A92147:241
A treatise of civil policy
A treatise of civil policy: being a resolution of forty three questions concerning prerogative, right and privilege, in reference to the supreme prince and the people. / By Samuel Rutherford professor of divinity of St Andrews in Scotland.A treatise of civil policy: being a resolution of forty three questions concerning prerogative, right and priviledge, in reference to the supream prince and the people. / By Samuel Rutherford professor of divintiy of St Andrews in Scotland.
London, : Printed and are to be sold by Simon Miller at the Star in St Pauls Church-yard near the West end., 1657 i.e. 1656
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.
QUEST. VIII. Whether the Prelate proveth by force of reason, that the people cannot be capable of any power of Government?
P. Prelate. God and nature giveth no power in vain, and which may not be reduced into action; but an active power, or a power of actual governing, was never acted by the Community; therefore this power cannot be seated in the Community as in the prime and proper subject; and it cannot be in every individual person of a Community, because Government intrinsically and essentially includeth a specified distinction of Governors, and some to be governed; and to speak properly, there can no other power be conceived in the Community naturally and properly, but only potestas passiva regiminis, a capacity or susceptabilitie to be governed, by one or by moe, just as the first matter desireth a form. This obligeth all, by the dictate of Natures law, to submit to actual government: and as it is in every individual person, it is not merely and properly voluntary, because howsoever nature dictates, that government is necessary for the safety of the society, yet every singular person, by corruption and self-love, hath a natural averseness and repugnancy to submit to any; every man would be a King himself: This universal desire, app•titus universalis aut naturalis, or universal propension to Government, is like the act of the understanding assenting to the first undeniable principles of truth, and to the wills general propension to happiness in general, which propension is not a free act, except our new Statists, as they have changed their faith, so they overturn true reason, it will puzzle them infinitely to make any thing in its kind passive, really active and collative of positive acts and effects. All know, no man can give what he hath not: an old Philosopher would laugh at him who would say, that a matter perfected and actuated by union, with a form, could at pleasure shake off its form, and marry it self to another: they may as well say, every wife hath power to resume her freedom, and marry another, as that any such power active is in the Community, or any power to cast off Monarchy.