Christianity without intending either to enlarge or contract, without considering indeed the limits by which it is bounded. This is also the method in which the same apostles enjoin the duty of servants to their masters, of children to their parents, of wives to their husbands: "Servants be subject to your masters."-" Children "obey your parents in all things.". "Wives, submit yourselves un"to your own husbands." The same concise and absolute form of expression occurs in all these precepts, the same silence as to any exceptions or distinctions; yet no one doubts but that the commands of masters, parents, and husbands, are often so immoderate, unjust, and inconsistent with other obligations, that they both may and ought to be resisted. In letters or dissertations written professedly upon separate articles of morality, we might with more reason have looked for a precise delineation of our duty, and some degree of modern accuracy in the rules which were laid down for our direction; but in those short collections of practical maxims which compose the conclusion, or some small portion, of a doctrinal, or perhaps controversial epistle, we cannot be surprised to find the author more solicitous to impress the duty, than curious to enumerate exceptions. The consideration of this distinction is alone sufficient to vindicate these passages of scripture from any explanation which may be put upon them, in favour of an unlimited passive obedience. But if we be permitted to assume a supposition, which many commentators proceed upon as a certainty, that the first Christians privately cherished an opinion, that their conversion to Christianity entitled them to new immunities, to an exemption, as of right (however they might give way to necessity,) from the authority of the Roman sovereign, we are furnished with a still more apt and satisfactory interpretation of the apostles' words. The two passages apply with great propriety to the refutation of this error; they teach the Christian convert to obey the magistrate "for the Lord's sake;" "not only for wrath, but for con"science sake;"-"there is no power but of God;" "that the pow"ers that be," even the present rulers of the Roman empire, though heathens and usurpers, seeing they are in possession of the actual and necessary authority of civil government, "are ordained of "God," and, consequently, entitled to receive obedience from those who profess themselves the peculiar servants of God, in a greater (certainly not in a less) degree than from any others. They briefly describe the offices of "civil governors, the punishment of evil "doers, and the praise of them that do well; from which description of the use of government, they justly infer the duty of subjection; which duty being as extensive as the reason upon which it is foun

ded, belongs to christians no less than to the heathen members of the community. If it be admitted, that the two apostles wrote with a view to this particular question, it will be confessed, that their words cannot be transferred to a question totally different from this, with any certainty of carrying along with us their authority and intention. There exists no resemblance between the case of a primitive convert, who disputed the jurisdiction of the Roman government over a disciple of christianity, and his who, acknowledging the general authority of the state over all its subjects, doubts whether that authority be not, in some important branch of it, so ill constituted, or abused, as to warrant the endeavours of the people to bring about a reformation by force. Nor can we judge what reply the apostles would have made to this second question, if it had been proposed to them, from any thing they have delivered upon the first; any more than in the two consultations above described, it could be known beforehand what I would say in the latter, from which I gave to the former.

6.6

The only defect in this account is, that neither the Scriptures, nor any subsequent history of the early ages of the church furnish any direct attestation of the existence of such disaffected sentiments amongst the primitive converts. They supply indeed some circumstances which render probable the opinion, that extravagant notions of the political rights of the Christian state were at that time entertained by many proselytes to the religion. From the question proposed to Christ, Is it lawful to give tribute unto Cesar?" it may be presumed that doubts had been started in the Jewish. schools concerning the obligation, or even lawfulness, of submission to the Roman yoke. The accounts delivered by Josephus, of various insurrections of the Jews of that and the following age, excited by this principle, or upon this pretence, confirm the presumption. For, as the Christians were at first chiefly taken from the Jews, confounded with them by the rest of the world, and from the affinity of the two religions, apt to intermix the doctrines of both, it is not to be wondered at that a tenet so flattering to the self-importance of those who embraced it, should have been communicated to the new institution. Again, the teachers of Christianity, amongst the privileges which their religion conferred upon its professors, were wont to extol the "liberty into which they were "called,"-" in which Christ had made them free." This liberty, which was intended of a deliverance from the various servitude, in which they had heretofore lived, to the domination of sinful passions, to the superstition of the Gentile idolatry, or the encumbe ed ritual of the Jewish dispensation, might by some be interpre

ted to signify an emancipation from all restraint which was imposed by an authority merely human. At least, they might be represented by their enemies as maintaining notions of this dangerous tendency. To some error or calumny of this kind, the words of St. Peter, seem to allude:-"For so is the will of God, that with "well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: as free and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness (i. e. sedition,) but as the servants of God." After all, if any one think this conjecture too feebly supported by testimony to be relied upon in the interpretation of Scripture, he will then revert to the considerations alleged in the preceding part of this chapter.

After so copious an account of what we apprehend to be the general design and doctrine of these much agitated passages, little need be added in explanation of particular clauses. St. Paul has

said, "Whosoever resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of "God." This phrase, "the ordinance of God," is by many so interpreted as to authorize the most exalted and superstitious ideas of the regal character. But surely such interpreters have sacrificed truth to adulation. For in the first place, the expression, as used by St. Paul, is just as applicable to one kind of government, and to one kind of succession, as to another;-to the elective magistrates of a pure republic, as to an absolute hereditary monarch. In the next place, it is not affirmed of the supreme magistrate exclusively, that he is the ordinance of God; the title, whatever it imports, belongs to every inferior officer of the state as much as to the highest. The divine right of kings is like the divine right of constables, the law of the land, or even actual and quiet possession of their office ;- —a right ratified, we humbly presume, by the divine approbation, so long as obedience to their authority appears to be necessary or conducive to the common welfare. Princes are ordained of God by virtue only of that general decree, by which he assents and adds the sanction of his will to every law of society which promotes his own purpose, the communication of human happiness; according to which idea of their origin and constitution (and without any repugnancy to the words of St. Paul,) they are by St. Peter denominated the ordinance of man.

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CHAPTER V.

OF CIVIL LIBERTY.

CIVIL liberty is the not being restrained by any law, but what conduces in a greater degree to the public welfare.

To do what we will, is natural liberty; to do what we will, consistently with the interest of the community to which we belong, is civil liberty; that is to say, the only liberty to be desired in a state of civil society.

I should wish, no doubt, to be allowed to act in every instance as I pleased, but I reflect that the rest also of mankind would then do the same; in which state of universal independence and self-direction, I should meet with so many checks and obstacles to my own will, from the interference and opposition of other men's, that not only my happiness, but my liberty, would be less, than whilst the whole community were subjected to the dominion of equal laws.

The boasted liberty of a state of nature exists only in a state of solitude. In every kind and degree of union and intercourse with his species, the liberty of the individual is augmented by the very laws which restrain it; because he gains more from the limitation of other men's freedom than he suffers by the diminution of his own. Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure.

The definition of civil liberty above laid down imports, that the laws of a free people impose no restraints upon the private will of the subject, which do not conduce in a greater degree to the public happiness; by which it is intimated, 1st, That restraint itself is an evil; 2dly, That this evil ought to be overbalanced by some public advantage; 3dly, That the proof of this advantage lies upon the legislature; 4thly, That a law being found to produce no sensible good effects, is a sufficient reason for repealing it, as adverse and injurious to the rights of a free citizen, without demanding specific evidence of its bad effects. This maxim might be remembered with advantage in a revision of many laws of this country; especially of the game laws; of the poor laws, so far as they lay restrictions upon the poor themselves; of the laws against Papists and Dissenters; and, amongst a people enamoured to excess and jealous of their liberty, it seems a matter of surprise, that this principle has been so imperfectly attended to.

The degree of actual liberty always bearing, according to this

account of it, a reversed proportion to the number and severity of the restrictions which are either useless, or the utility of which does not outweigh the evil of the restraint, it follows, that every nation possesses some, no nation perfect liberty; that this liberty may be enjoyed under every form of government: that it may be impaired indeed, or increased, but that it is neither gained, nor, lost, nor recovered, by any single regulation, change or event whatever: that, consequently, those popular phrases which speak of a free people; of a nation of slaves; which call one revolution the era of liberty, or another the loss of it; with many expressions of a like absolute form, are intelligible only in a comparitive sense.

Hence also we are enabled to apprehend the distinction between personal and civil liberty. A citizen of the freest republic in the world may be imprisoned for his crimes; and though his personal freedom be restrained by bolts and fetters, so long as his cofinement is the effect of a beneficial public law, his civil liberty is not invaded. If this instance appear dubious, the following will be plainer. A passenger from the Levant, who upon his return to England, should be conveyed to a Lazaretto by an order of quarantine, with whatever impatience he might desire his enlargement, and though he saw a guard placed at the door to oppose his escape, or even ready to destroy his life if he attempted it, would hardly accuse government of encroaching upon his civil freedom; nay, might perhaps rather congratulate himself, that he had at length set his foot again in a land of liberty. The manifest expediency of the measure not only justifies it, but reconciles the most odious. confinement with the perfect possession and the loftiest notions of civil liberty. And if this be true of the coercion of a prison, that it is compatible with a state of civil freedom, it cannot with reason be disputed of those more moderate constraints which the ordinary operation of government imposes upon the will of the individual. It is not the rigour, but the inexpediency of laws and acts of authority, which makes them tyrannical.

There is another idea of civil liberty, which though neither so simple nor so accurate as the former, agrees better with the signification, which the usage of common discourse, as well as the example of many respectable writers upon the subject, has affixed to the term. This idea places liberty in security; making it to consist not merely in an actual exemption from the constraint of useless and noxious laws and acts of dominion, but in being free from the danger of having any such hereafter imposed or exercised. Thus, speaking of the political state of modern Europe, we are accustomed to say of Sweden, that she hath lost her liberty by the