A92147:372
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.
yea should not God have given the sword or power of punishing ill doers, since that power should have been in vain, if there had been no violence, nor bloodshed, or sin on the earth: for the power of the sword and of lawful war, is given to men now in the state of sin. 4. Fatherly government and power is from the bosom and marrow of that fountain law of nature; but Royal power is not from the law of nature, more then Aristocratical or Democratical power. D. Ferne saith, Monarchy is not jure divino, (I am not1 of his mind) nor yet from the law of Nature, but, ductu naturae, by the guidance of nature. Sure it is from a supervenient commandment of God, added to the first law of nature, establishing Fatherly power. 5. Children having their life and first breathings of nature from their parents, must be in a more entire relation from their father, then from their Prince: Subjects have not their Being natural, but their civill, politic and peaceable well-being from their ⟨p. 113⟩Prince. 6. A father is a father by generation, and giving the being of nature to children, and is a natural head and root, without the free consent and suffrages of his children, and is essentially a father to one child, as Adam was to one Cain: but a Prince is a Prince by the free suffrages of a community, and cannot be a King to one only, and he is the politic head of a civill Corporation. 7. A father, so long as his children liveth can never leave off to be a father, though he were mad, and furious, though he be the most wicked man on earth. Qui genuit filium non potest non genuisse filium, what is once past cannot by any power be not passed, a father is a father for ever. But by confession of Royalists, as Barclay, Hug. Grotius, and Arnisaeus and others grant, if a King sell his subjects by sea or land to other nations, if he turn a furious Nero, he may be dethroned, and the power that created the King under such express conditions, as if the King violate them by his own consent, he shall be put from the Throne, may cease to be a King, and if a stronger King conquer a King and his subjects, Royalists •ay the conqueror is a lawful King; and so the conquered King must also lawfully come down from his Throne, and turn a lawful captive sitting in the dust. 8. Learned Politicians, as Bartholomeus Romulus, Defens. part. 1. num. 153. Joannes de Anania in c. fin.