A92147:707
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.
3. It is poor hungry skill in this New Statist, (for so he nameth all Scotland) to say, that any Laws are made for private interests, 1and the good of some individuals. Laws are not Laws, if they be not made for the safety of the people.
3. It is poore hungry skill in this New Statist, (for so he nameth all Scotland) to say, that any Lawes are made for private interests, 1and the good of some individuals. Lawes are not Lawes, if they be not made for the safetie of the people.
- 1The Kings supposed Prerogative, nothing, in comparison of the lives and blood of so many thousands as are killed in England and Ireland.
4. It is false, that the King in a public danger is to care for himself as a man, with the ruin and loss of any: Yea, in a public calamity, a good King, as David, is to desire he may die, that the Public may be saved, 2 Samuel, 24. 17. Exodus 32. 32. It is commended of all, that the Emperor Otho, yea and Richard the 2. of England, as M. Speed saith, Hist. of England, p. 757. resigned their Kingdoms to eschew the effusion of blood. The Prelate adviseth the King to pass over all laws of Nature, and slay thousands of innocents, and destroy Church and State of three Kingdoms, for a straw, and supposed Prerogative Royal. Now certainly, Prerogative, and Absoluteness to do good and ill, must be inferior to a Law, the end whereof is the safety of the People. For David willeth the pestilence may take him away, and so his Prerogative, that the People may be saved, 2 Sam. 24. 17. for Prerogative is cumulative, to do good, not privative to do ill; and so is but a mean to defend both the Law and the People.