A92147:268
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.
P. Prelate. In whom so ever this power of Government be, it is the 1only remedy to supply all defects, and to set right what ever is disjointed in Church and State, and the subject of this super-intending power must be free from all error in Judgement and Practice, and so we have a Pope in temporalibus; and if the Parliament err, the people must take order with them, else God hath left Church and State remediless. Ans. This is stolen from Barolaius also; 1. but the same Barclaius 2saith, Si Rex regnum suum alien• ditioni manciparit, regno cadit. If the King shall sell his Kingdom, or enslave it to a foreign power, he falleth from all right to his Kingdom: but who shall execute any such Law against him, not the people, not the Peers, not the Parliament; for this Mancipium ventris & aulae, this slave ⟨p. 63⟩saith, p. 147. I know no power in any to punish or curb Sovereignty, but in Almighty God. 2. We see no super-intending power on earth in King or people infallible, nor is the last power of taking order with a Prince who enslaveth his Kingdom to a foreign power3 placed by us in the people, because they cannot err; Court flatterer• ▪ who teach that the will of the Prince is the measure of all right and wrong, of Law and no Law; and above all Law must hold that the King is a temporal Pope, both in Ecclesiastical and Civill matters; but because they cannot so readily destroy themselves, (the law of Nature having given to them a contrary internal principle of self preservation) as a Tyrant who doth care for himself, and not for the people. 3. And because Extremis morbis extrema remedia in an extraordinary exigent, when Ahab and Jezebel did undo the Church of God, and Tyrannize▪over both the bodies and consciences of Priest, Prophet, and people, Elijah procured the convention of the States, and Elijah with the peoples help killed all Baals Priests, the King looking on, and no question, against his heart. In this case I think its more then evident that the people resumed their power. 4. We teach not that people should supply all defects in Government, nor that they should use their power when any thing is done amiss by the King, no more then the King is to cut off the whole people of God, when they refuse an Idolatrous service obtruded upon them against all Law;