A92147:882
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.
Assert. 3. By the place 1 Pet. 2. The servant unjustly buffeted is1 not to buffet his master again, but to bear patiently as Christ did, who when he was reviled, did not revile again. Not because the place condemneth resistance for self-defence, but because buffeting again is formally re-offending, not defending; defending is properly a warding of a blow or stroke: if my neighbour come to kill me, and I can by no means save my life by flight, I may defend my self, and all Divines say, I may rather kill, ere I be killed, because I am nearer by the law of nature, and dearer to my self, and my own life then to my brother: but if I kill him out of malice, or hatred, the act of defending, by the unlawful manner of doing, becometh an act of offending, and murder, whence the mind of the blood-shedder will ⟨p. 321⟩vary the nature of the action, from whence this corollary doth naturally issue, that the physical action of taking away the life maketh2 not murder, nor homicide, and so the physical action of offending my neighbour is not murder: Abraham may kill his son, he for whom the cities of refuge were ordained, and did kill his brother, yet not hating him, he was not, by Gods law, judged a murderer. And 2. It necessarily hence followeth, that an act which is physically an act of offending my brother, yea even to the taking away of his life is often morally and legally an act of lawful self-defence: an offending of another necessitated from the sole invention of self-defence is no more but an act of innocent self defence: if David with his men had killed any of Sauls men, in a set battle, David and his men only intending self defence, the warren Davids part was mere defensive, for physical actions of killing, indifferent of themselves, yet imperated by a principle of natural self-defence, and clothed with this formal end of self-defence, or according to the substance of the action, the act is of self-defence. If therefore one shall wound me deadly, and I know it is my death, after that, to kill the killer of my self, I being only a private man, must be no act of self-defence, but of homicide, because it cannot be imperated by a sinless dictate of a natural conscience, for this end of self-defence, after I know I am killed.