shallowness of mind, or else a carnal admiring of that worldly pomp and greatness, from whence they see him fallen; or rather, lastly, a dissembled and seditious pity, feigned of industry to beget new discord. As for mercy, if it be to a tyrant, under which name they themselves have cited him so oft in the hearing of God, of angels, and the holy church assembled, and there charged him with the spilling of more innocent blood by far than ever Nero did, undoubtedly the mercy which they pretend is the mercy of wicked men; and "their mercies," we read," are cruelties;" hazarding the welfare of a whole nation, to have saved one whom they so oft have termed Agag, and vilifying the blood of many Jonathans who have saved Israel; insisting with much niceness on the unnecessariest clause of their covenant wrested, wherein the fear of change and the absurd contradiction of a flattering hostility had hampered them, but not scrupling to give away for compliments, to an implacable revenge, the heads of many thousand Christians more.

Another sort there is, who coming in the course of these affairs to have their share in great actions above the form of law or custom, at least to give their voice and approbation; begin to swerve and almost shiver at the majesty and grandeur of some noble deed, as if they were newly entered into a great sin; disputing precedents, forms, and circumstances, when the commonwealth nigh perishes for want of deeds in substance, done with just and faithful expedition. To these I wish better instruction, and virtue equal to their calling; the former of which, that is to say, instruction, I shall endeavour, as my duty is, to bestow on them; and exhort them not to startle from the just and pious resolution of adhering, with all their strength and assistance, to the present parliament and army, in the glorious way wherein justice and victory hath set them-the only warrants through all ages, next under immediate revelation, to exercise supreme powerin those proceedings, which hitherto appear equal to what hath been done in any age or nation heretofore justly or magnanimously.

Nor let them be discouraged or deterred by any new apostate scarecrows, who, under shew of giving counsel, send out their barking monitories and mementoes, empty of aught else but the spleen of a frustrated faction. For how

can that pretended counsel be either sound or faithful, when they that give it see not, for madness and vexation of their ends lost, that those statutes and scriptures which both falsely and scandalously they wrest against their friends and associates, would, by sentence of the common adversary, fall first and heaviest upon their own heads? * Neither by mild and tender dispositions be foolishly softened from their duty and perseverance with the unmasculine rhetoric of any puling priest or chaplain, sent as a friendly letter of advice, for fashion's sake in private, and forthwith published by the sender himself, that we may know how much of friend there was in it, to cast an odious envy upon them to whom it was pretended to be sent in charity. Nor let any man be deluded by either the ignorance or the notorious hypocrisy and self-repugnance of our dancing divines, who have the conscience and the boldness to come with scripture in their mouths, glossed and fitted for their turns with a double contradictory sense, transforming the sacred verity of God to an idol with two faces, looking at once two several ways; and with the same quotations to charge others, which in the same case they made serve to justify themselves. For while the hope to be made classic and provincial lords led them on, while pluralities greased them thick and deep, to the shame and scandal of religion, more than all the sects and heresies they exclaim against; then to fight against the king's person, and no less a party of his lords and commons, or to put

On the conduct of the Presbyterians, Dr. Symmons, himself belonging to the movement party in politics, makes the following pertinent remarks: "In the course of this work the presbyterians obtain much of the author's notice; and their conduct is exposed by him with the severity it deserved. It was difficult indeed to animadvert too strongly upon the inconsistency of men who, after resisting the authority of their sovereign, after making him the aim of their devout execrations from the pulpit and of their artillery in the field, after hunting and pursuing him,' to use the author's own words, 'round about the kingdom with fire and sword;' after dethroning, seizing, and imprisoning him, now clamoured against the natural result of their own actions; and, pretending conscience and the covenant, felt extreme tenderness for the inviolability and sacredness of the king's person, which they had endangered by their war, and violated by their chains. It would have been well for them if they had attended to the salutary warning given to them by our author, and, withholding their confidence from men exasperated beyond the just hope of a reconciliation, had forborne to coalesce with the royalists, by whom they were soon to be crushed in one common ruin with their im mediate enemies, the independents."-(Life of Milton, p. 299-300.)-ED.

force upon both the houses, was good, was lawful, was no resisting of superior powers; they only were powers not to be resisted, who countenanced the good, and punished the evil.

But now that their censorious domineering is not suffered to be universal, truth and conscience to be freed, tithes and pluralities to be no more, though competent allowance provided, and the warm experience of large gifts, and they so good at taking them; yet now to exclude and seize upon impeached members, to bring delinquents without exemption to a fair tribunal by the common national law against murder, is now to be no less than Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. He who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God and saints, laden with all the innocent blood spilt in three kingdoms, and so to be fought against; is now, though nothing penitent or altered from his first principles, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the Lord's anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned. As if this only were obedience, to preserve the mere useless bulk of his person, and that only in prison, not in the field, not to disobey his commands, deny him his dignity and office, everywhere to resist his power, but where they think it only surviving in their own faction.

But who in particular is a tyrant, cannot be determined in a general discourse, otherwise than by supposition; his particular charge, and the sufficient proof of it, must determine that which I leave to magistrates, at least to the uprighter sort of them, and of the people, though in number less by many, in whom faction least hath prevailed above the law of nature and right reason, to judge as they find cause. this I dare own as part of my faith, that if such a one there be, by whose commission whole massacres have been committed on his faithful subjects,* his provinces offered to pawn

But

• The following are a few of the crimes which Milton, in the “Eikonoklastes" imputes to Charles I. "After the suspected poisoning of his father, not inquired into, but smothered up, and him protected and advanced to the very half of his kingdom, who was accused in parliament to be author of the fact; (with much more evidence than Duke Dudley, that false protector, is accused upon record to have poisoned Edward the Sixth ;) after all his rage and persecution, after so many years of cruel war, on his people in three kingdoms! Whence the author of Truths Manifest,' a Scotsman, not unacquainted with affairs, positively affirms, that there hath been more Christian blood shed by the commission, approbation, and connivance of King Charles and his father, James, in the latter end of their reigns, than in

*

or alienation, as the hire of those whom he had solicited to come in and destroy whole cities and countries; be he king, or tyrant, or emperor, the sword of justice is above him; in whose hand soever is found sufficient power to avenge the effusion, and so great a deluge of innocent blood. For if all human power to execute, not accidentally but intendedly, the wrath of God upon evil-doers without exception, be of God; then that power, whether ordinary, or if that fail, extraordinary, so executing that intent of God, is lawful, and not to be resisted. But to unfold more at large this whole question, though with all expedient brevity, I shall here set down, from first beginning, the original of kings; how and wherefore exalted to that dignity above their brethren; and from thence shall prove, that turning to tyranny they may be as lawfully deposed and punished, as they were at first elected this I shall do by authorities and reasons, not learnt in corners among schisms and heresies, as our doubling divines are ready to calumniate, but fetched out of the midst of choicest and most authentic learning, and no prohibited authors; nor many heathen, but Mosaical, Christian, orthodoxal, and, which must needs be more convincing to our adversaries, presbyterial.

No man, who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny, that all men naturally were born free,† being the image and

the Ten Roman Persecutions. Not to speak of those many whippings, pillories, and other corporal inflictions, whereof his reign also, before this war, was not unbloody: some have died in prison under cruel restraint, others in banishment, whose lives were shortened through the rigour of that persecution, wherewith so many years he infested the true church." "Yet here," in the Eikon Basilikè, he asks, "whose innocent blood he hath shed, what widows' or orphans' tears can witness against him?"-(Eikonoklastes, §. 9.)-ED.

What he here alludes to is explained at large in the "Eikonoklastes," where he says, "after the beginning of this parliament, whom he saw so resolute and unanimous to relieve the commonwealth, and that the Earl of Strafford was condemned to die, other of his evil counsellors impeached and imprisoned; to shew there wanted not evil counsel within himself sufficient to begin a war upon his subjects, though no way by them provoked, he sends an agent with letters to the King of Denmark, requiring aid against the parliament and that aid was coming, when divine Providence, to divert them, sent a sudden torrent of Swedes into the bowels of Denmark." (§. 10. See also §. 12, 13, 18, 21, 22.)-ED.

+ But Sir Robert Filmer, who made pretensions to know something, and those who, since his time, have stood up in defence of absolute monarchy,

resemblance of God himself, and were, by privilege above all the creatures, born to command, and not to obey: and that they lived so, till from the root of Adam's transgression falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and jointly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came cities, towns, and commonwealths.* And because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needful to ordain some authority that might restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right.

This authority and power of self-defence and preservation being originally and naturally in every one of them, and unitedly in them all; for ease, for order, and lest each man should be his own partial judge, they communicated and derived either to one, whom for the eminence of his wisdom and integrity they chose above the rest, or to more than one, whom they maintain, on the contrary, that "all men are born slaves;" and it must be acknowledged that, in most countries, experience is on their side. Upon this proposition, however, Locke makes himself merry in his first book on Government, observing, that "we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us we are all born slaves, and must continue so, there is no remedy for it: life and thraldom we entered upon together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other." Sir Robert Filmer's argument is ingenious. "Adam," he says, was an absolute monarch, and so are all princes ever since." But, as we are all descended from Adam, we must all be princes, born with the same right to absolute dominion over each other; and it is some obscure perception of this truth, some secret inkling of their indefeasible rights, that urges so many of Adam's children to contend for empire. However, if princes would be content with the measure of authority possessed by Adam, and seek no other subjects than themselves, there would be few inclined to dispute their pretensions.-ED.

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* Aristotle, who, in the first book of his Politics, has many very ingenious speculations on the origin and progress of society, observes, that "the union of various villages forms at length a city (Toλiç) or commonwealth, that finished fabric of society reaching, as near as may be, the bound of perfectness, self-sufficient and complete, constituted for safety, and productive of happiness." (c. 2.) And Goguet, a learned and sensible, though, in some things, a prejudiced writer, has traced more laboriously, with the help of our modern voyagers and travellers, the various steps by which man rises from a state of barbarism to the enjoyment of just laws and a free government. (Origine des Loix, t. i. p. 14—32.) Plato, in his "Republic and Laws," enters into the question in his usual profound and original way. See also Locke on Government, b. ii. c. 8.- ED.