A92147:902
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. The cutting off of a contagious member, that by a Gangrene, would corrupt the whole body, is well warranted by nature, because the safety of the whole is to be preferred to the safety of a part: Nor is it much that Royalists say the King being the head, destroy him, & the whole body the Common-wealth is dissolved; as cut off a mans head, & the life of the whole man is taken away; Because, 1. God cutteth off the spirits of tyrannous Kings, and yet the Commonwealth1 is not dissolved, no more then when a Leopard or a wild Boar, running through children is killed, it can be the destruction of all the children in the land. 2. A king indefinitely is referred to the Common-wealth as an adequate head to a Monarchical Kingdom, ⟨p. 332⟩and remove all Kings and the politic body as Monarchical, in its frame, is not Monarchical, but it leaveth not off to be a politic body, seeing it hath other Judges, but the natural body without the head cannot live. 2. This or that tyrannous King, being a transient mortal thing, cannot be referred to the immortal Common-wealth, as it is adequate correlate. They say, the King •ever dieth, yet this King can dye; an immortal politic body, such as the Common-wealth, must have an immortal head, and that is a King as a King; not this or that man, possibly a tyrant, who is for the time (and eternal things abstract from time) only a King.
3. The cutting off of a contagious member, that by a Gangrene, would corrupt the whole body, is well warranted by nature, because the safety of the whole is to be preferred to the safety of a part: Nor is it much that Royalists say the King being the head, destroy him, & the whole body the Comon-wealth is dissolved; as cut off a mans head, & the life of the whole man is taken away; Because, 1. God cutteth off the spirits of tyrannous Kings, and yet the Commonwealth1 is not dissolved, no more then when a Leopard or a wilde Boare, running through children is killed, it can be the destruction of all the children in the land. 2. A king indefinitely is referred to the Common-wealth as an adequat head to a Monarchicall Kingdome, ⟨p. 332⟩