whenever, and in whatever amounts, his conscience judges necessary; to appoint officials and servants for war and peace; or to appoint teachers and examine which doctrines support or oppose the people's defense, peace, and welfare. Second, the Sovereign fails in his duty if he allows people to remain ignorant or misinformed about the basis and reasons for these essential rights. Otherwise, they can easily be led into resisting him when the Common-wealth needs him to exercise those rights.\n\nThe basis of these rights must be taught carefully and truthfully because neither civil law nor fear of legal punishment can uphold them. A civil law forbidding rebellion, which includes any resistance to the essential rights of sovereignty, binds people not simply because it is a civil law. It binds them only through the Law of Nature against breaking one's promise. If people do not understand that natural obligation, they cannot understand the authority of any law the Sovereign makes. They regard punishment as an act of war. When they think themselves strong enough, they will try to avoid it through acts of war.\n\nI have heard some people say that justice is only an empty word. They say that anything someone can gain through force or cleverness belongs to him, not only in a state of war but also in a Common-wealth. I have already shown that this is false. Others similarly claim that no rational grounds or principles support the essential rights that make sovereignty absolute. They argue that, if there were such principles, someone would have discovered them somewhere. Yet, they say, no Common-wealth has ever recognized or claimed those rights. This is as bad an argument as it would be for the native peoples of America to deny that sound principles for building a house lasting as long as its materials exist, simply because they have never seen one so well built. Time and effort produce new knowledge every day. The art of sound building comes from rational principles found by diligent people who long studied materials and the effects of shape and proportion. These principles were found long after humans had begun to build, however poorly. Likewise, long after people began to create imperfect Common-wealths liable to fall back into disorder, diligent thought can discover rational principles for governing them. Whether people use these principles or neglect them matters very little to my personal interests today. But even if the principles I have stated are not principles of reason, I am sure that Scripture gives them authority. I will show this when I discuss the Kingdom of God, which Moses administered over the Jews, God's special people by covenant.\n\nSome object that even if these principles are right, ordinary people cannot understand them. I would be glad if the wealthy and powerful subjects of a kingdom, and those considered its most learned subjects, were no less able to understand them. But everyone knows that what prevents people from learning this teaching is not so much its difficulty as the interests of the learners. Powerful people have trouble accepting anything that gives another power control over their desires. Learned people have trouble accepting anything that exposes their mistakes and reduces their authority. Ordinary people's minds, by contrast, are like clean paper ready for whatever public authority writes on them, unless they have been corrupted by dependence on the powerful or covered with their teachers' opinions. Entire nations can be brought to accept the great mysteries of Christianity, which are beyond reason. Millions can be made to believe that the same body can be in countless places at once, which goes against reason. Why, then, could teachers and preachers protected by law not teach something so consistent with reason that any unprejudiced person needs only to hear it to learn it? I conclude that, while a Sovereign retains his full power, any difficulty in teaching people the essential rights of sovereignty, which are its natural and fundamental laws, comes from his own failure or that of the people to whom he entrusts the administration of the Common-wealth. He therefore has a duty to have people taught these rights. It is also to his own advantage and protects him as a person from the danger of rebellion.\n\nTo be specific, people should first be taught not to prefer any form of government they see in neighboring nations to their own, and not to seek change, whatever prosperity they see in nations governed differently. If people governed by an aristocratic or democratic assembly prosper, their prosperity does not come from aristocracy or democracy. It comes from the subjects' obedience and harmony. Likewise, people do not prosper under a monarchy simply because one man has the right to govern them; they prosper because they obey him. Take away obedience, and therefore harmony, from any kind of state. Its people will not prosper, and the state will soon dissolve. Those who try to reform a Common-wealth through disobedience will find that they destroy it instead. They resemble the foolish daughters of Peleus in the fable. They wanted to restore their aging father's youth, and on Medea's advice cut him into pieces and boiled him with strange herbs. They did not make him a new man. This wish for change resembles a breach of God's first Commandment. There God says, Non Habebis Deos Alienos, \"You shall not have the gods of other nations.\" Elsewhere, speaking of kings, he calls them gods.\n\nSecond, people should be taught not to admire any fellow subject's virtue, however high his rank or prominent his position in the Common-wealth, so much that they give him the obedience or honor owed only to the Sovereign. The same applies to any assembly other than the sovereign assembly. People in such positions represent the Sovereign in their particular roles. Subjects should accept only the direction they convey from sovereign authority, not direction originating with them. A Sovereign cannot be thought to love his people as he should if he fails to watch over their loyalty and lets popular men flatter them into disloyalty. This has often happened not merely in secret but openly. Preachers have even proclaimed the people's union with these men like a marriage before the church, In Facie Ecclesiae, and it has been announced in the open streets. It can aptly be compared to breaking the second of the ten Commandments.\n\nNor Should They Dispute the Sovereign Power\n\nThird, it follows that people should be told how wrong it is to speak badly of the sovereign representative, whether a person or an assembly; to question or dispute his power; or to use his name disrespectfully in any way. Doing so may make the people despise him and weaken the obedience on which the Common-wealth's safety depends. The third Commandment points by analogy to this teaching.\n\nFourth, people cannot learn this teaching, remember it, or even know where sovereign power lies after a generation has passed unless they set aside certain times from their ordinary work to listen to appointed teachers. Such times must therefore be fixed. People should gather then to pray to and praise God, the Sovereign of Sovereigns, and hear an account of their duties. Laws made by human authority that concern everyone should be read and explained to them, and they should be reminded of the authority that makes those rules laws. For this purpose the Jews had a Sabbath every seventh day, when the law was read and explained. Its observance reminded them that God was their King: he created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Resting from their work also reminded them that the God who was their King freed them from painful slave labor in Egypt. After celebrating God, they had time to enjoy lawful recreation themselves. Thus the entire first table of the Commandments sets out the extent of God's absolute power, not only as God but also as King of the Jews in particular by covenant. It can therefore show those who receive sovereign power by human consent what they ought to teach their subjects.\n\nBecause children's first education depends on their parents' care, children must obey them while under their guidance. Afterwards, gratitude requires them to recognize the benefit of that education through outward signs of honor. They should therefore be taught that each person's father was originally also his sovereign lord, with power of life and death over him. When the fathers of families established a Common-wealth, they gave up that absolute power, but they never meant to lose the honor owed to them for raising their children. Giving up that right to honor was not necessary for establishing sovereign power. Nor would anyone have reason to want children, feed them, and teach them if they would later bring him no more benefit than strangers did. This agrees with the fifth Commandment.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 2\n\nEvery Sovereign must also ensure that people are taught justice. Justice means not taking what belongs to another person. So people must be taught not to take by force or fraud anything that belongs to their neighbor under sovereign authority. Of the things someone owns, his life and limbs are dearest to him. Next, for most people, come the things connected to marital affection, and after those come wealth and the means of living. People must therefore be taught not to attack one another in private acts of revenge, violate marital honor, or steal one another's goods through force or fraud. They must also be shown the harmful results of false judgments caused by corrupt judges or witnesses. Such judgments destroy the distinction between what belongs to different people and make justice ineffective. All these duties are suggested by the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth Commandments.\n\nFinally, people must be taught that injustice includes not only unjust acts but also plans and intentions to commit them, even if chance prevents the acts. Injustice lies in a corrupt will as well as in a wrongful act. This is the meaning of the tenth Commandment and the sum of the second table of the Commandments. It all comes down to one command of mutual love: \"You shall love your neighbor as yourself.\" Similarly, the first table comes down to \"the love of God,\" whom the Jews had then newly accepted as their King.\n\nTo find the means and channels for teaching people, we must ask how beliefs opposed to human peace have become so firmly rooted in them despite resting on weak and false principles. I mean the beliefs I described in the preceding chapter: that people should decide what is lawful through their own private judgments rather than by the law; that subjects sin if they obey the Common-wealth's commands without first deciding for themselves that those commands are lawful; that their property rights in their wealth exclude the Common-wealth's authority over it; that subjects may lawfully kill those they call tyrants; that sovereign power can be divided; and similar beliefs. Here is how these ideas reach the people. Some people must focus on their work and trades because of necessity or greed. Others have enough to live on, or are idle, and pursue physical pleasures. Together these two groups make up most of humanity. Neither has time for the careful thought needed to learn the truth about natural justice or any other field of knowledge. They get their ideas about duty mostly from theologians preaching in pulpits. They also get them from neighbors or acquaintances who speak readily and persuasively, and so seem to know more about law and conscience than they do. The theologians and other people who appear learned, in turn, learn from universities, law schools, and books published by leading figures at those schools and universities. Clearly, then, teaching the people depends entirely on teaching young people correctly at the universities. Someone may ask: Are England's universities not learned enough already to do this? Or do you intend to teach the universities yourself? These are difficult questions. But I can answer the first without hesitation. Until near the end of Henry the Eighth's reign, the universities were the main supporters of the Pope's power against that of the Common-wealth. Many preachers, lawyers, and others educated there have since defended doctrines hostile to the King's sovereign power. This is sufficient evidence that, even if the universities did not invent those false doctrines, they did not know how to teach the true ones. These conflicting opinions make it certain that they have not been taught well enough. No wonder they still retain a taste of the subtle drink with which they were first seasoned against civil authority. As for the second question, it is neither appropriate nor necessary for me to answer yes or no. Anyone who sees what I am doing can easily tell what I think.\n\nThe people's safety also requires whoever holds sovereign power to administer justice equally to people of every rank. The rich and powerful must be able to obtain redress for injuries, and so must poor and unknown people. The powerful must have no more hope of escaping punishment when they use violence against, dishonor, or otherwise injure poorer people than when poorer people do the same to them. That is what equity requires. Since equity is a rule of the Law of Nature, a Sovereign is as bound by it as the poorest of his people. Every violation of law is an offense against the Common-wealth, but some violations are also offenses against private individuals. Offenses against only the Common-wealth can be pardoned without violating equity, because anyone may choose to pardon an offense against himself. An offense against a private individual cannot fairly be pardoned without the injured person's consent or reasonable compensation.\n\nDifferences in rank among subjects arise from acts of sovereign power. They therefore have no more place before the Sovereign, that is, in a court of justice, than the difference between kings and their subjects has before the King of Kings. Great people's honor should be valued according to the good they do and the help they give people of lower rank, or not valued at all. The violence, oppression, and injuries they commit are made worse, not excused, by their high position, because they have less need to commit them. Favoring the powerful has these consequences: escaping punishment makes them arrogant; arrogance breeds hatred; and hatred leads people to try to bring down everyone whose power oppresses and insults them, even if this destroys the Common-wealth.\n\nEqual justice also requires taxes to be imposed equally. Equality here depends not on equal wealth but on the equal debt each person owes the Common-wealth for his defense. It is not enough to work for one's living. A person must also fight, if necessary, to protect the fruits of that work. People must either do what the Jews did when they rebuilt the Temple after returning from captivity, building with one hand and holding a sword in the other, or hire others to fight for them. Taxes imposed by sovereign power are simply wages owed to those who bear the public sword and defend private people as they work in their different trades and occupations. The benefit everyone receives is the enjoyment of life, which is just as dear to the poor as to the rich. A poor person therefore owes the defenders of his life as much as a rich person owes for the defense of his own. The exception is that rich people who employ poor people may owe for the defense of many others as well as themselves. Given this, equal taxation depends more on taxing what is consumed equally than on taxing the wealth of those who consume it. Why should someone who works hard, saves the fruits of his work, and consumes little pay more than someone who lives idly, earns little, and spends everything he earns? Both receive the same protection from the Common-wealth. But when taxes fall on what people consume, each person pays equally for what he uses. The Common-wealth also loses nothing because of extravagant private spending.\n\nSome people are unable to support themselves by working because of circumstances they cannot avoid. They should not be left to private charity. The Common-wealth's laws should provide what their basic needs require. It is uncharitable for any person to neglect those unable to support themselves, and equally uncharitable for a Sovereign to leave them at the mercy of such uncertain charity.\n\nPeople who are physically strong are a different matter: they should be required to work. To prevent them from claiming that they cannot find work, there should be laws encouraging every kind of productive activity, including navigation, farming, fishing, and all kinds of manufacturing that require labor. As the number of poor but able-bodied people keeps growing, they should be moved to countries that are not sufficiently populated. They must not wipe out the people they find there. Instead, they should make those people settle closer together. The inhabitants should stop ranging over large areas to grab what they find and instead carefully cultivate each small plot to provide food at the proper time. When the whole world has too many inhabitants, the last remedy is war, which provides for everyone through either victory or death.\n\nThe Sovereign must also make good laws. But what makes a law good? By a good law I do not mean a just law, since no law can be unjust. Sovereign power makes the law, and everyone among the people has authorized and accepted whatever that power does. No one can call unjust what everyone has chosen to have done. The laws of a Common-wealth resemble the rules of a game: rules on which all the players agree are unjust to none of them. A good law is necessary for the good of the people and is also clear.\n\nLaws are authorized rules. Their purpose is not to prevent people from doing anything voluntarily. They should direct and guide people so that their strong desires, rashness, or poor judgment do not cause them harm. Hedges are placed beside a road not to stop travelers but to keep them on the road. An unnecessary law does not serve the real purpose of law and is therefore not good. One might think a law is good if it benefits the Sovereign even though the people do not need it. That is not so, for the Sovereign's good cannot be separated from the people's good. A Sovereign with weak subjects is weak himself, and people whose Sovereign lacks the power to govern them as he chooses are weak. Unnecessary laws are not good laws but traps to collect money. Where sovereign authority is recognized, such traps are unnecessary; where it is not, they cannot adequately defend the people.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXX, 3\n\nA law's clarity depends less on its wording than on a statement of the reasons and aims behind it. That statement tells us what the lawmaker meant. Once we know that, a few words can make the law easier to understand than many words can. All words can have more than one meaning, so adding words to the body of a law adds ambiguity. Excessive care with wording also seems to suggest that anyone who finds a way around its exact words is beyond the law's reach. This causes many unnecessary lawsuits. When I think how short ancient laws were and how they grew longer over time, I seem to see a contest between those who draft laws and those who argue cases. The drafters try to limit the lawyers, and the lawyers try to get around those limits. The lawyers have won. The lawmaker, who in every Common-wealth is the supreme representative, whether one person or an assembly, must therefore explain clearly why each law was made. The law itself should be as short as possible while using precise, meaningful terms.\n\nThe Sovereign's duty also includes applying punishments and rewards properly. Punishment is meant not for revenge or to vent anger, but to correct the offender or to correct others through his example. The harshest punishments should therefore fall on crimes most dangerous to the public. These include crimes driven by hatred of the established government, crimes arising from contempt for justice, crimes that arouse widespread public anger, and crimes that may seem to have official approval if unpunished, as when the sons, servants, or favorites of powerful people commit them. Public anger turns against not only the people who commit or direct injustice but also any authority likely to protect them. Thus Tarquin was driven out of Rome and the monarchy itself was dissolved because of the outrageous act of one of his sons. But crimes committed through weakness often allow for leniency without harm to the Common-wealth. Such crimes may result from great provocation, fear, or need, or from ignorance about whether an act is a serious crime. Where leniency is possible, the Law of Nature requires it. Punishing the leaders and teachers of a disturbance can set a useful example for the Common-wealth; punishing the poor people they misled cannot. Harshness toward those people punishes ignorance for which the Sovereign may largely be responsible, since it was his fault they were not better taught.\n\nLikewise, the Sovereign has a duty to award benefits only in ways that help the Common-wealth. That is what rewards are for. He does this when he gives people who have served the Common-wealth well enough compensation to encourage others to serve it just as faithfully and to study how to serve it better, while spending as little public money as possible. Paying an ambitious, popular subject money or giving him a high position to make him keep quiet and stop corrupting the people's minds is not a reward. Rewards are for past service, not for harmful behavior. Such payment shows fear, not gratitude, and hurts rather than helps the public. Trying to buy off ambition is like Hercules' struggle with the many-headed monster Hydra: whenever he defeated one head, three more grew in its place. When one popular man's stubbornness is overcome with a payment, his example encourages many more to cause the same trouble in hopes of the same benefit. Just as the sale of manufactured goods increases their production, making malice profitable increases malice. These measures may sometimes postpone a civil war, but they make the danger greater and public ruin more certain. A Sovereign entrusted with public safety therefore violates his duty if he rewards those who seek power by disrupting their country's peace. He should oppose such men early, at a little risk, rather than wait until he faces a greater risk later.\n\nAnother duty of the Sovereign is to choose good counselors, meaning people whose advice he takes in governing the Common-wealth. The word counsel, Consilium, derived in a corrupted form from Considium, has a broad meaning. It includes any assembly of people sitting together, whether to plan future action, judge past events, or decide how present law applies. Here I use it only for advice about future action. In this sense no one chooses counselors in a democracy or aristocracy, because the advisers themselves are members of the body they advise. The choice of counselors therefore belongs to monarchy. A monarch fails in his duty if he does not try to choose the most capable people in each field. The most capable counselors have the least expectation of gaining from bad advice and know the most about what promotes the Common-wealth's peace and defense. It is hard to tell who hopes to benefit from public disorder. But one good reason for suspicion is a man who flatters the people about grievances that are unreasonable or impossible to remedy while his own resources cannot cover his usual expenses. Anyone who needs to know can easily observe these signs. It is even harder to tell who understands public affairs best, though people who understand those affairs have much less need to identify such experts. In almost any field, knowing who understands its rules requires a considerable understanding of the field itself. No one can be sure another person's rules are true without first learning to understand them. The best signs of knowledge in any field are long experience in it and consistently good results. Good advice does not come by chance or inheritance. There is therefore no more reason to expect the rich or noble to give good advice on affairs of state than to expect them to design the dimensions of a fortress. We could only think otherwise if politics, unlike geometry, required no method of study and could be learned just by watching. That is false. Politics is the harder subject of the two. In these parts of Europe, certain people have been thought entitled by inheritance to sit in the highest council of state. This practice comes from the conquests of the ancient Germans. Many independent lords joined together to conquer other nations. They would not join the alliance without privileges that would later distinguish their descendants from their subjects' descendants. These privileges conflict with sovereign power. Such people may appear to keep them through the Sovereign's favor, but if they insist on them as a right, they must gradually lose them. In the end they will have only the honor that naturally comes from their abilities.\n\nHowever capable the counselors may be, their advice is more useful when each gives his opinion and reasons separately rather than in speeches before an assembly. It is also more useful when they have thought beforehand rather than speaking without preparation. In private and with preparation they have more time to consider the consequences of action. They are also less likely to disagree merely from envy, rivalry, or other passions stirred up by differences of opinion.\n\nOn matters that concern only the ease and welfare that subjects can gain through laws about domestic affairs, rather than relations with other nations, the best advice comes from the general reports and complaints of people in each province. They know their own needs best. Their requests should be carefully considered as long as they do not demand anything that reduces the essential rights of sovereignty. Without those rights, as I have often said, the Common-wealth cannot survive at all.\n\nAn army's chief commander must be popular with his troops. Otherwise they will neither love nor fear him as they should, and he cannot do his job successfully. He must work hard, be brave, friendly, generous, and fortunate. Then his soldiers will believe both that he is capable and that he cares for them. This popularity makes them eager and bold enough to earn his favor. It also protects the general's authority when he needs to punish soldiers who mutiny or neglect their duties. But unless precautions ensure the commander's loyalty, the soldiers' love is dangerous to sovereign power, especially when that power belongs to an assembly that is not popular. For the people's safety, those to whom the Sovereign entrusts his armies must therefore be both good commanders and loyal subjects.\n\nIf the Sovereign himself is popular, meaning his people respect and love him, a subject's popularity poses no danger. Soldiers are never so generally unjust that they will side with a captain they love against their Sovereign when they love both their Sovereign himself and his cause. That is why those who have violently overthrown a lawful Sovereign have always had to invent claims to his position before they could firmly take it. They do this to spare the people the shame of accepting them. A recognized right to sovereign power makes a ruler so popular that, on his side, he needs only to show that he can fully govern his own household to win his subjects' hearts. On his enemies' side, he needs only for them to disband their armies. For the largest and most active part of humanity has never yet been truly satisfied with the present state of affairs.\n\nI need say nothing here about a Sovereign's duties toward other Sovereigns, which fall under what is commonly called the Law of Nations. The Law of Nations and the Law of Nature are the same thing. In seeking his people's safety, each Sovereign has the same right that any individual has in seeking the safety of his own body. The law that tells people who have no civil government what to do and what to avoid in dealing with one another tells Common-wealths the same. That is, it directs the consciences of sovereign princes and sovereign assemblies. The only court of natural justice is conscience, where God, not a human being, reigns. God's laws that bind all humanity are natural laws insofar as he is the author of nature, and laws insofar as the same God is King of Kings. I will discuss the Kingdom of God, both as King of Kings and as King of a particular people, in the remainder of this work.\n\nCHAPTER XXXI. ON THE KINGDOM OF GOD BY NATURE\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXXI, 1\n\nOf God's Kingdom by Nature\n\nI have already given enough proof of four points. The condition of mere nature, or absolute liberty, for people who are neither sovereigns nor subjects, is anarchy and war. The rules that guide people away from that condition are the Laws of Nature. A Common-wealth without Sovereign Power is just an empty word and cannot survive. Subjects owe their Sovereigns unconditional obedience in everything that does not conflict with the Laws of God. To understand civic duty fully, we now need to know what those Laws of God are. Otherwise a person who receives an order from the civil authority cannot tell whether it conflicts with God's Law. Too much civil obedience might offend God. Or fear of offending God might lead the person to disobey the Common-wealth. To avoid both dangers, we need to know the divine Laws. And since knowing any law depends on knowing the Sovereign Power behind it, I will next discuss the Kingdom of God.\n\n“God is King, let the Earth rejoice,” says the psalmist (Psal. 96. 1). And again: “God is King though the Nations be angry; and he that sits on the Cherubim, though the earth be moved” (Psal. 98. 1). Whether they want to or not, people are always subject to God's power. By denying God's existence or providence, they may cast off the comfort of belief, but not his rule over them. Still, calling this power of God a kingdom is a metaphor when it extends over animals, plants, and lifeless bodies as well as people. Properly speaking, someone reigns only when he governs subjects by his word. He promises rewards to those who obey it and threatens punishment for those who do not. Thus lifeless bodies and unreasoning creatures are not subjects in God's Kingdom: they cannot understand instructions as his. Nor are atheists, or people who believe God takes no interest in human actions, his subjects in this sense. They acknowledge no word as his and expect no rewards or punishments from him. Those who believe God governs the world, has given people rules, and has offered them rewards and punishments are God's subjects. All the others must be regarded as enemies.\n\nRule by words requires that those words be clearly made known; otherwise they are not laws. A law must be announced clearly enough that ignorance is no excuse. Human laws are announced in one way: proclamation by a human voice. But God declares his Laws in three ways: through the dictates of natural reason; through revelation; and through the voice of a person whose miracles have led others to trust him. Accordingly, the Word of God has three forms: rational, directly perceived, and prophetic. These correspond to three ways of hearing: right reason, supernatural perception, and faith. No universal Laws have been given through supernatural perception, which involves revelation or inspiration. God speaks in that way only to particular people and says different things to different people.\n\nA twofold Kingdom of God, natural and prophetic. The difference between the other two kinds of God's Word, rational and prophetic, lets us distinguish two kinds of his Kingdom. In his natural Kingdom, he governs everyone who acknowledges his providence through the natural dictates of right reason. In his prophetic Kingdom, he chose a particular nation, the Jews, as his subjects. He governed them alone, not only by natural reason but also by specific Laws spoken through his holy prophets. In this chapter I will discuss God's natural Kingdom.\n\nThe Right of God's Sovereignty comes from his unlimited power. God's Right of Nature to rule people and punish those who break his Laws does not come from his having created them, as though he demanded obedience in return for his gifts. It comes from his irresistible power. I have already shown how Sovereign Right arises from a pact. To show how the same Right can arise from nature, I need only show when that Right is never given up. By nature everyone had a Right to everything, including the Right to rule everyone else. But no one could enforce that Right. For their own safety, people therefore gave it up and jointly appointed people with Sovereign Authority to rule and defend them. If someone had possessed irresistible power, however, there would have been no reason for him not to rule and defend both himself and others as he saw fit. Thus anyone with irresistible power naturally has dominion over everyone because his power surpasses theirs. It is through that power that Almighty God naturally has his Kingdom over people and the Right to afflict them as he pleases. He has it not because he is their gracious creator but because he is all-powerful. Punishment is due only for sin, since the word means suffering imposed for sin. But the Right to cause suffering does not always come from a person's sin; it comes from God's power.\n\nAncient writers debated why evil people often prosper while good people suffer. That is the same as asking by what Right God distributes prosperity and hardship in this life. This difficult question has shaken the faith of ordinary people, philosophers, and even saints in divine providence. David says, “How good is the God of Israel to those who are upright in heart; and yet I almost lost my footing and nearly slipped, for I was troubled by the wicked when I saw the ungodly prosper.” And Job protested earnestly to God about his many sufferings despite his righteousness. In Job's case God himself settles the question by pointing to his own power, not to Job's sin. Job's friends took his suffering as evidence that he had sinned. Job defended himself on the strength of his clear conscience. God then took up the matter. With arguments from his power, such as “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth,” he justified Job's suffering, upheld Job's innocence, and rejected his friends' mistaken doctrine. Our Savior made a similar judgment about the man born blind: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; but this happened so that the works of God might be revealed in him.” It is also said that “death entered the world through sin.” This means that if Adam had never sinned, he would never have died, or had his soul separated from his body. But it does not follow that God could not justly have caused him suffering without any sin, just as God causes suffering to other living creatures that cannot sin.\n\nHaving explained how God's Right of Sovereignty rests on nature alone, we must next consider the divine Laws, or dictates of natural reason. They concern either people's natural duties to one another or the honor naturally owed to our divine Sovereign. The first are the Laws of Nature already discussed in Chapters 14. and 15. of this book: equity, justice, mercy, humility, and the other moral virtues. What remains is to consider what natural reason alone, without any other word from God, tells people about honoring and worshiping the divine Majesty.\n\nHonor begins with an inward belief about another person's power and goodness. To honor God is therefore to think as highly as possible of his power and goodness. The outward signs of this belief in our words and actions are called worship. Worship is one part of what the Latin word cultus means. Strictly and consistently, cultus means the work someone does on something in order to gain a benefit from it. Some things we benefit from are under our control. Their benefits follow naturally from the work we put into them. Other things are not under our control; they respond to our efforts as they choose. In the first case, work on the earth is called cultivation, and educating children cultivates their minds. In the second, when we seek to influence people's choices through courtesy rather than force, cultus means courting their favor through helpful acts. These include praise, acknowledging their power, and doing whatever pleases people from whom we hope to benefit. This is worship in the proper sense. Thus Publicola is understood to mean someone who courts the people, while cultus Dei means the worship of God.\n\nInward honor, or belief in someone's power and goodness, gives rise to three Passions. Love concerns goodness; hope and fear concern power. It also gives rise to three kinds of outward worship: praise, magnifying, and blessing. Praise concerns goodness. Magnifying and blessing concern power and its result, happiness. Praise and magnifying can be expressed in words and actions. We use words when we call someone good or great. We act when we thank him for his generosity or obey his power. But we can express our belief that another person is happy only in words.\n\nSome signs of honor, both descriptions and actions, are naturally signs of it. Descriptions such as good, just, and generous are examples; so are actions such as prayer, thanks, and obedience. Other signs depend on human convention or custom. At some times and places they honor someone; elsewhere they dishonor someone or have no special meaning. Gestures used for greeting, prayer, and thanksgiving vary this way. The first kind is natural worship; the second is worship set by choice.\n\nWorship set by choice has two forms: commanded and voluntary. It is commanded when the person worshiped requires it, and voluntary when the worshiper chooses it. In commanded worship, the worship lies in obedience, not in the words or gestures. In voluntary worship, it depends on what the onlookers think. If the words or actions intended as honor look ridiculous or insulting to them, they are not worship. A sign has meaning for the person who receives or observes it, not simply for the person who makes it.\n\nThere is also public and private worship. Public worship is what a Common-wealth does as one person. Private worship is what an individual does. Public worship is freely chosen by the Common-wealth as a whole but not by each individual. Private worship is freely chosen in secret. In public, however, it always faces some restraint from laws or public opinion, which is the opposite of liberty.\n\nAmong people, the purpose of worship is power. When someone sees another person worshiped, he assumes that person is powerful and becomes more willing to obey him. This increases that person's power. But God pursues no ends. We worship him out of duty. The rules for doing so come from our ability to honor him and from what reason tells weaker people to do toward more powerful people: to hope for benefits, fear harm, or give thanks for benefits already received.\n\n### Part II, Chapter XXXI, 2\n\nTo find out what worship of God the light of nature teaches us, I will begin with his attributes. First, we must say that God exists. No one can intend to honor something he believes does not exist.\n\nSecond, philosophers who said the world, or the soul of the world, was God spoke of him in an unworthy way and denied his existence. God means the cause of the world. To say that the world is God is to say it has no cause, and thus there is no God.\n\nThird, saying that the world was never created but has always existed denies that God exists. Something eternal has no cause.\n\nFourth, those who think they give God peace by denying that he cares for humanity strip him of his honor. Their claim removes people's love and fear of him, which are the roots of honor.\n\nFifth, when speaking of God's greatness and power, calling him finite does not honor him. To assign him less than we possibly can shows no desire to honor him. We can always add something more to what is finite.\n\nFor this reason, giving God a shape does not honor him, since every shape has limits.\n\nNor does saying that we can conceive or imagine him, or hold an idea of him in our minds. Everything we can conceive has limits.\n\nNor should we say that he has parts or is a whole, since these belong only to finite things.\n\nNor should we say that he occupies a particular place. Anything in a place is bounded and finite.\n\nNor should we say that he moves or rests. Both imply that he occupies a place.\n\nNor should we say that there is more than one God, since this implies that each is finite. There cannot be more than one infinite being. Nor should we assign him Passions that involve grief, such as regret, anger, or mercy; Passions that involve a lack, such as appetite, hope, or desire; or any other passive capacity. We can speak this way metaphorically, referring to an effect rather than a Passion. For a Passion involves a power limited by something else.\n\nSo when we speak of God's will, we should not understand it as the rational appetite that human will is. We mean the power through which he brings everything about.\n\nThe same applies when we assign him sight and other acts of the senses, as well as knowledge and understanding. In us these are disturbances of the mind caused by external things pressing on our bodily organs. Nothing of this kind exists in God. These things depend on natural causes and cannot be assigned to him.\n\nSomeone who wants to say nothing about God beyond what natural reason supports must use negative descriptions, such as infinite, eternal, and beyond comprehension; superlatives such as highest and greatest; or indefinite descriptions such as good, just, holy, and creator. We use them not to define what he is, which would confine him within the limits of our imagination, but to show how much we admire him and how ready we are to obey him. That shows humility and a desire to honor him as much as we can. Only one name expresses our understanding of his nature: I AM. And only one name expresses his relation to us: God, a name that includes Father, King, and Lord.\n\nAs for acts of worshiping God, reason gives us the broad rule that they must show an intention to honor him. First among these acts are prayers. People did not think that the sculptors who made images turned them into gods. It was the people who prayed to them who did so.\n\nSecond comes thanksgiving. In worshiping God it differs from prayer only in timing: prayers come before a benefit and thanks afterward. Both acknowledge that God gives us every benefit, past and future.\n\nThird are gifts, meaning sacrifices and offerings. If we offer the best, they show honor, since they express thanks.\n\nFourth, swearing by no one but God is naturally a sign of honor. It acknowledges that only God knows the heart and that no person's cleverness or strength can protect someone who swears falsely from God's vengeance.\n\nFifth, speaking thoughtfully about God is part of worship guided by reason. It shows fear of him, and fear acknowledges his power. Thus we should not use God's name carelessly or without purpose, which is to use it in vain. It serves a purpose only in an oath ordered by the Common-wealth to settle a judgment, or in an oath between Common-wealths to prevent war. Debating God's nature also dishonors him. In God's natural Kingdom, we are assuming that natural reason is the only way to know anything. Natural reason proceeds from the principles of natural science. But those principles cannot teach us God's nature when they cannot even teach us our own nature or that of the smallest living creature. So people who use natural reason to argue about God's attributes only dishonor him. In the attributes we give God, we should look not for a philosophical truth in the words but for a pious intention to give him all the honor we can. Failing to see this has produced volumes debating God's nature. They honor the cleverness and learning of their authors, not God. They amount to thoughtless, pointless misuse of his sacred name.\n\nSixth, natural reason tells us that prayers, thanks, offerings, and sacrifices should each be the best of their kind and express honor as clearly as possible. Prayers and thanks, for example, should be spoken in carefully composed, beautiful language, not in hasty, careless, or coarse words. Otherwise we do not honor God as fully as we can. The pagans were therefore foolish to worship images as gods. But using poetry and music, both sung and played on instruments, was reasonable. It was also reasonable that the animals and gifts they offered and the acts they performed in worship showed deep submission and recalled benefits received. They did these things intending to honor him.\n\nSeventh, reason tells us to worship God not only in secret but also, especially, openly before other people. Otherwise we lose the chance to bring others to honor him, which is one of the most valuable ways to honor someone.\n\nFinally, obedience to his Laws, which here means the Laws of Nature, is the greatest worship of all. Obedience is more acceptable to God than sacrifice, while contempt for his commandments is the greatest possible insult. These are the Laws of divine worship that natural reason gives to individuals.\n\nBut a Common-wealth is one person, so it should offer God one form of worship. It does so by ordering individuals to worship openly. This is public worship, whose defining feature is uniformity. Actions performed differently by different people do not constitute one act of public worship. Where different kinds of worship are permitted because individuals follow different religions, there is no public worship and the Common-wealth itself has no religion.\n\nWords, and therefore God's attributes, get their meanings from human agreement and convention. We should therefore treat as signs of honor those attributes that people intend as signs of honor. Anything individuals may choose to do where reason is the only law can also be established through civil Laws by the will of the Common-wealth. And a Common-wealth has no will and makes no Laws except through the will of whoever holds Sovereign Power. It follows that individuals should accept and use in public worship the attributes the Sovereign sets as signs of honor to God.\n\nNot every action becomes a sign through convention. Some naturally show honor, while others naturally show contempt. Human authority cannot make actions that people would be ashamed to perform before someone they respect into divine worship. Nor can it remove decent, modest, and humble conduct from worship. But countless other acts and gestures are neither honorable nor insulting in themselves. Subjects should accept and use whichever of these the Common-wealth orders everyone to use openly as signs of honor and part of God's worship. The Scripture's statement “It is better to obey God than men” applies to God's Kingdom by pact, not his Kingdom by nature.\n\nI have now briefly discussed God's natural Kingdom and natural Laws. To finish the chapter I will give a short account of his natural punishments. Every human action begins a chain of consequences so long that no human foresight can see its end. Pleasant and unpleasant events are joined in this chain. Anyone who acts for pleasure must also face all the suffering tied to that action. This suffering is the natural punishment for actions that bring more harm than good. Thus excessive indulgence naturally leads to disease; rashness to accidents; injustice to violence from enemies; pride to ruin; cowardice to oppression; careless rule by princes to rebellion; and rebellion to slaughter. Punishments follow breaches of Laws. Natural punishments must therefore follow breaches of the Laws of Nature as natural consequences, not as penalties chosen at will.\n\nThat concludes my account, drawn from the principles of natural reason, of the structure, nature, and Rights of Sovereigns and the duty of subjects. I now consider how far this doctrine is from the practice of most of the world, especially in the West, where people have learned morality from Rome and Athens. I also consider how much moral philosophy those who exercise Sovereign Power must understand. I nearly come to believe my work is as useless as Plato's Common-wealth. Plato also believed that disorder in states and changes of government through civil war could not end until Sovereigns became philosophers. But then I reflect that Sovereigns and their chief ministers need to know only the science of natural justice. They do not need to master mathematics, as Plato requires, beyond encouraging its study through good Laws. Nor has Plato or any other philosopher so far organized and adequately, or even plausibly, proved all the principles of moral teaching from which people could learn both to govern and to obey. So I regain some hope that someday this short and, I think, clear book will reach a Sovereign. Perhaps he will consider it himself without an interpreter who has a personal stake in the matter or envies it. By fully exercising his Sovereignty to protect its public teaching, he might turn this truth in theory into something useful in practice.\n\nPART III. OF A CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXII\n\nOf the Principles of Christian Politics\n\nThe Word of God Given Through Prophets Is the Main Principle\n\nOf Christian Politics\n\nSo far I have derived the Rights of Sovereign Power and subjects' duties only from principles of nature. These are things experience shows to be true, or agreement about the use of words makes true. They come from human nature as we know it through experience, and from generally accepted definitions of words essential to political reasoning. Next I must discuss the nature and Rights of a Christian Common-wealth. Much of this depends on supernatural revelations of God's will. My argument must therefore rest not only on the natural Word of God but also on the prophetic Word.\n\nEven so, we should not reject our senses and experience, or our natural reason, which is undoubtedly God's Word. These are the resources he has put in our hands to use until our blessed Savior returns. We should not wrap them in the cloth of unquestioning faith and put them away. We should use them to gain justice, peace, and true religion. God's Word contains many things beyond reason, which natural reason can neither prove nor disprove. But nothing in it contradicts reason. If something seems to, the error lies in our poor interpretation or faulty reasoning.\n\nWhen something in Scripture is too difficult for us to examine, we are told to bring our understanding into obedience to its words. We should not use logic to try to extract philosophical truths from mysteries we cannot grasp and that lie outside the rules of natural science. The mysteries of religion are like wholesome pills given to a sick person. Swallowed whole, they can cure; chewed up, they are usually vomited back up and do no good.\n\nBringing our understanding into obedience does not mean forcing our intellect to accept another person's opinion. It means choosing to obey where obedience is due. We cannot change our senses, memory, understanding, reason, or opinions at will. They necessarily follow from what we see, hear, and consider. They do not result from our will; rather, our will follows from them. We bring our understanding and reason into obedience when we refrain from arguing, speak as lawful authority orders us to speak, and live accordingly. In short, we place trust and faith in the speaker, even if our minds can form no idea at all from what he says.\n\nWhen God speaks to someone, he must speak either directly or through another person to whom he previously spoke directly. A person God speaks to directly may understand well enough how it happened. But it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for anyone else to know. Suppose someone tells me God has spoken to him directly and supernaturally, and I doubt him. I cannot readily see what argument he could offer that would require me to believe him. If he is my Sovereign, he can require me to obey and not to declare through word or action that I disbelieve him. But he cannot make me think differently from what my reason tells me. If he has no such authority over me, I am not required to believe or obey him.\n\nSaying that God spoke to him in Holy Scripture does not mean God spoke directly to him. God spoke through prophets, apostles, or the Church, as he does to other Christians. Saying that God spoke to him in a dream means only that he dreamed it. That cannot convince someone who knows most dreams arise naturally from earlier thoughts. A dream like that may come from self-importance, foolish arrogance, or a mistaken belief that one's own holiness or other virtue has earned an extraordinary revelation. Saying he saw a vision or heard a voice means he dreamed while half asleep. People often mistake a dream for a vision when they fail to notice they were dozing. Saying he speaks through supernatural inspiration means he strongly desires to speak, or thinks so highly of himself that he cannot give a sufficient natural reason for it. Almighty God can speak through dreams, visions, voices, and inspiration. But that gives us no obligation to believe someone who claims God spoke to him that way. As a human being, he may be mistaken; worse, he may be lying.\n\nHow, then, can a person who has received no direct revelation of God's will, apart from natural reason, know when to obey God's Word as delivered by a self-described prophet? (1 Kings 22) The king of Israel consulted 400 prophets about his war against Ramoth Gilead, but only Micaiah was a true prophet. (1 Kings 13) A true prophet sent to speak against Jeroboam's altar had performed two miracles in his presence, showing that God had sent him. Yet an old prophet tricked him into eating and drinking with him, claiming God's authority. If one prophet can deceive another, how can we know God's will except through reason? Scripture gives two marks that identify a true prophet only when found together. One is performing miracles. The other is teaching no religion other than the one already established. Neither alone is enough. (Deut. 13 v. 1,2,3,4,5 ) “If a prophet arises among you, or a dreamer of dreams, and claims he will perform a miracle, and the miracle happens; if he says, Let us follow unfamiliar gods whom you have not known, you must not listen to him, and so on. Instead, that prophet and dreamer of dreams must be put to death, because he has urged you to rebel against the Lord your God.” Notice two things. First, God does not accept miracles alone as proof that he has called a prophet. As the third verse says, they test whether we stay loyal to God. The Egyptian sorcerers worked great miracles, though not as great as Moses's. Second, no matter how great the miracle, if it urges rebellion against the King or someone governing by the King's authority, its performer must be treated as someone sent to test the people's loyalty. Here “rebel against the Lord your God” means the same as “rebel against your King.” At the foot of Mount Sinai they had made God their King by pact. He ruled them solely through Moses, who alone spoke with God and conveyed God's commandments to the people from time to time. In the same way, after our Savior Christ had led his disciples to acknowledge him as the Messiah—God's anointed, whom the Jews expected daily to become their King but rejected when he came—he warned them of the danger posed by miracles. “False Christs and false prophets will arise,” he said, “and perform great wonders and miracles, enough to mislead even the chosen, if that were possible” (Mat. 24. 24). This shows that false prophets may work miracles, yet we must not accept their teaching as God's Word. St. Paul tells the Galatians further that “if I myself or an angel from heaven preaches a different gospel to you from the one I preached, let him be cursed” (Gal. 1. 8). That gospel said Christ was King. It follows from Paul's words that he curses all preaching against the authority of the King they have accepted. He speaks to people who had already accepted Jesus through his preaching as the Christ, or King of the Jews.\n\nMiracles without preaching the doctrine God has established are not enough. Likewise, preaching the true doctrine without miracles is not enough evidence of direct revelation. A person who teaches no false doctrine but claims to be a prophet without showing a miracle deserves no more attention on that account, as Deut. 18. v. 21, 22 shows: “If you say in your heart, How shall we know the word of the prophet is not what the Lord has spoken? When a prophet speaks in the Lord's name and what he says does not happen, the Lord did not speak that word. The prophet spoke it from the pride of his own heart. Do not fear him.” But someone may ask how we can tell whether a prophet's prediction will come true. He may predict something after more time than a human lifetime, or say without naming a date that it will happen someday. Then this way of identifying a prophet is useless. The miracle that requires us to believe a prophet must therefore be confirmed by an event that happens immediately or soon after. Scripture thus clearly requires two things together to identify a true prophet, or direct revelation: teaching the religion God has established, and showing a present miracle. Neither alone requires anyone else to heed him.\n\nSince miracles have now ceased, we have no remaining sign for accepting anyone's claimed private revelations or inspirations. We have no duty to listen to teaching beyond what agrees with Holy Scripture. Since our Savior's time Scripture has taken the place of all other prophecy. Careful, sound reasoning from it can readily produce every rule needed to know our duty to God and to other people, without religious frenzy or supernatural inspiration. I will therefore draw the principles of my account from Scripture: the Rights of those who are the highest governors of Christian Common-wealths on earth, and the duties of Christian subjects toward their Sovereigns. To that end, in the next chapter I will discuss the Bible's books, writers, purpose, and authority.\n\nCHAPTER XXXIII. OF THE NUMBER, AGE, PURPOSE, AUTHORITY, AND INTERPRETERS OF THE BOOKS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIII, 1\n\nOf the Number, Age, Purpose, Authority, and Interpreters of the Books of Holy Scripture\n\nThe books of Holy Scripture are the books that should form the canon, meaning the rules of Christian life. Every rule for living that people are bound by conscience to observe is a law. So the question about Scripture is a question about what counts as Law, both natural and civil, throughout Christianity. Scripture does not specify which Laws each Christian King must establish in his dominions, but it does specify which he must not establish. I have already shown that Sovereigns alone make Laws in their own dominions. So in any nation only the books its Sovereign Authority establishes as canonical are canonical, or Law. God is, of course, Sovereign over all Sovereigns. When he speaks to a subject, that person should obey him, regardless of what any earthly ruler orders. But the question is not whether to obey God. It is when and what God has said. Subjects who receive no supernatural revelation can learn this only through the natural reason that led them to obey their respective Common-wealths, or lawful Sovereigns, in order to secure peace and justice. For that reason I can acknowledge as Holy Scripture no books of the Old Testament except those that the authority of the Church of England orders us to acknowledge. It is well known which books these are, so there is no need to list them here. They are the same books St. Jerome acknowledged. He regarded the others—the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobias, the first and second of Maccabees (although he had seen the first in Hebrew), and the third and fourth of Esdras—as Apocrypha. Josephus, a learned Jew writing under Emperor Domitian, counted Twenty Two canonical books, matching the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. St. Jerome also counted that many, though he divided them differently. Josephus counted Five Books of Moses, Thirteen by prophets who wrote histories of their own times (we shall later see how this fits the prophetic writings in the Bible), and Four books of hymns and moral rules. St. Jerome counted Five Books of Moses, Eight of prophets, and Nine other sacred books, which he called the Hagiographa. The Septuagint were 70. learned Jews whom Ptolemy, King of Egypt, summoned to translate the Jewish Law from Hebrew into Greek. They left us in Greek no other books as holy Scripture beyond those accepted by the Church of England.\n\nAll Christian Churches and all Christian sects that accept any books as canonical agree equally that the books of the New Testament are canonical.\n\nNo adequate evidence from other historical accounts establishes who originally wrote the different books of Holy Scripture. Such evidence is the only way to prove a matter of fact. Nor can natural reason establish it: reason proves the truth of a conclusion, not of a historical fact. We must therefore use evidence found within the books themselves. It cannot tell us the writer of every book, but it can help us know when they were written.\n\nFirst, the name “five Books of Moses” does not prove Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Nor do the names Book of Joshua, Book of Judges, Book of Ruth, and Books of the Kings prove Joshua, the Judges, Ruth, and the Kings wrote those books. A title can identify the subject as readily as the writer. The History of Livy identifies its writer, but the History of Scanderbeg takes its name from its subject. In the last chapter of Deuteronomy, Ver. 6. says of Moses's grave that “no one knows where his grave is to this day,” meaning the day those words were written. They clearly were written after Moses was buried. It would be strange to say that Moses himself, even speaking as a prophet, said while alive that his grave had not been found up to that day. Someone might argue that only the last chapter, and not the rest of the Pentateuch, was written by another person. But consider Genesis, Chap. 12. Ver. 6: “Abraham passed through the land to the place of Sichem, to the plain of Moreh, and the Canaanite was then in the land.” This must have been written by someone living after the Canaanite was no longer in the land, not by Moses, who died before entering it. Also, at Numbers 21. Ver. 14. the writer cites an older book, The Book of the Wars of the Lord. It recorded Moses's actions at the Red Sea and the brook of Arnon. There is therefore enough evidence that the five Books of Moses were written after his lifetime, though it is less clear how much later.\n\nMoses did not put those books together in their entirety as we now have them. Still, he wrote everything they say he wrote. An example is the volume of the Law, apparently contained in Deuteronomy from chapter 11 through chapter 27. The Israelites were also ordered to write it on stones when they entered Canaan. (Deut. 31. 9) Moses himself wrote it and gave it to Israel's priests and elders, to be read to all Israel every seventh year when they gathered for the feast of Tabernacles. It is the Law that God commanded their Kings, once that form of government was established, to copy from the priests and Levites and place beside the Ark. (Deut. 31. 26) After it was lost, Hilkiah found it again much later and sent it to King Josias. Josias had it read to the people and renewed the Covenant between them and God. (2 King. 22. 8 & 23. 1,2,3)\n\nMany passages in the Book of Joshua suggest it too was written long after Joshua lived. Joshua set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan to mark the Israelites' crossing. (Josh 4. 9) The writer says, “They are there to this day.” (Josh 5. 9) “To this day” indicates a time in the past beyond living memory. Likewise, after the Lord said he had removed the people's disgrace from Egypt, the writer says, “The place is called Gilgal to this day.” That would have been an odd thing to say in Joshua's own lifetime. The writer also says the name of the Valley of Achor, named for the trouble Achan caused in the camp, “remains to this day.” (Josh. 7. 26) That too must have been written long after Joshua. Many other passages give the same kind of evidence: Josh. 8. 29. 13. 13. 14. 14. 15. 63.\n\nSimilar evidence makes the same point about the Book of Judges, chap. 1. 21,26 6.24 10.4 15.19 17.6 and Ruth 1. 1. The strongest example is Judg. 18. 30. It says Jonathan “and his sons were priests to the Tribe of Dan until the day the land was taken captive.”\n\nThere is similar evidence that the Books of Samuel were written after Samuel lived: 1 Sam. 5.5. 7.13,15. 27.6. & 30.25. After David awarded an equal share of the spoils to those guarding the supplies and those fighting, the writer says, “He made it a statute and a rule for Israel to this day.” (2. Sam. 6.4.) Also, after the Lord killed Uzzah for reaching out to steady the Ark, David was upset and named the place Perez-Uzzah. The writer says it bears that name “to this day.” That book must therefore have been written long after these events and long after David's lifetime.\n\nConsider the two Books of the Kings and the two Books of the Chronicles. Many passages mention monuments that the writer says still existed in his day: 1 Kings 9.13. 9.21. 10. 12. 12.19. 2 Kings 2.22. 8.22. 10.27. 14.7. 16.6. 17.23. 17.34. 17.41. 1 Chron. 4.41. 5.26. Their histories also continue through the captivity in Babylon. That alone proves they were written after it. Events recorded in a register always happen before the books that mention and cite it. These books repeatedly refer readers to the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, the books of the prophet Samuel, the prophet Nathan, and the prophet Ahijah, the Vision of Jehdo, and the books of the prophet Serveiah and the prophet Addo.\n\nThe Books of Esdras and Nehemiah were certainly written after the people returned from captivity. They describe that return, the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls and houses, the renewal of the Covenant, and the establishment of their government.\n\nQueen Esther's story takes place during the Captivity. Its writer must therefore have lived then or later.\n\nThe Book of Job offers no clue to when it was written. There is ample evidence (Exekiel 14.14, and James 5.11.) that Job was a real person. But the book itself seems less a history than a work on a question much debated in ancient times: “Why do wicked people often prosper in this world while good people suffer?” This seems especially likely because, as St. Jerome says, the Hebrew is prose from the beginning through the third verse of the third chapter, where Job's complaint starts. From there through the sixth verse of the last chapter it is written in hexameter verse, and the rest of that chapter is prose again. The whole debate is thus in verse, with prose added as a preface and an epilogue. Verse is not the usual way for someone in great pain like Job, or friends who come to comfort him, to speak. But in ancient philosophy, especially moral philosophy, it was common.\n\nDavid wrote most of the Psalms for use by the choir. Some songs by Moses and other holy men were added. Some Psalms, including the 137. and the 126., date from after the return from captivity. The Psalter must therefore have been collected and arranged in its present form after the Jews returned from Babylon.\n\nThe Proverbs collect wise and godly sayings. Some are Solomon's, some Agur son of Jakeh's, and some the mother of King Lemuel's. It is no more reasonable to think Solomon collected them than to think Agur or Lemues's mother did. Although these people supplied the sayings, some other godly person living after all of them gathered them into a single book.\n\nThe Books of Ecclesiastes and the Canticles contain nothing that was not Solomon's, apart from possibly their titles. “The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King in Jerusalem” and “the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's” seem to have been added to distinguish the books when the books of Scripture were gathered into one body of Law. That way both the teachings and their authors would be known.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIII, 2\n\nThe earliest prophets are Sophoniah, Jonas, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Michaiah. They lived in the time of Amaziah and Azariah, also called Ozias, kings of Judah. But the Book of Jonas is not really a record of his prophecy. That prophecy consists of just these words: “Forty days and Ninivy will be destroyed.” Instead, the book tells the story of his stubbornness and his arguments against God's commands. Since he is the subject of the story, he is unlikely to have written it. The Book of Amos, however, contains Amos's prophecy.\n\nJeremiah, Abdias, Nahum, and Habakkuk prophesied in the time of Josiah.\n\nEzekiel, Daniel, Aggeus, and Zacharias prophesied during the Captivity.\n\nTheir writings do not show when Joel and Malachi prophesied. But the headings of their books make something else clear enough: the whole Old Testament was put into its present form after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, and before Ptolemaeus Philadelphus had it translated into Greek by seventy men sent to him from Judea for that purpose. If the books called Apocrypha can be trusted on this point—the Church recommends them as useful for instruction, though not as canonical—Esdras put Scripture into its present form. This appears from his own words in the second book, chapter 14, verses 21, 22, and following. Speaking to God, he says: “Your law has been burned. So no one knows what you have done or what works are to begin. But if I have found favor with you, send the Holy Spirit into me. I will write everything that has happened in the world since the beginning, as it was written in your law, so people may find your path and those who want to live in later days may live.” And in verse 45: “When the forty days were over, the Most High spoke, saying, ‘Publish openly the first books you have written, so both worthy and unworthy people may read them. But keep the last seventy, to give only to wise people among the people.’” That is enough about when the books of the Old Testament were written.\n\nAll the New Testament writers lived within less than a century after Christ's Ascension. Except for St. Paul and St. Luke, they had all seen our Savior or been his disciples. So anything they wrote dates back to the time of the apostles. But the Church did not accept and recognize the books as their writings quite so early. The Old Testament books come down to us from no earlier than Esdras, who, guided by God's Spirit, recovered them after they had been lost. Likewise, the New Testament books cannot be traced, as a collection, to any earlier time than when Church governors gathered them, approved them, and recommended them as the writings of the apostles and disciples whose names they bear. There were not many copies, and no private person could easily have had them all. The first list of all the books of both Testaments appears in the Canons of the Apostles, supposedly collected by Clement, the first bishop of Rome after St. Peter. But that claim is only a supposition and many dispute it. The Council of Laodicea is the first council we know of that recommended the Bible to the Christian churches of its day as the writings of the prophets and apostles. It met in the year 364 after Christ. By then, ambition had so overtaken leading Church teachers that they no longer treated emperors, even Christian emperors, as shepherds of the people. They treated Christian emperors as sheep and non-Christian emperors as wolves. They tried to present their teachings not as the advice and information of preachers, but as the laws of absolute governors. They even considered frauds pious if the frauds made people more obedient to Christian doctrine. Nevertheless, I am convinced that they did not falsify Scripture, even though only churchmen had copies of the New Testament books. If they had meant to do that, they would surely have made the books more favorable to their power over Christian princes and civil sovereignty than they are. So I see no reason to doubt that the Old and New Testaments, as we now have them, are true records of what the prophets and apostles did and said. Perhaps some books called Apocrypha are true records too, if they were excluded from the canon only because they were not found in Hebrew, and not because their teachings disagreed with the other books. After Alexander the Great conquered Asia, few educated Jews lacked a thorough knowledge of Greek. The seventy translators who turned the Bible into Greek were all Hebrews. We also still have works by Philo and Josephus, both Jews, written eloquently in Greek. But it is the Church's authority, not the writer's identity, that makes a book canonical.\n\nThough different men wrote these books, their writers plainly had one and the same Spirit. They all work toward the same end: setting out the rights of the Kingdom of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Genesis traces the ancestry of God's people from the creation of the world to their arrival in Egypt. The other four books of Moses tell how they chose God as their king and give the laws he set for their government. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Samuel, up to Saul's time, describe what God's people did until they threw off God's rule and asked for a king like their neighboring nations had. The rest of the Old Testament history traces the line of David down to the Captivity. From that line would come the one who restored the Kingdom of God: our blessed Savior, God the Son. The books of the prophets foretold his coming. Then the Evangelists wrote about his life, his deeds, and his claim to the Kingdom while he lived on earth. Finally, Acts and the apostles' letters declare the coming of God the Holy Spirit and the authority he left with the apostles and their successors to direct the Jews and invite the Gentiles. In short, the Old Testament histories and prophecies and the New Testament Gospels and letters all have the same aim: to bring people to obey God, first as represented by Moses and the priests, second as represented by the man Christ, and third as represented by the apostles and the successors to their authority. These represented God's person at different times: Moses and his successors, the high priests and kings of Judah, in the Old Testament; Christ himself while he lived on earth; and the apostles and their successors from the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down upon them, to today.\n\nThe different branches of Christianity argue a great deal about where Scripture gets its authority. Sometimes they put the question another way: “How do we know it is God's word?” or “Why do we believe it is God's word?” The difficulty of answering comes largely from the unclear wording of the question. Everyone agrees that God is its first and original author. So that is not what they dispute. Also, nobody can know that Scripture is God's word unless God has revealed it to that person supernaturally, though all true Christians believe it. So the question is not properly one about our knowledge. Finally, if it is a question about our belief, different people believe for different reasons. No single general answer covers them all. The real question is: By whose authority does Scripture become law?\n\nWhere Scripture agrees with the Laws of Nature, it is unquestionably God's law. It carries its own authority, which anyone able to use natural reason can read. But this authority is no different from that of any other moral teaching that agrees with reason. The rules of reason are eternal laws, not laws that have been made.\n\nIf God himself makes Scripture law, it is like a written law. Such a law binds only people to whom God has made it known clearly enough that none of them can excuse themselves by saying they did not know it was his.\n\nIf God has not supernaturally revealed to a person that these writings are his, or that the people who published them were sent by him, that person is bound to obey them only by the authority of someone whose commands already have the force of law. That is the authority of the Commonwealth, held by the Sovereign, who alone has legislative power. If that legislative authority does not give Scripture the force of law, some other authority from God must do so, either private or public. A private revelation binds only the person to whom God has specifically revealed it. Suppose everyone had to accept as God's law whatever individuals tried to impose on them by claiming private inspiration or revelation. Many people, through pride or ignorance, mistake their own dreams, wild fantasies, and madness for signs of God's Spirit. Others, from ambition, falsely claim such signs against their own consciences. Under those conditions, no divine law could be recognized. If the authority is public, it belongs either to the Commonwealth or to the Church. If the Church is one person, it is the same as a Commonwealth of Christians. It is called a Commonwealth because its people are united in one person, their Sovereign. It is called a Church because those people are Christians united under one Christian Sovereign. But if the Church is not one person, it has no authority. It cannot command or act, possess any power or right, or have a will, reason, or voice. All these belong to persons. If all Christians do not belong to one Commonwealth, they are not one person. There is then no universal Church with authority over them, so the universal Church does not make Scripture law. Alternatively, if they do form one Commonwealth, all Christian monarchs and states are private persons. A universal Sovereign of all Christendom could judge, depose, and punish them. So the question about Scripture's authority comes down to this: “Are Christian kings and sovereign assemblies in Christian Commonwealths supreme in their own territories, answerable directly to God? Or are they subject to one vicar of Christ, set over the universal Church, who may judge, condemn, depose, and put them to death whenever he thinks it useful or necessary for the common good?”\n\nWe cannot answer that question without looking more closely at the Kingdom of God. That inquiry will also let us judge who has authority to interpret Scripture. Whoever has lawful power to make a writing into law also has power to approve or reject its interpretation.\n\nChapter XXXIV. What Spirit, Angel, and Inspiration Mean in the Books of Holy Scripture\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIV, 1\n\nWhat Spirit, Angel, and Inspiration Mean in the Books of Holy Scripture\n\nAll sound reasoning depends on words having consistent meanings. In what follows, those meanings depend neither on what I intend, as they do in natural science, nor on everyday usage, as they do in ordinary conversation. They depend on what the words mean in Scripture. So before going further, I must use the Bible to establish the meanings of words whose ambiguity could make my conclusions unclear or debatable. I will begin with “body” and “spirit.” The schools call these corporeal and incorporeal substances.\n\nIn its broadest sense, a body is something that fills or occupies a definite area or imagined place. It does not depend on our imagination; it is a real part of the universe. The universe is the collection of all bodies. So every real part of it is a body, and everything properly called a body belongs to the universe. A body is also called a substance because bodies can change: living creatures can perceive them in different ways. Substance means something subject to different properties. A body may be moving or still, and may seem hot or cold to us, or have one color, smell, taste, or sound and then another. We attribute these different appearances, produced when bodies act differently on our sense organs, to changes in the bodies acting on us. We call them the bodies' accidents. In this sense, substance and body mean the same thing. So “incorporeal substance” is self-contradictory, just like “incorporeal body.”\n\nIn everyday usage, though, people do not call every part of the universe a body. They use the word for things they can feel resisting their touch or see blocking their view. Thus people do not usually count air and things made of air as bodies. When they notice their effects, they call them wind, breath, or spirits, because the Latin word for them is spiritus. For example, they call the airy substance thought to give living creatures life and movement their vital and animal spirits. Then there are images formed by the brain that show us bodies where there are none: in a mirror, in a dream, or to a disturbed mind while awake. As the apostle says of all idols, these images are nothing. I mean that there is nothing at the place where they seem to be. In the brain itself they are just a disturbance caused either by objects acting on our senses or by disorderly agitation of our sense organs. People who are occupied with things other than finding the causes of such images do not know what to call them. So people whose knowledge they respect can easily persuade some that these are bodies formed from air condensed by supernatural power, since they look bodily. Others call them spirits because they cannot feel anything resisting their fingers where the images appear. Thus in ordinary speech, “spirit” properly means either a thin, fluid, invisible body or a ghost or other imagined apparition. It also has many figurative meanings. It can mean an attitude or tendency of mind: a spirit of contradiction is a tendency to challenge what other people say; an unclean spirit is a tendency toward impurity; a stubborn spirit is a tendency toward perversity; a dumb spirit is sullenness; and the Spirit of God can mean a tendency toward godliness and service to God. The word can also mean outstanding ability or an unusual mental passion or illness. Thus great wisdom is called a spirit of wisdom, and mad people are said to be possessed by a spirit.\n\nI find no other meanings of “spirit.” When none of these meanings makes a passage of Scripture intelligible, the passage lies beyond human understanding. In such cases, our faith consists not in an opinion about it but in submission. This applies wherever God is called a spirit or “the Spirit of God” means God himself. God's nature is beyond comprehension. We understand that he exists, but not what he is. So the attributes we give him do not tell each other what he is or state what we think his nature is. They express our desire to honor him with names we consider most honorable among ourselves.\n\nGenesis 1.2 says, “The Spirit of God moved over the surface of the waters.” If “Spirit of God” means God himself, this attributes motion and therefore location to God. These ideas are intelligible for bodies but not incorporeal substances. The passage would then be beyond our understanding: we cannot conceive of something that moves without changing place, or that changes place without having dimensions. Anything with dimensions is a body. But another passage helps explain the words. In Genesis 8.1, when the earth was covered in water as it was at the beginning, God intended to lower the water and reveal dry land again. He uses similar words: “I will bring my spirit over the earth, and the waters will diminish.” Here “spirit” means a wind, or air set in motion. As in the first passage, this wind can be called the Spirit of God because God made it happen.\n\nIn Genesis 41.38, Pharaoh calls Joseph's wisdom the Spirit of God. Joseph had advised him to find a wise, discerning man and put him in charge of Egypt. Pharaoh says, “Can we find anyone like this man, who has the Spirit of God in him?” And in Exodus 28.3, God says, “Speak to all who are wise in heart, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, to make Aaron's garments for his consecration.” Unusual skill, even at making garments, is called the Spirit of God because it is God's gift. The same usage occurs in Exodus 31.3,4,5,6 and 35.31. In Isaiah 11.2,3 the prophet says of the Messiah, “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, and the spirit of fear of the Lord.” Plainly, these are not numerous ghosts. They are numerous outstanding gifts God would give him.\n\nIn Judges, unusual zeal and courage in defending God's people are called the Spirit of God. That spirit moved Othoniel, Gideon, Jeptha, and Samson to free them from slavery (Judges 3.10; 6.34; 11.29; 13.25; 14.6,19). When Saul heard how arrogantly the Ammonites had treated the men of Jabeth Gilead, it is said (1 Samuel 11.6) that “The Spirit of God came upon Saul, and his anger”—or, in the Latin, his fury—“burned fiercely.” This probably means not a ghost but extraordinary zeal to punish the Ammonites' cruelty. Likewise, when the Spirit of God came upon Saul among the prophets singing and making music in praise of God (1 Samuel 19.20), it means a sudden and unexpected zeal to join their worship, not a ghost.\n\nThe false prophet Zedekiah asks Micaiah (1 Kings 22.24), “Which way did the Spirit of the Lord go from me to speak to you?” This cannot mean a ghost. Micaiah had predicted the outcome of the battle before the kings of Israel and Judah on the basis of a vision, not of a spirit speaking inside him.\n\nThe books of the prophets show the same thing. Though the prophets spoke by the Spirit of God, meaning by a special gift for prediction, their knowledge of the future came not from a ghost inside them but from a supernatural dream or vision.\n\nGenesis 2.7 says, “God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils (spiraculum vitae) the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” The breath of life that God breathed in means simply that God gave him life. Likewise, “as long as the Spirit of God is in my nostrils” (Job 27.3) means “as long as I live.” “The spirit of life was in the wheels” (Ezekiel 1.20) means “the wheels were alive.” And “the spirit entered me and set me on my feet” (Ezekiel 2.30) means “I recovered my physical strength.” It does not mean a ghost or incorporeal substance entered and possessed his body.\n\nIn Numbers, chapter 11, verse 17, God says, “I will take some of the spirit that is upon you and put it upon them, and they will bear the people's burden with you.” He means the seventy elders. Two of the seventy then prophesied in the camp. Some people complained, and Joshua wanted Moses to stop them, but Moses refused. This shows that Joshua did not know they had been given authority to do so. They prophesied in keeping with Moses's wishes, under a spirit or authority subordinate to his.\n\nIn the same sense, Deuteronomy 34.9 says that “Joshua was full of the spirit of wisdom” because Moses had laid his hands on him. Moses appointed Joshua to continue his work of bringing God's people into the promised land, a work Moses could not finish because he died.\n\nIn the same way, Romans 8.9 says, “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.” It means submission to Christ's teaching, not the ghost of Christ. And 1 John 4.2 says, “This is how you will know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.” This means the spirit of sincere Christianity: accepting the central article of Christian faith that Jesus is the Christ. It cannot mean a ghost.\n\nLikewise, the words “And Jesus, full of the Holy Ghost” (Luke 4.1), expressed as “the Holy Spirit” in Matthew 4.1 and Mark 1.12, can mean zeal to do the work God the Father sent him to do. To interpret the words as a ghost would be to say that God himself, which our Savior was, was filled with God. That makes little sense. I will not examine how we came to translate “spirits” as “ghosts,” a word that denotes nothing in heaven or on earth except imagined inhabitants of the human brain. But I will say that “spirit” in the text means no such thing. It means either a real substance literally or, figuratively, some unusual ability or condition of the mind or body.\n\nWhen the disciples saw Christ walking on the sea (Matthew 14.26; Mark 6.49), they thought he was a spirit. They meant a body made of air, not a mere image in the mind. It says they all saw him. An illusion of the brain cannot be shared by several people at once as a visible body can. Such illusions differ with each person's imagination. Similarly, the apostles took him for a spirit in Luke 24.3,7. And when St. Peter was freed from prison (Acts 12.15), the others did not believe it. When the maid said he was at the door, they said it was his angel. They must have meant a bodily substance. Otherwise, we must conclude that the disciples shared the common opinion of Jews and Gentiles that some such appearances were real, not imagined, and existed independently of human imagination. The Jews called these spirits and angels, good or bad. The Greeks called them daemons. Some such appearances may indeed be real substances: thin bodies God can form by the same power with which he formed everything else. He can use them as servants and messengers—that is, angels—to announce and carry out his will in extraordinary, supernatural ways whenever he chooses. Once formed, they are substances with dimensions. They take up space and can move between places, which is characteristic of bodies. So they are not incorporeal ghosts, which exist in no place: nowhere, and thus not at all, despite seeming to be something. But if “corporeal” is used in the most common sense to mean perceptible to our outer senses, then “incorporeal substance” can refer to something real rather than imaginary: a thin, invisible substance that has dimensions just like denser bodies.\n\n“Angel” generally means a messenger, and most often a messenger of God. God's messenger is anything that makes his extraordinary presence known: an extraordinary display of his power, especially through a dream or vision.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIV, 2\n\nScripture says nothing about the creation of angels. It often calls them spirits. But both in Scripture and in ordinary Jewish and Gentile speech, “spirit” sometimes means a thin body, like air, wind, or the vital and animal spirits of living things. At other times it means an image that arises in the imagination during dreams and visions. Such images are not real substances but events in the brain. Still, when God produces them supernaturally to make his will known, we can properly call them his messengers, or his angels.\n\nGentiles commonly mistook images made by the brain for things existing independently outside them. This led them to believe in good and evil daemons. Because these seemed to exist in reality, they called them substances; because they could not touch them, they called them incorporeal. For the same reason, and without anything in the Old Testament requiring it, Jews generally believed—apart from the Sadducees—that appearances God sometimes created in human imagination for his purposes, which they called his angels, were substances independent of imagination and lasting creatures of God. They thought those likely to help them were God's angels. Those likely to harm them they called evil angels or evil spirits, such as the spirit of Python and the spirits supposedly possessing mad people, lunatics, and people with epilepsy. They considered people with such illnesses possessed by daemons.\n\nBut if we look at Old Testament passages about angels, in most of them “angel” can only mean an image supernaturally produced in the imagination to show God's presence while he performs a supernatural act. So in other passages, where an angel's nature is not specified, we can understand the word the same way.\n\nFor example, in Genesis 16 the same appearance is called both an angel and God. The one called the angel of the Lord in verse 7 says to Agar in verse 10, “I will greatly multiply your descendants.” In other words, it speaks for God. And this appearance was not a shaped image but a voice. Clearly, then, “angel” here means nothing but God himself making Agar supernaturally hear a supernatural voice that testified to his special presence. Why could the angels who appeared to Lot also have been images of men formed supernaturally in his imagination? They are called men in Genesis 19.13; although there were two, Lot addresses them in verse 18 as one, and that one as God: “Lot said to them, ‘Oh, not so, my Lord.’” An angel earlier meant an imagined voice; these angels could be imagined figures. When an angel called from heaven to stop Abraham's hand from killing Isaac (Genesis 22.11), there was no visible appearance, just a voice. Yet the voice could rightly be called God's messenger or angel because it announced his will supernaturally. We need not assume any lasting ghosts. The angels Jacob saw on heaven's ladder (Genesis 28.12) appeared while he slept. They were therefore images in a dream. Still, because they were supernatural signs of God's special presence, they are rightly called angels. The same applies to Genesis 31.11, where Jacob says, “The angel of the Lord appeared to me in my sleep.” Everyone calls an appearance during sleep a dream, whether natural or supernatural. And the angel Jacob describes there was God himself, for that same angel says in verse 13, “I am the God of Bethel.”\n\nLikewise, the angel who went ahead of Israel's army toward the Red Sea and then moved behind it (Exodus 14.9) is the Lord himself in verse 19. He did not appear as a beautiful man. He appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Yet this pillar was the entire appearance and the angel promised to Moses as the army's guide (Exodus 14.9). The cloud pillar is said to have descended, stood at the tabernacle door, and spoken to Moses.\n\nSo movement and speech, commonly attributed to angels, are here attributed to a cloud. The cloud marked God's presence and was no less an angel than a figure shaped like a man or an exceptionally beautiful child, or a winged figure of the kind commonly painted, misleading ordinary people. Shape does not make something an angel; its function does. Angels serve as signs of God's presence in supernatural acts. When Moses asked God to go with the camp (Exodus 33.14), as he had done before the golden calf was made, God did not answer, “I will go,” or “I will send an angel instead.” He answered, “My presence will go with you.”\n\nIt would take too long to mention every Old Testament passage that uses the word “angel.” In brief, no passage in the part of the Old Testament the Church of England considers canonical proves that there is, or ever has been, a lasting thing called a spirit or angel that has no size and cannot be divided in thought into parts, with one part in one place and an adjacent part in the next. In short, nothing there proves an angel is not corporeal, if a body is understood as something that exists somewhere. In every passage, “angel” can mean messenger. John the Baptist is called an angel, and Christ the angel of the covenant. By the same reasoning, the dove and the fiery tongues could also be called angels, since they were signs of God's special presence. Daniel names two angels, Gabriel and Michael. But the text itself makes clear (Daniel 12.1) that Michael means Christ, not as an angel but as a prince. Gabriel was a supernatural image, like the appearances other holy men saw in their sleep. Daniel seemed to see two holy people talking in his dream, and one said to the other, “Gabriel, let us make this man understand his vision.” God does not need names to distinguish his heavenly servants. Names are useful only to mortals with limited memories. Nor does any New Testament passage prove that angels are both lasting and incorporeal, except when the word “angels” means the people God has appointed as messengers and servants of his word or deeds. Our Savior's own words may show that they last. In Matthew 25.41, he says that on the last day the wicked will be told, “Go, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.” This clearly shows that evil angels last, unless “the Devil and his angels” means the Church's enemies and their servants. But everlasting fire is no punishment to things that cannot suffer, as all incorporeal things must be. So the passage does not prove that angels are incorporeal. Similarly, St. Paul says (1 Corinthians 6.3), “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” And 2 Peter 2.4 says, “For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down into Hell.” And Jude 1,6 says, “The angels who did not keep their first position but left their own home, he has kept in everlasting chains under darkness until the judgment of the last day.” These passages show that angels last, but also support the conclusion that they are material. Matthew 22.30 says, “In the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.” People will last after resurrection but will not be incorporeal. So the same holds for angels.\n\nSeveral other passages support the same conclusion. Anyone who understands “substance” and “incorporeal” knows that, if incorporeal means not a thin body but no body at all, “incorporeal substance” is a contradiction. In that sense, saying that an angel or spirit is an incorporeal substance amounts to saying no angel or spirit exists. From the meaning of “angel” in the Old Testament and the nature of ordinary dreams and visions, I was inclined to think angels were only supernatural appearances in the imagination. God would produce them by special, extraordinary action to make his presence and commands known to humanity, especially his own people. But many New Testament passages, including our Savior's own words in texts whose accuracy is not in doubt, have forced my weak reason to acknowledge and believe that some angels are also real, lasting substances. Scripture cannot prove that they exist in no place, or nowhere, and thus are nothing, as those who call them incorporeal imply, even if indirectly.\n\nThe meaning of “inspiration” depends on the meaning of “spirit.” If taken literally, inspiration is simply blowing thin air or wind into a person, as someone fills a bladder with breath. If spirits are not bodies but exist only in the imagination, it would mean blowing an imagined image into someone. That makes no sense and is impossible, since such images only seem to be things; they are not things themselves. So Scripture uses “inspiration” only figuratively. When Genesis 2.7 says God breathed the breath of life into man, it means only that God gave him living movement. We should not think God first made a living breath and then blew it into Adam after making him, whether that breath was real or imaginary. It means what Acts 17.25 says: “He gave him life and breath.” He made him a living creature. Similarly, 2 Timothy 3.16 says, “All Scripture is given by inspiration from God.” This refers to the Old Testament. The figure of speech means that God led its writers' minds to write what would help teach, correct, rebuke, and instruct people in righteous living. But when St. Peter says (2 Peter 1.21), “Prophecy did not come in former times by human will, but God's holy men spoke as the Holy Spirit moved them,” the Holy Spirit means God's voice in a supernatural dream or vision, not inspiration. And when our Savior breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” his breath was not the Spirit. It was a sign of the spiritual gifts he gave them. Many people, including our Savior, are said to be full of the Holy Spirit. That fullness is not an infusion of God's substance. It is an abundance of his gifts, such as holy conduct and the ability to speak languages, whether received supernaturally or acquired by study and hard work. They are all gifts from God. Similarly, when God says in Joel 2.28, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions,” we must not take the words literally, as if his Spirit could be poured out or poured in like water. God promises prophetic dreams and visions. Even to speak literally of God's gifts being “infused” misuses the word. Those gifts are virtues, not bodies that can be transported and poured into people like barrels.\n\nIn the same way, taking “inspiration” literally or saying that good spirits entered people and made them prophesy, while evil spirits entered people who became delirious, mentally disturbed, or epileptic, is not the Scriptural meaning. In Scripture, “spirit” means God's power working through causes unknown to us. Likewise, the wind said to fill the house where the apostles met on Pentecost (Acts 2.2) was not the Holy Spirit, who is God himself. It was an outward sign of God's special work in their hearts, producing the inner gifts and holy virtues he thought they needed for their work as apostles.\n\nChapter XXXV. What Kingdom of God, Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament Mean in Scripture\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXV, 1\n\nWhat Kingdom of God, Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament Mean in Scripture\n\nTheologians, especially in sermons and devotional writings, usually take the Kingdom of God to mean eternal happiness after this life in the highest heaven. They also call this the Kingdom of Glory. Sometimes they mean sanctification, which is a pledge of that happiness, and call it the Kingdom of Grace. They never mean a monarchy: God's sovereign power over subjects who have consented to it themselves. Yet that is what “kingdom” properly means.\n\nBy contrast, I find that in most Scriptural passages the Kingdom of God means a kingdom in the proper sense. The people of Israel established it in a special way by voting to choose God as their king. They made a covenant with him in return for his promise to give them possession of the land of Canaan. Only rarely is the term figurative. In those cases, found only in the New Testament, it means mastery over sin. Every subject in the Kingdom of God will have that mastery without taking anything away from the Sovereign.\n\nFrom the creation onward, God ruled all people naturally by his power. But he also had particular subjects to whom he spoke commands aloud, as one person speaks to another. He ruled Adam this way and commanded him not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam disobeyed. By eating its fruit, he took it upon himself to be like God, deciding good and evil by his own judgment instead of his Creator's command. His punishment was the loss of the eternal life with which God had first created him. Later God punished Adam's descendants for their sins with a worldwide flood, sparing only eight people. Those eight then made up the Kingdom of God.\n\nAfterward, God chose to speak to Abraham. In Genesis 17.7,8, he made this covenant with him: “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you through their generations, an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you. I will give you and your descendants after you the land where you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession.” To memorialize and mark this covenant, he established the sacrament of circumcision in verse 11. This is called the Old Covenant, or Testament. It is an agreement between God and Abraham. By it Abraham binds himself and his descendants in a special way to obey God's stated law. He was already bound to obey the moral law, as if by an oath of loyalty. God is not yet given the title “king,” and Abraham and his descendants are not yet called a “kingdom.” But the reality is the same. By an agreement, God establishes his special sovereignty over Abraham's descendants. When Moses renews this covenant at Mount Sinai, it is explicitly called a special Kingdom of God over the Jews. St. Paul says of Abraham, not Moses (Romans 4.11), that he is the “father of the faithful.” That means the father of those who remain loyal and do not break the allegiance they swore to God, first through circumcision and later through baptism under the New Covenant.\n\nMoses renewed this covenant at the foot of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19.5), where the Lord ordered him to tell the people, “If you truly obey my voice and keep my covenant, you will be a people belonging especially to me, for all the earth is mine. You will be a priestly kingdom and a holy nation to me.” For “a people belonging especially to me,” the common Latin version has Peculium De Cunctis Populis. The English translation made early in King James's reign says “a special treasure to me above all nations”; the Geneva French says “the most precious jewel of all nations.” But the first is the most accurate. St. Paul confirms it in Titus 2.14, alluding to this passage when he says that our blessed Savior “gave himself for us to make us pure for himself, a special”—that is, an extraordinary—“people.” The Greek word is periousios, commonly contrasted with epiousios. The latter means ordinary, everyday, or, as in the Lord's Prayer, “for daily use.” The former means an extra supply, stored up and kept for special use, which the Latins call peculium. God confirms this meaning by giving the reason immediately afterward: “For all the earth is mine.” It is as if he said, “All the nations of the world belong to me, but you belong to me in a special way.” All nations belong to him because he has power over them. The Jews would belong to him by their own consent and covenant as well. That gives him an additional claim beyond his ordinary claim over all nations.\n\nThe same text confirms this explicitly: “You will be a priestly kingdom and a holy nation to me.” The common Latin has Regnum Sacerdotale. The translation of 1 Peter 2.9 agrees: Sacerdotium Regale, “a royal priesthood.” So does the way the kingdom was set up. No one but the high priest could enter the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Most Holy Place, to ask God's will directly of him. The English translation mentioned above follows the Geneva version in saying “a kingdom of priests.” This must either refer to one high priest succeeding another or else conflict with St. Peter and the practice of the high priesthood. Only the high priest ever had the task of informing the people of God's will, and no gathering of priests was ever permitted to enter the Sanctum Sanctorum.\n\nThe phrase “holy nation” confirms this too. “Holy” means belonging to God by a special right, not just a general one. As the text says, the whole earth is God's. But the whole earth is not called holy. Only what is set apart for his special service is holy, as the Jewish nation was. This passage alone makes it clear that the Kingdom of God properly means a Commonwealth. The people who would be subject to it established it by consent for their civil government. It regulated their conduct toward God their king, toward one another in matters of justice, and toward other nations in peace and war. It really was a kingdom. God was king, and after Moses died the high priest was to be his sole deputy or lieutenant.\n\nMany other passages clearly prove the same point. In 1 Samuel 8.7, the elders of Israel, upset by the corruption of Samuel's sons, demanded a king. Samuel was displeased and prayed to the Lord. The Lord answered, “Listen to the people, for they have not rejected you. They have rejected me as their king.” Clearly, God himself was their king at that time. Samuel did not command the people; he only delivered what God directed him to say from time to time.\n\nAgain, Samuel says to the people in 1 Samuel 12.12, “When you saw that Nahash, king of the Ammonites, was coming against you, you said to me, ‘No, a king must rule over us,’ even though the Lord your God was your king.” Clearly God was their king and governed the civil affairs of their Commonwealth.\n\nAfter the Israelites rejected God, the prophets foretold the restoration of his rule. Isaiah 24.23 says, “Then the moon will be put to shame and the sun disgraced when the Lord of Hosts reigns on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem.” This explicitly places his reign in Zion and Jerusalem, on earth. Micah 4.7 says, “The Lord will reign over them on Mount Zion.” Mount Zion is in Jerusalem, on earth. And Ezekiel 20.33 says, “As I live, says the Lord God, I will surely rule over you with a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, and fury poured out.” Verse 37 continues, “I will make you pass under the rod and bring you into the bond of the covenant.” That means: I will reign over you and hold you to the covenant you made with me through Moses. You broke that covenant by rebelling against me in Samuel's day and choosing another king.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXV, 2\n\nIn the New Testament, the angel Gabriel says of our Savior (Luke 1.32,33), “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his Kingdom will have no end.” This too is a Kingdom on earth. He was put to death as an enemy of Caesar for claiming it. The inscription on his cross read, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” He was mockingly crowned with thorns. And when the disciples proclaimed him, they were accused (Acts 17.7.) of “acting against Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one Jesus.” The Kingdom of God, then, is a real Kingdom, not a metaphorical one. That is how the phrase is used in both the Old and New Testaments. When we say, “For yours is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” we mean God’s Kingdom established by our Covenant with him, not his dominion by right of his power. He has always had that dominion. It would be pointless to pray, “Your Kingdom come,” unless we meant the restoration through Christ of the Kingdom of God interrupted when the Israelites rebelled and elected Saul. Nor would it make sense to say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is near,” or to pray, “Your Kingdom come,” if that Kingdom had continued without interruption.\n\nSo many other passages support this reading that it is surprising people have paid so little attention to it. The reason may be that it shows Christian kings too clearly their right to govern church affairs. Some have noticed this: instead of translating “a priestly Kingdom,” they write “a Kingdom of priests.” By the same reasoning, they might translate “a royal priesthood,” as St. Peter calls it, as “a priesthood of kings.” And where the text says “a special people,” they write “a precious jewel” or “treasure.” One might just as well call a general’s own regiment or company his precious jewel or treasure.\n\nIn short, the Kingdom of God is a civil Kingdom. At first it consisted in the obligation of the people of Israel to obey the laws Moses brought them from Mount Sinai. Later they were to obey the laws delivered by the High Priest of the time from before the cherubim in the Holy of Holies. This Kingdom was rejected when Saul was elected. The prophets foretold that Christ would restore it. We pray daily for its restoration in the Lord’s Prayer when we say, “Your Kingdom come.” We acknowledge his right to it when we add, “For yours is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever, Amen.” The apostles preached to announce this Kingdom, and teachers of the Gospel prepare people for it. To embrace that Gospel—that is, to promise obedience to God’s government—is to be in the Kingdom of Grace. For God has freely given such people the ability to become his subjects, or children, later on. This will happen when Christ comes in majesty to judge the world and actually govern his own people, in what is called the Kingdom of Glory. The Kingdom of God is also called the Kingdom of Heaven because its throne is glorious and wonderfully high. If it were not a Kingdom God exercised on earth through his deputies or representatives, who deliver his commands to the people, there would not have been so much dispute and war over who speaks to us for God. Nor would so many priests have sought spiritual jurisdiction, or any king denied it to them.\n\nThis literal understanding of the Kingdom of God also gives us the right meaning of the word “holy.” In God’s Kingdom it means what people in their own kingdoms call “public” or “the king’s.”\n\nA country’s king is the public person who represents all his subjects. God, the King of Israel, was the Holy One of Israel. A nation under one earthly sovereign belongs to that sovereign, the public person. Likewise the Jews, who were God’s nation, were called (Exod. 19.6.) “a holy nation.” “Holy” always means either God himself or something that belongs specifically to God. Similarly, “public” always means either the person of the Commonwealth itself or something belonging to the Commonwealth that no private individual can claim as property.\n\nThe Sabbath, God’s day, is therefore a holy day. The Temple, God’s house, is a holy house. Sacrifices, tithes, and offerings, which are God’s tribute, are holy duties. Priests, prophets, and kings anointed under Christ, who are God’s ministers, are holy men. Heavenly spirits serving as God’s messengers are holy angels, and so on. Wherever “holy” is used in its literal sense, it means something belongs to God through consent. When we say, “Hallowed be your name,” we ask God to give us the grace to keep the first Commandment, “Have no other gods but him.” Humanity belongs to God as his nation, but only the Jews were a holy nation. Why? Because through a covenant they became his own people.\n\nScripture generally uses “profane” to mean “common.” Their opposites, “holy” and “belonging specifically to someone,” must therefore mean the same thing in the Kingdom of God. In a figurative sense, people who live godly lives are also called holy, as if they had abandoned every worldly aim and given themselves entirely to God. In the literal sense, something is said to be sanctified by God when he makes it holy by setting it apart for his own use. This applies to the seventh day in the fourth Commandment and to the elect in the New Testament, who were said to be sanctified when they received the spirit of godliness. Something made holy by being dedicated and given to God by people, for use only in his public service, is also called sacred and said to be consecrated. Examples include temples and other houses of public prayer, their furnishings, priests and ministers, sacrificial animals, offerings, and the physical materials used in sacraments.\n\nThere are degrees of holiness. Some things set apart for God’s service may be set apart again for a closer and more special service. All Israelites were a people holy to God, but the tribe of Levi was a holy tribe among them. Among the Levites the priests were holier still, and among the priests the High Priest was the holiest. Similarly, Judea was the Holy Land, but the Holy City where God was to be worshiped was holier. The Temple was holier than the city, and the Holy of Holies holier than the rest of the Temple.\n\nA sacrament sets some visible thing apart from ordinary use and dedicates it to God’s service. It serves as a sign either of our admission to the Kingdom of God, among his special people, or of our remembrance of that admission. In the Old Testament the sign of admission was circumcision; in the New Testament it is baptism. In the Old Testament the act of remembrance was eating the Passover lamb at a set time each year. This reminded people of the night they were freed from slavery in Egypt. In the New Testament it is the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. This reminds us that our blessed Savior’s death on the cross freed us from slavery to sin. Sacraments of admission are performed only once, since admission is needed only once. But we often need reminders of our deliverance and our allegiance, so sacraments of remembrance must be repeated. These are the principal sacraments, like solemn oaths of our allegiance. Other acts of dedication may also be called sacraments if that word means only dedication to God’s service. But if it means an oath or promise of allegiance to God, the Old Testament has only circumcision and Passover, and the New Testament only baptism and the Lord’s Supper.\n\nChapter XXXVI. On the Word of God and Prophets\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 1\n\nOn the Word of God and Prophets\n\nWhen we speak of the Word of God or the word of a person, we do not mean a part of speech, like what grammarians call a noun or a verb. Nor do we mean a single sound, without other words to give it meaning. We mean a complete speech or statement in which someone affirms, denies, commands, promises, threatens, wishes, or asks something. The Latin word in this sense is not vocabulum, meaning an individual word, but sermo, or logos in Greek, meaning a speech, statement, or saying.\n\nAgain, “the Word of God” or “the word of a person” can refer to the speaker, meaning the words God or a person spoke. When we say “the Gospel of St. Matthew,” for example, we understand St. Matthew to have written it. But the phrase can also refer to its subject. When the Bible mentions “the words of the days of the kings of Israel or Judah,” it means that events in those days are the subject of those words. Biblical Greek retains many Hebrew expressions. In that Greek, “the Word of God” often means not speech delivered by God but speech about God and his government: the teaching of religion. Thus logos theou can mean the same as theologia, the subject we usually call divinity. The following passages make this clear. In Acts 13.46. Paul and Barnabas spoke boldly: “It was necessary that the Word of God be spoken to you first. But since you reject it and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, look: we turn to the Gentiles.” What is called the Word of God here is the teaching of the Christian religion, as the preceding account clearly shows. In Acts 5.20. an angel tells the apostles, “Go and stand in the Temple, and speak all the words of this life.” “The words of this life” means the teaching of the Gospel. This is clear from what they did in the Temple, as the chapter’s last verse states: “Every day, in the Temple and in every house, they never stopped teaching and preaching Christ Jesus.” Jesus Christ was thus the subject of this Word of Life, or, equivalently, of the words about the eternal life our Savior offered them. Similarly, Acts 15.7. calls the Word of God “the Word of the Gospel,” because it contains teaching about Christ’s Kingdom. Romans 10.8,9. calls the same Word “the Word of Faith”: teaching, as the passage explains, that Christ has come and risen from the dead. Matthew 13. 19. says, “When anyone hears the Word of the Kingdom,” meaning the teaching about the Kingdom given by Christ. Acts 12. 24. says that the same Word “grew and multiplied.” That is easy to understand if it means the teaching of the Gospel, but difficult and strange if it means God’s voice or speech. In the same way, “the teaching of devils” does not mean words spoken by a devil. It means what pagan people teach about demons and the apparitions they worshiped as gods (1 Tim. 4.1.).\n\nGiven these two meanings of “the Word of God” in Scripture, it is clear that all Scripture is the Word of God in the second sense, as teaching about the Christian religion. But not all of it is the Word of God in the first sense, as speech spoken by God. For example, God spoke the words “I am the Lord your God, etc.” through the end of the Ten Commandments to Moses. But the introduction, “God spoke these words and said,” is the wording of the writer of the sacred history. When “the Word of God” means what God has spoken, it is sometimes used literally and sometimes figuratively. Literally, it means the words he spoke to his prophets. Figuratively, it means his wisdom, power, and eternal decision in making the world. In this sense the commands “Let there be light,” “Let there be a firmament,” “Let us make man,” and so on (Gen. 1.) are the Word of God. The same sense appears in John 1.3.: “All things were made by it, and without it nothing was made that was made”; in Heb. 1.3.: “He upholds all things by the word of his power,” meaning by the power of his Word, or simply by his power; and in Heb. 11.3.: “The worlds were formed by the Word of God.” Many other passages have this meaning. The Latin word for fate, which literally means “the spoken word,” is also used in this sense.\n\nA second figurative meaning of God’s Word is the result of his Word: the thing he affirms, commands, threatens, or promises. Psalm 105.19. says Joseph was kept in prison “until his word came.” This means until what he had foretold to Pharaoh’s butler about being restored to his office (Gen. 40.13.) actually happened. “His word came” means the event came about. Similarly, Elijah says to God in 1 King. 18.36., “I have done all these your words,” instead of “I have done all these things at your command.” “Where is the Word of the Lord?” in Jer. 17.15. means “Where is the evil he threatened?” In Ezek. 12.28., “None of my words shall be delayed any longer” refers to the things God promised his people. In the New Testament, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Mat. 24.35.) means that everything I promised or foretold will happen. In this sense St. John the Evangelist—and, I think, only St. John—calls our Savior in the flesh “the Word of God.” Thus John 1.14. says “the Word became flesh”: that is, the Word or promise that Christ would come into the world. This Word “was with God in the beginning”: God the Father had planned to send God the Son into the world to show people the way to eternal life. But only then was the plan carried out and actually made flesh. Our Savior is called “the Word” not because he was the promise, but because he was what was promised. People who take this passage as a reason to call him “the Verb of God” only make it harder to understand. They might as well call him “the Noun of God.” Both a noun and a verb mean, to ordinary people, only a part of speech: a sound that by itself neither affirms, denies, commands, nor promises, and is neither a physical nor a spiritual substance. Such a thing cannot be called God or man, while our Savior is both. The Word that St. John says was with God in his Gospel is called “the Word of Life” in his first Epistle, verse 1, and “the eternal life, which was with the Father” in verse 2. He can be called the Word only in the same sense in which he is called Eternal Life: he brought us eternal life by coming in the flesh. Similarly, in Apocalypse 19.13. the apostle says of Christ, dressed in a garment dipped in blood, that his name is “the Word of God.” This means “He who came in accordance with God’s purpose from the beginning and with his Word and promises delivered by the prophets.” What became flesh here was not a word but God the Son. He is called the Word because his becoming flesh fulfilled the promise. In the same way the Holy Ghost is called “the Promise” (Acts 1.4. Luke 24.49.).\n\nSome passages of Scripture also use “the Word of God” for words consistent with reason and fairness, even if neither a prophet nor a holy person speaks them. Pharaoh Necho worshiped idols. Yet the words he sent to the good King Josiah, advising him not to oppose Necho’s march against Carchemish, are said to have come from God’s mouth. Josiah ignored them and was killed in battle, as 2 Chron. 35. vers. 21,22,23. relates. It is true that the first book of Esdras tells the same story differently: there it is Jeremiah, not Pharaoh, who speaks these words to Josiah from the Lord’s mouth. But we should trust canonical Scripture over whatever the Apocrypha says.\n\nThe Word of God also means what reason and fairness tell us to do when Scripture says it is written in a person’s heart, as in Psalm 36.31. Jerem. 31.33. Deut.30.11, 14. and many similar passages.\n\nIn Scripture “prophet” sometimes means a spokesperson: someone who speaks from God to people or from people to God. Sometimes it means a person who predicts future events. Sometimes it means someone who speaks without making sense, like a person who has lost his reason. Its most common meaning is someone who speaks from God to the people. Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others were prophets in this sense. So was the High Priest, because only he entered the Holy of Holies to ask God questions and report his answer to the people. Thus when Caiaphas said that it was best for one man to die for the people, St. John says (chap. 11.51.) that “he did not say this on his own, but as High Priest that year he prophesied that one man should die for the nation.” Those who taught people in Christian congregations are also said to prophesy (1 Cor. 14.3.). The word has the same sense when God tells Moses about Aaron (Exod. 4.16.), “He shall be your spokesperson to the people; he shall be a mouth for you, and you shall stand in place of God for him.” Chapter 7.1. calls this spokesperson a prophet: “See,” God says, “I have made you a god to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet.” In the sense of speaking from people to God, Abraham is called a prophet in Genes. 20.7. There God tells Abimelech in a dream, “Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet and will pray for you.” This suggests that those appointed to say public prayers for a Christian congregation can also properly be called prophets. In the same sense, the prophets who came down from the high place, or hill of God, with a psaltery, tambourine, pipe, and harp (1 Sam. 10.5,6.), and Saul among them (vers. 10.), are said to prophesy because they praised God publicly in that way. Miriam is also called a prophetess in this sense (Exod. 15.20.). The same applies when St. Paul says in 1 Cor. 11.4,5., “Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered, etc., and every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered.” Here prophesying means no more than praising God with psalms and sacred songs. Women could do that in church, though they were not permitted to address the congregation. In this sense pagan poets who composed hymns and other poems honoring their gods were called vates, or prophets. Anyone familiar with pagan books knows this, and it is clear from Tit. 1.12., where St. Paul says that one of the Cretans’ own prophets called them liars. Paul did not regard their poets as true prophets. He acknowledged the common use of the word “prophet” for people who praised a god in verse.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 2\n\nWhen “prophecy” means predicting future events that may or may not happen, prophets include more than God’s spokespeople who tell others what God foretold to them. They also include impostors who claim that familiar spirits help them predict the future, or who use superstitious methods to infer future events from past ones while misunderstanding their causes. As I explained in chapter 12 of this work, there are many kinds of these impostors. Among ordinary people, a single chance event that can be forced to fit their prediction may win them a reputation as prophets that countless failures cannot destroy. Prophecy is not an art. Nor, when it means prediction, is it a permanent calling. It is an exceptional, temporary task given by God, usually to good people but sometimes to wicked ones. The woman of Endor was said to have a familiar spirit, to have raised an image of Samuel with its help, and to have foretold Saul’s death. That did not make her a prophetess. She had no knowledge that would enable her to raise such an image, and nothing shows that God ordered her to raise it. Rather, God used her deception to frighten and discourage Saul, contributing to the defeat in which he died. Pagans also regarded confused speech as a kind of prophecy. The prophets of their oracles were intoxicated by a spirit or vapor from the cave of the Pythian oracle at Delphi. For a time they truly lost their reason and spoke like mad people. Their disconnected words could be made to fit any event, just as people claim that any body can be made from primal matter. Scripture uses “prophecy” in this sense too, in 1 Sam. 18. 10.: “An evil spirit came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the middle of the house.”\n\nAlthough “prophet” has all these meanings in Scripture, it most often means someone to whom God speaks directly, giving that prophet a message for another person or for the people. That raises the question of how God speaks to such a prophet. Some may ask how God can literally have a voice and language if he cannot literally have a tongue or other organs like a human being. The prophet David argues, “Should he who made the eye not see? Or he who made the ear not hear?” But perhaps this is said not to describe God’s nature, as people usually suppose, but to express our wish to honor him. Seeing and hearing are honorable qualities. We may attribute them to God to convey his almighty power as far as we are able to understand it. But if David’s argument were meant literally, we could also argue that God uses every part of the human body as we do because he made every part of it. Many such uses would be so indecent that attributing them to him would be the greatest insult imaginable. So when God is said to speak directly to people, we should understand that he makes them know his will in some way, whatever that way may be. There are many ways he does this, and we must look for them only in Holy Scripture. Scripture often says that God spoke to someone without telling us how. But it also often gives the signs by which people could recognize his presence and command. Those signs can help us understand how he spoke in many of the other cases.\n\nScripture does not say how God spoke to Adam, Eve, Cain, or Noah. Nor does it say how he spoke to Abraham before Abraham left his own country for Shechem in Canaan. There, in Gen. 12.7., God is said to have appeared to him. An appearance or vision, then, is one way God made his presence known. Again, Gen. 15.1. says the Word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. Something appeared as a sign of God’s presence and spoke to him as God’s messenger. God appeared to Abraham again as three angels (Gen. 18. 1.). He appeared to Abimelech in a dream (Gen. 20. 3.), to Lot as two angels (Gen. 19. 1.), and to Hagar as one angel (Gen. 21. 17.). He appeared to Abraham again as a voice from heaven (Gen. 22. 11.). He appeared to Isaac at night (Gen. 26. 24.), that is, in his sleep or in a dream. He appeared to Jacob in a dream (Gen. 18. 12.): as the text says, “Jacob dreamed that he saw a ladder, etc.” He also appeared to Jacob in a vision of angels (Gen. 32. 1.). He appeared to Moses as a flame of fire in a bush (Exod. 3.2.). After Moses, whenever the Old Testament explains how God spoke directly to someone, he always spoke in a vision or a dream. This was so with Gideon, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the other prophets. It often happened in the New Testament too, with Joseph, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John the Evangelist in the Apocalypse.\n\nGod spoke in a more extraordinary manner only to Moses on Mount Sinai and in the Tabernacle, and to the High Priest in the Tabernacle and in the Temple’s Holy of Holies. Moses and, after him, the High Priests were prophets of higher standing and more highly favored by God. God himself expressly says that he spoke to other prophets in dreams and visions, but spoke to his servant Moses as a man speaks to a friend. In Numb. 12. 6,7,8. he says: “If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known to him in a vision and speak to him in a dream. My servant Moses is different. He is faithful in all my house. I will speak with him mouth to mouth, clearly, not in obscure sayings, and he shall see the likeness of the Lord.” Exod. 33. 11. says, “The Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” Even so, God’s speech to Moses was mediated by an angel or angels, as Acts 7. ver. 35. and 53. and Gal. 3. 19. expressly show. It was therefore a vision, though clearer than the visions given to other prophets. In line with this, when God says in Deut. 13. 1., “If a prophet or dreamer of dreams arises among you,” the second term explains the first. Likewise, Joel 2. 28. says, “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” Again, dreams and visions explain prophecy. God also spoke in this way to Solomon when promising him wisdom, riches, and honor. The text says (1 Kings 3. 15.), “Solomon awoke, and saw that it was a dream.” In general, then, extraordinary Old Testament prophets learned the Word of God from dreams or visions: images they experienced while asleep or in a trance. In every true prophet those images were supernatural. In false prophets they were either natural or invented.\n\nYet these same prophets were also said to speak by the Spirit. In Zach. 7. 12. the prophet says of the Jews, “They made their hearts hard as diamond, so they would not hear the law and the words that the Lord of Hosts sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets.” This shows that, for extraordinary prophets who needed a separate commission for each new message—that is, a new dream or vision—speaking by the Spirit, or inspiration, was not a different way for God to speak from speaking by a vision.\n\nTo prophets with a permanent calling who held the highest authority, God spoke in the Old Testament from the Mercy Seat, in a way Scripture does not explain. Of the Old Testament prophets with a permanent calling, some had supreme authority and some were subordinate. Moses was the first supreme prophet. After him, each High Priest in turn held that position for as long as the priesthood held royal authority. Once the Jews had rejected God as their ruler, kings who submitted to God’s government became his chief prophets too, and the High Priest’s role became one of service. When they needed to ask God a question, the priests put on their holy garments and asked the Lord at the king’s command. The king could remove them from office when he saw fit. King Saul ordered that a burnt offering be brought (1 Sam. 13. 9.). He ordered the priest to bring the Ark near him (1 Sam. 14. 18.), then told him to stop (ver. 19.) when he saw an opportunity to attack his enemies. Saul also asked God for advice in the same chapter. Likewise, after being anointed but before taking possession of the Kingdom, King David “asked the Lord” (1 Sam. 23. 2.) whether he should fight the Philistines at Keilah. David then ordered the priest to bring the ephod (verse 10.) so he could ask whether he should stay in Keilah. King Solomon removed Abiathar from the priesthood (1 Kings 2. 27.) and appointed Zadok instead (verse 35.). Moses, the High Priests, and the godly kings were therefore all sovereign prophets, since they asked God how to act or what would happen whenever an exceptional occasion arose. But it is not clear how God spoke to them. To say that Moses had an ordinary prophet’s dream or vision when he went up to God on Mount Sinai contradicts God’s distinction between Moses and the other prophets in Numb. 12. 6,7,8. To say that God spoke or appeared as he is in his own nature denies that he is infinite, invisible, and beyond our understanding. To say that he spoke by inspiration or by infusing the Holy Spirit, when “Holy Spirit” means God himself, would make Moses equal to Christ. Only in Christ does the Godhead dwell bodily, as St. Paul says in Col. 2.9. Finally, to say that God spoke through the Holy Spirit when that means the Spirit’s gifts or graces would attribute nothing supernatural to Moses. For God leads people toward piety, justice, mercy, truth, faith, and every moral and intellectual virtue by teaching, example, and various natural, ordinary circumstances.\n\nJust as none of these accounts explains how God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, none explains how he spoke to the High Priests from the Mercy Seat. We therefore cannot understand how God spoke to those sovereign prophets of the Old Testament whose duty was to ask him questions. In the New Testament there was no sovereign prophet except our Savior, who was both the God who spoke and the prophet to whom he spoke.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVI, 3\n\nTo prophets with a permanent but subordinate calling, God spoke by the Spirit. I find no passage proving that God spoke supernaturally to subordinate prophets with a permanent calling. He spoke to them only in the way he naturally guides all other Christian people toward piety, belief, righteousness, and other virtues. This happens through a person’s nature, teaching, education, and the opportunities and encouragements people receive to practice Christian virtues. Yet it is right to attribute it to the work of the Spirit of God, or Holy Spirit, which in our language we call the Holy Ghost. Every good inclination comes from God’s work. But that work is not always supernatural. When a prophet is said to speak in or by the Spirit of God, we should understand only that he speaks according to God’s will as declared by the supreme prophet. For the most common meaning of “spirit” is a person’s purpose, mind, or disposition.\n\nIn Moses’ time, seventy other men prophesied in the Israelite camp. Numbers 11, verse 25, explains how God spoke to them: “The Lord came down in a cloud and spoke to Moses. He took some of the Spirit that was upon him and gave it to the seventy elders. When the Spirit rested upon them, they prophesied and did not stop.” First, this clearly shows that their prophecy to the people served and was subordinate to Moses’ prophecy. God took some of Moses’ Spirit to put upon them, so they prophesied as Moses wanted. Otherwise they would not have been allowed to prophesy at all. Someone complained about them to Moses (verse 27.), and Joshua wanted Moses to forbid them. Moses did not, but said to Joshua, “Do not be jealous on my behalf.” Second, in this passage the Spirit of God means only their willingness to obey and help Moses administer the government. If it meant that God’s Spirit as a substance—his divine nature—was breathed into them, then they would have received it no less than Christ himself. Yet only in Christ did the Spirit of God dwell bodily. Here it means the gift and grace of God that led them to cooperate with Moses, from whom their spirit came. Verse 16. shows that they were people Moses himself was to appoint as elders and officers of the people: “Gather for me seventy men whom you know to be elders and officers of the people.” “Whom you know” here means “whom you appoint,” or “whom you have appointed to these positions.” For we are told earlier (Exod. 18.) that Moses, following the advice of his father-in-law Jethro, appointed God-fearing judges and officers over the people. The seventy came from this group. By putting Moses’ spirit upon them, God inclined them to help him administer the Kingdom. In the same sense, the Spirit of God is said to have come upon David as soon as he was anointed and to have left Saul (1 Sam. 16. 13, 14.). God gave his graces to the man he chose to govern his people and took them from the man he rejected. “Spirit” therefore means an inclination to serve God, not any supernatural revelation.\n\nGod also often spoke through the outcome of lots, which were cast under the direction of those he had given authority over his people. The lots Saul ordered to be drawn (1 Sam. 14. 43.) revealed Jonathan’s offense: eating honeycomb against the oath taken by the people. God divided Canaan among the Israelites through “the lots Joshua cast before the Lord in Shiloh” (Josh. 18. 10.). It seems God also revealed Achan’s crime this way (Joshua 7.16., etc.). These were the ways God made his will known in the Old Testament.\n\nHe used all these ways in the New Testament too. He spoke to the Virgin Mary through a vision of an angel; to Joseph in a dream; to Paul on the road to Damascus in a vision of our Savior; and to Peter in a vision of a sheet lowered from heaven containing the flesh of different clean and unclean animals, and later in prison through a vision of an angel. He spoke to all the apostles and writers of the New Testament through the graces of his Spirit. He spoke to the apostles through a lot when they chose Matthias to replace Judas Iscariot.\n\nAll prophecy, then, involves a vision or dream (which, when they are natural, are the same thing), or some special gift from God so rarely seen among people that it inspires wonder. But special gifts, and even very extraordinary dreams and visions, may come from God not just through his direct supernatural action, but through his natural action and through other causes. We therefore need reason and judgment to tell natural gifts from supernatural ones, and natural visions and dreams from supernatural ones. We must be very cautious about obeying someone who claims to be a prophet and tells us, in God’s name, to follow his way to happiness as an act of obedience to God. Anyone claiming to teach the path to such great happiness also claims to govern people, to rule and reign over them. Since people naturally desire that power, we should suspect ambition and fraud. Everyone should examine and test such a person before obeying him, unless they have already agreed to obey him by establishing a Commonwealth, as when the prophet is the civil sovereign or is authorized by that sovereign. If ordinary people were not allowed to examine prophets and spirits, there would be no point in giving everyone signs by which to tell whom to follow and whom not to follow. Deut. 13. 1, etc., gives signs for recognizing a prophet, and 1 John 4.1. etc., gives signs for recognizing a spirit. Moreover, there is much prophesying in the Old Testament and much preaching in the New Testament against prophets. False prophets have ordinarily far outnumbered true ones. So everyone must beware of following their instructions at their own risk. The number of false prophets is clear from what happened when Ahab (1 Kings 12.) consulted four hundred prophets: all but one, Michaiah, were lying impostors. Not long before the Captivity, prophets generally told lies. “The prophets,” says the Lord through Jerem. cha. 14. verse 14., “prophesy lies in my name. I did not send them, command them, or speak to them. They prophesy a false vision to you, something worthless, a deception from their own hearts.” God therefore told the people through the prophet Jeremiah (chap. 23. 16.) not to obey them: “Thus says the Lord of Hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you. They deceive you. They speak a vision from their own hearts, not from the mouth of the Lord.”\n\nThe visionary prophets in Old Testament times quarreled. One challenged another, “When did the Spirit leave me to go to you?” as Michaiah and the other four hundred did. They called one another liars, as in Jerem. 14.14. There are similar controversies among spiritual prophets in the New Testament today. Everyone then was, and everyone now is, obliged to use natural reason to apply God’s rules to all prophecy and tell true prophecy from false. In the Old Testament, one rule was whether a prophet’s teaching agreed with what Moses, the sovereign prophet, taught. The other was a miraculous ability to predict what God would bring about, as I have already shown from Deut. 13. 1. etc. In the New Testament there was only one test: whether the prophet preached the teaching that Jesus is the Christ, the King of the Jews promised in the Old Testament. Anyone denying that teaching was a false prophet, whatever miracles he seemed to perform. Anyone teaching it was a true prophet. For St. John, expressly explaining how to test whether spirits are from God (1 Epist, 4. 2, etc.), warns first that false prophets will arise and then says: “By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.” This means that such a person is recognized and accepted as God’s prophet. It does not mean that confessing, professing, or preaching that Jesus is the Christ proves he is godly or among the elect. It means he is an acknowledged prophet. God sometimes speaks through prophets whose persons he has not accepted, as he did through Balaam and as he foretold Saul’s death through the witch of Endor. The next verse says, “Every spirit that does not acknowledge that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of Christ. This is the spirit of Antichrist.” The rule thus works in both directions. A true prophet preaches that the Messiah has already come as Jesus. A false prophet denies that he has come and expects some future impostor who will falsely claim that honor. The apostle rightly calls that impostor Antichrist. Everyone should therefore consider who the sovereign prophet is: who serves as God’s deputy on earth and holds, immediately under God, the authority to govern Christians. They should use as their rule the teaching he commands to be taught in God’s name. By this rule they should test the truth of what self-proclaimed prophets offer, with or without miracles. If their teaching conflicts with the rule, people should do as those who went to Moses to complain that some people in the camp were prophesying without clear authority. They should leave it to the sovereign, as the people left it to Moses, to permit or forbid them as he sees fit. If he rejects them, they should no longer listen to them. If he approves them, they should obey them as people to whom God has given a share of their sovereign’s Spirit. For if Christians do not accept their Christian sovereign as God’s prophet, they must either accept their own dreams as the prophecy that governs them and the swelling of their own hearts as God’s Spirit, or allow themselves to be led by a foreign prince or by fellow subjects. Such subjects can use slander of the government to charm them into rebellion, without any miracle to confirm their calling except occasional extraordinary success and escape from punishment. This destroys all laws, divine and human, and reduces all order, government, and society to the original chaos of violence and civil war.\n\nChapter XXXVII. On Miracles and Their Use\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVII, 1\n\nOn miracles and their use\n\nMiracles are God's astonishing works. That is why they are also called wonders. Most of them serve as signs of his commands. Without them, people might follow their own reasoning and doubt what he has commanded. Scripture commonly calls them signs for this reason. The Latin words ostenta and portenta have the same sense: they point to and foretell what the Almighty is about to do.\n\nTo understand a miracle, we must first understand which events people find astonishing. Two things make people wonder. First, an event must be unusual: nothing like it has happened before, or it has happened very rarely. Second, when it happens, we cannot imagine any natural way it could have happened, only God's direct action. But suppose we can see a possible natural cause, however rare the event is. Or suppose similar events happen often, even if we cannot imagine their natural cause. In either case, we stop wondering and do not consider it a miracle.\n\nIf a horse or cow spoke, that would be a miracle. It would be both unusual and hard to explain by natural causes. So would the production of a living creature with a strange new form, unlike nature's usual forms. But when a human or another animal produces offspring of its own kind, we know no more about how it happens than we know about those other events. Yet it is common, so it is no miracle. Likewise, if a person turned into a stone or a pillar, that would be a miracle because it is strange. If a piece of wood underwent such a change, it would not be a miracle, because we see that often. Yet we know no more about God's operation in one change than in the other.\n\nThe world's first rainbow was a miracle because it was the first, and therefore unusual. God placed it in the sky as a sign to assure his people that water would never again destroy the whole world. Today rainbows are common, so they are not miracles, whether people know their natural causes or not. Human skill also produces many unusual works. But once we know they are made by human skill, we also know how they are made. We do not count them as miracles, since they come through human work rather than God's direct action.\n\nWonder also depends on how much people know and have experienced. So the same thing can be a miracle to one person and not to another. Ignorant and superstitious people find great wonders in things that others recognize as natural. Nature is God's ordinary work, not his direct intervention, and those who understand it do not wonder at these events. Ordinary people, for example, have treated eclipses of the sun and moon as supernatural. Yet others could predict the very hour of an eclipse from its natural causes. Or a person might use an accomplice and secret information to learn what an unsuspecting, ignorant person has done in private. When he tells that person about the past, it seems miraculous. But such tricks are not easy to play on wise, cautious people.\n\nAnother feature of a miracle is its purpose. It is done to give credibility to God's messengers, ministers, and prophets, so that people will know God called and sent them and will be more willing to obey them. The creation of the world and the later destruction of all living creatures in the worldwide flood were astonishing works. But they were not done to establish the credibility of a prophet or another minister of God, so they are not usually called miracles. No matter how astonishing a work is, the wonder is not that God can do it. People naturally believe the Almighty can do anything. The wonder is that he does it at a person's prayer or word. God's works in Egypt through Moses were miracles in the proper sense. They were meant to persuade the Israelites that Moses had come to them not for his own purposes but because God had sent him. After God commanded Moses to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, Moses said (Exod 4.1. &c.), “They will not believe me, but will say that the Lord has not appeared to me.” God gave him the power to turn the rod in his hand into a serpent and back into a rod. He also gave him the power to make his hand leprous by putting it inside his clothing and to make it healthy again by taking it out. These acts would make the children of Israel believe, as verse 5 says, that the God of their ancestors had appeared to Moses. If that was not enough, God gave him the power to turn their water into blood. After Moses performed these miracles before the people, it says (verse 41.) that “they believed him.” Yet fear of Pharaoh kept them from obeying Moses. The other works that punished Pharaoh and the Egyptians were therefore also intended to make the Israelites believe Moses, and were properly miracles. Consider every miracle performed through Moses and the other prophets up to the Captivity, and then through our Savior and his apostles. The purpose was always to create or strengthen belief that God had sent them and that they had not acted on their own initiative. Scripture also shows that miracles were intended to create belief not in everyone, both elect and rejected, but only in the elect: those whom God had decided would become his subjects. The miraculous plagues in Egypt were not meant to convert Pharaoh. God had already told Moses that he would harden Pharaoh's heart so that Pharaoh would not let the people go. When Pharaoh finally let them go, the miracles had not persuaded him; the plagues had forced him. Scripture says of our Savior (Mat. 13. 58.) that he did not perform many miracles in his own country because the people there did not believe. In Marke 6.5., instead of “he did not perform many,” it says “he could perform none.” This was not because he lacked power; saying that would be blasphemy against God. Nor was it because miracles were not meant to bring unbelievers to Christ. Every miracle of Moses, the prophets, our Savior, and his apostles was meant to bring people into the Church. Rather, their miracles were meant to bring into the Church not everyone but those who would be saved, whom God had chosen. Our Savior was sent by his Father, and therefore could not use his power to convert those his Father had rejected. Some explain St. Marke's “he could not” as meaning “he would not.” But there is no example of this usage in Greek. In Greek, “would not” sometimes stands for “could not” when speaking of inanimate things that have no will, but “could not” never stands for “would not.” This explanation creates an obstacle for Christians whose faith is weak, as if Christ could perform miracles only among people already willing to believe.\n\nFrom what I have said about the nature and use of a miracle, I define it this way: “A miracle is a work of God, apart from the ordinary workings of nature that he established at creation, done to show his elect that he has sent an extraordinary minister for their salvation.”\n\nThis definition leads first to this conclusion: the work performed in any miracle does not result from a power belonging to the prophet. It results from God's direct action. God performs it without using the prophet as an intermediate cause.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVII, 2\n\nSecond, no Devil, angel, or other created spirit can perform a miracle. Such an act would have to result either from knowledge of nature or from an incantation, meaning the power of words. If the enchanters do it through an independent power of their own, then some power does not come from God, which everyone denies. If they do it through power given to them, then the work is not God's direct action. It is natural, and so is no miracle.\n\nSome passages of Scripture seem to credit magic and incantations with the power to perform wonders equal to some miracles done directly by God. For example, after Moses threw down his rod and it became a serpent, we read (Exod. 7. 11.) that “the magicians of Egypt did the same by their enchantments.” After Moses turned the waters of the Egyptian streams, rivers, ponds, and pools to blood, we read (Exod. 7. 22.) that “the magicians of Egypt did the same with their enchantments.” And after Moses brought frogs over the land by God's power, we read (Exod. 8. 7.) that “the magicians also did the same with their enchantments, and brought frogs upon the land of Egypt.” These passages, along with similar ones, may easily make someone think that enchantments can work miracles through the power of spoken words. Yet Scripture nowhere tells us what an enchantment is. Suppose an enchantment is not the production of strange effects by spells and words, as many suppose. Suppose it is instead a deception carried out by ordinary means, so far from supernatural that the deceivers need not even study natural causes. All they need is people's ordinary ignorance, foolishness, and superstition. Then passages that seem to support the power of magic, witchcraft, and enchantments must mean something other than what they seem to mean at first.\n\nWords clearly affect only people who understand them. Their only effect is to convey the speaker's intentions or feelings and thereby produce hope, fear, other feelings, or ideas in listeners. So when a rod seems to become a serpent, or water seems to become blood, or any other miracle seems to occur by enchantment, consider whether it serves to strengthen God's people. If it does not, then neither the rod nor the water nor anything else has been changed by the words. Instead, the spectator has been affected. The whole supposed miracle is that the enchanter has deceived someone. That is not a miracle, but a very easy thing to do.\n\nPeople in general, especially those who know little about natural causes or about people's motives and interests, are ignorant and prone to error. Countless simple tricks can deceive them. Before astronomy was known, imagine the reputation for miraculous power someone could have gained by telling people the hour or day when the sun would darken. If jugglers did not commonly handle cups and other small objects as they do now, people would think their tricks came at least from the Devil's power. A person can train himself to speak while breathing inward. In ancient times such people were called Ventriloqui. By doing this, he makes his voice sound faint, as if its faintness came from a great distance rather than a weak movement of his speech organs. He can make many people think they hear a voice from heaven, saying whatever he chooses. A clever person can also find out what someone has privately confessed to another about past actions and experiences. Repeating those secrets to the first person is easy, but many people gain a reputation as conjurers this way. It would take too long to list all the kinds of people whom the Greeks called Thaumaturgi, meaning workers of wonders. They do everything they do through their own skill alone. When several deceivers cooperate, however, people can be made to believe anything, no matter how impossible it is. Two people can deceive many if one pretends to be lame and the other pretends to cure him with a charm. A larger group can deceive many more if one pretends to be lame, another pretends to cure him, and everyone else testifies that it happened.\n\nBecause people are so ready to believe supposed miracles too quickly, there is no better precaution, and I think no other one, than the rule God gave through Moses. As I said in the previous chapter, it appears at the beginning of the 13. and end of the 18. of Deuteronomy. We must not accept as a prophet anyone who teaches a religion other than the one established by God's lieutenant, who at that time was Moses. Nor should we accept a prophet whose prediction does not come true, even if he teaches the same religion. In his time it was Moses, along with Aaron; in later times it was their successors. In every age, the sovereign governor of God's people, directly under God, is the Head of the Church. Before believing a supposed prophet or miracle, we must consult that head about the doctrine he has established. After doing so, we must see the alleged miracle performed. We must use every possible means to decide whether it really happens, and whether it is something no human could accomplish through natural powers, so that it requires God's direct action. On this point too, we must turn to God's lieutenant, to whom we have submitted our private judgment in every doubtful case. For example, someone might claim that after certain words are spoken over a piece of bread, God instantly changes it from bread into a God, a human being, or both, though it still looks exactly like bread. No one has reason to think this has really happened, or to fear the claimant, until he asks God through God's vicar or lieutenant whether it has happened. If the lieutenant says it has not, then Moses' words apply (Deut. 18. 22.): “He has spoken presumptuously; you shall not fear him.” If the lieutenant says it has happened, then it must not be contradicted. Similarly, if we only hear a report of a miracle rather than see it, we must ask the lawful Church—that is, its lawful head—how much we should trust the people reporting it. This is especially the situation of people living today under Christian sovereigns. In our times, I know of no one who has ever witnessed a wonder done by a person's charm, words, or prayer that someone of even average reason would consider supernatural. The issue is no longer whether an event we have seen is a miracle, or even whether a miracle we hear or read about really happened rather than being the work of a tongue or pen. Put simply, the question is whether the report is true or false. In judging this, each of us must rely not on private reason or conscience but on public reason: the judgment of God's supreme lieutenant. In fact, we have already made him our judge if we have given him sovereign power to do everything necessary for our peace and defense. Each individual always remains free in private thought to believe or disbelieve reports of miracles. He may consider what benefit the claim would bring to those who make or support it, and decide whether he thinks it a miracle or a lie. But when it comes to publicly professing that belief, private reason must give way to public reason, the reason of God's lieutenant. Who this lieutenant of God and Head of the Church is will be considered later, in its proper place.\n\nCHAPTER XXXVIII. WHAT SCRIPTURE MEANS BY ETERNAL LIFE, HELL, SALVATION, THE WORLD TO COME, AND REDEMPTION\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 1\n\nWhat Scripture means by eternal life, hell, salvation, the world to come, and redemption\n\nCivil society depends on justice. Justice depends on the power to impose death and lesser punishments, and to offer life and lesser rewards. Those powers belong to whoever holds sovereignty in the Commonwealth. A Commonwealth cannot survive if anyone besides the sovereign can give a reward greater than life or impose a punishment greater than death. Eternal life is a greater reward than life now, and eternal torment is a greater punishment than a natural death. So everyone who wants to avoid the disasters of disorder and civil war by obeying authority should carefully consider what Scripture means by eternal life and eternal torment. They should also consider what offenses against whom bring eternal torment, and what actions bring eternal life.\n\nFirst, Adam was created in a condition in which he would have lived forever in the Paradise of Eden if he had not broken God's command. The tree of life was there. He was allowed to eat from it as long as he did not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which was forbidden to him. As soon as he ate from the forbidden tree, God expelled him from Paradise “lest he put out his hand and take also from the tree of life and live forever” (Gen. 3. 22.). This suggests to me that Adam would have lived forever on Earth if he had not sinned, and that mortality came upon him and his descendants through his first sin. On this and every other question decided by Scripture, however, I submit to the interpretation of the Bible authorized by the Commonwealth of which I am a subject. Adam did not actually die at the moment he sinned. If he had, he could never have had children. Instead he lived much longer and saw many descendants before he died. So when God said, “On the day you eat from it, you shall surely die,” he must have meant that Adam would become mortal and certain to die. Adam forfeited eternal life by sinning. Whoever canceled that forfeiture would restore that life. Jesus Christ has made amends for the sins of everyone who believes in him. He has therefore restored to all believers the eternal life lost through Adam's sin. In this sense St. Paul's comparison holds (Rom. 5.18, 19.): “As one person's offense brought judgment upon all people and condemnation, so one person's righteousness brought the free gift upon all people and justification of life.” He makes the same point more plainly in 1 Cor. 15.21,22: “For since death came through a human being, resurrection of the dead also came through a human being. For as all die in Adam, so all shall be made alive in Christ.”\n\nThe passages just cited seem to place the eternal life Christ obtained for people on Earth. All die in Adam, meaning they have forfeited Paradise and eternal life on Earth. If all are likewise made alive in Christ, they must be made to live on Earth. Otherwise the comparison does not fit. The Psalmist seems to agree (Psal. 133.3.): “On Zion God commanded the blessing, even life forevermore.” Zion is in Jerusalem, on Earth. St. John also says (Rev. 2.7.), “To the one who overcomes I will give food from the tree of life, which is in the middle of God's Paradise.” This tree would have given Adam eternal life, and his life would have been on Earth. St. John seems to confirm the same point elsewhere (Rev. 21.2.): “I John saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Verse 10 says the same thing. The point appears to be that when Christ returns, the new Jerusalem, God's Paradise, will descend from heaven to God's people. They will not rise from Earth to reach it. This agrees with what the two men in white clothing, the two angels, said to the apostles as they watched Christ ascend (Acts 1.11.): “This same Jesus, taken from you into heaven, shall come in the same way you saw him go into heaven.” This sounds as if he will descend to govern them forever here under his Father, not take them up to be governed in heaven. It also agrees with the restoration of the Kingdom of God established under Moses, which was political government of the Jews on Earth. Our Savior's words (Mat. 22.30.) say “that at the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God's angels in heaven.” This describes eternal life as like the life Adam lost, particularly regarding marriage. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, they would have lived forever as the same individual people on Earth. Clearly they would not have gone on having children without end. If immortal people reproduced as people now do, there would soon be no room left for them to stand on Earth. The Jews who asked our Savior whose wife a woman who had married several brothers would be at the resurrection did not understand the consequences of immortality. There will be no reproduction and so no marriage, just as angels neither marry nor reproduce. There is another way Adam's lost eternal life resembles the life our Savior restored by his victory over death. Adam lost eternal life through his sin yet went on living for a time. Likewise, a faithful Christian has regained eternal life through Christ's suffering, though the Christian dies naturally and remains dead for a time, until the resurrection. Adam's death is dated from his condemnation, not its execution. Likewise, the life of those chosen in Christ is dated from their acquittal, not their resurrection.\n\nI cannot readily find a passage supporting the claim that after the resurrection people will live forever in the heavens—that is, in regions far from Earth where the stars are, or above the stars in another, higher heaven called Caelum Empyreum. Scripture does not mention that higher heaven, and reason gives no support for it. “Kingdom of Heaven” means the kingdom of the King who lives in heaven. His kingdom was the people of Israel, governed through his deputies the prophets: first Moses, then Eleazar and the sovereign priests. This continued until the days of Samuel, when they rebelled and wanted a mortal king like other nations had. When our Savior Christ has persuaded the Jews to return through his ministers' preaching and called the Gentiles to obey him, there will be a new Kingdom of Heaven. Our King will then be God, whose throne is heaven. Scripture does not clearly require people to rise any higher for their happiness than Earth, God's footstool. On the contrary, we read (Joh. 3.13.) that “no one has ascended into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of man, who is in heaven.” Incidentally, I take these words to be St. John's own rather than our Savior's, unlike the preceding words. Christ was then on Earth, not in heaven. St. Peter says something similar about David (Acts 2.34.). To prove Christ's ascension he quotes the Psalmist (Psal. 16.10.): “You will not leave my soul in hell or allow your Holy One to see decay.” Peter says these words refer to Christ, not David. His reason is: “For David has not ascended into heaven.” Someone might answer that David and others had not risen bodily, and would not rise until the general day of judgment, but their souls went to heaven when they left their bodies. Our Savior's words (Luke 20.37,38.) might seem to confirm this. To prove the resurrection from Moses' words, he says, “That the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush, when he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead but of the living, for they all live to him.” But if these words refer only to the soul's immortality, they do not prove what our Savior meant to prove: the body's resurrection, meaning the immortality of the whole person. Our Savior therefore means that those patriarchs were immortal not by any essential feature of human nature, but by God's will. In his generosity God chose to give eternal life to the faithful. The patriarchs and many other faithful people were dead at that time. Yet, as the passage says, they lived to God: their names were written in the Book of Life among those acquitted of their sins and appointed to eternal life at the resurrection. Scripture does not clearly teach that the human soul is naturally eternal, a living creature independent of the body. Nor does it clearly teach that any ordinary human being is immortal except through resurrection on the last day, apart from Enos and Elias. All of Job's 14. chapter is Job speaking, not his friends, and lamenting our natural mortality. It does not, however, contradict immortality at the resurrection. “There is hope for a tree,” he says in verse 7, “if it is cut down. Though its root grows old and its stump dies in the ground, when it senses water it will bud and grow branches like a plant. But a human being dies and wastes away; a human being gives up the spirit, and where is he?” And in verse 12: “A human being lies down and does not rise until the heavens are no more.” When will the heavens be no more? St. Peter tells us it will happen at the general resurrection. In his 2. Epistle, 3. Chapter, verse 7, he says that “the present heavens and Earth are kept for fire until the day of judgment and the destruction of ungodly people.” And in verse 12 he speaks of “looking for and hastening the coming of God, when the heavens will burn and dissolve, and the elements will melt in intense heat. Yet, according to the promise, we look for new heavens and a new Earth in which righteousness lives.” So when Job says people do not rise until the heavens are no more, he is saying that human immortal life begins only at the resurrection and the day of judgment. Scripture commonly uses “soul” and “life” to mean the same thing. This immortal life comes not from the nature of our species or from being born, but from the promise. St. Peter does not say, “We look for new heavens and a new Earth by nature,” but that we look for them by promise.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 2\n\nFinally, chapter 35. of this book has already used several clear passages of Scripture to show that the Kingdom of God is a civil Commonwealth. God himself is sovereign there, first under the Old Covenant and then under the New Covenant, governing through his vicar or lieutenant. Those same passages also show that after our Savior returns in majesty and glory to reign in fact and forever, the Kingdom of God will be on Earth. Most people will find this teaching new, even though many clear passages of Scripture support it. So I merely put it forward. I do not insist on this or any other disputed point of religion. Instead, I wait for the outcome of the dispute fought with swords over which authority approves or rejects every kind of doctrine. Among my countrymen, that dispute is not yet settled. Everyone who wants the protection of that authority's laws must obey its commands about speech and writing, whatever private opinions they hold. Teachings about the Kingdom of God affect human kingdoms so deeply that only those who hold sovereign power under God should decide them.\n\nScripture also appears to place God's enemies and their punishment after judgment on Earth, just as it places the Kingdom of God and eternal life there. In Scripture the place where buried people, or people swallowed by the earth, remain until the resurrection is usually described by words meaning underground. The Latin texts usually call it Infernus or Inferni, and the Greek texts call it Hades, meaning a place where people cannot see. This includes both the grave and any deeper place. But neither Testament specifies the location of the damned after the resurrection. It identifies their place only by the company they keep: they will be where wicked people whom God once destroyed from the face of the Earth by extraordinary miracles are found. For example, people say they are in Inferno, in Tartarus, or in the bottomless pit because Corah, Dathan, and Abirom were swallowed alive by the earth. The writers of Scripture did not mean us to believe the finite globe of Earth contains a bottomless pit, a hole infinitely deep. Earth is also tiny in comparison with the height of the stars. The Greeks called such a pit Tartarus in their Daemonologie, their teaching about daemons, and the Romans adopted the name. Virgill says of it:\n\nIt opens downward and stretches twice as far into the shadows\n\nAs the height of heaven's airy Olympus rises above us:\n\nBut Earth's size in relation to heaven does not allow for such a pit. Rather, we should understand the damned to be somewhere, without specifying where, in the company of those whom God punished in this exemplary way.\n\nLikewise, powerful people who lived before the flood in Noah's time were destroyed by the worldwide deluge for their wicked lives. The Greeks called them Heroes, and Scripture called them Giants. Both accounts say they were born from the union of the children of God with the children of human beings. So Scripture sometimes identifies the place of the damned by the company of those dead Giants. Proverbs 21.16. says, “The person who wanders from the path of understanding shall remain among the Giants.” Job 26.5. says, “Look, the Giants groan beneath the water, along with those who live with them.” Here the damned are placed beneath the water. Isaiah 14.9. says, “Hell is disturbed to meet you”—the king of Babylon—“and will move the Giants for you.” Here too the damned are under water, if the words are taken literally.\n\nThird, God punished the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in an extraordinary way. He destroyed them with fire and brimstone and turned the surrounding region into a foul-smelling lake of bitumen. So the place of the damned is sometimes described as a fire or a fiery lake. The Apocalypse, ch.21.8., says, “The fearful, unbelieving, and abominable, murderers, sexually immoral people, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their share in the lake burning with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” Hellfire here is a metaphor drawn from Sodom's real fire. Clearly it does not indicate a particular kind or location of torment. It means destruction generally, as in the 20. Chapter, verse 14: “Death and hell were thrown into the lake of fire.” That is, they were abolished and destroyed. After the day of judgment there will be no more dying or going to hell, that is, going to Hades—a word from which our word “hell” may come. No more going to Hades means no more dying.\n\nFourth, the plague of darkness struck the Egyptians. Scripture says (Exod. 10.23.), “They did not see one another, and no one rose from his place for three days; but all the children of Israel had light in their homes.” From this, the place of the wicked after judgment is called outer darkness, or, in the original wording, darkness outside. In Mat. 22.13., the king orders his servants “to tie up the man without a wedding garment, hand and foot, and throw him out”—Eis To Skotos To Exoteron, external darkness, or darkness outside. Although this is translated “utter darkness,” it tells us not how deep the darkness is but where it is: outside the home of God's elect.\n\nFinally, near Jerusalem was a place called the Valley of the Children of Hinnon. In one part called Tophet, the Jews had committed terrible idolatry by sacrificing their children to the idol Moloch. God had also punished his enemies terribly there. Josias burned the priests of Moloch on their own altars there, as described in detail in the 2 of Kings, chap. 23. Later the valley received the city's refuse and waste. Fires were lit there from time to time to clean the air and remove the smell of rotting flesh. Because of this dreadful place, the Jews later called the place of the damned Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnon. Gehenna is the word usually translated now as “hell.” The fires periodically burning there give us the idea of everlasting and unquenchable fire.\n\nNo one interprets Scripture to mean that after judgment all the wicked will be punished forever in the Valley of Hinnon. Nor does anyone think they will rise only to stay underground or under water forever, or that after resurrection they will never see one another or move from one place to another. It seems to me, then, that these descriptions of hellfire must be metaphors. We must look for their literal meaning. Every metaphor has some real basis that can be put into plain words. We must look for the real location of hell and the nature of its torments and tormentors.\n\nFirst, the names given to the tormentors describe exactly what they are and what they do: the Enemy, or Satan; the Accuser, or Diabolus; and the Destroyer, or Abbadon. These meaningful names—Satan, Devil, and Abbadon—do not identify particular individuals as personal names do. They name a role or quality. They should therefore have been translated rather than left as they are in Latin and modern Bibles. Left untranslated, they look like the personal names of daemons, making it easier to persuade people to believe in devils. That belief was part of the religion of the Gentiles at the time, and opposed the teachings of Moses and Christ.\n\nThe Enemy, Accuser, and Destroyer mean the enemy of those who will belong to the Kingdom of God. If the Kingdom of God after the resurrection is on Earth, as I have shown from Scripture in the preceding chapter that it seems to be, then the Enemy and his kingdom must also be on Earth. That was also the case before the Jews removed God as their king. God's kingdom was in Palestine, and the surrounding nations were the kingdoms of the Enemy. Thus Satan means any earthly enemy of the Church.\n\nScripture sometimes describes the torments of hell as “weeping and grinding of teeth,” as in Mat. 8.12. Sometimes it calls them “the worm of conscience,” as in Isa.66.24. and Mark 9.44, 46, 48. Sometimes it describes fire, as in the passage just mentioned: “where the worm does not die and the fire is not put out,” as well as many other passages. Sometimes it calls them “shame and contempt,” as in Dan. 12.2.: “Many who sleep in the dust of the Earth shall wake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” All these passages use metaphors for the grief and distress people feel when they see others enjoy eternal happiness that they themselves have lost through unbelief and disobedience. They can recognize the happiness of others only by comparing it with their own actual suffering. So they must also suffer the bodily pains and hardships of people living under evil, cruel governors and opposed by an enemy who is the eternal King of the saints, God Almighty. One of these bodily pains is a second death for each wicked person. Scripture is clear that everyone will rise from the dead, but it does not promise eternal life to anyone God has rejected. St. Paul answers a question about the bodies in which people will rise (1 Cor. 15.42, 43.): “The body is planted subject to decay and raised free of decay; planted in dishonor and raised in glory; planted in weakness and raised in power.” Glory and power cannot describe wicked people's bodies. Nor can “second death” describe people who die only once. We might call an everlasting life of suffering an everlasting death as a metaphor, but it makes little sense to call that a second death. The fire prepared for the wicked is everlasting. This means that after the resurrection the condition in which no one can live without bodily and mental torment will last forever. In that sense, the fire cannot be put out and the torments are everlasting. It does not follow that each person thrown into the fire or suffering those torments can endure them forever, always burning and suffering but never dying or being destroyed. Many passages affirm everlasting fire and torments, into which people may be thrown one after another forever. But I find none affirming that any individual will live forever in that fire. Instead, Scripture speaks of everlasting death, which is the second death. The Apocalypse says (Apoc. 20. 13,14.): “After death and the grave give up the dead in them, and each person is judged according to his works, death and the grave will also be thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death.” Clearly, then, each person condemned on judgment day will undergo a second death, after which he will die no more.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXVIII, 3\n\nScripture includes all the joys of eternal life under the name of salvation, or being saved. To be saved is to be made safe, either from particular evils or from every evil, including need, illness, and death itself. God created human beings immortal, free from decay and therefore from anything that could destroy their nature. They lost that happiness through Adam's sin. So being saved from sin means being saved from every evil and hardship that sin brought upon us. That is why Scripture treats forgiveness of sin and rescue from death and misery as the same thing. Our Savior showed this when he healed a man with paralysis by saying (Mat. 9.2.), “Son, take heart; your sins are forgiven.” He knew that the scribes thought it blasphemous for a man to claim to forgive sins, so he asked them (v.5.) “Which is easier to say: ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or ‘Get up and walk’?” He meant that, as far as saving the sick man was concerned, saying “Your sins are forgiven” and saying “Get up and walk” amounted to the same thing. He used the first expression to show that he had the power to forgive sins. Reason also makes this clear. Since death and misery were punishments for sin, release from sin must also mean release from death and misery. That is complete salvation, which the faithful will enjoy after the day of Judgment through the power and favor of Jesus Christ. That is why he is called our Savior.\n\nI need say nothing about particular acts of salvation, such as those meant in 1 Sam. 14.39., “as the Lord lives who saves Israel,” meaning from their current enemies; in 2 Sam. 22.4., “You are my Savior; you save me from violence”; and in 2 Kings 13.5., “God gave the Israelites a savior, and so they were delivered from the hand of the Assyrians.” Such passages present no difficulty and give no one an interested reason to distort their meaning.\n\nBut the place of general salvation raises a great difficulty, because that salvation must be in the Kingdom of Heaven. On one hand, the word kingdom suggests that salvation will be on Earth. A kingdom is an arrangement people establish for lasting security against enemies and need. Salvation is presented to us as the glorious reign of our King through conquest, not as safety through escape. So where we expect salvation we must also expect triumph; before triumph, victory; and before victory, battle. It is hard to suppose that battle will take place in Heaven. Yet however sound this reasoning may be, I will not rely on it without very clear passages of Scripture. Isaiah, 33. ver. 20,21,22,23,24, describes the state of salvation at length:\n\n“Look at Zion, the city of our solemn gatherings. Your eyes will see Jerusalem, a peaceful home, a tent that will not be taken down. None of its stakes will ever be pulled up, and none of its cords will be broken.\n\nBut there the glorious Lord will be for us like a place with broad rivers and streams. No rowing galley will travel there, and no splendid ship will pass through.\n\nFor the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King. He will save us.\n\nYour rigging hangs loose; they could not hold their mast firm or spread their sail. Then the great plunder is divided, and even the lame take a share.\n\nNo resident will say, ‘I am sick.’ The people living there will be forgiven their wrongdoing.”\n\nThese words tell us where salvation will come from: “Jerusalem, a peaceful home.” They tell us how long it will last: “a tent that will not be taken down,” and so on. They name its Savior: “the Lord, our Judge, our Lawgiver, our King. He will save us.” They describe the salvation: “the Lord will be for them like a broad moat of swift water,” and so on. They describe their enemies: “their rigging is loose, their masts weak, and the lame will take their plunder.” They describe those who are saved: “No resident will say, ‘I am sick.’” Finally, they include all this in forgiveness of sin: “The people living there will be forgiven their wrongdoing.” It is therefore clear that salvation will be on Earth when God reigns in Jerusalem at Christ's return. From Jerusalem salvation will reach the Gentiles admitted into God's Kingdom. The same prophet says this more explicitly in Chap. 66.20, 21.: “And they,” meaning the Gentiles who held any Jew captive, “will bring all your brothers from all nations as an offering to the Lord, on horses, in chariots, in litters, on mules, and on swift animals, to my holy mountain, Jerusalem, says the Lord. They will do so as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into the House of the Lord. And I will also take some of them as priests and Levites, says the Lord.” This makes it clear that Jerusalem will be the chief seat of God's Kingdom, the place from which salvation will come to us who were Gentiles. Our Savior confirms this when speaking to the Samaritan woman about where to worship God. In John 4.22. he tells her that the Samaritans worship what they do not know, while the Jews worship what they know: “For salvation comes from the Jews” (Ex Judais, meaning it begins with the Jews). It is as though he said, “You worship God, but you do not know through whom he will save you. We do know: he will be a Jew of the tribe of Judah, not a Samaritan.” The woman therefore replied quite to the point, “We know the Messiah will come.” Thus our Savior's statement, “Salvation comes from the Jews,” means the same as Paul's statement (Rom. 1.16,17.): “The Gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it God's righteousness is revealed from faith to faith”—from the faith of the Jew to that of the Gentile. In the same sense, the prophet Joel describes the day of Judgment (chap. 2.30,31.), when God will “show wonders in heaven and on earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun will turn dark and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” He adds in verse 32, “And whoever calls on the Lord's name will be saved. For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be salvation.” Obadiah says the same in verse 17: “On Mount Zion there will be deliverance; there will be holiness, and the house of Jacob will possess what belongs to them.” He means the possessions of the Gentiles, which he specifies in the following verses: Mount Esau, the land of the Philistines, the fields of Ephraim, Samaria, Gilead, and the cities of the South. He concludes, “The Kingdom will be the Lord's.” All these passages place salvation and the Kingdom of God on Earth after the day of Judgment. On the other hand, I have found no passage that can reasonably be used to prove that the saints will ascend into Heaven, whether into a Coelum Empyreum or any other region of the upper air. The only possible argument is that it is called the Kingdom of Heaven. It may bear that name because God, as King of the Jews, ruled them through commands sent from Heaven by angels to Moses to bring them back to obedience. From Heaven he will send him again to rule them and all other faithful people forever from the day of Judgment. Or it may be called that because our great King's throne is in Heaven, while Earth is only his footstool. But it does not seem fitting to a king's dignity that God's subjects should occupy a place as high as his throne, or higher than his footstool. Nor can I find any clear scriptural passage supporting it.\n\nWhat I have said about the Kingdom of God and salvation makes it easy to understand the world to come. Scripture mentions three worlds: the old world, the present world, and the world to come. St. Peter speaks of the first (2 Pet. 2.5.): “If God did not spare the old world, but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, when he brought the flood on the world of the ungodly,” and so on. The first world, then, lasted from Adam to the general Flood. Our Savior speaks of the present world (John 18.36.): “My Kingdom is not of this world.” For he came only to teach people the way to salvation and, through his teaching, to renew his Father's Kingdom. St. Peter speaks of the world to come (2 Pet. 3. 13.): “Nevertheless, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new Earth.” This is the world in which Christ will come down from Heaven in the clouds with great power and glory. He will send out his angels, gather his chosen people from the four winds and the farthest parts of Earth, and from then on reign over them forever under his Father.\n\nSaving a sinner requires a prior redemption. Someone guilty of sin is liable for its penalty. Either that person or someone else must pay the ransom demanded by the offended party, who holds that person in his power. Since the offended party is almighty God, who holds everything in his power, the ransom required before salvation can be gained is whatever God chooses to require. Ransom here does not mean a payment equal in value to the offense. No sinner can pay that for himself, and no righteous person can pay it for another. A person can repair harm done to someone else by restoring what was lost or offering compensation. But compensation cannot erase sin, because that would make permission to sin something that could be bought. God can instead pardon those who repent, either freely or in return for whatever penalty he chooses to accept. In the Old Testament he commonly accepted a sacrifice or offering. Forgiving a sin is not unjust, even if punishment has been threatened. Even among human beings, a promise of something good binds the person who makes it, but a threat—a promise of something bad—does not. Still less does such a threat bind God, who is infinitely more merciful than human beings. So when our Savior Christ redeemed us, he did not pay for human sins in the sense that his death, by its own power, would make it unjust for God to punish sinners with eternal death. Instead, at his first coming he offered himself as the sacrifice that God chose to require for the salvation, at his second coming, of those who repent and believe in him in the meantime. Scripture does not always call this act of redemption a sacrifice or offering; sometimes it calls it a price. But that does not mean a price whose value entitled him to demand our pardon from his offended Father. It means the price that God the Father mercifully chose to ask.\n\nChapter XXXIX. What the Word Church Means in Scripture\n\n### Part III, Chapter XXXIX\n\nWhat the Word Church Means in Scripture\n\nThe word church (Ecclesia) has several meanings in Scripture. Sometimes, though not often, it means God's house: a building where Christians gather for public worship. For example, 1 Cor. 14. ver. 34. says, “Let your women keep silent in the churches.” There the word stands for the congregation assembled in the building. Since then it has also been used for the building itself, to distinguish Christian places of worship from those of idol worshipers. The Temple of Jerusalem was God's house and a house of prayer. Any building Christians dedicate to the worship of Christ is likewise Christ's house. The Greek Fathers therefore called it Kuriake, the Lord's house. From this came the words Kyrke and church in our language.\n\nWhen church does not mean a building, it has the meaning that Ecclesia had in the Greek Common-wealths: a gathering of citizens called together to hear a magistrate speak. In the Roman Common-wealth this gathering was called Concio, while a speaker was called Ecclesiastes or Concionator. If lawful authority called the gathering (Acts 19.39.), it was an Ecclesia Legitima, a lawful church, or Ennomos Ecclesia. But if uproar and rebellious shouting brought the people together, it was a disorderly church, an Ecclesia Sugkechumene.\n\nSometimes the word means people entitled to belong to the congregation even when they are not assembled. It then means all Christians, however widely scattered. Thus Act. 8.3. says that “Saul ravaged the church.” It is in this sense that Christ is called head of the church. Sometimes it means a particular group of Christians, as in Col. 4.15.: “Greet the church in his house.” Sometimes it means only those whom God has chosen, as in Ephes. 5.27.: “A glorious church, without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish.” This means the triumphant church, or the church to come. Sometimes it means an assembly of people who profess Christianity, whether their profession is sincere or false. This is its meaning in Mat. 18.17.: “Tell it to the church; and if he refuses to hear the church, treat him as a Gentile or tax collector.”\n\nOnly in this last sense can a church count as one person. Only then can we say that it has the power to decide, speak, command, receive obedience, make laws, or perform any other action. Without authority from a lawful congregation, anything done by a crowd is the individual act of each person who was present and helped do it. It is not an act of everyone together as a single body, much less of those who were absent or present but unwilling. In this sense I define a church as “a group of people professing Christianity, united in the person of one Sovereign. They must assemble when he commands, and must not assemble without his authority.” In every Common-wealth an assembly without the civil Sovereign's authorization is unlawful. So a church assembly is also unlawful in any Common-wealth whose Sovereign has forbidden it to assemble.\n\nIt also follows that no universal church exists on Earth which all Christians are bound to obey. No power on Earth has authority over every other Common-wealth. Christians live under different princes and states, but each is subject to the Common-wealth of which that Christian is a member. None can therefore be subject to another person's commands. A church that can command, judge, absolve, condemn, or perform any other act is therefore the same thing as a civil Common-wealth of Christians. It is called a civil state because its subjects are human beings, and a church because its subjects are Christians. Temporal government and spiritual government are just two expressions introduced to make people see double and mistake who their lawful Sovereign is. It is true that after the Resurrection the bodies of the faithful will be spiritual as well as eternal. But in this life their bodies are solid and subject to decay. So in this life there is no kind of government, of either state or religion, other than temporal government. Nor may any subject lawfully teach a doctrine that the ruler of both state and religion forbids. That ruler must be one person. Otherwise factions and civil war will inevitably arise in the Common-wealth: between church and state, spiritualists and temporalists, the Sword of Justice and the Shield of Faith. Worse, the Christian and the human being will be at war in each Christian's own heart. The church's teachers are called pastors, and so are civil Sovereigns. But if pastors are not ranked under one another with one chief pastor, people will be taught conflicting doctrines. Both doctrines might be false, and at least one must be. I have already shown who the chief pastor is under the law of Nature: the civil Sovereign. In the following chapters we will see to whom Scripture gives that office.\n\nChapter XL. The Rights of the Kingdom of God Under Abraham, Moses, the High Priests, and the Kings of Judah\n\n### Part III, Chapter XL, 1\n\nThe Rights of the Kingdom of God Under Abraham, Moses, the High Priests, and the Kings of Judah\n\nAbraham was the father of the faithful and the first person in the Kingdom of God by Covenant. God first made the Covenant with him. In it Abraham bound himself and his descendants to recognize and obey God's commands. These included not just moral laws, which they could know by the light of Nature, but also particular commands God would give Abraham in dreams and visions. They were already obliged to obey the moral law. God did not need to promise them the land of Canaan to make a Covenant about that duty. No contract could add to or strengthen the natural duty Abraham, his descendants, and everyone else had to obey almighty God. So Abraham's Covenant with God was to accept as God's command whatever was commanded to him in God's name in a dream or vision, to pass it on to his family, and to make them obey it.\n\nWe can learn three important things about the government of God's people from this agreement with Abraham. First, when God made the Covenant, he spoke only to Abraham. He therefore made no separate agreement with Abraham's family or descendants. Their wills, which are essential to every Covenant, were already included in Abraham's will when the agreement was made. Abraham was thus assumed to have lawful power to make them do whatever he had promised on their behalf. God accordingly says (Gen 18.18, 19.), “All the nations of the Earth will be blessed through him. For I know he will command his children and household after him, and they will keep the Lord's way.” This gives us the first conclusion: people to whom God has not spoken directly must receive God's specific commands from their Sovereign, just as Abraham's family and descendants received them from Abraham, their father, master, and civil Sovereign. Consequently, people in every Common-wealth who have no supernatural revelation to the contrary must obey their own Sovereign's laws in their outward religious acts and professions. Inward thoughts and beliefs are different. Human rulers cannot know them; only God knows the heart. They are not voluntary or produced by law. They result from God's unrevealed will and power, so they cannot be subject to an obligation imposed by law.\n\nA second point follows. Abraham could lawfully punish any of his subjects who claimed a private vision, spirit, or other revelation from God to support a teaching he forbade. He could also punish those who followed such a claimant. Consequently, a Sovereign today may punish anyone who sets a claim of private spiritual authority against the laws. The Sovereign occupies the same position in a Common-wealth that Abraham held in his family.\n\nA third point follows too: just as only Abraham in his family could determine what was or was not God's word, only the Sovereign can do so in a Christian Common-wealth. God spoke only to Abraham, so only Abraham could know what God had said and explain it to his family. Likewise, those who hold Abraham's position in a Common-wealth are the sole interpreters of what God has said.\n\nThe same Covenant was renewed with Isaac and then with Jacob. It was not renewed again until the Israelites were freed from Egypt and reached the foot of Mount Sinai. Moses renewed it there, as I said earlier in chap. 35. From then on they became God's special Kingdom, with Moses as God's deputy during his lifetime. The succession to that office was assigned to Aaron and his descendants, so that they would be a priestly Kingdom under God forever.\n\nThis arrangement establishes a Kingdom for God. But Moses had no authority to rule the Israelites as heir to Abraham's rights, since he could not claim them by inheritance. So it does not yet appear that the people were obliged to accept him as God's deputy for longer than they believed God spoke to him. Despite their Covenant with God, his authority thus still depended entirely on their opinion of his holiness, the reality of his conversations with God, and the truth of his miracles. If their opinion changed, they would no longer be obliged to accept as God's law whatever he presented to them in God's name. We must therefore consider what other basis obliged them to obey Moses. God's command alone could not bind them, because God spoke to them only through Moses himself, not directly. Our Savior says about himself (John 5. 31.), “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true.” Still less should Moses' own testimony be accepted as proof of his claim to kingly power over God's people. His authority, like that of other princes, must therefore rest on the people's consent and promise to obey him. And it did. “The people” (Exod. 20.18.), “when they saw the thunder and lightning, heard the trumpet, and saw the mountain smoking, moved away and stood at a distance. They said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself, and we will listen. But do not let God speak to us, or we will die.’” This was their promise to obey. By making it, they bound themselves to obey whatever he gave them as God's command.\n\nAlthough the Covenant established a priestly Kingdom inherited by Aaron, that inheritance was to begin after Moses died. Whoever sets up and organizes a Common-wealth as its first founder—whether a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy—must have Sovereign power over the people for as long as he is doing that work. Scripture clearly states that Moses held that power throughout his life. First, in the passage just quoted, the people promised obedience to Moses, not to Aaron. Second, Exod. 24.1, 2. says, “And God said to Moses, ‘Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of Israel's elders. Moses alone shall approach the Lord. The others must not come close, and the people must not go up with him.’” Only Moses was called up to God; Aaron, the other priests, the seventy elders, and the people were not, and the people were explicitly forbidden to come up. Clearly, Moses alone represented God's person to the Israelites, and thus he alone was their Sovereign under God. Later verse 9 says, “Then Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of Israel's elders went up. They saw the God of Israel, and beneath his feet was something like a pavement of sapphire stone,” and so on. But this occurred only after Moses had already been with God and had brought God's words to the people. Moses alone went on the people's business. The others, like nobles in his company, were honored with a special privilege not granted to the people: as the next verse shows, they saw God and lived. “God did not lay his hand on them. They saw God and ate and drank,” meaning they stayed alive. But they carried no command from God to the people. Again, Scripture repeatedly says, “The Lord spoke to Moses,” both in matters of government generally and in ordering religious ceremonies in Chapters 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31 of Exodus and throughout Leviticus. It seldom says this of Aaron. Moses threw the calf Aaron had made into the fire. Finally, God himself decided in Moses' favor the question of Aaron's authority raised by Aaron and Miriam's rebellion (Numbers 12.). God also decided for Moses in the dispute with the people when Corah, Dathan, Abiram, and two hundred and fifty leaders of the assembly “gathered together” (Numbers 16. 3.) “against Moses and Aaron and said, ‘You take too much on yourselves. Everyone in the congregation is holy, and the Lord is among them. Why do you raise yourselves above the Lord's congregation?’” God made the Earth swallow Corah, Dathan, and Abiram alive with their wives and children, and burned up the two hundred and fifty leaders. So neither Aaron, nor the people, nor an aristocracy of leading men held Sovereignty over Israel under God. Moses alone held it, in civil government as well as religion. Only Moses spoke to God, so only he could tell the people what God required. No one else could even approach the mountain where God spoke with Moses without risking death. “You must set boundaries” (the Lord says, Exod 19. 12.) “around the people and tell them, ‘Be careful not to climb the mountain or touch its edge. Anyone who touches the mountain will certainly be put to death.’” Again in verse 21: “Go down and warn the people, or they may break through to stare at the Lord.” We can conclude that whoever holds Moses' place in a Christian Common-wealth is God's only messenger and the only interpreter of his commands. Accordingly, no one should go beyond the limits set by the various Sovereigns when interpreting Scripture. Since God now speaks in the Scriptures, they are Mount Sinai; their boundaries are the laws of those who represent God on Earth. People may look at them, see God's wonderful works, and learn to fear him. But interpreting them means prying into what God says to the person he appoints to govern under him, and making oneself the judge of whether that person governs as God commands. That crosses the limits God has set us and amounts to staring at God without reverence.\n\nIn Moses' time there was no prophet or person claiming God's Spirit unless Moses had approved and authorized that person. Only seventy people are said to have prophesied through God's Spirit in his time, and Moses chose every one of them. God said to him (Numb. 11.16.), “Gather for me seventy of Israel's elders whom you know to be elders of the people.” God shared his Spirit with these men, but it was not a different Spirit from Moses'. Verse 25 says, “God came down in a cloud and took some of the Spirit that was on Moses and gave it to the seventy elders.” As I showed earlier in chap. 36., spirit here means mind. The passage means that God gave them minds in agreement with, and subordinate to, Moses' mind. They could then prophesy—speak to the people in God's name—as Moses' assistants, by his authority, to advance teachings consistent with his. They were only assistants. When two of them prophesied in the camp, it was thought to be something new and unlawful. According to verses 27. and 28. of that chapter, they were accused, and Joshua urged Moses to stop them, not knowing that they prophesied through Moses' Spirit. This makes clear that no subject should claim to prophesy or possess the Spirit in opposition to the teaching established by the person God has put in Moses' place.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XL, 2\n\nAfter Aaron and then Moses died, the Kingdom passed by the Covenant to Aaron's son Eleazar, the high priest, because it was a priestly Kingdom. God declared Eleazar Sovereign under himself when he appointed Joshua commander of the army. God says expressly about Joshua (Numb. 27.21.), “He shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask the Lord for guidance on his behalf. At his word they shall go out, and at his word they shall come in: Joshua and all the children of Israel with him.” The supreme power to make war and peace therefore belonged to the priest. The high priest also held supreme judicial power. The priests kept the Book of the Law, and priests and Levites alone served as lower judges in civil cases, as Deut. 17.8, 9, 10. shows. Nobody questioned the high priest's supreme authority over how God was worshiped until Saul's time. Thus civil and religious power were joined in the same person, the high priest. They ought likewise to be joined in anyone who rules by divine right, meaning authority received directly from God.\n\nThe Book of Judges often says that between Joshua's death and Saul's time “there was no king in Israel.” Sometimes it adds that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” “There was no king” means there was no Sovereign power in Israel. That was true if we consider how such power was actually used. After Joshua and Eleazar died, “another generation arose” (Judges 2.10.) “who did not know the Lord or the works he had done for Israel. They did evil in the Lord's sight and served Baalim.” The Jews also had the trait St. Paul points out: they looked for a sign. They demanded signs not only before submitting to Moses' government but even after they had bound themselves by submitting. Yet signs and miracles are meant to create faith, not to keep people from breaking the faith they have pledged. Once they have pledged it, the law of Nature binds them. But if we look at the right to rule rather than how it was exercised, Sovereign power remained with the high priest. The people sometimes obeyed judges, men God selected in an unusual way to rescue his rebellious subjects from their enemies. Such obedience does not count against the high priest's right to Sovereign power over both civil affairs and religion. Neither the judges nor Samuel himself received an ordinary appointment to rule. Their appointment was extraordinary. The Israelites obeyed them not because duty required it, but out of respect for their favor with God, shown in their wisdom, courage, or success. So up to this point the right to regulate government and religion was inseparable.\n\nKings succeeded the judges. All authority in religion and government had previously belonged to the high priest; now it belonged to the king. Previously, by God's power and by a special agreement between the Israelites and God, Sovereignty over the people belonged to God and, under him, to the high priest as his deputy on Earth. The people cast off that arrangement with God's own consent. When they said to Samuel (1 Sam. 8.5.), “Appoint a king to judge us like all the nations,” they meant they no longer wanted to be ruled by commands issued by the priest in God's name. They wanted a ruler who would command them as other nations were commanded. By removing the high priest's royal authority, they also removed that particular form of God's government. Yet God agreed. He told Samuel (verse 7.), “Listen to everything the people say to you. They have not rejected you; they have rejected me as their king.” Since they had rejected God, whose authority the priests exercised, the priests had no authority left except what the king chose to grant. Good or bad kings granted more or less of it. Clearly, the king controlled civil government entirely. In verse 20. of the same chapter, the people say they want to be like the other nations. Their king will judge them, go before them, and fight their battles. In other words, he will hold all authority in peace and war. This includes control of religion. At that time the only word of God by which religion could be regulated was the law of Moses, which was also their civil law. Further, 1 Kings 2.27. says Solomon “removed Abiathar from being a priest before the Lord.” Solomon therefore had authority over the high priest as over any other subject, a strong sign of supremacy in religion. We also read in 1 Kings 8. that he dedicated the Temple, blessed the people, and personally spoke the excellent prayer used at the dedication of all churches and houses of prayer. This too is a strong sign of supremacy in religion. Again, 2 Kings 22. tells how a question arose about the Book of the Law found in the Temple. The high priest did not settle it. Josiah sent him and others to ask Hulda the prophetess about it. This is another sign of supremacy in religion. Finally, 1 Chro. 26.30. says David appointed Hashabiah and his brothers, who were Hebronites, as officers over Israel in the west “in all the Lord's business and in the king's service.” Verse 32. likewise says he appointed other Hebronites as “rulers over the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh”—the remaining Israelites living beyond the Jordan—“for every matter concerning God and for the king's business.” Is that not complete temporal and spiritual power, as those who would divide it call it? In short, from the first establishment of God's Kingdom to the Captivity, supreme power in religion was held by whoever held civil Sovereignty. Once Saul was chosen, the priests' role was not to command but to serve.\n\nYet even though the right to govern both civil affairs and religion belonged first to the high priests and then to the kings, the sacred history shows that the people did not understand this. A large part of them, probably most, trusted reports about Moses or accounts of conversations between God and the priests only while they saw great miracles, or something equivalent: great ability in their rulers or great success in their undertakings. Whenever their rulers displeased them, they used complaints about civil government or religion as an excuse to change the government or abandon their obedience whenever they pleased. This caused the nation's recurring civil unrest, divisions, and disasters. For example, the generation after Eleazar and Joshua died had not seen God's wonders and was left to its own weak reasoning. They did not understand that the Covenant bound them to a priestly Kingdom. They disregarded the priest's commands and Moses' laws, and each did what seemed right to him. In civil matters they obeyed whoever they thought could rescue them from neighboring nations that oppressed them. Instead of consulting God, as they should have done, they consulted men or women they guessed were prophets because they predicted future events. Even if they kept an idol in their chapel, they thought they worshiped the God of Israel as long as their chaplain was a Levite.\n\nLater, when they asked for a king like the other nations, they did not intend to abandon worship of God as their King. They had lost faith in the justice of Samuel's sons and wanted a king to judge their civil disputes. But they did not intend to let that king change the religion they believed Moses had taught them. They therefore always kept an excuse based on justice or religion ready to release themselves from obedience whenever they hoped to succeed. Samuel was displeased when the people wanted a king, since God was already their King and Samuel held authority only under him. Yet when Saul did not follow Samuel's advice to destroy Agag as God had commanded, Samuel anointed David as another king, removing Saul's heirs from the succession. Rehoboam was not an idol worshiper. But when the people thought he was an oppressor, that civil grievance led ten tribes to leave him for Jeroboam, who did worship idols. Throughout the history of the kings of Judah and Israel, prophets regularly criticized kings for violating religion and sometimes also for errors of state policy. For example (2 Chro. 19. 2.), the prophet Jehu reproved Jehosaphat for helping the king of Israel against the Syrians, and Isaiah reproved Hezekiah for showing his treasures to the ambassadors of Babylon. All this shows that although the kings held power over state and religion, none of them was free from challenges in using it except those who enjoyed favor because of their own natural abilities or successes. We cannot therefore argue from the practices of those times that supreme authority in religion did not belong to the kings, unless we give it to the prophets. That would mean concluding that Isaiah was supreme head of the church because Hezekiah's prayer before the cherubim did not receive an answer there and then, but received one later through Isaiah. Or we would have to conclude that neither Josiah nor the high priest but Hulda the prophetess held supreme religious authority, because Josiah consulted her about the Book of the Law. I do not think any teacher holds that view.\n\nDuring the Captivity the Jews had no Common-wealth at all. After they returned, they renewed their Covenant with God, but made no promise to obey Esdras or anyone else. Soon afterward they became subjects of the Greeks. Greek customs and beliefs about spirits, along with the teachings of the Cabalists, badly corrupted their religion. Their resulting confusion in government and religion tells us nothing about who held supreme authority in either. As far as the Old Testament is concerned, then, we can conclude that whoever held Sovereignty over the Jewish Common-wealth also had supreme authority over the outward worship of God and represented God's person: the person of God the Father. God was not called Father until he sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to redeem humanity from sin and bring people into his everlasting Kingdom, where they would be saved forever. We must speak of this in the next chapter.\n\nChapter XLI. The Office of Our Blessed Savior\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLI, 1\n\nOn the Office of Our Blessed Savior\n\nHoly Scripture describes three parts of the Messiah's office. First, he is a redeemer or savior. Second, he is a pastor, counselor, or teacher: a prophet sent by God to bring those God has chosen to salvation. Third, he is a king—an eternal king, though under his Father, as Moses and the high priests were in their respective times. These three roles correspond to three periods. At his first coming, he redeemed us by offering himself on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins. He began bringing people to faith in person then. He continues to do so now through his ministers, and will continue until he comes again. After his return, his glorious reign over those he has chosen will begin and last forever.\n\nAs a redeemer, he pays the price of sin, which is death. So he had to be sacrificed. He took our wrongs upon himself and carried them away as God required. This is not because the death of one sinless man could, by strict justice, pay for every person's offenses. Rather, God mercifully chose to accept sacrifices of this kind for sin. Under the old Law (Leviticus 16), the Lord required a yearly atonement for the sins of all Israel, priests and others alike. Aaron alone was to sacrifice a young bull for himself and the priests. For the rest of the people he was to receive two young goats. He sacrificed one; on the other's head—the scapegoat's—he placed his hands and confessed the people's wrongs, placing them all on its head. Then a suitable man led the goat into the wilderness, where it escaped, carrying away the people's wrongs. Just as sacrificing one goat was a sufficient price to redeem all Israel because God accepted it, the Messiah's death is a sufficient price for all humanity's sins because God required no more. Our Savior Christ's suffering seems to be represented here as clearly as in the offering of Isaac or any other Old Testament image of him. He was both the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat: “He was oppressed and afflicted (Isa. 53.7.); he did not open his mouth; he was brought like a lamb to slaughter, and like a sheep silent before the shearer, he did not open his mouth.” Here he is the sacrificed goat. “He has borne our griefs (ver. 4.) and carried our sorrows”; and again (ver. 6.), “The Lord has laid on him the wrongs of us all.” Here he is the scapegoat. “He was cut off from the land of the living (ver. 8.) for the wrongdoing of my people.” Here again he is the sacrificed goat. And again (ver. 11.), “He shall bear their sins.” Here he is the scapegoat. Thus the Lamb of God takes the place of both goats: sacrificed when he died, and escaping when he rose again. His Father raised him at the right time and removed him from human society in his ascension.\n\nA redeemer has no claim to what he redeems before he has paid its price. That price was the redeemer's death. Clearly, then, our Savior as a man was not yet king of the people he redeemed before he died—that is, while he lived bodily on earth. I mean he was not then their reigning king under the agreement believers make with him in baptism. Still, by renewing their agreement with God in baptism, they became obliged to obey him as king under his Father whenever he chose to take up the kingdom. Accordingly, our Savior says explicitly (John 18.36.), “My kingdom is not of this world.” Scripture speaks of only two worlds: this present one, which lasts until the day of judgment (also called the last day), and the one with a new heaven and a new earth. So Christ's kingdom will not begin until the general resurrection. This is what our Savior says (Mat. 16.27.): “The Son of man will come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to their works.” Rewarding people according to their works is a king's job, and it will not happen until he comes with his Father's glory and his angels. Our Savior says (Mat. 23.2.), “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat; therefore do and observe whatever they tell you to do.” He plainly assigns governing authority at that time to them, not himself. He does the same when he asks (Luke 12.14.), “Who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you?” And (John 12.47.), “I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world.” Yet our Savior came into this world so that he could be king and judge in the next. He was the Messiah, the Christ: the anointed priest and God's supreme prophet. In other words, he was to hold all the power held by the prophet Moses, by the high priests who succeeded Moses, and by the kings who succeeded the priests. St. John says explicitly (chap. 5. ver. 22.), “The Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son.” This does not conflict with “I did not come to judge the world.” The latter refers to the present world, and the former to the world to come. Likewise, Christ says of his second coming (Mat. 19.28.), “You who have followed me in the regeneration, when the Son of man sits on his glorious throne, you too will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”\n\nIf Christ had no kingdom in this world while on earth, why did he come the first time? He came to restore God's kingdom through a new Covenant. God had possessed it under the old Covenant, but the Israelites broke it through their rebellion when they chose Saul. To restore it, Christ had to announce that he was the Messiah, the king promised them by the prophets. He had to offer himself as a sacrifice for the sins of those who accepted him in faith. If the nation as a whole rejected him, he had to call believers among the Gentiles to obey him. Thus our Savior's work while on earth had two parts. He announced that he was the Christ. And through teaching and miracles, he persuaded and prepared people to live so as to deserve the immortality believers would enjoy when he returned in majesty to take possession of his Father's kingdom. That is why he often calls the time of his preaching the regeneration. It was not itself a kingdom and did not give people grounds to disobey the existing authorities: he told them to obey those who sat in Moses' seat and pay taxes to Caesar. It was only a pledge of the coming Kingdome of God for those to whom God gave the grace to be his disciples and believe in him. For this reason, the godly are said to be already in the kingdom of grace, like people granted citizenship in that heavenly kingdom.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLI, 2\n\nSo far, nothing Christ did or taught reduced the civil rights of the Jews or of Caesar. Both rulers and subjects in the Jewish commonwealth of that time expected the Messiah and the Kingdome of God. They could not have expected him if their laws had forbidden him, when he came, to identify and announce himself. Christ merely tried through preaching and miracles to show that he was the Messiah, and broke none of their laws in doing so. The kingdom he claimed belonged to another world. Meanwhile he taught everyone to obey those who sat in Moses' seat. He approved paying Caesar his tax and refused to act as a judge. How could his words or actions be seditious or threaten their civil government? But God had decided to make Christ a sacrifice to bring his chosen people back to the obedience they had promised in their Covenant. To do this, God used their malice and ingratitude. Christ also broke none of Caesar's laws. Pilate did hand him over for crucifixion to please the Jews. But first Pilate publicly said he found no fault in him. As the inscription explaining his sentence, Pilate did not write what the Jews requested, “He claimed to be king.” He simply wrote, “He was king of the Jews.” Despite their protests, he refused to change it, saying, “What I have written, I have written.”\n\nAs to the third part of his office, being king, I have already shown that his kingdom will not begin until the resurrection. Then he will be king not only as God, a role in which his unlimited power makes him already and forever king of all the earth. He will also be king specifically of his chosen people through the agreement they make with him in baptism. That is why our Savior says (Mat. 19.28.) that his apostles will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel “when the Son of man sits on his glorious throne.” He means that he will then reign as a human being. And he says (Mat. 16.27.), “The Son of man will come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to their works.” We read the same in Mark 13.26. and 14.26., and the time is stated still more clearly in Luke 22.29, 30.: “I grant you a kingdom, as my Father granted one to me, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Clearly the kingdom his Father granted Christ will not begin before the Son of man comes in glory and appoints his apostles judges of the twelve tribes of Israel. But someone may ask: if there is no marriage in the kingdom of heaven, will people eat and drink there? What does eating mean here? Our Savior explains (John 6.27.): “Work not for food that perishes, but for the food that lasts to eternal life, which the Son of man will give you.” Thus to eat at Christ's table means to eat from the Tree of Life. It means enjoying immortality in the kingdom of the Son of man. These and many other passages show that our Savior will exercise his kingship in his human nature.\n\nWhen he is king, moreover, he will serve under God the Father as God's deputy. Moses did so in the wilderness, the high priests before Saul's reign, and the kings after it. One prophecy about Christ says he will have an office like Moses': “I will raise up for them a prophet (says the Lord, Deut. 18.18.) from among their brothers like you, and I will put my words in his mouth.” Christ's actions on earth also show this likeness. Moses chose twelve tribal leaders to govern under him; our Savior chose twelve apostles to sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel. Moses authorized Seventy elders to receive God's Spirit and prophesy to the people, that is, as I have already said, to speak to them in God's name. Our Savior likewise appointed seventy disciples to preach his kingdom and salvation to every nation. When someone complained to Moses that some of the Seventy were prophesying in Israel's camp, Moses defended them because they were serving his government. Similarly, when St. John complained to our Savior about a man casting out devils in his name, he defended the man, saying (Luke 9.50.), “Do not forbid him, for whoever is not against us is on our side.”\n\nOur Savior resembled Moses also in establishing sacraments for entering the Kingdome of God and remembering how he rescued his chosen people from their miserable state. Before Moses' time, circumcision was the rite by which the children of Israel entered God's kingdom. They neglected the rite in the wilderness but restored it as soon as they entered the promised land. Before our Savior came, the Jews similarly had a rite of baptism: washing with water Gentiles who accepted the God of Israel. St. John the Baptist used that rite to receive all those who declared their allegiance to the Christ whom he preached as already present in the world. Our Savior made the same rite a sacrament for everyone who believed in him. Scripture does not explicitly say how baptism began. It may well have been modeled on the Mosaic law concerning leprosy. A person with leprosy had to remain outside Israel's camp for a time. If the priest later judged the person clean, they could enter the camp after a formal washing. This may have foreshadowed baptism: people cleansed of the leprosy of sin through faith are received into the church by its formal washing. Another possible source was an unusual Greek custom. If a person thought to be dead recovered, others were reluctant to associate with that person, as they would be with a ghost, until washing restored the person to human society. This was like washing newborn children to remove the uncleanness of birth, and was a kind of new birth. During the time when Judea was ruled by Alexander and his Greek successors, this Greek ceremony may have entered Jewish religion. But our Savior was unlikely to endorse a pagan rite. So baptism most likely developed from the lawful washing after leprosy. As for the other sacrament, eating the Passover lamb is clearly imitated in the Lord's Supper. Breaking the bread and pouring the wine commemorate our rescue from the misery of sin through Christ's suffering, just as eating the Passover lamb commemorated the Jews' rescue from slavery in Egypt. Moses' authority was subordinate: he was God's deputy. Christ's authority as a man was to be like Moses' and thus subordinate to his Father's. This is even clearer in the prayer he taught us: “Our Father, let your kingdom come,” and “Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.” He is said to “come in the glory of his Father.” And St. Paul says (1 Cor. 15.24.), “Then comes the end, when he has delivered the kingdom to God, the Father.” Many other passages say this just as clearly.\n\nTherefore, in both teaching and reigning, our Savior represents God as Moses did. From that time on, though not before, God is called the Father. God remains one and the same substance, but is one Person when represented by Moses and another Person when represented by his Son Christ. Since a Person is defined in relation to a representative, several representatives mean several Persons, even though the substance remains one and the same.\n\nChapter XLII. On Ecclesiastical Power\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 1\n\nOn Ecclesiastical Power\n\nTo understand what ecclesiastical power is and who holds it, we need to divide the time since our Savior's ascension into two periods. One came before kings and others holding supreme civil power converted. The other came afterward. For a long time after the ascension, no king or civil sovereign embraced Christian teaching and publicly permitted it.\n\nDuring the first period, ecclesiastical power clearly belonged to the apostles. After them it belonged to people they appointed to preach the Gospel, convert others to Christianity, and guide converts toward salvation. Those people in turn passed the power on to others they appointed. They did this by laying hands on them, a sign of giving the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of God, to those appointed as God's ministers to advance his kingdom. Laying on hands was simply the seal of their commission to preach Christ and teach his doctrine. Giving the Holy Spirit through this ceremony imitated Moses. Moses used the same ceremony for his minister Joshua, as we read in Deuteronomy 34. ver. 9.: “Joshua son of Nun was full of the Spirit of Wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him.” Between his resurrection and ascension, our Savior gave his Spirit to the apostles, first by “breathing on them and saying” (John 20.22.), “Receive the Holy Spirit.” After ascending (Acts 2.2, 3.), he sent down on them “a mighty wind and divided tongues of fire.” He did not lay hands on them, just as God did not lay hands on Moses. Later his apostles passed on the same Spirit by laying on hands, as Moses did to Joshua. This shows who continuously held ecclesiastical power in those early days, when there was no Christian commonwealth: those who received it from the apostles through successive laying on of hands.\n\nHere the Person of God appears for a third time. Moses and the high priests represented God in the Old Testament, and our Savior himself represented God as a man during his time on earth. Likewise the Holy Spirit—that is, the apostles and their successors who received the Holy Spirit and worked as preachers and teachers—has represented God ever since. But as I showed earlier ([chapt. 16.].), a Person is whoever is represented, each time that representation occurs. God, who has been represented, or personated, three times can therefore properly be called three Persons, although the Bible does not apply the word Person or Trinity to him. St. John does say (1 Epist. 5.7.), “Three bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one.” This fits the proper meaning of three Persons: one who is represented by another. God the Father, represented by Moses, is one Person; represented by his Son, another; represented by the apostles and teachers whose authority came from them, a third. Yet each Person is the Person of the same God. Someone might ask what these three bore witness to. St. John says (verse 11.) that their testimony is that “God has given us eternal life in his Son.” If asked how that testimony is shown, the answer is easy: through the miracles God worked first through Moses, then through his Son himself, and finally through his apostles who had received the Holy Spirit. Each represented God's Person in their own time, prophesying or preaching Jesus Christ. For the original twelve leading apostles, the distinguishing mark of being an apostle was witnessing his resurrection. This appears explicitly (Acts 1. ver. 21,22.) when St. Peter says, as a replacement for Judas Iscariot is being chosen, “One of these men who accompanied us throughout the time the Lord Jesus moved among us, from John's baptism until the day he was taken from us, must be appointed to witness his resurrection with us.” These words explain the witnessing St. John mentions. The same passage mentions another Trinity of witnesses on earth: “Three bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one” (ver. 8.). They are the gifts of God's Spirit and the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper. All testify alike, assuring believers' consciences of eternal life. St. John says of this testimony (verse 10.), “Whoever believes in the Son of man has the witness within himself.” In this earthly Trinity, the things themselves are not one: Spirit, water, and blood are not one substance, though their testimony agrees. In the heavenly Trinity, the Persons are Persons of the same God, represented at three different times and in three different situations. In short, so far as we can learn directly from Scripture, the doctrine of the Trinity comes to this. God, who is always one and the same, was the Person represented by Moses, by his Son in human flesh, and by the apostles. Represented by the apostles, God is the Holy Spirit through which they spoke. Represented by his Son, who was God and man, that God is the Son. Represented by Moses and the high priests, that God is the Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This explains why the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, meaning God, never occur in the Old Testament. They are names of Persons, arising from representation. Those names could not exist until different men had represented God's Person by ruling or directing others under him.\n\nWe have now seen how our Savior left ecclesiastical power to the apostles. We have also seen how he equipped them with the Holy Spirit to exercise that power better. The New Testament sometimes calls this Spirit Paracletus, meaning a helper or someone called on for help, though it is usually translated “Comforter.” Let us now consider what the power itself was and whom it applied to.\n\nCardinal Bellarmine, in his third general Controversy, discusses many questions about the pope of Rome's ecclesiastical power. He begins by asking whether it should be monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic. Every one of those forms of power is sovereign and can compel obedience. But suppose our Savior left his ministers no power of compulsion. Suppose he gave them only power to announce Christ's kingdom and persuade people to submit to it. They can teach those who have submitted, through instructions and good advice, how to gain entry when the Kingdome of God comes. Suppose the apostles and other Gospel ministers are our schoolteachers, not our commanders, and their instructions are helpful advice, not laws. Then all those debates are pointless.\n\nI have already shown in the last chapter that Christ's kingdom is not of this world. So his ministers cannot demand obedience in his name unless they are kings themselves. If the supreme king has no royal power in this world, by what authority can his officers demand obedience? Our Savior says, “As my Father sent me, so I send you.” But he was sent to persuade the Jews to return to his Father's kingdom and to invite the Gentiles into it. He was not sent to reign in majesty, even as his Father's deputy, before the day of judgment.\n\nThe period between the ascension and the general resurrection is called not a reign but a regeneration: a preparation of people for Christ's second, glorious coming on judgment day. Our Savior says (Mat. 19.28.), “You who have followed me in the regeneration, when the Son of man sits on his glorious throne, you too shall sit on twelve thrones.” And St. Paul says (Ephes. 6.15.), “Have your feet fitted with the preparation of the Gospel of peace.”\n\nOur Savior also compares this period to fishing. That means winning people over to obedience by persuasion, not by force or punishment. He did not say that he would make the apostles into so many Nimrods, hunters of men, but into fishers of men. He also compares it to yeast, sowing seed, and the growth of a mustard seed. Each image rules out compulsion, so there can be no actual reign in this period. Christ's ministers' work is evangelization: proclaiming Christ and preparing for his return, just as John the Baptist's preaching prepared for his first coming.\n\nAnother part of Christ's ministers' work in this world is helping people believe and have faith in Christ. But faith does not arise from, or depend on, force or commands. It comes only from arguments that seem certain or likely, based on reason or on things people already believe. Therefore, as Christ's ministers, they have no power to punish anyone for disbelieving or contradicting them. I mean they have no such power by virtue of being Christ's ministers. If they also hold supreme civil power by political appointment, they may lawfully punish any violation of their laws. St. Paul says plainly of himself and other Gospel preachers of his time (2 Cor. 1.24.), “We do not rule over your faith, but help your joy.”\n\nAnother reason Christ's ministers cannot command in this world is the lawful authority Christ left all rulers, Christian and non-Christian alike. St. Paul says (Col. 3.20.), “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord”; and (ver. 22.), “Servants, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only when they watch you, to please people, but sincerely, out of fear of the Lord.” Their masters were nonbelievers, yet the servants were told to obey them in everything. As to obedience to rulers, Paul urges people “to submit to the higher powers” (Rom. 13. the first 6. verses). He says “all power is ordained by God,” and we must submit not only from fear of their “anger” but for conscience's sake. St. Peter says (1 Epist. chap. 2e ver. 13, 14, 15.), “Submit to every human institution for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme ruler or to governors sent by him to punish wrongdoers and praise those who do well; for that is God's will.” St. Paul also says (Tit. 3.1.), “Remind people to submit to principalities and powers and obey magistrates.” All the rulers and powers Peter and Paul mention were nonbelievers. We must therefore be even more obedient to Christians whom God has appointed to hold supreme power over us. How could we be obliged to do anything against the commands of the king or other sovereign representative of our commonwealth, whose members we are and from whom we expect protection? Clearly Christ has given his ministers no power to command other people in this world unless they also hold civil authority.\n\nBut someone may object: what if a king, senate, or other sovereign person forbids us to believe in Christ? My answer is that this prohibition cannot work. Belief and disbelief do not follow people's orders. Faith is God's gift. Human beings cannot give it or take it away by promising rewards or threatening torture. But what if our lawful ruler orders us to say aloud that we do not believe? Must we obey? Speaking is an outward act, no different from another gesture showing our obedience. A Christian whose faith in Christ remains firm at heart has the same freedom in this matter that the prophet Elisha allowed Naaman the Syrian. Naaman had turned in his heart to Israel's God, saying (2 Kings 5.17.), “From now on your servant will offer no burnt offering or sacrifice to any gods but the Lord. May the Lord pardon your servant this one thing: when my master goes into the house of Rimmon to worship, leaning on my arm, and I bow in the house of Rimmon—may the Lord pardon your servant when I bow there.” The prophet approved and told him, “Go in peace.” Naaman believed in his heart, but by bowing before the idol Rimmon he outwardly denied the true God as fully as he would have by saying it. What, then, do we say about our Savior's words, “Whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my Father in heaven”? We can say this: when a subject like Naaman is compelled to act in obedience to his sovereign, following the laws of his country rather than his own intention, the act belongs to the sovereign, not to the subject. It is the ruler and the country's law that deny Christ before others, not the subject. If someone calls this doctrine incompatible with sincere Christianity, I ask them to consider a Muslim subject in a Christian commonwealth who is inwardly committed to his religion. Suppose his sovereign orders him to attend a Christian church service on pain of death. Must he, in good conscience, die rather than obey his lawful ruler? If my critic says yes, he allows all individuals to disobey their rulers in defense of their religion, whether true or false. If he says no, he grants himself a freedom he denies others. That contradicts our Savior's words, “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you,” and the Law of Nature, God's unquestionably eternal law: “Do not do to another what you would not have another do to you.”\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 2\n\nBut then what should we say about all the martyrs described in church history? Did they throw away their lives for nothing? To answer, we must distinguish between those who were called to preach and openly profess Christ's kingdom and those who received no such calling and were required to do nothing more than believe in their own hearts. Those in the first group who were put to death for testifying that Jesus Christ rose from the dead were true martyrs. A martyr, properly speaking, is a witness to the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Only those who knew him on earth and saw him after he rose can be such witnesses. To testify reliably, a witness must have seen the event. St. Peter's words make clear that only such people can properly be called Christ's martyrs. In Act. 1.21, 22. he says: “From these men who accompanied us throughout the time the Lord Jesus moved among us, from John's baptism to the day he was taken from us, one must be appointed to be a martyr—that is, a witness—with us to his resurrection.” Notice that a witness to the truth of Christ's resurrection, and thus to the fundamental Christian teaching that Jesus was the Christ, must be a disciple who knew him and saw him both before and after his resurrection. Such a person must be one of his first disciples. Others can testify only that their predecessors said it. They are witnesses to other people's testimony: secondary martyrs, or martyrs of Christ's witnesses.\n\nSomeone who opposes the laws and authority of the civil state to defend every doctrine they themselves infer from the accounts of our Savior's life or from the apostles' Acts and letters—or believe on some private person's authority—is far from being either a martyr of Christ or a martyr of his martyrs. Only one teaching deserves so honorable a name for those who die defending it: Jesus is the Christ. This means that he redeemed us and will return to give us salvation and eternal life in his glorious kingdom. No one is required to die for every doctrine that benefits the clergy's ambition or income. Nor is it a witness's death that makes someone a martyr. It is the testimony itself. The word means nothing more than someone who bears witness, whether or not that person is killed for it.\n\nFurther, someone who has not been sent to preach this fundamental teaching, but takes on that task on their own authority, may still be a witness and therefore a martyr. They may be a primary witness to Christ or a secondary witness to his apostles, disciples, or their successors. Yet they are not obliged to die for it. They were not called, and no such duty was laid on them. They should not complain if they lose the reward they expected from people who never hired them. No one, then, can be a martyr of either degree without authorization to preach that Christ has come in the flesh. In other words, martyrs must be people sent to convert nonbelievers. No one serves as a witness for someone who already believes and needs no witness. Witnesses speak to people who deny, doubt, or have never heard the claim. Christ authorized his apostles and his Seventy disciples to preach, not everyone who believed. And he sent them to unbelievers: “I send you,” he says, “as sheep among wolves,” not as sheep among other sheep.\n\nFinally, none of the terms of their commission, as expressly stated in the Gospel, gives them authority over the congregation.\n\nFirst, we read (Mat. 10.) that the twelve apostles were sent “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” and instructed to preach “that the Kingdome of God was near.” In the original language, preaching means the act of a town crier, herald, or other officer publicly announcing a king. But a crier has no right to command anyone. The seventy disciples are sent (Luke 10.2.) “as workers, not as lords of the harvest.” They are told (verse 9.) to say, “The Kingdome of God has come near you.” Here kingdom means not the kingdom of grace but the kingdom of glory. For they are also told to announce it to cities that refuse them (ver. 11.) as a warning: judgment day will be more bearable for Sodom than for such a city. Our Savior tells disciples seeking higher rank (Mat. 20.28.) that their job is to serve, just as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve. Preachers therefore have the power of servants, not masters. “Do not be called masters,” says our Savior (Mat. 23.10), “for you have one master, Christ.”\n\nAnother part of their commission is to teach all nations, as in Mat. 28.19., or as St. Mark 16.15 says, “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” Teaching and preaching are thus the same thing. Anyone announcing the arrival of a king must explain his right to rule if they want people to submit to him. St. Paul did this with the Jews of Thessalonica. “For three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and arguing that Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus is Christ.” But teaching from the Old Testament that Jesus was Christ—that is, king—and that he rose from the dead does not mean believers must obey their teachers against the laws and commands of their sovereigns. It means they would be wise to wait patiently and faithfully for Christ's future coming while obeying their present authorities.\n\nAnother part of their commission is to baptize “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” What is baptism? Dipping a person into water. What, though, does it mean to dip someone into water in the name of something? Here is what the words mean. Baptism dips or washes a person as a sign of becoming a new person and a loyal subject of the God whose Person Moses and the high priests once represented when he ruled the Jews. It is a sign of loyalty to Jesus Christ, God's Son, both God and man. He redeemed us and, in his human nature, will represent his Father's Person in his eternal kingdom after the resurrection. Baptism also means recognizing the apostles' teaching as the only sure way to that kingdom. The apostles, helped by the Spirit of the Father and Son, were left as our guides toward it. This is what we promise at baptism. The authority of earthly sovereigns will not end before judgment day. St. Paul states this explicitly (1 Cor. 15. 22, 23, 24.): “As all die in Adam, all will be made alive in Christ. But each in their own order: Christ the first fruits, then those who belong to Christ at his coming. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God, the Father, after he has brought down every rule, authority, and power.” Clearly baptism does not place us under a new authority that controls our outward actions during this life. We promise instead to follow the apostles' teaching as our guide to eternal life.\n\nThe power to remit or retain sins—also called the power to loose or bind, and sometimes the keys to the kingdom of heaven—follows from the authority to baptize or refuse baptism. Baptism is the sacrament by which those entering the Kingdome of God pledge allegiance. Entering that kingdom means gaining eternal life, and that means having one's sins forgiven. Just as committing sins lost eternal life for us, forgiveness restores it. Baptism aims at the forgiveness of sins. So when the people converted by St. Peter's Pentecost sermon asked what to do, he told them to “repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins.” Baptizing someone announces their admission to God's kingdom; refusing baptism announces their exclusion. Thus the apostles and their deputies and successors also received the power to announce whether people were excluded or retained there. After our Savior breathed on the apostles and said (John 20.22.), “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he added in the next verse, “The sins you forgive are forgiven, and the sins you retain are retained.” This does not give them the unconditional power to forgive or retain sins as God does. God knows a person's heart and whether their repentance and conversion are genuine. Ministers can forgive conditionally, when someone repents. If the forgiven person only pretends to repent, the forgiveness or absolution becomes void without any further act or ruling by the one who granted it. It does nothing for that person's salvation and instead makes their sin worse. The apostles and their successors must therefore judge by outward signs of repentance. If these appear, they have no authority to refuse absolution; if they do not, they have no authority to grant it. The same goes for baptism. The apostles could not refuse baptism to a converted Jew or Gentile or grant it to someone who had not repented. But no one can judge another person's repentance except from outward signs in their words and actions, which may be hypocritical. So another question arises: who is authorized to judge these signs? Our Savior himself decides it (Mat. 18. 15, 16, 17.): “If your brother sins against you, tell him his fault privately. If he listens, you have regained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others with you. If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church; let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.” This clearly assigns judgment of genuine repentance not to any one person but to the church: the assembly of believers or those authorized to represent them. A judgment also needs someone to announce the sentence. That always belonged to an apostle or a church pastor speaking for the assembly. Our Savior refers to this in verse 18: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” St. Paul's practice agreed with this (1 Cor. 5.3, 4, & 5.). He says, “Though absent in body, I am present in spirit and have already decided, as if I were present, about the man who has done this. When you are gathered in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, with my spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, hand this man over to Satan.” That means removing him from the church as a man whose sins are not forgiven. Paul announces the sentence, but the assembly first had to hear and judge the case, since he was absent. Later in the same chapter (ver. 11, 12.), he assigns the judgment more explicitly to the assembly: “I have written to you not to associate with anyone called a brother who is sexually immoral, and so on. Do not even eat with such a person. For why should I judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside?” Thus an apostle or pastor pronounced the sentence removing someone from the church. But the church judged whether the case deserved it. Before the conversion of kings and other sovereign rulers of commonwealths, the church here meant the assembly of Christians in one city—for example, the assembly of Christians in Corinth.\n\nThis use of the power of the keys to shut people out of the Kingdome of God is called excommunication. To excommunicate is, in the original language, Aposunagogon Poiein, “to cast out of the synagogue,” the place of worship. The expression comes from the Jewish practice of excluding from synagogues people whose conduct or teachings they thought contagious, just as the law of Moses separated people with leprosy from Israel's congregation until a priest declared them clean.\n\nBefore civil power enforced excommunication, its only effect was that those who were not excommunicated had to avoid the company of those who were. It was not enough to treat them as heathens who had never been Christian. Christians could eat and drink with heathens, but not with excommunicated people. St. Paul makes this clear (1 Cor. 5. ver. 9, 10, &c.). He says he had previously forbidden associating with people who committed sexual wrongdoing. Since avoiding all such people would require leaving the world, he limits his instruction to such offenders, or others behaving badly, who belonged to the community of believers. With such a person, he says, they must not associate, “not even to eat.” Our Savior means no more when he says (Mat. 18.17.), “Let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.” Tax collectors, who leased and collected the commonwealth's revenue, were so hated by the Jews who paid it that “tax collector” and “sinner” meant the same thing to them. Even when our Savior accepted an invitation from Zacchaeus, a tax collector, in order to convert him, people accused him of wrongdoing. Therefore, by adding “tax collector” to “heathen,” our Savior forbade eating with an excommunicated person.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 3\n\nAs for keeping them out of synagogues or other meeting places, the church had no power to do that, except when the owner of a place was a Christian or a non-Christian who chose to do so. Every place rightly falls under the authority of the Common-wealth. Therefore a person who had been excommunicated, just like a person who had never been baptized, could enter such a place with permission from the civil magistrate. Before his conversion, Paul entered the synagogues in Damascus under a commission from the high priest. He went there to arrest Christian men and women and take them to Jerusalem in chains (Acts 9.2.).\n\nThis shows what excommunication did to a Christian who abandoned the faith in a place where the civil power persecuted the church or did not support it: it caused no harm in this world and inspired no fear. It inspired no fear because such people no longer believed. It caused no harm because it restored them to the favor of the world. In the world to come, their condition would be no worse than that of people who had never believed. The harm fell instead on the church, because expelling them encouraged them to act more freely on their hostility.\n\nExcommunication therefore affected only people who believed that Jesus Christ would come back in glory to reign over and judge the living and the dead. They believed that he would deny entry into his Kingdom to people whose sins were retained, meaning people excommunicated by the church. That is why St. Paul calls excommunication a handing over of the excommunicated person to Satan. After the Judgment, every kingdom outside the Kingdom of Christ belongs to the Kingdom of Satan. This is what believers feared while they remained excommunicated, that is, while their sins had not been forgiven. We can therefore understand that, when the civil power had not authorized the Christian religion, excommunication was used only to correct conduct, not errors of opinion. It is a punishment that only people who believed in and expected our Savior's return to judge the world could feel. People with that belief needed only to live uprightly, not to hold any further opinion, in order to be saved.\n\nExcommunication is prescribed for wrongdoing, as in (Mat. 18.): if your brother offends you, tell him privately, then tell him with witnesses present, and finally tell the church. If he still does not listen, “Treat him as a non-Christian and a tax collector.” It is also prescribed for a scandalous way of life, as in (1 Cor. 5. 11.): “If anyone called a brother is sexually immoral, greedy, an idolater, a drunkard, or an extortioner, do not even eat with such a person.” But Scripture offers no authority, and the apostles offer no example, for excommunicating someone who holds to the foundation that Jesus was the Christ over differences of opinion on other points that do not destroy that foundation. There is a passage in St. Paul (Titus 3.10.) that seems to say otherwise: “After warning a heretic once and then twice, reject him.” A heretic is a member of the church who nevertheless teaches a private opinion forbidden by the church. St. Paul advises Titus to reject such a person after a first and second warning. But “reject” here does not mean excommunicate him. It means stop warning him, leave him alone, and set aside the dispute with him, because only he himself can come to be convinced. The same apostle says (2 Tim. 2.23.), “Avoid foolish and uninformed questions.” The original word for “avoid” here and “reject” in the earlier passage is the same: paraitou. Yet one can set aside foolish questions without excommunication. Again, he says (Tit. 3.93), “Avoid foolish questions.” Here the original word, periistaso, meaning “set them aside,” has the same force as the earlier “reject.” No other passage can even plausibly support expelling faithful members of the church who believe in the foundation merely because they have a distinctive belief built on it, perhaps out of a good and sincere conscience. On the contrary, all the passages that tell us to avoid such disputes teach pastors like Timothy and Titus not to create new articles of faith by deciding every small controversy. Doing so would needlessly burden people's consciences or prompt them to break the unity of the church. The apostles themselves followed that lesson. St. Peter and St. Paul had a serious dispute, as we can read in Gal. 2.11., but did not expel each other from the church. Some other pastors in the apostles' time did not follow it. Diotrephes (3 John 9. &c.) expelled people whom St. John himself thought the church should receive, because Diotrephes was proud of his position of leadership. Vanity and ambition entered the church of Christ that early.\n\nSeveral conditions must be met before a person can be subject to excommunication. First, that person must belong to a community, meaning a lawful assembly or Christian church with the power to judge the matter for which excommunication is proposed. Where there is no community, there can be no excommunication. Where there is no power to judge, there can be no power to pronounce a sentence. It follows that one church cannot excommunicate another. Either the two have equal power to excommunicate each other, in which case excommunication is not discipline or an exercise of authority but a split and a breakdown of mutual goodwill; or one is subordinate to the other so that both speak with one voice, in which case they are only one church. The excommunicated part is then no longer a church, but a scattered group of individuals.\n\nA sentence of excommunication advises people not to associate or even eat with the excommunicated person. So if a sovereign prince or assembly is excommunicated, the sentence has no effect. All subjects are bound by the law of Nature to be in the company and presence of their own Sovereign when required. They cannot lawfully drive their Sovereign from any place in his domain, whether secular or sacred, or leave his domain without permission. Still less can they refuse to eat with him if he invites them to that honor. Other princes and states belong to different congregations, so they need no sentence to keep them from associating with an excommunicated state. The very act that joins many people into one community also separates one community from another. Excommunication is therefore not needed to keep kings and states apart. It has no effect beyond what the nature of political organization already brings about, unless it encourages princes to wage war on each other.\n\nNor does excommunication affect a Christian subject who obeys the laws of his own Sovereign, whether that Sovereign is Christian or non-Christian. If the subject believes that “Jesus is the Christ, he has the Spirit of God” (1 Joh. 4.1.), and “God lives in him, and he in God” (1 Joh. 4.15.). A person who has the Spirit of God, lives in God, and has God living in him cannot be harmed by human excommunication. Therefore someone who believes Jesus is the Christ is free from all the dangers threatened against excommunicated people. Someone who does not believe this is not a Christian. So a genuine, sincere Christian is not subject to excommunication. Neither is someone who professes Christianity until hypocrisy shows itself in that person's conduct, that is, until the person's behavior goes against the Sovereign's law. That law is the standard for conduct, and Christ and his apostles have commanded us to obey it. The church can judge conduct only by outward actions. Those actions can be unlawful only when they violate the law of the Common-wealth.\n\nIf someone's father, mother, or master is excommunicated, children are not forbidden to associate or eat with them. In most cases, such a ban would require children to go without food because they have no means of obtaining it. It would also authorize them to disobey their parents and masters, contrary to the apostles' command.\n\nIn short, the power to excommunicate cannot extend beyond the purpose for which our Savior commissioned the apostles and the church's pastors. Their task was not to rule by commands and force but to teach and guide people toward salvation in the world to come. A teacher of any subject may give up on a student who stubbornly refuses to follow the teacher's rules. But the teacher cannot accuse the student of wrongdoing against the teacher, because the student was never obliged to obey. In the same way, a teacher of Christian doctrine may give up on disciples who stubbornly persist in an unchristian life. But the teacher cannot say they have wronged him, since they are not obliged to obey him. God's answer to Samuel in a similar situation applies to a teacher who complains in this way (1 Sam. 8.): “They have not rejected you, but me.” Excommunication without the help of the civil power has no effect. This is the case when a foreign authority excommunicates a Christian state or prince. It therefore ought to cause no fear. The name Fulmen Excommunicationis, meaning “the Thunderbolt of Excommunication,” came from a fantasy of the bishop of Rome who first used it. He imagined himself the King of Kings, just as non-Christians made Jupiter king of the gods and gave him a thunderbolt in poems and pictures with which to subdue and punish giants who dared deny his power. That fantasy rested on two errors. One was that the Kingdom of Christ belongs to this world, contrary to our Savior's own words, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” The other was that the bishop is Christ's representative not just over his own subjects but over all Christians in the world. Scripture gives no basis for that claim, and I will show the contrary in its proper place.\n\nWhen St. Paul came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue, he went in, as he usually did (Acts 17.2, 3.). “For three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and showing that Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom he preached was the Christ.” These were the Jewish Scriptures, or the Old Testament. The people to whom he was proving that Jesus was the Christ and had risen from the dead were Jews who already believed those Scriptures were the Word of God. Some believed as a result, according to verse 4.; some did not, according to verse 5. If all believed Scripture, why did they not all reach the same belief? Some accepted St. Paul's interpretation of the passages he cited, while others rejected it. Each interpreted the passages for himself. St. Paul came without any legal commission, as someone seeking to persuade rather than command. He had to persuade either by miracles, as Moses persuaded the Israelites in Egypt so that they could see his authority in God's works, or by reasoning from Scripture they already accepted so that they could see the truth of his teaching in God's Word. But anyone who uses written principles to persuade someone through reasoning makes that listener the judge of both the meaning of the principles and the strength of the conclusions drawn from them. If these Jews of Thessalonica were not the judges, who judged what St. Paul cited from Scripture? If St. Paul was the judge, why did he need to cite passages to prove his teaching? He could simply have said, “I find it in Scripture, that is, in your laws, which I am authorized by Christ to interpret.” Therefore there was no interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation the Jews of Thessalonica were obliged to accept. Each person could believe or not believe, depending on whether the claims seemed to match the meaning of the cited passages. In every kind of case, anyone who offers proof makes the person addressed the judge of that proof. The Jews in particular were explicitly required (Deut. 17.) to accept the rulings of the current priests and judges of Israel on every difficult question. But that requirement applied to Jews who had not yet converted.\n\nWhen converting non-Jews, citing Scripture they did not believe was of no use. So the apostles used reason to argue against their idol worship. Then they sought to persuade them to believe in Christ by testifying to his life and resurrection. At that point there could be no dispute about who had the authority to interpret Scripture. While a person remained an unbeliever, that person was not bound to follow anyone's interpretation of any scripture, except the Sovereign's interpretation of the country's laws.\n\nLet us now consider conversion itself and see whether anything in it could create such an obligation. People converted only to belief in what the apostles preached. And the apostles preached only that Jesus was the Christ: the King who would save them and reign over them forever in the world to come. This meant that he was not dead but had risen from the dead and gone up to heaven. One day he would return to judge the world, whose people would also rise to be judged, and reward each person according to that person's deeds. None of the apostles preached that he or any other apostle was an interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation all Christians had to accept as law. Interpreting laws is part of administering a kingdom that already exists, and the apostles had no such kingdom. They and every pastor since have prayed, “Let your Kingdom come,” and urged converts to obey the non-Christian princes then ruling them. The New Testament had not yet been published as a single collection. Each evangelist interpreted his own Gospel, and each apostle his own letter. As for the Old Testament, our Savior himself said to the Jews (John 5. 39.), “Search the Scriptures, for you think you have eternal life in them, and they testify about me.” If he had not meant them to interpret those Scriptures, he would not have told them to find proof there that he was the Christ. He would have interpreted them himself or referred them to the priests' interpretation.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 4\n\nWhen a difficult question arose, the apostles and elders of the church met and decided what should be preached and taught, and how they should interpret Scripture for the people. But they did not take away the people's freedom to read and interpret it for themselves. The apostles sent the churches various letters and other writings to instruct them. This would have been pointless if the churches were not allowed to interpret these writings, that is, to consider what they meant. What was true in the apostles' time had to remain true until there were pastors able to authorize an interpreter whose interpretation everyone had to accept. But that could not happen until kings became pastors or pastors became kings.\n\nA writing can be called canonical in two senses. A canon is a rule, and a rule is a direction that guides a person in any kind of action. Directions from a teacher to a student, or a counselor to a friend, are still canons or rules, even if the giver cannot force the recipient to follow them. But when the rules come from someone the recipient is bound to obey, these canons are not only rules but laws. Our question here, then, is who has the power to make the Scriptures, the rules of Christian faith, into laws.\n\nThe first part of Scripture to become law was the Ten Commandments. God himself wrote them on two stone tablets, gave them to Moses, and Moses made them known to the people. Before then God had given no written law. He had not yet chosen a people to be his special Kingdom, so he had given people only the Law of Nature: the rules of natural reason written in every person's heart. The first tablet contains the law of Sovereignty. 1. They must not obey or honor other nations' gods. Its words are “Non habebis Deos alienos coram me,” meaning, “Do not have as gods the gods other nations worship; have only me.” This forbade them to obey or honor any god as their King and Governor other than the one who spoke to them then through Moses and later through the high priest. 2. They “must not make any image to represent him.” They were not to choose any representative for themselves, imagined to be in heaven or on earth. They were instead to obey Moses and Aaron, whom God appointed to that office. 3. They “must not take God's name in vain.” They must not speak carelessly about their King or dispute his right to rule or the authority he gave his deputies, Moses and Aaron. 4. They “must stop their ordinary work every seventh day” and spend that time honoring him publicly. The second tablet gives people's duties to one another: “Honor your parents; do not kill; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not corrupt judgment through false testimony”; and finally, “Do not even plan in your heart to injure one another.” Our question now is who gave these written tablets the binding force of laws. God himself certainly made them laws. Yet a law binds a person, and is a law for that person, only if the person acknowledges it as the Sovereign's act. The people of Israel were forbidden to approach the mountain and hear what God said to Moses. How, then, could Moses' presentation of all these laws bind them to obey? Some were laws of Nature, including all of the second tablet. They were therefore recognized as God's laws by all peoples, not just the Israelites. But the question remains for the laws specific to the Israelites, like those of the first tablet. There is this qualification: immediately after Moses presented the laws, they bound themselves to obey him, saying (Exod. 20.19.), “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” Therefore only Moses, and after him the high priest, whom God appointed through Moses to administer this special Kingdom, had the power on earth to make this brief Scripture, the Ten Commandments, law in the Common-wealth of Israel. Moses, Aaron, and the later high priests were the civil Sovereigns. So up to this point, making Scripture canonical, or making it law, belonged to the civil Sovereign.\n\nGod prescribed the judicial law for Israel's magistrates. It governed how they administered justice and what sentences or judgments they gave in disputes between individuals. He also prescribed the Levitical law, governing the rituals and ceremonies of priests and Levites. Moses alone delivered all these laws to them. They therefore also became laws through the same promise to obey Moses. The text does not say whether these laws had been written down at that time, or whether Moses dictated them to the people after his forty days with God on the mountain. Either way, all were positive laws, equivalent to holy Scripture, and made canonical by Moses, the civil Sovereign.\n\nAfter the Israelites reached the plains of Moab, opposite Jericho, and were about to enter the Promised Land, Moses added various laws to the earlier ones. They are therefore called Deuteronomy, meaning “Second Laws.” As Deut. 29.1. says, they are “the words of a Covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel, besides the Covenant he made with them at Horeb.” After explaining the earlier laws at the beginning of Deuteronomy, Moses adds laws starting in chapter 12. and continuing through the end of chapter 26. As they crossed the Jordan, they were commanded (Deut. 27.1.) to write this law on large plaster-covered stones. Moses himself also wrote this law in a book, gave it to the “priests and elders of Israel” (Deut. 31.9.), and commanded (verse 26.) that it “be placed beside the Ark.” The Ark itself contained only the Ten Commandments. This is the law Moses ordered the kings of Israel to keep a copy of (Deuteronomy 17.18.). After it had been lost for a long time, it was found again in the Temple in Josiah's time and accepted as God's law by Josiah's authority. Both Moses when it was written and Josiah when it was recovered held civil Sovereignty. So up to this point, the power to make Scripture canonical belonged to the civil Sovereign.\n\nBetween the time of Moses and the return from captivity, the Jews accepted no book besides this Book of the Law as God's law. The prophets, except for a few, lived during the captivity itself, while the rest lived only a short time before it. Their prophecies were far from being generally accepted as laws. The prophets themselves were persecuted, partly by false prophets and partly by kings those false prophets misled. The Book of the Law itself, which Josiah had confirmed as God's law, was lost along with the whole history of God's works when Jerusalem was sacked and its people carried into captivity. This appears from 2 Esdras 14.21.: “Your Law has been burned; therefore no one knows the things you have done or the works that will begin.” Before the captivity, during the interval between the loss of the law and its recovery under Josiah, they had no written Word of God. Scripture does not say when it was lost, but it may well have happened under Rehoboam, when Shishak, king of Egypt, plundered the Temple (1 Kings 14.26.). During that interval, the people governed according to their own judgment or followed the guidance of people each of them took to be prophets.\n\nWe may infer from this that the Old Testament Scriptures we have today were not canonical or binding law for the Jews until they renewed their Covenant with God on returning from captivity and restored their Common-wealth under Esdras. From then on these Scriptures were regarded as the law of the Jews. As such, they were translated into Greek by Seventy elders of Judea, placed in Ptolemy's library at Alexandria, and accepted as the Word of God. Esdras was the high priest, and the high priest was their civil Sovereign. Clearly, then, only the sovereign civil power ever made the Scriptures into laws.\n\nThe New Testament began to be canonical under Christian Sovereigns. From the writings of the early church leaders who lived before Emperor Constantine accepted and authorized Christianity, we can see what Christians of that period thought about the New Testament books we now have. Apart from a few dissenters, they took these books to be the words of the Holy Spirit and therefore the canon or rule of faith. Because the dissenters were few, the rest were called the Catholic Church, and the dissenters were called heretics. The believers held their teachers in high regard, just as students generally hold their first teachers in high regard, whatever subject those teachers have taught them. So when St. Paul wrote to churches he had converted, or another apostle or disciple of Christ wrote to those who had embraced Christ, they certainly accepted these writings as true Christian teaching. But at that time the listener's faith, not the teacher's power or authority, caused the listener to accept the teaching. Thus the apostles did not make their own writings canonical; each convert made the writings canonical for himself.\n\nOur question, however, is not what an individual Christian made a law or canon for himself, since he could reject it again by the same right by which he accepted it. Our question is what became a canon binding people so that acting against it would be unjust. For the New Testament to be canonical in this sense, or law, anywhere that the law of the Common-wealth had not made it so would contradict the nature of law. As already shown, law is the command of the person or assembly to whom we have given sovereign authority to set whatever rules for our actions they think fit and to punish us for breaking them. If anyone else offers us rules the Sovereign has not prescribed, those rules are only counsel and advice. A person may refuse to follow such advice without injustice, whether it is good or bad. And if it conflicts with established laws, a person cannot follow it without injustice, however good it seems. In that case, I mean, one cannot follow it in one's actions or in speech to others. One may nevertheless believe one's private teachers without blame and wish for the freedom to act on their advice and for that advice to become public law. Inner faith is invisible by its nature and therefore outside all human jurisdiction. But when words and actions arising from it break our duty of civil obedience, they are unjust before both God and humanity. Our Savior said his Kingdom was not of this world and that he came not to judge the world but to save it. He therefore subjected us to no laws other than those of the Common-wealth: the Jews to the law of Moses, which he said (Mat. 5.) he came not to destroy but to fulfill; other nations to the laws of their respective Sovereigns; and everyone to the laws of Nature. He and his apostles taught that observing these laws was a necessary condition for admission on the last day into his eternal Kingdom, where there will be protection and everlasting life. Our Savior and his apostles left us no new laws binding us in this world, but new teaching to prepare us for the next. Thus, until the people to whom God gave earthly lawmaking power commanded obedience to the New Testament books containing this teaching, they were not binding canons or laws. They were only good, safe advice directing sinners toward salvation. Anyone could accept or refuse that advice at their own peril, but without committing an injustice by refusing it.\n\nFurthermore, our Savior commissioned his apostles and disciples to proclaim his Kingdom, which was to come, not already present. They were to teach all nations and baptize believers, enter the homes of people who welcomed them, and shake the dust off their feet against those who did not. They were not to call down fire from heaven to destroy those people or force them to obey by the sword. All this involves persuasion, not power. He sent them as sheep among wolves, not as kings among subjects. Their commission was not to make laws but to obey laws already made and teach others to obey them. So they could not make their writings binding canons without help from the sovereign civil power. The New Testament is therefore law only where lawful civil power has made it so. And there the king or Sovereign also makes it law for himself. In doing so he subjects himself not to the teacher or apostle who converted him, but directly to God and his Son Jesus Christ, as the apostles themselves did.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 5\n\nOne thing that might seem to give the New Testament the force of law for Christians in times and places of persecution is the decrees they made together in their councils. We read in Acts 15.28. that the apostles, elders, and whole church used these words: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to place no greater burden on you than these necessary things, etc.” This language seems to claim the power to place a burden on people who had accepted their teaching. To “place a burden on another” seems to mean the same thing as “bind that person.” The council's decisions would therefore appear to have been laws for Christians at the time. Nevertheless, they were no more laws than these other instructions: “Repent; be baptized; keep the commandments; believe the Gospel; come to me; sell all you have; give it to the poor;” and “follow me.” These are not commands but invitations and calls to Christianity, like the words of Esay 55.1.: “Come, everyone who is thirsty, come to the water; come and buy wine and milk without money.” First, the apostles had no power other than our Savior's power to invite people into the Kingdom of God. They themselves recognized that this Kingdom was to come, not already present, and people who have no kingdom cannot make laws. Second, if their council's decisions had been laws, no one could have disobeyed them without sinning. But nowhere do we read that people sinned by not accepting Christ's teaching. Instead, we read that they died in their sins: the sins they had committed against the laws they were obliged to obey had not been forgiven. These laws were the laws of Nature and the civil laws of the state to which each Christian had bound himself by agreement. Thus the “burden” the apostles could place on their converts did not consist of laws. It consisted of conditions offered to people seeking salvation. They could accept or refuse these conditions at their own risk, without committing a new sin by refusing, although they risked condemnation and exclusion from the Kingdom of God for their past sins. This is why St. John does not say of unbelievers that God's wrath “will come” upon them, but that “God's wrath remains upon them.” Nor does he say that they will be condemned, but that “they are condemned already” (John 3.36, 3.18). The benefit of faith can only be understood as “forgiveness of sins” if we also understand the harm of unbelief as “retention of those same sins.”\n\nBut someone may ask why the apostles and the church's later pastors should meet to agree on what to teach about faith and conduct if no one was obliged to follow their decisions. Here is the answer. By joining that council, its apostles and elders committed themselves to teaching the doctrine the council agreed should be taught, so far as it did not conflict with a law they were already obliged to obey. That did not mean all other Christians had to follow what they taught. They could deliberate about what each of them would teach, but not about what others had to do, unless their assembly had legislative power. Only civil Sovereigns could have that power. Though God is Sovereign of the whole world, we are not obliged to accept as his law everything any person proposes in his name, or anything contrary to civil law, which God has expressly commanded us to obey.\n\nThe decisions of the apostles' council were therefore advice, not laws. Decisions of any later teachers or councils assembled without the civil Sovereign's authority are even less likely to be laws. Consequently, although the New Testament books are excellent rules of Christian doctrine, only kings or sovereign assemblies could make them laws.\n\nNo record survives of the first council that made the Scriptures we now have canonical. The collection attributed to the first bishop of Rome after St. Peter is questionable. It lists the canonical books, but its words, “Sint vobis omnibus Clericis & Laicis Libris venerandi, &c.,” distinguish clergy from laypeople, a distinction not in use so close to St. Peter's time. The first council whose record survives that settled the canonical Scriptures is the Council of Laodicea. Its canon 59. forbids reading any other books in churches. This command is directed not to every Christian but only to people authorized to read books publicly in church, meaning church officers.\n\nIn the apostles' time, some church offices involved teaching and some involved service. The teaching offices involved preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to unbelievers, administering the sacraments and worship, and teaching converts the rules of faith and conduct. The service office was that of deacons. They were appointed to manage the church's material needs when it lived on a common fund supplied by believers' voluntary contributions.\n\nAmong those in teaching offices, the first and most important were the apostles. At first there were only twelve, chosen and appointed by our Savior himself. Their task was not just to preach, teach, and baptize. They were also to be witnesses to our Savior's resurrection. This testimony was the special and essential mark distinguishing an apostle from other church teachers. An apostle had either to have seen our Savior after his resurrection or to have known him before it and seen his works and other evidence of his divinity, so that the apostle would be a credible witness. This is why, when a new apostle was elected to replace Judas Iscariot, St. Peter said (Acts 1.21,22.), “One of the men who accompanied us all the time the Lord Jesus was among us, beginning with John's baptism and ending on the day he was taken up from us, must be appointed to join us as a witness of his resurrection.” The word “must” shows that an apostle had to have been with the first apostles during the time our Savior appeared in the flesh.\n\nMatthias Was Made an Apostle by the Congregation.\n\nMatthias was the first apostle not appointed by Christ while Christ was on earth. Here is how he was chosen. About 120 Christians had gathered in Jerusalem (Acts 1.15.). They put forward two men, Joseph the Just and Matthias (verse 23.), and drew lots. “The lot fell to Matthias, and he was counted among the apostles” (verse 26.). So the appointment of this apostle was the act of the congregation. It was not the act of St. Peter or the eleven, except as members of that assembly.\n\nNo other apostle was appointed after Matthias except Paul and Barnabas. According to Acts 13.1,2,3., this is what happened: “There were certain prophets and teachers in the church at Antioch: Barnabas; Simeon, called Niger; Lucius of Cyrene; Manaen, who had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch; and Saul. While they worshiped the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set Barnabas and Saul apart for me for the work to which I have called them.’ Then, after fasting and praying and placing their hands on them, they sent them away.”\n\nThis shows that, although the Holy Spirit called them, the particular church at Antioch made their call known to them and authorized their mission. That call was to be apostles, as we can see from Acts 14.14., which calls them both apostles. St. Paul makes clear in Rom. 1.1. that they became apostles through the church of Antioch's act. He uses the word the Holy Spirit used when calling him, describing himself as “an apostle set apart for the Gospel of God,” recalling the words “Set Barnabas and Saul apart for me, etc.” But since an apostle's task was to witness Christ's resurrection, someone may ask how St. Paul could know Christ had risen when he had not known our Savior before his suffering. The answer is simple. After our Savior ascended to heaven, he appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus and “chose him as an instrument to carry his name before non-Jews, kings, and the children of Israel.” Because Paul had seen the Lord after his suffering, he was a qualified witness to his resurrection. As for Barnabas, he had been a disciple before the suffering. Paul and Barnabas were therefore clearly apostles, yet they were chosen and authorized by the church at Antioch, not just by the first apostles. Matthias was similarly chosen and authorized by the church at Jerusalem.\n\nThe word bishop comes into our language from the Greek Episcopus and means an overseer or supervisor of any work, especially a pastor or shepherd. This word was also used figuratively to describe the office of a king or any other ruler or guide of a people, whether that person governed by laws or by teaching. This use occurred among Jews, who had originally been shepherds, and among non-Jews. So the apostles were the first Christian bishops, appointed by Christ himself. In this sense Judas's apostleship is called his “bishopric” (Acts 1.20.). Later, when elders were appointed in Christian churches to guide Christ's flock by teaching and advice, they too were called bishops. Timothy was an elder—the word “elder” in the New Testament names an office as well as an age—but he was also a bishop. Bishops at that time were content to be called elders. Even St. John, the apostle our Lord loved, begins his second letter, “The elder to the chosen lady.” Clearly, in the apostles' time, bishop, pastor, elder, and doctor, meaning teacher, were different names for the same office. There was then no government through force, only through teaching and persuasion. The Kingdom of God was still to come in a new world. No church could have authority to compel until the Common-wealth adopted the Christian faith. Thus these people had different duties, but not different degrees of authority.\n\nThe New Testament names no teaching offices in the church besides apostles, bishops, elders, pastors, and doctors. Their task was to proclaim Christ to Jews and other unbelievers, and guide and teach believers. The names evangelists and prophets refer not to offices but to different gifts that made different people useful to the church. Evangelists wrote about our Savior's life and actions. They included the apostles St. Matthew and St. John and the disciples St. Mark and St. Luke. They also included anyone else who wrote on that subject, such as St. Thomas and St. Barnabas are said to have done, though the church has not accepted the books circulated under their names. Prophets had the gift of interpreting the Old Testament and sometimes of reporting their own special revelations to the church. Neither these gifts nor the gifts of languages, driving out devils, curing other diseases, or anything else made a person a church officer. Only a proper call and election to teach could do that.\n\nThe apostles Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas were not appointed by our Savior himself. They were elected by the church, meaning the assembly of Christians: Matthias by the church of Jerusalem, and Paul and Barnabas by the church of Antioch. In the same way, the churches in other cities elected their own elders and pastors. To see the proof, let us look first at how St. Paul appointed elders in cities where he had converted people to Christianity, just after he and Barnabas became apostles. Acts 14.23. says that “they appointed elders in every church.” At first this may suggest that Paul and Barnabas chose the elders themselves and gave them authority. But the original text makes clear that each city's assembly of Christians chose and authorized them. It reads, “cheirotonesantes autoispresbuterous kat ekklesian,” meaning, “When they had appointed elders for them by a show of hands in each congregation.” It is well known that in all those cities magistrates and officers were chosen by a majority of votes. The usual way to distinguish votes for from votes against was by raising hands. So to appoint an officer in any of these cities meant bringing people together to elect that person by a majority. Some cities counted raised hands, others voices, and others balls, beans, or small stones, with each person placing one in a container marked yes or no. Different cities had different customs for voting. The assembly therefore elected its own elders. The apostles merely presided: they called the assembly together for the election, announced who had been chosen, and gave the blessing now called consecration. That is why the people who presided at assemblies, such as the elders in the apostles' absence, were called proestotes, or Antistities in Latin. These words mean the leading person in the assembly. The president counted the votes and announced the choice. If the votes were equal, the president settled the question by adding his own vote. That is what a council president does. Since all churches appointed their elders in the same way, we should understand the word “constitute” in Titus 1.5. the same way: “ina katasteses kata polin presbuterous,” or “I left you in Crete for this reason: to constitute elders in every city.” It means Titus was to assemble the believers and appoint elders by a majority of votes. Imagine a town where people had perhaps never seen officials selected except by an assembly. It would have been strange if, on becoming Christians, those people had even thought of another way to elect their teachers and guides—their elders, also called bishops. St. Paul's word Cheirotonesantes in Acts 14.23. points to election by a majority of votes. And bishops were always chosen by each town's assembly of Christians until the emperors found it necessary to regulate them to keep peace among them.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 6\n\nThe continuing practice of electing the bishops of Rome confirms the same point, even today. Suppose a bishop could choose the successor to a pastoral office in a city when he left to establish that office elsewhere. He would have an even stronger right to name a successor in the city where he last lived and died. Yet we find no bishop of Rome who ever named his successor. For a long time the people chose them. We can see this in the conflict over the election between Damascus and Ursinicus. Ammianus Marcellinus says it grew so violent that Juventius, the prefect, could not keep the peace and had to leave the city. More than a hundred men were found dead in the church itself. Later, the whole clergy of Rome chose the bishops, and later still the cardinals did. But no predecessor ever appointed his successor. If these bishops claimed no right to name successors, I think we can reasonably conclude that they had no right to appoint this new power either. Only someone with lawful authority not merely to teach the Church but to command it could take that power from the Church and give it to them. Only the civil sovereign could do that.\n\nThe original word for minister, diakonos, means someone who voluntarily does another person's business. A minister differs from a servant only in this: servants are bound by their position to do what they are told, while ministers are bound only by what they have agreed to do. They have no duty beyond that agreement. So those who teach God's Word and those who handle the Church's worldly affairs are both ministers, but they serve different people. The Church's pastors, called “ministers of the Word” (Acts 6.4.), are ministers of Christ, whose Word they teach. But a deacon's ministry, called “serving tables” (verse 2. of the same chapter), is service to the Church or congregation. Neither a single person nor the whole Church could properly call a pastor their minister. But the whole congregation could properly call a deacon its minister. That holds whether the deacon agreed to serve tables, distribute support to Christians when each city's Christians lived on shared funds or collections as they did at first, look after the house of prayer or its income, or handle any other worldly business of the Church.\n\nA deacon's job was to serve the congregation. Still, when the occasion arose, deacons preached the Gospel and defended Christ's teaching, each according to his gifts, as St. Stephen did. They also preached and baptized, as Philip did. The Philip who preached the Gospel in Samaria (Acts 8. 5.) and baptized the eunuch (verse 38.) was Philip the deacon, not Philip the apostle. When Philip preached in Samaria, the apostles were in Jerusalem (verse 1.). When they heard that Samaria had received God's Word, they “sent Peter and John to them” (verse 14.). Those whom Philip had baptized then received the Holy Ghost through Peter and John's laying on of hands (verse 15.), which they had not received through Philip's baptism. To confer the Holy Ghost, a minister of the Word, not a minister of the Church, had to administer or confirm their baptism. So the apostles sent Peter and John, members of their own group, from Jerusalem to Samaria to confirm the baptism of those Philip the deacon had baptized. Peter and John gave people who had previously only been baptized the gifts that signaled the Holy Spirit, gifts that at the time accompanied all true believers. We can learn what those gifts were from St. Mark (chapter 16.17.): “These signs will follow those who believe in my name: they will cast out devils; they will speak in new languages; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink anything deadly, it will not harm them; they will lay hands on the sick, and the sick will recover.” Philip could not give people the power to do these things. The apostles could, and, as this passage shows, they did give it effectively to every true believer baptized by a minister of Christ himself. Either Christ's ministers today cannot confer this power, or there are very few true believers, or Christ has very few ministers.\n\nThe first deacons were chosen not by the apostles but by a congregation of disciples, meaning Christians of all kinds. Acts 6. makes this clear. When the number of disciples had grown, the Twelve gathered them and said that it was not right for the apostles to leave God's Word in order to serve tables. They told the disciples (verse 3.), “Brothers, choose from among yourselves seven men with good reputations, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may put in charge of this work.” The apostles declared them elected, but the congregation chose them. Verse 5. says this even more plainly: “The proposal pleased the whole group, and they chose seven,” and so on.\n\nUnder the Old Testament, only the tribe of Levi could hold the priesthood and the Church's other, lower offices. The land was divided among the other tribes, excluding Levi. There were still twelve because Joseph's tribe was divided into Ephraim and Manasses. The tribe of Levi received certain cities to live in, with surrounding land for its cattle. For its share of support, it was to receive one tenth of the produce of its brothers' land. The priests, in turn, received one tenth of that tenth, along with part of the offerings and sacrifices. God had said to Aaron (Numbers 18. 20.), “You will inherit no land among them and have no share among them. I am your share and your inheritance among the children of Israel.” God was then king and had appointed the tribe of Levi as his public ministers. For their support he allowed them public revenue, the portion God had reserved for himself: tithes and offerings. This is what God meant by “I am your inheritance.” It would therefore be fitting to call the Levites clergy, from kleros, meaning lot or inheritance. The reason was not that they inherited God's Kingdom more than other people did, but that God's inheritance supported them. Since God himself was their king at that time, while Moses, Aaron, and the high priests who followed were his deputies, the right to tithes and offerings was established by the civil power.\n\nAfter the people rejected God by demanding a king, the Levites still received the same income. But their right to it came from the fact that the kings never took it away. The person who represented the public could decide how public revenue was spent, and until the Captivity that person was the king. After the return from the Captivity, the people again paid their tithes to the priest as before. Up to this point, then, the civil sovereign determined how the Church's ministers were supported.\n\nWe read only that our Savior and his apostles had a purse, carried by Judas Iscariot; that the apostles who were fishermen sometimes worked at their trade; and that, when our Savior sent the Twelve Apostles to preach, he forbade them “to carry gold, silver, or brass in their purses, for the worker deserves his pay” (Matthew 10. 9,10.). This suggests that their ordinary support suited their work. Their work was, as verse 8. says, “to give freely, because they had received freely.” Their support came from the free gifts of people who believed the good news they brought about the coming of the Messiah, their Savior. We can add gifts given in gratitude by people our Savior had healed. Among them were “certain women” (Luke 8. 2,3.) “who had been healed of evil spirits and illnesses: Mary Magdalen, out of whom seven devils had gone; Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward; Susanna; and many others, who supported him from their own resources.”\n\nAfter our Savior's Ascension, the Christians in each city lived on shared funds (Acts 4. 34.). They raised this money by selling their lands and possessions and willingly laying the proceeds at the apostles' feet. It was voluntary, not a duty. As St. Peter said to Ananias (Acts 5.4.), “While the land was yours, was it not your own? And after it was sold, was not the money under your control?” Ananias did not have to lie to keep either his land or his money. He did not have to contribute anything unless he wanted to. From the apostles' time until after Constantine the Great, bishops and pastors of the Christian Church were likewise supported only by voluntary gifts from people who had accepted their teaching. Tithes were not yet mentioned. But in the days of Constantine and his sons, Christians felt such affection for their pastors that, according to Ammianus Marcellinus's account of the conflict between Damasus and Ursinicus over the bishopric, the post was worth fighting for. The generosity of their congregations, especially of women of standing, let bishops live splendidly, ride in coaches, and enjoy expensive food and clothing.\n\nThe ministers of the Gospel lived on the goodwill of their congregations. But someone might ask whether pastors were then required to live on voluntary contributions, like charity. St. Paul asks (1 Corinthians 9. 7.), “Who goes to war at his own expense? Or who tends a flock without drinking its milk?” And again (1 Corinthians 9. 13.), “Do you not know that those who serve at holy ceremonies live on what is given to the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in what is given at the altar?” That is, they receive for their support part of what people offer there. He concludes, “In the same way the Lord has directed that those who preach the Gospel should live by the Gospel.” We can indeed infer from this that congregations ought to support their pastors. We cannot infer that pastors could set the amount or kind of their own support and serve themselves whatever they wanted. Their support had to be decided either by the gratitude and generosity of each member or by the whole congregation. The whole congregation could not decide it as a binding obligation, because its decisions were not yet laws. Before emperors and civil sovereigns made laws establishing pastoral support, it was therefore nothing but voluntary generosity. Those serving at the altar lived on what was offered there. With no courts, where could they sue for payment? Even if they had arbitrators among themselves, who could enforce their decisions when they had no power to arm their officers? So no fixed support could be assigned to the Church's pastors except by the whole congregation, and only when its decrees had the force not just of church rules but of laws. Such laws could be made only by emperors, kings, or other civil sovereigns. The right to tithes under the Law of Moses could not be applied to the Gospel's ministers of that time. Moses and the high priests were civil sovereigns of the people under God, whose Kingdom was then present among the Jews. God's Kingdom through Christ, by contrast, is still to come.\n\nSo far I have shown who the Church's pastors are and what their commission covers: preaching, teaching, baptizing, and presiding over their individual congregations. I have explained church discipline, namely excommunication. Where civil laws forbade Christianity, this meant Christians withdrawing from the company of an excommunicated person. Where civil law required Christianity, it meant removing that person from Christian congregations. I have shown who chose the Church's pastors and ministers—the congregation—and who consecrated and blessed them—the pastor. I have also shown what support was due to them: only their own possessions, their own labor, and the voluntary gifts of devout and grateful Christians. We must now consider the office of people who are civil sovereigns and have also embraced the Christian faith.\n\nFirst, we must remember that the right to judge which teachings serve peace and should be taught to subjects belongs inseparably to the civil sovereign power in every Common-wealth, whether one person or an assembly holds it. I proved this earlier in chapter 18. Even someone with little understanding can see that people act according to what they think will benefit or harm them. So if they come to believe obeying the sovereign power will hurt them more than disobeying, they will break the laws. They will thereby destroy the Common-wealth and bring confusion and civil war, the very things all civil government was established to prevent. Thus, in every non-Christian Common-wealth, sovereigns have been called pastors of the people. No subject could lawfully teach the people without their permission and authority.\n\nConversion to faith in Christ cannot be thought to take this right away from non-Christian kings. Christ never decreed that kings who believed in him should be deposed, made subject to anyone but himself, or—which comes to the same thing—stripped of the power needed to preserve peace among their subjects and defend them against foreign enemies. Christian kings therefore remain the supreme pastors of their people. They can appoint whichever pastors they choose to teach the Church, meaning the people in their care.\n\nEven if we say that the right to choose pastors belongs to the Church, as it did before kings converted and in the apostles' own time, as I have shown in this chapter, the Christian civil sovereign still has that right. As a Christian he approves the teaching. As sovereign, he represents the Church, so the teachers he elects are elected by the Church. When an assembly of Christians chooses its pastor in a Christian Common-wealth, the sovereign elects him because the assembly acts by his authority. In the same way, when a town chooses its mayor, the choice is the act of whoever has sovereign power. Every act is the act of the person whose consent is necessary for it to be valid. Historical examples of pastors chosen by the people or the clergy therefore do not count against a civil sovereign's right: the electors acted by his authority.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 7\n\nIn every Christian Common-wealth, then, the civil sovereign is the supreme pastor, responsible for his whole flock of subjects. All other pastors are appointed by his authority and get their power to teach and carry out their other pastoral duties from him. It follows that they get their right to teach, preach, and perform the rest of their office from the civil sovereign. They are his ministers, just as town magistrates, judges, and army commanders are ministers of the person who is chief magistrate of the whole Common-wealth, judge of all cases, and commander of all its armed forces: the civil sovereign. This is not because those who teach are his subjects, but because those who learn are. Suppose a Christian king gives another king the authority to appoint pastors in his lands, as several Christian kings let the Pope do. He does not thereby make that other king his own pastor or his people's sovereign pastor. That would mean giving up his civil power. That power depends on what people believe they owe him and on their fear of punishment in another world. Giving it away would make it depend on the skill and loyalty of religious teachers, who are as capable of ambition and ignorance as anyone else. So when an outsider has authority to appoint teachers, he receives it from the sovereign of the lands where they teach. Christian teachers are our schoolmasters in Christianity. But kings are heads of families. They may accept an outsider's recommendation of schoolmasters for their subjects, but they need not accept an outsider's command—especially when bad teaching would clearly bring great profit to the person recommending the teachers. Nor must kings keep such teachers longer than the public good permits. They remain responsible for that good as long as they retain any other essential right of sovereignty.\n\nSuppose, then, that someone asks a pastor carrying out his duties what the chief priests and elders of the people asked our Savior (Matthew 21.23.): “By what authority do you do these things, and who gave you that authority?” His only proper answer is that he acts by the authority of the Common-wealth, given him by the king or assembly representing it. All pastors except the supreme pastor carry out their duties by the right, or authority, of the civil sovereign: jure civili, by civil right. But a king or any other sovereign holds the office of supreme pastor by direct authority from God: by God's right, or jure divino. This is why only kings may include Dei Gratia Rex, and so on, in their titles, as a sign that they answer only to God. Bishops should begin their orders, “By the favor of the king's majesty, bishop of such a diocese,” or, as civil ministers do, “In his majesty's name.” When they instead say Divina Providentia, which is Dei Gratia in disguise, they deny that their authority comes from the civil state. They quietly slip out of the restraints of civil subjection, against the unity and defense of the Common-wealth.\n\nBut if every Christian sovereign is the supreme pastor of his own subjects, it seems he can not only preach—something perhaps no one will deny—but also baptize, administer the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and consecrate both places of worship and pastors to God's service. Most people deny this, partly because sovereigns do not normally do these things, and partly because administering sacraments and consecrating people and places for holy use are thought to require the laying on of hands by people ordained to the same ministry through a succession of similar ceremonies going back to the apostles. To show that Christian kings have the power to baptize and consecrate, I must therefore explain both why they do not normally exercise it and how they can exercise it if they choose, without the usual laying on of hands.\n\nThere is no doubt that a king who knew the sciences could personally teach them by the same right of office through which he authorizes others to teach them at universities. But running the whole Common-wealth takes up all his time, so it would be impractical for him to handle that particular task himself. A king can also sit in judgment if he wishes and hear and decide every kind of case, just as he can authorize others to do so in his name. But the burden of command and government keeps him at the helm and makes him delegate the work of his ministers to others under him. In the same way, our Savior, who certainly had the power to baptize, baptized no one himself. He sent his apostles and disciples to baptize (John 4.2.). St. Paul baptized few people because he had to preach in many places far apart. Among all the Corinthians he baptized only Crispus, Cajus, and Stephanus (1 Corinthians 1.14,16.). The reason was that his chief duty was to preach (1 Corinthians 1.17.). Clearly, a greater responsibility, such as governing the Church, excuses someone from a lesser one. So it is easy to see why Christian kings do not normally baptize: it is the same reason that few people today are baptized by bishops, and still fewer by the Pope.\n\nAs for whether laying on of hands is needed to authorize a king to baptize and consecrate, consider the following.\n\nLaying on of hands was a very old public Jewish ceremony. It identified precisely the person or thing meant in someone's prayer, blessing, sacrifice, consecration, condemnation, or other speech. When Jacob blessed Joseph's children (Genesis 48.14.), he “laid his right hand on the younger Ephraim and his left hand on the firstborn Manasseh.” He did this on purpose, though Joseph had presented them so that Jacob had to cross his arms. It showed which child he meant to bless more. Likewise, when Aaron was to sacrifice a burnt offering, he was commanded (Exodus 29.10.) “to lay his hands on the bull's head” and (verse 15.) “to lay his hand on the ram's head.” The same instructions appear again in Leviticus 1.4. and 8.14. When Moses appointed Joshua commander of the Israelites, consecrating him to God's service (Numbers 27.23.), he “laid his hands on him and gave him his charge.” This showed exactly whom the people should obey in war. At the consecration of the Levites, God ordered (Numbers 8.10.) that “the children of Israel should put their hands on the Levites.” When the blasphemer was condemned, God ordered (Leviticus 24.14.) that “all who heard him should lay their hands on his head, and the whole congregation should stone him.” Why would those who heard him, rather than a priest, Levite, or other officer of justice, lay their hands on him? Because no one else could show the congregation with certainty who had blasphemed and should die. Pointing to a person or thing so that others can see it is less likely to cause a mistake than identifying it by name so they can hear it.\n\nPeople followed this custom so closely that even when Aaron blessed the whole congregation at once, which could not be done by laying his hands on everyone, he still “raised his hand toward the people as he blessed them” (Leviticus 9.22.). We also read of a similar ceremony for consecrating temples among non-Jews: the priest laid his hands on a post of the temple while saying the words of consecration. In public service to God, it is natural to point to a particular thing with the hand so people can see it, rather than identify it with words for them to hear.\n\nThe ceremony was therefore not new in our Savior's time. Jairus, whose daughter was sick, asked our Savior (Mark 5.23.) not simply to heal her but “to lay his hands on her, so that she might be healed.” And “they brought him little children so that he would put his hands on them and pray” (Matthew 19.13.).\n\nFollowing this old custom, the apostles, elders, and council of elders laid hands on people they appointed as pastors. They also prayed that these people would receive the Holy Ghost. They did this not just once but sometimes again when a new need arose. Their purpose was always the same: to identify, precisely and with religious ceremony, the person appointed either to a pastoral office generally or to a particular mission. Thus “the apostles prayed and laid their hands” on the seven deacons (Acts 6.6.). This was not to give them the Holy Ghost, since they were full of the Holy Ghost before their selection, as verse 3. just above shows. It was to identify them for that office. After Philip the deacon had converted people in Samaria, Peter and John went there and “laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost” (Acts 8.17.). An elder, not just an apostle, had this power. St. Paul advises Timothy (1 Timothy 5.22.), “Do not lay hands on anyone hastily,” meaning do not appoint someone rashly to a pastor's office. The whole council of elders laid hands on Timothy, as we read in 1 Timothy 4.14. This means some did it by the council's appointment, most likely their presiding officer or spokesman, perhaps St. Paul himself. In his second letter to Timothy, verse 6., Paul tells him, “Stir up the gift of God that is in you through the laying on of my hands.” Note that the Holy Ghost here does not mean the third person of the Trinity. It means the gifts needed for a pastor's office. We also read that hands were laid on St. Paul twice: first by Ananias in Damascus when he was baptized (Acts 9.17,18.), and again at Antioch when he was first sent out to preach (Acts 13.3.). Laying on of hands in appointing pastors thus served to identify the person given that power. Suppose there had already been a Christian sovereign with the power to teach. Baptizing him, or making him Christian, would not have given him any new power. It would only have led him to preach true teaching and so use his power properly. Laying on of hands would then have been unnecessary; baptism alone would have been enough. But every sovereign already had the power to teach and appoint teachers before becoming Christian. Christianity therefore gave them no new right; it only guided them in teaching the truth. They needed no laying on of hands beyond what happens in baptism to authorize them to perform any pastoral function, such as baptizing or consecrating. In the Old Testament, only the priest had the right to consecrate when the high priest held sovereignty. But this changed when the king held sovereignty. We read in 1 Kings 8. that Solomon blessed the people, consecrated the temple, and spoke the public prayer that now serves as a model for consecrating all Christian churches and chapels. He therefore had the right not only to govern the Church but also to perform its functions.\n\nChristian sovereigns thus hold political and church authority together. Clearly, they have every kind of power over their subjects that one person can receive for governing people's outward actions, in both public affairs and religion. They can make whatever laws they judge best for their subjects, both as a Common-wealth and as a Church. The state and the Church consist of the same people.\n\nSo sovereigns may, if they wish, entrust the religious government of their subjects to the Pope, as many Christian kings now do. But in that role the Pope is subordinate to them. He acts in someone else's lands jure civili, by the civil sovereign's right, not jure divino, by God's right. The sovereign may therefore remove him from the role when the good of the subjects requires it. Sovereigns may also entrust religion to one supreme pastor or to an assembly of pastors. They may give them whatever power over the Church or over one another seems best, whatever titles of honor they choose—bishops, archbishops, priests, or elders—and whatever legal support they choose, by tithes or otherwise. They must do so with a sincere conscience, which only God can judge. The civil sovereign appoints the judges and interpreters of the canonical Scriptures, since he makes them law. He also gives force to excommunications. Without laws and punishments to humble stubborn people who reject restraints and bring them back into union with the rest of the Church, excommunication would be ignored. In short, the sovereign has supreme power in every cause, church or civil, as far as actions and words are concerned. Only these can be known and made the subject of an accusation. No one but God, who knows the heart, can judge what cannot be accused. These rights belong to every sovereign, whether a monarch or an assembly. Those who represent a Christian people also represent the Church, because a Church and a Common-wealth made up of Christian people are the same thing.\n\nWhat I have said here and elsewhere in this book seems clear enough to establish Christian sovereigns' supreme power over the Church. But Cardinal Bellarmine has argued at length for the Pope of Rome's claim to hold that power everywhere, and I think he has made as strong a case as possible in his Controversy De Summo Pontifice. I therefore think it necessary to examine the grounds and strength of his argument as briefly as I can.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 8\n\nOf the five books Bellarmine has written on this subject, the first asks three questions. First, which government is best in itself: monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy? He concludes that none of them alone is best, but rather a government combining all three. Second, which is the best government for the Church? He again favors a combination, though one with a larger share of monarchy. Third, did St. Peter occupy the monarch's position in this combined monarchy? As to his first conclusion, I have already proved sufficiently in chapter 18. that every government people are bound to obey is simple and absolute. Under monarchy one man alone is supreme. Everyone else who has any power in the state holds it by his commission, as long as he wishes, and exercises it in his name. Under aristocracy or democracy one assembly alone is supreme and holds the same power a monarch holds under monarchy. This is absolute sovereignty, not a mixture. Where one of these three forms is already established, there is no point in arguing which is best. The existing government must always be preferred, upheld, and considered best. Both the Law of Nature and God's positive law forbid anything that tends to overthrow it. Besides, unless a pastor also holds civil sovereignty, which form of government is best has no bearing on his power. Pastors are called not to govern people through commands, but to teach them and persuade them with arguments, leaving them to decide whether to accept or reject the teaching. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy describe three kinds of sovereign, not three kinds of pastor. We might say they describe three kinds of head of a family, not three kinds of schoolmaster for the family's children.\n\nHis second conclusion, about the best government for the Church, therefore has nothing to do with the Pope's power outside his own lands. In every other Common-wealth, any power the Pope may have is only that of a schoolmaster, not that of the head of the family.\n\nFor his third conclusion, that St. Peter was monarch of the Church, Bellarmine's chief argument comes from St. Matthew (chapter 16.18, 19.): “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church,” and so on. “I will give you the keys of Heaven; whatever you bind on Earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever you release on Earth will be released in Heaven.” Considered carefully, the passage proves only that Christ's Church has one foundation article of faith. It is the article Peter professed on behalf of all the apostles, which prompted our Savior to say the quoted words. To understand this clearly, we must consider that our Savior, John the Baptist, and the apostles preached only this article of faith: “He was the Christ.” Every other article requires faith only because it rests on that one. John began by preaching only this (Matthew 3.2.): “The Kingdom of God is near.” Our Savior then preached the same message (Matthew 4.17.). When he commissioned his Twelve Apostles (Matthew 10.7.), he mentioned no other article for them to preach. This was the fundamental article, the foundation of the Church's faith. Later, when the apostles returned to him, he asked all of them, not Peter alone (Matthew 16.13.), “Who do people say I am?” They answered, “Some say John the Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremias or one of the prophets.” Then he asked all of them again, not just Peter (verse 15.), “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered on behalf of all: “You are Christ, the Son of the living God.” As I said, this is the foundation of the whole Church's faith. It led our Savior to say, “On this stone I will build my Church.” Clearly the Church's foundation stone means the fundamental article of its faith. Someone may object: why, then, did our Savior say, “You are Peter”? A strict translation of the original would make the reason clear. The apostle Simon was nicknamed Stone, which is the meaning of the Syriac Cephas and the Greek Petrus. So after Peter confessed that fundamental article, our Savior played on his name, saying, as it would read in English, “You are Stone, and on this stone I will build my Church.” In other words, the article “I am the Christ” is the foundation of all the faith I require of members of my Church. Wordplay on someone's name is common enough. But if our Savior had meant to build the Church on St. Peter himself, it would have been strange and unclear to say, “You are a stone, and on this stone I will build my Church.” He could plainly have said, “I will build my Church on you,” and still have played on Peter's name.\n\nThe words that follow, “I will give you the keys of Heaven,” and so on, grant Peter no more than our Savior gave the rest of his disciples as well (Matthew 18.18.): “Whatever you bind on Earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever you release on Earth will be released in Heaven.” However we interpret this, there is no doubt that the power granted here belongs to all supreme pastors, including every Christian civil sovereign in his own lands. Suppose St. Peter or our Savior himself had converted a sovereign to faith in him and to recognition of his Kingdom. Because his Kingdom is not of this world, he would still have left that sovereign alone with supreme responsibility for converting his subjects. Otherwise he would have taken away the sovereign's sovereignty, to which the right to teach is inseparably attached. This is enough to refute Bellarmine's first book, which seeks to prove that St. Peter was monarch of the Church everywhere, meaning monarch of all Christians in the world.\n\nThe second book makes two claims: St. Peter was bishop of Rome and died there, and the Popes of Rome are his successors. Others have disputed both claims. But even supposing they are true, if “bishop of Rome” means either monarch or supreme pastor of the Church, that bishop was not Silvester but Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Like Constantine, every later Christian emperor was by right supreme bishop of the Roman Empire. I mean the Roman Empire, not all Christendom. Other Christian sovereigns had the same right within their own territories, because the office necessarily belongs to sovereignty. That answers his second book.\n\nIn the third book Bellarmine considers whether the Pope is Antichrist. I see no argument proving he is, in the sense Scripture gives that name. Nor will I use the character of Antichrist as an argument against the authority the Pope now exercises or has formerly exercised in another prince's or state's territory.\n\nThe Old Testament prophets clearly foretold a Messiah, or Christ, whom the Jews expected to restore God's Kingdom among them. They had rejected that Kingdom in Samuel's day when they demanded a king like other nations had. Their expectation exposed them to fraud by anyone ambitious enough to seek the Kingdom and clever enough to deceive the people with fake miracles, a show of holy living, or persuasive speeches and teaching. So our Savior and his apostles warned people against false prophets and false Christs. False Christs are those who claim to be the Christ but are not. Properly speaking, they are called Antichrists. This is like a split in the Church when two Popes are elected and each calls the other Antipapa, or false Pope. Thus Antichrist in its proper sense has two essential marks: he denies that Jesus is Christ, and he claims that he himself is Christ. St. John states the first mark in his first letter, chapter 4. verse 3.: “Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. This is the spirit of Antichrist.” Our Savior states the other mark (Matthew 24.5.): “Many will come in my name, saying, I am Christ.” And again: “If anyone says to you, Look, Christ is here, or Christ is there, do not believe it.” So an Antichrist must be a false Christ, someone who claims to be Christ. From these two marks, denying that Jesus is the Christ and claiming to be the Christ himself, it follows that he must also be an adversary of the true Christ. That is another common meaning of the word Antichrist. But among these many Antichrists is one particular figure, O Antichristos, the Antichrist: one specific person, not just an Antichrist in general. The Pope of Rome does not claim to be Christ or deny that Jesus is the Christ, so I do not see how he can be called Antichrist. That word means someone claiming to be Christ himself, not someone falsely claiming to be his deputy or chief representative. There are also clues about when this particular Antichrist will come. In Matthew 24.15., the abominable destroyer mentioned by Daniel (Daniel 9. 27.) will stand in the holy place. There will be suffering unlike any since the world began, or any that will ever happen again. If it lasted long, “no one could be saved; but for the sake of the chosen, those days will be cut short” (verse 22.). That suffering has not yet come. It will be followed immediately (verse 29.) by the darkening of the sun and moon, the falling of the stars, the shaking of the heavens, and our Savior's glorious return in the clouds. The Antichrist therefore has not yet come, while many Popes have come and gone. It is true that by claiming the power to make laws for all Christian kings and nations, the Pope seizes a kingdom in this world, which Christ did not claim. But he acts not as Christ, but on behalf of Christ. That does not make him Antichrist.\n\nIn his fourth book Bellarmine offers three propositions to prove that the Pope is the supreme judge in every question of faith and conduct, which would make him absolute monarch of every Christian in the world. First, his judgments cannot be wrong. Second, he can make actual laws and punish those who do not obey them. Third, our Savior gave the Pope of Rome all jurisdiction over the Church.\n\nTo support the claim that the Pope's judgments cannot be wrong, Bellarmine cites Scripture. His first passage is Luke 22.31.: “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” According to Bellarmine, Christ here gave Simon Peter two privileges: his own faith would never fail, and neither he nor any of his successors would ever issue an incorrect ruling about faith or conduct, or one contrary to an earlier Pope's ruling. This is a strange and very forced interpretation. Anyone who reads that chapter carefully will find that this very passage opposes the Pope's authority more than any other in Scripture. The priests and scribes were seeking to kill our Savior at Passover. Judas had resolved to betray him. When the day came to kill the Passover lamb, our Savior celebrated the meal with his apostles and told them he would not do so again until God's Kingdom came. He also said that one of them would betray him. They wondered who it was. And since their master would celebrate the next Passover only when he became king, they began arguing about which of them would then be the greatest. Our Savior therefore told them that the kings of the nations rule their subjects and are called by a name that in Hebrew means generous. But, he said, this is not how it can be among you: you must try to serve one another. I give you a Kingdom, but it is the kind my Father gave me. I am now to buy it with my blood, and will not possess it until I return. Then you will eat and drink at my table and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Turning to St. Peter, he then said: Simon, Simon, Satan wants to weaken your faith in the future Kingdom by making you think you can rule now. But I have prayed that your faith will not fail. So when you have turned back—and note this—and understand that my Kingdom belongs to another world, strengthen your brothers in that same faith. St. Peter replied like someone who no longer expected authority in this world: “Lord, I am ready to go with you not only to prison but to death.” Clearly, Peter was not only given no jurisdiction in this world. He was also charged with teaching all the other apostles that they too would have none. As for Peter's supposedly infallible final rulings on faith, all this text tells us is that Peter would keep believing this one point: Christ would return and take possession of the Kingdom on Judgment Day. The text does not extend that promise to all his successors. Indeed, we see them claiming the Kingdom in the world as it is now.\n\nHis second passage is Matthew 16.: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.” As I have already shown in this chapter, it proves only that the gates of Hell will not overcome Peter's confession, which prompted those words: that Jesus is Christ, the Son of God.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 9\n\nThe third text is John 21, verses 16, 17: “Feed my sheep.” This gives only a commission to teach. If we grant that the name “sheep” includes the other Apostles, it gives the highest authority to teach. But that applied only when no Christian Sovereigns already held that authority. I have already proved that Christian Sovereigns are the supreme pastors within their own dominions. They are appointed to that role by being baptized, without any further laying on of hands. Laying on hands is a ceremony for appointing someone. It is unnecessary when the Sovereign has already been appointed, through his absolute authority over his subjects, to decide what doctrine to teach. As I have shown, Sovereigns are supreme teachers in general by virtue of their office. By baptism, they also commit themselves to teaching Christ’s doctrine. When they allow others to teach their people, they do so at risk to their own souls. God will demand an account of how children and servants were taught from the heads of their households. God says of Abraham himself, not of a hired worker, in Genesis 18.19: “I know that he will command his children and his household after him to follow the Lord’s way and act with justice and sound judgment.”\n\nThe fourth passage is Exodus 28.30: “Put the Urim and the Thummin in the breastplate of judgment.” He says the Septuagint translates these as delosin kai aletheian, meaning evidence and truth. From this he concludes that God gave the high priest evidence and truth, which amount almost to infallibility. Perhaps he was given evidence and truth themselves. Or perhaps he was simply reminded to inform himself clearly and judge fairly. Either way, they were given to the high priest, and therefore to the civil Sovereign. In the Commonwealth of Israel the high priest ranked immediately below God. So the passage supports the evidence and truth, or ecclesiastical supremacy, of civil Sovereigns over their own subjects, against the Pope’s claimed authority. These are all the texts he offers to show that the Pope cannot err in judging questions of faith.\n\nTo show that the Pope cannot err in judgments about conduct, he gives one text, John 16.13: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” By “all truth,” he says, this means at least all truth necessary for salvation. But once he adds that qualification, he grants the Pope no more freedom from error than any Christian who will be saved. If anyone is mistaken on a point where avoiding error is necessary for salvation, that person cannot be saved. For something is necessary for salvation only if salvation without it is impossible. I will identify those points from Scripture in the following chapter. Here I will say only this: even if we granted that the Pope could never teach any error, that would give him no jurisdiction within another prince’s dominions. To claim otherwise would be like saying that conscience always requires a person to hire the best worker, even after promising the job to someone else.\n\nBesides quoting Scripture, he argues as follows. If the Pope could make a mistake on what is necessary for salvation, Christ would not have made adequate provision for the Church’s salvation, since Christ commanded the Church to follow the Pope’s directions. But the argument fails unless he shows when and where Christ gave that command, or even mentioned a Pope. Indeed, suppose we grant that everything given to St. Peter was given to the Pope. Scripture still commands no one to obey St. Peter. No one can act justly by obeying him when his commands conflict with those of that person’s lawful Sovereign.\n\nFinally, neither the Church nor the Pope himself has declared him the civil Sovereign of all Christians in the world. So Christians everywhere are not required to accept his jurisdiction over conduct. Civil sovereignty and final authority to judge disputes over conduct are the same thing. Those who make civil laws not only state which actions are just or unjust; they also determine it. The only thing that makes people’s conduct right or wrong is whether it follows the Sovereign’s law. So when the Pope claims the highest authority over disputes about conduct, he teaches people to disobey the civil Sovereign. That teaching is mistaken. It conflicts with the many commands of our Savior and his Apostles in Scripture.\n\nTo prove that the Pope can make laws, he cites many passages. First comes Deuteronomy 17.12: “The person who acts presumptuously and will not listen to the priest who serves there before the Lord your God, or to the judge, must die; so you shall remove evil from Israel.” In reply, we should remember that the high priest was the civil Sovereign immediately below God, and that he appointed all the judges. So the quoted words mean: “Anyone who presumes to disobey the current civil Sovereign, or any of his officials acting in their offices, must die,” and so forth. That clearly supports civil sovereignty against the Pope’s claim to universal authority.\n\nSecond, he cites Matthew 16, “Whatever you bind,” and so forth. He takes “binding” here to mean the kind attributed to the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23.4: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders.” He says this means making laws, and concludes that the Pope can make laws. But this passage, too, supports only the lawmaking power of civil Sovereigns. The scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses’ seat, and Moses was Sovereign of the people of Israel under God. Our Savior therefore commanded people to do everything they said, but not everything they did. That means obey their laws, but do not imitate their conduct.\n\nThe third passage is John 21.16, “Feed my sheep.” That is not authority to make laws; it is a command to teach. Making laws belongs to the head of the household, who chooses at his own discretion both his chaplain and a teacher for his children.\n\nThe fourth passage, John 20.21, works against him. It says, “As my Father sent me, so I send you.” But our Savior was sent to redeem through his death those who would believe. Through his preaching and that of his Apostles, he was to prepare them to enter his Kingdom. He himself says this Kingdom is not of this world, and he taught us to pray that it will come later. He refused, in Acts 1.6,7, to tell his Apostles when it would come. When it does come, the twelve Apostles will sit on twelve thrones, perhaps each as high as St. Peter’s, to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. Since God the Father did not send our Savior to make laws in the present world, the text gives us reason to conclude that our Savior did not send St. Peter to make laws here either. He sent him to persuade people to await Christ’s second coming with steady faith. Meanwhile, subjects should obey their princes. Princes should believe in that coming themselves and do their best to bring their subjects to the same belief. That is a bishop’s duty. This passage therefore strongly supports joining supreme ecclesiastical authority to civil sovereignty, the opposite of what Cardinal Bellarmine cites it to prove.\n\nThe fifth passage is Acts 15.28: “The Holy Spirit and we have thought it good to lay no greater burden on you than these necessary things: abstain from food offered to idols, from blood, from strangled animals, and from sexual immorality.” He points to “lay a burden” as evidence of lawmaking power. But who could read the passage and say that the Apostles could not use this wording to give advice just as easily as to make laws? A law says, “We command.” People offering advice normally say, “We think it good.” Advice can also place a burden on someone, though a conditional one: the person must follow it if they want to reach their goal. That is the kind of burden involved in abstaining from strangled animals and blood. It is not an absolute command, but advice for those who do not wish to go wrong. I showed in chapter 25 that law and advice differ in this respect: a law is based on the aims and interests of the person prescribing it, whereas advice is based on the aims and interests of the person receiving it. Here the Apostles aim solely at the converted Gentiles’ benefit, namely their salvation, not at their own benefit. After making their best effort, the Apostles will receive their reward whether people obey them or not. The council’s decisions were therefore advice, not laws.\n\nThe sixth passage is Romans 13: “Let everyone be subject to the higher powers, for no power exists except from God.” He says this refers to ecclesiastical as well as secular princes. I answer, first, that there are no ecclesiastical princes except those who are also civil Sovereigns. Their rule extends no further than their civil sovereignty. Outside those borders they may be accepted as teachers, but not recognized as princes. If the Apostle had meant that we should be subject both to our own princes and to the Pope, he would have taught something Christ himself called impossible: “to serve two masters.” Elsewhere the Apostle says, “I write these things while absent so that, when present, I need not be severe in using the authority the Lord has given me.” But he was not claiming power to execute, imprison, banish, whip, or fine anyone. Those are punishments. He claimed only the power to excommunicate. Without civil authority, that amounts only to leaving someone’s company and dealing with them no more than with a nonbeliever or a tax collector. On many occasions this could hurt the person who excommunicates more than the person excommunicated.\n\nThe seventh passage is 1 Corinthians 4.21: “Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love and a gentle spirit?” Again, the rod does not mean a magistrate’s power to punish offenders. It means only the power to excommunicate. By its nature excommunication is not a punishment, but an announcement of punishment Christ will impose when he possesses his Kingdom on Judgment Day. Even then it will not strictly be punishment of a subject for breaking the law. It will be retaliation against an enemy or rebel who denies our Savior’s right to the Kingdom. So this does not prove that a bishop without civil authority has lawmaking power.\n\nThe eighth passage is 1 Timothy 3.2: “A bishop must have only one wife, be watchful, sober,” and so forth. He calls that a law. I had thought no one but St. Peter, the Church’s monarch, could make a law in the Church. But suppose Peter’s authority lay behind this instruction. I still see no reason to call it a law rather than advice. Timothy was Paul’s student, not his subject, and Timothy’s flock were his students in Christ’s school, not his subjects in a Kingdom. If all Paul’s instructions to Timothy are laws, why is this not also a law: “Do not drink water alone any longer; take a little wine for your health”? Why would good doctors’ instructions not also be laws? An instruction becomes a law not because it is phrased as a command, but because the person receiving it is absolutely subject to the person giving it.\n\nLikewise the ninth passage, 1 Timothy 5.19, “Do not accept an accusation against an elder except on the testimony of two or three witnesses,” is wise advice, not a law.\n\nThe tenth passage is Luke 10.16: “Whoever hears you hears me, and whoever rejects you rejects me.” Certainly anyone who rejects the advice of those sent by Christ rejects Christ’s own advice. But who now is sent by Christ except pastors appointed by lawful authority? Who is lawfully appointed without appointment by the supreme pastor? And who is appointed by the supreme pastor of a Christian Commonwealth without the authority of its Sovereign? It follows that whoever hears his Christian Sovereign hears Christ. Whoever rejects the doctrine authorized by his Christian king rejects Christ’s doctrine. That is the opposite of Bellarmine’s intended conclusion. Yet none of this concerns law. Indeed, a Christian king does not turn his doctrines into laws merely by teaching his subjects as their pastor. He cannot force people to believe. As civil Sovereign, however, he can make laws that accord with his doctrine. Such laws can require particular actions, sometimes actions people would not otherwise perform and which he should not command. But once he commands them, they are laws. When subjects outwardly obey without inward approval, those actions belong to the Sovereign, not to the subject. In that case the subject is merely an instrument, making no independent move, because God has commanded obedience to Sovereigns.\n\nThe eleventh category includes every passage where the Apostle uses a word commonly used for a command when he is offering advice, or calls following his advice “obedience.” One example cited is 1 Corinthians 11.2: “I praise you for keeping my instructions as I delivered them to you.” The Greek says, “I praise you for holding to the things I passed on to you, as I passed them on.” That is far from saying they were laws, rather than good advice. Another is 1 Thessalonians 4.2: “You know what commands we gave you.” The Greek expression paraggelias edokamen is equivalent to paredokamen, “what we passed on to you,” as in the preceding quotation. It does not show that the Apostles’ teachings were anything more than advice, although verse 8 says, “Whoever rejects them rejects not a human being but God.” Our Savior himself did not come to judge, that is, to reign as king in this world. He came to sacrifice himself for sinners and leave teachers in his Church to guide people to Christ, not drive them. Christ never accepts forced actions, which are all that law can produce. He accepts the inward conversion of the heart, which comes from advice and teaching, not from laws.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 10\n\nAnother passage is 2 Thessalonians 3.14: “If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person and do not associate with him, so that he may be ashamed.” From “obey,” he wants to conclude that this letter was a law for the Thessalonians. The emperors’ letters were indeed laws. If St. Paul’s letter was also law, they had two masters to obey. But the Greek word for “obey,” upakouei, means “listen to” or “put into practice.” It applies not only to commands from someone with the right to punish, but also to advice offered for our good. Paul does not tell them to kill, beat, imprison, or fine the disobedient person, as lawmakers may do. He tells them to avoid his company so that he feels ashamed. Clearly the Christians feared not an Apostle’s ruling power but his reputation among the faithful.\n\nThe last passage is Hebrews 13.17: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they watch over your souls as people who must give an account.” Here too “obey” means follow their advice. The reason for obedience is not our pastors’ wishes or commands, but our own benefit. They care for the salvation of our souls, not the increase of their own power and authority. If everything they taught counted as law, not just the Pope but every pastor in his parish would have the power to make laws. Also, people required to obey their pastors would have no right to examine their commands. What, then, should we make of St. John’s instruction in 1 John 4.1: “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they come from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world”? Clearly we may question our pastors’ teaching, but no one may question a law. Everyone agrees that civil Sovereigns’ commands are laws. If someone else can also make laws, every Commonwealth, and therefore all peace and justice, must come to an end. That would conflict with every law, divine and human. Neither these nor any other scriptural passages can therefore show that the Pope’s decrees are laws where he is not also the civil Sovereign.\n\nOn the Pope’s Temporal Power\n\nThe question of whether the Pope is above other bishops. The last proposition he wants to prove is this: “Our Savior Christ has given ecclesiastical jurisdiction directly to no one but the Pope.” Here he discusses not whether the Pope is above Christian kings, but whether he is above other bishops. First he says that everyone agrees bishops’ jurisdiction is at least, in general, de jure divino, meaning “by divine right.” As evidence he cites St. Paul in Ephesians 4.11, who says that after ascending to heaven Christ “gave gifts to people: some to be Apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers.” From this he concludes that bishops indeed hold their jurisdiction by divine right. He will not, however, admit that they receive it directly from God. He says it passes through the Pope. But if someone can hold jurisdiction by divine right without receiving it directly from God, what lawful jurisdiction in a Christian Commonwealth, even civil jurisdiction, is not also held by divine right? Christian kings receive their civil authority directly from God. Their subordinate magistrates exercise their offices on the kings’ commissions. In doing so, their actions are as much de jure divino mediato, or “by divine right through another,” as a bishop’s actions under the Pope’s appointment. Every lawful authority comes from God: directly in the highest ruler, indirectly in those who serve under him. He must therefore admit that every constable in the state holds office by divine right, or deny that any bishop but the Pope does.\n\nBut outside those places where the Pope is civil Sovereign, the entire dispute about whether Christ left jurisdiction only to the Pope or also to other bishops is an argument over nothing. Neither Pope nor bishops have any jurisdiction where they are not Sovereigns. Jurisdiction means the power to hear and settle disputes between people. It belongs only to someone who can set the rules of right and wrong—that is, make laws—and use the sword of justice to compel obedience to decisions, whether he gives them himself or through his appointed judges. Only the civil Sovereign can lawfully do that.\n\nHe therefore cites Luke 6, where our Savior called his disciples together, chose twelve of them, and named them Apostles. This proves that Christ chose them, apart from Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas, and gave them the authority and command to preach. It does not prove that he authorized them to judge disputes between people. He himself refused that authority, saying, “Who made me a judge or arbitrator between you?” Elsewhere he says, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” Someone without the power to hear and settle disputes between people cannot be said to have jurisdiction at all. Still, our Savior did give the Apostles authority to preach and baptize throughout the world, provided their lawful Sovereigns did not forbid them. Christ and his Apostles explicitly command us in several places to obey our own Sovereigns in all things.\n\nHis arguments for bishops receiving jurisdiction from the Pope are all useless, since the Pope has no jurisdiction in other princes’ dominions. But they actually prove the opposite: whenever bishops do have jurisdiction, they receive it from their civil Sovereigns. So I will list the arguments.\n\nThe first comes from Numbers 11. Moses could not carry alone the whole burden of administering the affairs of Israel. God told him to choose seventy elders and took some of Moses’ spirit to place on them. This does not mean that God weakened Moses’ spirit, which would not have lightened his burden. It means that the elders all received their authority from Moses. On this point Bellarmine interprets the passage honestly and correctly. But Moses held full sovereignty in the Jewish Commonwealth. So the passage clearly means that the elders’ authority came from the civil Sovereign. It therefore supports the conclusion that bishops in each Christian Commonwealth receive authority from their civil Sovereign. They receive it from the Pope only in his own territories, not in any other state.\n\nThe second argument comes from the nature of monarchy. In a monarchy all authority belongs to one person, and others receive it through him. Bellarmine says the Church is governed as a monarchy. This too supports Christian monarchs. They really are monarchs over their own people, who form their own Church, since a Church is the same as a Christian people. The Pope’s power, even if he were St. Peter, is neither monarchy nor any other kind of ruling or coercive power. It consists only of teaching. God accepts willing obedience, not forced obedience.\n\nThe third argument is that St. Cyprian calls the see of St. Peter the head, source, root, and sun from which bishops’ authority comes. But the Law of Nature is a better guide to right and wrong than any merely human teacher’s words. Under that law, the civil Sovereign in every Commonwealth is the head, source, root, and sun from which all jurisdiction comes. Bishops’ jurisdiction therefore comes from the civil Sovereign.\n\nThe fourth argument rests on differences in the extent of bishops’ jurisdiction. If God had given it to them directly, Bellarmine says, he would have given them equal jurisdiction as well as equal rank. Yet some bishops oversee just one town, others a hundred towns, and still others many whole provinces. God did not command these differences. Their jurisdiction therefore comes from a person, not from God. Some have more and others less, as the Church’s prince wishes. This would help his case if he had first proved that the Pope had universal jurisdiction over all Christians. But he has not. Moreover, it is common knowledge that the Pope’s extensive jurisdiction was granted by those who possessed it: the Roman emperors. The patriarch of Constantinople claimed equality with the Pope on the same grounds, because he was bishop of the empire’s capital, where the emperor sat. So all other bishops receive jurisdiction from the Sovereigns of the places where they exercise it. Because of this, they do not have authority de jure divino. Nor does the Pope, except where he is also civil Sovereign.\n\nHis fifth argument is: “If bishops receive their jurisdiction directly from God, the Pope could not take it away, for he cannot act against God’s appointment.” This conclusion is sound and well supported. “But,” he says, “the Pope can take it away and has done so.” I grant that too, if he does it in his own dominions or in another prince’s dominions with that prince’s permission. He cannot do it everywhere simply as Pope. That authority belongs to each Christian Sovereign inside his own realm, and cannot be separated from sovereignty. Before the Israelites appointed a king over themselves like other nations, at God’s command to Samuel, the high priest held civil authority. Only he could appoint or remove a lesser priest. Afterward that authority passed to the king, as Bellarmine’s own argument can show. If priests, high priests or others, received jurisdiction directly from God, a king could not take it from them, “for he cannot act against God’s appointment.” Yet King Solomon clearly removed the high priest Abiathar from office in 1 Kings 2.26 and installed Zadok in his place in verse 35. Kings may likewise appoint and remove bishops as they think best for governing their subjects.\n\nHis sixth argument is this: if bishops hold jurisdiction de jure divino, meaning directly from God, their supporters should produce a passage from God’s word proving it. But they can produce none. That is a good argument, and I have nothing to say against it. It is equally good, however, as an argument that the Pope has no jurisdiction in any other prince’s dominions.\n\nLastly, he cites two Popes, Innocent and Leo, as witnesses. I am sure he could just as reasonably have cited almost every Pope since St. Peter. People naturally love power, so anyone who became Pope would be tempted to defend that opinion. Still, those Popes would only be testifying for themselves, as Innocent and Leo did. Their testimony would therefore be no good.\n\nIn his fifth book he draws four conclusions. The first is “the Pope is not lord of the whole world.” The second is “the Pope is not lord of the whole Christian world.” The third is “outside his own territory, the Pope has no temporal jurisdiction DIRECTLY.” I readily grant all three. The fourth is “in the dominions of other princes, the Pope has supreme temporal power INDIRECTLY.” I deny this, unless “indirectly” means he acquired it by dishonest means; then I grant it too. But as I understand him, he means that he has a right to this temporal jurisdiction as a consequence of his authority as pastor, because he could not exercise that authority without temporal power. So he claims that supreme civil power must accompany pastoral power, which he calls spiritual. On this basis the Pope claims the right to replace rulers, giving kingdoms to some and taking them from others whenever he thinks it will save souls.\n\nBefore examining his arguments for this doctrine, I should spell out its consequences. Then princes and states holding civil sovereignty in their several Commonwealths can consider whether accepting it is good for them and their subjects, for whom they must give an account on Judgment Day.\n\nTo say that the Pope does not have supreme civil power directly in other states’ territories means that he does not claim it as other civil Sovereigns do, through the original submission of those they govern. As I have already shown sufficiently in this treatise, every Sovereign’s right comes originally from the consent of every person to be governed. People may choose a ruler for their common defense against an enemy, agreeing to appoint a person or assembly to protect them. Or they may submit to a conquering enemy to save their lives. When the Pope disclaims direct supreme civil power over other states, he merely denies that he obtains his right in this way. He still claims it by another means: without the governed people’s consent, through a right God supposedly gives him when he becomes Pope. He calls this “indirect” power. Yet whatever basis he claims, the power is the same. If we grant his right, he can depose princes and governments whenever salvation of souls requires it. That means whenever he wants to, since he also claims sole authority to decide what will save souls. Bellarmine and many other teachers preach and write this doctrine. Some councils have decreed it; Popes have decreed it and put it into practice when opportunities arose. For example, the fourth Lateran Council, held under Pope Innocent the third, states in chapter three, De Haereticis: “If a king, after the Pope warns him, does not remove heretics from his kingdom, and after excommunication fails to make amends within a year, his subjects are released from their duty to obey him.” It has been put into practice on several occasions: the removal of Chilperique, king of France; the transfer of the Roman Empire to Charlemaine; the oppression of John, king of England; the transfer of the Kingdom of Navarre; more recently, the League against Henry the third of France; and many other cases. I think few princes fail to see that this is unjust and harmful. I wish all of them would decide whether to be kings or subjects. No one can serve two masters. They should therefore make things easier for those willing to obey by either keeping all the reins of government in their own hands or turning them all over to the Pope. Such people would then be protected in their obedience. Distinguishing temporal from spiritual power is only a matter of words. Sharing authority with another indirect power divides power just as really, and is just as dangerous in every respect, as sharing it with a direct power. Now I will turn to his arguments.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLII, 11\n\nHis first argument is this: “Civil power is subject to spiritual power. Therefore whoever holds supreme spiritual power has a right to command temporal princes and to dispose of their temporal affairs for spiritual ends.” Let us consider what it could mean to say that temporal, or civil, power is subject to spiritual power. There are only two ways to make sense of it. Either the person holding one power is subject to the person holding the other, or one power serves as a means to the end pursued by the other. We cannot mean that a power itself has power over another power, or that one power has rights over another or can command it. Subjection, command, right, and power belong to persons, not to powers. One activity can serve another, as a saddler’s craft serves the rider’s skill. Suppose we grant that civil government is a means to spiritual happiness. It does not follow that a king holding civil power must obey the Pope, who holds spiritual power, any more than every saddler must obey every rider. An activity’s place below another does not make its practitioner subject to the other practitioner. Nor does government’s service to a higher goal make its governor subject to another governor. So when Bellarmine says civil power is subject to spiritual power, he means the civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign. His argument becomes: “The civil Sovereign is subject to the spiritual Sovereign; therefore the spiritual prince may command temporal princes.” His conclusion simply repeats the premise he needed to prove. He first tries to prove it this way: “Kings and Popes, clergy and laypeople, make up just one Commonwealth, that is, one Church. In every body the parts depend on each other. Spiritual things do not depend on temporal things. Therefore temporal things depend on spiritual things and are subject to them.” This argument contains two serious errors. First, all Christian kings, Popes, clergy, and other Christians do not form one Commonwealth. France is one Commonwealth, Spain another, Venice a third, and so on. Each contains Christians, so they are separate bodies of Christians, or separate Churches. Their respective Sovereigns represent them. That makes each body able to command and obey, act and be acted upon, like an individual person. No general or universal Church can do this without a representative, and it has none on earth. If it did, all Christendom would be one Commonwealth, and that representative would be its Sovereign in both spiritual and temporal affairs. To be that representative, the Pope would need three things our Savior has not given him: authority to command, judge, and punish. He has no power to do more than excommunicate those who refuse to learn from him—that is, to leave their company. Even if the Pope were Christ’s only deputy, he could not exercise Christ’s government before our Savior’s second coming. And when Christ comes, St. Peter himself, together with the other Apostles, will judge the world, not the Pope.\n\nThe second error in his first argument is the claim that the members of a Commonwealth depend on each other as the parts of a living body do. They do hold together, but they depend only on the Sovereign, the soul of the Commonwealth. Without him the Commonwealth breaks apart in civil war. People no longer even hold together, because they have no common reliance on a known Sovereign. In the same way a living body’s parts return to earth when it loses the soul holding them together. This comparison gives no reason to think laypeople depend on clergy, or temporal officials on spiritual officials. Both depend on the civil Sovereign. He ought to direct his civil commands toward the salvation of souls, but he is subject to no one but God. This exposes the carefully constructed mistake in the first argument. It is designed to deceive people who confuse making actions serve an end with making one person subject to another in choosing the means. Nature, or God acting supernaturally, determines the means to every end. But in every nation, the power to make people use those means has been handed to the civil Sovereign under the Law of Nature, which forbids breaking one’s pledged word.\n\nHis second argument is: “Since every Commonwealth is assumed to be complete and self-sufficient, it may command another Commonwealth not subject to it, force it to change its government, and even depose its prince and replace him, if it cannot otherwise protect itself against the injuries that prince intends. Still more may a spiritual Commonwealth command a temporal one to change its government and depose and replace its princes if it cannot otherwise defend spiritual good.”\n\nIt is true that a Commonwealth may lawfully take all these steps to defend itself against injury, as I have already shown. If there were in the present world a spiritual Commonwealth separate from a civil one, its prince could also answer an injury, or guard against a future one, by making war. In short, he could depose, kill, subdue, or take any other hostile action. But by the same reasoning, a civil Sovereign could make war on the spiritual Sovereign when faced with the same injury or threat. I doubt Cardinal Bellarmine intended that consequence of his own claim.\n\nBut no spiritual Commonwealth exists in this world. It is the same as Christ’s Kingdom, which Christ himself says is not of this world. It will exist in the next world, at the resurrection. Those who have lived justly and believed that Jesus was the Christ will then rise with spiritual bodies, though they died with natural bodies. Then our Savior will judge the world, conquer his enemies, and establish a spiritual Commonwealth. Meanwhile no one on earth has a spiritual body, so there can be no spiritual Commonwealth among people still in the flesh. One could call preachers a Commonwealth, since they have a commission to teach and prepare people for admission to Christ’s Kingdom at the resurrection. But I have proved they are not one.\n\nHis third argument is: “Christians may not tolerate an unbelieving or heretical king if he tries to draw them into his unbelief or heresy. The Pope judges whether a king is leading his subjects into heresy. Therefore the Pope has the right to decide whether to depose that prince.”\n\nMy answer is that both claims are false. Christians, like people of any religion, break their pledge if they refuse to tolerate their king, whatever law he makes, even a law about religion. This violates divine law, both natural and revealed. No one judges heresy among subjects except their own civil Sovereign. Heresy is simply a private opinion stubbornly maintained against the opinion that the public person, the Commonwealth’s representative, has ordered to be taught. An opinion authorized for public teaching cannot therefore be heresy. Nor can the sovereign princes who authorize it be heretics. Only private people can be heretics, when they stubbornly defend a teaching forbidden by their lawful Sovereigns.\n\nTo prove that Christians must not tolerate unbelieving or heretical kings, he cites Deuteronomy 17. God there forbids the Jews to choose a foreigner when they appoint a king. Bellarmine concludes that Christians may not choose a non-Christian king. It is true that a Christian has already pledged to accept our Savior as king when he comes. Such a person would severely test God by choosing a king in this world whom he knows will try, through threats and persuasion, to make him break that pledge. But Bellarmine says the danger is the same whether Christians choose a non-Christian king or fail to depose him after choosing him. I reply that our question is not about the danger of failing to depose a king. It is about the justice of deposing him. Choosing him may sometimes be unjust. Once he has been chosen, deposing him is never just. It always breaks a pledge and therefore violates the Law of Nature, which is God’s eternal law. Nor do we read that such a doctrine was considered Christian in the Apostles’ time or under the Roman emperors, before the Popes acquired civil sovereignty over Rome. Bellarmine replies that early Christians did not depose Nero, Diocletian, Julian, or Valens the Arian only because they lacked military strength. Perhaps they did. But our Savior could have called for twelve legions of immortal, invulnerable angels. Did he lack the strength to depose Caesar, or at least Pilate, who found no fault in him yet unjustly handed him over to the Jews for crucifixion? And even if the Apostles lacked the strength to depose Nero, why did they teach new Christians in their letters to obey the established authorities, including Nero at that time? Why teach them to obey not only for fear of punishment, but also for conscience’s sake? Are we to say they both obeyed and taught what they did not mean, merely because they lacked strength? Christians should tolerate their non-Christian princes for conscience’s sake, not for lack of strength. The same applies to princes who authorize the teaching of an error, though I cannot call someone a heretic when his teaching is the publicly authorized doctrine. Bellarmine also cites 1 Corinthians 6 in support of the Pope’s temporal power. He says St. Paul appointed judges under the non-Christian princes of the time without authorization from those princes. That is untrue. Paul merely advises Christians to choose fellow believers to settle their differences as arbitrators, rather than sue one another before non-Christian judges. This is sound, charitable advice that should be followed even in the best Christian Commonwealths. As for the danger to religion if subjects tolerate a non-Christian or mistaken prince, a subject is not qualified to judge it. If he is qualified, then the Pope’s temporal subjects are equally qualified to judge the Pope’s doctrine. As I showed earlier, every Christian prince is as much the supreme pastor of his own subjects as the Pope is of his.\n\nThe fourth argument comes from the baptism of kings. To become Christians, they submit their scepters to Christ and promise to uphold and defend the Christian faith. That is true: Christian kings are Christ’s subjects. But they can still be the Pope’s equals, since each is supreme pastor of his own subjects. Even in Rome itself the Pope is no more than king and pastor.\n\nThe fifth argument draws on our Savior’s words, “Feed my sheep.” Bellarmine says these gave every power a pastor needs: power to drive away wolves, such as heretics; to confine rams that are mad or use their horns to attack other sheep, such as bad kings, even Christian ones; and to give the flock suitable food. He concludes that Christ gave St. Peter all three powers. I reply that the last power amounts only to the power, or rather the command, to teach. For driving away wolves, meaning heretics, Bellarmine quotes Matthew 7.15: “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” But heretics are not false prophets, or prophets of any kind. Even if the wolves here meant heretics, the Apostles were not commanded to kill them or depose them if they were kings. They were told to watch out for, flee, and avoid them. And Christ gave this advice not to St. Peter or any Apostle, but to the crowd of Jews following him up the mountain, most of whom had not yet converted. If it granted power to drive away kings, it granted that power not only to ordinary people but to people who were not even Christians. As for separating and confining aggressive rams, by whom he means Christian kings refusing to submit to Rome’s pastor, our Savior himself refused such power in this world. He advised letting wheat and weeds grow together until Judgment Day. Still less did he grant this power to St. Peter, and Peter could not pass it to the Popes. Peter and all other pastors are told to regard Christians who disobey the Church, meaning the Christian Sovereign, as nonbelievers and tax collectors. Since no one claims the Pope has authority over non-Christian princes, no one should claim he has authority over people who must be regarded as non-Christian.\n\nBut Bellarmine also draws a power to coerce kings from the mere power to teach. A pastor, he says, must give his flock suitable food. Therefore the Pope can and should force kings to do their duty. This would make the Pope, as pastor of Christians, king of kings. Every Christian king should either admit this or assume supreme pastoral responsibility in his own dominions.\n\nHis sixth and last argument consists of examples. My first answer is that examples prove nothing. Second, the examples he cites do not even make a right seem likely. Jehoiada’s killing of Athaliah in 2 Kings 11 was either authorized by King Joash, or it was a terrible crime by the high priest. Ever since Saul was chosen king, the high priest had been simply a subject. If St. Ambrose really excommunicated the emperor Theodosius, that was a capital crime. The judgments of Popes Gregory 1., Gregory 2., Zachary, and Leo 3. are invalid because they judged their own cases. The acts they performed in line with this doctrine, particularly Zachary’s, are among the worst crimes human beings can commit. This is all I will say about ecclesiastical power. I would have been briefer and left Bellarmine’s arguments unexamined if he had written as a private person, rather than as the champion of the Papacy against all other Christian princes and states.\n\nChapter XLIII. What Is Necessary for a Person to Enter the Kingdom of Heaven\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 1\n\nWHAT A PERSON NEEDS TO ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN\n\nFor a long time, the most common pretext for rebellion and civil war in Christian Common-wealths has come from a problem that has not yet been adequately resolved: how to obey both God and a human ruler when their commands conflict. Clearly, if someone receives two conflicting commands and knows that one comes from God, he must obey that one, not the other. This remains true even if the other command comes from his lawful Sovereign, whether a monarch or a sovereign assembly, or from his father. The difficulty is that when someone gives an order in God's name, people often cannot tell whether the order comes from God or whether the person giving it is misusing God's name for private purposes. In the Jewish Church there were many false prophets who sought standing with the people by pretending to have dreams and visions. Likewise, in the Church of Christ there have always been false teachers who seek standing with the people through fanciful and false doctrines. Once they have won that standing, ambition leads them to use it to control people for their own benefit.\n\nBut this difficulty of obeying both God and the civil Sovereign on earth presents no problem for people who can tell what is necessary for entry into the Kingdom of God and what is not. If a civil Sovereign's order can be obeyed without losing eternal life, disobeying it is unjust. Then the apostle's commands apply: “Servants, obey your masters in all things,” and “Children, obey your parents in all things.” So does our Savior's instruction: “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' chair. Therefore observe and do everything they tell you.” But if obeying an order would bring eternal damnation, it would be madness to obey it. Then our Savior's advice applies (Mat. 10. 28.): “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Anyone who wants to avoid both punishment in this world for disobeying an earthly Sovereign and punishment in the next for disobeying God must learn to distinguish what is necessary for eternal salvation from what is not.\n\nEverything necessary for salvation falls under two virtues: faith in Christ and obedience to laws. Perfect obedience alone would be enough for us. But all of us have disobeyed God's law, both originally through Adam and personally through our own offenses. We therefore need more than obedience for the rest of our lives. We also need forgiveness for past sins, and that forgiveness is the reward for faith in Christ. Nothing else is strictly necessary for salvation. This is clear because the Kingdom of Heaven is closed only to sinners—that is, people who disobey or break the law. It is not even closed to them if they repent and believe all the articles of Christian faith necessary for salvation.\n\nGod accepts the will behind our actions as if we had performed them. The obedience he asks of us is therefore a serious effort to obey him, and it is also called by other names that mean this effort. Sometimes it is called charity or love, because both involve a willingness to obey. Our Savior himself says that loving God and loving one another fulfills the whole law. Sometimes it is called righteousness, because righteousness is the will to give everyone what is theirs—in other words, the will to obey the laws. Sometimes it is called repentance, because to repent is to turn away from sin and return to a willingness to obey. So anyone who sincerely wants to keep God's commandments, truly repents of breaking them, or loves God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself has all the obedience needed to enter the Kingdom of God. If God demanded perfect innocence, no one could be saved.\n\nBut which commandments has God given us? Are all the laws given to the Jews through Moses God's commandments? If so, why aren't Christians taught to obey them? If not, what other commandments are there besides the Law of Nature? Our Savior Christ gave us no new laws. He advised us to obey the laws we are subject to: the Laws of Nature and the laws of our respective Sovereigns. Nor did he make any new law for the Jews in the Sermon on the Mount. He only explained the laws of Moses, to which they were already subject. God's laws, then, are only the Laws of Nature. The chief one is that we must not break our word. This means obeying the civil Sovereigns whom we established over ourselves by mutual agreement. This law of God, which commands obedience to civil law, therefore also commands obedience to every rule in the Bible wherever the civil Sovereign has made the Bible law, as I proved in the preceding chapter. Elsewhere those rules are only advice, which someone may refuse without injustice, though at his own risk.\n\nNow we know what obedience is needed for salvation and to whom it is owed. Next we must consider faith: whom we believe, why we believe, and which articles or points those who will be saved must believe. First, we cannot believe a person without knowing what he says, so the person we believe must be someone we have heard speak. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets believed God himself, who spoke to them supernaturally. The apostles and disciples who spent time with Christ believed our Savior himself. But we cannot say that people to whom neither God the Father nor our Savior has ever spoken believe God as the person speaking to them. They believed the apostles, and later the pastors and teachers of the Church, who commended the history of the Old and New Testaments to their faith. Thus, since our Savior's time, Christian faith has rested first on the reputation of pastors and then on the authority of those who made the Old and New Testaments the accepted rule of faith. Only Christian Sovereigns could do that. They are therefore the supreme pastors and the only people whom Christians today hear speak on God's behalf, apart from anyone to whom God now speaks supernaturally. But because many false prophets have “gone out into the world,” other people must test such spirits, as St. John advises (1 Epistle, Chap. 4. ver.1.), “whether they are of God or not.” And since testing doctrines belongs to the supreme pastor, the person whom everyone without a special revelation must believe in each Common-wealth is its supreme pastor, the civil Sovereign.\n\nPeople have different reasons for believing a Christian doctrine. Faith is God's gift, and he creates it in each person by whatever means he thinks best. The most usual immediate reason we believe a point of Christian faith is that we believe the Bible is the Word of God. But why we believe the Bible is the Word of God is fiercely disputed, as happens with every question that has not been clearly stated. People ask not “Why do we believe it?” but “How do we know it?” as if belief and knowledge were the same. One side bases its claim to knowledge on the Church's infallibility; the other bases it on the testimony of a private spirit. Neither proves what it claims. How can someone know the Church is infallible without first knowing that Scripture is infallible? And how can someone know his own private spirit is anything other than belief based on his teachers' authority and arguments, or an exaggerated opinion of his own gifts? Besides, nothing in Scripture implies that the Church is infallible, much less that any particular church is, and least of all that any particular person is.\n\nChristians, then, plainly do not know that Scripture is the Word of God; they believe it. The ordinary way God provides to bring them to believe it works through natural means: their teachers. St. Paul says of Christian faith in general (Rom. 10.17.), “Faith comes by hearing,” meaning by hearing our lawful pastors. He also says (verses 14,15. of the same chapter): “How shall they believe in one of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?” So the ordinary reason people believe the Scriptures are the Word of God is the same reason they believe all the other articles of our faith: they hear people whom the law authorizes and appoints to teach us, such as parents at home and pastors in church. Experience makes this even clearer. In Christian Common-wealths, nearly everyone believes, or at least professes, that Scripture is the Word of God; in other Common-wealths, hardly anyone does. What could explain this difference except that people in Christian Common-wealths are taught it from childhood, while people elsewhere are taught something else?\n\nBut if teaching causes faith, why does not everyone believe? Faith must therefore be God's gift, which he gives to whomever he chooses. Yet he gives it to its recipients through teachers, so hearing is its immediate cause. In a school, many pupils are taught but only some learn. The teacher is the cause of learning for those who do learn, but that does not mean learning is not God's gift. Every good thing comes from God. Still, not everyone who receives a good thing can claim to be inspired. Inspiration means a supernatural gift given directly by God. Anyone claiming that claims to be a prophet and is subject to examination by the Church.\n\nWhether people know, believe, or grant that the Scriptures are the Word of God, I will use their clear passages to show which articles of faith, and only which, are necessary for salvation. Those people must then know, believe, or grant that conclusion too.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 2\n\nThe only necessary article of Christian faith, the one necessary thing (Unum Necessarium): the only article of faith that Scripture makes strictly necessary for salvation is this: Jesus is the Christ. Christ means the King whom God earlier promised through the prophets of the Old Testament to send into the world. He would reign forever under God over the Jews and over people of other nations who believed in him. He would give them the eternal life lost through Adam's sin. Once I have proved this from Scripture, I will show when, and in what sense, certain other articles can also be called necessary.\n\nMy first argument that belief in this article, Jesus is the Christ, is all the faith required for salvation comes from the evangelists' purpose. They described our Savior's life in order to establish this one article. Here is the substance of St. Matthew's Gospel. Jesus descended from David and was born of a virgin, which are identifying marks of the true Christ. The Magi came to worship him as King of the Jews, and Herod sought to kill him for the same reason. John the Baptist proclaimed him. He and his apostles preached that he was that King. He taught the law not like a scribe but as someone with authority. He healed diseases simply by speaking and performed many other miracles predicted of the Christ. He was greeted as King when he entered Jerusalem. He warned people against others who would claim to be Christ. He was arrested, accused, and executed for saying he was King. The reason for his conviction was written on the cross: “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” All this aims at one thing: that people believe Jesus is the Christ. That, then, was the purpose of St. Matthew's Gospel. The other evangelists had the same purpose, as reading them shows. Thus the entire Gospel aims to establish that one article. St. John says so outright in his conclusion (John 20. 31.): “These things are written so that you may know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.”\n\nMy second argument comes from what the apostles preached, both during our Savior's life on earth and after his ascension. While he was alive, the apostles were sent (Luke 9.2.) to preach the Kingdom of God. Neither there nor in Mat. 10.7. did he give them any other commission: “As you go, preach, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is near.” This meant that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, the King who was to come. They preached the same message after his ascension, as Acts 17.6. shows: “They dragged Jason,” says St. Luke, “and certain brethren before the rulers of the city, crying, ‘These men who have turned the world upside down have come here too. Jason has welcomed them. They all act against Caesar's decrees, saying there is another King, one Jesus.’” The same is clear from verses 2. and 3. of that chapter. St. Paul “went to them, as he usually did, and for three Sabbaths argued from the Scriptures. He explained and showed that Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom he preached is Christ.”\n\nMy third argument comes from passages in Scripture that say all the faith needed for salvation is easy. If salvation required inward assent to all the Christian doctrines now taught, most of which are disputed, nothing in the world would be harder than being a Christian. The thief on the cross, though repentant, could not have been saved by saying, “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” That statement expressed belief in no article other than that Jesus was the King. Nor could it be said, as it is in Mat. 11. 30., that “Christ's yoke is easy and his burden light.” Nor could it be said in Matth. 18.6. that “little children believe in him.” Nor could St. Paul have said (1 Cor. 1. 21.), “God chose to save believers through the foolishness of preaching.” Nor could St. Paul himself have been saved, much less have become such a great teacher of the Church so quickly. He perhaps never thought about transubstantiation, purgatory, or many other articles now being imposed on people.\n\nMy fourth argument comes from explicit passages whose meaning is not open to dispute. First, John 5. 39.: “Search the Scriptures, for you think you have eternal life in them, and they are what testify about me.” Our Savior is speaking here only of the Old Testament Scriptures. The Jews could not then search the New Testament Scriptures because they had not yet been written. But the Old Testament says nothing about Christ except the signs by which people could recognize him when he came: that he would descend from David, be born in Bethlehem to a virgin, perform great miracles, and so on. So believing that Jesus was that person was enough for eternal life. More than enough is not necessary; therefore no other article is required. Again, John 11. 26.: “Whoever lives and believes in me shall not die eternally.” Belief in Christ is therefore sufficient faith for eternal life, so no more faith is necessary. Believing in Jesus and believing that Jesus is the Christ are the same thing, as the next verses show. When our Savior asked Martha (verse 26.), “Do you believe this?” she answered (verse 27.), “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.” So this article alone supplies enough faith for eternal life; more than enough is not necessary. Third, John 20. 31.: “These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and so that by believing you may have life through his name.” Believing that Jesus is the Christ is enough faith to obtain life, so no other article is necessary. Fourth, 1 John 4. 2.: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” And 1 Joh. 5. 1.: “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” And verse 5.: “Who overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” Fifth, Act. 8. ver. 36, 37.: “Look,” said the eunuch, “here is water. What prevents me from being baptized?” Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.” He answered, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” Thus belief in this article, Jesus is the Christ, is sufficient for baptism, which means admission to the Kingdom of God. Consequently it alone is necessary. In general, whenever our Savior tells someone, “Your faith has saved you,” he says it because the person has made a confession that directly, or by implication, expresses belief that Jesus is the Christ.\n\nMy last argument comes from passages that make this article the foundation of faith, since a person who holds to the foundation will be saved. The first is Mat. 24.23.: “If anyone tells you, ‘Look, here is Christ,’ or ‘There he is,’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders,” and so on. Here we see that we must hold to the article that Jesus is the Christ, even if someone teaching the opposite works great miracles. The second is Gal. 1. 8.: “Even if we or an angel from Heaven preach to you another Gospel than the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” But Paul and the other apostles preached only this article as the Gospel: Jesus is the Christ. So we must reject even an angel's authority if the angel teaches the opposite, and all the more the authority of any mortal. This, then, is the fundamental article of Christian faith. A third passage is 1 Joh. 4.1.: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit. This is how you will know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.” This article is plainly the standard for judging and testing all other articles. It alone is therefore fundamental. A fourth is Matt. 16.18. After St. Peter professed this article to our Savior, saying, “You are Christ, the Son of the living God,” our Savior replied, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” I conclude that all other Church doctrines are built on this article as their foundation. A fifth is 1 Cor. 3. ver. 11, 12, and following: “No one can lay any other foundation than the one already laid: Jesus is the Christ. Now if someone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or stubble, each person's work will be revealed. For the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what kind of work each person has done. If the work someone built on it survives, he will receive a reward. If someone's work burns up, he will suffer loss, but he himself will be saved, though as through fire.” Some of these words are plain and easy to understand; others are allegorical and difficult. From the plain words we can conclude that pastors who teach the foundation, Jesus is the Christ, may be saved even if they draw false conclusions from it, as everyone sometimes does. All the more may people be saved who are not pastors but listeners and who believe what their lawful pastors teach them. Believing this article is therefore sufficient, and no other article of faith is strictly necessary for salvation.\n\n### Part III, Chapter XLIII, 3\n\nNow consider the allegorical part: “The fire will test each person's work,” and “They will be saved, but as through fire,” or “through fire” (the original says dia puros). It does not count against the conclusion I drew from the plain words. Still, some have used this passage to argue for the fire of purgatory. So I will give my own guess about what this testing of doctrines and saving of people as through fire means. The apostle seems to be alluding to the prophet Zechariah, Ch. 13. 8,9., who says this about the restoration of the Kingdom of God: “Two parts in it shall be cut off and die, but the third shall remain in it. I will bring the third part through the fire and refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They shall call on the name of the Lord, and I will hear them.” Judgment Day is the day when the Kingdom of God is restored. St. Peter tells us (2 Pet. 3. v.7, 10, 12.) that on that day the world will burn. The wicked will die in that fire. But the remaining people whom God saves will pass through it unharmed. There they will be tested and freed from idolatry, as fire separates impurities from silver and gold, and they will be made to call on the true God's name. St. Paul alludes to this when he says the Day will test each person's doctrine, judging which doctrines are gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or stubble. By the Day he means Judgment Day, the great day when our Savior comes to restore God's Kingdom in Israel. Those who have built false conclusions on the true foundation will then see their doctrines condemned. Yet they themselves will be saved. They will pass unharmed through this fire that engulfs the world and live forever to call on the one true God. Under this reading, the passage agrees with the rest of Holy Scripture and says nothing at all about the fire of purgatory.\n\nSomeone might ask whether salvation requires believing not only that Jesus is the Christ but also that God is all-powerful and created the world, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and that everyone else will rise from the dead on the last day. I answer that it does, and that many other articles are necessary too. But they are contained in this one article and can be deduced from it, some more easily than others. If people believe Jesus is the Son of the God of Israel, and believe that the Israelites' God is the all-powerful Creator of everything, they also believe God is the all-powerful Creator of everything. Who cannot see that? And how could someone believe Jesus is the King who will reign forever without also believing he has risen from the dead? A dead man cannot act as King. In short, someone who holds to the foundation, Jesus is the Christ, explicitly holds whatever he can see is rightly deduced from it. He also implicitly holds every consequence of it that he cannot work out for himself. Therefore belief in this one article remains sufficient faith for repentant people to obtain forgiveness of sins and, in consequence, enter the Kingdom of Heaven.\n\nI have shown that all the obedience needed for salvation is a willingness to obey God's law, which is repentance. I have also shown that all the faith needed for salvation is contained in the belief that Jesus is the Christ. I will now cite Gospel passages showing that these two together contain everything needed for salvation. The people to whom St. Peter preached at Pentecost, immediately after our Savior's ascension, asked him and the other apostles (Act. 2.37.), “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Peter answered in the next verse: “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized for the forgiveness of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” So repentance and baptism, meaning belief that Jesus is the Christ, are all that salvation requires. Again, a certain ruler asked our Savior (Luke 18.18.), “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He answered (verse 20), “You know the commandments: Do not commit adultery. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother.” When the ruler said he had kept these, our Savior added, “Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come follow me.” This meant, “Rely on me as the King.” Thus keeping the law and believing Jesus is the King are all that someone needs for eternal life. Third, St. Paul says (Rom. 1.17.), “The just shall live by faith.” He does not say everyone shall, only the just. So faith and justice, meaning the will to be just, or repentance, are all that eternal life requires. And our Savior preached (Mark 1.15.): “The time has come, and the Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the Gospel.” The Gospel is the good news that the Christ has come. So all that salvation requires is repentance and belief that Jesus is the Christ.\n\nSince faith and obedience, which is included in repentance, must both come together for our salvation, it is pointless to argue about which of the two justifies us. It is useful, though, to show how each contributes and in what sense each is said to justify us. First, if righteousness means that our actions themselves are just, no one can be saved. Everyone has broken God's law. So when we are said to be justified by works, this must refer to our will, which God always accepts in place of the action itself, whether in good people or evil people. Only in this sense is a person called just or unjust. In this sense a person's justice justifies him: in God's judgment it gives him the standing of a just person and makes him able to live by his faith, which he could not do before. Justice justifies when “to justify” means to call a person just. It does not mean that the person has fulfilled the law so completely that punishing him for his sins would be unjust.\n\nA person is also said to be justified when his plea is accepted even though it is inadequate on its own. We offer our will and our effort to keep the law, and we repent of our failures; God accepts that in place of actually keeping it. But God accepts the will in place of the action only in those who have faith. Faith is therefore what makes our plea valid. In this sense, faith alone justifies. So both faith and obedience are necessary for salvation, but each is said to justify us in a different sense.\n\nWhether the Sovereign is Christian or not, it is not hard, now that I have shown what salvation requires, to reconcile salvation with obedience to the civil Sovereign. If the Sovereign is Christian, he permits belief in the article that Jesus is the Christ and in all the articles contained in it or clearly deduced from it. This is all the faith salvation requires. As Sovereign, he demands obedience to all his own laws, that is, to all civil laws. These include all the Laws of Nature and therefore all God's laws. Apart from the Laws of Nature and the Church's laws, which are part of civil law because the lawmaking Church is the Common-wealth, there are no other divine laws. Obeying a Christian Sovereign therefore prevents no one from believing in or obeying God. Suppose, though, that a Christian King drew some false conclusions from the foundation that Jesus is the Christ. He might build with hay or stubble on that foundation and order others to teach those conclusions. St. Paul says the King will still be saved. So the person who teaches them on his order will be even more likely to be saved, and the person who merely believes his lawful teacher, without teaching them, more likely still. If the civil Sovereign forbids a subject to profess some of his own opinions on these matters, on what grounds can the subject disobey? Christian Kings can make mistakes in drawing conclusions, but who is to judge? Should a private person judge when his own obedience is at issue? Or should judgment belong to the person appointed by the Church, that is, by the civil Sovereign who represents it? And if the Pope or an apostle judges, can he not make an error of reasoning? Did not one of the two, St. Peter or St. Paul, make a mistake in what he built on the foundation when St. Paul confronted St. Peter to his face? So there can be no conflict between God's laws and the laws of a Christian Common-wealth.\n\nIf the civil Sovereign is not a believer, any of his subjects who resists him sins against God's laws, which are the Laws of Nature. He also rejects the apostles' advice that all Christians should obey their rulers, and all children and servants should obey their parents and masters in everything. As for their faith, it is inward and invisible. They have the permission Naaman had and need not endanger themselves for it. If they do put themselves in danger, they should expect their reward in Heaven, not complain about their lawful Sovereign, and certainly not wage war against him. Anyone who does not welcome a just opportunity for martyrdom lacks the faith he claims to have. He only pretends to have it to give his own defiance an excuse. And what unbelieving King would be so unreasonable as to kill or persecute a subject who expects Christ's second coming after this world has burned and intends to obey him then—which is what believing Jesus is the Christ means—while believing himself bound in the meantime to obey that King's laws, as every Christian is obliged in conscience to do?\n\nThis is enough about the Kingdom of God and church government. I do not claim to put forward any position of my own. I have only shown the conclusions that seem to me to follow from the principles of Christian politics, which are the Holy Scriptures, in support of the power of civil Sovereigns and the duty of their subjects. When citing Scripture, I have tried to avoid passages whose interpretation is unclear or disputed. I have cited only interpretations that are the most straightforward and that fit the meaning and purpose of the whole Bible, which was written to reestablish God's Kingdom in Christ. The writer's purpose, not just the words themselves, gives us the light we need to interpret a text correctly. People who insist on isolated passages without considering the main purpose can draw nothing clearly from them. Instead, they scatter fragments of Scripture like dust before people's eyes, making everything more obscure than it is. This is a common trick of people who seek their own advantage rather than the truth.\n\nPART IV. OF THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 1\n\nOn spiritual darkness caused by misinterpreting Scripture\n\nBesides the divine and human sovereign powers I have discussed so far, Scripture mentions another power. It speaks of “the rulers of the darkness of this world” (Eph. 6. 12.), “the kingdom of Satan” (Mat. 12. 26.), and “the rule of Beelzebub over demons” (Mat. 9. 34.). These demons are apparitions that appear in the air. That is why Satan is also called “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2. 2.). And because he rules in this world's darkness, he is called “the prince of this world” (Joh. 16. 11.). Accordingly, people under his rule are called children of darkness, in contrast to the faithful, who are children of the light. Beelzebub is prince of apparitions, the inhabitants of his realm of air and darkness. Thus children of darkness and demons, apparitions, or deceptive spirits stand for the same thing in this allegory. In light of this, the kingdom of darkness described here and elsewhere in Scripture is simply a “league of deceivers.” They want power over people in this world. Through obscure and mistaken teachings, they try to put out the light of both nature and the gospel in people's minds, and so make them unready for the coming kingdom of God.\n\nPeople born completely blind have no idea of visible light. No one can imagine a brighter light than any they have perceived with their senses. The same is true of the light of the gospel and of understanding: no one can conceive of a greater degree of it than they have already reached. So people can recognize their own darkness only by reasoning from the unexpected accidents that happen along their way. The darkest part of Satan's kingdom lies outside God's church, among those who do not believe in Jesus Christ. But this does not mean the church enjoys, like the land of Goshen, all the light needed to do the work God has assigned us. If it is not night among us, or at least foggy, why has Christendom seen people pushing one another out of place through foreign and civil wars almost since the apostles' time? Why do they stumble over every small hardship of their own and every small advantage of another's? Why do they take so many different paths toward the same goal, happiness? We are still in the dark.\n\nDuring the night of our natural ignorance, the enemy came here and sowed the weeds of spiritual error. First, he misused and put out the light of Scripture: we go wrong because we do not know the Scriptures. Second, he brought in the demonology of pagan poets, their invented teaching about demons. These demons are merely idols or figments of the mind, with no reality apart from human imagination. They include ghosts of dead people, fairies, and other things in old wives' tales. Third, he mixed into Scripture various remnants of Greek religion and much of the Greeks' empty and mistaken philosophy, especially Aristotle's. Fourth, he mixed false or uncertain traditions and invented or uncertain histories with all this. This is how we come to err by “paying attention to deceiving spirits” and to the demonology of those “who speak lies hypocritically” (or, as the original says at 1 Tim. 4.1,2., “who play the part of liars”), “with a seared conscience”—that is, against their own knowledge. In this chapter I will briefly discuss the first of these ways of deceiving people: the misuse of Scripture.\n\nThe greatest misuse of Scripture, from which almost all the others follow or which they serve, is to twist it into proof that the kingdom of God so often mentioned there means today's church. On that reading, it consists of Christians now alive and those who have died and will rise again on the last day. But God's kingdom was first established over the Jews alone through Moses. That is why they were called his special people. It ended when they chose Saul, refused any longer to be ruled by God, and demanded a king like other nations. God himself agreed, as I showed more fully in Chapter 35. After that, there was no kingdom of God in the world based on a covenant or on anything else, except in the sense that God always has been, is, and will be king of all people and creatures, ruling by his infinite power according to his will. Yet through his prophets he promised to restore that government to the Jews when the time appointed in his secret counsel had fully come, and when they returned to him through repentance and reform of their lives. He also invited the Gentiles to share the happiness of his reign on the same terms of conversion and repentance. And he promised to send his Son into the world to atone by his death for the sins of all of them and to prepare them by his teaching to receive him at his second coming. Since that second coming has not happened, God's kingdom has not yet come. We are now bound by covenant to no kings except our civil sovereigns. The only qualification is that Christians are already in the kingdom of grace, since they already have the promise of admission when he returns.\n\nIf the present church were Christ's kingdom, it would follow that there must be a man or assembly through whom our Savior, now in heaven, speaks and gives laws, and who represents him to all Christians. Or there must be several men or assemblies doing this for different parts of Christendom. The Pope claims this kingly power under Christ everywhere, while assemblies of local pastors claim it in individual Commonwealths. But Scripture grants it only to civil sovereigns. The resulting dispute grows so heated that it puts out the light of nature. It so darkens people's understanding that they cannot see to whom they have pledged obedience.\n\nThe Pope's claim to be Christ's chief deputy in the present church—which is supposed to be the kingdom promised in the gospel—has another consequence. It leads to the teaching that a Christian king must receive his crown from a bishop, as though this ceremony gave him the words Dei Gratia, “by the grace of God,” in his title. On that view, he becomes king by God's favor only when crowned under the authority of God's universal deputy on earth. It also leads to the view that every bishop, whoever his sovereign is, takes an oath of absolute obedience to the Pope when consecrated. Another consequence is the teaching of the fourth Council of Lateran, held under Pope Innocent the third (Chap. 3. De Haereticis.): “If a king, after the Pope warns him, does not purge his kingdom of heresies, and after being excommunicated for this does not make amends within a year, his subjects are released from their duty to obey him.” Here “heresies” means all opinions the Roman Church forbids anyone to uphold. Thus whenever the Pope's political plans conflict with those of other Christian princes, as they often do, a fog descends over their subjects. They cannot tell a stranger forcing his way onto their rightful prince's throne from the prince they themselves put there. In this mental darkness, another man's ambition leads them to fight one another without knowing friend from enemy.\n\nThe view that the present church is God's kingdom also makes pastors, deacons, and other church ministers call themselves the clergy, while they call other Christians the laity, meaning simply “the people.” The word clergy means those whose livelihood comes from the revenue God reserved for himself while he reigned over the Israelites and assigned as an inheritance to the tribe of Levi. The Levites were to be his public ministers. Unlike their brothers, they received no share of land to live on. The Pope claims that the present church, like ancient Israel, is God's kingdom, and claims the same revenue as God's inheritance for himself and his subordinate ministers. The name “clergy” suits that claim. That is why church officials have long demanded and collected from Christians tithes and other payments once paid to the Levites as God's due among the Israelites. They claim these payments Jure Divino, by God's right. Everywhere this has burdened people with two taxes, one to the state and another to the clergy. The clergy's share, a tenth of their income, is twice what a king of Athens, considered a tyrant, took from his subjects to meet all public expenses. He took only a twentieth and still supported the Commonwealth amply. In the Jewish kingdom, while God ruled through the priests, tithes and offerings made up all public revenue.\n\nConfusing the present church with God's kingdom also produced a division between civil and canon law. Civil laws are the acts of sovereigns within their territories. Canon laws are the Pope's acts within those same territories. Until the transfer of the Empire to Charlemagne, those canons were only proposed rules, which Christian princes accepted voluntarily. Later, as the Pope's power grew, they became commanded rules. Even emperors had to let them pass as laws to prevent worse trouble into which a misled public might be drawn.\n\nThis is why, in lands where the Pope's ecclesiastical power is fully accepted, Jews, Turks, and Gentiles are allowed to practice their religions within the Roman Church, provided their practice and profession do not offend against civil authority. But a Christian, even a foreigner, faces death for not following the Roman religion, because the Pope claims all Christians as his subjects. Otherwise, persecuting a Christian foreigner for professing his country's religion would violate the law of nations as much as persecuting a nonbeliever would, or more: whoever is not against Christ is with him.\n\nFor the same reason, certain people in every Christian state are exempt from taxes and civil courts by ecclesiastical privilege. The secular clergy enjoy this exemption, as do monks and friars. In many places they make up so large a share of the population that, if needed, they alone could supply an army big enough for any war the militant church might send them to fight against their own princes or others.\n\nA second widespread misuse of Scripture turns consecration into conjuring or enchantment. In Scripture, to consecrate means to offer, give, or dedicate a person or thing to God in reverent, appropriate words and gestures by setting it apart from ordinary use. That is to make it holy, to make it God's, for use only by those God has appointed as his public ministers, as I explained fully in Chapter 35. This changes not the consecrated thing itself but its use, from ordinary to holy and reserved for God's service. When someone claims that such words change a thing's very nature or quality, this is not consecration. It is either an extraordinary work of God or empty, impious conjuring. Since claims to change nature during consecration are made so often, these cannot be called extraordinary works. They are just incantations meant to make people believe a change has occurred despite what their eyes and all their other senses tell them. For example, the priest should dedicate bread and wine to God's special use in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Setting them apart from ordinary use signifies and reminds people of their redemption through Christ's suffering: his body was broken and his blood shed on the cross for our sins. Instead, the priest claims that by saying our Savior's words, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” the bread ceases to be bread and becomes his actual body, though those receiving it see and sense no difference from before the consecration. Egyptian conjurers are said to have changed rods into serpents and water into blood. People think they merely fooled onlookers' senses with false appearances, yet still call them enchanters. But suppose their rods looked nothing like serpents and their water looked like nothing but water, and they still insisted to the king that the rods were serpents and the water blood. We would call that both enchantment and lying. Priests do exactly this every day. They turn sacred words into a charm that produces no perceptible effect and insist that bread has become a man, indeed a God. They demand that people worship it as though our Savior himself were there as God and man, thus committing gross idolatry. If saying “it is not bread any longer but God” excuses idolatry, why could the Egyptians not say that the leeks and onions they worshiped were not really leeks and onions but a divinity beneath their outward appearance? “This is my body” means “This signifies or represents my body.” That is a common figure of speech. Taking it literally is a misuse. Even if taken literally, it could apply only to the bread Christ himself consecrated with his own hands. He never said that any bread would instantly change its substance when any priest said, “This is my body” or “This is Christ's body.” The Roman Church did not establish this change of substance until Innocent the third's time, no more than 500. years ago, when papal power was greatest and the age so dark that people could not recognize the bread given them to eat. This was especially so when it bore an image of Christ on the cross, as though people were meant to believe it had turned not only into Christ's body but also into the wood of his cross, and that they ate both in the sacrament.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 2\n\nA similar incantation is used instead of consecration in baptism. Here the charm combines the misuse of God's name in each person of the Trinity and in the whole Trinity with the sign of the cross at every name. First, when making holy water, the priest says, “I command you, creature of water, in the name of God the almighty Father, in the name of Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and by the power of the Holy Ghost, to become water under this command, to drive off all the enemy's powers and root out and overthrow the enemy, etc.” Likewise, when blessing the salt to be mixed with it, he says, “Become salt under this command, so that all apparitions and the tricks of the devil's fraud may flee and leave the place where you are sprinkled; and let every unclean spirit be commanded by him who will come to judge the living and the dead.” When blessing the oil he says, “Let all the enemy's power, all the devil's forces, and all Satan's attacks and apparitions be driven off by this creature of oil.” The infant to be baptized also undergoes many charms. First, at the church door the priest blows three times in the child's face and says, “Leave him, unclean spirit, and make room for the Holy Ghost the Comforter.” This treats every child as demon-possessed until a priest blows on it. Before the child enters the church, the priest again says, “I command you, etc., to leave this servant of God.” The same exorcism is repeated once more before baptism. These and other incantations and consecrations are used in administering baptism and the Lord's Supper. Almost everything these holy men use has its prescribed exorcism, except the priest's unholy spit.\n\nNor are marriage, extreme unction, visiting the sick, consecrating churches and churchyards, and similar rites free of charms. They use enchanted oil and water, and misuse the cross and David's sacred words “Asperges me Domine Hyssopo” as though these had the power to drive away apparitions and imaginary spirits.\n\nAnother widespread error comes from misunderstanding “eternal life,” “everlasting death,” and “the second death.” Scripture plainly says God created Adam with the conditional prospect of living forever, if he did not disobey God's command. This was not an essential feature of human nature; it came from the power of the tree of life, which Adam could eat from until he sinned. After his sin he was driven out of Paradise so he could not eat from it and live forever. Christ's suffering cancels sin for all who believe in him and thus restores eternal life to all the faithful, and to them alone. Despite this, people have long taught a very different doctrine: every person naturally has eternal life because the soul is immortal. On that account, the flaming sword at Paradise's entrance keeps people from the tree of life, yet cannot keep them from the immortality God took from Adam for his sin. Nor would Christ's sacrifice be needed to restore that immortality. It follows that not just the faithful and righteous but the wicked and pagans too will have eternal life, without any death at all, much less a second, everlasting death. To get around this problem, people say that “second and everlasting death” means a second and everlasting life, but in torment. Such a figure of speech is never used except in this one case.\n\nThat whole doctrine rests solely on some obscure New Testament passages. Read in light of Scripture as a whole, these passages are clear enough in a different sense, and the doctrine is not necessary to Christian faith. Suppose that when a person dies, only the corpse remains. God raised lifeless dust and clay into a living creature by his word. Could he not just as easily bring a corpse back to life and keep that person alive forever, or make that person die again, with another word? In Scripture “soul” always means either life or a living creature. Body and soul together mean a living body. On the fifth day of creation, God said, “Let the water produce Reptile Animae Viventis,” a creeping thing with a living soul. The English version says “that has life.” Again, God created whales “& omnem animam viventem,” rendered in English as “every living creature.” Likewise, God made man from the earth's dust and breathed into his face the breath of life: “& factus est Homo in animam viventem,” meaning “and man became a living creature.” After Noah left the ark, God said he would no longer strike “omnem animam viventem,” or “every living creature.” And Deut. 12.23. says, “Do not eat the blood, for the blood is the soul,” meaning “the life.” If “soul” in these passages meant a bodiless substance existing apart from a body, we could draw that conclusion as readily about any other living creature as about humans. As for faithful people's souls remaining in their bodies from the resurrection through eternity, not by their own nature but through God's special grace, I believe I have proved that sufficiently from Scripture in Chapter 38. New Testament passages saying someone will be thrown body and soul into hellfire mean simply body and life: they will be thrown alive into Gehenna's perpetual fire.\n\nThis opening admits the dark doctrine first of eternal torments, then of purgatory. It also admits stories of dead people's ghosts walking about, especially in consecrated, lonely, or dark places; claims to exorcise and command apparitions; appeals to dead people; and the doctrine of indulgences. Indulgences supposedly exempt someone for a time or forever from purgatory's fire, which is said to burn and cleanse these bodiless substances so they are fit for heaven. Before our Savior's time, most people had absorbed from Greek demonology the belief that human souls were substances separate from bodies. They believed that after bodily death every soul, whether its owner was godly or wicked, must exist somewhere by its own nature, without any special gift from God. Church teachers therefore spent a long time wondering where these souls remained until reunion with their bodies at the resurrection. For a while they supposed the souls lay beneath altars. But later the Roman Church found it more profitable to construct purgatory for them, a place that some other churches have demolished in recent times.\n\nLet us now examine the Scripture passages that seem to offer the strongest support for these three widespread errors. I have already answered Cardinal Bellarmine's passages in support of a present kingdom of God administered by the Pope. None offer a better apparent case. I showed that God's kingdom established by Moses ended when Saul was chosen. Afterward a priest never removed a king on his own authority. The high priest's action against Athaliah was taken not in his own right but in the right of her son, the young King Joash. Solomon, by contrast, removed the high priest Abiathar on his own authority and appointed another. The hardest passage of all to answer as evidence that God's kingdom under Christ is already in this world is cited not by Bellarmine or anyone else in the Roman Church but by Beza, who says the kingdom began at Christ's resurrection. I do not know whether Beza intends to give supreme ecclesiastical power to the presbytery in the Commonwealth of Geneva, and so to every presbytery in every other Commonwealth, or to princes and other civil sovereigns. In places with that form of church government, presbyteries have claimed the power to excommunicate their own kings and to be the highest authorities in religion, just as the Pope claims that power everywhere.\n\nThe claim that Christ's kingdom began at the resurrection rests on these words (Mark 9.1.): “Truly, I tell you, some of those standing here will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God come with power.” Taken strictly according to grammar, they mean either that some people who were standing near Christ then are still alive, or that God's kingdom must already exist in this world. Another passage is harder still. After our Savior's resurrection, immediately before his ascension, the apostles asked him (Acts.1.6.), “Will you restore the kingdom to Israel at this time?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times and seasons that the Father has placed under his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses (martyrs) in Jerusalem, in all Judaea and Samaria, and to the farthest part of the earth.” In other words: “My kingdom has not yet come, and you will not know in advance when it will come, for it will come like a thief in the night. But I will send you the Holy Ghost. Through him you will have the power to tell the whole world, through your preaching, of my resurrection, the deeds I have done, and the teaching I have given. Then people may believe in me and expect eternal life when I return.” How does this agree with the idea that Christ's kingdom came at his resurrection? St. Paul also says (1 Thessal. 1.9, 10.) that people “turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven.” Waiting for his Son from heaven means waiting for him to come and rule as king in power. That would be unnecessary if his kingdom already existed. Again, if God's kingdom began at the resurrection, as Beza says about Mark 9.1., why have Christians prayed ever since then, “Let your kingdom come”? Clearly St. Mark's words cannot be read that way. Our Savior says that some of those standing there will not taste death before seeing God's kingdom come in power. If the kingdom was to come at Christ's resurrection, why say “some” rather than “all”? They all lived until after he rose.\n\nThose demanding an exact explanation of this passage should first explain our Savior's similar words to St. Peter about St. John (chap. 21.22.): “If I want him to stay until I come, what is that to you?” Those words led to a report that John would not die. But the report was neither confirmed as well founded nor rejected as ill founded on the basis of those words; the saying was left unexplained. St. Mark's passage presents the same difficulty. If we may guess at its meaning from what comes next, both here and in St. Luke's repetition, it could well refer to the transfiguration described in the next verses. They say, “After six days Jesus takes Peter, James, and John”—some, not all, of his disciples—“up a high mountain by themselves, and is transfigured before them. His clothing becomes shining, whiter than snow, so white no launderer on earth could make it. Elijah and Moses appear to them and talk with Jesus, etc.” They thus saw Christ in the glory and majesty in which he will come, and “they were very afraid.” In this way our Savior's promise came true in a vision. That it was a vision may be inferred from St. Luke's account (ch. 9. ve. 28.), which says Peter and the others were weighed down with sleep. It is certain from Matth. 17.9., where our Savior says, “Tell no one of the vision until the Son of man has risen from the dead.” Whatever the explanation, the passage supplies no argument that God's kingdom begins before the day of judgment.\n\nThere are other passages used to argue that the Pope has power over civil sovereigns, besides those Bellarmine cites. Some say the two swords Christ and his apostles had were the spiritual and the temporal swords, and that Christ gave both to St. Peter. They also say that of the two lights in the sky, the greater stands for the Pope and the lesser for the king. By that reasoning one could just as well conclude from the Bible's first verse that heaven stands for the Pope and earth for the king. This is not an argument from Scripture. It is an arrogant insult to princes, which became fashionable when the Popes felt secure enough in their power to scorn all Christian kings. They even trampled on emperors' necks and mocked both the emperors and Scripture with the words of Psalm 91: “You shall tread on the lion and the adder; you shall trample the young lion and the dragon beneath your feet.”\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 3\n\nAs for ceremonies of consecration, most depend on the judgment of church governors rather than on Scripture. Even so, those governors must follow what the action itself calls for. The ceremonies, words, and gestures must be proper and meaningful, or at least appropriate to the action. When Moses consecrated the tabernacle, the altar, and their vessels (Exod. 40.), he anointed them with the oil God had ordered made for that purpose, and they became holy. Nothing was exorcised to drive off apparitions. Moses, Israel's civil sovereign, also consecrated Aaron, the high priest, and his sons. He washed them with water, not exorcised water, put their garments on them, and anointed them with oil. They became holy and able to serve the Lord as priests. This was a simple and proper way to wash and dress them before presenting them to God as his servants. When King Solomon, Israel's civil sovereign, consecrated the temple he had built (2 Kings 8.), he stood before the whole congregation of Israel and blessed them. He thanked God for putting it in his father's heart to build the temple and for giving Solomon the grace to complete it. Then he prayed that God would accept the house, although it could not match God's infinite greatness, and would hear the prayers of his servants who prayed inside it or, when away, toward it. Finally he offered a peace offering, and the house was dedicated. There was no procession: the king stayed where he stood. There was no exorcised water or Asperges Me, and no irrelevant use of words spoken on another occasion. He gave a proper, reasonable speech suited to presenting his newly built house to God. We do not read that St. John exorcised the Jordan's water or Philip the river water in which he baptized the eunuch. Nor do we read that any pastor in the apostles' time put his spit into the nose of someone being baptized and said, “In odorem suavitatis,” meaning “for a sweet scent to the Lord.” No human authority can justify the ceremony of spitting, because it is unclean, or the frivolous use of that Scripture passage.\n\nSeveral passages may at first seem enough to prove that a soul separated from the body lives forever. The claim applies not only to the souls of the chosen, through special grace and the restoration of the eternal life Adam lost by sin and our Savior restored to the faithful by sacrificing himself. It also applies to rejected people's souls, supposedly as a natural property of human nature, requiring no grace from God beyond what all humans receive. But when I compare those passages with the passage from chapter 14 of Job that I quoted earlier in Chapter 38, I find them much more open to other interpretations than Job's words are.\n\nFirst are Solomon's words (Ecclesiastes 12.7.): “Then the dust shall return to dust, as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it.” Unless another text directly contradicts it, this could mean that only God knows what happens to a person's spirit on death, and humans do not. Solomon expresses this same thought in the same book (Chap. 3. ver. 20,21.): “All go”—humans and beasts—“to the same place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. Who knows that the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?” That is, no one but God knows. It is common enough to say “God knows what” and “God knows where” about things we do not understand. Gen. 5.24. says, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” This is explained at Heb. 13.5.: “He was taken away so he would not die; he was not found, because God had taken him away. Before he was taken away, he had testimony that he pleased God.” This supports the immortality of his body as much as that of his soul. It proves that his removal was something special for people who please God, not something they share with the wicked, and that it depended on grace rather than nature. By contrast, how can we read Solomon's words (Eccles. 3.19.) except literally? “What happens to human beings happens to beasts: the same thing happens to both. As one dies, so does the other. They all have one breath (one spirit), so a human has no advantage over a beast, for everything is empty.” Taken literally, this denies the soul's natural immortality. It does not conflict with the eternal life the chosen will enjoy by grace. He also says (chap. 4. ver.3.), “Better off than both is someone not yet born”—better than those now living or those who have lived. If everyone who ever lived had an immortal soul, that would be hard to say: having an immortal soul would then be worse than having no soul. And again (Chapt. 9.5.): “The living know they will die, but the dead know nothing”—that is, by nature and before the body's resurrection.\n\nAnother passage that seems to favor a naturally immortal soul is our Savior's statement that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive. But this concerns God's promise and the certainty that they will rise again, not a life they were actually living then. In the same way God told Adam that on the day he ate the forbidden fruit he would certainly die. From that day Adam was under a sentence of death, but the sentence was not carried out until almost a thousand years later. So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alive by promise when Christ spoke, but will not actually live again until the resurrection. The story of the rich man and Lazarus proves nothing against this if we take it for what it is, a parable.\n\nOther New Testament passages seem directly to ascribe immortality to the wicked. They clearly will all rise for judgment. Many passages also say they will go into “everlasting fire, everlasting torment, everlasting punishment,” and that the worm of conscience never dies. All this is included under “everlasting death,” which people normally explain as everlasting life in torment. Yet nowhere can I find a statement that anyone will live in torment forever. It also seems difficult to say that God, the Father of Mercies, who does whatever he wants in heaven and earth, who controls every human heart and produces both our willing and our doing, and without whose free gift no one even wants to do good or repent of evil, should punish people's sins without end by tortures as extreme as anyone can imagine or worse. We must therefore consider what “everlasting fire” and similar expressions in Scripture mean.\n\nI have already shown that God's kingdom under Christ starts on judgment day. On that day the faithful will rise again with glorious, spiritual bodies and become subjects of his eternal kingdom. They will not marry or be given in marriage, or eat and drink as they did in their natural bodies. Instead, each will live forever as an individual, without relying on successive generations for the species to endure. The rejected will also rise again to receive punishment for their sins. And those among the chosen who are still alive in earthly bodies on that day will have their bodies suddenly changed into spiritual, immortal ones. But no Scripture passage proves that the rejected, who make up Satan's kingdom, will have glorious or spiritual bodies, or be like God's angels, neither eating, drinking, nor having children. Nor does any passage prove that each of them will live forever as an individual, as each faithful person will, and as Adam would have if he had not sinned. Only the passages about eternal torments might seem to prove it, and they can be read another way.\n\nWe can therefore infer that, after the resurrection, the chosen will return to Adam's condition before his sin. The rejected will be in the condition Adam and his descendants were in after his sin. The difference is that God promised Adam a redeemer for himself and those descendants who would trust him and repent. He did not promise one to those who die in their sins, as the rejected do.\n\nGiven this, passages mentioning eternal fire, eternal torment, or the worm that never dies do not contradict a second and everlasting death in the ordinary, literal sense of death. Fire or torments prepared for the wicked in Gehenna, Tophet, or wherever else may continue forever. There may always be wicked people to suffer them, even though no individual suffers forever. The wicked, left in their condition after Adam's sin, might rise again to live as before, marrying and being given in marriage. They might have heavy, perishable bodies like all humans now have and go on having children after the resurrection, as before. No passage of Scripture says otherwise. St. Paul, discussing the resurrection (1 Cor. 15.), speaks only about rising to eternal life, not rising to punishment. About the former he says the body is “sown in decay and raised without decay; sown in dishonor and raised in honor; sown in weakness and raised in power; sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body.” None of this can be said about bodies raised for punishment. Luke 20. Verses 34,35,36. is a rich passage on this point: “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage. But those counted worthy to reach that world and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Nor can they die again, because they are equal to the angels and are God's children, being children of the resurrection.” The children of this world, living in the condition Adam left to them, will marry and be given in marriage. That is, they will decay and produce successive generations. Their kind will endure, but individual people will not be immortal. They are not worthy to be among those who gain the next world and fully rise from the dead. They will spend only a short time as temporary residents of that world, solely to receive the punishment their stubborn disobedience deserves. The chosen alone are children of the resurrection and the only heirs to eternal life. They alone can never die again. They, not the rejected, are equal to angels and are God's children. After rising again, the rejected face a second and everlasting death. Between their resurrection and that second and everlasting death lies a period of punishment and torment. As new sinners arrive in succession, this punishment will continue as long as the human kind lasts through reproduction, which is forever.\n\nAs I said, the doctrine of purgatory rests on this doctrine that separated souls are immortal by nature. If eternal life comes only through grace, there is no life apart from bodily life and no immortality before the resurrection. Bellarmine's Old Testament passages from canonical Scripture in support of purgatory begin with David's fasting for Saul and Jonathan (2 Kings, 1. 12.), and then for Abner's death (2 Sam. 3. 35.). Bellarmine says David fasted to obtain something from God for them after their deaths. His reason is that David stopped fasting and asked for food as soon as he learned his own child had died, though he had fasted while trying to obtain the child's recovery. Then, assuming souls exist separately from bodies, Bellarmine argues that fasting can obtain nothing for souls already in heaven or hell. Therefore some dead people's souls must be in neither heaven nor hell, but a third place: purgatory. He has had to force those passages very hard to make them prove purgatory. In fact, mourning and fasting for someone whose life had brought mourners no benefit honor the dead person. When the dead person's life had benefited them, those ceremonies express their own loss. So David honored Saul and Abner by fasting. On the death of his own child he comforted himself by eating his usual food.\n\nBellarmine's other Old Testament passages have not even the appearance of proof. He cites every text containing “anger,” “fire,” “burning,” “purging,” or “cleansing,” whenever one of the Church Fathers has used it rhetorically in a sermon about the already accepted doctrine of purgatory. Take the first verse of Psalm 37: “Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, or punish me in your fierce displeasure.” What would this have to do with purgatory if Augustine had not taken the anger to mean hellfire and the displeasure to mean purgatory's fire? And what does purgatory have to do with Psalm 66. 12., “We went through fire and water, and you brought us to a moist place”? The teachers of those times used this and similar passages to decorate or lengthen their sermons and commentaries, then dragged them by ingenuity into service as supposed proof.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 4\n\nBut he cites other places in the New Testament that are harder to answer. The first is Matthew 12.32: “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Ghost will not be forgiven, either in this world or in the world to come.” He takes Purgatory to be the world to come, where some sins may be forgiven though they were not forgiven in this world. Yet plainly there are only three worlds. The first ran from Creation to the Flood, was destroyed by water, and is called the old world in Scripture. The second runs from the Flood to the day of Judgment, is the present world, and will be destroyed by fire. The third begins on the day of Judgment and lasts forever; it is called the world to come. Everyone agrees that there will be no Purgatory in that world. So the world to come cannot be Purgatory. What, then, can our Savior’s words mean? I admit that they are very hard to reconcile with all the doctrines now unanimously accepted. There is no shame in admitting that Scripture is too deep for our limited understanding to reach its bottom. Still, I can offer more learned theologians some ideas suggested by the text itself. First, to speak against the Holy Ghost as the third person of the Trinity is to speak against the Church, where the Holy Ghost lives. The comparison may be between our Savior’s readiness to bear offenses against him while he was on earth and the severity of later pastors toward those who denied the authority they received from the Holy Ghost. It is as though he said: You who deny my power, even you who crucify me, will be pardoned by me whenever you return to me in repentance. But if you deny the authority of those who later teach you through the Holy Ghost, they will not forgive you. They will persecute you in this world and deny you absolution, even if you return to me, unless you also return to them. As far as they can, they will leave you to the punishments of the world to come. On this reading, the words are a prophecy of the conditions that have long existed in the Christian Church. Or, if that is not their meaning—for I do not insist on a definite answer to so difficult a passage—there may be room after the Resurrection for some sinners to repent. Another passage seems to agree. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. 29: “What will those who are baptized for the dead do, if the dead do not rise at all? Why are they baptized for the dead?” One might reasonably infer, as some have, that in St. Paul’s time people customarily received baptism on behalf of the dead. They pledged for deceased friends that those friends would be ready to obey and accept our Savior as their King when he returned. Similarly, believers now stand as sponsors and guarantors of the faith of infants who cannot yet believe. Forgiveness of sins in the world to come would then require no Purgatory. But both these readings are so surprising that I do not rely on them. I offer them to those thoroughly versed in Scripture, to see whether some clearer passage contradicts them. I see clear evidence in Scripture only for this: neither the word Purgatory nor the thing itself appears in this or any other text. Nor does anything prove that the soul must have a place apart from the body, whether Lazarus’s soul during the four days he was dead or the souls that the Roman Church claims are now being tormented in Purgatory. God could give life to a piece of clay. He has the same power to restore life to a dead man and remake his lifeless, decaying corpse into a glorious, spiritual, immortal body.\n\nAnother passage is 1 Corinthians 3. It says that those who build stubble, hay, and so on upon the true foundation will lose their work, but “they themselves will be saved, though as through fire.” He takes this fire to be the fire of Purgatory. As I said before, the words allude to Zechariah 13. 9: “I will bring the third part through the fire, refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested.” This concerns the Messiah’s coming in power and glory, at the day of Judgment and the burning of the present world. The elect will not be destroyed then but refined. That is, they will give up their mistaken doctrines and traditions as though these were burned away, and afterward call on the name of the true God. Likewise the Apostle says that people who keep the foundation that Jesus is the Christ but build some mistaken doctrines on it will not be destroyed in the fire that renews the world. They will pass through it to salvation, but will recognize and give up their former errors. The builders are the pastors; the foundation is that Jesus is the Christ; the stubble and hay are false conclusions drawn from it through ignorance or weakness. The gold, silver, and precious stones are their true doctrines; their refining or cleansing is their abandonment of error. None of this gives any reason to think that incorporeal souls, which cannot suffer, will burn.\n\nA third passage is the one already mentioned, 1 Corinthians 15, about baptism for the dead. From it he first concludes that prayers for the dead are useful, and from that, that there is a fire of Purgatory. Neither conclusion follows. Among the many interpretations of “baptism,” his first choice is that it means, figuratively, a baptism of repentance, and that people are baptized in this sense when they fast, pray, and give alms. On this view, baptism for the dead is the same thing as prayer for the dead. But this metaphor occurs nowhere in Scripture or any other use of language, and it conflicts with Scripture’s meaning and purpose. “Baptism” is used in Mark 10. 38 and Luke 12. 59 for being dipped in one’s own blood in testimony to Christ, as Christ was on the cross and most of the Apostles were. But prayer, fasting, and almsgiving can hardly be called dipping. The word is also used in Matthew 3. 11 for a cleansing with fire, which might seem to support Purgatory. Yet the fire and cleansing there plainly are those mentioned by the prophet Zechariah in chapter 13, verse 9: “I will bring the third part through the fire and refine them,” and so on. St. Peter says afterward, in his first epistle, 1. 7: “So that the testing of your faith, much more precious than gold that perishes though tested with fire, may result in praise, honor, and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.” And St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3. 13: “The fire will test what kind of work each person has done.” St. Peter and St. Paul speak of the fire at Christ’s second appearing, and Zechariah of the day of Judgment. So the passage in St. Matthew may refer to the same event. There is then no need for a fire of Purgatory.\n\nAnother interpretation of baptism for the dead is the one I mentioned earlier, which he ranks second in probability. From it too he infers that prayers for the dead are useful. If people who have not heard of Christ or believed in him may be received into Christ’s Kingdom after the Resurrection, their friends do not pray for them in vain between their death and their resurrection. Suppose we grant that, in answer to believers’ prayers, God may turn to himself some who have not heard Christ preached and so could not have rejected him. Suppose also that there is nothing wrong with people’s charity in praying for them. This still proves nothing about Purgatory. Rising from death to life is one thing; rising from Purgatory to life is another. The latter is a move from one life to another, from life in torment to life in joy.\n\nA fourth passage is Matthew 5. 25: “Come to terms with your adversary quickly while you are on the way with him, or the adversary may hand you over to the officer and you may be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will not come out until you have paid the last penny.” In this allegory the offender is the sinner. Both the adversary and the judge are God; the way is this life; the prison is the grave; and the officer is death. The sinner will not rise from it to eternal life, but to a second death, until he has paid the last penny, or Christ pays it for him through his Passion. That Passion is a full ransom for every kind of sin, lesser sins as well as greater crimes, making both equally pardonable.\n\nThe fifth passage is Matthew 5. 22: “Whoever is angry with his brother without cause will be liable to judgment. Whoever says to his brother, Racha, will be liable to the council. But whoever says, You fool, will be liable to hellfire.” From these words he infers three kinds of sins and three kinds of punishments. Since only the last sin is punished with hellfire, he concludes that after this life lesser sins are punished in Purgatory. Nothing in any interpretation yet given of these words supports that inference. Will there be separate courts after this life, like the Jewish judges and council of our Savior’s time, to hear and decide different kinds of crimes? Will all judgment not belong to Christ and his Apostles? To understand the text, we must read it with the words before and after it. In this chapter our Savior interprets the Law of Moses. The Jews thought they had fulfilled it if they did not violate its literal wording, even when they violated the lawgiver’s intended meaning. They thought the Sixth Commandment was broken only by killing a person, and the Seventh only by lying with a woman who was not one’s wife. Our Savior tells them that a person’s inward anger toward his brother, without just cause, is murder. He says: You have heard the Law of Moses, “You shall not kill,” and that “Whoever kills will be condemned before the judges,” or before the council of seventy. But I tell you that being angry with your brother without cause, or calling him Racha or a fool, is murder. At the day of Judgment it will be punished with hellfire by Christ and his Apostles sitting in judgment. These words do not separate different crimes, courts, and punishments. They criticize the Jewish way of distinguishing one sin from another by the differences among their earthly courts, rather than by differences in a person’s willingness to obey God. Christ shows them that someone who wants to hurt his brother will be thrown into hellfire, whether that desire appears only as an insult or never appears in action. The judges and the council will be the same court at the day of Judgment, not different courts. Given this, I cannot imagine how this text could support Purgatory.\n\nThe sixth passage is Luke 16. 9: “Make friends for yourselves with unrighteous wealth, so that when you fail they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.” He cites it to prove that we should call on departed saints. But its meaning is plain: we should use our wealth to make friends of the poor and gain their prayers while they live. “Whoever gives to the poor lends to the Lord.” The seventh passage is Luke 23. 42: “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” He says this means sins can be forgiven after this life. But that does not follow. Our Savior forgave the man then, and when he returns in glory he will remember to raise him again to eternal life.\n\nThe eighth passage is Acts 2. 24, where St. Peter says of Christ that “God raised him up and released him from the pains of death, because it was impossible for death to hold him.” He takes this to mean that Christ went down into Purgatory to release some souls from their torment there. Yet plainly it was Christ who was released. He was the one death, or the grave, could not hold, not the souls in Purgatory. If we pay attention to Beza’s notes on this passage, everyone will see that the word should be “bonds” rather than “pains.” There is then no further reason to look for Purgatory in this text.\n\nCHAPTER XLV. ON DEMONOLOGY AND OTHER REMNANTS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 1\n\nON DEMONOLOGY AND OTHER REMNANTS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES\n\nBright objects make an impression on the organs of sight. Their light may travel in a direct line, reflect off opaque objects, or bend while passing through transparent objects. In living creatures to whom God has given organs of sight, this impression produces an image of the object that caused it. We call this image sight. It seems to be not merely an image, but the actual object outside us. In the same way, a person who presses his eye hard sees a light outside, in front of him, that nobody else sees. No such light exists outside him. Motion inside his organs presses outward against resistance and makes him think it does. When the motion caused by such pressure continues after the object that caused it has gone, we call it imagination or memory, and, during sleep or sometimes when illness or violence badly disturbs the organs, a dream. I have already discussed these things briefly in Chapters 2 and 3.\n\nThe ancient people who claimed knowledge of nature never discovered how sight works. Those who do not consider matters so far removed from their immediate needs were even less likely to discover it. So it was hard for people to think of the images in their imagination and senses as anything but real things outside themselves. Some thought these images, because they disappear without anyone knowing how or where, must be wholly incorporeal or immaterial: forms without matter, colors and shapes without colored or shaped bodies. They thought the images could put on airy bodies like clothing when they wanted to be visible to our physical eyes. Others called them bodies and living creatures made of air or some still finer, ethereal matter, which thickened when they wanted to be seen. Both groups gave them the general name demons. It was as though the dead people they dreamed about lived not in their own brains but in the air, heaven, or hell; as though they were ghosts rather than mental images. This makes as much sense as saying that you see your ghost in a mirror, the ghosts of the stars in a river, or the demon or ghost of the immense sun that lights the visible world when you see its usual image, apparently only a foot wide. People therefore feared these images as beings of unknown, and thus unlimited, power to help or harm them. This allowed the rulers of heathen Common-wealths to control that fear. They established demonology—an enterprise in which poets, as the leading priests of heathen religion, were especially employed or honored—to serve public peace and the obedience of subjects needed for it. They classified some demons as good and others as evil, using the first as a spur to obey the laws and the second as reins to stop people from breaking them.\n\nWhat they meant by demons can be seen partly in the genealogy of the gods written by Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek poets, and partly in other histories. I noted a few examples earlier, in Chapter 12 of this book.\n\nThrough colonies and conquests the Greeks spread their language and writings to Asia, Egypt, and Italy. Inevitably they also spread their demonology, or what St. Paul calls “their doctrines of devils.” The belief then spread to Jews in Judea, Alexandria, and other places where they lived. But unlike the Greeks, the Jews used “demon” only for evil spirits, not for both good and evil ones. They called the good ones the Spirit of God and regarded the people they entered as prophets. In short, the Jews credited any unusual good trait to the Spirit of God, and any unusual evil trait to a demon—a kakodaimen, or evil demon, meaning a devil. Thus they called people whom we would call mad or mentally disturbed, and people with epilepsy, demoniacs, or possessed by the devil. They said the same of people who said things that seemed absurd to them because they did not understand them. They said that a notably unclean person had an unclean spirit, and that a mute person had a mute devil. They said John the Baptist had a devil because of his unusual fasting (Matthew 11. 18). They said of our Savior, because he said that anyone who kept his sayings would never see death (John 8. 52), “Now we know you have a devil. Abraham died, and the prophets died.” And when he said, in John 7. 20, that people were trying to kill him, the people answered, “You have a devil. Who is trying to kill you?” Clearly the Jews had the same view of such appearances: they thought these were not mental images produced by the brain but real things independent of the imagination.\n\nIf this teaching is false, someone may ask, why did our Savior not contradict it and teach the opposite? Why did he sometimes speak as though confirming it? My first answer is that when Christ says, “A spirit does not have flesh and bones,” he shows that spirits exist but does not deny that they are bodies. When St. Paul says, “We will rise with spiritual bodies,” he too recognizes spirits, but as bodily spirits. That is not difficult to understand. Air and many other things are bodies, though they have neither flesh and bones nor any other coarse substance visible to the eye. But when our Savior addresses the devil and orders him out of a man, would his words not be inappropriate if the devil meant a disease such as madness or mental disturbance, or a bodily spirit? Can diseases hear? Can a bodily spirit enter a body of flesh and bones that is already full of the spirits that sustain its life and movement? Must there not, then, be spirits that are neither bodies nor mere images? To the first question I answer that our Savior’s command to the madness or mental disturbance he cured is no more inappropriate than his rebuke of a fever or of the wind and sea. These cannot hear either. Nor is it more inappropriate than God’s command to light, the firmament, the sun, and the stars to exist: they could not hear before they existed. Such words are appropriate because they express the power of God’s Word. It is equally appropriate, then, to order madness or mental disturbance to leave a person’s body, using the name “devils” by which people commonly understood these conditions at the time. As for the second question, whether the spirits were incorporeal, I have found no passage of Scripture suggesting that anyone was ever possessed by any bodily spirit except his own, which naturally moves his body.\n\nSt. Matthew says that immediately after the Holy Ghost descended on our Savior in the form of a dove, he was “led by the Spirit into the wilderness” (chapter 4. 1). Luke 4. 1 puts it this way: “Jesus, full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness.” Clearly “Spirit” here means the Holy Ghost. This cannot mean possession, since Christ and the Holy Ghost are one and the same substance, not one substance or body possessing another. In the following verses he is said to be “taken by the devil into the holy city and placed on a pinnacle of the temple.” Should we conclude that the devil possessed him or carried him there by force? Again, he is said to have been carried by the devil to an extremely high mountain, from which the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world. We should not believe that the devil possessed or forced him, or that any mountain is literally high enough to show someone a whole hemisphere. What can this passage mean except that he went to the wilderness himself, while the journeys from the wilderness to the city and from the city to the mountain took place in a vision? St. Luke’s wording fits this: he says that Jesus was led into the wilderness not by the Spirit but in the Spirit. About being taken to the mountain and the pinnacle of the temple, Luke speaks as Matthew does. This fits the nature of a vision.\n\nAgain, St. Luke says that “Satan entered” Judas Iscariot, after which Judas went to discuss with the chief priests and captains how to betray Christ to them. Satan means the enemy. His entering Judas can mean Judas’s hostile, treacherous intention to sell his Lord and Master. Scripture often uses “the Holy Ghost” to mean the graces and good inclinations the Holy Ghost gives. Likewise, Satan’s entry may mean the wicked thoughts and plans of Christ’s and his disciples’ enemies. It is hard to say that the devil entered Judas before Judas had a hostile plan. But it makes no sense to say that Judas first became Christ’s enemy in his heart and the devil entered him afterward. Satan’s entry and Judas’s wicked purpose were therefore the same thing.\n\nBut if there are no immaterial spirits and no bodily spirit can possess a human body, someone may again ask why our Savior and his Apostles did not teach the people this plainly enough to remove all doubt. Such questions, however, are more speculative than necessary for a Christian’s salvation. One might as well ask why Christ, though able to give everyone faith, piety, and every moral virtue, gave them to some and not all. Or why he left the study of natural causes and sciences to human reason and effort rather than revealing it supernaturally to everyone, or anyone. Many other such questions could be asked, and probable, devout answers could be given. When God brought the Israelites into the Promised Land, he did not secure it by subduing every surrounding nation. He left many nations there as thorns in their sides, to stir their piety and effort from time to time. Likewise our Savior, while guiding us toward his heavenly Kingdom, did not eliminate every hard question about nature. He left them for our reason and effort to tackle. His preaching aimed only to show the plain, direct path to salvation: belief “that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himself for our sins, and that when he returns he will reign gloriously over his elect and save them forever from their enemies.” Belief in possession by spirits or mental images does not block that path, though for some it becomes a reason to leave it and follow their own inventions. If we demand that Scripture answer every question that might trouble us while we obey God’s commands, we might just as well complain that Moses did not give the date when such spirits were created, as he did for the creation of earth, sea, people, and animals. In short, Scripture tells me that angels and spirits, good and evil, exist. It does not tell me that they are incorporeal like the appearances people see in the dark or in dreams or visions, which the Romans called spectra and took for demons. I find that bodily spirits exist, though they are fine and invisible, but not that any human body was possessed or inhabited by them. And the bodies of the saints will be such bodies—spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.\n\nNevertheless, the opposite teaching, that incorporeal spirits exist, has been so influential in the Church that exorcism, the expulsion of devils by an incantation, is based on it. Though now practiced rarely and without much conviction, exorcism has not entirely disappeared. People spoke of many demoniacs and few mad people or sufferers from other unusual diseases in the early Church. Today we hear about and see many mad people but few demoniacs. Nature has not changed; the names have. Another question is why the Apostles and, for a time after them, the Church’s pastors cured unusual diseases when pastors now do not appear to do so. Likewise, why can’t every true believer now do everything believers did then? We read in Mark 16. 17 that believers could “cast out devils in Christ’s name, speak in new languages, pick up snakes, drink deadly poison without harm, and heal the sick by laying their hands on them,” using no words beyond “in the name of Jesus.” Probably these extraordinary gifts were given to the Church only while people trusted wholly in Christ and looked for happiness only in his coming Kingdom. When they sought authority and wealth and trusted their cleverness to obtain a kingdom in this world, God took back those supernatural gifts.\n\nAnother remnant of Gentile religion is the worship of images. Neither Moses in the Old Testament nor Christ in the New established it. Nor was it newly imported from the Gentiles; it remained among them after they called themselves Christians. Before our Savior preached, Gentiles generally worshipped as gods the appearances that external objects impress on the senses and leave in the brain. These are commonly called ideas, idols, mental images, or conceptions. They represent the external objects that cause them, but are no more real in themselves than things that seem to stand before us in a dream. This is why St. Paul says, “We know that an idol is nothing.” He did not think that an image made of metal, stone, or wood was nothing. He meant that the thing people honored or feared in the image and treated as a god was an invention. It had no place, home, motion, or existence except as motions in the brain. To give these inventions divine honor is what Scripture calls idolatry and rebellion against God. God was King of the Jews, with Moses and then the high priest as his deputy. If the people had been allowed to worship and pray to images—representations of their own imaginings—they would no longer have depended on the true God, whom nothing can resemble, or on his chief ministers, Moses and the high priests. Instead each person would have governed himself according to his appetite. This would have completely destroyed the Common-wealth and, through lack of unity, the people themselves. So God’s first law was that “they must not take ALIENOS DEOS, the gods of other nations, as gods, but only the one true God, who chose to speak with Moses and through him gave them laws and directions for peace and salvation from their enemies.” The second was that “they must not invent any image for themselves to worship.” A king is equally deposed when people submit to a new king set up by a neighboring nation or to one they set up themselves.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 2\n\nThe Scripture passages said to permit people to set up and worship images, or even to set them up in places where God is worshipped, fall into three groups. First are two examples: the cherubim over God’s Ark and the bronze serpent. Second are texts commanding us to worship certain created things because of their relationship to God, such as his footstool. Finally, other texts authorize religious honor for holy things. But before examining whether these passages prove the claims made for them, I must explain what worship, images, and idols mean.\n\nI have already shown in Chapter 20 of this book that to honor a person is to value that person’s power highly, and that we measure its value by comparison with others. But nothing can be compared with God in power. Any value we place on him short of infinite does not honor him; it dishonors him. Honor by nature is therefore private and inward, in the heart. But people’s inner thoughts show outwardly in words and actions. These signs of our honor are called worship, or cultus in Latin. Thus praying to someone, swearing by someone, obeying, and serving with care and attentiveness—in short, any words or deeds that show fear of displeasing someone or a wish to please them—are worship, whether sincere or pretended. Because they seem to show honor, they too are commonly called honor.\n\nThe worship we give those we believe to be merely human, such as kings and other authorities, is civil worship. The worship we give someone or something we believe to be God is divine worship, whatever words, ceremonies, gestures, or other actions we use. Bowing down before a king is only civil worship if we think he is only a man. But someone who merely removes his hat in church because he believes it to be God’s house performs divine worship. Those who try to distinguish divine from civil worship by the words douleia and latreia, rather than by the worshipper’s intention, deceive themselves. There are two kinds of servants. The first are entirely under their masters’ power: prisoners of war held as slaves and their children. They have no control over their own bodies; their lives depend on their masters’ will, and the slightest disobedience can cost them their lives. They are bought and sold like animals. They were called douloi, meaning slaves, and their service was called douleia. The second kind serve voluntarily for wages or in hope of some benefit from their masters. They were called thetes, or household servants; their masters have no claim on their service beyond what their Covenants specify. Both kinds of servants have their work assigned by someone else, whether they are enslaved or serve voluntarily. Latris is the general name for both, meaning a person who works for another as either a slave or a voluntary servant. So latreia means service of every kind, while douleia means only the service and condition of a slave. Scripture uses both words interchangeably for our service to God: douleia because we are God’s slaves, and latreia because we serve him. Every kind of service includes not just obedience but also worship—actions, gestures, and words showing honor.\n\nIn its strictest sense an image is the likeness of something visible. In this sense only the apparent forms of visible objects presented to our sight are images. Examples include the appearance of a person or another object in water, produced by reflection or refraction, and the appearance of the sun or stars when seen directly through the air. These appearances are not real things in the objects seen or in the places where they seem to be. Their size and shape are not the same as the objects’ and can change with changes in the organs of sight or with lenses. They often appear in our imagination and dreams when the object is absent, or they take on different colors and shapes, since they depend only on the imagination. These are the images first and most properly called ideas and idols, words taken from Greek, in which eido means “to see.” They are also called phantasms, Greek for “appearances.” From images like these comes the name imagination for one of our human capacities. Clearly, no image can be made of an invisible thing.\n\nClearly, too, there can be no image of an infinite thing. Every image or mental appearance formed by the impression of a visible thing has a shape, and every shape has boundaries in every direction. So there can be no image of God, the human soul, or spirits. There can be images only of visible bodies: bodies that produce light or are lit by something else.\n\nPeople can also imagine shapes they have never seen by joining parts of different creatures, as poets do when they make centaurs, chimeras, and other never-seen monsters. They can then give these shapes material form in wood, clay, or metal. These too are called images, not because they resemble any actual body, but because they resemble imagined beings in their makers’ brains. The original imagined idols in the brain resemble the idols painted, carved, molded, or cast in material. That similarity lets us call the crafted object an image of the idol formed in the imagination by nature.\n\nIn a broader sense, “image” includes anything that represents one thing by another. An earthly Sovereign may thus be called the image of God, and a lower-ranking magistrate the image of an earthly Sovereign. Gentile idol worship often paid little attention to whether the physical idol looked like the imagined one, yet the object was still called its image. An uncut stone has been set up as Neptune, and many other figures looked nothing like the shapes attributed to their gods. Today, too, we see many images of the Virgin Mary and other saints that look nothing like one another or any single person’s mental picture. Yet they serve the purpose for which they were set up: their names alone identify the people mentioned in the history, and each viewer supplies an imagined likeness of his own, or none at all. Thus, in the broadest sense, an image resembles something visible or represents it, or, as most often happens, does both.\n\nScripture uses the word idol even more broadly for the sun, a star, or any other created thing, visible or invisible, when it is worshipped as a god.\n\nHaving explained worship and images, I will now consider them together and ask what idolatry is forbidden by the Second Commandment and other passages of Scripture.\n\nTo worship an image is voluntarily to perform outward acts that show honor to any of the following: the image’s material, whether wood, stone, metal, or another visible thing; the mental image it was shaped to resemble or represent; or both combined into a single living being, with the material as its body and the imagined thing as its soul.\n\nRemoving one’s hat before someone powerful or before a prince’s throne, or in another place the prince chooses to stand for him when absent, is civil worship of that person. It shows honor to the person, not the seat or place, and is not idolatry. But if someone believed the prince’s soul lived in the seat, or addressed a petition to the seat, that would be divine worship and idolatry.\n\nPraying to a king for things within his power, even while lying prostrate before him, is only civil worship. We recognize only human power in him. But voluntarily asking him for fair weather, or anything else only God can provide, is divine worship and idolatry. On the other hand, if a king forces a person to do this by threat of death or other severe physical punishment, it is not idolatry. Worship of himself that a Sovereign commands under threat of his laws does not show that the person obeying inwardly honors him as God. It shows that the person wants to escape death or a miserable life. Something that does not show inward honor is not worship, and therefore is not idolatry. Nor can one say that this person sets a bad example or puts a stumbling block in a fellow believer’s path. However wise or learned the person compelled to worship may be, no one else can conclude from the act that the person approves of it, only that he does it out of fear. It is the Sovereign’s act, not his own.\n\nWorshipping God in a particular place, or facing an image or a particular place, does not mean worshipping or honoring the place or image. It means recognizing it as holy, or set aside from ordinary use. That is what holy means. It implies no new property in the place or image, only a new relationship through dedication to God. It is therefore no more idolatrous than worshipping God before the bronze serpent, or than Jews outside their country facing the Temple of Jerusalem while praying, or than Moses removing his shoes before the burning bush on the ground of Mount Sinai. God had chosen that place to appear and to give his laws to the people of Israel. The ground was holy because it was set apart for God’s use, not because holiness was an inherent quality of it. Nor is it idolatrous for Christians to worship in churches formally dedicated to God for that purpose by a king or another true representative of the Church. But it is idolatry to worship God as though he lived inside an image or a place. That would put an infinite substance in a finite place. Such finite gods are merely imagined idols with no real existence; Scripture commonly calls them vanities, lies, and nothing. There is also idolatry when people worship God while using a place or image to remind them of him or his works, if it was dedicated or set up by private individuals rather than by our Sovereign pastors. This remains true even when they do not think God lives or is present in the place or image. The commandment says, “You shall not make for yourself any carved image.” God commanded Moses to set up the bronze serpent. Moses did not make it on his own authority, so it did not violate the commandment. But Aaron and the people made the golden calf without God’s authority, and this was idolatry. It was idolatry not only because they regarded it as God, but because they made it for religious use without authorization either from God their Sovereign or from Moses his deputy.\n\nThe Gentiles worshipped Jupiter and others as gods. Perhaps these had once been living people who did great and glorious things. They also worshipped various men and women as children of gods, believing they had been conceived by an immortal deity and a mortal person. This was idolatry: they made these beings into gods for themselves without authority from God, whether in his eternal Law of Reason or in his explicit revealed will. Our Savior, however, was a man whom we also believe to be immortal God and the Son of God. Believing this is not idolatry, since we base it not on our imagination or judgment but on God’s Word revealed in Scripture. As for worshipping the Eucharist: if Christ’s words “This is my body” mean that he himself and the apparent bread in his hand are his body, and, beyond that, every apparent piece of bread ever consecrated by priests since then or to be consecrated hereafter is one of Christ’s bodies while all remain one body, then such worship is not idolatry, since our Savior authorized it. But if that text does not mean this—and no other text can be cited for it—then such worship is a human institution and is idolatry. It is not enough to say that God can turn bread into Christ’s body. The Gentiles too believed God was all-powerful. On that basis they could just as easily excuse their idolatry by claiming that their wood and stone were transformed into Almighty God.\n\nSome claim that divine inspiration means a supernatural entry of the Holy Ghost into a person, not the gaining of God’s grace through teaching and study. I think they face a very dangerous dilemma. If they do not worship the people they believe inspired in that way, they are impious, since they fail to adore God’s supernatural presence. If they do worship them, they commit idolatry, for the Apostles never allowed anyone to worship them in that way. The safest course, then, is to understand the dove descending on the Apostles, Christ breathing on them when he gave them the Holy Ghost, and the granting of it through the laying on of hands as signs God chose or ordained to signify his promise. He promised to help these people as they studied to preach his Kingdom and to help them behave in a way that would guide others rather than set a bad example.\n\nBesides idolatrous worship of images, there is worship of images that sets a bad example. It too is a sin, but it is not idolatry. Idolatry uses signs of genuine inward honor. Worship that sets a bad example only appears to be worship. A person may inwardly and sincerely hate both the image and the imaginary demon or idol to which it is dedicated, and act only out of fear of death or other severe punishment. Yet this is a sin when done by people whose actions others look to for guidance. Those who follow their lead are bound to stumble and fall in matters of religion. The example of people we pay no attention to, however, has no effect on us. It leaves us to our own care and caution and so does not cause our fall.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLV, 3\n\nSo suppose a Pastor lawfully appointed to teach and guide others, or anyone else widely respected for his knowledge, outwardly honors an idol out of fear. Unless he makes his fear and unwillingness as clear as his act of worship, he causes his brother to stumble by seeming to approve idolatry. His brother sees what his teacher, or a person he considers knowledgeable, does and concludes that it is lawful in itself. Causing that kind of stumbling is a sin. But suppose someone who is neither a Pastor nor particularly respected for his knowledge of Christian doctrine does the same thing, and another person follows him. He has not caused that person to stumble: the follower had no reason to copy him. Instead the follower uses the example as a pretext to excuse himself before others. Take an uneducated man subject to an idolatrous King or State who is ordered, on pain of death, to worship before an idol. If he detests the idol in his heart, he does well to comply, though he would do better if he had the courage to die rather than worship it. But if a Pastor, who has undertaken as Christ's messenger to teach Christ's doctrine to all nations, did the same, he would not only sin by causing other Christians to stumble in conscience. He would also betray and abandon his charge.\n\nHere is the substance of what I have said so far about worshipping images. A person commits idolatry if he worships, in an image or any created thing, its material, an imagined being he thinks lives in it, or both. The same is true if he believes such things hear his prayers or see his acts of devotion without ears or eyes. Someone who imitates that worship for fear of punishment sins if his example carries weight among his fellow Christians. But a person does not commit idolatry if he worships the Creator of the world before an image or in a place he did not make or choose himself, but which God's Word commanded him to use. The Jews did this when they worshipped God before the cherubim, for a time before the bronze serpent, and in or toward the Temple of Jerusalem, which also served for only a time.\n\nAs for worship of Saints, images, relics, and other things now practiced in the Church of Rome, I say God's Word does not permit these practices. They did not arise from doctrine taught in that Church. Some remained there from the first conversion of the Gentiles, and the Bishops of Rome later endorsed, confirmed, and expanded them.\n\nConsider the Scriptural evidence offered for them, especially images God ordered people to set up. They were not set up for anyone to worship. People were to worship God himself before them, as before the cherubim over the Ark and the bronze serpent. We never read that a priest or anyone else worshipped the cherubim. On the contrary, we read (2 Kings 18.4.) that Hezekiah smashed the bronze serpent Moses had set up because the people burned incense to it. Nor are those examples instructions for us to set up images under the pretext of worshipping God before them. The second Commandment says, “You shall not make for yourself any carved image, etc.” Its wording distinguishes images God commanded to be set up from images we set up for ourselves. We cannot validly argue from the cherubim or bronze serpent to images invented by people, or from worship God commanded to worship people choose for themselves. We must also consider that Hezekiah broke the bronze serpent because the Jews worshipped it, so they would stop. Christian Sovereigns should similarly tear down images their subjects have customarily worshipped, removing the occasion for further idolatry. Today, where people worship images, the uneducated really believe the images have divine power. Their Pastors tell them some images have spoken or bled, or performed miracles. They take these acts to have been done by a Saint whom they believe to be the image itself or to live inside it. When the Israelites worshipped the calf, they thought they worshipped the God who brought them out of Egypt. Yet it was idolatry because they thought the calf either was that God or contained him. Some may think people cannot be so foolish as to believe an image is God or a Saint, or to worship it as such. Scripture clearly says otherwise. When the golden calf was made, the people said (Exod. 32. 2.), “These are your Gods, O Israel.” Laban's images (Gen. 31.30.) are called his Gods. Daily experience with all kinds of people also shows that those who care only about food and comfort would rather believe any absurdity than trouble themselves to examine it. They hold their faith as if it were an inalienable inheritance, unless a new, explicit Law takes it away.\n\nOthers argue from certain passages that it is lawful to paint angels and even God himself. They point to God walking in the Garden, Jacob seeing God at the top of the ladder, and other visions and dreams. But visions and dreams, whether natural or supernatural, are only mental images. Anyone who paints one makes an image not of God but of his own imagined picture. That is making an idol. I do not say that drawing an imagined picture is a sin. But once it is drawn, treating it as a representation of God violates the second Commandment and serves no purpose except worship. The same applies to images of angels and dead people, except when used as memorials to friends or people worth remembering. That use does not worship the image; it gives civil honor to a person who lived in the past, rather than to a person now present. But suppose we make an image of a Saint and honor it solely because we believe the Saint hears our prayers and likes the honor we give him, though he is dead and without sensation. Then we attribute more than human power to him, which is idolatry.\n\nNeither the Law of Moses nor the Gospel authorizes religious worship of images or other representations of God that people set up for themselves. Nor does either authorize worship of the image of any creature in Heaven, on Earth, or beneath the Earth. Even Christian Kings, who are living representatives of God, must not receive any act of worship from their subjects that implies more power than a mortal human being can have. We therefore cannot suppose the religious worship now practiced entered the Church through a misunderstanding of Scripture. It must have remained because the images themselves were not destroyed when the Gentiles who worshipped them converted.\n\nThe reason was that their owners valued the workmanship of the images too highly and paid too much for them. Although converted from religious worship of the images as demons, they kept them in their homes under the pretext of honoring Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, and other Pastors of the early Church. It was easy to give them new names. What may once have been an image of Venus and Cupid could become one of the Virgin Mary and her Son, our Savior. A Jupiter could become Barnabas, a Mercury could become Paul, and so on. Meanwhile worldly ambition gradually took hold of the Pastors. It led them to try to please the new Christians, and to welcome the kind of honor that they too could hope to receive after death, like those who had already received it. Worship of images of Christ and his Apostles thus grew more and more idolatrous. Some time after Constantine, several Emperors, Bishops, and general Councils recognized and opposed its unlawfulness, but acted too late or too weakly.\n\nCanonizing Saints is another remnant of Gentile religion. It is not a misunderstanding of Scripture or a new invention of the Roman Church. The custom is as old as the Commonwealth of Rome itself. The first person ever canonized at Rome was Romulus. Julius Proculus swore before the Senate that he had spoken with Romulus after his death. Romulus assured him he lived in Heaven, where he was called Quirinius, and would favor their new city's State. On this basis the Senate publicly certified his sanctity. Julius Caesar and later Emperors received the same certification: they were canonized as Saints. That is what canonization now means, and it is the same as the pagans' apotheosis.\n\nThe Popes also took the title and power of Pontifex Maximus from pagan Rome. In the ancient Commonwealth of Rome, this was the title of the person who, under the Senate and people, held supreme authority to regulate all ceremonies and teachings concerning their religion. When Augustus Caesar changed the State into a monarchy, the only offices he took for himself were this one and Tribune of the People. Together they gave him supreme power in both State and religion. Later Emperors held these offices too. Constantine was the first Emperor to profess and authorize Christianity. His profession made it appropriate for him to have the Bishop of Rome regulate religion under his authority. It does not appear that the Bishops received the title Pontifex so early. Rather, later Bishops seem to have taken it themselves to bolster the power they exercised over Bishops of the Roman provinces. Their authority over other Bishops came not from any privilege of St. Peter, but from the privilege of the city of Rome, which the Emperors were always willing to support. This is clear from what happened when the Emperor made Constantinople the imperial seat: its Bishop claimed equality with the Bishop of Rome. Eventually, after a struggle, the Pope prevailed and became Pontifex Maximus. But his right came only from the Emperor. It did not extend beyond the Empire, or anywhere after the Emperor lost power in Rome, even though the Pope himself had taken that power away. We can therefore note in passing that the Pope has no standing above other Bishops except in territories where he himself is the civil Sovereign, or where the Emperor, holding civil Sovereign power, has expressly chosen him to be the chief Pastor of the Emperor's Christian subjects.\n\nCarrying images in processions is another survival of Greek and Roman religion. They too carried their idols from place to place in a kind of chariot dedicated to that purpose, called in Latin Thensa and Vehiculum Deorum. The image was placed in a frame or shrine called Ferculum. What they called Pompa is what we now call a procession. Accordingly, among the divine honors the Senate gave Julius Caesar was the right to a Thensam & Ferculum, a sacred chariot and shrine, in the Pompa or procession at the Circaean games. That amounted to carrying him about as a God, just as the Popes today are carried by Swiss guards under a canopy.\n\nThese processions also involved carrying burning torches and candles before images of the gods, among both Greeks and Romans. Later the Roman Emperors received the same honor. We read that when Caligula took power, people carried him from Misenum to Rome through a crowd, past roads lined with altars, animals for sacrifice, and burning torches. Caracalla was welcomed into Alexandria with incense, thrown flowers, and Dadouchiais, meaning torches. Among the Greeks the Dadochoi carried burning torches in the processions of their gods. In time, devout but uneducated people often honored their Bishops with a similar display of wax candles. They regularly gave that honor to images of our Savior and the Saints inside the Church itself. That is how wax candles came into use; some ancient Councils also established the practice.\n\nThe pagans also had their Aqua Lustralis, or holy water. The Church of Rome copies their holidays as well. They had Bacchanalia; we have our wakes, which answer to them. They had Saturnalia; we have carnivals and the freedom given to servants on Shrove Tuesday. They had processions of Priapus; we fetch in and raise Maypoles and dance around them, and dancing is a form of worship. They had a procession called Ambarvalia; we have a procession around the fields during Rogation Week. I do not think these are all the ceremonies left in the Church from the Gentiles' first conversion. They are simply all I can remember now. Anyone who carefully studied the histories of Greek and Roman religious rites would, I am sure, find many more of these old, empty bottles of Gentile religion. Through negligence or ambition, the teachers of the Roman Church have filled them again with the new wine of Christianity, which will in time surely burst them.\n\nChapter XLVI. Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 1\n\nOf Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions\n\nPhilosophy means “knowledge gained by reasoning from the way something is produced to its properties, or from its properties to a possible way of producing it, so that we can produce the effects human life requires, as far as materials and human power allow.” Thus a geometer reasons from the construction of figures to discover many of their properties, and from those properties to discover new ways to construct them. This lets people measure land and water, among countless other uses. In the same way, an astronomer studies how the sun and stars rise, set, and move in different parts of the heavens. He then discovers the causes of day and night and the changing seasons, enabling him to keep track of time. The same applies to other sciences.\n\nThis definition clearly excludes the original kind of knowledge called experience, which makes up prudence. We do not gain it by reasoning. Animals have it as well as humans. It is only a memory of how events followed one another in the past. Leave out the smallest circumstance that changes the outcome, and even the most prudent person's expectation fails. Correct reasoning, by contrast, produces only general, eternal, unchanging truths.\n\nWe also cannot call false conclusions philosophy. Anyone who reasons correctly with words he understands can never reach a false conclusion.\n\nNor Is Supernatural Revelation Philosophy\n\nNor should we call anything known through supernatural revelation philosophy, since reasoning did not produce it.\n\nNor should we call it philosophy when someone reasons from the authority of books. That does not reason from cause to effect or from effect to cause. It is faith, not knowledge.\n\nBecause reasoning depends on speech, people must have discovered some general truths by reasoning almost as soon as they had language. The indigenous people of America have some sound moral sayings. They also know a little arithmetic and can add and divide numbers that are not too large. But that does not make them philosophers. Small amounts of grain and grapevines grew scattered through fields and woods before people knew their value, ate their produce, or planted separate grainfields and vineyards. At that time they ate acorns and drank water. Similarly, from the beginning there have been various true, general, useful insights, growing naturally from human reason. At first, though, there were only a few. People relied on rough experience. They had no method: they did not sow or cultivate knowledge separately from the weeds and common plants of error and guesswork. They lacked leisure because they had to find life's necessities and defend themselves from their neighbors. Things could not change until great Commonwealths were established. Leisure is the mother of philosophy, while a Commonwealth is the mother of peace and leisure. Philosophy was first studied where there were great, flourishing cities. The Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the priests of Chaldea and Egypt are counted the earliest philosophers; those countries were the oldest kingdoms. Philosophy had not yet arisen among the Greeks and other western peoples. Their Commonwealths, perhaps no larger than Lucca or Geneva, had peace only when their fears of one another were equal. They had no leisure to observe anything but one another. Eventually war united many of the smaller Greek cities into fewer and larger ones. Then Seven Men from different parts of Greece gained reputations for wisdom. Some were known for moral and political sayings, others for the learning of the Chaldeans and Egyptians: astronomy and geometry. Still, we hear of no schools of philosophy at that point.\n\nAfter defeating the Persian armies, the Athenians gained control of the sea, and with it all the islands and coastal cities of the Archipelago in both Asia and Europe. They became wealthy. People with no work at home or abroad had little to do except, as St. Luke says (Acts 17.21.), spend their time “telling and hearing news,” or publicly discuss philosophy with the city's young people. Each teacher chose a place to do this. Plato used public walks called Academia, named after Academus. Aristotle used the walk at the temple of Pan called Lycaeum. Others used the Stoa, a covered walkway where merchants' goods were unloaded. Still others met elsewhere, spending their leisure teaching or debating their opinions. Some gathered young people wherever they could find an audience. Carneades did this in Rome while serving as an ambassador. Cato therefore advised the Senate to send him away quickly, fearing that the young men who enjoyed what they thought was his fine talk would have their morals corrupted.\n\nAs a result, the place where a teacher taught and debated was called schola, which means leisure in their language. Their discussions were called diatribae, meaning passing the time. Philosophers also took the names of some of their groups from their meeting places. Followers of Plato's teaching were called Academics. Followers of Aristotle were called Peripatetics, after the walk where he taught. Followers of Zeno were called Stoics, after the Stoa. It would be like naming people after More-fields, Pauls-Church, or the Exchange just because they often meet there to chatter and idle.\n\nNevertheless, people liked this custom so much that it spread in time throughout Europe and most of Africa. Public schools for lectures and debates were established and supported in almost every Commonwealth.\n\nThe Jews also had schools, both before and after our Savior's time, but they were schools of their Law. They were called synagogues, meaning congregations of the people. Yet the Law was read, explained, and debated in them every Sabbath. They therefore differed from public schools only in name, not in nature. They existed not just in Jerusalem but in every Gentile city where Jews lived. There was one such school at Damascus, which Paul entered to persecute people. He entered others at Antioch, Iconium, and Thessalonica to debate. Another was the synagogue of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and people from Asia. This was the school of the Libertines and of Jews visiting Jerusalem from elsewhere. Its members debated with Saint Stephen.\n\nBut what use have those schools been? What science today has been gained from their lectures and debates? We do not owe geometry, the mother of all natural science, to them. Plato, the best Greek philosopher, barred people from his school unless they already knew some geometry. Many people studied that science to humanity's great benefit, but there is no mention of their schools. There was no sect of geometers, and at that time they were not called philosophers. The natural philosophy of those schools was more a dream than a science, expressed in senseless, meaningless language. Anyone who tries to teach philosophy without first learning a great deal of geometry cannot avoid that. Nature works by motion, and we cannot know the ways and degrees of motion without knowing the proportions and properties of lines and figures. Their moral philosophy merely describes their own Passions. Without civil government the rule of conduct is the Law of Nature; within civil government it is civil law. This determines what is honorable and dishonorable, just and unjust, and generally good and evil. The philosophers, instead, base the rules of good and bad on their own likes and dislikes. Since tastes differ so greatly, nothing wins general agreement, and everyone does whatever seems right to him as far as he dares, undermining the Commonwealth. Their logic, which ought to be a method of reasoning, consists only of traps made of words and tricks for confusing anyone who tries to question them. In short, as Cicero, himself one of the old philosophers, says, there is nothing so absurd that some of them have not defended it. I believe almost nothing in natural philosophy could be more absurd than what is now called Aristotle's Metaphysics, nothing more hostile to government than much of his Politics, and nothing more ignorant than a large part of his Ethics.\n\nThe Jewish school was originally a school for the Law of Moses. Moses commanded (Deut. 31.10.) that at the end of every seventh year, during the Feast of the Tabernacles, the Law be read to all the people so they could hear and learn it. The reading of the Law every Sabbath, a practice followed after the Captivity, should therefore have had only one purpose: to acquaint people with the commandments they had to obey and to explain the prophets' writings to them. But our Savior's many rebukes make clear that their false commentaries and empty traditions corrupted the text of the Law. They understood the prophets so poorly that they recognized neither Christ nor the works he did, although the prophets had foretold them. Their lectures and debates in the synagogues thus turned the teaching of their Law into an imaginary kind of philosophy about the incomprehensible nature of God and spirits. They made it from the Greeks' vain philosophy and theology, mixed with their own ideas drawn from the more obscure Scriptural passages that were easiest to twist to their purposes, and from their ancestors' fabulous traditions.\n\nWhat is now called a university is a collection of many public schools in one town or city, joined into one organization under one governing body. Its chief schools were established for three professions: the Roman religion, Roman law, and medicine. Philosophy has a place there only as a servant to the Roman religion. Since Aristotle alone is treated as an authority there, that study is not really philosophy, which does not depend on authors, but Aristotelianism. Until very recently geometry had no place there at all, since it serves nothing but strict truth. Anyone whose natural talent brought him to a high level in geometry was commonly thought to be a magician practicing a diabolical art.\n\nI will now turn to specific doctrines of vain philosophy. They passed to the universities, and from there into the Church, partly from Aristotle and partly from lack of understanding. I will consider their basic principles first. There is a first philosophy on which all other philosophy ought to depend. Its chief task is to set the correct boundaries for the meanings of the most general terms or names. These boundaries, commonly called definitions, prevent ambiguity and double meanings in reasoning. Examples include definitions of body, time, place, matter, form, essence, subject, substance, accident, power, act, finite, infinite, quantity, quality, motion, action, and passion. Many more are needed to explain our ideas about the nature and production of bodies. The explanation, or fixing of the meanings, of these terms is commonly called metaphysics in the Schools, after a work of Aristotle with that title. But the title has another meaning there: “books written or placed after his natural philosophy.” The Schools take the books to be about supernatural philosophy, since the word metaphysics allows both meanings. Indeed, most of what those books say is so impossible to understand, and so opposed to natural reason, that anyone who thinks it has any meaning must think it supernatural.\n\nFrom this metaphysics, mixed with Scripture to produce scholastic theology, we are told that some essences in the world exist apart from bodies. They call them abstract essences and substantial forms. Explaining this jargon calls for more than ordinary attention here. I also ask readers unfamiliar with such discussion to excuse my addressing those who are familiar with it. The world—I do not mean just the Earth, which gives lovers of earthly things the name worldly, but the universe, the entire mass of everything that exists—is corporeal, meaning it is body. It has length, width, and depth. Every part of a body is also a body and has these dimensions. Consequently every part of the universe is a body, and anything that is not a body is not part of the universe. Since the universe is everything, what is no part of it is nothing, and is nowhere. This does not mean that spirits are nothing. They have dimensions and therefore really are bodies, though in ordinary speech the word body applies only to things we can see or touch, that is, things with some opacity. But people call spirits incorporeal, a more honorable name that can therefore be applied more reverently to God himself. In speaking of him, we do not consider which attribute best describes his incomprehensible nature, but which best expresses our wish to honor him.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 2\n\nTo understand the grounds for their claim that there are abstract essences, or substantial forms, we must first consider what those words properly mean. We use words to record our thoughts and ideas for ourselves and to communicate them to others. Some words name things we think about. These include all kinds of bodies that affect the senses and leave an impression in the imagination. Other words name the imagined impressions themselves: the ideas or mental images we have of things we see or remember. Others name names, or kinds of speech. Universal, plural, singular, negation, true, false, syllogism, question, promise, and covenant are names for certain forms of speech. Other words show that one name follows from, or conflicts with, another. When someone says, “A man is a body,” he means that the name body necessarily applies wherever the name man applies. They are different names for the same thing, a man. The word is, joining them together, shows this connection. Just as we use is, the Latins use est and the Greeks use esti in its various forms. I do not know whether all other nations have an equivalent word in their languages, but I am sure they do not need one. If that were the custom, simply placing two names in order could show their connection just as well as is, be, are, and similar words. Custom gives words their force.\n\nSuppose a language had no verb corresponding to est, is, or be. Its speakers would still be just as capable as Greeks and Latins of making inferences, drawing conclusions, and reasoning in every way. But what would become of the terms entity, essence, essential, essentially, and the many related terms derived from that verb, as they are commonly used? They are not names of things. They are signs by which we show that we think one name or attribute follows from another. When we say, “a man is a living body,” we do not mean that the man is one thing, the living body another, and the is or being a third. We mean that the man and the living body are the same thing. The inference “If he is a man, he is a living body” is valid, and the word is expresses it. So phrases such as to be a body, to walk, to be speaking, to live, and to see, and words meaning the same thing, such as corporeality, walking, speaking, life, and sight, are names of nothing. I have explained this more fully elsewhere.\n\nSomeone may ask why I go into such fine distinctions in a work that claims to deal only with what is needed to understand government and obedience. My purpose is to stop people from letting themselves be deceived by those who teach separated essences on the basis of Aristotle's vain philosophy. They use empty names to frighten people away from obeying their country's laws, just as people scare birds from grain with an empty coat, a hat, and a bent stick. This doctrine is the basis for saying that when a man dies and is buried, his soul, meaning his life, can walk apart from his body and be seen at night among the graves. On the same basis, they say the shape, color, and taste of a piece of bread exist in a place where, according to them, there is no bread. They also say faith, wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes poured into a person or blown into him from heaven, as though virtuous people could be separated from their virtues. Many more such claims weaken subjects' dependence on their country's Sovereign power. Who will try to obey the laws if he expects obedience to be poured or blown into him? Who would not obey a priest who can make God, rather than obey his Sovereign, or even God himself? And who, if afraid of ghosts, will not highly respect people who can make the holy water that drives ghosts away? This is enough to illustrate the errors introduced into the Church through Aristotle's entities and essences. He may have known his philosophy was false, but written it because it agreed with and supported their religion, and because he feared the fate of Socrates.\n\nOnce people accept the error of separated essences, they necessarily become entangled in many further absurdities. If they claim these forms are real, they must give them a place. But they also claim they are incorporeal and have no measurable dimensions. Everyone knows a place has dimensions and can only be occupied by something bodily. So to preserve their reputation, they distinguish between being somewhere “circumscriptively” and being there “definitively.” These are just words, with no meaning here. They work only in Latin, which hides their emptiness. To circumscribe something is simply to determine or define its place, so the two terms in their distinction mean the same thing. In particular, they say a man's essence is his soul. They claim that the whole soul is in his little finger, and the whole soul is in every other part of his body, however small, while the whole body has no more soul than any one of its parts. Can anyone think God is served by such absurdities? Yet anyone who believes in an incorporeal soul separated from the body must believe all this.\n\nWhen they are asked how an incorporeal substance can feel pain and be tortured in the fire of Hell or Purgatory, they have no answer except that we cannot know how fire burns souls.\n\nMotion is a change of place, and incorporeal substances cannot occupy a place. This leaves them struggling to explain how a soul can leave the body and travel to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, or how people's ghosts—and, I might add, the clothes they appear in—can walk at night through churches, churchyards, and other burial places. I do not know what they can say except that ghosts walk “definitively,” not “circumscriptively,” or “spiritually,” not “temporally.” Such remarkable distinctions could be applied equally well to any difficulty at all.\n\nThey refuse to define eternity as an endless succession of time. If they did, they could not explain how God's will and his predetermination of future things would not come before his foreknowledge of those same things, as an effective cause comes before its effect and an agent before its action. Nor could they explain many other bold opinions about God's incomprehensible nature. Instead they teach that eternity is the present moment standing still, what the Schools call nunc-stans. Neither they nor anyone else understands that expression, any more than they would understand hic-stans as a description of infinitely vast space.\n\nWhen we mentally divide a body by counting its parts, we also count the parts of the space it occupied. Thinking of more parts therefore means thinking of more places for them. No one can conceive of more or fewer parts than there are places for those parts. Yet they want us to believe that by God's almighty power one body can be in many places at once, and many bodies in one place at once. It is as though we honored divine power by saying that what exists does not exist, or that what happened did not happen. These are only a small fraction of the contradictions forced on them by trying to argue philosophically about the divine, incomprehensible nature instead of admiring and worshipping it. God's attributes cannot tell us what he is. They should express our wish to honor him with the best names we can think of. Those who try to reason from these names of honor about his nature lose their understanding at the first attempt. They stumble from one difficulty into another without end. They are like a man unfamiliar with court ceremonies who enters the presence of someone far more important than anyone he is used to addressing. He trips at the door, drops his cloak to keep from falling, then drops his hat while picking up the cloak. One awkward move after another reveals his alarm and lack of polish.\n\nAs for physics, the knowledge of the subordinate and secondary causes of natural events, they give us no causes at all, only empty words. Ask why some kinds of bodies naturally fall toward the Earth while others naturally move away from it. Following Aristotle, the Schools say those that fall are heavy, and heaviness makes them fall. Ask what heaviness means, and they define it as a tendency to go to the Earth's center. Thus the cause of falling is a tendency to go down. This amounts to saying that bodies rise or fall because they do. Or they tell us that the Earth's center is the place where heavy things rest and are preserved, so they tend toward it. That treats stones and metals as though they had desires and could recognize where they wanted to be, as people can; or as though they loved rest, unlike people; or as though a piece of glass were less safe in a window than it would be falling into the street.\n\nSuppose we ask why the same body sometimes seems bigger than at other times, without anything being added to it. They say it is condensed when it seems smaller and rarefied when it seems bigger. What do those words mean? To be condensed is to have less quantity than before in precisely the same matter, and to be rarefied is to have more. But matter cannot exist without some definite quantity. Quantity is simply the measure of matter, that is, of body, by which we say one body is bigger or smaller than another by a given amount. Their account is as if a body could first be made with no quantity at all, and later be supplied with more or less quantity according to how dense it was meant to be.\n\nFor the cause of the human soul they say, Creatur Infundendo, and Creando Infunditur: “It is created by pouring it in,” and “Poured in by creation.”\n\nFor the cause of sensation they offer the presence everywhere of species, meaning the appearances of objects. When these appearances reach the eye, they call it sight; the ear, hearing; the palate, taste; the nostril, smell; and the rest of the body, touch.\n\nAs the cause of willing any particular action, which they call Volitio, they give the general capacity to will one thing at one time and another thing at another time, which they call Voluntas. They thus make the ability the cause of the act. That is like explaining people's good or evil actions by saying they were capable of doing them.\n\nOften they disguise their own ignorance in other words and call it the cause of natural events. For instance, they say fortune causes contingent events, meaning events whose cause they do not know. They attribute many effects to hidden qualities, meaning qualities unknown to them and therefore, as they think, to everyone else. They also appeal to sympathy, antipathy, antiperistasis, specific qualities, and similar terms. None identifies either the agent producing the effects or the process that produces them.\n\nIf metaphysics and physics like this do not count as vain philosophy, nothing ever has; and St. Paul did not need to warn us to avoid it.\n\nTheir moral and civil philosophy is just as absurd, or more so. Suppose a man commits an injustice, that is, does something against the law. They say God is the primary cause of the law and the primary cause of that action and all other actions, yet not a cause at all of the injustice, meaning the action's failure to conform to the law. This is vain philosophy. One might just as well say one man makes both a straight line and a crooked line, while another makes them fail to match. That is the philosophy of people who decide on their conclusions before they know their premises. They pretend to understand what cannot be understood, and turn names meant to honor God into descriptions of his nature. This particular distinction was made to defend the doctrine of free will, meaning a human will not subject to God's will.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 3\n\nAristotle and other non-Christian philosophers define good and evil by what people desire. That works well enough when we consider each person governed by their own law. When people have no law besides their own desires, there can be no general rule about which actions are good or evil. But in a Common-wealth this measure is wrong. The measure is not what private people want. It is the law, which expresses the will and desires of the state. Yet people still follow this teaching. They judge their own actions, other people's actions, and even the actions of the Common-wealth by their own Passions. No one calls anything good or evil except what looks that way to them, without considering public laws. The only exception is monks and friars. Their vows bind them to unquestioning obedience to their superior, the same obedience that every subject should consider themselves bound by the Law of Nature to give the civil Soveraigne. Using one's own measure of good is not only a useless teaching. It also harms the public state.\n\nIt is also useless and false philosophy to say that marital sex conflicts with chastity or self-restraint, and therefore to treat marriage as a moral vice. That is what people do when they cite chastity and self-restraint as reasons to forbid clergy to marry. They admit that it is only a rule of the church that requires those in holy orders who constantly attend the altar and administer the Eucharist to abstain from women constantly. They call this abstinence continual chastity, self-restraint, and purity. So they call lawful sex with one's wife a lack of chastity and self-restraint. In this way they make marriage a sin, or at least so impure and unclean that it makes a man unfit to serve at the altar. If the rule exists because marital sex is a lack of self-restraint and contrary to chastity, then every marriage is a vice. If instead it exists because sex is too impure and unclean for a man dedicated to God, other natural, necessary things that everyone does daily should make men still less fit to be priests, since those things are more unclean.\n\nBut the hidden basis of the ban on priests marrying was probably not something as flimsy as these mistakes in moral philosophy. Nor was it the preference for single life over marriage that came from the wisdom of St. Paul. He saw how inconvenient it would be for preachers of the Gospel, forced during those times of persecution to flee from one country to another, to be burdened with caring for a wife and children. Rather, the basis was the plan of later popes and priests to make themselves the clergy: the sole heirs of the Kingdome of God in this world. To do this, they needed to give up marriage. Our Savior says that when his Kingdome comes, God's children will “neither marry nor be given in marriage, but will be like the angels in heaven”; that is, they will be spiritual. Since these men had taken the name “spiritual” for themselves, it would have been inconsistent to let themselves have wives of their own when there was no need for them to do so.\n\nFrom Aristotle's political philosophy they learned to call every kind of Common-wealth except government by the people a tyranny. Athens had such a popular government at the time. They called all kings tyrants. They also called the aristocracy of thirty governors installed in Athens by its Spartan conquerors the Thirty Tyrants. And they called the people's condition under democracy liberty. Originally a tyrant simply meant a monarch, nothing more. But after monarchy was abolished in most parts of Greece, the name came to express both its original meaning and the hatred popular states felt toward it. Likewise, the word “king” became hateful after Rome deposed its kings. People naturally assume that an insulting title applied to a great enemy must point to some serious fault. When the same people are unhappy with those who run a democracy or an aristocracy, they have no trouble finding insulting names to express their anger. They quickly call the first anarchy and the second oligarchy, or the tyranny of a few. What actually offends the people is simply that they are governed not as each person wishes but as the public representative sees fit, whether that representative is one man or an assembly. In other words, they object to government that decides according to its own judgment. They give their superiors ugly names for this reason. They never understand, perhaps until a little after a civil war, that without such government war must go on forever. They also fail to understand that people and weapons, not words and promises, give laws their force and power.\n\nThat is why another mistake in Aristotle's Politics is his claim that in a well-ordered Common-wealth laws, rather than people, should govern. Anyone with their natural senses, even someone who cannot read or write, knows they are governed by those they fear and believe can kill or hurt them if they disobey. Who believes that a law, mere words and paper, can hurt them without people's hands and swords? This is a harmful mistake. When people dislike their governors, it leads them to side with those who call the governors tyrants and to think they may lawfully go to war against them. Yet the clergy often encourage such mistakes from the pulpit.\n\nThere is another mistake in their political philosophy, though they did not learn it from Aristotle, Cicero, or any other non-Christian writer. They extend the power of law, which only governs actions, to people's very thoughts and consciences. They examine and investigate what people believe even when their words and actions comply with the law. This either punishes people for honestly reporting their thoughts or forces them to lie for fear of punishment. A civil magistrate who plans to employ a minister to teach may certainly ask whether he agrees to preach particular doctrines. If he refuses, the magistrate may deny him the job. But forcing him to accuse himself of holding opinions, when none of his actions is forbidden by law, violates the Law of Nature. This is especially true of those who teach that a person who dies with a false opinion about an article of Christian faith will suffer extreme and eternal torment. Who, knowing that an error poses such a danger, would let their natural concern for themselves make them stake their soul on someone else's judgment rather than their own, when that other person has nothing to lose from their damnation?\n\nIt is another error in politics for a private person, without the authority of the Common-wealth—that is, without the permission of its representative—to interpret the law according to their own spirit. But this error does not come from Aristotle or any other non-Christian philosopher. None of them denies that the power to make laws includes the power to explain them when needed. Wherever the Scriptures have the force of law, are they not made law by the authority of the Common-wealth? Are they not, consequently, part of civil law?\n\nA similar mistake occurs when anyone except the Soveraigne restricts a power that the Common-wealth has not restricted. That is what people do when they reserve the preaching of the Gospel for one particular order of men, though the laws leave it open to others. If the state permits me to preach or teach—if it does not forbid me—no one else can forbid me. Suppose I find myself among the idol worshipers of America. Though I am a Christian who has not been ordained, should I think it a sin to preach Jesus Christ until I have received ordination from Rome? And after preaching, should I refuse to answer their questions and explain the Scriptures to them? Should I refuse to teach? Someone may say that necessity will count as sufficient authorization for this, and for giving them the sacraments. That is true. But it is also true that whenever necessity calls for an exemption, no exemption is needed if there is no law prohibiting the act. Therefore, denying these functions to people whom the civil Soveraigne has not barred takes away a lawful liberty. This goes against the teaching of civil government.\n\nMore examples could be given of the useless philosophy brought into religion by the teachers of scholastic theology. Others can find them for themselves if they wish. I will add only this: most writings by scholastic theologians are nothing more than meaningless strings of strange and crude words, or words used differently from ordinary Latin. They would puzzle Cicero, Varro, and every grammarian of ancient Rome. Anyone who wants proof should try, as I have said before, to translate a scholastic theologian into French, English, or another modern language with a rich vocabulary. If a statement cannot be made understandable in most of these languages, it is not understandable in Latin either. I cannot classify this meaningless language as false philosophy. Still, it can hide the truth and also make people think they have found it, so that they stop looking.\n\nFinally, consider the errors drawn from false or uncertain history. What are the legends of imaginary miracles in the lives of saints, or the stories of apparitions and ghosts cited by teachers of the Roman Church to support their doctrines of hell, purgatory, exorcism, and other teachings supported by neither reason nor Scripture? What are all those traditions they call the unwritten Word of God? They are old wives' tales. They do find some of these stories scattered through the writings of the ancient Fathers. But the Fathers were human and could too easily believe false reports. Citing their opinions as proof of the stories they believed has no persuasive force for people who, following the advice of St. John (1 Epistle, chapter 4, verse 1), test spirits. In all matters concerning the power of the Roman Church—a power whose abuses the Fathers either did not suspect or benefited from—such citations instead discredit their testimony, because they believed reports too readily. The most honest people, if they know little about natural causes, are especially likely to do this, as the Fathers did. Good people are naturally the least likely to suspect fraud. Pope Gregory, St. Bernard, and our Bede say something about ghosts that claimed to be in purgatory. But I believe they got their stories entirely from others. If they or anyone else claim firsthand knowledge of such stories, they will not confirm these empty reports. They will only expose their own weakness or fraud.\n\nWe may add to the introduction of false philosophy the suppression of true philosophy by people who have neither lawful authority nor enough learning to judge what is true. Our own voyages prove that people live on the opposite side of the earth, and everyone educated in the human sciences now acknowledges this. It also becomes clearer each day that the movements of the earth determine years and days. Yet church authorities have punished people merely for proposing this view in their writings as an opportunity to lay out the arguments for and against it. What reason is there for doing so? Is it that such opinions conflict with true religion? They cannot, if the opinions are true. Let competent judges examine their truth first, or let those who claim to know otherwise refute them. Do they conflict with the established religion? Then silence them through the laws governing their teachers—that is, civil laws. Those who teach even true philosophy against the law may lawfully be punished for disobedience. Do the opinions encourage disorder in government by supporting rebellion or sedition? Then let the authority charged with keeping the public peace silence them and punish their teachers. That authority is civil. Any power church officials claim in their own right where they are subjects of the state is an unlawful seizure of power, even if they call it God's right.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVII, 1\n\nON WHO BENEFITS FROM SUCH DARKNESS\n\nCicero praises one of the Cassii, a strict Roman judge, for a habit he had in criminal cases. When the witnesses did not provide enough evidence, he would ask the accusers, Cui Bono? That is, what profit, honor, or other satisfaction had the accused gained, or hoped to gain, from the act? Among the clues to a person's identity, none points more clearly to the person responsible than the benefit of the act. I will use this rule here to examine who may have kept people in this part of Christendom believing, for so long, doctrines that are contrary to peaceful human society.\n\nFirst consider the mistaken claim that the present Church, still at work on earth, is the Kingdome of God: the Kingdome of Glory or the Promised Land, not the Kingdome of Grace, which is only the promise of that land. This claim brings worldly benefits. First, it gives the pastors and teachers of the Church, as God's public ministers, a supposed right to govern the Church. Since the Church and the Common-wealth consist of the same people, it consequently gives them a supposed right to govern the Common-wealth. By claiming this right, the pope persuaded the subjects of every Christian prince that disobeying the pope meant disobeying Christ himself. Whenever the pope and another prince disagreed, those subjects, captivated by the phrase “spiritual power,” abandoned their lawful Soveraigns. In effect, this gave the pope a universal monarchy over Christendom. The popes were first given the position of supreme teachers of Christian doctrine within the Roman Empire by Christian emperors and under their authority. The popes themselves acknowledge this. The title was Pontifex Maximus, an officer subject to the civil state. But once the empire had been divided and dissolved, it was easy to press a different title, the right of St. Peter, on people already under their control. This preserved the power they claimed and extended it over the same Christian provinces after they ceased to be united in the Roman Empire. People want to rule. The benefit of a universal monarchy is therefore enough reason to presume that the popes who claimed and long enjoyed it invented the teaching through which they acquired it: that the Church on earth now is Christ's Kingdome. If that is granted, Christ must have a deputy among us to tell us what he commands.\n\nOnce some Churches had rejected the pope's universal power, we might reasonably expect their civil Soveraigns to recover whatever part of that power had rightfully been theirs before they unwisely surrendered it. This effectively happened in England. There was one exception: the officials through whom the kings governed religion maintained that they held their positions by God's right. They thus appeared to claim, if not supremacy, at least independence from civil power. But this was only an apparent claim, since they acknowledged the king's right to stop them from performing their functions whenever he pleased.\n\nWhere presbyteries assumed that office, however, they kept the teaching that Christ's Kingdome had already come and had begun with our Savior's resurrection, even though they prohibited many other Roman Church doctrines. But Cui Bono? What benefit did they expect? The same thing the popes expected: sovereign power over the people. What does it mean for them to excommunicate their lawful king, except to bar him from every place of public worship in his own kingdom and forcibly resist him if he tries to correct them by force? And if they excommunicate anyone without the civil Soveraigne's authority, what does that mean except taking away that person's lawful liberty and unlawfully claiming power over their fellow citizens? The Roman and Presbyterian clergy, then, are the authors of this religious darkness.\n\nI also include here all the doctrines that help them keep spiritual sovereignty once they have acquired it. First is the claim that the pope cannot make a mistake when acting in his public office. Who would not readily obey everything he commands if they believed that?\n\nSecond is the teaching that bishops in every Common-wealth receive their right to office neither directly from God nor indirectly from their civil Soveraigns, but from the pope. This gives every Christian Common-wealth many powerful men—for bishops are powerful—who depend on and owe obedience to the pope, even though he is a foreign prince. It enables him, as he has done many times, to stir up a civil war against any state that refuses to be governed according to his wishes and interests.\n\nThird is the exemption of bishops, other priests, monks, and friars from civil law. It means a large part of every Common-wealth enjoys the protection and benefits of the civil state's laws but pays none of the public expenses and is not subject to the penalties that other subjects face for their crimes. As a result, these people fear no one but the pope and support only him, to maintain his universal monarchy.\n\nFourth, they give their priests, called merely presbyters or elders in the New Testament, the name sacerdotes, meaning people who offer sacrifices. When God was king of the Jews, that title belonged to the civil Soveraigne and his public ministers. Likewise, they turn the Lord's Supper into a sacrifice. These practices encourage people to believe that the pope has the same power over all Christians that Moses and Aaron had over the Jews: all civil and church power, as the high priest had then.\n\nFifth, teaching that marriage is a sacrament gives the clergy the authority to decide whether marriages are lawful. This lets them decide which children are legitimate and therefore who has the right to inherit kingdoms.\n\nSixth, forbidding priests to marry helps secure the pope's power over kings. If a king is a priest, he cannot marry and pass on his kingdom to his descendants. If he is not a priest, the pope claims church authority over him and his people.\n\nSeventh, through confession made privately to a priest, they gain better information about the plans of princes and other important civil figures than those figures can gain about the plans of the church authorities. This helps secure their power.\n\nEighth, by declaring people saints and martyrs, they strengthen their power. They make trusting people stubbornly resist the laws and orders of their civil Soveraigns, even to the death, if the pope excommunicates those rulers and declares them heretics or enemies of the Church—which they interpret to mean enemies of the pope.\n\nNinth, they secure the same power by attributing to every priest the power to make Christ, impose penance, and forgive or retain sins.\n\nTenth, the clergy grow rich through the doctrines of purgatory, justification by outward acts, and indulgences.\n\nEleventh, through their teachings about demons, exorcism, and related practices, they keep, or think they keep, people more afraid of their power.\n\nFinally, the metaphysics, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, and the pointless distinctions, crude terms, and unclear language of the schoolmen, are taught at universities, all founded and regulated under papal authority. They help conceal these errors and make people mistake the misleading glow of worthless philosophy for the light of the Gospel.\n\nIf these examples were not enough, we could add other obscure doctrines of theirs. The obvious benefits of these doctrines are to establish unlawful power over the lawful Soveraigns of Christian peoples, to sustain that power once established, or to give wealth, honor, and authority in this world to those who maintain it. So by the rule of Cui Bono, we may rightly identify the authors of all this spiritual darkness: the pope and Roman clergy, together with anyone else trying to persuade people of the mistaken teaching that the Church now on earth is the Kingdome of God mentioned in the Old and New Testaments.\n\nBut emperors and other Christian Soveraigns also played a part in harming themselves and the public. Under their governments these errors first appeared, along with similar attempts by church officials to take over their duties, threatening their possessions and disturbing their subjects' peace. They allowed this because they failed to foresee the consequences or understand what their teachers were planning. Without the rulers' authority, no rebellious doctrine could initially have been preached publicly. They could have stopped it at the start. But once these religious figures had won over the people, no one could devise a human remedy. We must await whatever remedies God chooses to provide. In his own good time he never fails to destroy human schemes against the truth. He often lets his enemies' success and ambition grow so extreme that their violence opens eyes that the caution of their predecessors had kept shut. Their attempts to seize too much make them lose everything, as Peter's net broke under the struggles of too many fish. Meanwhile, those who impatiently tried to resist such encroachments before their subjects' eyes had opened only increased the power they opposed. I therefore do not blame Emperor Frederick for holding the stirrup for our countryman Pope Adrian. His subjects were so disposed at the time that he was unlikely to have retained the empire if he had refused. Instead, I blame those rulers who originally had their full power and allowed such doctrines to be invented in the universities of their own lands. They held the stirrup for every succeeding pope as the popes climbed onto the thrones of all Christian Soveraigns, ready to ride and exhaust both those rulers and their people as they pleased.\n\n### Part IV, Chapter XLVII, 2\n\nHuman inventions can be unraveled in the same way they were woven, but in reverse order. The weaving began with the earliest sources of power: the wisdom, humility, honesty, and other virtues of the apostles. Converts obeyed the apostles out of respect, not because they had to. Their consciences were free, while only civil authorities had power over their words and actions. Later, as Christ's flocks grew, the elders met to decide what they should teach. They bound themselves not to teach anything contrary to the decisions of those meetings. This led people to think that their followers were also obliged to accept their teaching. If people refused, the elders refused to associate with them. This was then called excommunication, and they did it not because those people did not believe but because they disobeyed. That was the first knot tied around their liberty. As the number of elders grew, those in the chief city or province gained authority over the elders of individual parishes and reserved the name “bishops” for themselves. This was the second knot tied around Christian liberty. Finally, because Rome was the imperial city, its bishop claimed authority over all the other bishops in the empire. He did so partly through the emperors' own consent and the title Pontifex Maximus, and finally, after the emperors had become weak, through the special rights supposedly granted to St. Peter. This was the third and last knot, completing the construction of papal power.\n\nTo take that power apart, then, we must follow the same path in reverse, starting with the knot tied last. We can see this in the dismantling of church government outside the civil government's authority in England.\n\nFirst, Queen Elizabeth completely ended the power of the popes. Bishops who had previously carried out their functions by the pope's authority then did so by the authority of the queen and her successors. But because they kept saying they held office jure divino, or by divine right, people thought they were claiming a right directly from God. That undid the first knot. Later, the Presbyterians in England succeeded in abolishing government by bishops. That undid the second knot. At nearly the same time the Presbyterians also lost their power. We are thus back to the freedom of the earliest Christians: each person may follow Paul, Cephas, or Apollos, whichever they prefer. This may be best, provided it causes no quarrels and we do not judge Christ's teaching by our liking for his minister, a fault the apostle condemned in the Corinthians. First, no power ought to rule people's consciences except the Word itself. The Word produces faith in each person, not always as those who plant and water intend, but as God, who makes it grow, intends. Second, those who teach that even a small error is very dangerous cannot reasonably demand that a person capable of reasoning for themselves follow someone else's reasoning, or the majority opinion of many others. That is scarcely better than gambling one's salvation on a coin toss. Nor should these teachers resent losing their old authority. They should know better than anyone that power is kept through the same virtues by which it is gained: wisdom, humility, clear teaching, and honest conduct. It is not kept by suppressing the natural sciences or the moral teaching of natural reason, using unclear language, claiming more knowledge than one can show, practicing supposedly pious fraud, or committing other offenses. Such acts by pastors of God's Church are not merely faults but scandals that may eventually make people question their authority and bring it down.\n\nOnce the world accepted the doctrine that “the Church now at work on earth is the Kingdome of God described in the Old and New Testaments,” ambition and campaigning for church offices followed. Competition was strongest for the great office of Christ's deputy. The pomp of those who won the most important public offices gradually became so obvious that they lost the inner respect owed to a pastor's work. The wisest people with any civil power then needed only the authorization of their princes to stop obeying them. After the bishop of Rome secured recognition as universal bishop by claiming to succeed St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or Kingdome of Darkness, could aptly be compared with a kingdom of fairies: the old wives' tales told in England about ghosts, spirits, and their nighttime tricks. Anyone who examines the origins of this great church dominion will easily see that the papacy is just the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, crowned and seated on its grave. The papacy arose suddenly from the ruins of that non-Christian power.\n\nThey also use Latin in church and official business. No nation in the world commonly speaks it now. What is this language but the ghost of old Roman speech?\n\nIn every country where fairies appear, they have just one universal king. Some of our poets call him King Oberon, but Scripture calls him Beelzebub, Prince of Demons. Likewise, church officials acknowledge just one universal king, the pope, no matter whose territory they live in.\n\nChurch officials call themselves spiritual men and ghostly fathers. Fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts live in darkness, isolated places, and graves. Church officials move through the darkness of unclear doctrines, monasteries, churches, and churchyards.\n\nChurch officials have cathedrals. Wherever one is built, holy water and certain spells called exorcisms supposedly have the power to make its town a city, a seat of rule. Fairies also have enchanted castles and enormous ghosts that rule the surrounding areas.\n\nFairies cannot be caught and made to answer for the harm they do. In the same way, church officials disappear from civil courts.\n\nChurch officials deprive young men of the use of reason with spells made from metaphysics, miracles, traditions, and distorted Scripture. These young men become fit for nothing except carrying out orders. Fairies are likewise said to steal young children from cradles and turn them into people unable to reason, whom ordinary people call elves and who are prone to mischief.\n\nOld wives' tales do not say in what workshop fairies make their spells. But we know the workshops of the clergy well enough. They are the universities, whose instruction was authorized by the popes.\n\nWhen fairies dislike someone, they supposedly send their elves to pinch them. When church officials dislike a civil state, they too make their elves—that is, superstitious subjects under their spell—pinch their princes by preaching rebellion. Or they persuade one prince with promises to pinch another.\n\nFairies do not marry, but among them are incubi who have sex with people of flesh and blood. Priests do not marry either.\n\nChurch officials take the cream of the land through tithes and gifts from ignorant people who fear them. Likewise, fairy tales say fairies enter dairies and feast on the cream skimmed from milk.\n\nThe stories do not record what money fairies use in their kingdom. Church officials, though, take the same money we do when they collect payment. When they have to pay, however, they do so in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.\n\nWe can add this to the other likenesses between the papacy and the fairy kingdom: fairies exist only in ignorant people's imaginations, fed by old wives' and old poets' tales. In the same way, outside his own civil territory, the pope's spiritual power exists only in the fear of excommunication felt by people misled by false miracles, false traditions, and false readings of Scripture.\n\nSo it was not very hard for Henry 8. or for Queen Elizabeth to drive these spirits out by their own exorcisms. But who knows? The spirit of Rome has now departed and travels through the barren places of China, Japan, and the Indies on missions that bring it little reward. It may return; or, rather, a group of spirits worse than it may enter and live in this house that has been swept clean, leaving it worse off than it was at the start. After all, the Roman clergy are not the only ones claiming that the Kingdome of God exists in this world and that they therefore have power here apart from the civil state. This is all I intended to say about the teaching of the political theorists. Once I have reviewed it, I will gladly submit it to my country's judgment.\n\nA REVIEW AND CONCLUSION\n\n### Review and Conclusion, 1\n\nA REVIEW AND CONCLUSION\n\nSome of the mind's natural abilities conflict with each other, as do some Passions. Looking at how they affect social life, some people argue that no single person can be suited to every kind of civil duty. They say that strict judgment makes people critical and unwilling to forgive other people's mistakes and weaknesses. Meanwhile, a quick imagination makes thought too unsteady to distinguish right from wrong accurately. Also, sound reasoning is necessary in every deliberation and legal argument. Without it, people make rash decisions and give unjust judgments. Yet reasoning has little effect without powerful eloquence that wins attention and agreement. These abilities seem to conflict. Reasoning is based on principles of truth. Eloquence relies on accepted opinions, whether true or false, and on people's shifting and varied Passions and interests.\n\nAmong the Passions, courage—by which I mean disregard for wounds and violent death—makes people inclined to seek private revenge and sometimes to disturb public peace. Fearfulness, on the other hand, often leads people to abandon the public defense. Some say that the same person cannot have both qualities.\n\nConsidering people's differing opinions and habits more generally, they also say it is impossible to remain consistently friendly in civil life with everyone we must deal with. Almost all of the world's business consists of endless competition for honor, wealth, and authority.\n\nMy answer is that these are serious difficulties, but they are not impossibilities. Education and training can reconcile them, and sometimes do. Judgment and imagination can both have a place in one person, taking turns as the person's goal requires. The Israelites in Egypt were sometimes tied to the work of making bricks and at other times traveled around gathering straw. In the same way, judgment can sometimes concentrate on a particular issue while imagination roams the world at another time. Reason and eloquence can also work well together, perhaps not in the natural sciences but certainly in moral questions. Wherever people can make error look attractive and recommend it, they have still more opportunity to make truth attractive and recommend it, if they have the truth. Nor is fearing the laws incompatible with not fearing a public enemy, or refraining from harming others incompatible with forgiving harm done by them. Human nature, therefore, is not as inconsistent with civil duties as some believe. I knew one man who had clear judgment and a broad imagination, strong reasoning and graceful speech, courage in war and fear of the laws, all to an exceptional degree. He was my noble and honored friend Mr. Sidney Godolphin. He hated no one, and no one hated him. Sadly, he was killed early in the recent civil war while fighting for the public cause, by a hand that neither recognized him nor understood what it was doing.\n\nI would add the following to the Laws of Nature stated in the 15. Chapter: “Each person is bound by nature, as far as they can, to defend in war the authority that protects them in peacetime.” Anyone claiming a Right of Nature to preserve their own body cannot also claim a Right of Nature to destroy the person whose strength preserves them. That would plainly contradict their own claim. This law can be inferred from some of those already listed, but the times require us to emphasize and remember it.\n\nSeveral recently published English books show me that the civil wars have not yet taught people exactly when a subject becomes bound to a conqueror, what conquest is, or why it obliges people to obey a conqueror's laws. To make these matters clearer, I say that a person becomes the subject of a conqueror at the moment when, being free to submit, that person consents to be a subject, either in express words or by another adequate sign. At the end of the 21. Chapter I explained when someone is free to submit. A person with no special obligation to the former Soveraigne beyond that of an ordinary subject may submit when the necessities of their life are within the enemy's guarded territory and garrisons. At that point the former Soveraigne no longer protects them; the opposing side protects them in exchange for what they pay toward its support. Such payment is everywhere considered lawful because it is unavoidable, even though it helps the enemy. Complete submission, which is only another kind of help to the enemy, cannot therefore be considered unlawful. Besides, those who submit help the enemy with only part of their property, while those who refuse help the enemy with all of it. So submission or an agreed settlement should not be called help to the enemy but rather a loss for the enemy. If, however, someone has taken on the further obligation of a soldier, that person cannot submit to a new power while the old one still holds the field and provides the means to live, either in its armies or in its garrisons. In that case the soldier cannot say they lack protection or the means to live as a soldier. But when that support also fails, soldiers too may seek protection wherever they are most likely to find it and may lawfully submit to a new master. That is when they may lawfully do so if they choose. Once they do, they are unquestionably bound to be loyal subjects. A lawfully made contract cannot lawfully be broken.\n\nThis also tells us when people may be said to have been conquered, and what conquest and the right of a conqueror mean. Submission includes all of these things. Conquest is not victory itself. It is the acquisition, through victory, of a right over people. Someone killed is defeated but not conquered. Someone captured and put in prison or chains is also defeated but not conquered, because that person remains an enemy and may escape if able. But someone who promises obedience and is allowed to keep their life and liberty is then conquered and becomes a subject, not before. The Romans used to say their general had pacified a province, meaning in English that he had conquered it. They said victory had pacified a country when its people had promised Imperata Facere, meaning “to do what the Roman people commanded them.” That was conquest. A promise may be spoken outright or implied: spoken outright in a direct promise, implied by other signs. For instance, a person may not have been asked for an explicit promise, perhaps because that person's power is insignificant. But if the person openly lives under the conquerors' protection, they are understood to submit to the government. If they live there secretly, however, they may be treated as a spy and enemy of the state. I am not saying that they commit an injustice, since acts of open hostility are not called that. I am saying that they may justly be put to death. Similarly, if someone is outside their country when it is conquered, that person is neither conquered nor a subject. But if they return and submit to the government, they must obey it. To define conquest, then: it is acquiring the Right of Soveraignty through victory. The right is acquired when people submit and contract with the victor, promising obedience in exchange for life and liberty.\n\nIn the 29th Chapter I named defective formation as one cause of the collapse of Common-wealths. The defect is the absence of an absolute lawmaking power free to decide as it sees fit. Without it, the civil Soveraigne has to wield the sword of justice inconsistently, as though it were too hot to hold. I left out one reason for this. Rulers all want to justify the war through which they first gained power. They think their right rests on that war rather than on holding power. For instance, if English kings had a right to rule only because William the Conqueror had fought for a good cause and they were his most direct descendants, perhaps no subject anywhere in the world today would be bound to obey a Soveraigne. In their needless attempt to justify themselves, such rulers justify every successful rebellion that ambition may raise against them or their successors. So I count this among the most effective seeds of a state's destruction: conquerors demand not only that people obey them in future actions but also that people approve everything the conquerors did in the past, although scarcely any Common-wealth in the world began in a way that can be conscientiously justified.\n\nThe word “tyranny” means exactly what “sovereignty” means, whether one person or several hold power. The only difference is that people who say “tyranny” are understood to be angry with those they call tyrants. I therefore think that allowing people openly to hate tyranny is allowing them to hate the Common-wealth in general. It is another harmful seed, much like the one just described. To justify a conqueror's cause, people generally have to criticize the conquered side's cause. Yet neither judgment is needed to make the conquered obey. This is all I wish to say in reviewing the first and second parts of this work.\n\nIn the 35th Chapter, I showed at length from Scripture that, in the Jewish Common-wealth, God himself was made the Soveraigne by a pact with the people. They were therefore called his special people, to distinguish them from the rest of the world. Over the rest God ruled by his own power, not by their consent. In God's Kingdome Moses was his deputy on earth, and Moses told the people which laws God had appointed to be enforced. I did not then think it necessary to consider who carried out those laws, especially the death penalties, as carefully as I now do. We know that in Common-wealths generally, bodily punishments were carried out either by guards or other soldiers serving the sovereign power, or by people whose poverty, lack of concern for honor, and hardness of heart combined to make them seek the work. But among the Israelites, a specific law of God their Soveraigne required the people to stone anyone convicted of a capital crime. The witnesses were to cast the first stones, and then the rest of the people. The law specified who would carry out the sentence. It did not permit anyone to throw a stone before conviction and sentencing by the congregation acting as judge. The witnesses still had to be heard before execution, unless the act was committed in the congregation's presence or before lawful judges. In that case the judges themselves were sufficient witnesses. This procedure has not been fully understood, leading to the dangerous belief that someone may sometimes kill another person by a personal right based on religious zeal. It is as if executions of offenders in the ancient Kingdome of God rested on private zeal rather than the Soveraigne's command. Yet a close look at the texts that seem to support this belief shows the opposite.\n\n### Review and Conclusion, 2\n\nFirst, consider when the Levites attacked the people who had made and worshiped the golden calf and killed three thousand of them. They acted on Moses's command, which came from God, as Exod. 32.27 makes clear. When the son of an Israelite woman blasphemed God, the people who heard him did not kill him. They brought him to Moses, who kept him in custody until God gave a sentence against him, as Levit. 25.11, 12 shows. Again, when Phinehas killed Zimri and Cosbi (Numbers 25.6, 7.), he did not act under a private right of religious zeal. Their offense took place before the assembly, so no witness was needed. The law was known, and Phinehas was the heir apparent to sovereign power. Most importantly, his act was lawful only because Moses later ratified it, something Phinehas had no reason to doubt would happen. Sometimes the expectation of later ratification is necessary for a Commonwealth's safety. During a sudden rebellion, for example, anyone who can put it down with his own forces in the area where it begins may lawfully do so, and seek ratification or a pardon either during the action or afterward. Also, Numb. 35.30. expressly says, “Whoever kills the murderer must kill him on the word of witnesses.” But witnesses imply a formal court process. This rules out the claimed right of zealots to execute people. The law of Moses concerning someone who urges another person to worship idols—that is, to renounce allegiance in the kingdom of God—says (Deut. 13.8.) not to conceal that person. It commands the accuser to see that the person is put to death and to throw the first stone, but not to kill the person before a conviction. And Deut. 17. ver.4, 5, 6. lays out the procedure for an accusation of idolatry precisely. There God addresses the people as a judge and commands them to investigate the charge carefully. If they find it true, they must stone the accused, with the witness throwing the first stone. This is public condemnation, not private zeal. Similarly, if a father has a rebellious son, the law (Deut. 21. 18.) tells him to bring the son before the town judges, after which all the townspeople must stone him. Finally, St. Steven was stoned on the pretext of these laws, not on a claim of private zeal. Before he was taken away for execution, he had argued his case before the high priest. Nothing here, or anywhere else in the Bible, supports executions driven by private zeal. That zeal often combines ignorance with passion and threatens both justice and peace in a Commonwealth.\n\nIn the 36th Chapter I said that Scripture does not tell us exactly how God spoke supernaturally to Moses. I did not mean that God never spoke to him in dreams, visions, or a supernatural voice, as he spoke to other prophets. The way God spoke to Moses from the mercy seat is stated expressly in Numbers 7.89.: “From that time on, when Moses entered the tabernacle of the congregation to speak with God, he heard a voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat, which is above the ark of the testimony. From between the cherubim, God spoke to him.” But Scripture does not say what made God's way of speaking to Moses superior to his way of speaking to other prophets, such as Samuel and Abraham. God also spoke to them by a voice, that is, through a vision. Perhaps the difference was simply that Moses's vision was clearer. We cannot understand “face to face” and “mouth to mouth” literally, because God's nature is infinite and beyond human understanding.\n\nAs for the teaching of this whole work, I still see no reason to doubt that its principles are true and appropriate or that its reasoning is sound. I base the civil rights of sovereigns, and both the duties and freedoms of subjects, on the familiar natural inclinations of human beings and on the provisions of the law of nature. Anyone who claims enough reason to govern his own family should understand these things. I base those same sovereigns' authority in church matters on scriptural passages that are clear in themselves and agree with the purpose of Scripture as a whole. So I believe that anyone who reads this book simply to learn will learn from it. But those who have already committed themselves to opposing views, through their writing, public speeches, or prominent actions, will not be so easily convinced. While reading, people in that position naturally start searching for objections to what they have just read and stop paying attention to what comes next. There are bound to be many such objections at a time when people's interests are changing. Much of the teaching that helps establish a new government must conflict with what helped dissolve the old one.\n\nThe part about a Christian Commonwealth contains some new teachings. In a state that has already formally settled on the opposite views, a subject who publishes them without permission might be at fault for taking on the role of a teacher. But now people are calling not only for peace but also for truth. Offering teachings that I think are true and that plainly support peace and loyalty to people who are still deciding what to believe is like offering new wine for new casks, so that both can be preserved. I assume that when something new cannot cause trouble or disorder in a state, people are not generally so devoted to the past that they would prefer old errors to new, well-proven truths.\n\nWhat I distrust most is my writing style. Still, I believe it is clear, apart from any printing mistakes. I have left out the decorative quotations from ancient poets, speakers, and philosophers that have lately become customary. Whether this was right or wrong, I made the choice for several reasons. First, the truth of any teaching rests either on reason or on Scripture. Both can give authority to many writers, but neither gets its own authority from a writer. Second, these questions concern what is right, not what happened, so witnesses have no place in deciding them. Third, hardly any of those ancient writers avoids contradicting either himself or others at some point, which makes their testimony inadequate. Fourth, when people accept opinions solely because they are ancient, those opinions are not really their own judgments. They are words passed from mouth to mouth like a yawn. Fifth, people often have a dishonest purpose when they dress up corrupt teachings with clever phrases from other writers, like food studded with cloves. Sixth, as far as I can see, the ancient writers people quote did not consider it a mark of good style to do the same with earlier writers. Seventh, when people bring up Greek and Latin sentences unchanged, without having digested them, it shows that they have not thought them through. Finally, I respect ancient people who clearly wrote the truth or helped us find it for ourselves. But I think mere age deserves no respect. If we respect what is oldest, the present is the oldest age. If we mean the writer's own age, I doubt that the people who receive this honor were generally older when they wrote than I am as I write. On closer examination, praise for ancient authors comes not from respect for the dead but from rivalry and mutual envy among the living.\n\nIn conclusion, as far as I can tell, nothing in this entire work, or in what I previously wrote in Latin on the same subject, conflicts with God's word or with good conduct, or disturbs the public peace. So I think this book can usefully be printed and, more usefully still, taught in universities, if the people authorized to decide that question agree. Universities are the sources of teaching about civil and moral life. Preachers and members of the upper classes draw from them whatever they find and spread it among the people, both from the pulpit and in everyday conversation. We must therefore take great care to keep that teaching free of the poison of pagan political writers and the spells of deceiving spirits. Then most people will know their duties and be less likely to help a few discontented people pursue their ambitions against the state. They will also resent the payments needed for their peace and defense less. And rulers will have less reason to maintain, at public expense, an army larger than needed to protect public freedom against invasion and encroachment by foreign enemies.\n\nThis brings my discussion of civil and church government to an end. The troubles of the present time prompted me to write it, without favoritism, without directing it at particular people, and with no aim other than to show the mutual relationship between protection and obedience. Human nature and divine laws, both natural and positive, require that relationship to be observed without exception. When states are changing, truths like these are not born under favorable stars: those dismantling an old government look on them angrily, while those building a new one turn their backs on them. Even so, I do not think this work will now be condemned either by the public authority that judges teaching or by anyone who wants public peace to last. With that hope, I return to my interrupted study of natural bodies. If God gives me the health to finish it, I hope its new ideas will please people as much as new ideas about this artificial body, the Commonwealth, tend to offend them. Everyone welcomes a truth that threatens no one's advantage or pleasure.\n\nThe End","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/leviathan/translations/trn_leviathan_plain.txt"}],"retex_markdown_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/leviathan/retex.md"}}