A57975:858
Lex, Rex
Lex, rex The law and the prince : a dispute for the just prerogative of king and people : containing the reasons and causes of the most necessary defensive wars of the kingdom of Scotland and of their expedition for the aid and help of their dear brethren of England : in which their innocency is asserted and a full answer is given to a seditious pamphlet entitled Sacro-sancta regum majestas, or, The sacred and royal prerogative of Christian kings, under the name of J. A. but penned by Jo. Maxwell the excommunicate P. Prelate. : with a scriptural confutation of the ruinous grounds of W. Barclay, H. Grotius, H. Arnisœus, Ant. de Domi P. Bishop of Spalata, and of other late anti-magistratical royalists, as the author of Ossorianum, D. Fern, E. Symmons, the doctors of Aberdeen, &c. : in XLIV questions.Lex, rex The law and the prince : a dispute for the just prerogative of king and people : containing the reasons and causes of the most necessary defensive wars of the kingdom of Scotland and of their expedition for the ayd and help of their dear brethren of England : in which their innocency is asserted and a full answer is given to a seditious pamphlet intituled Sacro-sancta regum majestas, or, The sacred and royall prerogative of Christian kings, under the name of J. A. but penned by Jo. Maxwell the excommunicate P. Prelat. : with a scripturall confutation of the ruinous grounds of W. Barclay, H. Grotius, H. Arnisœus, Ant. de Domi P. Bishop of Spalata, and of other late anti-magistratical royalists, as the author of Ossorianum, D. Fern, E. Symmons, the doctors of Aberdeen, &c. : in XLIV questions.
London: printed for John Field, 1644London: printed for Iohn Field, 1644
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
1Assert. 3. By the place 1 Pet. 2. The servant unjustly buffeted is not to buffet his master again, but to bear patiently as Christ did, who when he was reviled, did not revile again. Not because the place condemneth resistance for self-defence, but because buffeting again is formally re-offending, not defending; defending is properly a warding of a blow or stroke: if my neighbour come to kill me, and I can by no means save my life by flight, I may defend my self, and all Divines say, I may rather kill, ere I be killed, because I am nearer by the law of nature, and dearer to my self, and my own life then to my brother: but if I kill him out of malice, or hatred, the act of defending, by the unlawful manner of doing, becometh an act of offending, and murder, whence the mind of the blood-shedder will ⟨p. 321⟩vary the nature of the action, from whence this corollary doth naturally issue, that the physical action of taking away the life maketh not murder, nor homicide,2 and so the physical action of offending my neighbour is not murder: Abraham may kill his son, he for whom the cities of refuge were ordained, and did kill his brother, yet not hating him, he was not, by Gods law, judged a murderer. And 2. It necessarily hence followeth, that an act which is physically an act of offending my brother, yea even to the taking away of his life is often morally and legally an act of lawful self-defence: an offending of another necessitated from the sole invention of self-defence is no more but an act of innocent self defence: if David with his men had killed any of Sauls men, in a set battle, David and his men only intending self defence, the war •n Davids part was mere defensive, for physical actions of killing, indifferent of themselves, yet imp•rated by a principle of natural self-defence, and clothed with this formal end of self-defence, or according to the substance of the action, the act is of self-defence. If therefore one shall wound me deadly, and I know it is my death, after that, to kill the killer of my self, I being only a private man, must be no act of self-defence, but of homicide, because it cannot be imperated by a sinless dictate of a natural conscience, for this end of self-defence, after I know I am killed.