A92147:393
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.
nature in a forced people, so soon as they can escape from a violent Conqueror maketh them a free people: and si solo tempore (saith Ferd. Vasquez, l. 2. c. 82. n. 6.) justificatur subjectio, solo tempore facilius justificabitur liberatio.
Assert. 20. All the Goods of the Subjects belongeth not to the1 King: I presuppose, that the division of Goods doth not necessarily flow from the law of nature, for God made man before the fall, Lord of the creatures indefinitely; but what Goods be Peters, and not Pauls, we know not. But supposing mans sin, though the light of the Sun and Air be common to all, and religious places be proper to none, yet it is morally unpossible, that there should not be a distinction of meum & tuum, mine and thine: and the decalogue forbidding theft, and coveting the wife of another man, (yet is she the wife of Peter, not of Thomas by free election, not by an act of natures law) doth evidence to us, that the division of things is so far forth, (men now being in the state of sin) of the law of nature, that it hath evident ground in the Law of nations; and thus far natural, that the heat that I have from my own coat and cloak, and the nourishment from my own meat, are physically incommunicable to any*. But I hasten to prove the Proposition: If 1. I have leave to premit, that in time of necessity all things are common by Gods Law: A man travelling, might eat Grapes in his neighbours vineyard, though he was not licensed to carry any away. I doubt if David wanting money, was necessitated ⟨p. 121⟩to pay money for the Show-bread, or for Goliaths sword, supposing these to be the very Goods of private men, and ordinarily to be bought and sold: natures Law in extremity, for self preservation, hath rather a Prerogative Royal above all Laws of Nations, and all civill Laws then any mortal King; and therefore by the civill Law, all are the Kings, in case of extreme necessity; in this meaning, any one man is obliged to give all he hath for the good of the Common-wealth, and so far the good of the King, in as far as he is head and father of the Common-wealth