1651 2026
This is an AI modernization of Leviathan into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Thomas Hobbes wrote this book in Paris. He had left England in 1640, at fifty-two, because a manuscript of his defending the king's authority was circulating and Parliament had begun arresting men for less. He stayed away eleven years, teaching mathematics for a while to the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. While he wrote, England fought two civil wars and cut off the head of Charles I in January 1649. Leviathan was published in London in 1651, and Hobbes came home that year and made his peace with the government that had won.
So the argument is not speculation about a hypothetical past. When Hobbes describes what happens to people once there is no common power over them, he is describing something he had just watched from across the Channel. Without such a power there is no industry, no farming, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, and continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. That is five adjectives. It is almost always quoted as three. The claim underneath it is thinner than its reputation: not that people are monsters, but that they are roughly equal in strength and cunning, so that anybody can kill anybody, and that fear alone is then enough to produce a war of every man against every man. The way out is an agreement to hand the right of self-defence to one sovereign power, because covenants, without the sword, are but words.
The book is longer and stranger than the part everybody knows. It runs to forty-seven chapters in four parts, and the state of nature occupies one of them. Slightly over half the whole text is about religion: what Scripture actually means by spirit, prophet, miracle, hell and the kingdom of God, who has the right to say what it means, and why the Roman church is the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. That was the live quarrel in 1651. Hobbes was arguing that no church can hold authority independent of the state. This edition contains the whole thing, all four parts and the Review and Conclusion, which is the section that told Englishmen when they could lawfully submit to whoever had won.
It satisfied nobody. Royalists read the Conclusion as a licence for Cromwell, churchmen read the rest as atheism, and in 1666 a committee of the Commons named the book in a bill against profaneness. Hobbes burned papers and never again published on religion in England. He is also very funny, in a dry and contemptuous way, particularly about universities. Rousseau's Social Contract and Burke's Reflections are both in this collection, and all three men are arguing with each other.
Part I: Of Man
Part II: Of Commonwealth
Part III: Of a Christian Commonwealth
Part IV: Of the Kingdom of Darkness
To my most honored friend, Mr. Francis Godolphin of Godolphin.
Honored Sir,
Your most worthy brother, Mr. Sidney Godolphin, while he lived, was kind enough to think my studies worth something — and, as you know, to back that good opinion with real acts of generosity, great in themselves and greater still for the worth of the man who gave them. There is no virtue that fits a man for the service of God or the service of his country, for civil society or for private friendship, that did not show plainly in everything he did — not as something acquired out of necessity, or put on for the occasion, but inborn, shining out of a generous nature. So in honor and gratitude to him, and with devotion to you, I humbly dedicate to you this discourse of mine on the commonwealth.
I don't know how the world will receive it, or how it may reflect on those who seem to favor it. The road I am walking is lined on one side by people fighting for too much liberty, and on the other by people fighting for too much authority, and it is hard to pass between those two points unwounded. Still, it seems to me that an effort to strengthen the civil power should not be condemned by the civil power itself; nor should private men, by attacking that effort, announce that they think such power is already too great.
Besides, I am not speaking of men, but in the abstract, of the seat of power — like those simple and impartial creatures in the Roman Capitol that defended the people inside with their noise, not because of who those people were, but because that is where they were. So I offend no one, I think, except those outside the walls, or anyone inside (if there is any such person) who favors them.
What may give the most offense are certain texts of Holy Scripture that I cite for purposes other than the ones they are ordinarily put to by others. But I have done this with due submission, and also — given my subject — out of necessity. For those texts are the outworks of the enemy: the forward fortifications from which they attack the civil power.
If, despite all this, you find my work generally condemned, you may excuse yourself by saying that I am a man who loves his own opinions and thinks everything he says is true; that I honored your brother, and honor you; and that on the strength of that, I have presumed — without your knowledge — to take the title of being, as I truly am,
Sir,
Your most humble and most obedient servant, Thomas Hobbes.
Paris, April 15/25, 1651.
Nature — the art by which God has made and governs the world — can be imitated by the art of man, here as in so many other things, even to the point that man can make an artificial animal. After all, life is just a motion of limbs, set going from some central part inside. So why shouldn't we say that all automata — machines that move themselves by springs and wheels, the way a watch does — have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring? What are the nerves, but so many strings? What are the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, just as the maker intended?
But art goes further still, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature: man himself. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, civitas), which is nothing other than an artificial man — though one of greater stature and strength than the natural man, for whose protection and defense it was built.
In this artificial man, sovereignty — the supreme power, whether held by a king or an assembly — is an artificial soul, giving life and motion to the whole body. The magistrates and other officers of justice and law enforcement are artificial joints. Reward and punishment, by which every joint and member is fastened to the seat of sovereignty and moved to do its duty, are the nerves, doing the same job they do in a natural body. The wealth and riches of all the individual members are its strength. Salus populi — the people's safety — is its business. Counselors, who supply it with everything it needs to know, are its memory. Equity and laws are an artificial reason and will. Concord is its health; sedition is its sickness; and civil war is its death. And lastly, the pacts and covenants — the binding agreements — by which the parts of this body politic were first made, fitted together, and united, resemble that Fiat, that "Let us make man," which God pronounced at the Creation.
To describe the nature of this artificial man, I will consider:
First, the matter it is made of, and its maker — both of which are man.
Secondly, how it is made, and by what covenants; what the rights and just power or authority of a sovereign are; and what preserves a commonwealth and what dissolves it.
Thirdly, what a Christian commonwealth is.
Lastly, what the Kingdom of Darkness is.
Concerning the first point, there is a saying that has been thrown around a lot lately: that wisdom is acquired not by reading books, but by reading men. Following that idea, certain people — who mostly can give no other proof of being wise — take great delight in showing off what they think they have read in other men, by passing unkind judgments on one another behind each other's backs.
But there is another saying, not well understood these days, by which they might learn to truly read one another, if they were willing to take the trouble. It is Nosce teipsum: Read yourself. This was never meant, as it is used now, to excuse the barbarous behavior of men in power toward their inferiors, or to encourage men of low rank to act insolently toward their betters. It was meant to teach us this: because one man's thoughts and passions are so similar to another's, whoever looks into himself — and considers what he is doing when he thinks, judges, reasons, hopes, fears, and so on, and on what grounds — will thereby read and know what the thoughts and passions of all other men are on similar occasions.
I mean the similarity of the passions themselves, which are the same in all men: desire, fear, hope, and the rest. I do not mean the similarity of the objects of the passions — the particular things desired, feared, hoped for, and so on. Those vary with each person's individual makeup and particular upbringing, and they are so easily hidden from us that the characters written on a man's heart — blotted and scrambled as they are by deceit, lying, faking, and false doctrines — are legible only to the One who searches hearts. It is true that men's actions sometimes reveal their designs. But to read those actions without comparing them to our own, and without weighing all the circumstances that might change the case, is to try to decipher a code without the key — and to be deceived most of the time, either by trusting too much or by trusting too little, depending on whether the reader is himself a good man or a bad one.
But even if a man could read another man perfectly by his actions, that would serve him only with his acquaintances, and they are few. Whoever is to govern a whole nation must read in himself not this or that particular man, but mankind. That is hard to do — harder than learning any language or science. Yet once I have set down my own reading in an orderly and clear way, the only work left to anyone else will be to consider whether he does not find the same things in himself. For this kind of doctrine admits no other demonstration.
I want to examine the thoughts of man — first one at a time, and afterward in trains, where each thought depends on the one before it.
Taken singly, every thought is a representation or appearance of some quality, or some other feature, of a body outside us — what we commonly call an OBJECT. The object works on the eyes, the ears, and the other parts of the body, and by working in different ways, it produces different appearances.
The origin of all of them is what we call SENSE. For there is no conception in a person's mind that was not first, in whole or in part, born in the organs of sense. Everything else derives from that original.
Knowing the natural cause of sense is not strictly necessary for the business now at hand, and I have written about it at length elsewhere. Still, to fill in each part of my present method, I will briefly lay it out here.
The cause of sense is the external body, or object, which presses on the organ proper to each sense — directly, as in taste and touch, or indirectly, as in seeing, hearing, and smelling. That pressure is carried inward, by way of the nerves and the other strings and membranes of the body, until it reaches the brain and the heart. There it causes a resistance, a counter-pressure — an endeavor of the heart to push back, to deliver itself. And because that effort presses outward, it seems to be some matter outside us.
This seeming, this appearance — call it the fancy — is exactly what people mean by sense. To the eye, it consists in a light, or a color with a shape. To the ear, in a sound. To the nostril, in an odor. To the tongue and palate, in a flavor. And to the rest of the body, in heat, cold, hardness, softness, and the other qualities we pick out by feeling.
Now, all these qualities we call "sensible" are, in the object that causes them, nothing but so many different motions of matter — motions by which the object presses on our organs in different ways. And in us, the ones being pressed, they are nothing but different motions either. For motion produces nothing but motion.
But how they appear to us is fancy — and the appearance is the same whether we are awake or dreaming. Press, rub, or strike your eye, and you will fancy you see a light. Press your ear, and it produces a ringing din. The bodies we actually see and hear do the very same thing — they produce these appearances by their own strong, though unobserved, action.
For if those colors and sounds really lived in the bodies, or objects, that cause them, they could never be separated from them. But they can be — we see it done. Mirrors and lenses sever the image from the thing; echoes, by reflection, sever the sound from its source. In those cases we know the thing we see is in one place, and the appearance is in another. And though at a certain distance the real, actual object seems to be clothed in the very fancy it begets in us, still the object is one thing, and the image or fancy is another.
So sense, in every case, is nothing else but original fancy — caused, as I have said, by the pressure, that is, the motion, of external things upon our eyes, ears, and the other organs appointed for it.
But the philosophy schools, throughout all the universities of Christendom, teach a different doctrine, grounded on certain texts of Aristotle. To explain vision, they say that the thing seen sends out, in every direction, a visible species — in plain English, a visible show, apparition, or aspect, a "being seen" — and that the receiving of this into the eye is seeing. To explain hearing, they say the thing heard sends out an audible species — that is, an audible aspect, or an audible "being seen" — which enters at the ear and makes hearing. And they go further: to explain understanding itself, they say the thing understood sends out an intelligible species — an intelligible "being seen" — which comes into the understanding and makes us understand.
I do not say this to disapprove of universities. But because I will have to speak later about their proper role in a commonwealth, I must show you along the way, at every opportunity, what things in them need to be amended. And among those things, the sheer frequency of insignificant speech — words that signify nothing — is one.
When a thing is lying still, it will lie still forever unless something else moves it. Nobody doubts that. But here is the twin truth: when a thing is in motion, it will stay in motion forever unless something else stops it. The reasoning is exactly the same — nothing can change itself — yet people find this one much harder to accept.
Why? Because people measure everything, not just other people but all other things, by themselves. After moving around, they feel pain and fatigue, so they assume everything else gets tired of motion too and seeks rest of its own accord. It rarely occurs to them that the desire for rest they feel in themselves might just be some other motion. That is how the Scholastics ended up teaching that heavy bodies fall downward out of an "appetite for rest" — a longing to preserve their nature in the place that suits them best. Which means they were ascribing appetite, and knowledge of what is good for one's own preservation, to lifeless objects. That is more than even human beings have. Absurd.
So: once a body is in motion, it moves forever unless something hinders it. And whatever hinders it cannot kill the motion in an instant, but only over time, by degrees. Watch the water: even after the wind dies down, the waves keep rolling for a long while afterward. The same thing happens with the motion made in the internal parts of a man when he sees, dreams, and so on. After the object is taken away, or the eye is shut, we still retain an image of the thing we saw — dimmer than when we actually saw it, but there.
This is what the Romans called IMAGINATION, from the image made in seeing — and they applied the word, somewhat loosely, to all the other senses as well. The Greeks called it fancy — phantasia — which means "appearance," a word that fits any of the senses equally well. Imagination, then, is nothing but DECAYING SENSE. It is found in human beings, and in many other living creatures, both sleeping and waking.
The decay of sense in a person who is awake is not the dying-out of the motion made in sensing. It is the obscuring of that motion — the way the light of the sun obscures the light of the stars. The stars give off their light just as much in the daytime as at night; but among the many impressions striking our eyes, ears, and other organs, only the strongest one registers. Since the sun's light dominates, the action of the stars does not affect us.
In the same way, when an object is removed from our sight, the impression it made in us remains. But other, more present objects come crowding in after it and work on us, so the imagination of the past thing grows obscured and weak — like a single voice in the noise of the day. It follows that the more time passes after seeing or sensing something, the weaker the imagination of it becomes. The continual change of the human body eventually destroys the very parts that were set in motion during sensing.
So distance in time and distance in space have one and the same effect on us. At a great distance in space, whatever we look at appears dim, the small details blur, and voices grow faint and indistinct. Just so, after a great distance in time, our imagination of the past is weak: of cities we once visited, we lose many particular streets; of events, many particular details.
This decaying sense goes by two names, depending on what we want to emphasize. When we mean the thing itself — the image, the imagination itself — we call it imagination, as I said before. But when we mean the decay, signaling that the sense is fading, old, and past, we call it MEMORY. So imagination and memory are one and the same thing, given different names for different purposes.
Much memory — memory of many things — is called EXPERIENCE.
Now, imagination is only of things that were previously perceived by sense, whether all at once or in parts at different times. This gives us two kinds. The first, imagining a whole object as it was presented to the senses, is SIMPLE imagination — as when you picture a man, or a horse, that you have seen before. The second is COMPOUND imagination — as when, from seeing a man at one time and a horse at another, we put together in our mind a centaur. The same thing happens when a man combines the image of his own person with the image of another man's deeds — when he imagines himself a Hercules or an Alexander, which happens often to people who read too many romance novels. That is compound imagination, and properly speaking, it is nothing but a fiction of the mind.
There are also other imaginations that arise in people while wide awake, caused by an unusually strong impression on the senses. Stare at the sun, and the impression leaves an image of the sun before your eyes long afterward. Concentrate long and intensely on geometrical figures, and even awake in the dark you will see images of lines and angles before your eyes. This kind of imagination has no particular name, because it is not the sort of thing people usually talk about.
The imaginations of those who sleep are what we call DREAMS. And these too, like all other imaginations, were in the senses first — either whole or in pieces. Now, in sleep, the brain and nerves — the necessary organs of sense — are so numbed that external objects cannot easily move them. So in sleep, no imagination can occur, and therefore no dream, except what comes from the agitation of the inner parts of a man's own body. Those inner parts are connected to the brain and the other organs, and when they are disturbed, they keep the brain in motion — and so the imaginations formerly made there appear as if the man were awake.
But here is the difference. Since the organs of sense are numbed, no new object can come in to overpower and obscure those images with a stronger impression. So a dream is necessarily more vivid, in this silence of the senses, than our waking thoughts are. That is why it is so hard — many people think it impossible — to tell sense and dreaming apart with certainty.
For my own part, I am satisfied on this point, and here is my reasoning. In dreams I do not often or consistently think of the same persons, places, objects, and actions that I think of while awake. Nor do I remember as long a chain of coherent thoughts while dreaming as I do at other times. And while awake I often notice how absurd my dreams were, but I never dream about the absurdities of my waking thoughts. So I am confident that when I am awake, I know I am not dreaming — even though when I dream, I think I am awake.
Since dreams are caused by disturbances in some of the body's inner parts, different disturbances must produce different dreams. Lying cold breeds dreams of fear, and raises up the thought and image of some frightening object — for the motion runs both ways, from the brain to the inner parts and from the inner parts to the brain. Likewise, just as anger heats certain parts of the body when we are awake, so when we sleep, the overheating of those same parts causes anger, and raises up in the brain the imagination of an enemy. In the same way, natural affection, when we are awake, causes desire, and desire produces heat in certain other parts of the body — so too much heat in those parts while we sleep raises up in the brain the imagination of affection shown to us. In short, our dreams are our waking imaginations run in reverse: the motion, when we are awake, begins at one end; when we dream, at the other.
The hardest time to tell a dream from waking thoughts is when, by some accident, we fail to notice that we have slept. This happens easily to a man full of fearful thoughts, with a troubled conscience, who falls asleep without the usual signposts — going to bed, undressing — say, a man who nods off in a chair. Someone who deliberately and carefully settles himself down to sleep will, if some bizarre, extravagant imagination comes to him, have no trouble recognizing it as a dream.
Take the famous case of Marcus Brutus — the man whose life Julius Caesar spared, who was Caesar's favorite, and who murdered him anyway. The story goes that at Philippi, on the night before he gave battle to Augustus Caesar, Brutus saw a terrifying apparition. Historians usually report it as a vision. But consider the circumstances, and you can easily judge it to have been nothing but a short dream. Sitting in his tent, brooding, haunted by the horror of his rash act, slumbering in the cold — it was not hard for him to dream of exactly what frightened him most. And as the fear gradually woke him, the apparition would just as gradually have faded. Since he had no assurance that he had been asleep, he had no reason to think it a dream rather than a vision.
This is not a rare occurrence. Even people who are fully awake — if they are timid and superstitious, their heads full of frightening tales, alone in the dark — are subject to the same imaginations, and believe they see spirits and the ghosts of dead men walking in churchyards. What they see is either their own imagination, or else the trickery of certain persons who exploit such superstitious fear in order to pass through the night in disguise, to places they would rather not be known to visit.
From this ignorance — not knowing how to distinguish dreams and other strong imaginations from vision and real sense — arose the greater part of the religion of the pagans of the past, who worshipped satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and the like. And from the same ignorance comes the opinion that uneducated people hold today about fairies, ghosts, and goblins, and about the power of witches.
As for witches: I do not think their witchcraft is any real power. Yet I think they are justly punished — for the false belief that they can do such harm, joined with the intention to do it if they could. Their trade is closer to a new religion than to any craft or science. As for fairies and walking ghosts, I think the belief in them has been deliberately taught, or at least deliberately left unrefuted, in order to keep up the market for exorcisms, crosses, holy water, and other such inventions of "ghostly men" — the clergy.
Now, there is no doubt that God can produce supernatural apparitions. But it is no article of Christian faith that he does so as often as people fear such things — any more than they fear his stopping or changing the course of nature, which he can also do. Wicked men, under the cover of "God can do anything," are bold enough to say anything when it serves their purposes, even when they know it to be untrue. The wise man's part is to believe them no further than right reason makes what they say appear credible.
If this superstitious fear of spirits were swept away — and with it, fortune-telling from dreams, false prophecies, and the many other things that depend on them, by which crafty, ambitious people prey on the simple — men would be far better fitted than they are for civil obedience.
This ought to be the work of the universities. Instead, they nourish such doctrine. Not knowing what imagination or the senses actually are, they simply teach whatever they received. Some say that imaginations arise by themselves and have no cause. Others, that they arise most commonly from the will, and that good thoughts are blown ("inspired") into a man by God, and evil thoughts by the Devil — or that good thoughts are poured ("infused") into a man by God, and evil ones by the Devil. Some say the senses receive the "species" of things and deliver them to the "common sense," and the common sense hands them over to the fancy, and the fancy to the memory, and the memory to the judgment — like passing parcels from hand to hand, with many words and nothing understood.
The imagination that is raised in a man — or in any other creature equipped with the faculty of imagining — by words or other voluntary signs, is what we generally call UNDERSTANDING. It is common to man and beast: a dog will, by habit, understand the call or the scolding of his master, and so will many other animals. But the understanding that is unique to man is the understanding not only of another's will, but of his conceptions and thoughts — grasped through the sequence and arrangement of the names of things into affirmations, negations, and other forms of speech. Of this kind of understanding I will speak later.
By a train of thoughts — what I call the "consequence" of one thought from another — I mean the way thoughts follow each other in succession. To distinguish it from discourse in words, I call it MENTAL DISCOURSE: a conversation the mind has with itself.
When a person thinks about anything at all, the next thought is not as random as it seems. Thoughts do not just follow one another in any order whatsoever. Remember: we have no imagination that did not first come to us, in whole or in part, through the senses. In the same way, we never pass from one imagination to another unless the same transition happened before in our senses.
Here is the reason. All imaginations are motions inside us — leftovers of the motions made during sensation. And motions that followed one another during sensation stay linked together afterward. So when the first motion comes back and takes over, the second follows it, the way matter in motion hangs together — the way water on a smooth table is drawn in whichever direction your finger guides any one part of it.
But here is the catch: in sensation, the same perceived thing is sometimes followed by one thing and sometimes by another. So over time it becomes impossible to be certain what we will imagine next. Only one thing is certain: it will be something that followed the same thought before, at one time or another.
This train of thoughts, this mental discourse, comes in two kinds.
The first is unguided — without design, without steadiness. In this kind there is no passionate thought to govern and direct the thoughts that follow, no desire steering them toward some goal. The thoughts simply wander, and seem irrelevant to one another, as in a dream. These are typically the thoughts of people who are not only alone but also free of any pressing concern — though even then their thoughts are as busy as ever, just without harmony. It is like the sound an out-of-tune lute would make for anyone who strummed it, or a tuned one in the hands of someone who cannot play.
And yet even in this wild ranging of the mind, you can often trace its path and see how one thought depends on another. Here is an example. In a conversation about our present civil war, what could seem more out of place than the question someone actually asked: what was the value of a Roman penny? Yet to me the connection was perfectly clear. The thought of the war led to the thought of handing the King over to his enemies. That thought brought in the thought of the handing over of Christ. And that brought the thought of the thirty pieces of silver, the price of that betrayal — from which the malicious question followed easily enough. And all of this happened in an instant, for thought is quick.
The second kind is steadier, because it is regulated by some desire and design. The impression made by things we desire or fear is strong and lasting — or, if it fades for a while, it comes back quickly. Sometimes it is so strong that it interrupts and breaks our sleep.
From desire arises the thought of some means we have seen produce the thing we are aiming at. From that comes the thought of a means to that means, and so on, until we arrive at some starting point within our own power. And because the goal makes such a strong impression, it keeps coming back to mind — so if our thoughts begin to wander, they are quickly pulled back onto the path. One of the Seven Sages of Greece noticed this, and it led him to give people a precept that is now worn out with use: Respice finem — "look to the end." That is, in everything you do, keep your eye fixed on what you want, because that is what directs all your thoughts along the way to getting it.
The regulated train of thoughts is itself of two kinds. In the first, we imagine an effect and hunt for the causes or means that produce it. This kind is common to both humans and animals. In the second, we imagine some thing — anything at all — and hunt for all the possible effects it could produce. In other words, we imagine what we could do with it once we have it. Of this second kind I have never seen any sign except in human beings. It is a kind of curiosity that hardly belongs to the nature of any creature whose only passions are bodily ones, like hunger, thirst, lust, and anger.
In short, when the discourse of the mind is governed by design, it is nothing but seeking — the faculty of invention, which the Romans called sagacitas and solertia: a hunting out of the causes of some present or past effect, or of the effects of some present or past cause.
Sometimes a person looks for something he has lost. From the place and time where he first missed it, his mind runs backward, from place to place and time to time, to find where and when he last had it — that is, to find some definite, limited time and place from which to begin a methodical search. Then, from there, his thoughts run over those same places and times to discover what action or occasion might have made him lose it. This is what we call REMEMBRANCE, or calling to mind. The Romans called it reminiscentia — as if it were a re-counting, a going back over the ledger of our former actions.
Sometimes a person knows the definite area within which he must search, and then his thoughts sweep over every part of it — the way one would sweep a room to find a jewel, or the way a spaniel ranges across a field until it picks up a scent, or the way someone runs through the alphabet to start a rhyme.
Sometimes a person wants to know the outcome of an action. Then he thinks of some similar action in the past and the outcomes that followed it, one after another, assuming that similar actions will be followed by similar outcomes. Someone who wants to foresee what will become of a criminal runs back over what he has seen follow the same crime before, in this order of thoughts: the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows. This kind of thinking is called foresight, and PRUDENCE, or providence — and sometimes wisdom. Though, since it is so hard to observe every circumstance, such guesswork is very prone to error. Still, this much is certain: the more experience of past things one person has compared to another, the more prudent he is, and the less often his expectations fail him.
Only the present exists in nature. Past things exist only in memory. And things to come have no existence at all — the future is nothing but a fiction of the mind, made by applying the consequences of past actions to present ones. The person with the most experience does this with the most confidence, but never with enough confidence to count as certainty. And though we call it prudence when the outcome matches our expectation, in its own nature it is only presumption. For genuine foresight of things to come — providence — belongs only to the one by whose will those things are to come. From him alone, and supernaturally, comes prophecy. The best natural prophet is the best guesser; and the best guesser is the one most practiced and studied in the matters he guesses at, for he has the most signs to guess by.
A SIGN is the prior event taken as evidence of the one that follows — or, in reverse, the following event taken as evidence of the prior one — whenever similar sequences have been observed before. And the more often they have been observed, the less uncertain the sign is. That is why the person with the most experience in any kind of business has the most signs by which to guess at the future, and so is the most prudent — so much more prudent than a newcomer to that business that no advantage of natural, off-the-cuff cleverness can make up the difference. Though perhaps many young men think otherwise.
Nevertheless, it is not prudence that separates man from beast. There are animals that, at a year old, observe more and pursue their own good more prudently than a ten-year-old child can.
Just as prudence is a presumption about the future, drawn from the experience of the past, there is also a presumption about past things, drawn from other things that are likewise past. Someone who has seen the stages by which a flourishing state slid first into civil war and then into ruin will, at the sight of any other state's ruins, guess that the same kind of war and the same downward course happened there too. But this guess carries almost the same uncertainty as guesses about the future, since both rest on nothing but experience.
I can think of no other act of the human mind that is planted in us so naturally that it requires nothing for its exercise except being born human and living with the use of the five senses. The other faculties, which I will discuss shortly and which seem to belong to humans alone, are acquired and improved by study and effort. Most people learn them through instruction and discipline, and they all flow from the invention of words and speech. Beyond sense, thoughts, and the train of thoughts, the mind of man has no other motion at all — though with the help of speech and method, these same faculties can be raised to such a height that they distinguish humans from every other living creature.
Whatever we imagine is finite. Therefore there is no idea or conception of anything we call infinite. No one can hold in his mind an image of infinite size, or conceive the ends and bounds of the thing so named — we have no conception of the thing itself, only of our own inability. So the name of God is used not to make us conceive him — for he is incomprehensible, and his greatness and power are beyond conceiving — but so that we may honor him.
Also, because (as I said before) whatever we conceive was first perceived by sense, all at once or in parts, no one can have a thought representing anything that is not subject to sense. It follows that no one can conceive anything except as being in some place; as having some definite size; and as divisible into parts. Nor can anyone conceive that a thing is entirely in this place and entirely in another place at the same time, or that two or more things can occupy one and the same place at once. None of these things ever has been or ever can be presented to the senses. They are absurd phrases, accepted on trust — with no meaning at all — from deceived philosophers, and from Scholastics who are deceived, or deceiving.
The invention of printing, clever as it was, is no great achievement compared with the invention of letters. Who first discovered the use of letters, nobody knows. The man said to have brought them into Greece was Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of Phoenicia. A profitable invention it was — for preserving the memory of time past, and for connecting humankind, scattered as it is across so many distant regions of the earth. And a difficult one too, since it required careful observation of the various motions of the tongue, palate, lips, and the other organs of speech, in order to create that many distinct characters to record them.
But the noblest and most profitable invention of all was SPEECH itself — names and the ways of connecting them — by which people register their thoughts, recall them after they have passed, and declare them to one another for mutual benefit and conversation. Without speech, there would have been among human beings no commonwealth, no society, no contract, no peace — no more than among lions, bears, and wolves.
The first author of speech was God himself, who instructed Adam how to name the creatures presented to his sight. Scripture goes no further than that on the subject. But that much was enough to set Adam on the path of adding more names, as experience and the use of things gave him occasion, and of joining them together, bit by bit, so as to make himself understood. In time he could have gathered as much language as he found a use for — though hardly as rich a vocabulary as an orator or philosopher needs. I find nothing in Scripture, directly or by implication, suggesting that Adam was taught the names of all figures, numbers, measures, colors, sounds, imaginings, and relations — much less the names of words and speech themselves, like general, special, affirmative, negative, interrogative, optative, infinitive, all of which are useful — and least of all words like entity, intentionality, quiddity, and the other weighty terms of the Scholastic schools.
All this language, gathered and enlarged by Adam and his descendants, was lost again at the Tower of Babel, when God struck every man, for his rebellion, with forgetfulness of his former language. Forced by this to scatter into different parts of the world, people necessarily developed, little by little, the diversity of tongues we have now — in whatever ways need, the mother of all inventions, taught them. And over the course of time, languages everywhere grew richer.
The general use of speech is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal discourse — to turn the train of our thoughts into a train of words. We do this for two benefits.
The first is to register the consequences of our thoughts. Thoughts tend to slip out of memory and put us to fresh labor; but they can be recalled again by the words we marked them with. So the first use of names is to serve as MARKS, or notes of remembrance.
The second comes when many people use the same words: then, by the connection and order of those words, they can signal to one another what they conceive or think about each matter, and also what they desire, fear, or feel. Used this way, words are called SIGNS.
The special uses of speech are these. First, to record what we discover by thinking to be the cause of anything, present or past, and what effects present or past things may produce — which, in sum, is the acquiring of arts and sciences. Second, to show others the knowledge we have attained — which is to counsel and teach one another. Third, to make our wills and purposes known to others, so that we may have one another's mutual help. Fourth, to please and delight ourselves and others by playing with our words, innocently, for pleasure or ornament.
To these four uses there correspond four abuses. First, when people register their thoughts wrongly because the meanings of their words keep shifting — so they record, as their conceptions, things they never actually conceived, and deceive themselves. Second, when they use words metaphorically — that is, in some sense other than the one the words were established for — and thereby deceive others. Third, when by words they declare something to be their will which is not. Fourth, when they use words to wound one another. Nature has armed living creatures — some with teeth, some with horns, some with hands — to hurt an enemy; so it is simply an abuse of speech to wound someone with the tongue. The one exception is a person we are obligated to govern; and then it is not wounding, but correcting and improving.
The way speech serves the remembrance of causes and effects consists in the imposing of names, and in the connecting of them.
Of names, some are PROPER, singular to one thing only — Peter, John, this man, this tree. And some are COMMON to many things — man, horse, tree. Each of these, though only one name, is nevertheless the name of many different particular things; and with respect to all of them taken together, it is called a UNIVERSAL. There is nothing in the world universal except names; for every one of the things named is individual and singular.
One universal name is imposed on many things because of their similarity in some quality or other feature. And whereas a proper name brings to mind one thing only, a universal recalls any one of those many.
Among universal names, some are of wider and some of narrower extent — the larger ones containing the smaller — and some are of equal extent, each containing the other. For example, the name body has a wider signification than the word man, and contains it; while the names man and rational are of equal extent, each comprehending the other. And we should notice here that by a "name" we do not always mean a single word, as in grammar; sometimes a name is a roundabout phrase of many words. All these words — he that in his actions observes the laws of his country — make up just one name, equivalent to the single word just.
By this imposing of names, some of wider and some of narrower signification, we turn the reckoning of consequences among things imagined in the mind into a reckoning of consequences among names. Take, for example, a man with no use of speech at all — someone born and remaining entirely deaf and mute. If you set a triangle before his eyes, with two right angles beside it (like the corners of a square), he may, by working it through, compare them and find that the three angles of that triangle equal the two right angles standing next to it. But show him another triangle, different in shape from the first, and he cannot know without fresh labor whether its three angles also equal the same.
A man who has the use of words is in a different position. When he observes that this equality of angles followed not from the length of the sides, nor from anything else particular to his triangle, but only from the sides being straight and the angles being three — and that this was all he meant by calling it a triangle — he will boldly conclude, universally, that this equality of angles holds in all triangles whatsoever, and will register his discovery in these general terms: every triangle has its three angles equal to two right angles. And so a consequence found in one particular case comes to be registered and remembered as a universal rule. It frees our mental reckoning from time and place; it spares us all labor of the mind except the first; and it makes what was found true here and now, true in all times and places.
Nowhere is the use of words in registering our thoughts so obvious as in numbering. A born fool who could never learn by heart the order of the number words — one, two, three — may notice every stroke of the clock, and nod along with it, or say one, one, one, but he can never know what hour it strikes. And it seems there was a time when those number names were not in use, and people had to apply the fingers of one or both hands to whatever they wanted to keep count of. That, it appears, is why our number words run to ten in every nation — and in some only to five — before beginning again. And someone who can count to ten, if he recites the numbers out of order, will lose himself and not know when he is done; much less will he be able to add and subtract and perform the other operations of arithmetic. So without words there is no possibility of reckoning numbers — much less of reckoning magnitudes, speeds, forces, and the other things whose calculation is necessary for humankind's existence and well-being.
When two names are joined together into a consequence, or affirmation — for instance, a man is a living creature, or if he is a man, he is a living creature — then if the second name, living creature, signifies everything the first name, man, signifies, the affirmation is TRUE; otherwise it is FALSE. For true and false are attributes of speech, not of things. Where there is no speech, there is neither truth nor falsehood. There may be ERROR — as when we expect something that will not happen, or suspect something that never did — but in neither case can a person be charged with untruth.
Since truth, then, consists in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, anyone who seeks precise truth must remember what every name he uses stands for, and place it accordingly. Otherwise he will find himself entangled in words like a bird in lime twigs: the more he struggles, the more stuck he becomes. That is why in geometry — the only science it has pleased God to bestow on mankind so far — men begin by settling the meanings of their words. This settling of meanings they call DEFINITIONS, and they place them at the beginning of their reckoning.
From this it is clear how necessary it is, for anyone who aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of earlier authors — and either to correct them where they are carelessly set down, or to make his own. For the errors of definitions multiply as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities which they eventually see but cannot escape without reckoning anew from the beginning, where the foundation of their errors lies. This is what happens to people who trust books: they do as those who add up many small sums into a larger one without checking whether the small sums were added correctly in the first place. When at last the error becomes visible, and they never think to distrust their starting points, they have no idea how to clear themselves. They waste their time fluttering over their books — like birds that came in by the chimney and, finding themselves shut in a room, flutter against the false light of a glass window, lacking the wit to consider how they got in.
So the first use of speech lies in the right definition of names, which is the acquisition of science. And the first abuse lies in wrong definitions, or in none at all; from this come all false and senseless doctrines. These make the men who take their instruction from the authority of books, rather than from their own thinking, as far below the condition of ordinary ignorant men as men equipped with true science are above it. For between true science and erroneous doctrine, ignorance sits in the middle. Natural sense and imagination are not subject to absurdity. Nature itself cannot err. And as people grow richer in language, they become wiser — or madder — than ordinary. Nor is it possible, without letters, for anyone to become either exceptionally wise or (unless his memory is damaged by disease or some defect of the organs) exceptionally foolish. For words are wise men's counters — they use them to calculate with, nothing more. But words are the money of fools, who value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, a Thomas Aquinas, or any other doctor whatsoever — who was, after all, only a man.
Subject to names is whatever can enter into, or be considered in, an account — whatever can be added to something else to make a sum, or subtracted from it to leave a remainder. The Romans called accounts of money rationes, and accounting ratiocinatio; and what we call items in our bills and account books, they called nomina — that is, names. From this, it seems, they extended the word ratio to the faculty of reckoning in everything else. The Greeks have just one word, logos, for both speech and reason — not because they thought there was no speech without reason, but because there is no reasoning without speech. And the act of reasoning they called syllogism, which means summing up the consequences of one statement with another.
Because the same things can enter into an account for different features, their names are variously twisted and varied to show that diversity. This diversity of names can be reduced to four general headings.
First, a thing may enter into account as matter, or body — as living, sensible, rational, hot, cold, moved, at rest. With all such names, the word matter or body is understood; all these are names of matter.
Second, a thing may enter into account, or be considered, for some accident or quality we conceive to be in it — for being moved, for being so long, for being hot, and so on. Then, from the name of the thing itself, by a small change or twist, we make a name for the accident we are considering: for living we put into the account life; for moved, motion; for hot, heat; for long, length; and the like. All such names are names of the accidents and properties by which one body is distinguished from another. These are called ABSTRACT names — because they are severed, not from matter, but from the account of matter.
Third, we bring into account the properties of our own bodies, by which we make distinctions of another kind. When something is seen by us, we reckon not the thing itself but the sight, the color, the idea of it in the imagination. When something is heard, we reckon not the thing but only the hearing, or the sound, which is our imagination or conception of it through the ear. Such names are names of fancies — of our own imaginings.
Fourth, we bring into account, consider, and give names to names themselves, and to forms of speech. General, universal, special, equivocal are names of names. And affirmation, interrogation, command, narration, syllogism, sermon, oration, and many other such words are names of speeches.
And this is the whole variety of names POSITIVE — names put down to mark something that exists in nature, or that the human mind can feign: bodies that are, or may be conceived to be; or the properties of bodies that are, or may be feigned to be; or words and speech.
There are also other names, called NEGATIVE, which are notes signifying that a given word is not the name of the thing in question — words like nothing, no man, infinite, unteachable, three lacking four, and the like. These are nevertheless useful in reckoning, or in correcting a reckoning, and they call our past thoughts to mind, even though they are not the names of any thing — because they make us refuse to accept names that are not rightly used.
All other names are nothing but insignificant sounds, and they come in two sorts. The first sort: words that are new, and whose meaning has never been explained by any definition. The Scholastics and puzzled philosophers have coined these in abundance.
The second sort: when men weld together two names whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent — like the name an incorporeal body, or (which comes to the same thing) an incorporeal substance, and a great many more. For whenever an affirmation is false, the two names it is composed of, put together and made into one, signify nothing at all. For example, if it is a false affirmation to say a quadrangle is round, then the phrase round quadrangle signifies nothing; it is a mere sound. Likewise, if it is false to say that virtue can be poured, or blown up and down, then the phrases in-poured virtue and in-blown virtue are as absurd and meaningless as a round quadrangle. And so you will rarely meet a senseless, insignificant word that is not built out of some Latin or Greek names. A Frenchman seldom hears our Savior called by the name Parole, but often by the name Verbe — yet Verbe and Parole differ in nothing except that one is Latin and the other French.
When a man, on hearing any speech, has the very thoughts which the words of that speech and their connection were established and arranged to signify, then he is said to UNDERSTAND it — understanding being nothing else but conception caused by speech. And therefore, if speech is peculiar to man (and as far as I know, it is), then understanding is peculiar to him as well. It follows that of absurd and false affirmations — when they are universal — there can be no understanding at all; though many people think they understand such statements, when all they are really doing is repeating the words softly to themselves, or turning them over in their minds.
What kinds of speech signify the desires, aversions, and passions of the human mind, and how those speeches are used and abused, I will discuss after I have dealt with the passions.
The names of things that affect us — that is, things that please and displease us — have, in everyday conversation, an INCONSTANT signification, because not everyone is affected the same way by the same thing, nor is the same person affected the same way at all times. Since all names are imposed to signify our conceptions, and all our feelings are themselves conceptions, then when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoid naming them differently. Even though the nature of the thing we conceive is the same, the diversity of our reception of it — owing to our different bodily constitutions and our prejudices of opinion — gives everything a tint of our different passions.
In reasoning, therefore, a man must be careful of words which, beyond signifying what we imagine of the thing's nature, also carry the disposition and interest of the speaker. The names of virtues and vices are like this. One man calls wisdom what another calls fear; one calls cruelty what another calls justice; one calls extravagance what another calls generosity; one calls seriousness what another calls stupidity; and so on. Names like these can never be true grounds for any reasoning. Neither can metaphors and figures of speech — but those are less dangerous, because they openly profess their inconstancy. The others do not.
When a man reasons, he is doing nothing but conceiving a sum total from the addition of parts, or conceiving a remainder from the subtraction of one sum from another. If this is done with words, it is conceiving the consequence from the names of all the parts to the name of the whole; or from the names of the whole and one part, to the name of the other part. In some fields, such as numbers, men name other operations besides adding and subtracting — multiplying and dividing — but these are really the same thing. For multiplication is just the adding together of equal things, and division is just the subtracting of one thing as many times as we can.
These operations are not confined to numbers. They apply to anything at all that can be added together or taken one out of another. Arithmeticians teach how to add and subtract in numbers. Geometricians teach the same in lines, figures (solid and flat), angles, proportions, times, degrees of speed, force, power, and the like. Logicians teach the same in consequences of words: adding together two names to make an affirmation; two affirmations to make a syllogism; many syllogisms to make a demonstration; and from the sum, or conclusion of a syllogism, they subtract one proposition to find the other. Writers on politics add together agreements to find men's duties; and lawyers add laws and facts to find what is right and wrong in the actions of private persons. In sum: wherever there is room for addition and subtraction, there is room for reason. And where these have no place, reason has nothing at all to do.
Out of all this we may define — that is to say, determine — what is meant by the word reason when we count it among the faculties of the mind. REASON, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning — that is, adding and subtracting — the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts. I say marking them when we reckon by ourselves, and signifying when we demonstrate or prove our reckonings to other men.
In arithmetic, beginners must make mistakes, and even the professors themselves may often err and total things up wrongly. So too in every other subject of reasoning: the ablest, most attentive, and most practiced men may deceive themselves and draw false conclusions. Not that reason itself is not always right reason — it is, just as arithmetic is a certain and infallible art. But no one man's reason, and no group of men's reason, supplies the certainty — any more than an account is correctly totaled just because a great many people have unanimously approved it.
So when there is a dispute over an account, the parties must, by their own agreement, set up as right reason the reason of some arbitrator or judge, whose decision they will both accept. Otherwise their dispute must either come to blows or remain unsettled, for want of a right reason established by nature. And so it is in every debate of every kind. When men who think themselves wiser than everyone else clamor and demand "right reason" as judge, yet really want nothing more than for matters to be decided by no reason but their own, it is as intolerable in human society as it is in a card game, after trump has been declared, to insist on using as trump, on every hand, whatever suit you happen to hold the most of. For that is exactly what such men do: they want every passion of theirs, as it comes to hold sway in them, to be taken for right reason — and in their own disputes, no less. They betray their lack of right reason by the very claim they lay to it.
The use and end of reason is not to find the sum and truth of one or a few consequences far removed from the first definitions and settled meanings of names. It is to begin at those definitions and proceed from one consequence to the next. There can be no certainty about the final conclusion without certainty about all the affirmations and negations on which it was grounded and from which it was inferred.
Think of the head of a household settling his accounts. He adds the sums of all his bills of expense into one total — but never checks how each bill was added up by the people who submitted it, or what he is actually paying for. He gains no more by this than if he had accepted the whole account in one lump, trusting in the skill and honesty of every accountant. It is the same in reasoning about anything else: a man who takes up conclusions on the trust of authors, and does not work them out from the first items in every reckoning — which are the meanings of names settled by definitions — loses his labor. He does not know anything. He only believes.
A man can reckon without words in particular cases — as when, at the sight of some one thing, we guess what probably came before it or what is likely to follow it. If what he thought likely to follow does not follow, or what he thought likely to have come before did not come before, this is called error, and even the most prudent men are subject to it.
But when we reason in words of general signification and land on a general inference that is false, then — though it is commonly called error — it is in fact an ABSURDITY, or senseless speech. For error is only a deception, a presuming that something has happened or will happen which, though it did not happen or will not, was at least not impossible. But when we make a general assertion, unless it is a true one, its very possibility is inconceivable. And words by which we conceive nothing but the sound are the ones we call absurd, insignificant, and nonsense. So if a man talked to me of a round quadrangle, or the accidents of bread in cheese, or immaterial substances, or a free subject, a free will, or anything "free" other than free from being hindered by opposition — I would not say he was in error. I would say his words were without meaning. That is to say: absurd.
I said before, in the second chapter, that man excels all other animals in this faculty: whenever he conceives anything whatsoever, he is inclined to inquire into its consequences, and what effects he could produce with it. Now I add another degree of that same excellence: by words, he can reduce the consequences he finds to general rules, called theorems or aphorisms. That is, he can reason — reckon — not only in numbers, but in everything else that can be added to or subtracted from something.
But this privilege is offset by another: the privilege of absurdity, to which no living creature is subject but man alone. And of men, none are more subject to it than those who profess philosophy. What Cicero says of them somewhere is entirely true: there is nothing so absurd that it cannot be found in the books of philosophers. The reason is obvious. Not one of them begins his reasoning from the definitions, or explanations, of the names he is going to use — a method that has been used only in geometry, whose conclusions have thereby been made indisputable.
The first cause of absurd conclusions I ascribe to the lack of method: they do not begin their reasoning from definitions — that is, from settled meanings of their words — as if they could cast up an account without knowing the value of the number words one, two, and three.
Now, all bodies enter into our reckoning under various considerations, which I mentioned in the previous chapter; and since these considerations carry different names, various absurdities arise from confusing them and connecting their names into assertions where they do not fit. And therefore:
The second cause of absurd assertions I ascribe to giving the names of bodies to accidents, or of accidents to bodies. This is what people do when they say faith is "infused" or "inspired" — when nothing can be poured or breathed into anything but a body — or that extension is body, or that phantasms are spirits, and so on.
The third, to giving the names of the accidents of bodies outside us to the accidents of our own bodies — as they do who say the color is in the body, or the sound is in the air, and so on.
The fourth, to giving the names of bodies to names or speeches — as they do who say that there are things universal, or that a living creature is a genus, or "a general thing," and so on.
The fifth, to giving the names of accidents to names and speeches — as they do who say the nature of a thing is in its definition, or a man's command is his will, and the like.
The sixth, to the use of metaphors, tropes, and other rhetorical figures in place of proper words. It is perfectly acceptable in common speech to say, for example, the road goes, or leads, here or there, or the proverb says this or that — even though roads cannot go and proverbs cannot speak. But in reckoning, in the search for truth, such expressions cannot be admitted.
The seventh, to names that signify nothing, picked up and learned by rote from the Scholastics: "hypostatical," "transubstantiate," "consubstantiate," "eternal-now," and the rest of the Schoolmen's cant.
A man who can avoid these things will not easily fall into any absurdity — unless it be through the sheer length of a calculation, where he may forget what came before. For all men by nature reason alike, and reason well, when they have good principles. Who is so stupid as both to make a mistake in geometry and to persist in it after someone else has pointed out his error?
From all this it appears that reason is not, like sense and memory, born with us; nor acquired by experience alone, as prudence is. It is attained by hard work: first, in the apt imposing of names; and second, in acquiring a good and orderly method of proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connecting one name to another; and from there to syllogisms, which are the connections of one assertion to another — until we arrive at a knowledge of all the consequences of names belonging to the subject at hand. And that is what men call SCIENCE.
Whereas sense and memory are only knowledge of fact — of a thing past and unchangeable — science is the knowledge of consequences, of the dependence of one fact upon another. By it, from what we can do right now, we know how to do something else when we choose, or a similar thing at another time. Because once we see how a thing comes about, from what causes, and in what manner, then whenever similar causes come into our power, we see how to make them produce similar effects.
Children, then, are not endowed with reason at all until they have attained the use of speech. They are called reasonable creatures because of the evident possibility of their having the use of reason in time to come. And most men, though they have the use of reasoning a little way — as in counting to some degree — get little use out of it in everyday life. There they govern themselves, some better, some worse, according to their differences of experience, quickness of memory, and inclination toward various ends — but most of all according to good or bad fortune, and one another's mistakes. As for science — certain rules for their actions — they are so far from it that they do not even know what it is. Geometry they have taken for sorcery. And as for the other sciences, those who have never been taught their beginnings, and made some progress in them so as to see how they are acquired and generated, are in this respect like children who, having no idea where babies come from, are made to believe by the women that their brothers and sisters were not born but found in the garden.
Even so, those who have no science are in a better and nobler condition with their natural prudence than men who, by reasoning badly, or by trusting those who reason wrong, land on false and absurd general rules. For ignorance of causes and of rules does not lead men as far astray as relying on false rules — taking for causes of what they aim at things which are not causes of it at all, but rather causes of the contrary.
To conclude: the light of human minds is perspicuous words — but first trimmed and purged of ambiguity by exact definitions. Reason is the pace; the increase of science, the road; and the benefit of mankind, the destination. And on the contrary, metaphors and senseless, ambiguous words are like ignes fatui — will-o'-the-wisps. Reasoning upon them is wandering among innumerable absurdities; and their end is contention, and sedition, or contempt.
As much experience is prudence, so much science is sapience. We usually have only the one name, wisdom, for them both; but the Romans always distinguished between prudentia and sapientia, ascribing the former to experience, the latter to science. To make the difference appear more clearly, suppose one man endowed with an excellent natural skill and dexterity in handling his weapons; and another who has added to that dexterity an acquired science of where he can strike his adversary, or be struck by him, in every possible posture or guard. The ability of the first would be to the ability of the second as prudence is to sapience: both useful, but the second infallible. But those who, trusting only to the authority of books, follow the blind blindly, are like the man who trusts the false rules of a fencing master and presumptuously ventures against an adversary who either kills him or disgraces him.
Of the signs of science, some are certain and infallible; some, uncertain. Certain, when the man who claims the science of anything can teach it — that is, demonstrate its truth clearly to another. Uncertain, when only some particular outcomes match his claim, and on many occasions things turn out as he says they must. The signs of prudence are all uncertain; for it is impossible to observe by experience, and remember, every circumstance that might change the outcome.
But in any business where a man has no infallible science to proceed by, to abandon his own natural judgment and be guided by general maxims read in authors — maxims subject to many exceptions — is a sign of folly, and is generally scorned under the name of pedantry. Even among those very men who, in the councils of the commonwealth, love to show off their reading in politics and history, very few do the same in their domestic affairs, where their own particular interest is at stake. They have prudence enough for their private business. But in public, they care more about the reputation of their own cleverness than about the success of anyone else's business.
Animals have two kinds of motion that belong to them alone. One is called vital motion: it begins at conception and continues without interruption through the whole of life. The circulation of the blood, the pulse, breathing, digestion, nutrition, excretion — these are vital motions, and they need no help from the imagination. The other kind is animal motion, otherwise called voluntary motion: walking, speaking, moving any of our limbs in whatever way we first picture in our minds.
I have already shown, in the first and second chapters, that sense is motion in the organs and inner parts of the body, caused by the action of the things we see and hear, and that imagination is nothing but the leftovers of that same motion, remaining after sense. And because walking, speaking, and other voluntary motions always depend on a prior thought of where, which way, and what, it is clear that the imagination is the first internal beginning of all voluntary motion.
Now, people who have never studied the matter cannot conceive of any motion at all when the thing moved is invisible, or when the space it moves through is too small to notice. But that does not mean such motions do not exist. However small a space may be, whatever moves across a larger space — of which that small one is a part — must move across the small one first.
These small beginnings of motion inside the human body, before they show themselves in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called ENDEAVOR — the tiny internal beginnings of motion.
When this endeavor is directed toward the thing that causes it, it is called APPETITE, or DESIRE. Desire is the general name; appetite is often reserved for the desire of food — namely hunger and thirst. And when the endeavor moves away from something, it is generally called AVERSION.
The words "appetite" and "aversion" come to us from the Latin, and both signify motions: one of approaching, the other of retreating. So do the Greek words for the same things, horme and aphorme. Nature herself often presses these truths on men — truths they later stumble over when they go looking for something beyond nature. The Scholastics, for instance, can find no actual motion at all in the mere appetite to walk or move. But since they must admit some motion is there, they call it "metaphorical motion" — which is simply absurd speech. Words may be metaphorical. Bodies and motions cannot.
What men desire, they are also said to LOVE; and they are said to HATE the things they have aversion for. So desire and love are the same thing, except that by desire we always mean the object is absent, and by love we usually mean it is present. Likewise, by aversion we signify the absence of the object, and by hate, its presence.
Of appetites and aversions, some are born with us: the appetite for food, the appetite for excretion and relief (which might more properly be called aversions, since they come from something men feel in their own bodies), and a few others — not many. The rest, the appetites for particular things, come from experience — from testing their effects on ourselves or watching their effects on other men. For things we do not know at all, or do not believe exist, we can have no further desire than the desire to taste and try them. But we feel aversion not only toward things we know have hurt us, but also toward things when we do not know whether they will hurt us or not.
The things we neither desire nor hate, we are said to despise. CONTEMPT is nothing but an immobility, a stubbornness of the heart in resisting the action of certain things — and it comes either from the heart being already moved in another direction by more powerful objects, or from lack of experience of the things despised.
And because the makeup of a man's body is in constant change, it is impossible for all the same things to always cause in him the same appetites and aversions. Much less can all men agree in desiring almost any single object.
But whatever a man desires, that is what he, for his part, calls good. Whatever he hates, he calls evil. And whatever he despises, he calls worthless and beneath notice. For these words — good, evil, contemptible — are always used in relation to the person using them. Nothing is simply and absolutely good or evil. There is no common rule of good and evil to be found in the nature of the objects themselves. The rule comes from the person of the man, where there is no commonwealth; or, in a commonwealth, from the person who represents it; or from an arbitrator or judge whom disagreeing men set up by consent, making his decision the rule.
Latin has two words whose meanings come close to good and evil but are not quite the same: pulchrum and turpe. The first signifies that which, by some visible sign, promises good; the second, that which promises evil. Our language has no names that general. For pulchrum we say, depending on the thing, fair, beautiful, handsome, gallant, honorable, comely, or lovely; for turpe we say foul, deformed, ugly, base, nauseating, and the like, as the subject requires. All these words, used properly, signify nothing but the look or appearance that promises good or evil.
So there are three kinds of good: good in the promise — that is pulchrum; good in effect, as the end desired — which is called jucundum, delightful; and good as the means — which is called utile, profitable. And there are just as many kinds of evil: evil in the promise is what they call turpe; evil in effect and end is molestum — unpleasant, troublesome; and evil in the means is inutile — unprofitable, hurtful.
In sense, as I have said before, what is really inside us is only motion, caused by the action of external objects — though it appears to the sight as light and color, to the ear as sound, to the nostril as odor, and so on. In the same way, when the action of that same object continues from the eyes, ears, and other organs to the heart, the real effect there is nothing but motion, or endeavor, which consists in appetite or aversion toward or away from the object. But the appearance, the felt sense of that motion, is what we call either DELIGHT or TROUBLE OF MIND.
This motion called appetite — and, in its appearance, delight and pleasure — seems to be a strengthening of the vital motion, a help to it. That is why the things that caused delight were quite properly called jucunda, from juvare, to help or fortify; and their contraries molesta, offensive, from hindering and troubling the vital motion.
PLEASURE, therefore (or delight), is the appearance or sense of good; and MOLESTATION or DISPLEASURE is the appearance or sense of evil. And so all appetite, desire, and love comes with some delight, more or less; and all hatred and aversion with more or less displeasure and offense.
Of pleasures, or delights, some arise from the sense of an object that is present. These may be called pleasures of sense. (The word "sensual," as used by those who condemn such pleasures, has no place until there are laws.) Of this kind are all the fillings and emptyings of the body, and everything pleasant to sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch.
Other pleasures arise from expectation — from foreseeing the end or consequence of things, whether those things please or displease in the sense itself. These are pleasures of the mind in the person who draws those consequences, and they are generally called JOY. In the same way, some displeasures are in the sense, and are called PAIN; others are in the expectation of consequences, and are called GRIEF.
These simple passions — appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief — take different names for different reasons. First, when they follow one after another, they are named differently according to the opinion men have of their chances of getting what they desire. Secondly, from the object loved or hated. Thirdly, from considering many of them together. Fourthly, from the alternation or sequence itself.
Hope — Appetite combined with an opinion of attaining the thing is called HOPE.
Despair — The same, without that opinion, is DESPAIR.
Fear — Aversion, with the opinion that the object will hurt us, is FEAR.
Courage — The same, with hope of avoiding that hurt by resisting, is COURAGE.
Anger — Sudden courage is ANGER.
Confidence — Constant hope is CONFIDENCE in ourselves.
Diffidence — Constant despair is DIFFIDENCE in ourselves — a settled distrust of our own powers.
Indignation — Anger at great hurt done to another, when we believe it was done by injury, is INDIGNATION.
Benevolence — Desire of good for another is BENEVOLENCE, GOOD WILL, CHARITY. Directed at mankind in general, it is GOOD NATURE.
Covetousness — Desire of riches is COVETOUSNESS — a name always used as blame, because men competing for riches are displeased when others get them. The desire itself, though, deserves blame or approval according to the means by which the riches are sought.
Ambition — Desire of office or precedence is AMBITION — a name also used in the worse sense, for the reason just mentioned.
Pusillanimity — Desire of things that help our purposes only a little, and fear of things that hinder them only a little, is PUSILLANIMITY — small-mindedness.
Magnanimity — Contempt for little helps and little hindrances is MAGNANIMITY — greatness of mind.
Valor — Magnanimity in danger of death or wounds is VALOR, or FORTITUDE.
Liberality — Magnanimity in the use of riches is LIBERALITY.
Miserableness — Pusillanimity in the same is WRETCHEDNESS, MISERABLENESS, or PARSIMONY — depending on whether the speaker approves or disapproves.
Kindness — Love of persons for company and society is KINDNESS.
Natural Lust — Love of persons only for pleasing the senses is NATURAL LUST.
Luxury — Love of the same, acquired by rumination — that is, by imagining past pleasure — is LUXURY.
The Passion of Love; Jealousy — Love of one person singularly, with desire to be singularly loved in return, is THE PASSION OF LOVE. The same, with fear that the love is not mutual, is JEALOUSY.
Revengefulness — Desire to hurt another in order to make him condemn some act of his own is REVENGEFULNESS.
Curiosity — Desire to know why, and how, is CURIOSITY. No living creature has it but man — so man is distinguished from the other animals not only by his reason but by this singular passion as well. In the other animals, the appetite for food and the other pleasures of sense dominate, and crowd out any care for knowing causes. Curiosity is a lust of the mind that, by a persistence of delight in the continual and tireless generation of knowledge, outlasts the short intensity of any bodily pleasure.
Religion; Superstition; True Religion — Fear of invisible power, whether invented by the mind or imagined from stories that are publicly allowed, is RELIGION; from stories not allowed, SUPERSTITION. And when the imagined power really is such as we imagine it, TRUE RELIGION.
Panic Terror — Fear without any grasp of why or what is PANIC TERROR — named after the fables that make the god Pan its author. In truth, the person who first feels such fear always has some idea of the cause; the rest simply run because everyone else is running, each one assuming his neighbor knows why. That is why this passion strikes no one except in a crowd or multitude of people.
Admiration — Joy from the sense of novelty is ADMIRATION — proper to man, because it stirs up the appetite for knowing the cause.
Glory; Vainglory — Joy arising from imagining one's own power and ability is that exultation of the mind called GLORYING. If it is grounded on the experience of one's own past actions, it is the same as confidence. But if it is grounded on the flattery of others, or merely supposed by the man himself for the delight he takes in its consequences, it is called VAINGLORY — vanity. The name fits, because a well-grounded confidence leads a man to attempt things, whereas merely supposed power does not, and is therefore rightly called vain.
Dejection — Grief from the opinion that one lacks power is called DEJECTION of mind.
The vainglory that consists in pretending or supposing abilities in ourselves that we know we do not have is most common in young men. It is fed by the histories and fictions of gallant heroes, and is often corrected by age and employment.
Sudden Glory; Laughter — SUDDEN GLORY is the passion that produces those grimaces we call LAUGHTER. It is caused either by some sudden act of our own that pleases us, or by spotting some defect in another person, by comparison with which we suddenly applaud ourselves. It strikes most often those who are conscious of having the fewest abilities themselves — people forced to stay in their own good graces by noticing the imperfections of other men. That is why a great deal of laughter at the defects of others is a sign of pusillanimity. One of the proper works of a great mind is to help others and free them from scorn, and to compare itself only with the most able.
Sudden Dejection; Weeping — On the contrary, SUDDEN DEJECTION is the passion that causes WEEPING. It is brought on by accidents that suddenly snatch away some intense hope, or some prop of a person's power. Those most subject to it are those who rely chiefly on external supports — such as women and children. So some weep for the loss of friends, others for friends' unkindness, others when reconciliation puts a sudden stop to their thoughts of revenge. But in all cases, both laughter and weeping are sudden motions, and habit wears them both away. No one laughs at an old joke, or weeps over an old calamity.
Shame; Blushing — Grief at the discovery of some defect in our ability is SHAME — the passion that reveals itself in BLUSHING. It consists in the awareness of something dishonorable. In young men it is a sign of the love of a good reputation, and commendable. In old men it is a sign of the same, but because it comes too late, not commendable.
Impudence — Contempt for good reputation is called IMPUDENCE.
Pity — Grief at the calamity of another is PITY, and it arises from imagining that the same calamity might befall ourselves. That is why it is also called COMPASSION, and, in the phrase of the present time, FELLOW-FEELING. And that is also why the best men have the least pity for calamity that comes from great wickedness — and why those who think themselves least exposed to a given calamity feel the least pity for it.
Cruelty — Contempt for, or insensitivity to, the calamity of others is what men call CRUELTY, and it comes from a sense of security about one's own fortune. For I do not believe it possible that any man takes pleasure in the great harms of other men with no end of his own in view.
Emulation; Envy — Grief at a competitor's success in wealth, honor, or some other good, joined with the endeavor to strain our own abilities to equal or surpass him, is called EMULATION. Joined instead with the endeavor to supplant or hinder the competitor, it is ENVY.
When appetites and aversions, hopes and fears about one and the same thing arise in a man's mind by turns — when the various good and evil consequences of doing or not doing the thing pass through his thoughts in succession, so that sometimes he has an appetite for it, sometimes an aversion from it, sometimes hope of managing it, sometimes despair or fear of attempting it — the whole sum of those desires, aversions, hopes, and fears, continued until the thing is either done or judged impossible, is what we call DELIBERATION.
It follows that there is no deliberation about things past, because they obviously cannot be changed; nor about things known or believed to be impossible, because men know, or think, that deliberating about them is pointless. But about impossible things we believe to be possible, we may deliberate — not knowing that it is in vain. And it is called deliberation because it is a putting an end to the liberty we had of doing the thing, or not doing it, according to our own appetite or aversion.
This alternating succession of appetites, aversions, hopes, and fears occurs no less in other living creatures than in man. Therefore beasts also deliberate.
Every deliberation is said to end when the thing deliberated about is either done or judged impossible — because until then we keep the liberty of doing it or not, according to our appetite or aversion.
In deliberation, the last appetite or aversion — the one immediately attached to the action or to the omission of it — is what we call the WILL: the act (not the faculty) of willing. And beasts that have deliberation must necessarily also have will.
The definition of the will commonly given by the Scholastics — that it is a "rational appetite" — is not a good one. If it were, there could be no voluntary act against reason, since a voluntary act is precisely one that proceeds from the will and from nothing else. But if instead of "rational appetite" we say "an appetite resulting from prior deliberation," then their definition becomes the same as mine. The will, therefore, is the last appetite in deliberating.
It is true that in everyday talk we say a man once had a will to do a thing that he nevertheless refrained from doing. But that, properly speaking, was only an inclination — and an inclination makes no action voluntary, because the action depends not on it but on the last inclination or appetite. If the intervening appetites made an action voluntary, then by the same logic all the intervening aversions would make the same action involuntary — and one and the same action would be both voluntary and involuntary.
From this it is clear that voluntary actions include not only those that begin in covetousness, ambition, lust, or other appetites for the thing proposed, but also those that begin in aversion, or in fear of the consequences of leaving it undone.
The forms of speech that express the passions are partly the same as those that express our thoughts, and partly different. First, and generally, all passions can be expressed in the indicative: I love, I fear, I rejoice, I deliberate, I will, I command. But some passions have particular expressions of their own — expressions which, nonetheless, are not affirmations, unless they happen to serve some further inference beyond the passion they spring from.
Deliberation is expressed in the subjunctive — the form of speech proper for stating suppositions and their consequences, as in: if this is done, then this will follow. It differs from the language of reasoning only in this: reasoning works in general terms, while deliberation is mostly about particulars.
The language of desire and aversion is the imperative: do this, do not do that. When the person addressed is obliged to do or not do the thing, this is command; otherwise it is prayer, or else counsel.
The language of vainglory, of indignation, of pity, and of revengefulness is the optative — the language of wishing. But for the desire to know there is a special expression called the interrogative: What is it? When will it happen? How is it done? Why so?
Other language of the passions I find none. Cursing, swearing, reviling, and the like do not signify as speech at all — they are just the actions of a tongue that has gotten used to them.
These forms of speech, I say, are expressions, or voluntary indications, of our passions. But they are not certain signs of them, because men may use them at will, whether they feel the passions or not. The best signs of a passion actually present are found in the face, the motions of the body, the actions, and the ends or aims we otherwise know the man to have.
In deliberation, the appetites and aversions are raised by foreseeing the good and evil consequences and sequels of the action we are deliberating about. So the good or evil effect of the action depends on foreseeing a long chain of consequences — and very seldom is any man able to see to the end of it. But as far as a man does see: if the good in those consequences outweighs the evil, the whole chain is what writers call apparent or seeming good; and when the evil outweighs the good, the whole is apparent or seeming evil. So the man who has, by experience or reason, the longest and surest view of the consequences deliberates best himself, and is able, when he chooses, to give the best counsel to others.
Continual success in obtaining the things a man desires from time to time — continual prospering, in other words — is what men call FELICITY: happiness. I mean the happiness of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here, because life itself is nothing but motion, and can no more be without desire and without fear than it can be without sense. What kind of happiness God has prepared for those who devoutly honor him, a man will know no sooner than he enjoys it — those are joys as incomprehensible now as the Scholastics' phrase "beatifical vision" is unintelligible.
The form of speech by which men signify their opinion of the goodness of anything is PRAISE. The form by which they signify its power and greatness is MAGNIFYING. And the form by which they signify their opinion of a man's happiness the Greeks called makarismos — calling someone blessed — for which we have no word in our language.
And this much is sufficient, for the present purpose, to have said about the passions.
Every train of discourse driven by the desire for knowledge comes, at last, to an end — either because you find what you were looking for, or because you give up the search. And wherever the chain of discourse gets interrupted, there is an end of it, at least for that time.
If the discourse is purely mental — the mind talking to itself — it consists of thoughts swinging back and forth: the thing will happen, the thing will not happen; it has been, it has not been. So wherever you break off the chain of a man's thinking, you leave him stranded in a presumption one way or the other: it will be, or it will not be; it has been, or it has not been. All of this is OPINION.
Notice the parallel. The back-and-forth of desires, when we deliberate about good and evil, has its exact counterpart in the back-and-forth of opinions, when we inquire into the truth about past and future. And just as the last desire in deliberation is called the will, so the last opinion in the search for the truth of past and future is called the JUDGMENT — the resolute and final verdict of the person doing the reasoning. And just as the whole chain of alternating desires on the question of good or bad is called deliberation, so the whole chain of alternating opinions on the question of true or false is called DOUBT.
No discourse whatsoever can end in absolute knowledge of fact, whether past or still to come. Knowledge of fact is, at its origin, sense — and ever afterward, memory. And knowledge of consequence, which I said before is called science, is not absolute but conditional. No man can know by discourse that this or that is, has been, or will be — that would be knowing absolutely. He can only know that if this is, then that is; if this has been, then that has been; if this shall be, then that shall be. That is knowing conditionally. And even then, it is not knowledge of the consequence of one thing to another, but of one name of a thing to another name of the same thing.
So when discourse is put into speech, and begins with the definitions of words, and proceeds by connecting them into general affirmations, and connecting those in turn into syllogisms, the end — the final sum — is called the conclusion. And the thought of the mind it signifies is that conditional knowledge, that knowledge of the consequences of words, which is commonly called science. But if the first ground of such discourse is not definitions, or if the definitions are not rightly joined together into syllogisms, then the end or conclusion is once again opinion — an opinion about the truth of something said, even though it is sometimes said in absurd and senseless words that no one could possibly understand.
When two or more men know one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it to one another — which is as much as to say they know it together. And because such men make the best witnesses of each other's deeds, or of a third man's, it always has been and always will be considered a very evil act for any man to speak against his conscience, or to corrupt or force another man to do so. That is why the plea of conscience has been listened to so carefully in every age.
Afterward, men took the same word and used it metaphorically, for the knowledge of their own secret deeds and secret thoughts. Hence the rhetorical saying that the conscience is a thousand witnesses.
And last of all, men passionately in love with their own new opinions — however absurd — and stubbornly determined to maintain them, gave those opinions, too, the revered name of conscience. As if to make it seem unlawful ever to change them or to speak against them. And so they pretend to know their opinions are true, when the most they actually know is that they think so.
When a man's discourse does not begin at definitions, it begins in one of two other places. Either it begins at some contemplation of his own — and then it is still called opinion. Or it begins at the saying of someone else, whose ability to know the truth, and whose honesty in not deceiving, he does not doubt. In that case the discourse is not so much about the thing as about the person. And the resolution of it is called BELIEF and FAITH: faith in the man; belief both of the man and of the truth of what he says.
So in belief there are two opinions at once: one about the saying, the other about the man's virtue. To have faith in a man, to trust him, to believe him — these all mean the same thing, namely an opinion of the man's truthfulness. But to believe what is said means only an opinion of the truth of the saying itself.
Now here is something worth observing. The phrase "I believe in" — like the Latin credo in, and the Greek pisteuo eis — is never used except in the writings of theologians. In all other writing, men say instead: I believe him; I have faith in him; I rely on him — in Latin, credo illi and fido illi; in Greek, pisteuo auto. And this peculiarity of the ecclesiastical use of the word has stirred up many disputes about the right object of the Christian faith.
But "believing in," as the words are used in the Creed, means not trust in the person, but confession and acknowledgment of the doctrine. For it is not only Christians — men of every kind believe in God in the sense of holding everything they hear him say to be true, whether they understand it or not. And that is all the faith and trust that can possibly be placed in any person whatsoever. But they do not all believe the doctrine of the Creed.
From this we may draw a conclusion. Whenever we believe a saying to be true — any saying at all — on the basis of arguments taken not from the thing itself, nor from the principles of natural reason, but from the authority and good opinion we have of the man who said it, then the speaker is the person we believe in, the person we trust, the person whose word we take. He is the object of our faith, and the honor done in believing is done to him alone.
It follows that when we believe the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate revelation from God himself, our belief, faith, and trust is in the Church — whose word we take, and rest content with. And those who believe what a prophet tells them in the name of God are taking the word of the prophet: they do honor to him, and it is him they trust and believe concerning the truth of what he reports — whether he is a true prophet or a false one.
And the same goes for all other history. If I refused to believe everything the historians have written about the glorious deeds of Alexander or Caesar, I don't think the ghost of Alexander or Caesar would have any just cause to be offended — nor would anyone else, except the historian. If Livy says the gods once made a cow speak, and we don't believe it, we are not distrusting God; we are distrusting Livy.
So the matter is plain: whatever we believe on no other grounds than the authority of men and their writings — whether those men were sent from God or not — is faith in men only.
Virtue, in every kind of subject, is something valued for standing out. It exists by comparison. If everyone had every quality in equal measure, nothing would be prized in anyone.
By INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES, we always mean those abilities of the mind that people praise, value, and wish they had themselves. They usually go under the name of a good wit — though the word "wit" is also used to single out one particular ability from the rest.
These virtues come in two sorts: natural and acquired.
By "natural," I do not mean what a man has from birth. What we are born with is nothing but sense, and in sense men differ so little from one another — and from brute beasts — that it cannot be counted among the virtues. I mean instead the wit that is gained by use and experience alone, without method, training, or instruction.
This NATURAL WIT consists mainly of two things: quickness of imagining — that is, a swift movement from one thought to the next — and steady direction toward some chosen goal.
The opposite, a slow imagination, makes the defect of mind commonly called DULLNESS, stupidity, and sometimes other names that signify slowness of motion, or difficulty in being moved at all.
This difference in quickness comes from the difference in men's passions. People love and dislike different things, so their thoughts run in different directions, and they hold onto and notice different things as they pass through the imagination.
Now, when thoughts follow one another, there are really only a few things to notice about them: how they are alike, how they are unlike, what they are good for, or how they serve a particular purpose.
Those who notice the likenesses between things — especially likenesses that others rarely spot — are said to have a good wit, by which, in this case, we mean a good FANCY: a creative quickness of imagination.
Those who notice the differences and dissimilarities — which is called distinguishing, discerning, and judging between thing and thing — are said, when such discerning is not easy, to have a good JUDGMENT. And in matters of conversation and business in particular, where you must read the times, the places, and the people, this virtue is called DISCRETION.
The first of these, fancy without the help of judgment, is not praised as a virtue. But the second — judgment, and discretion — is praised for its own sake, with or without any fancy to assist it.
Besides the discretion about times, places, and persons that a good fancy requires, something else is needed too: a frequent steering of one's thoughts toward their end — that is, toward some use to be made of them. A man who does this will find himself easily supplied with comparisons that please, not only because they illustrate his speech and decorate it with new and fitting metaphors, but because of the sheer rarity of their invention.
But without steadiness and direction toward some end, a great fancy is one kind of madness. You see it in people who, entering into any conversation, get snatched away from their point by every thought that crosses their mind, into so many digressions, and such long ones, and so many parentheses, that they completely lose themselves. I know of no particular name for this kind of folly. Its cause is sometimes lack of experience, which makes a thing seem new and remarkable to one man that seems ordinary to everyone else; sometimes it is small-mindedness, which makes something seem important to him that other men consider a trifle. And whatever seems new or important — and therefore worth telling — pulls a man, step by step, away from the road his talk was supposed to travel.
In a good poem, whether epic or dramatic, and likewise in sonnets, epigrams, and other pieces, both judgment and fancy are required — but the fancy must be the more prominent, because such works please by their extravagance. They simply must not offend through indiscretion.
In a good history, judgment must be the more prominent, because the goodness of a history lies in its method, its truth, and its choice of the actions most worth knowing. Fancy has no place there except in dressing up the style.
In speeches of praise, and in attacks and invectives, fancy dominates, because the goal is not truth but honoring or dishonoring someone — which is done through noble or vile comparisons. Judgment only supplies the circumstances that make an action praiseworthy or blameworthy.
In exhortations and in courtroom pleadings, judgment or fancy is most needed depending on whether truth or disguise serves the purpose at hand.
In demonstration, in counsel, and in every rigorous search for truth, judgment does everything — except that sometimes the understanding needs to be opened up by an apt comparison, and then there is that much use for fancy. But metaphors, in this case, are utterly excluded. Since metaphors openly profess deceit, to admit them into counsel or reasoning would be obvious folly.
And in any discourse whatsoever, if a lack of discretion shows, the whole performance will be taken as a sign of poor wit, no matter how extravagant the fancy. And the reverse holds too: where the discretion is obvious, the discourse will never be taken for witless, however ordinary the fancy.
The secret thoughts of a man range over everything — holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and frivolous — without shame or blame. Spoken discourse cannot do that; it can go only as far as judgment approves of the time, the place, and the company. An anatomist or a physician may speak or write his professional opinion about unclean things, because his purpose is not to please but to be useful. But for another man to publish his extravagant and entertaining fancies about the same subjects is like a man who has been tumbled in the mud coming to present himself in good company. The difference is nothing but a lack of discretion.
Likewise, in openly relaxed moods and among familiar company, a man may play with the sounds and double meanings of words, and often with flashes of extraordinary fancy. But in a sermon, or in public, or before strangers, or before people we ought to respect, there is no jingling wordplay that will not be counted as folly. And again, the only difference is the lack of discretion.
So where wit is lacking, it is not fancy that is missing, but discretion. Judgment without fancy is wit; fancy without judgment is not.
When a man with some project in hand runs his thoughts over a multitude of things and observes how they contribute to that project — or what project they might contribute to — and when his observations are neither easy nor common, this wit of his is called prudence. It depends on a great deal of experience, and on memory of similar things and their consequences in the past.
In prudence there is not as much difference between men as there is in their fancies and judgments. The experience of men of equal age is not very unequal in quantity; it simply lies in different fields, since everyone has his own private business. Governing a household well and governing a kingdom well are not different degrees of prudence — they are different sorts of business, just as painting a miniature and painting a portrait at life size or larger are not different degrees of art. A plain farmer is more prudent in the affairs of his own house than a privy counselor is in the affairs of another man.
Add to prudence the use of unjust or dishonest means — the kind that fear or poverty usually suggests to men — and you get that crooked wisdom called CRAFT, which is a sign of small-mindedness. For magnanimity, greatness of mind, is precisely the contempt for unjust or dishonest shortcuts.
And what the Romans called versutia — in English, "shifting" — is the trick of escaping a present danger or difficulty by getting into a bigger one, as when a man robs one person to pay another. It is just a shorter-sighted craft. The name comes from versura, which means borrowing money at interest to pay the interest you already owe.
As for acquired wit — I mean wit acquired by method and instruction — there is only one kind: reason. Reason is grounded in the right use of speech, and it produces the sciences. But I have already spoken of reason and science in the fifth and sixth chapters.
The causes of these differences in wit lie in the passions, and the differences in the passions come partly from men's different bodily constitutions and partly from their different upbringings. If the difference came from the makeup of the brain and the organs of sense, exterior or interior, men would differ as much in their sight and hearing and other senses as they do in their fancies and discretions. So the difference comes from the passions — which vary not only with men's physical temperaments but also with their differences of custom and education.
The passions that most of all cause differences of wit are, principally, a greater or lesser desire for power, for riches, for knowledge, and for honor. And all of these can be reduced to the first — the desire for power. For riches, knowledge, and honor are just different kinds of power.
So a man who has no great passion for any of these things — who is, as people say, indifferent — may well be a good man in the sense that he gives no offense, but he cannot possibly have either a great fancy or much judgment. For the thoughts are to the desires what scouts and spies are to an army: they range abroad and find the way to the things desired. All steadiness of the mind's motion, and all its quickness, comes from that.
To have no desires is to be dead. To have weak passions is dullness. To have passions spread indifferently across everything is GIDDINESS and distraction. And to have stronger, more vehement passions for something than is ordinarily seen in other men — that is what men call MADNESS.
Of madness there are almost as many kinds as there are passions. Sometimes the extraordinary and extravagant passion comes from a bad constitution of the body's organs, or from damage done to them; and sometimes the damage and disorder of the organs is caused by the vehemence or long persistence of the passion itself. But in both cases the madness is of one and the same nature.
The passion whose violence or persistence produces madness is either great vainglory — commonly called pride and self-conceit — or great dejection of mind.
Pride makes a man prone to anger, and the excess of anger is the madness called RAGE and FURY. And so it happens that an excessive desire for revenge, once it becomes habitual, injures the organs and turns into rage. Excessive love, joined with jealousy, also becomes rage. An excessive opinion of oneself — as divinely inspired, or as wise, learned, handsome, and so on — becomes distraction and giddiness; the same opinion joined with envy becomes rage. And a vehement conviction of the truth of anything, when contradicted by others — rage.
Dejection makes a man prone to groundless fears, which is the madness commonly called MELANCHOLY. It too shows itself in various ways: in haunting lonely places and graves, in superstitious behavior, in fearing some particular thing — one man one thing, another man another.
In sum, all passions that produce strange and unusual behavior go by the general name of madness. As for the particular kinds of madness, anyone who cared to take the trouble could enroll a legion of them. And if the excesses are madness, there is no doubt that the passions themselves, when they tend toward evil, are degrees of the same thing.
Take an example. The effect of folly in people possessed by an opinion of being divinely inspired may not always show itself in any one man through some wildly extravagant action. But when many of them conspire together, the rage of the whole multitude is visible enough. What greater proof of madness could there be than to clamor against, strike, and throw stones at our best friends? Yet a multitude like that will do something even worse: they will clamor against, fight, and destroy the very people who, all their lives before, protected them and kept them safe from injury. And if this is madness in the multitude, it is the same madness in every individual man.
Think of it this way. In the middle of the sea, a man hears no sound from the patch of water right beside him — yet he can be quite sure that patch contributes as much to the roaring of the sea as any other patch of the same size. In the same way, though we may notice no great disturbance in one or two individual men, we can be quite sure their individual passions are parts of the seditious roaring of a troubled nation.
And even if nothing else betrayed their madness, the very act of claiming such inspiration for themselves is proof enough. If a man in Bedlam — the madhouse — entertained you with perfectly sober conversation, and as you took your leave you asked who he was, so you could repay his courtesy another time, and he told you he was God the Father, I think you would need to wait for no extravagant action to be sure of his madness.
This opinion of inspiration, commonly called the "private spirit," very often begins with a man's lucky discovery of an error that everyone else holds. Not knowing — or not remembering — by what chain of reasoning he arrived at this singular truth (as he thinks it is, though it is often an untruth he has stumbled onto), he immediately admires himself as someone in the special grace of God Almighty, who has revealed this to him supernaturally by his Spirit.
Again, that madness is nothing other than passion showing itself too plainly can be gathered from the effects of wine, which are the same as the effects of disordered organs. The variety of behavior in men who have drunk too much is exactly the variety found in madmen: some raging, some loving, some laughing — all extravagantly, each according to whichever passion dominates in him. For all the wine does is strip away dissimulation, and take from them the sight of how deformed their passions look.
For I believe the most sober of men, when they walk alone with nothing to occupy or discipline the mind, would be unwilling for the vanity and extravagance of their thoughts in those moments to be publicly seen. Which is a confession that passions, left unguided, are for the most part sheer madness.
The world's opinions about the cause of madness, in ancient times and in later ones, have been two. Some derived madness from the passions. Others derived it from demons or spirits, good or bad, which they believed could enter a man, possess him, and move his organs in the strange and uncouth way that madmen move. The first sort, accordingly, called such men madmen. The second sort called them sometimes demoniacs (that is, possessed by spirits), sometimes energumeni (that is, agitated or moved by spirits). And in Italy today they are called not only pazzi, madmen, but also spiritati — men possessed.
There was once a great crowd gathered at Abdera, a Greek city, for a performance of the tragedy of Andromeda, on an extremely hot day. A great many of the spectators fell into fevers, and the heat and the tragedy together produced this odd result: they did nothing but recite iambic verses full of the names of Perseus and Andromeda. The madness, along with the fever, was cured by the coming of winter — and this madness was thought to come from the passion imprinted on them by the tragedy.
Likewise, a fit of madness once swept through another Greek city, seizing only the young women, and caused many of them to hang themselves. Most people at the time thought it the work of the Devil. But one man suspected that this contempt for life might come from some passion of the mind, and reckoned that the young women did not hold their honor in the same contempt. So he advised the magistrates to strip the bodies of those who hanged themselves and let them hang out naked. This, the story says, cured the madness.
But on the other side, those same Greeks often attributed madness to the operation of the Eumenides, the Furies — and sometimes of Ceres, Phoebus, and other gods. So much did men credit phantasms that they took them for living aerial bodies, and gave them the general name of spirits. And as the Romans held the same opinion as the Greeks, so did the Jews. They called madmen prophets, or, depending on whether they thought the spirits good or bad, demoniacs. Some of them called both prophets and demoniacs madmen, and some called the same man both demoniac and madman.
For the pagans of the past, this is no surprise, since diseases and health, vices and virtues, and many natural accidents were named and worshipped by them as demons — so that by "demon" a man might understand a fever as easily as a devil. But for the Jews to hold such an opinion is somewhat strange. For neither Moses nor Abraham claimed to prophesy by possession of a spirit; they prophesied from the voice of God, or by a vision or dream. Nor is there anything in their law, moral or ceremonial, by which they were taught that there was any such thing as inspiration-by-possession, or possession at all.
When God is said (Numbers 11:25) to take from the spirit that was in Moses and give it to the seventy elders, the Spirit of God — if we take it for the substance of God — is not something that can be divided up. What the Scriptures mean by the Spirit of God in a man is the man's own spirit, inclined to godliness. And where it is said (Exodus 28:3), "whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom to make garments for Aaron," it does not mean a spirit inserted into them that can sew garments; it means the wisdom of their own spirits in that kind of work.
In the same sense, the spirit of a man, when it produces unclean actions, is ordinarily called an unclean spirit; and so with other "spirits" — not always, but whenever the virtue or vice in question is extraordinary and conspicuous. Nor did the other prophets of the Old Testament claim possession-style inspiration, or claim that God spoke in them. God spoke to them — by voice, vision, or dream. And the "burden of the Lord" was not possession; it was command.
How then could the Jews fall into this opinion of possession? I can imagine no reason except the one common to all mankind: the lack of curiosity to search out natural causes, and the habit of placing happiness in acquiring the coarse pleasures of the senses and whatever leads most directly to them. For when people see some strange and unusual ability or defect in a man's mind, and cannot also see what cause it might naturally come from, they can hardly believe it natural. And if not natural, it must, they think, be supernatural. And then what can it be, but that either God or the Devil is in him?
That is how it came about that when our Savior (Mark 3:21) was pressed by the multitude, those of his own household suspected he was mad, and went out to restrain him — while the scribes said he had Beelzebub, and that this was how he cast out devils: as if the greater madman overawed the lesser. And it is how (John 10:20) some said, "He has a devil, and is mad," while others, holding him for a prophet, said, "These are not the words of one who has a devil." So too in the Old Testament: the man who came to anoint Jehu (2 Kings 9:11) was a prophet, but some of the company asked Jehu, "What did that madman come for?"
In sum, it is clear that whoever behaved in an extraordinary way was thought by the Jews to be possessed by either a good or an evil spirit — except by the Sadducees, who erred so far in the other direction as not to believe there were any spirits at all (which comes very near to outright atheism), and who thereby, perhaps, only provoked others all the more to call such men demoniacs rather than madmen.
But why, then, does our Savior go about curing them as if they were possessed, and not as if they were mad? I can give no other kind of answer than the one given to those who press Scripture the same way against the motion of the Earth. The Scripture was written to show men the kingdom of God, and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects — leaving the world, and the philosophy of the world, to the disputation of men, for the exercise of their natural reason. Whether it is the Earth's motion or the Sun's that makes day and night, and whether the wild actions of men come from passion or from the Devil (so long as we do not worship him), makes no difference at all to our obedience and subjection to God Almighty — which is the thing the Scripture was written for.
As for our Savior speaking to the disease as if to a person: that is the usual manner of all who cure by words alone, as Christ did (and as enchanters pretend to do, whether they speak to a devil or not). Is not Christ also said (Matthew 8:26) to have rebuked the winds? Is he not said (Luke 4:39) to rebuke a fever? Yet that does not prove a fever is a devil.
And where many of these devils are said to confess Christ, there is no need to interpret those passages as anything more than that those madmen confessed him. And where our Savior (Matthew 12:43) speaks of an unclean spirit that goes out of a man, wanders through dry places seeking rest and finding none, and returns into the same man with seven other spirits worse than himself — that is plainly a parable, alluding to a man who makes a small effort to quit his lusts, is defeated by their strength, and ends up seven times worse than he was.
So I see nothing at all in Scripture that requires us to believe demoniacs were anything other than madmen.
There is yet another fault in the discourses of some men which may also be numbered among the kinds of madness: the abuse of words I spoke of earlier, in the fifth chapter, under the name of absurdity. This is when men speak words which, put together, have no signification at all. Some fall into it by misunderstanding words they have received and now repeat by rote; others do it deliberately, intending to deceive through obscurity.
This affliction strikes no one but those who traffic in questions about incomprehensible matters, like the Scholastics, or in questions of abstruse philosophy. The common run of men seldom speak insignificantly — and are therefore counted idiots by those distinguished persons. But to be sure their words have nothing in the mind corresponding to them, we need some examples. If any man requires one, let him take a Scholastic into his hands and see whether he can translate any single chapter on any difficult point — the Trinity, the Deity, the nature of Christ, transubstantiation, free will, and so on — into any modern language so as to make it intelligible, or into any tolerable Latin of the kind familiar to those who lived when Latin was a living, common tongue.
What is the meaning of these words: "The first cause does not necessarily inflow anything into the second, by force of the essential subordination of the second causes, by which it may help it to work"? That is the translation of the title of the sixth chapter of Suárez's first book, Of the Concourse, Motion, and Help of God. When men write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad — or trying to make others so?
And take in particular the question of transubstantiation. After certain words have been spoken, there are men who say that the white-ness, the round-ness, the magni-tude, the quali-ty, the corruptibili-ty — all of them incorporeal, and so on — go out of the wafer and into the body of our blessed Savior. Do they not make those nesses, tudes, and ties into so many spirits possessing his body? For by "spirits" they always mean things that, while incorporeal, can nevertheless be moved from one place to another.
So this kind of absurdity may rightly be counted among the many sorts of madness. And all the time these men spend guided by the clear thoughts of their worldly ambition — when they refrain from disputing and writing this way — is nothing but their lucid intervals.
And so much for the intellectual virtues and defects.
There are two kinds of KNOWLEDGE. One is knowledge of fact. The other is knowledge of the consequence of one statement to another.
The first kind is nothing more than sense and memory, and it is absolute knowledge — as when we see something happening, or remember seeing it done. This is the knowledge required of a witness.
The second kind is called science, and it is conditional — as when we know that if the figure shown is a circle, then any straight line through the center will divide it into two equal parts. This is the knowledge required of a philosopher — that is, of anyone who claims to reason.
The record of knowledge of fact is called HISTORY, and it comes in two sorts. One is natural history: the history of facts, or effects of nature, that do not depend on human will — histories of metals, plants, animals, regions, and the like. The other is civil history: the history of the voluntary actions of people living in commonwealths.
The records of science are the books that contain demonstrations of how one statement follows from another. These are commonly called books of philosophy, and they come in many sorts, depending on the variety of their subject matter. They may be divided as I have divided them in the following table.
SCIENCE — that is, knowledge of consequences, which is also called PHILOSOPHY:
A. Consequences from the properties of natural bodies — which is called NATURAL PHILOSOPHY.
1. Consequences from the properties common to all natural bodies, which are quantity and motion.
a. Consequences from quantity and motion in the abstract — indeterminate, not yet tied to any particular thing. Because these are the principles, the first foundation of philosophy, this is called philosophia prima:
FIRST PHILOSOPHY
b. Consequences from motion and quantity determined — pinned down to particular cases.
1) Consequences from quantity and motion determined by figure and by number — the mathematical sciences:
GEOMETRY
ARITHMETIC
2) Consequences from the motion and quantity of particular kinds of bodies.
a) Consequences from the motion and quantity of the great parts of the world, such as the earth and the stars — cosmography:
ASTRONOMY
GEOGRAPHY
b) Consequences from the motion of particular kinds and shapes of bodies — mechanics, the doctrine of weight — the science of:
ENGINEERS
ARCHITECTURE
NAVIGATION
2. PHYSICS — consequences from qualities.
a. Consequences from the qualities of transient bodies, the kind that sometimes appear and sometimes vanish:
METEOROLOGY
b. Consequences from the qualities of permanent bodies.
1) Consequences from the qualities of the stars.
a) Consequences from the light of the stars. From this, together with the motion of the sun, is made the science of:
SCIOGRAPHY — the science of shadows, used for telling time
b) Consequences from the influence of the stars:
ASTROLOGY
2) Consequences from the qualities of the liquid bodies that fill the space between the stars — such as the air, or the ethereal substance.
3) Consequences from the qualities of earthly bodies.
a) Consequences from the parts of the earth that have no sense.
1] Consequences from the qualities of minerals, such as stones, metals, and so on.
2] Consequences from the qualities of plants.
b) Consequences from the qualities of animals.
1] Consequences from the qualities of animals in general.
a] Consequences from vision:
OPTICS
b] Consequences from sounds:
MUSIC
c] Consequences from the rest of the senses.
2] Consequences from the qualities of human beings in particular.
a] Consequences from the passions of men:
ETHICS
b] Consequences from speech.
i) In magnifying, vilifying, and the like:
POETRY
ii) In persuading:
RHETORIC
iii) In reasoning:
LOGIC
iv) In contracting — in making agreements — the science of:
JUST and UNJUST
B. Consequences from the properties of political bodies — which is called POLITICS, or CIVIL PHILOSOPHY.
1. Consequences from the institution of commonwealths, concerning the rights and duties of the body politic, or sovereign.
2. Consequences from the same, concerning the duties and rights of the subjects.
The POWER of a man, taken in the most general sense, is his present means to obtain some future apparent good. Power is either original or instrumental.
Natural power is the excellence of body or mind: exceptional strength, good looks, prudence, skill in the arts, eloquence, generosity, noble birth. Instrumental powers are the ones acquired through those natural gifts, or through luck, and they serve as means and instruments to acquire still more — riches, reputation, friends, and the secret working of God, which men call good luck. For power, in this respect, behaves like fame: it grows as it goes. Or like a falling object, which picks up speed the farther it travels.
The greatest of human powers is the kind compounded out of the powers of many men, united by consent in one person — natural or artificial — who has the use of all their powers at his command. That is the power of a commonwealth. Or it may depend on the will of each individual member, like the power of a faction, or of several factions in league. So to have servants is power. To have friends is power. They are strengths united.
Riches joined with generosity are power, because they buy friends and servants. Riches without generosity are not — because in that case wealth does not defend its owner; it just exposes him to envy, like prey.
A reputation for power is itself power, because it attracts the loyalty of people who need protection.
So is a reputation for loving one's country — what we call popularity — and for the same reason.
In fact, any quality that makes a man loved or feared by many people, or even the reputation of such a quality, is power, because it is a means of getting the help and service of many.
Success is power, because it builds a reputation for wisdom or good fortune, which makes men either fear you or rely on you.
Friendliness in those who already hold power increases their power, because it wins love.
A reputation for prudence in the conduct of peace or war is power, because we hand over the government of ourselves more willingly to prudent men than to others.
Noble birth is power — not everywhere, but only in those commonwealths where nobility carries privileges. The power consists in the privileges.
Eloquence is power, because it looks like prudence.
Good looks are power, because beauty is a promise of good things to come, and it recommends men to the favor of women and strangers.
The sciences are only a small power, because science is not eminent — it does not stand out, so nobody gives any one man credit for it. And it exists in only a few people, and even in them, only about a few subjects. For science has this peculiar nature: no one can recognize that it exists at all unless he has already mastered a good share of it himself.
Arts of public use — fortification, the making of engines and other instruments of war — are power, because they contribute to defense and victory. And though the true mother of these arts is science, namely mathematics, they get credited to the craftsman who brings them into the light. With the common crowd, the midwife passes for the mother.
The value, or WORTH, of a man is — as with everything else — his price: that is, however much would be given for the use of his power. So it is not absolute, but depends on the need and judgment of someone else. An able commander of soldiers commands a great price in wartime, or when war threatens — but not in peace. A learned and honest judge is worth a great deal in peacetime, but less in war. And with men, as with everything else, it is not the seller who sets the price, but the buyer. Let a man rate himself at the highest value he can — and most men do — his true value is still no more than what others judge it to be.
The way we show the value we place on one another is what is commonly called honoring and dishonoring. To value a man at a high rate is to honor him; at a low rate, to dishonor him. But "high" and "low" here have to be measured against the rate each man sets on himself.
The public worth of a man — the value placed on him by the commonwealth — is what men commonly call DIGNITY. And this valuation by the commonwealth shows itself in offices of command, judgeships, public employment, or in names and titles introduced to mark such value.
To ask another for help of any kind is to HONOR him, because it is a sign that we believe he has the power to help; and the harder the help asked for, the greater the honor.
To obey is to honor, because nobody obeys someone they think has no power to help or hurt them. And so, to disobey is to dishonor.
To give great gifts to a man is to honor him, because it is buying protection and acknowledging power. To give small gifts is to dishonor, because that is mere charity, and it signals an opinion that he needs only small assistance. To work hard at promoting another's good, and to flatter him, is to honor — a sign that we seek his protection or aid. To neglect him is to dishonor.
To give way, or yield place to another in any advantage, is to honor — an admission of greater power. To grab precedence for yourself is to dishonor.
To show any sign of love or fear of another is to honor, for both to love and to fear is to value. To despise someone, or to love or fear him less than he expects, is to dishonor — it is undervaluing.
To praise a man, to magnify him, to call him happy, is to honor him, because nothing is valued but goodness, power, and happiness. To mock, revile, or pity him is to dishonor.
To speak to another with consideration, to appear before him with decency and humility, is to honor him — these are signs of fear of offending. To speak to him rashly, or to do anything obscene, sloppy, or impudent in his presence, is to dishonor.
To believe, to trust, to rely on another is to honor him — a sign of confidence in his virtue and power. To distrust or disbelieve him is to dishonor.
To listen to a man's counsel, or to his talk of any kind, is to honor — a sign that we think him wise, or eloquent, or witty. To fall asleep, walk out, or chat while he speaks is to dishonor.
To do for another those things he takes for signs of honor, or that law or custom makes signs of honor, is to honor him; because in approving the honor done by others, we acknowledge the power that others acknowledge. To refuse to do them is to dishonor.
To agree with a man's opinion is to honor him — a sign of approving his judgment and wisdom. To dissent is to dishonor, and amounts to accusing him of error — and if you dissent from him on many things, of folly.
To imitate is to honor, for imitation is the most emphatic form of approval. To imitate a man's enemy is to dishonor him.
To honor those whom another honors is to honor him — a sign of approval of his judgment. To honor his enemies is to dishonor him.
To employ a man in counsel, or in difficult undertakings, is to honor him — a sign of confidence in his wisdom or other power. To deny such employment to those who seek it is to dishonor.
All these ways of honoring are natural, and they hold both inside and outside commonwealths. But inside commonwealths, where the holder of supreme authority can make anything he pleases stand for a sign of honor, there are other honors as well.
A sovereign honors a subject with any title, office, employment, or action whatsoever that he himself chooses to count as a sign of his will to honor him.
The king of Persia honored Mordecai when he ordered him led through the streets in the king's robes, on one of the king's horses, with a crown on his head and a prince walking ahead of him proclaiming, "Thus shall it be done to him whom the king will honor." And yet another king of Persia — or the same one on another occasion — granted a man who asked, as reward for some great service, permission to wear one of the king's robes. Permission granted, said the king — but he must wear it as the king's fool. And that turned it into dishonor. So much for civil honor: things like magistracies, offices, titles, and in some places painted coats of arms. Men honor those who have them, as carrying so many signs of favor in the commonwealth — and that favor is power.
Honorable is whatever possession, action, or quality serves as evidence and sign of power.
And therefore to be honored, loved, or feared by many is honorable, as evidence of power. To be honored by few or none is dishonorable.
Good fortune, if it lasts, is honorable, as a sign of the favor of God. Bad fortune and losses are dishonorable. Riches are honorable, for they are power. Poverty is dishonorable. Magnanimity, generosity, hope, courage, confidence are honorable, for they spring from an awareness of one's own power. Small-mindedness, stinginess, fear, and self-distrust are dishonorable.
Deciding promptly — settling on what to do in good time — is honorable, because it shows contempt for small difficulties and dangers. Indecision is dishonorable, as a sign of overvaluing little obstacles and little advantages. For when a man has weighed his options as long as time allows and still cannot decide, the difference between them must be slight; so if he fails to decide, he is overvaluing trifles — which is small-mindedness.
All actions and speeches that come, or seem to come, from much experience, science, discretion, or wit are honorable, for all these are powers. Actions or words that come from error, ignorance, or folly are dishonorable.
Gravity — a serious manner — is honorable insofar as it seems to come from a mind occupied with something else, because being occupied is a sign of power. But if it seems to come from a deliberate effort to look grave, it is dishonorable. The gravity of the first kind is like the steadiness of a ship loaded with merchandise; the second, like the steadiness of a ship ballasted with sand and other junk.
To be conspicuous — that is, to be widely known for wealth, office, great deeds, or any eminent good — is honorable, as a sign of the power for which one is conspicuous. Obscurity, by contrast, is dishonorable.
To be descended from famous parents is honorable, because such men more easily inherit the connections and friends of their ancestors. To be descended from obscure parentage is, by contrast, dishonorable.
Actions that spring from fairness, even at a cost to oneself, are honorable, as signs of magnanimity — and magnanimity is a sign of power. By contrast, craft, shifty dealing, and disregard of fairness are dishonorable.
And here is the uncomfortable part: it makes no difference to honor whether an action is just or unjust, so long as it is great and difficult — and therefore a sign of much power. For honor consists only in the opinion of power. That is why the ancient pagans did not think they were dishonoring the gods, but greatly honoring them, when they put them in their poems committing rapes, thefts, and other great but unjust or unclean acts. Nothing about Jupiter is celebrated so much as his adulteries; nothing about Mercury so much as his frauds and thefts. In one of Homer's hymns, the highest praise given to Mercury is this: that born in the morning, he had invented music by noon, and before nightfall had stolen the cattle of Apollo away from his herdsmen.
Among men, too, until great commonwealths were established, it was considered no dishonor to be a pirate or a highway robber — rather a lawful trade, not only among the Greeks but among all other nations, as the histories of ancient times make plain. And to this day, in this part of the world, private duels are honorable, and always will be, however unlawful — until the day honor is established for those who refuse a challenge, and disgrace for those who issue one. For duels are often genuine effects of courage, and the basis of courage is always strength or skill, which are power. Though for the most part they are the effects of rash talk, and of the fear of dishonor in one or both of the fighters — who, having committed themselves by their own rashness, are driven into the dueling ground to avoid disgrace.
Coats of arms and hereditary heraldry are honorable where they carry eminent privileges; otherwise not. For their power consists either in those privileges, or in riches, or in some other thing equally honored in other men. This kind of honor, commonly called gentry, descends from the ancient Germans. No such thing was ever known where German customs were unknown, and it is not in use anywhere today where Germans have not settled. The ancient Greek commanders, when they went to war, painted their shields with whatever designs they pleased — so much so that an unpainted shield was a sign of poverty and of a common soldier. But they did not pass these designs down as inheritance. The Romans handed down the marks of their families, but those were the portraits of their ancestors, not emblems. Among the peoples of Asia, Africa, and America there is not, and never was, any such thing. The Germans alone had that custom, and from them it spread into England, France, Spain, and Italy, when in great numbers they either fought as allies of the Romans or carved out their own conquests in these western parts of the world.
For Germany was anciently — like all other countries at their beginnings — divided among countless little lords, or masters of families, who waged continual war on one another. These masters, chiefly so that they could be recognized by their followers when they were covered in armor, and partly for ornament, painted their armor, or their shield, or their coat with the picture of some beast or other device, and also fixed some prominent, visible mark on the crest of their helmets. This ornament of arms and crest descended by inheritance to their children — to the eldest unchanged, and to the rest with some mark of difference, whatever the old master (in German, the Here-alt — the source of our word "herald") thought fit. When many such families joined together into a greater monarchy, this duty of the herald, to keep the coats of arms distinct, became a separate private office. The descendants of those lords are the great and ancient gentry, whose arms mostly display living creatures noted for courage and plunder, or castles, battlements, belts, weapons, bars, palisades, and other emblems of war — for in those days nothing was honored but military virtue. Later on, not only kings but popular commonwealths granted various coats of arms to those who marched off to war or returned from it, as encouragement or reward for their service. All of this an observant reader can find in those ancient Greek and Latin histories that mention the German nation and its customs.
Titles of honor, such as duke, count, marquis, and baron, are honorable, as signifying the value set on their holders by the sovereign power of the commonwealth. These titles were in old times titles of office and command, derived some from the Romans, some from the Germans and French. Dukes — in Latin duces — were generals in war. Counts — comites, "companions" — were those who kept the general company out of friendship, and were left behind to govern and defend conquered and pacified territory. Marquises — marchiones — were counts who governed the marches, the borderlands of the empire. These titles of duke, count, and marquis came into the empire around the time of Constantine the Great, from the customs of the German military. But baron seems to have been a title of the Gauls, meaning a great man — the kind of men the kings or princes employed in war around their persons. It seems to derive from vir — Latin for "man" — becoming ber and bar, which meant in the language of the Gauls what vir meant in Latin; thence to bero and baro, so that such men were called berones, and afterward barones, and in Spanish varones. Anyone who wants the origins of titles of honor in more detail can find them, as I found these, in Mr. Selden's most excellent treatise on the subject. In the course of time, these offices of honor — through political trouble, and for reasons of good and peaceful government — were turned into mere titles, serving mostly to mark the precedence, place, and rank of subjects in the commonwealth. Men were made dukes, counts, marquises, and barons of places where they had neither property nor command, and still other titles were invented for the same purpose.
WORTHINESS is a different thing from the worth or value of a man, and different too from his merit or desert. It consists in a particular power or ability for the thing he is said to be worthy of — and that particular ability is usually called FITNESS, or aptitude.
For the worthiest man to be a commander, a judge, or to hold any other office, is the one best equipped with the qualities required to do the job well; and the worthiest of riches is the one with the qualities most needed for using riches well. Lacking any of these qualities, a man may still be a worthy man — valuable for something else. Then again, a man may be worthy of riches, office, and employment and yet have no claim to receive them ahead of anyone else, and so cannot be said to merit or deserve them. For merit presupposes a right — that the thing deserved is owed by promise. Of that I shall say more later, when I come to speak of contracts.
By MANNERS, I do not mean politeness — how one person should greet another, or whether a man should rinse his mouth or pick his teeth in company, and other points of the small morals. I mean those qualities of mankind that concern our living together in peace and unity.
To see what those qualities are, start here: the happiness of this life does not consist in the repose of a satisfied mind. There is no Finis Ultimus — final goal — and no Summum Bonum — greatest good — of the kind described in the books of the old moral philosophers. A man whose desires have come to an end can no more live than a man whose senses and imagination have come to a standstill. Happiness is a continual progress of desire from one object to another, where getting the first thing is only the road to getting the next.
Why? Because the object of a man's desire is not to enjoy something once, for one instant of time, but to secure forever the way to his future desires. So the voluntary actions and inclinations of all men aim not only at obtaining a contented life, but at making it secure. Men differ only in how they go about it — partly because passions differ from person to person, and partly because each person has different knowledge, or different opinions, about which causes produce the effect he wants.
So in the first place, I put forward as a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
The cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intense delight than he has already attained, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power. It is that he cannot secure the power and means to live well that he has right now without acquiring more. That is why kings, whose power is greatest, turn their efforts to securing it — at home by laws, abroad by wars. And when that is done, a new desire takes its place: in some, fame from new conquests; in others, ease and sensual pleasure; in others, admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art or other ability of the mind.
Competition for riches, honor, command, or any other power inclines men toward contention, enmity, and war — because the way for one competitor to get what he desires is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repel the other. Competition for praise, in particular, inclines men toward reverence for antiquity. Men compete with the living, not the dead — so they credit the dead with more than they deserve, in order to dim the glory of their living rivals.
Desire for ease and sensual pleasure disposes men to obey a common power, because such desires make a man give up the protection he might otherwise have to win by his own industry and labor.
Fear of death and wounds disposes men the same way, and for the same reason. On the other hand, needy and hardy men who are not content with their present condition — along with all men ambitious for military command — are inclined to keep the causes of war alive, and to stir up trouble and sedition. There is no military honor except through war, and no better hope of mending a bad game than forcing a new shuffle of the cards.
Desire for knowledge, and for the arts of peace, inclines men to obey a common power. Such a desire contains a desire for leisure — and therefore for protection by some power other than one's own.
Desire for praise disposes men to praiseworthy actions — the kind that please the people whose judgment they value; for when we despise a man, we despise his praise as well. Desire for fame after death does the same. True, after death there is no sense of the praise given us on earth — those joys are either swallowed up in the unspeakable joys of heaven or extinguished in the extreme torments of hell. Yet such fame is not pointless. Men take a present delight in foreseeing it, and in foreseeing the benefit that may pass from it to their descendants. They do not see that benefit now, but they imagine it — and whatever is pleasure to the senses is pleasure in the imagination too.
To receive from someone we consider our equal greater benefits than we can ever hope to repay disposes us to counterfeit love — and to real, secret hatred. It puts a man in the position of a desperate debtor who avoids the sight of his creditor and quietly wishes him somewhere he will never be seen again. Benefits oblige; obligation is bondage; and bondage to an equal is hateful.
But to receive benefits from someone we acknowledge as our superior inclines us to love, because the obligation is no new humiliation; and cheerful acceptance (which men call gratitude) is such an honor done to the giver that it generally counts as repayment. Receiving benefits from an equal, or even an inferior, also disposes us to love — as long as there is hope of repaying them. For then the receiver intends the obligation as one of mutual aid and service, and from that comes a competition over who shall out-give the other: the noblest and most profitable contest possible, in which the winner is pleased with his victory, and the loser gets his revenge by admitting it.
To have done a man more harm than you can make up for, or are willing to, inclines you to hate the one you have hurt. For you must expect either his revenge or his forgiveness — and both are hateful.
Fear of oppression disposes a man to strike first, or to seek safety by joining with others. There is no other way a man can secure his life and liberty.
Men who distrust their own cleverness do better in times of tumult and sedition than men who suppose themselves wise or crafty. The crafty love to consult; the others, fearing to be outmaneuvered, strike first. And in sedition, where men are always on the edge of battle, holding together and using every advantage of force is a better strategy than anything cleverness can produce.
Vain men — those who delight in imagining themselves gallant without being conscious of any real ability in themselves — are inclined only to show, not to action. For when danger or difficulty appears, they can expect nothing but to have their insufficiency exposed.
Vain men who estimate their ability from the flattery of other men, or from the luck of some past success, without any solid ground of hope from true knowledge of themselves, are inclined to rush in — and then, as danger or difficulty approaches, to retreat if they can. For seeing no way to safety, they would rather risk their honor, which can be patched up with an excuse, than their lives, for which no patch is sufficient.
Men who hold a strong opinion of their own wisdom in matters of government are disposed to ambition, because without public employment in council or office, the honor of their wisdom is lost. That is why eloquent speakers are inclined to ambition: eloquence looks like wisdom, both to themselves and to others.
Pusillanimity disposes men to indecision, and so to losing the occasions and best opportunities for action. For when men have deliberated right up to the moment of action, and it is still not clear which course is best, that is a sign that the motives on either side are not very different. To fail to decide then is to lose the occasion by weighing trifles — which is pusillanimity.
Frugality (though a virtue in poor men) makes a man unfit to achieve actions that require the strength of many men at once. For it starves their effort, which has to be nourished and kept vigorous by reward.
Eloquence, joined with flattery, disposes men to trust those who have it — for eloquence looks like wisdom, and flattery looks like kindness. Add military reputation, and men are disposed to attach themselves, and subject themselves, to those who have all three. The first two give them assurance against danger from the man himself; the third gives them assurance against danger from others.
Lack of science — that is, ignorance of causes — disposes a man, or rather forces him, to rely on the advice and authority of others. For every man who cares about the truth must, if he does not rely on his own judgment, rely on the opinion of someone else — someone he thinks wiser than himself, and sees no reason to suspect of deceiving him.
Ignorance of what words signify — which is lack of understanding — disposes men to take on trust not only truths they do not know, but errors too, and worse, the nonsense of those they trust. For neither error nor nonsense can be detected without a perfect understanding of words.
From the same source it comes that men give different names to one and the same thing, according to the difference of their own passions. Those who approve of a private opinion call it opinion; those who dislike it call it heresy — and yet heresy means nothing more than private opinion, with a stronger tincture of anger in it.
From the same source it also comes that men cannot distinguish, without study and real understanding, between one action of many men and many actions of one multitude — between, for example, the single action of all the senators of Rome in killing Catiline, and the many actions of a number of senators in killing Caesar. And so they are disposed to take for the action of the people what is really a multitude of actions done by a multitude of men — led on, perhaps, by the persuasion of one.
Ignorance of the causes and original constitution of right, equity, law, and justice disposes a man to make custom and example the rule of his actions: to think a thing unjust because it has been the custom to punish it, and just because he can produce an example of it going unpunished and approved — or, as the lawyers (who alone use this false measure of justice) barbarously call it, a precedent. He is like little children, who have no other rule of good and bad manners than the corrections they receive from their parents and teachers. Except that children stay constant to their rule, and grown men do not. Grown strong and stubborn, men appeal from custom to reason and from reason to custom as it serves their turn — abandoning custom when their interest requires it, and setting themselves against reason whenever reason is against them.
That is why the doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and by the sword — while the doctrine of lines and figures is not. For in that subject, men do not care what the truth is, since it crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. I have no doubt that if the proposition that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two angles of a square had been contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men who have dominion, that doctrine would have been — if not disputed — then suppressed by the burning of every book of geometry, as far as the man it concerned was able.
Ignorance of remote causes disposes men to attribute all events to the causes that are immediate and instrumental — for these are the only causes they perceive. That is why, in every country, men aggrieved by payments to the public discharge their anger on the publicans — the tax farmers, collectors, and other officers of the public revenue — and attach themselves to anyone who finds fault with the public government. Then, having committed themselves beyond hope of justification, they end up attacking the supreme authority itself, for fear of punishment, or for shame at accepting a pardon.
Ignorance of natural causes disposes a man to credulity — to believing, many times, in impossibilities. For he knows nothing to say they might not be true, being unable to detect the impossibility. And credulity, because men love to be listened to in company, disposes them to lying. So ignorance by itself, without any malice, can make a man both believe lies and tell them — and sometimes invent them too.
Anxiety about the future disposes men to inquire into the causes of things, because knowing the causes makes men better able to arrange the present to their best advantage.
Curiosity — the love of knowing causes — draws a man from considering an effect to seeking its cause, and then the cause of that cause, until of necessity he comes at last to this thought: there must be some cause that has no earlier cause, but is eternal. And that is what men call God. So it is impossible to inquire deeply into natural causes without being inclined to believe there is one eternal God — even though no one can have an idea of him in the mind that matches his nature.
Think of a man born blind, who hears others talk of warming themselves by a fire and is then brought to warm himself at one. He can easily conceive, and assure himself, that there is something there which men call fire, and which causes the heat he feels — but he cannot imagine what it is like, or have an idea of it in his mind such as sighted men have. In the same way, from the visible things of this world and their admirable order, a man may conceive that there is a cause of them all, which men call God — and yet have no idea or image of him in his mind.
And those who make little or no inquiry into the natural causes of things are still moved by the fear that grows out of that very ignorance — fear of whatever it is that has the power to do them great good or great harm. That fear inclines them to suppose, and invent for themselves, various kinds of invisible powers; to stand in awe of their own imaginations; to call on those powers in times of distress, and to give them thanks when expected good fortune arrives — making the creatures of their own imagination into their gods. By this means, from the endless variety of imagination, men have created in the world endless sorts of gods. And this fear of invisible things is the natural seed of what everyone calls religion in himself — and superstition in those who worship or fear that power differently than he does.
This seed of religion has been noticed by many. And some of those who noticed it have been inclined to nourish it, dress it up, and shape it into laws — adding to it, out of their own invention, whatever opinions about the causes of future events they thought would best enable them to govern others, and to make the greatest use of their own powers.
Since there are no signs or fruits of religion anywhere but in human beings, there is no reason to doubt that the seed of religion is also found only in human beings. It must consist in some quality peculiar to us — or at least in some quality we possess to an eminent degree — that is not found in other living creatures.
First, it is peculiar to human nature to be inquisitive about the causes of the events we see. Some people ask more, some less, but everyone asks at least enough to be curious about the causes of their own good and bad fortune.
Secondly, when we see anything that has a beginning, we naturally think it must have had a cause — something that determined it to begin exactly when it did, rather than sooner or later.
Thirdly, consider the difference between us and the animals. A beast's whole happiness is its daily food, its comfort, and its appetites. It has little or no foresight about the future, because it does not observe or remember the order, sequence, and dependence of the things it sees. But man observes how one event is produced by another, and remembers what came before and what came after. And when he cannot be sure of the true causes of things — for the causes of good and bad fortune are mostly invisible — he supposes causes for them anyway: either causes his own imagination suggests, or causes he takes on the authority of other men, people he believes are his friends and wiser than himself.
The first two of these traits produce anxiety. Once a man is convinced that everything that has happened, or will happen, has a cause, it becomes impossible for him — constantly striving as he does to protect himself from the evils he fears and to obtain the goods he desires — not to be in perpetual worry about the future.
So every man, and especially the over-cautious man, is in a condition like that of Prometheus. The name Prometheus, translated, means "the prudent man." And Prometheus was chained to Mount Caucasus, a place with a vast view, where an eagle fed on his liver, devouring by day exactly as much as grew back at night. In the same way, the man who looks too far ahead, anxious about the future, has his heart gnawed at all day long by fear of death, poverty, or some other calamity. He gets no rest, no pause from his anxiety, except in sleep.
This perpetual fear, which accompanies mankind whenever we are ignorant of causes — as if we were standing in the dark — must have some object. And when there is nothing visible to blame for our good or bad fortune, we blame some invisible power or agent.
Perhaps this is what some of the old poets meant when they said that the gods were first created by human fear. Said of the gods — that is, of the many gods of the pagans — this is very true.
But the acknowledgment of one God — eternal, infinite, and omnipotent — can be derived more easily from the desire to know the causes of natural bodies and their various powers and operations than from fear of what might happen to us in the future. For take a man who, from some effect he sees, reasons back to its next and immediate cause, and from there to the cause of that cause, plunging himself deep into the pursuit of causes. He will arrive at last at this conclusion: that there must be — as even the heathen philosophers admitted — one First Mover. That is, one first and eternal cause of all things. And that is what people mean by the name God.
And he reaches it without ever thinking about his own fortune. Worry about one's fortune does the opposite: it inclines a man toward fear, and it distracts him from searching out the causes of other things — and so it gives occasion for inventing as many gods as there are men to invent them.
As for the matter, or substance, of these imagined invisible agents: natural thinking could arrive at no other idea than that they were made of the same stuff as the human soul — and that the human soul was made of the same stuff as what appears in a dream to someone sleeping, or in a mirror to someone awake. Not knowing that such apparitions are nothing but creations of the imagination, men took them to be real, external substances, and so called them ghosts — as the Romans called them imagines and umbrae, "images" and "shades" — and thought them spirits, that is, thin airy bodies. They imagined the invisible agents they feared to be like these ghosts, except able to appear and vanish at will.
But the opinion that such spirits were incorporeal — without bodies, immaterial — could never enter any man's mind by nature. Men can certainly put together words with contradictory meanings, like "spirit" and "incorporeal," but they can never form a mental image of anything answering to them. That is why men who, by their own reflection, arrive at the acknowledgment of one infinite, omnipotent, and eternal God prefer to confess that he is incomprehensible and above their understanding, rather than to define his nature as "incorporeal spirit" and then have to confess that their definition is unintelligible. Or if they do give him such a title, they do it not dogmatically — not intending to make the divine nature understood — but piously, to honor him with attributes as remote as possible from the grossness of visible bodies.
Next, consider how men think these invisible agents work their effects — that is, what immediate causes they use to bring things about. Men who do not know what causing actually is (which is to say, almost all men) have no rule to guess by except this: observing and remembering what they have seen come before a similar effect on some earlier occasion — without seeing any dependence or connection at all between the earlier event and the later one. And so from similar things in the past, they expect similar things to come, and they hope for good or bad luck, superstitiously, from things that play no part whatsoever in causing it.
So the Athenians, facing their war at Lepanto, demanded another Phormio — a general who had won for them there before. The faction of Pompey, for their war in Africa, demanded another Scipio. And others have done the same on countless occasions since. In the same way men attribute their fortune to a bystander, to a lucky or unlucky place, to words spoken aloud — especially if the name of God is among them, as in charming and conjuring, the liturgy of witches. They go so far as to believe such words have the power to turn a stone into bread, bread into a man, or anything into anything.
Thirdly, as for the worship that men naturally offer to invisible powers: it can be nothing other than the same expressions of reverence they would use toward men. Gifts. Petitions. Thanks. Bowing the body. Respectful forms of address. Sober behavior. Carefully prepared words. Swearing oaths — that is, assuring one another of promises — by invoking them. Beyond that, reason suggests nothing. It leaves men either to stop there, or, for further ceremonies, to rely on those they believe wiser than themselves.
Lastly, as for how these invisible powers reveal to men the things that are going to happen — especially their good or bad fortune in general, or their success in some particular undertaking — men are naturally at a loss. All they can do is guess at the future from the past, which makes them very apt not only to take chance occurrences, after one or two coincidences, as omens of the same outcome forever after, but also to believe similar predictions from other men, once they have formed a good opinion of them.
In these four things, then — opinion of ghosts, ignorance of secondary causes, devotion toward what men fear, and the taking of chance things for omens — consists the natural seed of religion. And because of the different imaginations, judgments, and passions of different people, this seed has grown up into ceremonies so varied that the ceremonies used by one man are, for the most part, ridiculous to another.
For these seeds have been cultivated by two sorts of men. The first sort nourished and ordered them according to their own invention. The second sort did so by God's commandment and direction. But both sorts did it with the same purpose: to make the men who relied on them more apt for obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society.
So the religion of the first sort is part of human politics, and teaches part of the duty that earthly kings require of their subjects. The religion of the second sort is divine politics, and contains precepts for those who have yielded themselves as subjects in the kingdom of God. Of the first sort were all the founders of commonwealths and the lawgivers of the pagans. Of the second sort were Abraham, Moses, and our blessed Savior, through whom the laws of the kingdom of God have come down to us.
As for the part of religion that consists in opinions about the nature of invisible powers: there is almost nothing that has a name that the pagans did not, in one place or another, consider a god or a devil, or that their poets did not imagine to be animated, inhabited, or possessed by some spirit or other.
The unformed matter of the world was a god, under the name of Chaos.
The sky, the ocean, the planets, fire, earth, and the winds were so many gods.
Men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek — all deified. Beyond that, they filled almost every place with spirits called demons: the plains with Pan and his satyrs; the woods with fauns and nymphs; the sea with tritons and still more nymphs; every river and fountain with a ghost bearing its name, plus nymphs; every house with its lares, or household spirits; every man with his genius — his personal guardian spirit; hell with ghosts and spiritual officers like Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and the nighttime everywhere with larvae and lemures — ghosts of the dead — and a whole kingdom of fairies and bogeymen.
They also ascribed divinity, and built temples, to mere accidents and qualities: Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, Contention, Virtue, Honor, Health, Rust, Fever, and the like. When they prayed for or against these things, they prayed to them — as if there were ghosts with those names hovering over their heads, dropping down or withholding the good or evil being prayed for or against.
They invoked their own wit under the name of the Muses; their own ignorance under the name of Fortune; their own lust under the name of Cupid; their own rage under the name of the Furies; their own private parts under the name of Priapus. And they blamed what happened in their sleep on incubi and succubi — demons who supposedly visited by night. In short, there was nothing a poet could introduce as a character in his poem that they did not make either a god or a devil.
The same authors of pagan religion noticed the second ground of religion — men's ignorance of causes, and their consequent readiness to credit their fortune to causes with no apparent connection to it at all. They seized the opportunity to foist upon that ignorance, in place of secondary causes, a kind of second-tier, ministerial gods: ascribing the cause of fertility to Venus; the cause of the arts to Apollo; of subtlety and craft to Mercury; of tempests and storms to Aeolus; and so on, other effects to other gods — until among the heathen there were almost as many gods as there were lines of business.
To the worship men naturally thought fitting for their gods — offerings, prayers, thanks, and the rest already named — these same pagan legislators added images, in both painting and sculpture, so that the more ignorant sort (that is to say, most people, the general run of them), thinking the gods these images represented were really contained in them, housed within them as it were, might stand in that much more fear of them. And they endowed these gods with lands, houses, officers, and revenues, set apart from all other human uses — that is, consecrated, made holy to those idols: caverns, groves, woods, mountains, and whole islands.
They attributed to these gods not only shapes — some human, some animal, some monstrous — but also the faculties and passions of men and beasts: sense, speech, sex, lust, reproduction. And not only reproduction by mixing with one another to propagate the race of gods, but also by mixing with men and women, begetting half-breed gods who were mere lodgers in heaven, like Bacchus, Hercules, and others. Besides these: anger, revenge, and the other passions of living creatures, and the actions that flow from them — fraud, theft, adultery, sodomy, and any vice that can be taken as an effect of power or a cause of pleasure; all those vices, in short, which among men are considered to be against the law rather than against honor.
Lastly, consider predictions of the future, which are naturally nothing but conjectures from past experience — and supernaturally, divine revelation. To these the same authors of pagan religion, partly on the strength of pretended experience, partly on pretended revelation, added innumerable other superstitious methods of divination, and made men believe they could discover their fortunes:
Sometimes in the ambiguous or senseless answers of the priests at Delphi, Delos, Ammon, and other famous oracles — answers made ambiguous by design, so that the oracle would be right either way, or made absurd by the intoxicating vapors of the place, which are very common in sulfurous caverns.
Sometimes in the leaves of the Sibyls — prophetesses whose prophecies, like perhaps those of Nostradamus (for the fragments now surviving seem to be inventions of later times), filled certain books held in high repute in the days of the Roman Republic.
Sometimes in the meaningless speeches of madmen, who were supposed to be possessed by a divine spirit — a possession they called enthusiasm, literally "a god within." These kinds of fortune-telling were accounted theomancy, or prophecy.
Sometimes in the position of the stars at a person's birth, which was called horoscopy and considered a branch of judicial astrology.
Sometimes in one's own hopes and fears, called thumomancy — divination by one's own spirit — or presage.
Sometimes in the predictions of witches who pretended to consult the dead — which is called necromancy, conjuring, and witchcraft, and is really nothing but sleight of hand and accomplices working a con.
Sometimes in the chance flight or feeding of birds, called augury.
Sometimes in the entrails of a sacrificed beast, which was aruspicina.
Sometimes in dreams.
Sometimes in the croaking of ravens or the chattering of birds.
Sometimes in the lines of the face, which was called metoposcopy; or by palmistry, in the lines of the hand; or in chance words overheard, called omina — omens.
Sometimes in monsters or unusual events — eclipses, comets, rare meteors, earthquakes, floods, deformed births, and the like — which they called portenta and ostenta, because they thought these things portended, or foreshowed, some great calamity to come.
Sometimes in pure lottery: heads or tails; counting holes in a sieve; dipping at random into the verses of Homer and Virgil; and innumerable other such empty notions.
So easily are men drawn to believe anything, by men who have gained their trust and who know how to take hold of their fear and their ignorance with gentleness and skill.
And so the first founders and legislators of commonwealths among the pagans, whose aim was simply to keep the people in obedience and peace, took care everywhere to do three things.
First, to imprint on people's minds the belief that the precepts they gave concerning religion came not from their own devising but from the dictates of some god or other spirit — or else that the lawgivers themselves were beings of a higher nature than mere mortals — so that their laws might be the more easily accepted. So Numa Pompilius claimed to have received the ceremonies he instituted among the Romans from the nymph Egeria. The first king and founder of the kingdom of Peru claimed that he and his wife were children of the Sun. And Muhammad, to establish his new religion, claimed to have conferences with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove.
Second, they took care to make it believed that the same things which were forbidden by the laws were also displeasing to the gods.
Third, to prescribe ceremonies, supplications, sacrifices, and festivals by which the anger of the gods could supposedly be appeased — and to teach that failure in war, great epidemics of sickness, earthquakes, and every man's private misery all came from the anger of the gods, and that the gods' anger came from neglecting their worship, or from forgetting or botching some required point of the ceremonies. And though among the ancient Romans a man was not forbidden to deny what the poets had written about the pains and pleasures after this life — indeed, several men of great authority and gravity in that state openly mocked such things in their speeches — still, the belief in them was always more encouraged than the contrary.
By these and similar institutions, they achieved their goal, which was the peace of the commonwealth. The common people, blaming their misfortunes on neglect or error in the ceremonies, or on their own disobedience to the laws, were that much less inclined to mutiny against their governors. And being entertained with the pomp and pastime of festivals and public games held in honor of the gods, they needed nothing but bread to keep them from discontent, grumbling, and uprising against the state. That is why the Romans, who had conquered the greatest part of the known world, had no scruple about tolerating any religion whatsoever in the city of Rome itself — unless it contained something incompatible with their civil government. Nor do we read of any religion being forbidden there except that of the Jews, who, being the peculiar kingdom of God, thought it unlawful to acknowledge subjection to any mortal king or state whatsoever. And so you see how the religion of the pagans was a part of their policy.
But where God himself planted religion by supernatural revelation, he also made for himself a peculiar kingdom, and gave laws — not only of behavior toward himself, but of behavior toward one another. And so in the kingdom of God, policy and civil laws are a part of religion, and the distinction between temporal and spiritual dominion has no place there.
It is true that God is king of all the earth. Yet he may still be king of a peculiar, chosen nation. There is no more contradiction in that than in a general who commands the whole army also keeping a particular regiment or company of his own. God is king of all the earth by his power; but of his chosen people he is king by covenant. I will speak more fully of the kingdom of God, both by nature and by covenant, in a later part of this discourse, where I have assigned it its own place.
Given how religion is propagated, it is not hard to understand the causes of its dissolution back into its first seeds, or principles — which are nothing but an opinion of a deity, and of powers invisible and supernatural. That opinion can never be entirely rooted out of human nature; new religions can always be made to spring from it again, cultivated by men who have the reputation for such work.
For all organized religion is founded, at first, on the faith that a multitude places in some one person — someone they believe to be not only a wise man who labors for their happiness, but a holy man, to whom God himself condescends to declare his will supernaturally. It follows necessarily that when the people who govern a religion come to have their wisdom, their sincerity, or their love suspected — or when they cannot show any plausible token of divine revelation — the religion they want to uphold will be suspected too, and (without fear of the civil sword) contradicted and rejected.
What destroys the reputation for wisdom, in anyone who founds a religion or adds to one already founded, is requiring belief in contradictions. Both halves of a contradiction cannot possibly be true. To demand belief in both is therefore evidence of ignorance — which exposes the author on that point, and discredits him in everything else he puts forward as supernatural revelation. For a man may indeed receive revelation of many things above natural reason, but of nothing against it.
What destroys the reputation for sincerity is doing or saying things that look like signs that the men who require others to believe do not believe it themselves. All such doings and sayings are therefore called scandalous — stumbling blocks that make men fall on the road of religion: injustice, cruelty, profanity, greed, and luxurious living. After all, who can believe that a man who routinely commits actions springing from any of these roots really believes there is any invisible power to be feared — the same power he uses to frighten other men over lesser faults?
What destroys the reputation for love is being caught pursuing private ends: when the belief they require of others leads, or seems to lead, to the acquisition of power, riches, rank, or secure pleasure for themselves alone, or for themselves especially. For whatever men reap personal benefit from, they are presumed to do for their own sakes and not for love of others.
Lastly, the only testimony men can give of a divine calling is the working of miracles, or true prophecy (which is also a miracle), or extraordinary success. So when points of religion received from men who did perform such miracles are supplemented with additions from men who cannot certify their calling with any miracle, those additions win no more belief than whatever the custom and laws of the place where the believers were raised have worked into them. For just as in natural matters men of judgment require natural signs and arguments, so in supernatural matters they require supernatural signs — which are miracles — before they consent inwardly, and from their hearts.
All these causes of the weakening of men's faith appear plainly in the following examples.
First, we have the example of the children of Israel. When Moses — who had certified his calling to them by miracles and by leading them successfully out of Egypt — was absent a mere forty days, they revolted from the worship of the true God he had commended to them, and setting up a golden calf as their god (Exodus 32:1-2), they relapsed into the idolatry of the very Egyptians from whom they had so recently been delivered. And again: after Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and the whole generation that had seen the great works of God in Israel were dead, another generation arose and served Baal (Judges 2:11). So when miracles failed, faith failed too.
Again: when the sons of Samuel, appointed by their father as judges in Beersheba, took bribes and judged unjustly (1 Samuel 8:3), the people of Israel refused to have God as their king any longer in any way different from how he was king of all other peoples — and so they cried out to Samuel to choose them a king after the manner of the nations. So when justice failed, faith failed too — to the point that they deposed their God from reigning over them.
And when the Christian religion was being planted, the oracles fell silent in every part of the Roman Empire, and the number of Christians grew wonderfully every day and in every place through the preaching of the apostles and evangelists. A great part of that success may reasonably be attributed to the contempt into which the pagan priests of that time had brought themselves by their uncleanness, their greed, and their scheming among princes.
The religion of the Church of Rome, likewise, was abolished in England and many other parts of Christendom partly for the same cause — for the failing of virtue in the pastors makes faith fail in the people — and partly from the importing of Aristotle's philosophy and doctrine into religion by the Scholastics. From that source arose so many contradictions and absurdities that the clergy earned a reputation both for ignorance and for fraudulent intentions, and inclined the people to revolt against them: either against the will of their own princes, as in France and Holland, or with their princes' consent, as in England.
Lastly, among the points the Church of Rome has declared necessary for salvation, there are so many that work so plainly to the advantage of the Pope and of his spiritual subjects living in the territories of other Christian princes, that if it were not for the mutual rivalry of those princes, they could exclude all foreign authority without war or trouble, as easily as it has been excluded in England.
For who fails to see whose benefit it serves to have it believed that a king does not hold his authority from Christ unless a bishop crowns him? That a king, if he is a priest, cannot marry? That whether a prince was born in lawful marriage must be judged by authority from Rome? That subjects may be freed from their allegiance if the court of Rome judges their king a heretic? That a king — like Chilperic of France — may be deposed by a pope (as he was by Pope Zachary) for no cause at all, and his kingdom given to one of his own subjects? That the clergy and the religious orders, in whatever country, shall be exempt from their king's jurisdiction in criminal cases? Or who fails to see who profits from the fees for private Masses, and the proceeds of Purgatory — along with other signs of private interest, enough to deaden the most lively faith, if (as I said) the civil magistrate and custom did not prop it up more than any opinion people hold of the sanctity, wisdom, or honesty of their teachers?
So I may attribute all the changes of religion in the world to one and the same cause: unpleasing priests. And not only among Catholics, but even in that church which has prided itself most on reformation.
Nature has made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind that, although you can sometimes find one man who is obviously stronger in body or quicker in mind than another, still, when you add everything up, the difference between man and man is not so great that one of them can claim any advantage for himself that another cannot claim just as well. Consider strength of body: the weakest man has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by a secret plot or by joining forces with others who are in the same danger he is.
As for the faculties of the mind, I find an even greater equality among men than the equality of strength. (I am setting aside the arts built on words, and especially the skill of proceeding by general and infallible rules called science, which very few people have, and only in a few subjects — because it is not a natural faculty we are born with, nor is it picked up, the way prudence is, while we are busy attending to something else.) For prudence is nothing but experience, and equal time bestows experience equally on all men in whatever things they equally apply themselves to.
What may make such equality hard to believe is simply each man's vain conceit of his own wisdom. Nearly every man thinks he has more of it than the common crowd — that is, more than everyone except himself and a few others whom he approves of, either because they are famous or because they agree with him. For such is the nature of men: however readily they admit that many others are more clever, more eloquent, or more learned, they will hardly believe that many are as wise as they are. Each man sees his own wit up close and other men's at a distance. But this proves that men are equal on this point, not unequal. For ordinarily there is no greater sign that a thing is equally distributed than that every man is contented with his share.
From this equality of ability arises an equality of hope in attaining our ends. And therefore, if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and on the way to their end — which is chiefly their own survival, and sometimes only their pleasure — they try to destroy or subdue one another. This is how it comes to pass that where an invader has nothing more to fear than another man's individual strength, then if one man plants, sows, builds, or holds a good piece of ground, others can be expected to come prepared with united forces to dispossess him — to strip him not only of the fruit of his labor, but of his life or liberty as well. And the invader, in turn, stands in the same danger from someone else.
Given this mutual mistrust, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as striking first: that is, using force or cunning to master the persons of all the men he can, for as long as it takes until he sees no other power big enough to endanger him. This is no more than his own survival requires, and it is generally allowed.
There is more. Some men take pleasure in contemplating their own power through acts of conquest, and they push those conquests further than their security requires. And because of them, others — who would otherwise be glad to live at ease within modest bounds — would not be able to survive for long by standing only on the defensive. They too must increase their power by invading. And so, since enlarging one's dominion over other men is necessary to a man's survival, it has to be allowed him.
Again, men get no pleasure (but on the contrary, a great deal of grief) from keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all. For every man expects his companion to value him at the same rate he sets on himself; and at every sign of contempt or undervaluing, he naturally tries — as far as he dares, which among men with no common power to keep them quiet is far enough to make them destroy each other — to extort a higher value from those who slight him, by harming them; and from everyone else, by the example.
So in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; second, distrust; third, glory.
The first makes men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, over trifles — a word, a smile, a different opinion, or any other sign of being undervalued, whether aimed directly at them in person or reflected onto their relatives, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.
This makes one thing clear: whenever men live without a common power to keep them all in check, they are in the condition called war — and not just any war, but a war of every man against every man. For WAR consists not in battle only, or in the act of fighting, but in a stretch of time in which the will to fight is sufficiently known. The notion of time, then, belongs to the nature of war just as it belongs to the nature of weather. Foul weather does not lie in a shower or two of rain, but in a tendency toward rain over many days together. In the same way, the nature of war consists not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition to fight, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.
Whatever follows from a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, also follows from a time when men live with no other security than what their own strength and their own ingenuity can supply. In such a condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit of it is uncertain — and consequently no farming of the earth; no navigation, and no use of the goods that can be imported by sea; no comfortable building; no machines for moving and hauling things that require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no reckoning of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death — and the life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
To someone who has not weighed these things carefully, it may seem strange that nature should pull men apart this way and make them apt to invade and destroy one another. Such a person, not trusting this inference drawn from the passions, may want to see it confirmed by experience. Then let him consider his own behavior. When he takes a journey, he arms himself and tries to travel in good company. When he goes to sleep, he locks his doors. Even inside his own house, he locks his chests. And he does all this knowing that there are laws and armed public officers ready to avenge any wrong done to him. What opinion does he have of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed? Of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors? Of his own children and servants, when he locks his chests? Doesn't he accuse mankind by his actions just as much as I do by my words?
But neither of us is accusing man's nature in this. The desires and other passions of man are in themselves no sin. Neither are the actions that proceed from those passions — until men know a law that forbids them. And they cannot know such laws until laws are made; and no law can be made until men have agreed on the person who shall make it.
It may perhaps be thought that no such time or condition of war ever existed, and I believe it was never universal over the whole world. But there are many places where people live that way now. The indigenous peoples in many parts of America — at least as the reports that reach us describe them — have, apart from the government of small families whose harmony depends on natural appetite, no government at all, and live to this day in the brutish manner I described above. In any case, we can see what kind of life there would be where there was no common power to fear, from the kind of life that men who have previously lived under a peaceful government sink into during a civil war.
But even if there had never been a time when particular men were in a condition of war against one another, still, in all times, kings and persons of sovereign authority — because of their independence — are in continual jealousies, in the state and posture of gladiators: weapons pointed, eyes fixed on one another. That is, their forts, garrisons, and guns stand on the frontiers of their kingdoms, and their spies work continually among their neighbors. That is a posture of war. But because by this posture they uphold the industry of their subjects, it does not produce the misery that goes along with the liberty of individual men.
From this war of every man against every man, something else follows: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where there is no law, there is no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are not faculties of either the body or the mind. If they were, they could exist in a man who was alone in the world, just as his senses and passions can. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude.
It also follows from the same condition that there is no ownership, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct — but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for as long as he can keep it.
And this is the bad condition that man is actually placed in by mere nature — though with a possibility of climbing out of it, a possibility that lies partly in the passions, partly in his reason.
The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death; desire of the things necessary for comfortable living; and a hope of obtaining them by their industry. And reason suggests convenient articles of peace on which men may be drawn to agreement. These articles are the ones otherwise called the laws of nature — of which I shall speak more particularly in the two following chapters.
The RIGHT OF NATURE, which writers commonly call jus naturale — the natural right — is the liberty each man has to use his own power, as he himself wills, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life. And consequently, it is the liberty of doing anything which, in his own judgment and reason, he conceives to be the aptest means to that end.
By LIBERTY is understood, according to the proper meaning of the word, the absence of external impediments. Such impediments may often take away part of a man's power to do what he would; but they cannot prevent him from using the power left to him according to what his judgment and reason dictate.
A LAW OF NATURE (lex naturalis — natural law) is a precept, or general rule, discovered by reason, which forbids a man to do anything that is destructive of his life, or that takes away his means of preserving it; and forbids him to neglect anything by which he thinks his life may best be preserved.
Those who write on this subject tend to confuse jus and lex — right and law. But the two ought to be distinguished. A RIGHT consists in the liberty to do something or to hold back from it; whereas a LAW determines the matter and binds you to one or the other. So law and right differ as much as obligation and liberty — which, in one and the same matter, cannot coexist.
Now, the condition of man, as I declared in the previous chapter, is a condition of war of every one against every one. In that condition, every man is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he might use that could not be a help to him in preserving his life against his enemies. It follows that in such a condition, every man has a right to everything — even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to everything endures, no man — however strong or wise he may be — can have any security of living out the time that nature ordinarily allows men to live.
And consequently it is a precept, a general rule of reason: that every man ought to seek peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all the helps and advantages of war.
The first branch of this rule contains the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: seek peace, and follow it. The second branch contains the sum of the right of nature, which is: by all means we can, defend ourselves.
From this fundamental law of nature, which commands men to seek peace, this second law is derived: that a man be willing, when others are willing too, to lay down this right to all things — as far as he thinks it necessary for peace and for his own defense — and be contented with as much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.
For as long as every man holds on to this right of doing anything he likes, all men remain in the condition of war. But if other men will not lay down their right along with him, then there is no reason for anyone to strip himself of his own. That would be to offer himself up as prey — which no man is bound to do — rather than to dispose himself to peace.
This is that law of the Gospel: whatever you require that others should do to you, do that to them. And it is that law of all men: quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris — what you do not want done to you, do not do to another.
To lay down a man's right to anything is to strip himself of the liberty of hindering another from the benefit of that other man's own right to the same thing. For he who renounces or passes away his right does not give any other man a right which that man did not have before — because there is nothing to which every man did not already have a right by nature. He merely stands out of the way, so that the other may enjoy his own original right without hindrance from him — though not without hindrance from everyone else. So the benefit that comes to one man from another man's giving up his right is simply this much: fewer obstacles to the use of the right he had all along.
A right is laid aside either by simply renouncing it, or by transferring it to another. By simply RENOUNCING it, when the man does not care who receives the benefit of it. By TRANSFERRING it, when he intends the benefit for some particular person or persons.
And when a man has in either way abandoned or granted away his right, he is then said to be OBLIGED, or BOUND, not to hinder those to whom the right was granted or abandoned from enjoying the benefit of it. He ought not — it is his DUTY not — to make void that voluntary act of his own. And such hindrance is INJUSTICE, and INJURY, as being sine jure — without right — the right having been renounced or transferred beforehand.
So injury, or injustice, in the controversies of the world is somewhat like what the Scholastics, in their disputations, call absurdity. For just as it is called an absurdity to contradict what one maintained at the beginning, so in the world it is called injustice and injury to voluntarily undo what one had voluntarily done from the beginning.
The way a man either simply renounces or transfers his right is by a declaration, or signification — some voluntary and sufficient sign or signs — that he does so renounce or transfer, or has done so, to the one who accepts it. These signs are either words only, or actions only, or — as happens most often — both words and actions. And these same signs are the BONDS by which men are bound and obliged. Bonds that have their strength not from their own nature — for nothing is more easily broken than a man's word — but from fear of some evil consequence upon breaking them.
Whenever a man transfers his right or renounces it, he does so either in exchange for some right reciprocally transferred to himself, or for some other good he hopes to gain by it. For it is a voluntary act, and the object of every man's voluntary acts is some good to himself.
And therefore there are some rights which no man can be understood — by any words or other signs — to have abandoned or transferred. First, a man cannot lay down the right of resisting those who assault him by force to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to aim at any good to himself by doing so. The same may be said of wounds, and chains, and imprisonment — both because there is no benefit in enduring such things, as there is in patiently allowing another to be wounded or imprisoned, and also because when a man sees men proceed against him by violence, he cannot tell whether they intend his death or not.
And lastly, the motive and end for which this renouncing and transferring of right is introduced is nothing else but the security of a man's person — his life, and his means of preserving life in a way that does not make him weary of it. And therefore, if a man by words or other signs seems to strip himself of the very end for which those signs were intended, he is not to be understood as if he meant it, or as if it were his will. He is to be understood as ignorant of how such words and actions would be interpreted.
The mutual transferring of right is what men call CONTRACT.
There is a difference between transferring the right to a thing and transferring — that is, delivering — the thing itself. For the thing may be delivered together with the transfer of the right, as in buying and selling with cash in hand, or in the exchange of goods or lands; or it may be delivered some time afterward.
Again, one of the contractors may deliver the thing contracted for on his part, and leave the other to perform his part at some fixed time afterward, trusting him in the meantime. In that case, the contract on the trusting side is called a PACT, or COVENANT. Or both parties may contract now to perform later. In these cases, the one who is to perform in the time to come, being trusted, is said — when he performs — to be keeping his promise, or keeping faith; and if he voluntarily fails to perform, that is a violation of faith.
When the transferring of right is not mutual, but one party transfers in the hope of gaining friendship or service from another, or from that person's friends; or in hope of gaining a reputation for charity or magnanimity; or to free his mind from the pain of compassion; or in hope of reward in heaven — this is not contract, but GIFT, FREE GIFT, GRACE. These words all signify one and the same thing.
Signs of contract are either express or by inference. Express signs are words spoken with understanding of what they signify. Such words are either of the present or past tense — "I give," "I grant," "I have given," "I have granted," "I will that this be yours" — or of the future: "I will give," "I will grant." Words of the future are called a promise.
Signs by inference are sometimes the consequence of words, sometimes the consequence of silence, sometimes the consequence of actions, sometimes the consequence of refraining from an action. In general, a sign by inference of any contract is whatever sufficiently demonstrates the will of the contractor.
Words alone, if they are of the time to come and contain a bare promise, are an insufficient sign of a free gift, and therefore not binding. For if they are of the time to come — "Tomorrow I will give" — they are a sign that I have not given yet, and consequently that my right is not transferred, but remains mine until I transfer it by some other act. But if the words are of the present or past — "I have given," or "I do give, to be delivered tomorrow" — then my tomorrow's right is given away today, and that by the force of the words alone, even with no other evidence of my will.
There is a great difference in meaning between these two phrases: volo hoc tuum esse cras and cras dabo — that is, between "I will that this be yours tomorrow" and "I will give it to you tomorrow." The phrase "I will" in the first expression signifies an act of the will in the present; in the second, it signifies a promise of an act of the will to come. So the first words, being of the present, transfer a future right; the second, being of the future, transfer nothing.
But if there are other signs of the will to transfer a right besides words, then even though the gift is free, the right may pass by words of the future. For instance, if a man sets a prize for whoever comes first to the end of a race, the gift is free; and though the words are of the future, the right passes. For if he did not want his words understood that way, he should not have let the runners run.
In contracts, the right passes not only where the words are of the present or past, but also where they are of the future. For all contract is mutual transfer, or exchange, of right; and therefore he who promises only — because he has already received the benefit for which he promises — is to be understood as intending the right to pass. For unless he had been content to have his words so understood, the other party would not have performed his part first. For this reason, in buying and selling and other acts of contract, a promise is equivalent to a covenant, and is therefore binding.
He that performs first, in the case of a contract, is said to MERIT what he is to receive by the other's performance; and he has it as his due. Also, when a prize is offered to many, to be given only to the winner, or money is thrown into a crowd to be enjoyed by those who catch it — though this is a free gift, yet to win it, or to catch it, is to merit it, and to have it as DUE. For the right is transferred in the offering of the prize and in the throwing down of the money; it is simply not determined to whom until the outcome of the contest decides it.
But between these two sorts of merit there is this difference: in contract, I merit by virtue of my own power and the contractor's need; but in the case of free gift, I am enabled to merit only by the generosity of the giver. In contract, I merit that the contractor should part with his right; in the case of gift, I do not merit that the giver should part with his right, but only that when he has parted with it, it should be mine rather than another's.
And this, I think, is the meaning of that distinction of the Scholastics between meritum congrui and meritum condigni — merit by fitness and merit by worthiness. God Almighty has promised paradise to those men (blinkered as they are by carnal desires) who can walk through this world according to the precepts and limits he has prescribed; so they say that he who walks that way shall merit paradise ex congruo — by fitness. But because no man can demand a right to it by his own righteousness, or by any other power in himself, but only by the free grace of God, they say no man can merit paradise ex condigno — by worthiness. This, I say, I think is the meaning of that distinction. But since these disputers do not agree on the meaning of their own technical terms any longer than it serves their purposes, I will not affirm anything about what they mean. I say only this: when a gift is given indefinitely, as a prize to be contended for, he that wins it merits it, and may claim the prize as due.
If a covenant is made in which neither party performs immediately, but they trust one another, then in the condition of mere nature — which is a condition of war of every man against every man — upon any reasonable suspicion, it is void. But if there is a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance, it is not void.
For he that performs first has no assurance the other will perform afterward; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men's ambition, greed, anger, and other passions without the fear of some coercive power — and in the condition of mere nature, where all men are equal and each is judge of the justness of his own fears, no such power can possibly be supposed. And therefore he who performs first only betrays himself to his enemy — contrary to the right, which he can never abandon, of defending his life and his means of living.
But in a civil state, where a power is set up to constrain those who would otherwise violate their faith, that fear is no longer reasonable. And for that reason, he who by the covenant is to perform first is obliged to do so.
The cause of fear that makes such a covenant invalid must always be something arising after the covenant is made — some new fact, or other sign of the will not to perform. Otherwise it cannot make the covenant void. For whatever could not stop a man from promising ought not to be admitted as a hindrance to performing.
He that transfers any right transfers, as far as lies in his power, the means of enjoying it. He that sells land is understood to transfer the grass and whatever grows upon it; nor can he that sells a mill divert the stream that drives it. And they that give a man the right of government in sovereignty are understood to give him the right of levying money to maintain soldiers, and of appointing magistrates for the administration of justice.
To make a covenant with brute beasts is impossible. Since they do not understand our speech, they do not understand or accept any transfer of right, nor can they transfer any right to another; and without mutual acceptance, there is no covenant.
To make a covenant with God is impossible, except through the mediation of those God speaks to — either by supernatural revelation, or by his lieutenants who govern under him and in his name. For otherwise we cannot know whether our covenants are accepted or not. And therefore those who vow anything contrary to any law of nature vow in vain, since it would be unjust to pay such a vow. And if the thing vowed is commanded by the law of nature, then it is not the vow that binds them, but the law.
The matter, or subject, of a covenant is always something that falls under deliberation — for to covenant is an act of the will, that is to say, an act, and the last act, of deliberating. It is therefore always understood to be something to come, and something judged possible for the one covenanting to perform.
And therefore, to promise what is known to be impossible is no covenant. But if something thought possible beforehand proves impossible afterward, the covenant is valid and binding — though not to the thing itself, yet to its value; or if that too is impossible, then to the honest, unfeigned endeavor of performing as much as is possible. For to more than that, no man can be obliged.
Men are freed of their covenants in two ways: by performing, or by being forgiven. For performance is the natural end of obligation; and forgiveness is the restoring of liberty, being a transfer back of that right in which the obligation consisted.
Covenants entered into out of fear, in the condition of mere nature, are binding. For example, if I covenant to pay a ransom, or perform a service for my life, to an enemy, I am bound by it. For it is a contract in which one party receives the benefit of life, and the other is to receive money or service for it; and consequently, where no other law forbids the performance — as none does in the condition of mere nature — the covenant is valid.
Therefore prisoners of war, if trusted with the payment of their ransom, are obliged to pay it. And if a weaker prince makes a disadvantageous peace with a stronger one out of fear, he is bound to keep it — unless, as was said before, some new and just cause of fear arises to renew the war. And even within commonwealths, if I am forced to buy my life from a thief by promising him money, I am bound to pay it, until the civil law discharges me. For whatever I may lawfully do without obligation, I may lawfully covenant to do through fear; and what I lawfully covenant, I cannot lawfully break.
A former covenant makes a later one void. For a man that has passed away his right to one man today does not have it to pass to another man tomorrow; and therefore the later promise passes no right, and is null.
A covenant not to defend myself from force by force is always void. For, as I have shown before, no man can transfer or lay down his right to save himself from death, wounds, and imprisonment — the avoiding of which is the only purpose of laying down any right at all. Therefore the promise of not resisting force transfers no right in any covenant, and is not binding. For though a man may covenant, "Unless I do such-and-such, kill me," he cannot covenant, "Unless I do such-and-such, I will not resist you when you come to kill me." For man by nature chooses the lesser evil — the danger of death in resisting — rather than the greater, which is certain and present death in not resisting.
And all men grant this to be true, as shown by the fact that they lead criminals to execution and to prison with armed guards, even though those criminals consented to the very law by which they are condemned.
A covenant to accuse oneself, without assurance of pardon, is likewise invalid. For in the condition of nature, where every man is judge, there is no place for accusation; and in the civil state, accusation is followed by punishment — which, being force, a man is not obliged not to resist.
The same is true of accusing those whose condemnation would plunge a man into misery — a father, a wife, a benefactor. For the testimony of such an accuser, if not willingly given, is presumed to be corrupted by nature, and therefore not to be received; and where a man's testimony is not to be credited, he is not bound to give it.
Accusations extracted by torture, likewise, are not to be counted as testimony. For torture is to be used only as a means of conjecture — a glimmer of light in the further examination and search for truth. What a man confesses in that case tends toward the relief of the one being tortured, not toward informing the torturers, and therefore ought not to have the credit of sufficient testimony. For whether he delivers himself by a true accusation or a false one, he does it by the right of preserving his own life.
The force of words being, as I have noted before, too weak to hold men to the performance of their covenants, there are in man's nature only two imaginable helps to strengthen it. These are either a fear of the consequence of breaking their word, or a glory, a pride, in appearing not to need to break it. This second is a generosity too rarely found to be counted on — especially among the pursuers of wealth, command, or sensual pleasure, which is to say the greatest part of mankind. The passion to be relied upon is fear.
Fear has two very general objects: one is the power of invisible spirits; the other is the power of the men one would offend by breaking faith. Of these two, though the first is the greater power, the fear of the second is commonly the greater fear. The fear of the first is, in every man, his own religion — which has a place in the nature of man before civil society exists. The second does not; at least, not place enough to keep men to their promises, because in the condition of mere nature, the inequality of power is revealed only by the outcome of battle.
So before the time of civil society, or during its interruption by war, there is nothing that can strengthen a covenant of peace against the temptations of greed, ambition, lust, or any other strong desire, except the fear of that invisible power which every man worships as God and fears as an avenger of his treachery. All that can be done, therefore, between two men not subject to civil power, is to put one another to swear by the God each fears. This swearing, or OATH, is a form of speech, added to a promise, by which the one who promises signifies that unless he performs, he renounces the mercy of his God, or calls down God's vengeance on himself. Such was the heathen form: "Let Jupiter kill me, as I kill this beast." So is our form: "I shall do thus and thus, so help me God." And each man adds the rites and ceremonies of his own religion, so that the fear of breaking faith may be the greater.
From this it appears that an oath taken according to any other form or rite than that of the man who swears it is in vain, and is no oath; and that there is no swearing by anything which the swearer does not believe to be God. For though men have sometimes sworn by their kings, out of fear or flattery, they meant it to be understood that they were attributing divine honor to them. And swearing by God unnecessarily is merely profaning his name; while swearing by other things, as men do in everyday talk, is not swearing at all, but an impious habit picked up from too much vehemence in talking.
It appears also that the oath adds nothing to the obligation. For a covenant, if lawful, binds in the sight of God without the oath just as much as with it; and if unlawful, it does not bind at all — even though it is confirmed with an oath.
From the law of nature that obliges us to transfer to others those rights which, if we kept them, would block the peace of mankind, a third law follows. It is this: that men perform the covenants they make. Without this law, covenants are pointless — nothing but empty words. Every man would still hold his right to everything, and we would still be in the condition of war.
This law of nature is the fountain and origin of JUSTICE. Where no covenant has gone before, no right has been transferred, and every man has a right to everything — so no action can be unjust. But once a covenant is made, breaking it is unjust. The definition of injustice is exactly this, and nothing more: the not performing of a covenant. And whatever is not unjust, is just.
But remember what I said in the last chapter: covenants of mutual trust are invalid wherever either side has reasonable fear that the other will not perform. So although justice originates in the making of covenants, there can be no actual injustice until that fear is removed — and as long as men remain in the natural condition of war, it cannot be removed. Before the words "just" and "unjust" can have any place, there must be some coercive power that compels all men equally to keep their covenants, through the terror of a punishment greater than any benefit they could expect from breaking them. That same power must also secure the property men acquire by mutual contract, as compensation for the universal right they give up. And no such power exists before a commonwealth is erected.
You can draw the same conclusion from the standard definition of justice taught in the universities: "Justice is the constant will of giving to every man his own." Where there is no "own" — no property — there is no injustice. And where no coercive power has been erected — where there is no commonwealth — there is no property, because all men have a right to all things. Therefore where there is no commonwealth, nothing is unjust.
So the nature of justice consists in the keeping of valid covenants. But covenants only become valid when a civil power is constituted that is strong enough to compel men to keep them. And that is also the moment property begins.
The fool has said in his heart: there is no such thing as justice. Sometimes he says it with his tongue too, and argues for it seriously. His argument goes like this. Every man's survival and contentment are entrusted to his own care. So there can be no reason why a man may not do whatever he thinks will get him there. Therefore making or not making covenants, keeping or not keeping them, is not against reason — so long as it serves his benefit.
Notice what the fool is not denying. He does not deny that covenants exist, that they are sometimes broken and sometimes kept, or that breaking them is called injustice and keeping them justice. What he questions is whether injustice — setting aside the fear of God, for the same fool has said in his heart there is no God — might not sometimes square with the reason that tells every man to pursue his own good. Especially, he says, when the payoff is big enough to put a man beyond the reach not only of other men's scorn and insults, but of their power. The kingdom of God is gotten by violence, he says — but what if it could be gotten by unjust violence? Would it be against reason to take it that way, when it is impossible to be hurt by doing so? And if it is not against reason, it is not against justice — or else justice cannot be approved as good.
From this kind of reasoning, successful wickedness has come to be called virtue. There are men who condemn breaking faith in every other case, yet allow it when the prize is a kingdom. Even the pagans who believed that Saturn was deposed by his own son Jupiter still believed that this same Jupiter was the avenger of injustice. There is something similar in a piece of law in Coke's commentaries on Littleton — the great English law book — where he says that if the rightful heir to the crown stands convicted of treason, the crown shall nevertheless descend to him, and eo instante — at that very instant — the conviction becomes void. From examples like these, a man will be strongly tempted to conclude: when the heir apparent of a kingdom kills the man who holds the throne — even his own father — you may call it injustice or whatever name you please, but it can never be against reason, since all the voluntary actions of men aim at their own benefit, and the most reasonable actions are the ones that best serve their ends.
This reasoning sounds clever. It is nevertheless false.
Here is why. The question is not about mutual promises where neither side has any security of performance — where no civil power stands over the parties — because such promises are not covenants at all. The question arises only where one party has already performed, or where there is a power that can make him perform. Then we ask: is it against reason — that is, against the benefit of the other party — to perform, or not? And I say it is not against reason.
To show this, consider two things. First: when a man does something that, by everything that can be foreseen and reckoned on, tends to his own destruction, the act is not made reasonable or wise just because some accident he could not have expected happens to turn it to his benefit. Lucky is not the same as smart.
Second: in a condition of war, where every man is an enemy to every man for lack of a common power to keep them all in check, no man can hope to defend himself from destruction by his own strength or wit alone. He needs allies — confederates — and in any confederation, each member expects the same defense from the alliance that everyone else does. So a man who declares that he thinks it reasonable to cheat the people who help him can, in reason, expect no means of safety beyond his own single power. The man who breaks his covenant — and thereby declares that he thinks he may reasonably do so — cannot be received into any society that unites for peace and defense, except by the mistake of those who let him in. And once in, he cannot be kept there unless they fail to see the danger of their mistake. A man cannot reasonably count on other people's errors as the means of his security. So if he is abandoned or cast out of society, he perishes; and if he survives in society, it is only by the errors of other men — errors he could neither foresee nor count on. Either way, his policy works against the reason of his own preservation. Everyone who refrains from destroying him does so only out of ignorance of what is good for themselves.
As for the fool's example of gaining the secure and everlasting happiness of heaven by any means whatever — that is frivolous. There is only one imaginable way to gain it, and it is not breaking covenants but keeping them.
And as for the other example, gaining sovereignty by rebellion: it is obvious that even if it succeeds, it cannot reasonably be expected to succeed — the contrary is far more likely. And whoever gains power that way teaches others to gain it from him the same way. So the attempt is against reason. Justice, therefore — that is, the keeping of covenant — is a rule of reason that forbids us to do anything destructive to our life. And consequently it is a law of nature.
Some people go further still. They will not have the law of nature be the set of rules that preserve man's life on earth, but rules for attaining eternal happiness after death — and they think breaking a covenant may sometimes serve that end, and so be just and reasonable. These are the people who think it a work of religious merit to kill, depose, or rebel against the sovereign power set over them by their own consent. But there is no natural knowledge of man's condition after death, much less of any reward then waiting for breach of faith. There is only a belief, grounded on other men's saying that they know it supernaturally — or that they know people, who knew people, who knew other people, who knew it supernaturally. So breach of faith cannot be called a precept of reason or of nature.
Others accept the keeping of faith as a law of nature, but make exceptions for certain persons — heretics, say, or people who habitually fail to keep their own covenants. This too is against reason. If some fault in a man were enough to discharge a covenant once made, the same fault should, in reason, have been enough to prevent the making of it.
The words "just" and "unjust" mean one thing when applied to men, and another when applied to actions. Applied to men, they signify whether a man's manners — his whole way of life — conform to reason. Applied to actions, they signify whether particular actions conform to reason, regardless of the man's character.
A just man, then, is one who takes all the care he can that his actions be just; an unjust man is one who neglects that care. In our language such men are more often called righteous and unrighteous than just and unjust, but the meaning is the same. A righteous man does not lose that title by one or a few unjust actions that spring from sudden passion or from mistaking things or persons. Nor does an unrighteous man lose his character because of actions he does, or holds back from doing, out of fear — because his will is shaped not by justice but by the apparent benefit of the act.
What gives human actions the flavor of justice is a certain nobility or gallantness of courage — rarely found — by which a man scorns to owe the contentment of his life to fraud or broken promises. This justice of manners is what is meant when justice is called a virtue, and injustice a vice.
The justice of actions, by contrast, does not make men "just" but merely guiltless; and the injustice of actions — which is also called injury — makes them merely guilty.
Again: injustice of manners is the disposition or readiness to do injury. It is injustice before it ever proceeds to action, and without supposing any individual person wronged. But the injustice of an action — an injury — does suppose an individual person wronged: namely, the person to whom the covenant was made. That is why the injury is often received by one man while the damage lands on another. Suppose a master commands his servant to give money to a stranger, and the servant fails to do it. The injury is done to the master, whom the servant had covenanted to obey; the damage falls on the stranger, to whom the servant had no obligation, and whom he therefore could not injure. So too in commonwealths: private men may forgive one another their debts, but not robberies or other violence that damages them. Withholding a debt is an injury to themselves; robbery and violence are injuries to the person of the commonwealth.
Whatever is done to a man in accordance with his own will, signified to the doer, is no injury to him. If the doer had not given away, by some earlier covenant, his original right to do as he pleases, then there is no breach of covenant — and so no injury. And if he had, then the other man's signified will to have the thing done releases that covenant — and so, again, no injury.
Writers divide the justice of actions into commutative and distributive. The first, they say, consists in arithmetical proportion; the second in geometrical proportion. So they place commutative justice in the equal value of the things contracted for, and distributive justice in distributing equal benefit to men of equal merit — as if it were injustice to sell something for more than you paid for it, or to give a man more than he merits.
This is wrong. The value of everything contracted for is measured by the appetite of the contractors, and so the just value is whatever they are content to give. And merit — apart from the kind created by covenant, where performance on one side merits performance on the other, which falls under commutative justice, not distributive — is not owed by justice at all. It is rewarded by grace only. So this distinction, in the sense in which it is usually expounded, is not right.
To speak properly: commutative justice is the justice of a contractor — the performance of covenant in buying and selling, hiring and renting out, lending and borrowing, exchanging, bartering, and other acts of contract.
And distributive justice is the justice of an arbitrator — the act of defining what is just. If the arbitrator performs the trust placed in him by those who made him arbitrator, he is said to distribute to every man his own. This is indeed just distribution, and may be called (though improperly) distributive justice. More properly it is called equity — which is itself a law of nature, as I will show in its place.
As justice depends on a prior covenant, so gratitude depends on prior grace — that is, on a prior free gift. It is the fourth law of nature, and may be put in this form: that a man who receives benefit from another out of mere grace should endeavor that the giver have no reasonable cause to regret his good will. No man gives except with the intention of some good to himself, because giving is voluntary, and the object of every voluntary act is some good to the doer. If men see that their generosity will be wasted, there will be no beginning of benevolence or trust — and therefore no mutual help, and no reconciliation of one man to another. Men would remain in the condition of war, which is contrary to the first and fundamental law of nature, the one that commands men to seek peace. The breach of this law is called ingratitude, and it has the same relation to grace that injustice has to obligation by covenant.
A fifth law of nature is COMPLAISANCE — that is: that every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest. To understand this, consider that men differ in their fitness for society, owing to the diversity of their affections — much like stones brought together for building. A stone that is so rough and irregular in shape that it takes more room from the others than it fills itself, and so hard that it cannot easily be smoothed, hinders the building, and the builders throw it away as useless and troublesome. Just so, a man whose roughness of nature drives him to hold on to things that are superfluous to him and necessary to others, and whose stubborn passions cannot be corrected, is to be left out of society, or cast out of it, as a burden to it. Every man is supposed — not only by right but by necessity of nature — to do all he can to obtain what is necessary for his preservation. So whoever sets himself against that, for the sake of things he does not need, is guilty of the war that must follow, and acts contrary to the fundamental law of nature, which commands us to seek peace. Those who observe this law may be called SOCIABLE (the Latins call them commodi — agreeable, accommodating); those who break it: stubborn, unsociable, perverse, intractable.
A sixth law of nature is this: that, given assurance about the future, a man ought to pardon the past offenses of those who repent and desire it. PARDON is nothing but the granting of peace. Granted to those who persist in their hostility, it is not peace but fear. But refused to those who give assurance for the future, it is the sign of an aversion to peace — and therefore contrary to the law of nature.
A seventh: that in revenges — that is, in paying back evil for evil — men look not at the greatness of the evil past, but at the greatness of the good to follow. This forbids us to inflict punishment with any other purpose than the correction of the offender or the guidance of others. The law follows from the one before it, which commands pardon upon security for the future. Besides, revenge that pays no regard to example or to future benefit is mere triumphing and glorying in another's hurt, aiming at no end at all — for the end is always something still to come. Glorying to no end is vanity, and contrary to reason; and hurting without reason tends to introduce war, which is against the law of nature. Its common name is cruelty.
Because all signs of hatred or contempt provoke men to fight — so much so that most men would rather risk their lives than go unavenged — we may set down in the eighth place this precept for a law of nature: that no man declare hatred or contempt of another, by deed, word, look, or gesture. The breach of this law is commonly called contumely — insult.
The question of who is the better man has no place in the condition of mere nature, where, as I showed earlier, all men are equal. The inequality that exists now was introduced by the civil laws. I know that Aristotle, in the first book of his Politics, lays down as a foundation of his doctrine that some men are by nature more worthy to command — meaning the wiser sort, such as he took himself to be on account of his philosophy — and others to serve, meaning those with strong bodies who were not philosophers like him. As if master and servant were introduced not by the consent of men, but by difference of wit! That is against reason, and against experience too. Very few men are so foolish that they would not rather govern themselves than be governed by others. And when the wise-in-their-own-eyes contend by force with those who distrust their own wisdom, the wise do not always win — or often — or almost ever.
If nature has made men equal, then, that equality must be acknowledged. And if nature has made men unequal, the equality must still be admitted — because men who think themselves equal will not enter into conditions of peace except on equal terms. So for the ninth law of nature I set down this: that every man acknowledge another as his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride.
On this law depends another: that at the entrance into conditions of peace, no man require to reserve for himself any right which he is not content to have reserved to every one of the rest. Just as it is necessary for all men who seek peace to lay down certain rights of nature — that is, to give up the liberty of doing whatever they please — so it is necessary for human life to retain some rights: the right to govern their own bodies; to enjoy air, water, movement, roads to travel from place to place; and everything else without which a man cannot live, or cannot live well. If, when peace is being made, men demand for themselves what they would not grant to others, they act contrary to the previous law, which commands the acknowledgment of natural equality, and therefore against the law of nature. The observers of this law are the people we call modest; the breakers, arrogant. The Greeks call the violation of this law pleonexia — the desire for more than one's share.
Also, if a man is trusted to judge between man and man, it is a precept of the law of nature that he deal equally between them. Without that, the disputes of men can be settled only by war. A judge who plays favorites does everything in his power to scare men away from using judges and arbitrators at all — and so, against the fundamental law of nature, he is a cause of war.
The observance of this law — giving to each man, by equal distribution, what in reason belongs to him — is called EQUITY, and, as I said before, distributive justice. Its violation is called acception of persons — in Greek, prosopolepsia: favoritism, judging by the face rather than the case.
From this follows another law: that things which cannot be divided be enjoyed in common, if they can be — without limit, if the quantity of the thing permits; otherwise in proportion to the number of those who have a right to it. Any other arrangement makes the distribution unequal, and contrary to equity.
But some things can neither be divided nor enjoyed in common. In that case the law of nature that prescribes equity requires that the entire right — or else, if the use is to alternate, the first possession — be determined by lot. For equal distribution belongs to the law of nature, and no other means of equal distribution can be imagined.
There are two sorts of lots: arbitrary and natural. An arbitrary lot is one agreed on by the competitors. A natural lot is either primogeniture — birthright of the firstborn; the Greek word is kleronomia, which means "given by lot" — or first seizure.
So things that cannot be enjoyed in common or divided ought to be awarded to the first possessor, and in some cases to the firstborn, as acquired by lot.
It is also a law of nature that all men who mediate peace be allowed safe conduct. For the law that commands peace as the end commands intercession as the means; and the means to intercession is safe conduct.
However willing men may be to observe these laws, questions may still arise about a man's action. First, was it done or not done? Second, if done, was it against the law or not? The first is called a question of fact; the second a question of right. Unless the parties to the question mutually covenant to stand by the decision of another, they are as far from peace as ever. This other person, to whose decision they submit, is called an ARBITRATOR. So it belongs to the law of nature that those in a dispute submit their right to the judgment of an arbitrator.
Since every man is presumed to do all things for his own benefit, no man is a fit arbitrator in his own cause. And even if he were perfectly fit, equity grants equal benefit to each party — so if one of them is admitted as judge, the other must be admitted too, and the dispute, which is the cause of war, remains. That is against the law of nature.
For the same reason, no man ought to be accepted as arbitrator in any cause if the victory of one party visibly brings him greater profit, honor, or pleasure than the victory of the other. He has taken a bribe — an unavoidable bribe, perhaps, but a bribe nonetheless — and no man can be obliged to trust him. So again the dispute, and the condition of war, remain — contrary to the law of nature.
And in a dispute over fact, since the judge has no reason to credit one party more than the other, he must (if there is no other evidence) give credit to a third witness — or a third and a fourth, or more. Otherwise the question stays undecided and is left to force, contrary to the law of nature.
These are the laws of nature that dictate peace as the means of preserving men in multitudes — the ones that concern the doctrine of civil society. There are other things that tend to the destruction of particular men — drunkenness, and all the other forms of intemperance — which may therefore also be counted among the things the law of nature forbids. But they are not necessary to mention here, and not relevant enough to this place.
This may seem too subtle a chain of deductions for all men to take notice of — most men being too busy getting food, and the rest too careless to understand. But so that no man can plead ignorance, the laws have been compressed into one easy sum, intelligible to even the humblest capacity. It is this: Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself. This rule shows a man that, to learn the laws of nature, he need do only one thing. When he is weighing the actions of other men against his own, and theirs seem too heavy, let him put their actions into the other pan of the scale and his own into theirs — so that his own passions and self-love add nothing to the weight. Then there is not one of these laws of nature that will not appear to him perfectly reasonable.
The laws of nature oblige in foro interno — in the internal court, the court of conscience. That is, they bind a man to desire that they take effect. But in foro externo — in the external court, the court of action — they do not always bind. A man who was modest and tractable, and kept all his promises, in a time and place where no one else did, would only make himself prey to others and bring about his own certain ruin — contrary to the foundation of all the laws of nature, which aim at nature's preservation. And on the other side, a man who has security that others will observe those laws toward him, but does not observe them himself, is seeking not peace but war — and consequently the destruction of his nature by violence.
And whatever laws bind in foro interno can be broken not only by an act contrary to the law, but also by an act in accordance with it — in the case where a man believes it to be contrary. For although his action follows the law, his purpose was against the law; and where the obligation is in foro interno, that is a breach.
The laws of nature are immutable and eternal. Injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride, iniquity, favoritism, and the rest can never be made lawful. For it can never be that war preserves life and peace destroys it.
These same laws are easy to observe, because they oblige only to a desire and an endeavor — I mean an unfeigned and constant endeavor. Since they require nothing but the endeavor, whoever endeavors to fulfill them, fulfills them. And he that fulfills the law is just.
The science of these laws is the true and only moral philosophy. For moral philosophy is nothing other than the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. Good and evil are names that signify our desires and aversions, which differ as men's temperaments, customs, and doctrines differ. Different men disagree not only in their judgments about what is pleasant or unpleasant to taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight, but about what conforms or fails to conform to reason in the actions of common life. Indeed, the same man at different times differs from himself: at one time he praises — that is, calls good — what at another time he condemns and calls evil. From this arise disputes, controversies, and at last war.
So as long as a man is in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war, private appetite is the measure of good and evil. And yet all men agree on this much: that peace is good. And therefore the way or means of peace — which, as I have shown, are justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, and the rest of the laws of nature — are good too; that is to say, moral virtues, and their contrary vices, evil. Now the science of virtue and vice is moral philosophy; and therefore the true doctrine of the laws of nature is the true moral philosophy.
The writers on moral philosophy acknowledge the same virtues and vices. But they do not see what their goodness consists in, nor that they come to be praised as the means of peaceful, sociable, and comfortable living. So they locate virtue in a moderate middle degree of the passions — as if it were not the cause, but the degree, of daring that made courage; as if it were not the cause, but the size, of a gift that made generosity.
These dictates of reason men usually call by the name of laws — but improperly. They are only conclusions, or theorems, about what conduces to men's preservation and defense; whereas law, properly speaking, is the word of one who by right has command over others. Yet if we consider these same theorems as delivered in the word of God, who by right commands all things — then they are properly called laws.
A PERSON is one whose words or actions are considered either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man — or of any other thing to which they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction.
When the words and actions are considered as his own, he is called a NATURAL PERSON. When they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, he is a feigned or ARTIFICIAL PERSON.
The word "person" is Latin. Where we use it, the Greeks had prosopon, which means the face — just as persona in Latin means the disguise, the outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes, more particularly, the part of the costume that disguises the face: a mask or visor. From the stage, the word was carried over to any representer of speech and action, in courtrooms as well as theaters. A person, then, is the same thing as an actor — both on the stage and in everyday life. To PERSONATE is to act, or to represent, either yourself or someone else; and he who acts another is said to bear his person, or to act in his name. Cicero uses the word in this sense when he says, "Unus sustineo tres personas: mei, adversarii, et judicis — I bear three persons: my own, my adversary's, and the judge's." A man in this role goes by different names on different occasions: a representer or representative, a lieutenant, a vicar, an attorney, a deputy, a procurator, an actor, and the like.
Among artificial persons, some have their words and actions owned by those they represent. In that case the person is the ACTOR — the one who acts — and the one who owns his words and actions is the AUTHOR; and the actor acts by authority. For the same relation that, when we speak of goods and possessions, is called ownership (in Latin dominus, in Greek kurios — owner, master), is called authorship when we speak of actions. And just as the right of possession is called dominion, so the right of doing any action is called AUTHORITY. By authority, then, is always understood a right of doing some act; and done by authority means done by commission or license from the one whose right it is.
From this it follows that when the actor makes a covenant by authority, he binds the author by it, no less than if the author had made it himself, and no less subjects him to all its consequences. So everything said earlier (in chapter 14) about the nature of covenants between man and man in their natural capacity is true also when covenants are made by their actors, representers, or procurators who have authority from them — as far as their commission extends, but no further.
And therefore anyone who makes a covenant with the actor, or representer, without knowing what authority he actually has, does so at his own peril. For no man is obliged by a covenant of which he is not the author — nor, consequently, by a covenant made against, or beyond, the authority he gave.
When the actor does something against the law of nature by command of the author, and he is obliged by a former covenant to obey him, then it is not he but the author who breaks the law of nature. For though the action is against the law of nature, it is not his action. On the contrary: to refuse to do it would be against the law of nature that forbids breaking covenants.
And he who makes a covenant with the author through the mediation of the actor, not knowing what authority the actor has but taking him at his word, is no longer obliged if that authority is not made evident to him on demand. For a covenant made with the author is not valid without the author's own counter-assurance. But if the man making the covenant knew in advance that he could expect no assurance beyond the actor's word, then the covenant is valid — because in that case the actor makes himself the author. And so, just as the covenant obliges the author and not the actor when the authority is evident, it obliges the actor alone when the authority is faked; for then there is no author but himself.
There are few things that cannot be represented by fiction. Inanimate things — a church, a hospital, a bridge — may be personated by a rector, a master, or an overseer. But inanimate things cannot be authors, and therefore cannot give authority to their actors. Still, the actors may have authority to maintain such things, given to them by their owners or governors. And for this reason, such things cannot be personated until there is some state of civil government.
Likewise children, fools, and madmen who have no use of reason may be personated by guardians or curators. But they can be authors, during that time, of no action done by them — not unless, when they recover the use of reason, they judge that action reasonable. Yet during the period of folly, whoever has the right of governing them may give authority to the guardian. But this, again, has no place except in a civil state; for before such a state exists, there is no dominion of persons.
An idol, a mere figment of the brain, may be personated — as the gods of the heathen were. Officers appointed by the state personated them; and the gods held possessions, goods, and rights which men from time to time dedicated and consecrated to them. But idols cannot be authors, for an idol is nothing. The authority came from the state. And therefore, before the introduction of civil government, the gods of the heathen could not be personated.
The true God may be personated. And he was: first, by Moses, who governed the Israelites — they were not his people, but God's people — not in his own name, with "Hoc dicit Moses — Thus says Moses," but in God's name, with "Hoc dicit Dominus — Thus says the Lord." Secondly, by the Son of man, his own Son, our Blessed Savior Jesus Christ, who came to bring back the Jews and bring all nations into the kingdom of his Father — not as from himself, but as one sent from his Father. And thirdly, by the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, speaking and working in the Apostles — which Holy Ghost was a Comforter who came not of himself, but was sent by them both, and proceeded from them both.
A multitude of men is made one person when they are represented by one man, or one person — provided it is done with the consent of every single individual in that multitude. For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that makes the person one. And it is the representer who bears the person — and only one person. Unity in a multitude cannot be understood in any other way.
And because the multitude is naturally not one but many, its members cannot be understood as one author, but as many authors, of everything their representative says or does in their name. Every man gives their common representer authority from himself in particular, and owns all the actions the representer performs — if they give him authority without limit. Otherwise, when they limit him in what he shall represent them in, and how far, none of them owns more than what they gave him commission to act. Without that one representer, there is no "one action of many men" — only the many actions of one multitude.
If the representative consists of many men, the voice of the greater number must be taken as the voice of them all. For if the lesser number pronounces, say, in the affirmative, and the greater in the negative, there will be more than enough negatives to cancel the affirmatives; and so the surplus of negatives, standing uncontradicted, is the only voice the representative has.
A representative of an even number — especially when the number is not large, so that the contradictory voices are frequently equal — is for that reason frequently mute and incapable of action. Yet in some cases, contradictory voices equal in number can still settle a question. In condemning or absolving, for instance, an equal split of votes absolves precisely by failing to condemn; but it does not, on the contrary, condemn by failing to absolve. For when a case has been heard, not to condemn is to absolve; but to say that not absolving is condemning is not true. The same holds in deliberating whether to carry out an execution at once or to defer it to another time: when the voices are equal, not decreeing execution is a decree of delay.
Or suppose the number is odd — three or more, whether men or assemblies — and each one has, by a negative voice, the authority to cancel the effect of all the affirmative voices of the rest. This number is no representative at all. Because of the diversity of men's opinions and interests, it becomes — often, and in matters of the greatest consequence — a mute person, unfit for many things, and above all unfit for the government of a multitude, especially in time of war.
Of authors there are two sorts. The first is the author simply so called, whom I defined above: the one who owns the action of another simply. The second is the one who owns an action or covenant of another conditionally — that is, he undertakes to do it himself if the other does not do it at, or before, a certain time. These conditional authors are generally called SURETIES — in Latin, fidejussores and sponsores; for debt in particular, praedes; and for appearance before a judge or magistrate, vades.
Why would men — who naturally love liberty, and naturally love power over others — ever agree to put themselves under restraint, the kind of restraint we see them living under in commonwealths? The final cause, the end, the whole design of it, is foresight: they can see that this is how they preserve their own lives and win a more contented life in the bargain. In other words, this is how they get themselves out of that miserable condition of war which, as I have shown, follows necessarily from the natural passions of men whenever there is no visible power to keep them all in awe — no power to bind them, through fear of punishment, to keep their covenants and observe those laws of nature I set down in chapters fourteen and fifteen.
For the laws of nature — justice, fairness, modesty, mercy, and, summing them all up, do to others as you would have done to you — are, by themselves, contrary to our natural passions. Without the terror of some power to make them be observed, they stand no chance against the passions that pull us toward partiality, pride, revenge, and the rest. And covenants, without the sword, are but words, with no strength to secure a man at all.
So despite the laws of nature — which everyone keeps when he is willing to keep them, which is to say, when he can do so safely — if no power has been set up, or none great enough for our security, then every man will rely, and may lawfully rely, on his own strength and cunning to guard himself against everyone else. And so it has been. In every place where men lived in small families, robbing and plundering one another was a trade. Far from being considered a violation of the law of nature, the greater the plunder a man took, the greater his honor. The only laws men observed in that business were the laws of honor: spare cruelty, leave men their lives and their farming tools. And what small families did then, cities and kingdoms — which are only larger families — do now. For their own security they enlarge their dominions on every pretext of danger, fear of invasion, or aid that might be given to invaders. They work as hard as they can to subdue or weaken their neighbors by open force and secret schemes; and because they have no other safeguard, they do it justly — and are remembered for it in later ages with honor.
Nor does joining together in small numbers give men this security. When numbers are small, a small addition on one side or the other makes such a large difference in strength that it is enough to decide the victory — and that very fact invites invasion. The multitude big enough to trust for our security is not fixed at any particular number. It is measured against the enemy we fear, and it is big enough when the enemy's advantage is not so visible and so obvious that it would decide the outcome of a war and so tempt him to attack.
And let the multitude be as great as you please: if each man's actions are directed by his own private judgment and his own private appetites, they can expect no defense and no protection from it — not against a common enemy, and not against the injuries they do one another. Because they are divided in their opinions about how their strength should best be used, they do not help each other; they hinder each other, and through mutual opposition they grind their strength down to nothing. The result is that they are easily subdued by a very few who do agree together — and when there is no common enemy, they make war on each other over their private interests.
Here is the proof. If we could suppose that a great multitude of men would agree to observe justice and the other laws of nature without a common power to keep them all in awe, then we might as well suppose all mankind would do the same. And in that case there would be no civil government or commonwealth at all — and no need for one — because there would be peace without subjection.
Nor is it enough — for the security men want to last their whole lives — that they be governed and directed by one judgment for a limited time only, as for one battle or one war. They may win a victory through their united effort against a foreign enemy. But afterward, when they have no common enemy left, or when the man one faction calls an enemy another faction calls a friend, the difference in their interests must necessarily dissolve them, and they fall back into a war among themselves.
Why Certain Creatures, Without Reason or Speech, Live in Society Without Any Coercive Power
It is true that certain living creatures, such as bees and ants, live sociably with one another — which is why Aristotle counts them among the political creatures — and yet they have no direction except their own particular judgments and appetites, and no speech by which one of them can tell another what it thinks would serve the common benefit. So someone may well want to know why mankind cannot do the same. To which I answer:
First, men are continually in competition for honor and dignity, and these creatures are not. Among men, therefore, that competition breeds envy and hatred, and finally war. Among them, it does not.
Second, among these creatures the common good does not differ from the private good. Each one, being naturally inclined to its own private benefit, serves the common benefit at the same time. But man — whose joy consists in comparing himself with other men — can relish nothing but what makes him stand out.
Third, these creatures, not having the use of reason as man does, do not see, and do not think they see, any fault in how their common business is managed. Whereas among men there are a great many who think themselves wiser and abler to govern the public than the rest. These men strive to reform and innovate, one this way, another that way — and so they drag the commonwealth into distraction and civil war.
Fourth, these creatures, though they have some use of voice to make their desires and feelings known to one another, lack that art of words by which some men can present good in the likeness of evil, and evil in the likeness of good — and inflate or shrink the apparent size of either — unsettling men and disturbing their peace whenever it pleases them.
Fifth, irrational creatures cannot tell the difference between injury and damage — between being wronged and merely being hurt. So as long as they are at ease, they take no offense at their fellows. Whereas man is most troublesome precisely when he is most at ease, for that is when he loves to show off his wisdom and second-guess the actions of those who govern the commonwealth.
Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is natural. The agreement of men is by covenant only — which is artificial. So it is no wonder that something more than covenant is required to make their agreement constant and lasting: a common power, to keep them in awe and to direct their actions toward the common benefit.
There is only one way to erect such a common power — one able to defend them from invasion by foreigners and from the injuries they do one another, and so to secure them well enough that by their own industry, and by the fruits of the earth, they may feed themselves and live contentedly. That way is this: to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that can reduce all their wills, by majority voice, to one will.
This means appointing one man, or one assembly of men, to bear their person — to be their representative. And it means that every one of them owns and acknowledges himself to be the author of whatever the bearer of their person does, or causes to be done, in everything that concerns the common peace and safety. Every man submits his will to that man's will, and his judgment to that man's judgment.
This is more than consent. It is more than concord. It is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man — as if every man said to every man: "I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition: that you give up your right to him too, and authorize all his actions in the same way."
When this is done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH — in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God, to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defense. For by this authority, given to him by every individual man in the commonwealth, he has so much power and strength conferred on him that the terror of it enables him to shape the wills of them all — toward peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.
In him consists the essence of the commonwealth, which, to define it, is this: one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants with one another, have every one made themselves the author, so that he may use the strength and means of them all, as he thinks expedient, for their peace and common defense.
The one who bears this person is called the SOVEREIGN, and is said to have sovereign power. Everyone besides him is his SUBJECT.
There are two ways of attaining this sovereign power. One is by natural force: as when a man makes his children submit themselves, and their children, to his government, because he can destroy them if they refuse; or when by war a man subdues his enemies to his will, granting them their lives on that condition. The other is when men agree among themselves to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, trusting that he will protect them against all others.
This second kind may be called a political commonwealth, or a commonwealth by institution — by agreement. The first kind is a commonwealth by acquisition — by conquest. And I shall speak first of a commonwealth by agreement.
A commonwealth is said to be INSTITUTED — established by the agreement of the people themselves, rather than by conquest — when a multitude of men agree and covenant, every one with every one, as follows: that whatever man or assembly of men the major part chooses to bear the person of them all — that is, to be their representative — every one of them, the man who voted for it and the man who voted against it alike, shall authorize all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly, exactly as if they were his own. And the purpose of all this is to live peaceably among themselves, and to be protected against other men.
From this institution of a commonwealth are derived all the rights and powers of the man, or assembly of men, on whom the sovereign power is conferred by the consent of the assembled people.
First, because they covenant, it is to be understood that they are not bound by any former covenant to anything that contradicts this one. Consequently, those who have already instituted a commonwealth — being bound by covenant to own the actions and judgments of one sovereign — cannot lawfully make a new covenant among themselves to obey anyone else, in anything whatsoever, without the sovereign's permission.
So the subjects of a monarch cannot, without his leave, cast off monarchy and return to the confusion of a disunited multitude; nor can they transfer their person from the man who bears it to another man, or to another assembly. For they are bound, every man to every man, to own — and to be counted author of — everything that the man who is already their sovereign shall do, and judge fit to be done. If even one man dissented, all the rest would be breaking the covenant they made with that man, which is injustice. Besides, each of them has given the sovereignty to the one who bears their person; so if they depose him, they take from him what is his own — and that, again, is injustice.
What's more, if a man who attempts to depose his sovereign is killed or punished by him for the attempt, he is the author of his own punishment, since by the institution he is the author of everything his sovereign does. And because it is injustice for a man to do anything for which he may be punished by his own authority, he is unjust on that ground as well.
Some men have excused their disobedience to their sovereign by claiming a new covenant — made not with men, but with God. This too is unjust. For there is no covenant with God except through the mediation of somebody who represents God's person; and nobody does that but God's lieutenant, who holds the sovereignty under God. But this pretense of a covenant with God is so obvious a lie, even in the pretenders' own consciences, that it is the act not merely of an unjust disposition, but of a vile and cowardly one.
Secondly, because the right of bearing the person of them all is given to the man they make sovereign by a covenant made only between subject and subject — not by any covenant between him and any of them — there can be no breach of covenant on the sovereign's part. And consequently none of his subjects can be freed from subjection by any pretense that he has forfeited his power.
That the man who is made sovereign makes no covenant with his subjects beforehand is plain to see. Either he would have to make it with the whole multitude as one party to the covenant, or he would have to make a separate covenant with every individual man. With the whole multitude as one party, it is impossible — because before the institution they are not yet one person. And if he makes as many separate covenants as there are men, those covenants become void the moment he has the sovereignty; for whatever act any one of them might point to as a breach is the act both of the sovereign and of all the rest, since it was done in the person, and by the right, of every one of them in particular.
Besides, if any one or more of them claim the sovereign broke the covenant made at his institution, and others — or even one other subject, or the sovereign alone — claim there was no such breach, there is in this case no judge to decide the controversy. So the question returns to the sword; and every man recovers the right of protecting himself by his own strength — contrary to the very design they had in the institution. It is therefore pointless to grant sovereignty by way of a prior covenant.
The opinion that any monarch receives his power by covenant — that is, on condition — comes from failing to understand this easy truth: covenants, being nothing but words and breath, have no force to oblige, contain, constrain, or protect any man except what they get from the public sword — that is, from the untied hands of the man or assembly that holds the sovereignty, whose actions are vouched for by them all, and performed by the strength of them all, united in him.
But when an assembly of men is made sovereign, nobody imagines any such covenant to have passed at the institution. No man is so dull as to say, for example, that the people of Rome made a covenant with the Romans to hold the sovereignty on such-and-such conditions — and that if the conditions were not met, the Romans might lawfully depose the Roman people. That men fail to see that the reasoning is the same in a monarchy as in a popular government comes from the ambition of some, who are kinder to government by an assembly — in which they may hope to take part — than to monarchy, which they have no hope of ever enjoying.
3. No One Can Justly Protest Against the Institution of the Sovereign Declared by the Major Part
Thirdly, because the major part has, by consenting voices, declared a sovereign, the man who dissented must now consent with the rest. That is, he must be content to own all the actions the sovereign shall do — or else justly be destroyed by the rest. For if he voluntarily entered the congregation of those who were assembled, he sufficiently declared by that act his will to stand by whatever the major part should ordain — and therefore tacitly covenanted to do so. So if he refuses to stand by it, or protests against any of their decrees, he acts contrary to his covenant, and therefore unjustly. And whether he was part of the congregation or not, and whether his consent was asked or not, he must either submit to their decrees or be left in the condition of war he was in before — in which anyone at all might destroy him without injustice.
Fourthly, because by this institution every subject is author of all the actions and judgments of the instituted sovereign, it follows that whatever the sovereign does can be no injury to any of his subjects, nor ought he to be accused of injustice by any of them. For a man who does something by authority from another does no injury, in doing it, to the one by whose authority he acts. But by this institution of a commonwealth, every particular man is author of everything the sovereign does. So a man who complains of injury from his sovereign is complaining of something he himself is the author of; and therefore he ought to accuse no one but himself — no, and not even himself, because to do injury to one's self is impossible.
It is true that those who have sovereign power may commit iniquity — moral wrong. But they cannot commit injustice, or injury in the proper meaning of the word.
Fifthly, and as a consequence of the last point, no man who has sovereign power can justly be put to death, or punished in any other manner, by his subjects. For seeing every subject is author of the actions of his sovereign, he would be punishing another for actions committed by himself.
And because the end of this institution is the peace and defense of them all, and whoever has a right to the end has a right to the means, it belongs by right to whatever man or assembly holds the sovereignty to be judge both of the means of peace and defense, and of the hindrances and disturbances to them; and to do whatever he shall think necessary to be done — both in advance, to preserve peace and security by preventing discord at home and hostility from abroad, and, when peace and security are lost, to recover them. And therefore:
Sixthly, it is annexed to the sovereignty to be judge of which opinions and doctrines work against peace, and which promote it; and consequently, on what occasions, how far, and in what matters men are to be trusted when speaking to multitudes of people; and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they are published. For the actions of men proceed from their opinions; and in the good governing of opinions consists the good governing of men's actions, with a view to their peace and concord.
And though in matters of doctrine nothing ought to be regarded but the truth, this is not in conflict with regulating doctrine for the sake of peace. For a doctrine in conflict with peace can no more be true than peace and concord can be against the law of nature.
It is true that in a commonwealth where false doctrines have, through the negligence or clumsiness of governors and teachers, become generally accepted over time, the contrary truths may be generally offensive. Yet even the most sudden and rough bursting-in of a new truth never breaks the peace — it only sometimes wakes the war. For men governed so loosely that they dare take up arms to defend or introduce an opinion are still at war; their condition is not peace, but only a cease-fire out of fear of one another; they live, as it were, perpetually on the edge of the battlefield. It belongs, therefore, to the holder of the sovereign power to be judge — or to appoint all the judges — of opinions and doctrines, as a thing necessary to peace, in order to prevent discord and civil war.
Seventhly, annexed to the sovereignty is the whole power of prescribing the rules by which every man may know what goods he may enjoy, and what actions he may do, without being harassed by any of his fellow subjects. And this is what men call PROPERTY. For before the constitution of sovereign power, as I have already shown, all men had a right to all things — which necessarily causes war. So this property, being necessary to peace and depending on sovereign power, is the act of that power, made for the sake of public peace. These rules of property (or meum and tuum — mine and thine), and of good, evil, lawful, and unlawful in the actions of subjects, are the CIVIL LAWS — that is, the laws of each commonwealth in particular; though the name "civil law" is now restricted to the ancient civil laws of the city of Rome — for Rome being the head of a great part of the world, her laws in those days were, in these parts, the civil law.
Eighthly, annexed to the sovereignty is the right of judicature — that is, of hearing and deciding all controversies that may arise concerning law, whether civil or natural, or concerning fact. For without the deciding of controversies there is no protection of one subject against the injuries of another; the laws concerning mine and thine are in vain; and there remains to every man, from his natural and necessary appetite for his own preservation, the right of protecting himself by his private strength — which is the condition of war, and contrary to the end for which every commonwealth is instituted.
Ninthly, annexed to the sovereignty is the right of making war and peace with other nations and commonwealths — that is, of judging when it serves the public good, and how great the forces to be assembled, armed, and paid for that end should be, and of levying money on the subjects to cover the expense. For the power by which the people are to be defended consists in their armies; and the strength of an army consists in the union of their strength under one command — which command the instituted sovereign therefore has, because the command of the militia, even without any other institution, makes the man who holds it sovereign. And therefore, whoever may be made general of an army, the holder of the sovereign power is always generalissimo — the supreme commander.
Tenthly, annexed to the sovereignty is the choosing of all counselors, ministers, magistrates, and officers, both in peace and in war. For since the sovereign is charged with the end — the common peace and defense — he is understood to have the power to use whatever means he shall think most fit to discharge that duty.
11. And of Rewarding and Punishing — at His Discretion, Where No Former Law Has Set the Measure
Eleventhly, to the sovereign is committed the power of rewarding with riches or with honor, and of punishing with bodily or monetary punishment, or with public disgrace, every subject — according to the law he has previously made; or, if no law has been made, according to what he shall judge will most encourage men to serve the commonwealth, or deter them from doing it disservice.
Lastly, consider what value men are naturally apt to set on themselves, what respect they expect from others, and how little they value other men. From all this there continually arise among them rivalry, quarrels, factions, and at last war — to the destroying of one another, and the weakening of their strength against a common enemy. So it is necessary that there be laws of honor, and a public scale of the worth of men who have deserved well of the commonwealth, or are able to deserve well of it; and that there be force in the hands of someone or other to put those laws into execution. But it has already been shown that not only the whole militia — the armed forces of the commonwealth — but also the judging of all controversies, is annexed to the sovereignty. To the sovereign, therefore, it also belongs to give titles of honor, and to appoint what rank of place and dignity each man shall hold, and what signs of respect, in public or private meetings, they shall give to one another.
These are the rights that make up the essence of sovereignty; and they are the marks by which a man may discern in what man, or assembly of men, the sovereign power is placed and resides. For these rights are incommunicable and inseparable. The power to coin money, to dispose of the estates and persons of underage heirs, to have pre-emption — the right of first purchase — in markets, and all other prerogatives granted by statute, may be transferred away by the sovereign, and the power to protect his subjects still retained. But if he transfers the militia, he retains the judicature in vain, for want of the power to execute the laws. If he grants away the power of raising money, the militia is in vain. If he gives away the government of doctrines, men will be frightened into rebellion by the fear of spirits. So if we consider any one of these rights, we shall quickly see that holding on to all the rest will produce no effect in preserving peace and justice — the end for which all commonwealths are instituted.
It is of this division that it is said, "A kingdom divided in itself cannot stand." For unless this division comes first, division into opposing armies can never happen. If the opinion had not first taken hold of the greatest part of England that these powers were divided between the King, the Lords, and the House of Commons, the people would never have been divided, and fallen into this civil war — first between those who disagreed about politics, and afterward between the dissenters about the liberty of religion. And the war has so instructed men on this point of sovereign right that there are few now in England who do not see that these rights are inseparable. So it will be generally acknowledged at the next return of peace — and so it will continue, until their miseries are forgotten, and no longer, unless the common people are taught better than they have been so far.
And because these are essential and inseparable rights, it follows necessarily that whatever the words by which any of them may seem to be granted away, the grant is void — unless the sovereign power itself is renounced in direct terms, and the name of sovereign is no longer given by the grantees to the man who granted them. For when he has granted away all he can, if we grant back the sovereignty, everything is restored, as inseparably annexed to it.
Since this great authority is indivisible, and inseparably annexed to the sovereignty, there is little ground for the opinion of those who say of sovereign kings that though they are singulis majores — of greater power than each of their subjects taken one by one — they are nonetheless universis minores — of less power than all of them together. For if by "all together" they do not mean the collective body as one person, then "all together" and "every one" signify the same thing, and the statement is absurd. But if by "all together" they understand them as one person — which person the sovereign bears — then the power of all together is the same as the sovereign's power, and again the statement is absurd. This absurdity they see well enough when the sovereignty rests in an assembly of the people; in a monarch they fail to see it — and yet the power of sovereignty is the same wherever it is placed.
And as with the power, so also the honor of the sovereign ought to be greater than that of any one of his subjects, or of all of them together. For the sovereignty is the fountain of honor. The dignities of lord, earl, duke, and prince are its creatures. As servants are equal in the presence of their master, and without any honor at all, so are subjects in the presence of the sovereign. And though they shine, some more, some less, when they are out of his sight, in his presence they shine no more than the stars in the presence of the sun.
Sovereign Power Is Not as Harmful as the Lack of It — and the Harm Comes Mostly from Not Readily Submitting to a Lesser Evil
But here a man may object that the condition of subjects is very miserable, exposed as they are to the lusts and other irregular passions of the man, or men, who hold such unlimited power in their hands. Commonly, those who live under a monarch think it is the fault of monarchy; and those who live under the government of democracy, or some other sovereign assembly, attribute all the inconvenience to that form of commonwealth — when in fact the power is the same in all forms, provided the forms are complete enough to protect them.
Such objectors fail to consider that the estate of man can never be without some inconvenience or other; and that the greatest inconvenience that can possibly happen to the people in general, under any form of government, is scarcely noticeable next to the miseries and horrible calamities that accompany a civil war — or that dissolute condition of masterless men, without subjection to laws, and without a coercive power to tie their hands from plunder and revenge.
Nor do they consider that the heaviest pressure from sovereign governors comes not from any delight or profit the governors can expect from damaging or weakening their subjects — for in their subjects' vigor consists their own strength — but from the subjects themselves: who, contributing unwillingly to their own defense, make it necessary for their governors to draw from them whatever they can in time of peace, so that they may have the means, in any emergency or sudden need, to resist their enemies, or to gain advantage over them.
For all men are by nature equipped with remarkable magnifying glasses — their passions and their self-love — through which every little payment looks like a great grievance. But they lack the telescopes — namely, moral and civil science — to see, far off, the miseries that hang over them, and that cannot be avoided without such payments.
The difference between commonwealths lies in the difference of the sovereign — the person who represents each and every one of the multitude. And since sovereignty rests either in one man or in an assembly of more than one; and since into that assembly either every man has the right to enter, or not every man but only certain men distinguished from the rest; it is clear that there can be only three kinds of commonwealth. For the representative must be either one man or more than one; and if more, then it is an assembly of all, or of only a part.
When the representative is one man, the commonwealth is a MONARCHY. When it is an assembly of all who are willing to come together, it is a DEMOCRACY, or popular commonwealth. When it is an assembly of only a part, it is called an ARISTOCRACY.
There can be no other kind of commonwealth. For either one, or more, or all must hold the sovereign power — which I have shown to be indivisible — entire.
There are other names for government in the histories and the books of policy — tyranny, for instance, and oligarchy. But these are not the names of other forms of government. They are the names of the same forms, disliked. People who are discontented under a monarchy call it tyranny; people displeased with an aristocracy call it oligarchy; and likewise, people who feel aggrieved under a democracy call it anarchy — which means the absence of government. Yet I do not think anyone believes that the absence of government is some new kind of government. And by the same reasoning, no one should believe that a government is one kind when they like it, and another kind when they dislike it or feel oppressed by the governors.
Clearly, men in a state of absolute liberty may, if they please, give authority to one man to represent every one of them, just as readily as they may give such authority to any assembly of men whatsoever. They may therefore subject themselves, if they think it good, to a monarch just as absolutely as to any other representative.
It follows that where a sovereign power has already been set up, there can be no other representative of the same people, except for certain particular purposes, limited by the sovereign. To allow otherwise would be to erect two sovereigns, and to have every man's person represented by two actors who, by opposing each other, must divide the power which — if men want to live in peace — is indivisible. That would reduce the multitude back into the condition of war, contrary to the very purpose for which all sovereignty is instituted.
So just as it would be absurd for a sovereign assembly to invite the people of its dominion to send up deputies with power to make known their advice and desires, and then to treat those deputies, rather than itself, as the absolute representative of the people — so it is equally absurd to think the same thing in a monarchy. And I do not know how so obvious a truth has lately been so little noticed: that in a certain monarchy, a man who held the sovereignty by a descent of six hundred years, who alone was called sovereign, who received the title of Majesty from every one of his subjects, and who was unquestionably taken by them for their king, was nevertheless never considered their representative — while that name passed without contradiction as the title of the men whom the people, at his command, sent up to carry their petitions and give him (if he permitted it) their advice.
Let this serve as a warning to those who are the true and absolute representatives of a people: instruct men in the nature of that office, and be careful how you admit any other general representation on any occasion whatsoever, if you mean to discharge the trust committed to you.
The difference between these three kinds of commonwealth does not lie in a difference of power, but in a difference of convenience — that is, in their aptitude to produce the peace and security of the people, which is the purpose for which they were instituted. Comparing monarchy with the other two, we may observe the following.
First: whoever bears the person of the people, or belongs to the assembly that bears it, also bears his own natural person. And though he may be careful, in his political person, to advance the common interest, he is just as careful — or more so — to advance the private good of himself, his family, his relatives, and his friends. For the most part, if the public interest happens to cross the private, he prefers the private; for the passions of men are commonly more powerful than their reason. From this it follows that wherever the public and private interest are most closely united, there the public interest is most advanced. Now in a monarchy, the private interest is the same as the public. The riches, power, and honor of a monarch arise only from the riches, strength, and reputation of his subjects. For no king can be rich, or glorious, or secure, whose subjects are poor, or contemptible, or too weak — through want or division — to fight a war against their enemies. Whereas in a democracy or an aristocracy, the public prosperity does not add as much to the private fortune of a man who is corrupt or ambitious as a treacherous piece of advice often does, or a betrayal, or a civil war.
Second: a monarch receives counsel from whomever he pleases, whenever and wherever he pleases. He can hear the opinions of men genuinely versed in the matter he is deliberating, of whatever rank or quality, as long before the time of action and with as much secrecy as he wants. But when a sovereign assembly needs counsel, no one is admitted except those who have had a right to be there from the beginning — and these, for the most part, are men more versed in acquiring wealth than in acquiring knowledge. They give their advice in long speeches, which may and commonly do stir men up to action, but do not govern them in it. For the understanding is never enlightened by the flame of the passions — only dazzled. Nor is there any place or time in which an assembly can receive counsel in secrecy, because of its own multitude.
Third: the resolutions of a monarch are subject to no inconstancy except that of human nature. But in assemblies, besides the inconstancy of nature, there arises an inconstancy from the number. The absence of a few who would have kept a resolution firm once it was taken — which may happen through overconfidence, negligence, or private obstacles — or the diligent attendance of a few of the contrary opinion, undoes today everything that was concluded yesterday.
Fourth: a monarch cannot disagree with himself out of envy or self-interest. An assembly can — and to such a height that it may produce a civil war.
Fifth: there is this inconvenience in monarchy, that any subject may be stripped of everything he possesses by the power of one man, for the enriching of a favorite or a flatterer. I confess this is a great and unavoidable inconvenience. But the same thing can just as easily happen where the sovereign power is in an assembly. For their power is the same; they are just as subject to evil counsel, and just as easily seduced by orators, as a monarch is by flatterers; and becoming one another's flatterers, they serve one another's greed and ambition by turns. Moreover, the favorites of an assembly are many, and their relatives far more numerous than any monarch's. Besides, there is no favorite of a monarch who cannot help his friends as well as hurt his enemies. But orators — that is to say, the favorites of sovereign assemblies — though they have great power to hurt, have little power to save. For to accuse requires less eloquence than to excuse (such is man's nature), and condemnation looks more like justice than absolution does.
Sixth: it is an inconvenience in monarchy that the sovereignty may descend upon an infant, or upon someone who cannot tell good from evil. The inconvenience consists in this: that the use of his power must be in the hands of another man, or of some assembly of men, who govern by his right and in his name, as curators and protectors of his person and his authority. But to say there is inconvenience in putting the use of the sovereign power into the hands of a man, or an assembly of men, is to say that all government is more inconvenient than confusion and civil war. So whatever danger can be claimed here must arise from the rivalry of those who may become competitors for an office of such great honor and profit.
To see that this inconvenience does not come from the form of government we call monarchy, consider the possibilities. Either the previous monarch appointed who should have the guardianship of his infant successor — expressly, by testament, or tacitly, by not overriding the accepted custom in that case. Then such inconvenience, if it happens, is to be blamed not on the monarchy but on the ambition and injustice of the subjects — which is the same in every kind of government where the people are not well instructed in their duty and in the rights of sovereignty. Or else the previous monarch made no arrangement at all for such guardianship. In that case the law of nature has provided this sufficient rule: that the guardianship shall be in the man who has, by nature, the most interest in preserving the authority of the infant, and who can gain the least by his death or diminishment. For since every man by nature seeks his own benefit and advancement, to put an infant into the power of those who can advance themselves by destroying or damaging him is not guardianship — it is treachery. So with sufficient provision made against every just quarrel about the government under a child, if any contention arises that disturbs the public peace, it is not to be attributed to the form of monarchy, but to the ambition of subjects and their ignorance of their duty.
On the other side, there is no great commonwealth whose sovereignty rests in a great assembly that is not — when it comes to deliberations of peace and war, and the making of laws — in the very same condition as if the government were in a child. For just as a child lacks the judgment to dissent from the counsel given him, and so is forced to take the advice of those to whom he is entrusted, so an assembly lacks the liberty to dissent from the counsel of the majority, whether that counsel is good or bad. And just as a child needs a tutor or protector to preserve his person and authority, so also, in great commonwealths, the sovereign assembly, in all great dangers and troubles, needs Custodes Libertatis — guardians of liberty — that is, dictators, or protectors of its authority. These are nothing less than temporary monarchs, to whom the assembly may commit the entire exercise of its power for a time — and at the end of that time, assemblies have been stripped of that power by their dictators more often than infant kings have been by their protectors, regents, or any other tutors.
Though the kinds of sovereignty are, as I have now shown, only three — monarchy, where one man has it; democracy, where the general assembly of subjects has it; and aristocracy, where it rests in an assembly of certain persons named or otherwise distinguished from the rest — still, anyone who considers the particular commonwealths that have existed and do exist in the world may not find it easy to reduce them all to three, and may be inclined to think there are other forms, made by mixing these together. For example: elective kingdoms, where kings hold the sovereign power for a time only; or kingdoms in which the king's power is limited — governments which most writers nevertheless call monarchies. Likewise, if a popular or aristocratic commonwealth subdues an enemy country and governs it by a president, procurator, or other magistrate, this may seem at first sight to be a democratic or aristocratic government. But it is not. Elective kings are not sovereigns but ministers of the sovereign; limited kings are not sovereigns but ministers of those who hold the sovereign power; and provinces subject to the democracy or aristocracy of another commonwealth are not governed democratically or aristocratically, but monarchically.
First, consider an elective king, whose power is limited to his lifetime, as it is in many places in Christendom today, or to certain years or months, like the dictator's power among the Romans. If he has the right to appoint his successor, he is no longer elective but hereditary. But if he has no power to elect his successor, then either there is some other known man or assembly that can elect a new one after his death — or else the commonwealth dies and dissolves with him, and returns to the condition of war. If it is known who has the power to confer the sovereignty after his death, then it is also known that the sovereignty was in them all along. For no one has the right to give what he does not have the right to possess and keep for himself, if he thinks fit. But if there is no one who can confer the sovereignty after the death of the man first elected, then he has the power — indeed, he is obliged by the law of nature — to provide for a successor, to keep those who trusted him with the government from relapsing into the miserable condition of civil war. And consequently, he was, when elected, an absolute sovereign.
Second, a king whose power is limited is not superior to the one — man or assembly — that has the power to limit it. And he that is not superior is not supreme; that is to say, not sovereign. The sovereignty, therefore, was always in the assembly that had the right to limit him, and the government was consequently not a monarchy, but either a democracy or an aristocracy. So it was in ancient Sparta, where the kings had the privilege of leading the armies, but the sovereignty was in the Ephori — the board of magistrates who held the real power.
Third, when the Roman people governed the land of Judea, for example, by a president, Judea was not therefore a democracy — for the people of Judea were not governed by any assembly into which any of them had the right to enter. Nor was it an aristocracy — for they were not governed by any assembly into which any man could enter by their election. They were governed by one person. And though that person, with respect to the people of Rome, was an assembly of the people — a democracy — yet with respect to the people of Judea, who had no right whatsoever to participate in the government, it was a monarch. For where people are governed by an assembly chosen by themselves out of their own number, the government is called a democracy or an aristocracy; but when they are governed by an assembly not of their own choosing, it is a monarchy — not of one man over another man, but of one people over another people.
In all these forms of government, the material is mortal. Not only monarchs but whole assemblies die. So for the preservation of peace among men, it is necessary that, just as order was taken for an artificial man, order should also be taken for an artificial eternity of life. Without it, men governed by an assembly would return to the condition of war in every generation, and men governed by one man would return to it as soon as their governor died. This artificial eternity is what men call the right of succession.
There is no perfect form of government where the disposing of the succession is not in the hands of the present sovereign. For if it lies in any other particular man or private assembly, it lies in a person who is a subject, and the sovereign may take it back at his pleasure — so the right is really in himself. And if it lies in no particular man, but is left to a fresh choice, then the commonwealth is dissolved when the sovereign dies, and the right belongs to whoever can seize it — contrary to the intention of those who instituted the commonwealth for their perpetual security, not a temporary one.
In a democracy, the whole assembly cannot fail unless the multitude to be governed fails. Questions about the right of succession therefore have no place at all in that form of government.
In an aristocracy, when any member of the assembly dies, the election of another into his place belongs to the assembly, as the sovereign to whom the choosing of all counselors and officers belongs. For whatever the representative does as actor, every one of the subjects does as author. And though the sovereign assembly may give others the power to elect new men to fill its ranks, the election is still made by its authority — and by that same authority it may be recalled whenever the public requires it.
The greatest difficulty about the right of succession arises in monarchy. The difficulty comes from this: at first sight it is not obvious who is to appoint the successor, nor, in many cases, whom he has appointed. Both questions require more careful reasoning than most men are accustomed to use.
As to the question of who shall appoint the successor of a monarch who has the sovereign authority — that is, a monarch who owns the sovereign power, not one who merely uses it, as elective kings and princes do — we must consider this: either the man in possession has the right to dispose of the succession, or else that right falls back to the dissolved multitude. For the death of the man who owns the sovereign power leaves the multitude with no sovereign at all — that is, with no representative in whom they are united and through whom they are capable of doing any single action whatsoever. They are therefore incapable of electing any new monarch. Every man would have an equal right to submit himself to whomever he thinks best able to protect him — or, if he can, to protect himself by his own sword. And that is a return to confusion, and to the condition of a war of every man against every man, contrary to the end for which monarchy was first instituted. It is therefore clear that, by the institution of monarchy, the disposing of the successor is always left to the judgment and will of the present possessor.
And as for the question that may sometimes arise — whom the monarch in possession has designated to succeed to and inherit his power — it is settled by his express words and testament, or by other tacit signs sufficient to show his will.
By express words, or testament: when the monarch declares it in his lifetime, viva voce — by spoken word — or in writing, as the first emperors of Rome declared who should be their heirs. For the word "heir" does not by itself mean a man's children or nearest relatives, but whomever a man declares, in any way, that he wants to succeed him in his estate. If, therefore, a monarch declares expressly, by word or writing, that a certain man shall be his heir, then that man is invested with the right of being monarch immediately upon the death of his predecessor.
But where testament and express words are lacking, other natural signs of the will are to be followed. One of these is custom. Where the custom is that the next of kin absolutely succeeds, there the next of kin has the right to the succession — for if the will of the man in possession had been otherwise, he could easily have declared it in his lifetime. Likewise, where the custom is that the next of the male line succeeds, there the right of succession is in the next male relative, for the same reason. And the same holds if the custom were to advance the female line. For whatever custom a man could override with a word, and does not, is a natural sign that he wants that custom to stand.
But where neither custom nor testament has gone before, it is to be understood: first, that a monarch's will is for the government to remain monarchical, because he has approved that form of government in his own case. Second, that a child of his own, male or female, is to be preferred before anyone else — because men are presumed to be more inclined by nature to advance their own children than the children of other men; and of their own children, a male rather than a female, because men, in his view, are naturally fitter than women for actions of labor and danger. Third, where his own children fail, a brother rather than a stranger — and so on, always the nearer in blood rather than the more remote, because it is always presumed that the nearer in kin is the nearer in affection; and it is evident that a man always receives, by reflection, the most honor from the greatness of his nearest kindred.
But if it is lawful for a monarch to dispose of the succession by words of contract or by testament, someone may object to a great inconvenience: he may sell or give his right of governing to a stranger. And because strangers — that is, men not used to living under the same government, and not speaking the same language — commonly undervalue one another, this may turn to the oppression of his subjects. That is indeed a great inconvenience. But it does not come necessarily from being subject to a stranger's government; it comes from the unskillfulness of governors who are ignorant of the true rules of politics. That is why the Romans, when they had subdued many nations, made their government digestible by removing that grievance as far as they thought necessary: they gave not only the privileges but the very name of Romans, sometimes to whole nations, and sometimes to the leading men of every nation they conquered, and took many of them into the Senate and into offices of responsibility, even in the city of Rome itself.
And this is what our most wise king, King James, aimed at in working for the union of his two realms of England and Scotland. Had he obtained it, it would in all likelihood have prevented the civil wars that now make both those kingdoms miserable. It is therefore no injury to the people for a monarch to dispose of the succession by will — though through the fault of many princes, it has sometimes proved inconvenient. And there is this further argument for its lawfulness: whatever inconvenience can come from giving a kingdom to a stranger can also come from marrying among strangers in such a way that the right of succession may descend upon them — and yet everyone counts that as lawful.
A commonwealth by acquisition — by conquest — is one where the sovereign power is acquired by force. And it is acquired by force when men, singly or many together by majority vote, authorize all the actions of the man or assembly that holds their lives and liberty in his power, and do so out of fear of death or chains.
This kind of dominion, or sovereignty, differs from sovereignty by agreement in only one respect. Men who choose their sovereign by agreement do it out of fear of one another, not fear of the man they are installing. In conquest, they subject themselves to the very man they are afraid of.
In both cases, notice, they do it out of fear. That point deserves the attention of those who hold that all covenants made out of fear of death or violence are void. If that were true, no one in any kind of commonwealth could be obligated to obey at all.
It is true that in a commonwealth, once it is set up — whether by agreement or by conquest — promises made out of fear of death or violence are not covenants, and do not bind, when the thing promised is against the laws. But the reason is not that the promise was made out of fear. The reason is that the person promising had no right to the thing he promised. And when he could lawfully perform his promise and chooses not to, what releases him is not any invalidity in the covenant — it is the sentence of the sovereign. Otherwise we would have a contradiction: a man would promise lawfully and break his promise unlawfully. But when the sovereign — who is the actor here — acquits him, then he is acquitted by the very person who extorted the promise, as the author of his release.
But the rights and consequences of sovereignty are the same in both. The conquering sovereign's power cannot be transferred to another without his consent. He cannot forfeit it. He cannot be accused of injury by any of his subjects. He cannot be punished by them. He is the judge of what is necessary for peace, and the judge of doctrines. He is the sole lawmaker, and the supreme judge of disputes, and of the times and occasions of war and peace. It belongs to him to choose magistrates, counselors, commanders, and all other officers and ministers, and to decide rewards and punishments, honor and rank. The reasons for all of this are the same ones I gave in the previous chapter for the identical rights and consequences of sovereignty by agreement.
Dominion is acquired in two ways: by generation and by conquest.
The right of dominion by generation is the right a parent has over his children, and it is called PARENTAL dominion (Hobbes' term: paternal). But it does not actually come from the begetting — as if the parent had dominion over the child simply because he produced him. It comes from the child's consent, either expressed outright or declared by other sufficient signs.
Here is why begetting cannot be the source. As to generation, God ordained a helper for man, and there are always two people who are equally parents. So dominion over the child should belong equally to both, and the child should be equally subject to both — which is impossible, for no one can obey two masters.
Some have assigned the dominion to the man alone, on the grounds that he is the more excellent sex. They miscalculate. There is not always such a difference of strength or judgment between the man and the woman that the right could be settled without a fight.
In commonwealths, this dispute is decided by the civil law, and for the most part — though not always — the ruling favors the father. But that is only because commonwealths have mostly been founded by fathers of families, not by mothers. The question before us, though, concerns the pure state of nature, where there are presumed to be no laws of marriage and no laws for the raising of children — nothing but the law of nature and the natural inclination of the sexes toward each other and toward their children.
In this state of pure nature, either the parents settle the dominion over the child between themselves by contract, or they do not settle it at all. If they settle it, the right passes according to the contract. We find in history that the Amazons made exactly such a contract with the men of neighboring countries, to whom they went to have children: any male child would be sent back to the father, but the females would stay with them. So the dominion over the females rested with the mother.
If there is no contract, the dominion belongs to the mother. For in the state of pure nature, where there are no marriage laws, no one can know who the father is unless the mother declares it. The right of dominion over the child therefore depends on her will, and is consequently hers.
Consider it another way. The infant is first of all in the mother's power, so that she may either nourish it or abandon it. If she nourishes it, the child owes its life to her, and is therefore bound to obey her rather than anyone else — and so the dominion over it is hers. But if she abandons it and someone else finds it and nourishes it, the dominion belongs to the one who nourishes it. For the child ought to obey the person who preserves it. Preservation of life is the whole purpose for which one man becomes subject to another, so every man is presumed to promise obedience to the one who has the power to save or destroy him.
If the mother is the father's subject, the child is in the father's power. And if the father is the mother's subject — as when a sovereign queen marries one of her own subjects — the child is subject to the mother, because the father is her subject too.
If a man and a woman who are monarchs of two separate kingdoms have a child, and they make a contract about who shall have dominion over him, the right passes by the contract. If they make no contract, the dominion follows the dominion of the place where the child lives — for the sovereign of each country has dominion over everyone who resides in it.
Whoever has dominion over the child has dominion also over the child's children, and over their children's children. For he that has dominion over a man's person has dominion over everything that is his. Without that, dominion would be a mere title, with no effect.
The right of succession to parental dominion proceeds in the same way as the right of succession to a monarchy — which I have already covered sufficiently in the previous chapter.
Dominion acquired by conquest, or victory in war, is what some writers call DESPOTIC, from the Greek despotes — a lord or master. It is the dominion of a master over his servant.
This dominion is acquired by the victor when the vanquished, to avoid the death-blow hanging over him, covenants — either in express words or by other sufficient signs of his will — that so long as his life and the liberty of his body are allowed him, the victor shall have the use of them at his pleasure.
Only after such a covenant is made is the vanquished a SERVANT — not before. By the word servant (whether it comes from servire, to serve, or from servare, to save — a question I leave to the grammarians) I do not mean a captive kept in prison or in chains until his captor, or whoever bought him from his captor, decides what to do with him. Such men — commonly called slaves — have no obligation at all. They may break their chains or their prison, and may kill their master or carry him off captive, with perfect justice. A servant is something different: a man who, having been captured, is allowed his bodily freedom, and who, upon his promise not to run away and not to do violence to his master, is trusted by him.
So it is not the victory that gives the right of dominion over the vanquished — it is his own covenant. He is not obligated because he was conquered, that is, beaten and captured or put to flight. He is obligated because he comes in and submits to the victor.
Nor is the victor obligated to spare an enemy who surrenders without any promise of his life. Yielding at discretion obligates the victor no longer than his own discretion shall see fit.
What men do when they ask for what we now call quarter (the Greeks called it zogria — "taking alive") is to dodge the immediate fury of the victor by submitting, and to bargain for their lives with ransom or service. So a man who has been given quarter has not had his life given to him — only deferred until further deliberation. He has not yielded on condition of keeping his life; he has yielded at discretion. Only then is his life secure, and his service owed, when the victor has trusted him with his bodily freedom. For slaves who work in prisons or in shackles do not work out of duty, but to avoid the cruelty of their taskmasters.
The master of a servant is master also of all he has, and may demand the use of it — his goods, his labor, his servants, and his children — as often as he sees fit. For the servant holds his life from his master by the covenant of obedience: that is, by owning and authorizing whatever the master shall do. And if the master kills him, or throws him into chains, or otherwise punishes him for refusing to obey, the servant is himself the author of that punishment, and cannot accuse the master of injury.
In sum: the rights and consequences of both parental and despotic dominion are exactly the same as those of a sovereign by agreement, and for the same reasons — the reasons laid out in the previous chapter. So consider a man who is monarch of several nations, holding sovereignty in one by the agreement of the assembled people, and in another by conquest — that is, by the submission of each individual to avoid death or chains. If he demands more from the conquered nation than from the other, on the grounds of his title by conquest, that is an act of ignorance of the rights of sovereignty. For the sovereign is equally absolute over both — or else there is no sovereignty at all, and then every man may lawfully protect himself, if he can, with his own sword. Which is the condition of war.
From all this it appears that a great family, if it is not part of some commonwealth, is in itself — as far as the rights of sovereignty go — a little monarchy. This holds whether the family consists of a man and his children, or a man and his servants, or a man and his children and servants together; the father or master is the sovereign.
And yet a family is not properly a commonwealth, unless it has such power — by its own numbers or by other advantages — that it cannot be subdued without the hazard of war. For where a group of men is plainly too weak to defend itself even united, each member may use his own reason in time of danger to save his own life, by flight or by submission to the enemy, as he thinks best — just as a very small company of soldiers, surprised by an army, may throw down their weapons and ask for quarter, or run, rather than be put to the sword.
And that shall suffice for what I find, by speculation and deduction, concerning sovereign rights — derived from the nature, the needs, and the purposes of men in setting up commonwealths and placing themselves under monarchs or assemblies entrusted with power enough to protect them.
Now let us consider what Scripture teaches on the same point.
To Moses, the children of Israel say this: "Speak thou to us, and we will hear thee; but let not God speak to us, lest we die" (Exodus 20:19). That is absolute obedience to Moses.
Concerning the right of kings, God himself, by the mouth of Samuel, says: "This shall be the right of the king you will have to reign over you. He shall take your sons, and set them to drive his chariots, and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and to gather in his harvest; and to make his engines of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he shall take your daughters to make perfumes, to be his cooks and bakers. He shall take your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. He shall take the tithe of your grain and wine, and give it to the men of his chamber, and to his other servants. He shall take your menservants and your maidservants, and the choice of your youth, and employ them in his business. He shall take the tithe of your flocks; and you shall be his servants" (1 Samuel 8:11-17). That is absolute power, and it is summed up in the last words: you shall be his servants.
Again, when the people heard what power their king was to have, they consented to it anyway, saying: "We will be as all other nations, and our king shall judge our causes, and go before us, to conduct our wars" (1 Samuel 8:19-20). Here is confirmed the right that sovereigns have both to the armed forces and to all judicature — which together contain as absolute a power as one man can possibly transfer to another.
Again, the prayer of King Solomon to God was this: "Give to thy servant understanding, to judge thy people, and to discern between good and evil" (1 Kings 3:9). It belongs to the sovereign, then, to be judge, and to prescribe the rules for telling good from evil. Those rules are laws — and therefore the legislative power is in him.
Saul sought the life of David. Yet when it was in David's power to kill Saul, and his servants would gladly have done it, David forbade them, saying: "God forbid I should do such an act against my Lord, the anointed of God" (1 Samuel 24:9).
For the obedience of servants, St. Paul says: "Servants, obey your masters in all things" (Colossians 3:20), and "Children, obey your parents in all things" (verse 22). That is simple obedience in those who are subject to parental or despotic dominion.
Again: "The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' chair, and therefore all that they shall bid you observe, that observe and do" (Matthew 23:2-3). There again is simple obedience. And St. Paul: "Warn them that they subject themselves to princes, and to those that are in authority, and obey them" (Titus 3:2). This obedience is also simple.
Lastly, our Savior himself acknowledges that men ought to pay whatever taxes kings impose — "Give to Caesar that which is Caesar's" — and he paid such taxes himself. He acknowledged too that the king's word is sufficient to take anything from any subject when there is need, and that the king is the judge of that need. For he himself, as King of the Jews, commanded his disciples to take the donkey and its colt to carry him into Jerusalem: "Go into the village over against you, and you shall find a she-ass tied, and her colt with her; untie them, and bring them to me. And if any man ask you what you mean by it, say, the Lord hath need of them; and they will let them go" (Matthew 21:2-3). The disciples will not ask whether his need is a sufficient title, nor whether he is the judge of that need. They simply acquiesce in the will of the Lord.
To these passages we may add the one from Genesis: "You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5), and verse 11: "Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee thou shouldest not eat?"
The judging of good and evil was forbidden under the name of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as a trial of Adam's obedience. The Devil, to inflame the ambition of the woman — to whom that fruit already looked beautiful — told her that by tasting it, they would be as gods, knowing good and evil. And so, having both eaten, they did indeed take upon themselves God's office, which is the judging of good and evil. But they acquired no new ability to tell the two apart correctly.
As for the line that having eaten, they saw they were naked — no one has ever read that passage to mean they had been blind before and could not see their own skin. The meaning is plain: that was the moment they first judged their nakedness (in which it was God's will to create them) to be indecent. And by being ashamed of it, they silently passed judgment on God himself. Whereupon God says, "Hast thou eaten...?" — as if to say: do you, who owe me obedience, take it upon yourself to judge my commandments? By this it is clearly signified — though allegorically — that the commands of those who have the right to command are not to be censured or disputed by their subjects.
So it appears plainly, to my understanding, from both reason and Scripture, that the sovereign power — whether placed in one man, as in monarchy, or in one assembly of men, as in popular and aristocratic commonwealths — is as great as men can possibly be imagined to make it.
People may imagine many evil consequences flowing from so unlimited a power. But the consequences of the lack of it — perpetual war of every man against his neighbor — are far worse. The condition of man in this life will never be free of inconveniences. But no commonwealth suffers any great inconvenience except what proceeds from the subjects' disobedience, and their breach of the very covenants from which the commonwealth had its being. And whoever thinks sovereign power too great, and seeks to make it less, must subject himself to a power that can limit it — which is to say, to a greater one.
The strongest objection is the objection from practice: men ask where and when such power has ever been acknowledged by subjects. But one may ask them in return: when, or where, has there ever been a kingdom long free from sedition and civil war? In those nations whose commonwealths have lived long, and have been destroyed only by foreign war, the subjects never disputed the sovereign power at all. But in any case, an argument from the practice of men — men who have never sifted the question to the bottom, who have never weighed with exact reason the causes and nature of commonwealths, and who suffer daily the miseries that flow from their ignorance of them — is no argument at all. Even if everyone in the world built their houses on sand, it would not follow that houses ought to be built that way.
The skill of making and maintaining commonwealths consists in certain rules, as arithmetic and geometry do — not, like tennis, in practice alone. And these rules are ones that poor men have not had the leisure to find out, and that men who have had the leisure have so far lacked the curiosity, or the method, to discover.
Liberty, or FREEDOM, properly means the absence of opposition — and by opposition I mean external impediments to motion. The word applies just as well to irrational and inanimate creatures as to rational ones. Whatever is tied down or hemmed in, so that it can move only within a certain space, and that space is fixed by the opposition of some external body — we say it does not have the liberty to go further.
The same goes for all living creatures while they are imprisoned or restrained by walls or chains. The same goes for water while it is held in by banks or vessels, when otherwise it would spread itself into a larger space. We say they are not at liberty to move as they would without those external impediments.
But when the obstacle to motion lies in the constitution of the thing itself, we do not say it lacks the liberty to move; we say it lacks the power. A stone lying still, or a man fastened to his bed by sickness, is not unfree. He is unable.
According to this proper and generally accepted meaning of the word, A FREE MAN is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered from doing what he has a will to do.
But when the words "free" and "liberty" are applied to anything but bodies, they are being misused. What is not subject to motion is not subject to impediment. When we say, for example, "the way is free," we do not mean any liberty of the road, but of the people who walk it without being stopped. When we say a gift is free, we do not mean any liberty of the gift, but of the giver, who was not bound by any law or covenant to give it. When we speak freely, it is not the liberty of the voice or the pronunciation, but of the man, whom no law has obliged to speak otherwise than he did.
And finally, from the phrase "free will" no liberty of the will, desire, or inclination can be inferred — only the liberty of the man, which consists in this: that he finds no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do.
Fear and liberty go together perfectly well. When a man throws his goods into the sea for fear the ship will sink, he does it entirely willingly, and he could refuse to do it if he wanted. It is therefore the action of a man who was free. So too a man sometimes pays his debt only for fear of prison; since nobody stopped him from keeping the money, that was the action of a man at liberty. And in general, all the actions men do in commonwealths out of fear of the law are actions the doers had the liberty not to do.
Liberty and necessity go together too. Watch the water: it has not only the liberty but the necessity of flowing down its channel. The same is true of the actions men do voluntarily. Because they proceed from the man's will, they proceed from liberty. And yet because every act of a man's will, and every desire and inclination, proceeds from some cause, and that cause from another cause, in a continual chain whose first link is in the hand of God — the first of all causes — they proceed from necessity. To anyone who could see the connection of all those causes, the necessity of all men's voluntary actions would be plainly visible.
And so God, who sees and arranges all things, sees also that the liberty of man in doing what he will is accompanied by the necessity of doing what God wills — no more and no less. Men may do many things that God does not command, and of which He is therefore not the author; but they can have no passion or appetite for anything unless God's will is the cause of that appetite. If His will did not guarantee the necessity of man's will, and consequently of everything that depends on man's will, then the liberty of men would contradict and obstruct the omnipotence and liberty of God. And that is enough, for our present purpose, about natural liberty — the only thing that is properly called liberty.
But just as men, to attain peace and preserve themselves by it, have made an artificial man, which we call a commonwealth, so they have also made artificial chains, called civil laws. By their mutual covenants, they have fastened these chains at one end to the lips of the man or assembly to whom they have given the sovereign power, and at the other end to their own ears. These bonds are weak by their own nature; yet they can be made to hold — not because they are hard to break, but because breaking them is dangerous.
It is only in relation to these bonds that I am now to speak of the liberty of subjects. No commonwealth in the world has rules regulating all the actions and words of men — such a thing is impossible. It follows necessarily that in every kind of action the laws have passed over in silence, men have the liberty to do what their own reason suggests is most profitable to themselves.
For if we take liberty in its proper sense — bodily liberty, freedom from chains and prison — it would be quite absurd for men to clamor, as they do, for a liberty they so obviously enjoy. And if we take liberty to mean exemption from the laws, it is no less absurd for men to demand, as they do, the very liberty by which all other men may become masters of their lives. Yet absurd as it is, that is exactly what they demand — not realizing that laws have no power to protect them without a sword in the hands of a man, or men, to see those laws carried out.
The liberty of a subject, therefore, lies only in those things which the sovereign, in regulating men's actions, has left unregulated: the liberty to buy and sell and otherwise make contracts with one another; to choose where they live, what they eat, and how they make their living; to raise their children as they think fit; and so on.
Still, we must not imagine that this kind of liberty abolishes or limits the sovereign's power of life and death. For I have already shown that nothing the sovereign representative does to a subject, on any pretext whatsoever, can properly be called injustice or injury — because every subject is the author of every act the sovereign does. The sovereign never lacks the right to anything, except insofar as he himself is a subject of God, and bound by that to observe the laws of nature.
And so it can happen, and often does happen in commonwealths, that a subject is put to death by command of the sovereign power, and yet neither party wrongs the other — as when Jephthah caused his daughter to be sacrificed. In that case and others like it, the one who dies had the liberty to do the action for which he is nevertheless put to death without injury.
The same holds for a sovereign prince who puts an innocent subject to death. The action is against the law of nature, because it is contrary to equity — as the killing of Uriah by David was. Yet it was not an injury to Uriah, but to God. Not to Uriah, because Uriah himself had given David the right to do as he pleased. But to God, because David was God's subject, and the law of nature forbade him all iniquity. David himself, when he repented of the deed, plainly confirmed this distinction, saying, "Against you only have I sinned."
In the same way, when the people of Athens banished the most powerful men of their commonwealth for ten years at a time, they did not think they were committing any injustice — and yet they never even asked what crime the man had committed, only what harm he might do. Indeed, they would command the banishment of they knew not whom. Every citizen brought his oyster shell into the marketplace with the name of the man he wanted banished written on it, without actually accusing him of anything. Sometimes they banished an Aristides, precisely because of his reputation for justice; sometimes a vulgar comedian like Hyperbolus, simply as a joke. And yet no one can say that the sovereign people of Athens lacked the right to banish them, or that an Athenian lacked the liberty to joke, or to be just.
The liberty that is mentioned so often and so honorably in the histories and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans — and in the writings and talk of those who have gotten all their political learning from them — is not the liberty of particular men. It is the liberty of the commonwealth. And it is exactly the same liberty every man would have if there were no civil laws and no commonwealth at all. Its effects are the same, too.
For just as among masterless men there is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor — no inheritance to pass to a son or expect from a father, no property in goods or lands, no security, but a full and absolute liberty in every particular man — so in states and commonwealths that do not depend on one another, every commonwealth (not every man) has an absolute liberty to do whatever it judges — that is, whatever the man or assembly that represents it judges — most conducive to its benefit. But along with that, commonwealths live in the condition of perpetual war, forever on the edge of battle, with their frontiers armed and cannons planted against their neighbors all around.
The Athenians and the Romans were free — that is, they were free commonwealths. Not that any particular man had the liberty to resist his own representative, but that their representative had the liberty to resist or invade other peoples. To this day, the word LIBERTAS — liberty — is written in huge letters on the turrets of the city of Lucca. Yet no man can conclude from this that a particular man has any more liberty there, or any more exemption from service to the commonwealth, than he would have in Constantinople. Whether a commonwealth is a monarchy or a popular state, the freedom is still the same.
But it is an easy thing for men to be deceived by the attractive name of liberty, and — for lack of the judgment to tell the difference — to mistake for their private inheritance and birthright what is in fact the right of the public only. And when that same error is backed by the authority of men famous for their writings on the subject, it is no wonder it produces sedition and the overthrow of governments.
In these western parts of the world, we have been taught to take our opinions about the founding and the rights of commonwealths from Aristotle, Cicero, and other Greeks and Romans. Living under popular states, these men did not derive those rights from the principles of nature. They copied them into their books from the practice of their own commonwealths, which were popular — just as grammarians describe the rules of language from the speech of their time, or the rules of poetry from the poems of Homer and Virgil.
And because the Athenians were taught (to keep them from wanting to change their government) that they were free men, and that everyone living under a monarchy was a slave, Aristotle wrote it down in his Politics (book 6, chapter 2): "In democracy, liberty is to be supposed: for it is commonly held that no man is free in any other government." And like Aristotle, so Cicero and other writers grounded their civil doctrine on the opinions of the Romans, who were taught to hate monarchy — at first by the men who, having deposed their sovereign, divided the sovereignty of Rome among themselves, and afterward by their successors.
By reading these Greek and Latin authors, men have acquired from childhood a habit — under a false show of liberty — of favoring uprisings, of insolently second-guessing the actions of their sovereigns, and then of second-guessing those second-guessers, with so much spilling of blood that I think I can truly say: nothing was ever so dearly bought as these western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues.
Now we come to the particulars of the true liberty of a subject — that is, the things a subject may refuse to do, without injustice, even when the sovereign commands them. To find them, we must consider what rights we give away when we make a commonwealth — or, which is the same thing, what liberty we deny ourselves by owning all the actions, without exception, of the man or assembly we make our sovereign.
For our obligation and our liberty both lie in the act of our submission, and must therefore be deduced from it. No man has any obligation that does not arise from some act of his own, for all men equally are by nature free. And since such deductions must be drawn either from the express words "I authorize all his actions," or from the intention of the man who submits himself to the sovereign's power (an intention which is to be understood from the purpose for which he submits), the obligation and liberty of the subject must be derived either from those words (or their equivalent), or else from the purpose for which sovereignty was instituted: namely, peace among the subjects themselves, and defense against a common enemy.
First, then. Sovereignty by agreement is created by covenant of every one to every one; sovereignty by conquest, by covenant of the vanquished to the victor, or of child to parent. So it is plain that every subject retains liberty in all those things whose right cannot be transferred by covenant. I showed in chapter 14 that covenants not to defend one's own body are void. Therefore:
If the sovereign commands a man — even one justly condemned — to kill, wound, or maim himself; or not to resist those who attack him; or to go without food, air, medicine, or anything else he cannot live without; that man has the liberty to disobey.
If a man is interrogated by the sovereign, or by the sovereign's authority, about a crime he himself committed, he is not bound to confess it without assurance of a pardon — because, as I showed in the same chapter, no man can be obliged by covenant to accuse himself.
Again, the consent of a subject to sovereign power is contained in these words: "I authorize, or take upon me, all his actions." There is no restriction at all in those words of the subject's own former natural liberty. By permitting the sovereign to kill me, I am not bound to kill myself when he commands it. It is one thing to say, "Kill me, or my fellow, if you please"; it is quite another to say, "I will kill myself, or my fellow." It follows, therefore, that:
No man is bound by the words themselves either to kill himself or to kill any other man. Consequently, whatever obligation a man may sometimes have, on the sovereign's command, to carry out a dangerous or dishonorable office, depends not on the words of our submission but on the intention behind it — which is to be understood from its purpose. So the rule is this: when our refusal to obey would frustrate the purpose for which sovereignty was established, then there is no liberty to refuse. Otherwise, there is.
On this ground, a man commanded as a soldier to fight against the enemy may in many cases refuse without injustice — even though his sovereign has right enough to punish his refusal with death. For instance, when he provides a capable soldier to take his place: in that case he has not deserted the service of the commonwealth. And allowance must be made for natural timidity — not only in women, of whom no such dangerous duty is expected, but also in men of womanish courage. When armies fight, there is running away on one side or both; yet when men do it not out of treachery but out of fear, they are judged to have acted not unjustly, but dishonorably. For the same reason, avoiding battle is not injustice — it is cowardice.
But the man who enrolls himself as a soldier, or takes enlistment money, throws away the excuse of a timid nature. He is obliged not only to go into battle but also not to run from it without his captain's leave. And when the defense of the commonwealth requires, all at once, the help of everyone able to bear arms, then everyone is obliged — because otherwise the founding of the commonwealth, which they lack the purpose or the courage to preserve, was for nothing.
No man has the liberty to resist the sword of the commonwealth in defense of another man, guilty or innocent — because such a liberty strips the sovereign of the means of protecting us, and so destroys the very essence of government. But suppose a great many men together have already resisted the sovereign power unjustly, or committed some capital crime for which every one of them expects death. Do they then have the liberty to band together and assist and defend one another? Certainly they do. For they are only defending their lives — which the guilty man may do just as well as the innocent. There was indeed injustice in the first breach of their duty; but their taking up arms afterward, though it is done to maintain what they have done, is no new unjust act. And if it is done only to defend their persons, it is not unjust at all. The offer of a pardon, however, takes away the plea of self-defense from those it is offered to, and makes it unlawful for them to keep assisting or defending the rest.
As for other liberties, they depend on the silence of the law. Where the sovereign has prescribed no rule, the subject has the liberty to act or to hold back, at his own discretion. This kind of liberty is therefore greater in some places and lesser in others, greater in some times and lesser in others, according to what those who hold the sovereignty think most convenient. For example, there was a time in England when a man could enter his own land by force and throw out anyone wrongfully occupying it. But in later times, that liberty of forcible entry was taken away by a statute made by the king in Parliament. And in some places of the world men have the liberty of many wives; in other places, no such liberty is allowed.
If a subject has a dispute with his sovereign — about a debt, or the right of possession of lands or goods, or about any service required of him, or about any penalty, bodily or financial, grounded on a previous law — he has the same liberty to sue for his right as if it were a dispute with another subject, and before judges appointed by the sovereign. For since the sovereign is making his demand by force of a previous law, and not by virtue of his power, he thereby declares that he requires no more than what that law shows to be due. The lawsuit is therefore not contrary to the will of the sovereign, and consequently the subject has the liberty to demand a hearing of his case, and a sentence according to that law. But if the sovereign demands or takes anything on the claim of his power, then no legal action lies. For everything done by him by virtue of his power is done by the authority of every subject — and so a man who brings an action against the sovereign brings it against himself.
If a monarch or sovereign assembly grants a liberty to all or any of his subjects, and while that grant stands he is unable to provide for their safety, the grant is void — unless he directly renounces the sovereignty or transfers it to another. For he could have openly and in plain terms renounced or transferred it, if that had been his will, and he did not. So we must understand that it was not his will, and that the grant came from ignorance of the conflict between such a liberty and the sovereign power. The sovereignty is therefore still retained, and with it all the powers necessary to exercise it: the power of war and peace, of the courts, of appointing officers and counselors, of levying money, and the rest named in chapter 18.
The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasts by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when no one else can protect them, can be given up by no covenant.
The sovereignty is the soul of the commonwealth; once it has departed from the body, the limbs no longer receive their motion from it. The end of obedience is protection — and wherever a man sees protection, whether in his own sword or in another's, nature directs his obedience to it, and his effort to maintain it. And though sovereignty, in the intention of those who make it, is immortal, it is by its own nature not only subject to violent death by foreign war, but carries within it, from the very moment of its founding, through the ignorance and passions of men, many seeds of a natural mortality by internal discord.
If a subject is taken prisoner in war, or his person or his means of living are within the guards of the enemy, and his life and bodily liberty are given back to him on condition that he become subject to the victor, he has the liberty to accept the condition. And having accepted it, he is the subject of the one who took him — because he had no other way to preserve himself. The case is the same if he is detained on the same terms in a foreign country. But if a man is held in prison or in chains, or is not trusted with the liberty of his own body, he cannot be understood to be bound by covenant to subjection. He may therefore escape, if he can, by any means whatsoever.
If a monarch gives up the sovereignty both for himself and for his heirs, his subjects return to the absolute liberty of nature. For though nature may declare who his sons are and who his nearest kin are, it depends on his own will (as was said in the previous chapter) who shall be his heir. If he will have no heir, there is no sovereignty and no subjection. The case is the same if he dies without known relatives and without declaring an heir — for then no heir can be known, and consequently no subjection is due.
If the sovereign banishes his subject, then during the banishment he is not a subject. But a man sent abroad on a mission, or given leave to travel, is still a subject — though by contract between sovereigns, not by virtue of the covenant of subjection. For whoever enters another's dominion is subject to all its laws, unless he has a privilege by the friendship of the sovereigns, or by special license.
If a monarch defeated in war surrenders himself as subject to the victor, his subjects are released from their former obligation and become obliged to the victor. But if he is held prisoner, or does not have the liberty of his own body, he is not understood to have given away the right of sovereignty. His subjects are therefore obliged to obey the magistrates he previously appointed, who govern not in their own name but in his. For since his right remains, the only question is one of administration — that is, of the magistrates and officers. And if he has no means of naming them, he is presumed to approve those he himself appointed before.
Having spoken of the generation, form, and power of a commonwealth, the order of my subject brings me next to its parts. And first to systems, which resemble the similar parts — the muscles — of a natural body. By SYSTEMS I mean any number of men joined together in one interest or one business. Some of these are regular, and some irregular. Regular systems are those in which one man, or one assembly of men, is constituted representative of the whole number. All the rest are irregular.
Of regular systems, some are absolute and independent, subject to none but their own representative. Only commonwealths are of this kind, and of those I have spoken already in the five preceding chapters. The others are dependent — that is, subordinate to some sovereign power, to which every member, and the representative too, is subject.
Of subordinate systems, some are political and some private. Political systems — otherwise called bodies politic, or persons in law — are those made by authority from the sovereign power of the commonwealth. Private systems are those that subjects set up among themselves, or that are constituted by authority from a stranger. For no authority derived from a foreign power is public within the dominion of another; there, it is private.
And of private systems, some are lawful, some unlawful. Lawful are those the commonwealth allows; all others are unlawful. Irregular systems — those with no representative at all — consist only in a gathering of people. If such a gathering is not forbidden by the commonwealth and not made with evil design — like the flow of people to markets, or to public shows, or for any other harmless purpose — it is lawful. But when the intention is evil, or (if the number is considerable) unknown, it is unlawful.
In bodies politic, the power of the representative is always limited; and what prescribes the limits is the sovereign power. For unlimited power is absolute sovereignty, and the sovereign in every commonwealth is the absolute representative of all the subjects. No one else, therefore, can be representative of any part of them except so far as the sovereign gives leave. And to give a body politic of subjects leave to have an absolute representative, for all intents and purposes, would be to abandon the government of that much of the commonwealth, and to divide the dominion — contrary to the people's peace and defense. The sovereign cannot be understood to do that by any grant which does not plainly and directly discharge them of their subjection. For when one reading of his words contradicts what he clearly intends, those words are not signs of his will; they are signs of error and miscalculation — to which all mankind is far too prone.
The bounds of the power given to the representative of a body politic are to be learned from two things: one, their writ, or letters from the sovereign; the other, the law of the commonwealth.
In the founding or acquisition of a commonwealth, which is independent, no writing is needed, because the power of its representative has no bounds except those set out by the unwritten law of nature. But in subordinate bodies, the necessary limitations — concerning their business, their times, and their places — are so various that they can neither be remembered without letters nor taken notice of unless those letters are patent: open letters, which can be read out to everyone, and sealed or certified with the seals or other permanent signs of the sovereign authority.
And because such limitation is not always easy, or even possible, to set down in writing, the ordinary laws, common to all subjects, must determine what the representative may lawfully do in every case where the letters themselves are silent. And therefore:
In a body politic, if the representative is one man, then whatever he does in the person of the body that is not warranted by his letters or by the laws is his own act — not the act of the body, nor of any member of it besides himself. For beyond what his letters or the laws allow, he represents no one's person but his own. But what he does within those bounds is the act of every member. For everyone is author of the sovereign's acts, since the sovereign is their unlimited representative; and the act of a man who does not stray from the sovereign's letters is the act of the sovereign — so every member of the body is author of it.
But if the representative is an assembly, then whatever the assembly decrees without warrant from their letters or the laws is the act of the assembly — the body politic — and the act of every man by whose vote the decree was made. It is not the act of any man who, being present, voted against it, nor of any man who was absent, unless he voted by proxy. It is the act of the assembly because it was voted by the majority; and if it is a crime, the assembly may be punished as far as it is capable of punishment — by dissolution, or by forfeiture of its letters (which to such artificial and fictitious bodies is capital punishment), or, if the assembly has a common stock in which none of the innocent members has property, by a fine. For nature has exempted all bodies politic from bodily penalties. But those who did not give their vote are innocent, because the assembly cannot represent any man in things unwarranted by its letters, and so they are not implicated by its votes.
When the Representative Is One Man, He Alone Is Liable for Money Borrowed or Owed — Not the Members
If the person of the body politic rests in one man, and he borrows money from a stranger — that is, from someone not of the same body (for no letters need limit borrowing, since limiting the lending is left to men's own inclination) — the debt is the representative's. For if his letters gave him authority to make the members pay what he borrows, he would by consequence have sovereignty over them. In that case the grant would either be void, as proceeding from error — a failing common to human nature, and an insufficient sign of the granter's will — or, if the sovereign stands by it, then the representative is sovereign, and falls outside the present question, which concerns subordinate bodies only. No member, therefore, is obliged to pay the debt so borrowed; only the representative himself. For the lender, being a stranger to the letters and to the constitution of the body, counts as his debtors only those who are actually engaged; and since the representative can engage himself and no one else, the lender has him alone for debtor. He must pay it out of the common stock, if there is one, or, if there is none, out of his own estate.
If he comes into debt by contract, or by a fine, the case is the same.
But when the representative is an assembly and the debt is owed to a stranger, then all those, and only those, are responsible for the debt who gave their votes to the borrowing, or to the contract that made it due, or to the act for which the fine was imposed. For every one of them, in voting, engaged himself for the payment. He who is author of the borrowing is obliged to pay even the whole debt — though once any one of them pays it, the rest are discharged.
But if the debt is owed to one of the assembly itself, then only the assembly is obliged to pay it, out of their common stock, if they have one. For having liberty of vote, if he voted that the money should be borrowed, he voted that it should be paid back. If he voted against the borrowing, or was absent, then by lending the money he votes for the borrowing after all, contradicting his earlier vote; he is bound by the later one, and becomes both borrower and lender. Consequently he cannot demand payment from any particular man, but only from the common treasury. And if that fails, he has no remedy and no complaint except against himself — who, knowing the acts of the assembly and its means to pay, and being under no compulsion, nevertheless lent his money through his own folly.
Protesting the Decrees of Political Bodies Is Sometimes Lawful — But Against the Sovereign Power, Never
From all this it is clear that in political bodies which are subordinate and subject to a sovereign power, it is sometimes not only lawful but prudent for a particular man to protest openly against the decrees of the representative assembly, and to have his dissent registered, or witnessed — because otherwise he may be obliged to pay debts contracted, and answer for crimes committed, by other men. But in a sovereign assembly that liberty is taken away: first, because he who protests there denies the assembly's sovereignty; and second, because whatever the sovereign power commands is, as far as the subject is concerned (though not always in the sight of God), justified by the command itself — for of every such command, every subject is the author.
The variety of bodies politic is almost infinite. They are distinguished not only by the different kinds of business for which they are constituted — and the diversity there is beyond description — but also by their times, places, and numbers, which are subject to many limitations. As to their business, some are ordained for government. First, the government of a province may be committed to an assembly of men, in which all resolutions depend on the votes of the majority. That assembly is then a body politic, and its power is limited by its commission. The word "province" signifies a charge, or care of business, which the man whose business it is commits to another to administer for him and under him. So when one commonwealth contains several countries with laws distinct from one another, or far distant in place, and the administration of government is committed to different persons, those countries where the sovereign does not reside, but governs by commission, are called provinces.
But of a province governed by an assembly residing in the province itself, there are few examples. The Romans, who held sovereignty over many provinces, always governed them by presidents and praetors — not by assemblies, the way they governed the city of Rome and the adjacent territories. Likewise, when colonies went out from England to plant Virginia and the Summer Islands — Bermuda — though their government here at home was committed to assemblies in London, those assemblies never committed the government under them to any assembly there. They sent each plantation one governor. For though every man, where he can be present, naturally desires to participate in government, yet where men cannot be present, they are by nature also inclined to commit the government of their common interest to a monarchical rather than a popular form. You can see the same thing in men with great private estates: when they are unwilling to take the pains of managing their own business, they would rather trust one servant than an assembly of their friends or servants.
But however it stands in fact, we may suppose the government of a province or colony committed to an assembly. And when it is, what I have to say here is this: whatever debt that assembly contracts, and whatever unlawful act it decrees, is the act only of those who assented, not of any who dissented or were absent — for the reasons already given. Also, an assembly residing outside the bounds of the colony it governs cannot exercise any power over the persons or goods of any member of the colony, to seize them for debt or any other duty, in any place outside the colony itself; it has no jurisdiction or authority elsewhere, and is left to whatever remedy the law of that place allows it. And though the assembly has the right to impose a fine on any of its members who break the laws it makes, it has no right to enforce that fine outside the colony itself. What is said here of the rights of an assembly governing a province or colony applies equally to an assembly governing a town, a university, a college, a church, or any other government over the persons of men.
And generally, in all bodies politic, if any particular member thinks himself injured by the body itself, the hearing of his case belongs to the sovereign, and to those whom the sovereign has appointed — or shall appoint — as judges of such cases. It does not belong to the body itself. For in this case the whole body is merely his fellow subject. In a sovereign assembly it is otherwise: for there, if the sovereign is not the judge, even in his own cause, there can be no judge at all.
In a body politic formed for the ordering of foreign trade, the most suitable representative is an assembly of all the members — that is, an assembly arranged so that every man who ventures his money may be present, if he chooses, at all the deliberations and resolutions of the body. To see why, consider the purpose for which merchants — who are free to buy and sell, export and import, each at his own discretion — nevertheless bind themselves together into one corporation.
It is true that few merchants can fill a whole ship with the goods they buy at home for export, or with what they buy abroad to bring home; so they need to join together in one society, where every man may either share in the gains in proportion to his stake, or take his own goods and sell what he transports or imports at whatever prices he sees fit. But that alone is no body politic, for there is no common representative to bind them to any law beyond what binds every other subject. No — the purpose of their incorporating is to make their gains greater, and that is done two ways: by being the only buyer and the only seller, both at home and abroad. So to grant a company of merchants the status of a corporation, a body politic, is to grant them a double monopoly: one as sole buyers, the other as sole sellers. For when a company is incorporated for trade with a particular foreign country, they alone export the goods marketable in that country — which makes them the sole buyer at home and the sole seller abroad. At home there is only one buyer, and abroad only one seller: both profitable to the merchant, because he thereby buys at home at lower rates and sells abroad at higher. And abroad there is only one buyer of foreign goods, and only one who sells them at home: both, again, profitable to the investors.
Of this double monopoly, one half is disadvantageous to the people at home, the other to foreigners. For at home, by their sole right of exportation, they set whatever price they please on the farming and handiwork of the people; and by their sole right of importation, whatever price they please on all the foreign goods the people need — both bad for the people. Conversely, by being sole seller of native goods abroad and sole buyer of foreign goods on the spot, they raise the price of the one and beat down the price of the other, to the foreigner's disadvantage. For where only one sells, the goods are dearer; and where only one buys, cheaper. Such corporations, therefore, are nothing but monopolies. Yet they would be very profitable for a commonwealth if they were bound into one body in foreign markets only, and left at liberty at home — every man free to buy and sell at whatever price he could.
The purpose of these bodies of merchants, then, is not any common benefit to the whole body (which in this case has no common stock except what is deducted from the members' individual stakes for building, buying, supplying, and manning ships), but the particular gain of each individual investor. It is reasonable, therefore, that every one of them be acquainted with the management of his own money — that is, that every one be a member of the assembly that has the power to order it, and be acquainted with its accounts. And so the representative of such a body must be an assembly at which every member may be present at the consultations, if he wishes.
If a body politic of merchants contracts a debt to a stranger by the act of their representative assembly, every member is liable by himself for the whole. For a stranger can take no notice of their private rules; he regards them simply as so many particular men, each obliged for the whole payment, until payment by any one of them discharges all the rest. But if the debt is owed to one of the company, the creditor is debtor for the whole to himself, and so cannot demand his debt from any particular man — only from the common stock, if there is one.
If the commonwealth imposes a tax on the body, it is understood to be laid on every member in proportion to his particular stake in the company. For in this case there is no other common stock than what is made up of their individual investments.
If a fine is laid on the body for some unlawful act, only those are liable by whose votes the act was decreed, or by whose assistance it was carried out; for in none of the rest is there any crime except belonging to the body — and if that were a crime, it is not theirs, because the body was ordained by the authority of the commonwealth.
If one of the members is in debt to the body, the body may sue him; but his goods cannot be seized, nor his person imprisoned, by the body's own authority — only by the authority of the commonwealth. For if they could do it by their own authority, they could by their own authority give judgment that the debt is due — which would be to make them judges in their own cause.
These bodies made for the government of men, or of trade, are either perpetual, or limited to a time prescribed in writing. But there are also bodies whose duration is limited only by the nature of their business. For example, suppose a sovereign monarch, or a sovereign assembly, thinks fit to command the towns and other parts of the territory to send him their deputies, to inform him of the condition and needs of the subjects, or to advise with him on the making of good laws, or for any other purpose — dealing with them as with one person representing the whole country. Such deputies, having a place and time of meeting assigned to them, are, in that place and at that time, a body politic representing every subject of that dominion — but only for such matters as are put before them by the man or assembly that summoned them by the sovereign authority. And when it is declared that nothing more shall be proposed or debated by them, the body is dissolved. For if they were the absolute representative of the people, they would be the sovereign assembly — and then there would be two sovereign assemblies, two sovereigns, over the same people, which cannot stand with their peace. Therefore, once there is a sovereignty, there can be no absolute representation of the people except by it. As for the limits of how far such a body shall represent the whole people, those are set out in the writing by which they were summoned. For the people cannot choose their deputies for any other purpose than the one expressed in the writing directed to them by their sovereign.
Private bodies that are regular and lawful are those constituted without letters or any other written authority beyond the laws common to all other subjects. Because they are united under one representative person, they count as regular. Of this kind are all families, in which the father, or master, orders the whole household. He obliges his children and servants as far as the law permits, but no further; for none of them is bound to obey in actions the law has forbidden. In all other actions, for as long as they are under domestic government, they are subject to their fathers and masters as to their immediate sovereigns. For the father and the master, having been absolute sovereigns in their own families before commonwealths were instituted, lose afterward no more of their authority than the law of the commonwealth takes from them.
Private bodies that are regular but unlawful are those that unite themselves under one representative person without any public authority at all. Such are the corporations of beggars, thieves, and gypsies, formed the better to order their trade of begging and stealing; and the corporations of men who, by authority from some foreign person, unite themselves within another's dominion, for the easier spreading of doctrines and for building a party against the power of the commonwealth.
Irregular systems are, in their nature, nothing but leagues — or sometimes the mere gathering of people without union for any particular design, not bound by any obligation of one to another, but arising only from a similarity of wills and inclinations. They become lawful or unlawful according to the lawfulness or unlawfulness of each particular man's design in them; and his design is to be judged by the occasion.
Leagues of subjects — leagues being commonly made for mutual defense — are, within a commonwealth (which is itself no more than a league of all the subjects together), for the most part unnecessary; they smell of unlawful design, and are for that cause unlawful, and commonly go by the name of factions, or conspiracies. For a league is a connection of men by covenants; and if no power is given to any one man or assembly to compel performance (as in the condition of mere nature), it remains valid only so long as no just cause of distrust arises. Leagues between commonwealths, over whom there is no human power established to keep them all in awe, are therefore not only lawful but profitable for as long as they last. But leagues of the subjects of one and the same commonwealth — where every man can obtain his right by means of the sovereign power — are unnecessary for maintaining peace and justice, and, if their design is evil or unknown to the commonwealth, unlawful. For all banding together of strength by private men is, if for evil intent, unjust; if for an intent unknown, dangerous to the public, and unjustly concealed.
If the sovereign power rests in a great assembly, and a number of men who are part of that assembly consult apart, without authority, to contrive the guidance of the rest — that is a faction, an unlawful conspiracy, a fraudulent seduction of the assembly for their own particular interest. But if a man whose private interest is to be debated and judged in the assembly makes as many friends there as he can, there is no injustice in him; for in this case he is no part of the assembly. And even if he hires such friends with money (unless there is an express law against it), it is still not injustice. For sometimes — such are men's manners — justice cannot be had without money; and every man may think his own cause just until it has been heard and judged.
In every commonwealth, if a private man keeps more servants than the management of his estate and his lawful employment for them require, it is faction, and unlawful. For having the protection of the commonwealth, he has no need of private force to defend him. And whereas in nations not thoroughly civilized, numerous families have lived in continual hostility and invaded one another with private force, it is plain enough that either they acted unjustly, or else they had no commonwealth at all.
And as with factions for kindred, so with factions for the government of religion — Papists, Protestants, and so on — or of the state, like the patricians and plebeians of old Rome, or the aristocratic and democratic factions of old Greece: all are unjust, being contrary to the peace and safety of the people, and a taking of the sword out of the hand of the sovereign.
A gathering of people is an irregular system, whose lawfulness or unlawfulness depends on the occasion and on the number of those assembled. If the occasion is lawful and evident, the gathering is lawful — like the usual meeting of men at church, or at a public show, in the usual numbers. But if the numbers are extraordinarily great, the occasion is not evident; and consequently anyone who cannot give a particular and good account of his being among them is to be judged conscious of an unlawful and tumultuous design. It may be lawful for a thousand men to join in a petition to be delivered to a judge or magistrate; yet if a thousand men come to present it, that is a tumultuous assembly — because one or two are all that purpose requires. But in such cases it is not some set number that makes the assembly unlawful; it is a number too great for the officers then present to suppress and bring to justice.
When an unusual number of men assemble against a man whom they accuse, the assembly is an unlawful tumult, since they could deliver their accusation to the magistrate by a few, or by one man. Such was the case of St. Paul at Ephesus, where Demetrius, with a great number of other men, brought two of Paul's companions before the magistrate, crying out with one voice, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" — which was their way of demanding justice against them, for teaching the people a doctrine that was against both their religion and their trade. The occasion, considering the laws of that people, was a just one; yet their assembly was judged unlawful, and the magistrate rebuked them for it in these words (Acts 19:40): "If Demetrius and the other workmen can accuse any man of anything, there are pleas, and deputies; let them accuse one another. And if you have any other thing to demand, your case may be judged in an assembly lawfully called. For we are in danger of being accused for this day's sedition, because there is no cause by which any man can give a reason for this gathering of people." Here he calls an assembly of which men can give no just account a sedition — one they could not answer for.
And this is all I shall say concerning systems and assemblies of people, which may be compared, as I said, to the similar parts of a man's body: those that are lawful, to the muscles; those that are unlawful, to wens, boils, and abscesses, bred by the unnatural gathering of evil humors.
In the last chapter I spoke of the similar parts of a commonwealth — the systems and bodies within it. In this one I will speak of its organic parts: the organs and joints of the artificial man, which are its public ministers.
A PUBLIC MINISTER is a person whom the sovereign — whether a monarch or an assembly — employs in some business, with authority to represent, in that employment, the person of the commonwealth.
Now, every man or assembly that holds sovereignty represents two persons — or, as the more common phrase puts it, has two capacities. One is natural, the other political. A monarch bears not only the person of the commonwealth but also the person of a man; a sovereign assembly bears not only the person of the commonwealth but also the person of the assembly itself.
This distinction matters, because those who serve the sovereign in his natural capacity are not public ministers. Only those who serve him in the administration of the public business are. So the ushers, sergeants, and other officers who wait on an assembly for no purpose except the convenience of the men assembled — in an aristocracy or a democracy — are not public ministers. Neither are the stewards, chamberlains, treasurers, or any other officers of a monarch's household. They serve the man, not the state.
Among public ministers, some are given charge of a general administration — either of the whole dominion or of a part of it.
Of the whole: as when the predecessor of an infant king commits the entire administration of the kingdom, during the boy's minority, to a Protector or Regent. In that case every subject is obliged to obey — as far as the ordinances the Protector makes and the commands he gives are issued in the king's name and are not inconsistent with the king's sovereign power.
Of a part, or province: as when a monarch or a sovereign assembly gives the general charge of some territory to a governor, lieutenant, prefect, or viceroy. Here too, everyone in that province is obliged to obey everything he does in the name of the sovereign, so long as it is not incompatible with the sovereign's right.
For such Protectors, viceroys, and governors have no right of their own at all — only what depends on the sovereign's will. And no commission given to them can ever be interpreted as a declaration of intent to transfer the sovereignty itself, unless it says so in express and unmistakable words. This kind of public minister resembles the nerves and tendons that move the various limbs of a natural body.
Other ministers have a special administration — charge of some particular business, either at home or abroad.
At home, first, there is the economy of the commonwealth. Those who have authority concerning the treasury — to collect, receive, pay out, or audit the tributes, taxes, rents, fines, and whatever else counts as public revenue — are public ministers. Ministers, because they serve the representative person and can do nothing against his command or without his authority. Public, because they serve him in his political capacity.
Second, those who have authority concerning the military — the custody of arms, forts, and ports; the levying, paying, or commanding of soldiers; or providing anything necessary for war by land or sea — are public ministers. But a soldier without command, though he fights for the commonwealth, does not on that account represent its person — because there is no one for him to represent it to. Everyone who holds command represents the commonwealth only to those he commands.
Those who have authority to teach the people their duty to the sovereign power — or to license others to teach it — and to instruct them in the knowledge of what is just and unjust, so as to make them more fit to live in godliness and in peace among themselves, and to resist the public enemy, are also public ministers. Ministers, because they do this not by their own authority but by another's. Public, because they do it — or should do it — by no authority but the sovereign's.
Only the monarch, or the sovereign assembly, has immediate authority from God to teach and instruct the people. No one but the sovereign receives his power Dei Gratia simply — that is, from the favor of God alone. Everyone else receives his from the favor and providence of God and of his sovereign: in a monarchy, Dei Gratia et Regis — "by the grace of God and the king" — or Dei Providentia et Voluntate Regis — "by God's providence and the king's will."
Those who are given jurisdiction are also public ministers. In their seats of justice they represent the person of the sovereign, and their sentence is his sentence. For, as I have already shown, all judicature is essentially attached to the sovereignty; every other judge is therefore only a minister of him, or them, that holds the sovereign power.
Controversies come in two kinds — controversies of fact and controversies of law — and so judgments do too: some of fact, some of law. Consequently, in the same controversy there may be two judges, one of fact and one of law.
In both kinds of controversy, a dispute may arise between the party being judged and the judge himself. Since both are subjects of the sovereign, equity requires that this dispute be judged by men agreed on by the consent of both — for no man can be a judge in his own cause. But the sovereign is already agreed on as judge by them both, so the sovereign must either hear the cause and decide it himself, or appoint as judge someone both parties agree on.
This agreement can be understood to happen in several ways. First, if the defendant is allowed to object to any judges whose interest makes him suspect them — as for the complainant, he has already chosen his own judge by bringing the case — then the judges he does not object to are judges he himself has agreed on. Second, if he appeals to some other judge, he can appeal no further; his appeal is his choice. Third, if he appeals to the sovereign himself, and the sovereign — in person, or through delegates the parties agree on — gives sentence, that sentence is final. For the defendant has been judged by his own judges; that is to say, by himself.
Having considered these properties of just and rational judicature, I cannot resist pointing out the excellent constitution of the courts of justice established in England for both Common Pleas and Public Pleas. By Common Pleas I mean those where both complainant and defendant are subjects; by Public Pleas — also called Pleas of the Crown — those where the complainant is the sovereign.
There were two orders of men: Lords and Commons. The Lords had this privilege: in all capital crimes, their judges were none but Lords — as many of them as chose to be present. Since this was always acknowledged as a privilege of favor, their judges were never anyone but those they had themselves desired. And in all controversies, every subject — and the Lords too, in civil cases — had for judges men of the county where the matter in dispute lay. Against these the accused could make his objections, until at last twelve men were agreed on without objection, and by those twelve he was judged. So, having his own judges, the party could allege nothing against the finality of the sentence.
These public persons, with authority from the sovereign power either to instruct or to judge the people, are members of the commonwealth that may fitly be compared to the organs of voice in a natural body.
Public ministers also include all those who have authority from the sovereign to carry out the execution of judgments given; to publish the sovereign's commands; to suppress riots; to apprehend and imprison criminals; and to do other acts that tend to preserve the peace. Every act they do by such authority is the act of the commonwealth, and their service answers to that of the hands in a natural body.
Public ministers abroad are those who represent the person of their own sovereign to foreign states: ambassadors, messengers, agents, and heralds, sent by public authority and on public business.
But those sent only by the authority of some private faction of a troubled state, even if they are received, are neither public nor private ministers of the commonwealth — because none of their actions have the commonwealth for author. Likewise, an ambassador sent from one prince to another to offer congratulations or condolences, or to attend a ceremony, is a private person: the authority may be public, but the business is private, belonging to the prince in his natural capacity.
And if a man is sent secretly into another country to scout out its plans and its strength — a spy — then although both the authority and the business are public, he is only a private minister, because there is no one abroad who can take notice of any person in him except his own. Yet he is still a minister of the commonwealth, and may be compared to an eye in the natural body. And those appointed to receive the petitions and other information of the people — who are, so to speak, the public ear — are public ministers, and represent their sovereign in that office.
A counselor — or a council of state, if we consider it as having no authority of judicature or command, but only the job of giving advice to the sovereign when asked, or offering it unasked — is not a public person. The reason: the advice is addressed to the sovereign alone, and the sovereign's person cannot be represented to him by someone else in his own presence.
But a body of counselors is never without some other authority, either of judicature or of immediate administration. In a monarchy, they represent the monarch when delivering his commands to the public ministers. In a democracy, the council or senate presents the result of its deliberations to the people as a council — but when it appoints judges, or hears cases, or gives audience to ambassadors, it acts in the quality of a minister of the people. And in an aristocracy, the council of state is the sovereign assembly itself, and gives counsel to no one but itself.
The NUTRITION of a commonwealth consists in these things: plenty, meaning an abundance of the materials that sustain life; the distribution of those materials; their CONCOCTION — that is, their preparation, their digestion into a usable form; and, once prepared, their conveyance through convenient channels to public use.
As for plenty, nature itself sets the limit. The materials of life are those commodities which, from the two breasts of our common mother — the land and the sea — God either gives freely to mankind, or sells to us for the price of our labor.
The matter of this nourishment consists of animals, plants, and minerals, and God has laid them freely before us, on or near the face of the earth. Nothing more is required than the labor and industry of gathering them in. So plenty depends — next to God's favor — purely on the labor and industry of men.
This matter, commonly called commodities, is partly native and partly foreign. Native commodities are those available within the territory of the commonwealth; foreign ones are imported from outside. And because no territory under the dominion of a single commonwealth — unless it is enormous — produces everything needed for the maintenance and motion of the whole body, and because few territories fail to produce something beyond their own needs, the surplus commodities at home stop being surplus at all. They become the means of supplying what is lacking at home, by importing what can be had abroad — whether by exchange, by just war, or by labor. For a man's labor, too, is a commodity that can be exchanged for benefit, as much as any other thing. Indeed, there have been commonwealths with no more territory than they needed to live on that nevertheless not only maintained but increased their power — partly by the labor of carrying trade from one place to another, and partly by selling manufactured goods made from materials brought in from elsewhere.
The distribution of the materials of this nourishment is the establishment of mine, and thine, and his — in one word, PROPERTY — and in every kind of commonwealth it belongs to the sovereign power. For where there is no commonwealth, there is (as I have already shown) a perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, in which everything belongs to whoever can grab it and keep it by force. That is neither property nor common ownership; it is uncertainty. This is so obvious that even Cicero — a passionate defender of liberty — attributed all property to the civil law, in a public court. "Let the civil law be once abandoned," he said, "or even carelessly guarded — not to say oppressed — and there is nothing any man can be sure of receiving from his ancestors, or of leaving to his children." And again: "Take away the civil law, and no man knows what is his own and what belongs to another."
Property, then, is an effect of the commonwealth — property begins with the commonwealth. And since the commonwealth can do nothing except through the person who represents it, distribution is the act of the sovereign alone, and it consists in laws, which no one can make who does not hold the sovereign power. The ancients understood this well. They called law Nomos — which means "distribution" — and they defined justice as distributing to every man his own.
In this distribution, the first law concerns the division of the land itself. The sovereign assigns every man a portion according to what he — and not any subject, or any number of subjects — judges consistent with equity and the common good. The children of Israel were a commonwealth in the wilderness, but they lacked the commodities of the earth until they became masters of the Promised Land. That land was afterward divided among them, not at their own discretion, but at the discretion of Eleazar the priest and Joshua their general. There were twelve tribes — thirteen, once the tribe of Joseph was subdivided — yet they made only twelve portions of land, ordained no land at all for the tribe of Levi, and assigned the Levites a tenth of the whole harvest instead. The division, in other words, was arbitrary: it followed the judgment of those in authority, not some pre-existing right.
And though a people who take possession of a land by war do not always exterminate the former inhabitants, as the Jews did, but leave many or most or all of them their estates, it is still clear that they hold those estates afterward as grants from the victor's distribution — just as the people of England held everything they had from William the Conqueror.
From all this we can conclude what a subject's property in his land actually amounts to: a right to exclude every other subject from using it — not a right to exclude his sovereign, whether that sovereign is an assembly or a monarch. For the sovereign — that is, the commonwealth, whose person he bears — is understood to do nothing except for the sake of the common peace and security, and this distribution of lands is to be understood as done for the same end. It follows that any distribution the sovereign makes that damages the common peace and security is contrary to the will of every subject who entrusted his peace and safety to the sovereign's discretion and conscience, and so by the will of every one of them it is to be counted void.
It is true that a sovereign monarch, or the greater part of a sovereign assembly, may order many things done in pursuit of their passions, against their own consciences — and that is a breach of trust and of the law of nature. But this is not enough to authorize any subject to make war on his sovereign, or even to accuse him of injustice, or to speak evil of him in any way. The subjects authorized all his actions, and in granting him the sovereign power they made those actions their own. In what cases the commands of sovereigns are contrary to equity and the law of nature is a question I will take up later, in another place.
In the distribution of land, one might imagine the commonwealth itself taking a portion — possessing it and improving it through its representative — and that this portion could be made large enough to cover the whole cost of the common peace and defense. And that would be perfectly true, if you could imagine a representative free of human passions and weaknesses. But human nature being what it is, setting aside public land, or any fixed revenue for the commonwealth, is pointless. It tends toward the dissolution of government, back into the condition of mere nature and war, the moment the sovereign power falls into the hands of a monarch or an assembly that is either too careless with money or too reckless in committing the public stock to a long or costly war.
Commonwealths can endure no diet. Their expenses are not limited by their own appetite but by external accidents — and by the appetites of their neighbors. So the public riches cannot be capped at any limit other than what emergencies happen to require. In England, the Conqueror reserved various lands for his own use (besides forests and hunting chases, kept for his recreation or for preserving the woods), and he reserved various services on the land he gave his subjects. Yet it seems these were reserved not for his maintenance in his public capacity but in his natural one — for he and his successors, despite all those reserves, laid arbitrary taxes on all their subjects' land whenever they judged it necessary. And if those public lands and services were intended as a sufficient maintenance for the commonwealth, the plan ran contrary to its own purpose: the taxes that followed prove the revenue was insufficient, and the recent state of the Crown's revenue proves it was subject to being sold off and whittled away. It is therefore pointless to assign a portion to the commonwealth — a commonwealth which may sell it or give it away, and which does sell it and give it away whenever its representative does so.
Just as the distribution of lands at home belongs to the sovereign, so does the assignment of where, and in what commodities, the subject may trade abroad. For if that were left to the discretion of private persons, some of them would be drawn by profit both to supply the enemy with the means to hurt the commonwealth, and to hurt it themselves by importing things that please men's appetites but are nonetheless harmful — or at least useless — to them. And therefore it belongs to the commonwealth (that is, to the sovereign only) to approve or disapprove both the places and the goods of foreign trade.
Further: it is not enough for the sustenance of a commonwealth that every man have property in a portion of land, or in a few commodities, or a natural property in some useful skill — for there is hardly a skill in the world that is not necessary to the existence, or at least the well-being, of almost every individual man. So it is necessary that men distribute what they can spare, and transfer their property in it to one another, by exchange and mutual contract. And therefore it belongs to the commonwealth — that is to say, to the sovereign — to appoint the manner in which all kinds of contract between subjects (buying, selling, exchanging, borrowing, lending, leasing, and hiring) are to be made, and by what words and signs they shall be understood as valid. As for the matter and distribution of the nourishment to the several members of the commonwealth, this much — considering the scale of the whole work — is sufficient.
By concoction I mean this: reducing all the commodities that are not consumed right away, but stored up as nourishment for the future, into something of equal value — and something so portable that it does not hinder a man's movement from place to place, so that wherever he goes, he can buy whatever nourishment that place affords. And this something is nothing other than gold, and silver, and money. Gold and silver, as it happens, are highly valued in almost every country of the world, which makes them a convenient measure of the value of all other things between nations. And money — of whatever material, so long as it is coined by the sovereign of a commonwealth — is a sufficient measure of the value of all things between the subjects of that commonwealth.
By means of these measures, all commodities, movable and immovable, are made to accompany a man wherever he goes, inside or outside his ordinary place of residence. Money passes from man to man within the commonwealth, and goes round and round, nourishing every part of it as it circulates. In this way concoction is, so to speak, the sanguification of the commonwealth — its blood-making. For natural blood is made the same way, from the fruits of the earth, and as it circulates it nourishes every member of the body of man along its route.
And because silver and gold get their value from the material itself, they enjoy two privileges. First, their value cannot be altered by the power of one commonwealth, or even a few, since they are a common measure of the commodities of all places — whereas base money can easily be raised or lowered in value. Secondly, they give commonwealths the power to move, and to stretch out their arms, when need requires, into foreign countries — supplying not only private subjects who travel, but whole armies with provisions. But coin that is valued not for its material but only for the stamp of the place that minted it cannot endure a change of air. It has its effect at home only — and even there it is subject to changes in the law, which can shrink its value, often to the loss of the very people who hold it.
The conduits and channels by which money is conveyed to public use are of two sorts: one that carries it into the public coffers, and another that issues it out again for public payments. Of the first sort are collectors, receivers, and treasurers. Of the second are the treasurers again, together with the officers appointed to pay the various public and private ministers. And in this, too, the artificial man keeps up his resemblance to the natural one. The veins of the natural body receive blood from all the parts of the body and carry it to the heart; there the blood is made vital, and the heart, through the arteries, sends it out again to enliven all the members and enable them to move.
The PROCREATION, or children, of a commonwealth are what we call plantations, or colonies: groups of men sent out from the commonwealth under a conductor or governor, to inhabit a foreign country — either one previously empty of inhabitants, or one emptied at the time, by war.
When a colony is settled, one of two things happens. Either the colonists become a commonwealth of their own, discharged from their subjection to the sovereign who sent them — as many commonwealths of ancient times did. In that case the commonwealth they came from was called their metropolis, or mother city, and it requires no more of them than fathers require of the children they emancipate and set free from the family's government: namely, honor and friendship. Or else they remain united to their metropolis, as the colonies of the Roman people did — and then they are not commonwealths themselves, but provinces, parts of the commonwealth that sent them out. So the rights of colonies (apart from honor, and alliance with their metropolis) depend entirely on their license, or charter — the letters by which their sovereign authorized them to plant.
Nothing shows more plainly how misleading it is to judge the nature of things by the ordinary, inconstant use of words than the confusion between counsel and command. The trouble comes from grammar: both are spoken in the imperative mood. "Do this" is what a man says when he commands — but it is also what he says when he gives counsel, and when he exhorts. And yet few people fail to see that these are very different things, or fail to tell them apart, once they notice who is speaking, to whom the speech is directed, and on what occasion.
But when readers meet these phrases in books, and either cannot or will not stop to consider the circumstances, they sometimes mistake the precepts of counselors for the precepts of commanders, and sometimes the reverse — whichever reading best suits the conclusion they want to draw or the action they want to approve. To prevent those mistakes, and to give the terms commanding, counseling, and exhorting their proper and distinct meanings, I define them as follows.
COMMAND is when a man says "Do this" or "Do not do this" without expecting any reason for it beyond the will of the one who says it. From this it follows plainly that he who commands is aiming at his own benefit. The only reason behind his command is his own will — and the proper object of every man's will is some good to himself.
COUNSEL is when a man says "Do this" or "Do not do this" and draws his reasons from the benefit that the action will bring to the person he is speaking to. From this it is evident that he who gives counsel claims to be aiming — whatever he actually intends — at the good of the one he advises.
So here is the first great difference between counsel and command: command is directed to the benefit of the one who gives it; counsel, to the benefit of the one who receives it.
From this comes a second difference. A man may be obliged to do what he is commanded — as when he has covenanted to obey. But he can never be obliged to do what he is counseled, because the harm of ignoring counsel falls on himself alone. And if he should covenant to follow it, then the counsel has changed its nature: it has become a command.
A third difference: no man can claim a right to be another man's counselor. He cannot claim that being heard benefits himself — that is not what counsel is for — and to demand the right to counsel someone is really to announce a desire to learn that person's plans, or to gain some other good for oneself, which (as I said before) is the proper object of every man's will.
One more thing belongs to the nature of counsel: whoever asks for it cannot, in fairness, accuse or punish the counsel he receives, whatever it turns out to be. To ask counsel of another man is to give him permission to advise whatever he thinks best. So a man who gives counsel to his sovereign — whether a monarch or an assembly — when the sovereign asks for it, cannot in fairness be punished for it, whether his advice agrees with the opinion of the majority or not, so long as it speaks to the question under debate. Indeed, if the sense of an assembly could be known before the debate was finished, the assembly should neither ask for nor accept any further counsel — for the sense of the assembly is the resolution of the debate and the end of all deliberation. The general rule is this: whoever demands counsel is the author of it, and therefore cannot punish it; and what the sovereign cannot do, no one else can. But if one subject counsels another to do something against the law, that counsel is punishable by the commonwealth — whether it came from bad intention or from mere ignorance — because ignorance of the law is no excuse where every man is bound to know the laws he lives under.
EXHORTATION and DEHORTATION are counsel delivered with visible signs that the giver passionately wants it followed — or, to put it more briefly, counsel vehemently pressed. (Exhortation urges you toward an action; dehortation urges you away from it.) A man who exhorts does not carefully work out the consequences of what he advises, or bind himself to the rigor of true reasoning. He spurs the man he counsels toward action — just as the man who dehorts scares him away from it. So such speakers pitch their reasons to the common passions and opinions of their audience, and they reach for similes, metaphors, examples, and the other tools of oratory to persuade their hearers that following the advice would be useful, honorable, or just.
Several things follow from this. First: exhortation and dehortation are directed to the good of the speaker, not of the one being advised — which is contrary to the duty of a counselor, who by the very definition of counsel ought to regard not his own benefit but the benefit of the man he advises. And that the exhorter is serving his own benefit is plain enough from his long and vehement urging, and from the artful, calculated style of it. Nobody asked him for any of that. Since it springs from his own motives, it is directed chiefly to his own advantage — and only accidentally, or not at all, to the good of the person being counseled.
Second: exhortation and dehortation have a use only where a man is speaking to a crowd. When speech is addressed to one person, that person can interrupt and examine the reasons more rigorously than a multitude can — a multitude is simply too many people to enter into dispute and dialogue with someone addressing them all at once.
Third: those who exhort and dehort when they have been asked for counsel are corrupt counselors — bribed, as it were, by their own interest. However good their advice may happen to be, the man who gives it this way is no more a good counselor than a judge who hands down a just sentence for a bribe is a just judge. But where a man may lawfully command — a father in his family, a general in his army — his exhortations and dehortations are not only lawful but necessary and praiseworthy. Only then they are no longer counsels; they are commands. And when such commands order harsh and unpleasant labor, necessity sometimes — and humanity always — requires that they be sweetened in the delivery: framed with encouragement, in the tone and phrasing of counsel rather than the harsher language of command.
We can take examples of the difference between command and counsel from the forms of speech that express them in Holy Scripture. "Have no other gods but me. Make no graven image. Do not take God's name in vain. Keep the Sabbath holy. Honor your parents. Do not kill. Do not steal" — these are commands, because the reason we are to obey them is drawn from the will of God our King, whom we are obliged to obey. But these words — "Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and follow me" — are counsel, because the reason for doing so is drawn from our own benefit: namely, that we shall have "treasure in heaven." Again, "Go into the village across from you, and you will find a donkey tied, and her colt; untie her and bring her to me" is a command, for the reason behind the act is drawn from the will of the Master. But "Repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus" is counsel — because doing so brings no benefit to God Almighty, who will still be King however we rebel, but only to ourselves, who have no other way of escaping the punishment hanging over us for our sins.
We have now derived the difference between counsel and command from the nature of counsel itself — which consists in laying out the benefit or harm that may come to the person counseled, through the necessary or probable consequences of the proposed action. From that same nature we can also derive the difference between fit and unfit counselors.
Experience is nothing but the memory of consequences observed in similar actions before, and counsel is nothing but the speech by which that experience is made known to another. So the virtues and defects of counsel are the same as the intellectual virtues and defects. To the person of a commonwealth, counselors serve in the place of memory and mental discourse. But here the resemblance between the commonwealth and a natural man breaks down in one respect of great importance. A natural man receives his experience from the natural objects of sense, which act on him without any passion or interest of their own. Whereas those who give counsel to the representative person of a commonwealth may have — and often do have — private aims and passions of their own, which render their counsels always suspect and many times unfaithful. So we may set down as the first condition of a good counselor: that his ends and interests not be inconsistent with the ends and interests of the one he counsels.
Second. The office of a counselor, when an action comes under deliberation, is to make its consequences plain — to inform the one he counsels truly and clearly. So he ought to deliver his advice in the form of speech that makes the truth appear most evident: with the firmest reasoning, in language exact and proper, and as briefly as the evidence allows. Therefore rash and unproven inferences (such as those fetched only from examples or from the authority of books — which are witnesses of fact or of opinion, not arguments about what is good or evil), obscure, confused, and ambiguous expressions, and all metaphorical speech designed to stir up passion, are repugnant to the office of a counselor. Such reasoning and such language are useful only for deceiving a man, or for steering him toward someone else's ends instead of his own.
Third. The ability to counsel comes from experience and long study, and no man can be presumed to have experience in everything that the administration of a great commonwealth requires. So no man is presumed to be a good counselor except in business he has not only handled extensively but has also thought long and hard about. The business of a commonwealth is to keep the people safe at home and defend them against foreign invasion. That requires great knowledge of human nature, of the rights of government, and of the nature of equity, law, justice, and honor — none of which can be gained without study. It also requires knowledge of the strength, resources, and geography of one's own country and its neighbors, and of the inclinations and designs of every nation that might do them harm — and that is not gained without much experience. Not just the whole of these subjects, but every single particular of them, demands the age and observation of a man in years, and more than ordinary study. The kind of wit required for counsel, as I have said before, is judgment; and men differ in judgment according to their different educations — some trained in one kind of study or business, some in another. Where infallible rules exist for doing a thing — as in machines and buildings, where the rules of geometry govern — all the experience in the world cannot equal the counsel of the man who has learned or discovered the rule. Where there is no such rule, the man with the most experience in that particular kind of business has the best judgment of it, and is the best counselor.
Fourth. To counsel a commonwealth in any business that touches another commonwealth, it is necessary to know the intelligence reports and dispatches that come from there, and all the records of treaties and other transactions of state between the two — which no one can do except those whom the representative sees fit to admit. From which we may see that people who have not been called to counsel have no good counsel to push forward in such cases.
Fifth. Supposing the number of counselors equal, a man is better counseled by hearing them separately than in an assembly — and for many reasons.
First, hearing them apart, you get the advice of every man. In an assembly, many of them deliver their advice with an aye or a no, or with their hands or feet, moved not by their own judgment but by the eloquence of another — or by fear of displeasing some speaker, or the whole assembly, by contradicting — or by fear of appearing slower-witted than those who applauded the contrary opinion.
Second, in any assembly of many, there cannot fail to be some whose interests run contrary to the public's. Those interests make them passionate; passion makes them eloquent; and eloquence draws others into the same advice. The passions of men, which are moderate when separate — like the heat of a single ember — when assembled are like many embers that inflame one another (especially when they fan each other with orations), to the point of setting the commonwealth on fire under the pretense of counseling it.
Third, hearing every man apart, you can examine — when there is need — the truth or probability of his reasons, and the grounds of the advice he gives, by frequent interruptions and objections. That cannot be done in an assembly, where on every difficult question a man is more likely to be stunned and dazzled by the variety of talk about it than informed of the course he ought to take. Besides, no assembly of many is ever called together for advice without someone in it ambitious to be thought eloquent and learned in politics — someone who gives his advice with an eye not to the business at hand but to the applause for his motley oration, stitched together from the multicolored threads and shreds of other authors. That is, at best, an irrelevance that eats up the time of serious consultation — and in the private way of counseling apart, it is easily avoided.
Fourth, in deliberations that ought to be kept secret — and public business gives many occasions for those — the counsels of many, and especially of assemblies, are dangerous. That is why great assemblies are forced to hand such affairs over to smaller numbers, and to the persons most experienced and most trusted.
To conclude: who approves of taking counsel from a great assembly of counselors so heartily that he would wish for, or even accept, their services when the question is marrying off his children, disposing of his lands, governing his household, or managing his private estate — especially if some among them do not wish him well?
A man who does his business with the help of many prudent counselors, consulting each one separately in his own area of expertise, does it best — like a man playing tennis with skilled partners, each placed at his proper station. He does next best who uses his own judgment alone, like a man who plays with no partner at all. But the man who is carried up and down to his business by an organized council — one that cannot move except by a plurality of agreeing opinions, and whose decisions are commonly slowed (out of envy or self-interest) by the dissenting faction — does it worst of all. He is like a man carried to the ball by players who may be good, but who carry him in a wheelbarrow or some other contraption: heavy in itself, dragged back by the clashing judgments and efforts of those pushing it, and all the more so the more hands are set to it — and worst of all when one or more among them wants him to lose.
It is true that many eyes see more than one. But that does not apply to many counselors — only to the case where the final decision rests with one man. Otherwise, because many eyes see the same thing along different lines of sight, and are apt to glance sideways toward their private benefit, those who do not wish to miss their mark, though they look about with two eyes, never aim with more than one. And so no great popular commonwealth was ever held together except by a foreign enemy that united it, or by the reputation of some one eminent man among them, or by the secret counsel of a few, or by the mutual fear of evenly matched factions — never by the open consultations of the assembly. As for very small commonwealths, popular or monarchical, no human wisdom can hold them up any longer than the jealousy of their powerful neighbors lasts.
By CIVIL LAWS I mean the laws that men are bound to observe not because they are members of this or that commonwealth in particular, but because they are members of a commonwealth at all. Knowledge of particular laws belongs to those who make the study of their own countries' laws their profession; knowledge of civil law in general belongs to anyone. The ancient law of Rome was called their civil law, from the word civitas — which means a commonwealth. The countries that once lived under the Roman Empire and were governed by that law still keep whatever parts of it they see fit, and they call that portion "the Civil Law" to distinguish it from the rest of their own civil laws. But that is not what I intend to discuss here. My design is not to show what is law here or there, but what law is — as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and various others have done without ever taking up the legal profession.
First, it is obvious that law in general is not counsel but command. And not the command of just any man to just any man, but only the command of one whose command is addressed to someone formerly obliged to obey him. Civil law adds only one thing: the name of the person commanding, which is the persona civitatis — the person of the commonwealth.
With that in mind, I define civil law in this manner: CIVIL LAW is, to every subject, those rules which the commonwealth has commanded him — by word, writing, or other sufficient sign of its will — to use for the distinction of right and wrong; that is to say, of what is contrary to the rule and what is not.
There is nothing in this definition that is not evident at first sight. Everyone can see that some laws are addressed to all subjects in general, some to particular provinces, some to particular occupations, and some to particular men; each is law to everyone the command is directed at, and to no one else. Everyone can see that laws are the rules of just and unjust — nothing being counted unjust that is not contrary to some law. Likewise, that none can make laws but the commonwealth, because our subjection is to the commonwealth alone; and that commands must be signified by sufficient signs, because otherwise a man has no way of knowing how to obey them. Whatever can be deduced from this definition by necessary consequence, then, ought to be acknowledged as truth. Here is what I deduce from it.
1. In every commonwealth, the legislator is the sovereign and no one else — whether the sovereign is one man, as in a monarchy, or one assembly of men, as in a democracy or aristocracy. For the legislator is the one who makes the law, and only the commonwealth prescribes and commands the observance of the rules we call law. Therefore the commonwealth is the legislator. But the commonwealth is not a person, and has no capacity to do anything except through its representative — that is, the sovereign. Therefore the sovereign is the sole legislator. For the same reason, no one can repeal a law once made except the sovereign, because a law is repealed only by another law that forbids it to be put into execution.
2. The sovereign of a commonwealth, whether an assembly or one man, is not subject to the civil laws. Since he has the power to make and repeal laws, he can free himself from any subjection whenever he pleases — by repealing the laws that trouble him and making new ones — and consequently he was free all along. The man who can be free whenever he wants to be is free already. Nor is it possible for any person to be bound to himself; whoever can bind can release, and so whoever is bound only to himself is not bound at all.
3. When long use acquires the authority of a law, it is not the length of time that makes the authority but the will of the sovereign, signified by his silence — for silence is sometimes a sign of consent. And custom remains law only so long as the sovereign stays silent about it. So if the sovereign has a question of right grounded not on his present will but on laws made long ago, the passage of time takes nothing away from his right, and the question must be judged by equity. After all, plenty of unjust actions and unjust sentences go unchallenged for longer than any man can remember. Our own lawyers agree that no customs count as law except reasonable ones, and that evil customs ought to be abolished. But the judgment of what is reasonable, and of what is to be abolished, belongs to the one who makes the law — the sovereign assembly or monarch.
4. The law of nature and the civil law contain each other, and they are of equal extent. Here is why. The laws of nature — which consist of equity, justice, gratitude, and the other moral virtues that depend on these — are not, in the condition of mere nature, properly laws at all, but qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience: conclusions, or theorems, as I said at the end of Chapter 15. Once a commonwealth is established, then they are actually laws — and not before — because then they are the commands of the commonwealth, and therefore civil laws as well; for it is the sovereign power that obliges men to obey them. When private men fall into disputes, someone must declare what equity is, what justice is, and what moral virtue is, and make those declarations binding; and that requires the ordinances of sovereign power, with punishments ordained for those who break them. Those ordinances are therefore part of the civil law. The law of nature, then, is part of the civil law in every commonwealth in the world.
The reverse is also true: the civil law is part of the dictates of nature. For justice — that is, performance of covenant, and giving every man his own — is a dictate of the law of nature. But every subject in a commonwealth has covenanted to obey the civil law: either with his fellow subjects, as when men assemble to make a common representative, or with the representative himself, one by one, as when men subdued by the sword promise obedience so that they may receive their lives. Therefore obedience to the civil law is part of the law of nature too. Civil law and natural law are not different kinds of law but different parts of law: one part, being written, is called civil; the other, unwritten, natural. The right of nature, however — man's natural liberty — may be cut back and restrained by the civil law. Indeed, the whole purpose of making laws is nothing but such restraint, without which there cannot possibly be any peace. Law was brought into the world for one thing only: to limit the natural liberty of particular men in such a way that they do not hurt one another but assist one another, and join together against a common enemy. These are the artificial chains, called civil laws; and the greatest liberty of subjects still depends on the silence of the law.
5. If the sovereign of one commonwealth subdues a people who have lived under other written laws, and afterward governs them by those same laws, those laws are still the civil laws of the victor, not of the vanquished commonwealth. For the legislator is not the one by whose authority the laws were first made, but the one by whose authority they continue to be laws now. So where the dominion of a commonwealth contains diverse provinces, and in those provinces a diversity of laws — commonly called the customs of each province — we are not to suppose that such customs have their force merely from length of time. They were anciently laws, written or otherwise made known, as the constitutions and statutes of the sovereigns of those days; and they are laws now, not by virtue of the prescription of time, but by the constitutions of their present sovereigns. But if an unwritten law is generally observed in all the provinces of a dominion, and no iniquity appears in its use, that law can be nothing but a law of nature, obliging all mankind equally.
6. Since all laws, written and unwritten, receive their authority and force from the will of the commonwealth — that is, from the will of the representative, which in a monarchy is the monarch and in other commonwealths the sovereign assembly — a man may well wonder where certain opinions come from, found in the books of eminent lawyers in several commonwealths, which directly or by consequence make the legislative power depend on private men or subordinate judges.
For example: "The common law has no controller but Parliament." That is true only where a Parliament holds the sovereign power and can be assembled and dissolved by nothing but its own discretion. For if anyone else has the right to dissolve it, that person also has the right to control it — and consequently to control its controllings. And if no one has that right, then the controller of laws is not Parlamentum — the Parliament — but Rex in Parlamento — the King in Parliament. And where a Parliament is sovereign: even if it should assemble ever so many men, and ever so wise, from the countries subject to it, for whatever cause, no one will believe that such a gathering has thereby acquired legislative power for itself.
Another example: "The two arms of a commonwealth are force and justice; the first is in the King, the other deposited in the hands of Parliament." As if a commonwealth could hold together where the force is in any hand that justice has no authority to command and govern.
7. That law can never be against reason, our lawyers all agree; and they agree that the law is not the letter — that is, not every construction that can be put on the words — but what accords with the intention of the legislator. All true. But the question is: whose reason shall be received as law? It cannot be any private reason, for then there would be as much contradiction in the laws as there is among the Scholastics. Nor can it be — as Sir Edward Coke would have it (in his commentary on Littleton, Book 2, chapter 6, folio 97b) — an "artificial perfection of reason, gotten by long study, observation, and experience" (such as his own, he means). For long study may just as well increase and entrench erroneous opinions; and when men build on false foundations, the more they build, the greater the ruin. Of those who study and observe with equal time and equal diligence, the reasonings and resolutions are, and must remain, discordant. So it is not that juris prudentia — the wisdom of subordinate judges — that makes law, but the reason of this our artificial man, the commonwealth, and his command. And since the commonwealth, in its representative, is but one person, contradiction cannot easily arise in the laws; and when it does, the same reason is able to remove it, by interpretation or by alteration. In all courts of justice it is the sovereign — the person of the commonwealth — who judges. The subordinate judge ought to keep in view the reason that moved his sovereign to make the law, so that his sentence conforms to it; then his sentence is his sovereign's sentence. Otherwise it is his own, and an unjust one.
8. From the fact that law is a command, and that a command consists in a declaration or manifestation — by voice, writing, or some other sufficient sign — of the will of the one who commands, we may understand this: the command of the commonwealth is law only to those who have the means to take notice of it. Over born fools, children, and madmen there is no law, any more than over brute beasts; nor are they capable of the title of just or unjust, because they never had the power to make any covenant or to understand its consequences, and so they never took it upon themselves to authorize the actions of any sovereign, as those who make themselves a commonwealth must do. And just as nature or accident has taken from some men the notice of all laws in general, so too any man from whom some accident — not arising from his own fault — has taken away the means of taking notice of a particular law is excused if he does not observe it. Properly speaking, that law is no law to him. It is therefore necessary to consider here what arguments and signs are sufficient for knowing what the law is — that is to say, what the will of the sovereign is — in monarchies and in other forms of government alike.
First: if a law obliges all subjects without exception, and is not written or otherwise published in places where they can take notice of it, it is a law of nature. For whatever men are to recognize as law not on other men's word but each from his own reason must be agreeable to the reason of all men — and no law fits that description but the law of nature. The laws of nature therefore need no publishing and no proclamation, since they are contained in this one sentence, approved by all the world: Do not that to another, which thou thinkest unreasonable to be done by another to thyself.
Second: if a law obliges only some category of men, or one particular man, and is not written or published by word, it is likewise a law of nature, known by the same arguments and signs that distinguish those in that condition from other subjects. For any law that is not written, or somehow published by the one who makes it law, can be known in no way except by the reason of the one who is to obey it — and such a law is therefore not only civil but natural. For example, if the sovereign employs a public minister without written instructions about what to do, that minister is obliged to take the dictates of reason as his instructions. If the sovereign makes him a judge, the judge is to take notice that his sentence ought to follow the reason of his sovereign — and since that reason is always understood to be equity, he is bound to it by the law of nature. If an ambassador, then in everything not contained in his written instructions, he is to take as his instruction whatever reason dictates to be most conducive to his sovereign's interest. And so it goes for all other ministers of the sovereignty, public and private. All these instructions of natural reason may be gathered under one name: fidelity, which is a branch of natural justice.
The law of nature excepted, it belongs to the essence of all other laws to be made known to every man who shall be obliged to obey them — by word, by writing, or by some other act known to proceed from the sovereign authority. For the will of another cannot be understood except by his own word or act, or by conjecture drawn from his aim and purpose; and in the person of the commonwealth, that purpose must always be presumed consonant with equity and reason. In ancient times, before letters were in common use, laws were often put into verse, so that uneducated people, taking pleasure in singing or reciting them, could keep them more easily in memory. For the same reason Solomon advises a man to bind the ten commandments upon his ten fingers (Proverbs 7:3). And concerning the law that Moses gave the people of Israel at the renewing of the covenant, he tells them to teach it to their children, talking of it both at home and on the road, at lying down and at rising up (Deuteronomy 11:19); to write it on the posts and doors of their houses; and to assemble the people — man, woman, and child — to hear it read (Deuteronomy 31:12).
Nor is it enough that the law be written and published; there must also be clear signs that it proceeds from the will of the sovereign. For private men, when they have force enough — or think they have — to secure their unjust designs and carry them safely to their ambitious ends, may publish whatever they please as law, without the legislative authority or against it. What is required, then, is not only a declaration of the law, but also sufficient signs of its author and its authority. The author, or legislator, is presumed in every commonwealth to be evident, because he is the sovereign — constituted by the consent of everyone, and so presumed by everyone to be sufficiently known. It is true that men are generally so heedless, and so secure, that once the memory of the first constitution of their commonwealth wears out, they no longer consider by whose power they are defended against their enemies, by whose power their industry is protected, and by whose power they are righted when injury is done to them. But since no man who actually considers the matter can question it, no excuse can be drawn from ignorance of where the sovereignty is placed. And it is a dictate of natural reason — and consequently an evident law of nature — that no man ought to weaken the very power whose protection he has himself demanded, or knowingly accepted, against others. Therefore no man can have any doubt about who is sovereign except by his own fault, whatever evil men may suggest. The real difficulty lies in the evidence of the authority derived from him; and removing that difficulty depends on knowledge of the public registers, public counsels, public ministers, and public seals, by which all laws are sufficiently verified.
Verified, I say — not authorized. For the verification is only the testimony and record, not the authority of the law, which consists in the command of the sovereign alone.
If, then, a man has a question of injury that depends on the law of nature — that is to say, on common equity — the sentence of the judge who is commissioned with authority to hear such causes is a sufficient verification of the law of nature in that individual case. The advice of someone who makes the study of the law his profession is useful for avoiding disputes; but it is only advice. It is the judge who must tell men what is law, upon the hearing of the controversy.
But when the question is of an injury or a crime under a written law, every man can — by recourse to the registers, himself or through others — be sufficiently informed, before he does the injury or commits the crime, whether it is an injury or not. Indeed, he ought to do so: when a man doubts whether the act he is about to do is just or unjust, and can inform himself if he wishes, going ahead anyway is unlawful. Likewise, a man who supposes himself injured in a case settled by the written law — which he can see and consider, himself or through others — does unjustly if he complains before he consults the law; he reveals a disposition to harass other men rather than to demand his own right.
If the question is of obedience to a public officer, then to have seen his commission with the public seal and heard it read — or to have had the means of being informed of it, had one wished — is a sufficient verification of his authority. For every man is obliged to do his best endeavor to inform himself of all written laws that may concern his own future actions.
The legislator known, and the laws sufficiently published — whether in writing or by the light of nature — there is still one very material circumstance wanting to make them obligatory. For the nature of a law lies not in its letter but in its intent, or meaning — that is to say, in the authentic interpretation of the law, which is the sense of the legislator. Therefore the interpretation of all laws depends on the sovereign authority; and the interpreters can be none but those whom the sovereign — to whom alone the subject owes obedience — shall appoint. Otherwise, by the craft of an interpreter, the law may be made to bear a sense contrary to that of the sovereign, and by that means the interpreter becomes the legislator.
All laws, written and unwritten, need interpretation. The unwritten law of nature is easy enough for those who use their natural reason without partiality or passion, and it therefore leaves its violators without excuse. But considering that there are very few men — perhaps none — who are not in some cases blinded by self-love or some other passion, it has become of all laws the most obscure, and consequently it has the greatest need of able interpreters. Written laws, if short, are easily misinterpreted through the various meanings of a word or two; if long, they are all the more obscure through the various meanings of many words. So no written law, delivered in few words or many, can be well understood without a perfect understanding of the final causes for which the law was made — and the knowledge of those final causes is in the legislator. To him, therefore, no knot in the law can be insoluble: either he finds the ends of the thread and unties it that way, or he makes whatever ends he pleases by the legislative power — as Alexander did with his sword and the Gordian knot — which no other interpreter can do.
The interpretation of the laws of nature, in a commonwealth, does not depend on books of moral philosophy. The authority of writers, without the authority of the commonwealth, does not make their opinions law, however true those opinions may be. What I have written in this very treatise concerning the moral virtues, and their necessity for procuring and maintaining peace, though it is evident truth, is not law on that account; it is law because in every commonwealth in the world it is part of the civil law. Naturally reasonable it may be — but it is by the sovereign power that it is law. Otherwise it would be a great error to call the laws of nature "unwritten law" at all, when we see so many volumes published about them, and in those volumes so many contradictions of one another, and of themselves.
The Interpreter of the Law Is the Judge, Giving Sentence Viva Voce — Aloud, in Court — in Every Particular Case
The interpretation of the law of nature is the sentence of the judge who is constituted by the sovereign authority to hear and determine the controversies that depend on it; and it consists in applying the law to the case at hand. For in the act of judging, the judge does no more than consider whether the demand of the party is consonant with natural reason and equity; and the sentence he gives is therefore the interpretation of the law of nature. That interpretation is authentic — not because it is his private sentence, but because he gives it by the authority of the sovereign, by which it becomes the sovereign's sentence, and law, for that time, to the parties pleading.
A Judge's Ruling Does Not Bind Him, or Any Other Judge, to Rule the Same Way in Similar Cases Forever After
But no judge, subordinate or sovereign, is immune to error in a judgment of equity. So if, in a later case of the same kind, he finds it more consistent with equity to give the contrary ruling, he is obliged to do so. No man's error becomes his own law, or obliges him to persist in it. And for the same reason, it does not become law for other judges either, even if they have sworn to follow it.
Granted: when a wrong ruling is given by the sovereign's authority, and the sovereign knows of it and allows it, then in laws that are changeable it amounts to the making of a new law — for cases in which every little circumstance is the same. But in laws that cannot change, such as the laws of nature, wrong rulings are no laws at all: not to the same judge, not to other judges, not in similar cases, ever after. Princes succeed one another; one judge passes and another comes; indeed, heaven and earth shall pass away, but not one tittle of the law of nature shall pass — for it is the eternal law of God. Therefore all the rulings of all the judges who have ever lived cannot, even taken together, make a law contrary to natural equity. Nor can the examples of former judges justify an unreasonable ruling, or excuse the present judge from the work of studying what equity requires in the case before him, from the principles of his own natural reason.
Take an example. It is against the law of nature to punish the innocent — and an innocent man is one who clears himself in court and is acknowledged innocent by the judge. Now suppose a man is accused of a capital crime. Seeing the power and malice of some enemy, and how often judges are corrupt and partial, he runs away for fear of how it might turn out. Later he is captured and brought to a lawful trial, where he shows convincingly that he was not guilty of the crime, and is acquitted of it — and is nevertheless condemned to forfeit his goods. This is a plain condemnation of an innocent man. So I say there is no place in the world where this can count as an interpretation of a law of nature, or be made law by the rulings of earlier judges who did the same thing. The judge who first ruled that way ruled unjustly, and no injustice can be a pattern of judgment for the judges who come after.
A written law may forbid innocent men to flee, and they may be punished for fleeing. But to treat flight from fear of injury as a presumption of guilt, after a man has already been judicially absolved of the crime, is contrary to the very nature of a presumption — which has no place once judgment has been given. Yet a great lawyer sets exactly this down as the common law of England. "If a man," he says, "that is innocent, be accused of felony, and for fear flees for the same; although he judicially acquits himself of the felony, yet if it be found that he fled for the felony, he shall, notwithstanding his innocence, forfeit all his goods, chattels, debts, and duties. For as to the forfeiture of them, the law will admit no proof against the presumption in law, grounded upon his flight."
Look at what is being said here. An innocent man, judicially acquitted, despite his innocence — and when no written law forbade him to flee — is condemned, after his acquittal, on a mere presumption in law, to lose everything he owns. If the law grounds on his flight a presumption of the deed itself — and the deed was capital — then the sentence should have been capital. If the presumption was not of the deed, then why should he lose his goods? This, therefore, is no law of England; and the condemnation rests not on a presumption of law, but on the presumption of the judges.
It is also against law to say that no proof shall be admitted against a presumption of law. All judges, sovereign and subordinate, who refuse to hear proof, refuse to do justice. Even if the sentence happens to be just, judges who condemn without hearing the proofs offered are unjust judges, and their presumption is nothing but prejudice — which no man ought to carry with him to the seat of justice, whatever precedent judgments or examples he claims to be following. There are other matters of this kind in which men's judgments have been warped by trusting to precedents; but this much is enough to show that although a judge's sentence is law to the party pleading before him, it is no law to any judge who succeeds him in that office.
Likewise, when the question concerns the meaning of written laws, the interpreter is not whoever writes a commentary on them. Commentaries are usually more open to quibbling than the text itself, and so they need further commentaries — and there is no end to that kind of interpretation. So unless there is an interpreter authorized by the sovereign, from whom the subordinate judges may not depart, the interpreter can be none other than the ordinary judges, exactly as in cases of unwritten law; and their sentences are to be taken as law by the parties pleading — in that particular case — but they do not bind other judges to rule the same way in similar cases. A judge can err even in interpreting written laws; but no error of a subordinate judge can change the law, which is the general sentence of the sovereign.
With written laws, men commonly distinguish between the letter of the law and its sentence — its meaning. If by the letter is meant whatever can be squeezed out of the bare words, the distinction is a good one. For the meanings of almost all words, either in themselves or in their metaphorical uses, are ambiguous, and a clever argument can stretch them into many senses — but there is only one sense of the law. If, however, by the letter is meant the literal sense, then the letter and the sentence — the intention — of the law are one and the same. For the literal sense is the sense the legislator intended the letter of the law to convey; and the intention of the legislator is always presumed to be equity. For a judge to think otherwise of the sovereign would be a serious insult.
So if the words of the law do not fully authorize a reasonable sentence, the judge ought to fill the gap with the law of nature; or, if the case is difficult, postpone judgment until he has received fuller authority. For example: a written law ordains that whoever is thrust out of his house by force shall be restored to it by force. Now it happens that a man carelessly leaves his house empty, and on returning is kept out of it by force — a case for which no specific law was ordained. It is evident that this case is contained in the same law; otherwise the man has no remedy at all, and that, we must suppose, is against the intention of the legislator.
Again, the words of the law command the judge to rule according to the evidence. A man is falsely accused of a deed that the judge himself saw done — by someone else, not by the accused. In this case the judge should neither follow the letter of the law into condemning the innocent, nor give sentence against the evidence of the witnesses, since the letter of the law runs the other way. Instead he should arrange with the sovereign for another judge to be appointed, and serve as a witness himself. So the awkward results that follow from the bare words of a written law may lead a judge to the intention of the law, and so to a better interpretation of it — but no awkward result can justify a sentence against the law. For a judge of right and wrong is not a judge of what is convenient or inconvenient to the commonwealth.
The abilities required in a good interpreter of the law — that is, in a good judge — are not the same as those of an advocate, namely the study of the laws. A judge ought to take notice of the facts from nothing but the witnesses; and in the same way he ought to take notice of the law from nothing but the statutes and constitutions of the sovereign, cited in the pleadings, or declared to him by those who have authority from the sovereign power to declare them. He has no need to work out in advance what his judgment will be: what he shall say about the facts will be given to him by witnesses, and what he shall say on points of law will come from those who present it in their pleadings and interpret it, with authority, on the spot.
The Lords of Parliament in England were judges, and the most difficult cases have been heard and decided by them; yet few of them were deeply versed in the study of the laws, and fewer still had practiced law as a profession. And although they consulted with lawyers appointed to attend for that very purpose, the Lords alone had the authority to give sentence. In the same way, in ordinary trials of right, twelve men of the common people are the judges, and they give sentence not only on the facts but on the right itself, pronouncing simply for the plaintiff or for the defendant. That is, they are judges not only of fact but also of right; and in a criminal case they determine not only whether the deed was done or not done, but whether it was murder, homicide, felony, assault, and the like — which are determinations of law. But because they are not expected to know the law on their own, someone with authority is there to inform them of it in the particular case they are to judge. And yet if they do not rule according to what he tells them, they face no penalty for it — unless it can be shown that they ruled against their consciences, or had been corrupted by a bribe.
The things that make a good judge, or a good interpreter of the laws, are these. First, a right understanding of that principal law of nature called equity — which depends not on reading other men's writings, but on the goodness of a man's own natural reason and his own reflection, and is therefore presumed to be strongest in those who have had the most leisure, and the most inclination, to reflect on it. Second, contempt for unnecessary riches and promotions. Third, the ability, in judging, to strip himself of all fear, anger, hatred, love, and compassion. Fourth and last, patience to hear, diligent attention in hearing, and the memory to retain, digest, and apply what he has heard.
The classification and division of the laws has been done in different ways, according to the different methods of the men who have written about them. It is a matter that depends not on nature but on the writer's purpose, and it serves each man's own method. In the Institutes of Justinian, we find seven sorts of civil laws:
1. The edicts, constitutions, and epistles of the prince — that is, of the emperor — because the whole power of the people resided in him. The proclamations of the kings of England are like these.
2. The decrees of the whole people of Rome (including the senate), when the question was put to them by the senate. These were laws, at first, by virtue of the sovereign power residing in the people; and those of them that the emperors did not repeal remained laws by the imperial authority. For all binding laws are understood to be laws by the authority of whoever has the power to repeal them. Somewhat like these laws are the Acts of Parliament in England.
3. The decrees of the common people (excluding the senate), when the question was put to them by the tribune of the people. Those of them not repealed by the emperors remained laws by the imperial authority. Like these were the orders of the House of Commons in England.
4. Senatus consulta — the orders of the senate. When the people of Rome grew so numerous that it became inconvenient to assemble them, the emperor thought it fitting that men should consult the senate instead of the people. These bear some resemblance to the acts of council.
5. The edicts of praetors and, in some cases, of the aediles — like the chief justices in the courts of England.
6. Responsa prudentum — the answers of the learned: the rulings and opinions of those lawyers whom the emperor gave authority to interpret the law, and to give answers to those who came to them for legal advice. Judges were obliged by the emperor's constitutions to observe those answers in giving judgment; and they would be like the reports of adjudged cases in England, if other judges were bound by the law of England to observe them. For the judges of the common law of England are not, properly speaking, judges, but juris consulti — legal advisers — of whom the real judges, who are either the Lords or twelve men of the county, are to ask advice on points of law.
7. Also unwritten customs, which by their own nature are an imitation of law. By the tacit consent of the emperor, provided they are not contrary to the law of nature, these are genuinely laws.
Another division of laws is into natural and positive. Natural laws are those that have been laws from all eternity. They are called not only natural but also moral laws, consisting in the moral virtues — justice, equity, and all the habits of mind that lead to peace and charity — of which I have already spoken in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters.
Positive laws are those that have not existed from eternity, but were made laws by the will of those who held sovereign power over others; and they are either written, or made known to men by some other sign of the will of their legislator.
Again, of positive laws, some are human and some divine. And of human positive laws, some are distributive and some penal. Distributive laws are those that determine the rights of subjects, declaring to every man the terms on which he acquires and holds property in lands or goods, and a right or liberty of action; and these speak to all the subjects. Penal laws are those that declare what penalty shall be inflicted on those who violate the law; and these speak to the ministers and officers appointed to carry out the punishment. For although everyone ought to be informed in advance of the punishments ordained for transgression, the command is not addressed to the offender — who cannot be expected to punish himself faithfully — but to the public ministers appointed to see the penalty executed. These penal laws are for the most part written together with the distributive laws, and are sometimes called judgments. For all laws are general judgments, or sentences, of the legislator; and likewise every particular judgment is a law to the man whose case is judged.
Divine positive laws (for natural laws, being eternal and universal, are all divine) are those commandments of God which are not from all eternity, nor addressed universally to all men, but only to a certain people or to certain persons — and which are declared to be God's laws by those whom God has authorized to declare them. But how can this human authority to declare God's positive laws be known? God may command a man, in a supernatural way, to deliver laws to other men. But it is of the essence of law that the person to be bound by it be assured of the authority of the one who declares it — and we cannot naturally perceive that authority to come from God. So two questions arise. How can a man, without a supernatural revelation of his own, be assured of the revelation received by the declarer? And how can he be bound to obey those laws?
To the first question — how a man can be assured of another's revelation without a revelation made particularly to himself — the answer is that it is evidently impossible. A man may be moved to believe in such a revelation by the miracles he sees the declarer perform, or by the extraordinary holiness of his life, or his extraordinary wisdom, or the extraordinary success of his actions — all of which are marks of God's extraordinary favor. But they are not assured evidence of special revelation. Miracles are marvelous works; but what is marvelous to one man may not be marvelous to another. Holiness can be faked; and the visible successes of this world are most often the work of God through natural and ordinary causes. So no man can infallibly know, by natural reason, that another man has had a supernatural revelation of God's will. He can have only a belief — and each man's belief will be firmer or weaker as the signs of it appear greater or smaller.
The second question — how he can be bound to obey such laws — is not so hard. If the law declared is not against the law of nature (which is undoubtedly God's law), and he undertakes to obey it, then he is bound by his own act. Bound, I say, to obey it — but not bound to believe it. For men's beliefs and inward thoughts are not subject to commands; they answer only to the working of God, ordinary or extraordinary. Faith in a supernatural law is not a fulfilling of it but only an assenting to it — not a duty we offer to God, but a gift God freely gives to whom he pleases. Just so, unbelief is not a breach of any of God's laws, but a rejection of them all — except the laws of nature.
What I am saying here will be made still clearer by the examples and testimonies on this point in holy Scripture. The covenant God made with Abraham — in a supernatural manner — was this: "This is the covenant which thou shalt observe between me and thee and thy seed after thee" (Genesis 17:10). Abraham's descendants did not receive this revelation; they did not yet exist. Yet they are a party to the covenant, and bound to obey whatever Abraham declared to them as God's law. And they could not be bound except through the obedience they owed to their parents — who, when they are subject to no other earthly power, as in Abraham's case, hold sovereign power over their children and servants. Again, where God says to Abraham, "In thee shall all nations of the earth be blessed: for I know thou wilt command thy children, and thy house after thee, to keep the way of the Lord, and to observe righteousness and judgment," it is plain that the obedience of his family, who had no revelation of their own, depended on their prior obligation to obey their sovereign.
At Mount Sinai, only Moses went up to God; the people were forbidden to approach, on pain of death — and yet they were bound to obey everything Moses declared to them as God's law. On what ground, except this submission of their own: "Speak thou to us, and we will hear thee; but let not God speak to us, lest we die"? These two passages make it sufficiently clear that in a commonwealth, a subject who has no certain and assured revelation made particularly to himself concerning the will of God is to obey, as God's will, the command of the commonwealth. For if men were free to take their own dreams and fancies — or the dreams and fancies of private men — for God's commandments, scarcely two men would agree on what God's commandments are; and yet, out of regard for those fancies, every man would despise the commandments of the commonwealth.
I conclude, therefore, that in all things not contrary to the moral law — that is to say, to the law of nature — all subjects are bound to obey as divine law whatever is declared to be so by the laws of the commonwealth. This is evident to anyone's reason. Whatever is not against the law of nature may be made law in the name of those who hold the sovereign power; and there is no reason men should be any less obliged by it when it is propounded in the name of God. Besides, there is no place in the world where men are permitted to claim commandments of God other than those the commonwealth declares to be such. Christian states punish those who revolt from the Christian religion; and all other states punish those who set up any religion their laws forbid. And in whatever is not regulated by the commonwealth, it is equity — which is the law of nature, and therefore an eternal law of God — that every man equally enjoy his liberty.
There is also another distinction of laws: into fundamental and not fundamental. I confess I could never discover, in any author, what a fundamental law is supposed to mean. Nevertheless, one may very reasonably distinguish laws in that manner.
A FUNDAMENTAL LAW, in every commonwealth, is one which, if it is taken away, the commonwealth fails and is utterly dissolved — like a building whose foundation is destroyed. A fundamental law, therefore, is the law by which subjects are bound to uphold whatever power is given to the sovereign, whether a monarch or a sovereign assembly, without which the commonwealth cannot stand: such as the power of war and peace, of judicature, of choosing officers, and of doing whatever the sovereign judges necessary for the public good. A law is not fundamental when repealing it does not drag the dissolution of the commonwealth along with it — such as the laws concerning disputes between one subject and another. So much for the division of laws.
I find the terms lex civilis and jus civile — civil law and civil right — used interchangeably for the same thing, even in the most learned authors; and they ought not to be. For right is liberty — namely, the liberty the civil law leaves us. But civil law is an obligation, and takes from us the liberty the law of nature gave us. Nature gave every man a right to secure himself by his own strength, and to strike a suspected neighbor first, as a precaution; the civil law takes away that liberty in every case where the law's protection can safely be waited for. So lex and jus — law and right — differ as much as obligation and liberty.
Likewise, laws and charters are taken indiscriminately for the same thing. Yet charters are donations of the sovereign — not laws, but exemptions from law. The language of a law is jubeo, injungo — "I command and enjoin." The language of a charter is dedi, concessi — "I have given, I have granted." And what is given or granted to a man is not forced upon him by a law. A law may be made to bind all the subjects of a commonwealth; a liberty, or charter, applies only to one man, or to some one part of the people. For to say that all the people of a commonwealth have liberty in some case whatsoever is only to say that, in such a case, no law has been made — or that, having been made, it has now been repealed.
A SIN is not only a violation of a law, but also any contempt for the lawgiver. For such contempt is a breach of all his laws at once. So sin can consist not only in committing an act, or speaking words the laws forbid, or failing to do what the law commands, but also in the intention or purpose to break the law. The mere purpose to break the law is already a degree of contempt toward the one whose job it is to see the law enforced.
But notice the line here. To take pleasure in the mere imagination of possessing another man's goods, servants, or wife — with no intention of taking them from him by force or fraud — is no breach of the law that says "Thou shalt not covet." Nor is it a sin to take pleasure in imagining or dreaming of the death of a man from whose life you expect nothing but damage and grief. The sin begins when you resolve to put some act in execution that tends toward it. For to be pleased by the fiction of something that would please you if it were real is a passion so built into the nature of man — and of every other living creature — that to make it a sin would be to make a sin of being human. Thinking this through has made me consider those people too severe, both on themselves and on others, who maintain that the first stirrings of the mind are sins, even when checked by the fear of God. Though I confess it is safer to err on that side than on the other.
A CRIME is a sin that consists in committing — by deed or word — what the law forbids, or omitting what it has commanded. So every crime is a sin; but not every sin is a crime. To intend to steal or kill is a sin, even if it never shows itself in word or deed: God, who sees the thoughts of man, can lay it to his charge. But until it appears in something done or said, from which a human judge can argue the intention, it does not have the name of crime.
The Greeks observed this distinction in their words: hamartema on one side, and egklema or aitia on the other. The first (translated "sin") means any swerving from the law whatsoever; the latter two (translated "crime") mean only that kind of sin for which one man may accuse another. For intentions that never appear in any outward act, there is no place for human accusation. The Latins did the same: peccatum, which is sin, covers every kind of deviation from the law; but crimen — a word they derive from cerno, "to perceive" — means only such sins as can be made to appear before a judge, and therefore are not mere intentions.
From this relation of sin to law, and of crime to civil law, several things follow.
First: where law ceases, sin ceases. But because the law of nature is eternal, violation of covenants, ingratitude, arrogance, and all acts contrary to any moral virtue can never cease to be sins.
Second: where the civil law ceases, crimes cease. For when no law remains but the law of nature, there is no place for accusation — every man is then his own judge, accused only by his own conscience and cleared by the uprightness of his own intention. So when his intention is right, his act is no sin; when it is not, his act is a sin — but not a crime.
Third: when the sovereign power ceases, crime ceases too. For where there is no such power, there is no protection to be had from the law, and so everyone may protect himself by his own strength. No man, in setting up a sovereign power, can be supposed to have given away the right of preserving his own body — the very thing all sovereignty was established to secure. But this holds only for those who did not themselves help to destroy the power that protected them. For that was a crime from the beginning.
The source of every crime is some defect of the understanding, or some error in reasoning, or some sudden force of the passions. The defect in understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.
Ignorance, in turn, comes in three sorts: ignorance of the law, of the sovereign, and of the penalty.
Ignorance of the law of nature excuses no one, because every man who has reached the use of reason is supposed to know that he ought not do to another what he would not have done to himself. So wherever a man goes, if he does anything contrary to that law, it is a crime. If a man comes here from the Indies and persuades people to receive a new religion, or teaches them anything that tends toward disobedience of this country's laws — however sincerely convinced he is of the truth of what he teaches — he commits a crime, and may justly be punished for it. Not only because his doctrine is false, but because he is doing what he would never approve in another: namely, someone traveling from here to there and trying to change the religion in his country. But ignorance of the civil law does excuse a man in a foreign country, until that law is declared to him — because until then, no civil law binds him.
Likewise, if the civil law of a man's own country has not been declared clearly enough for him to know it if he wishes, and the action is not against the law of nature, his ignorance is a good excuse. In all other cases, ignorance of the civil law excuses nothing.
Ignorance of the sovereign power in the place where a man ordinarily lives does not excuse him; he ought to take notice of the power by which he has been protected there.
Ignorance of the penalty, where the law has been declared, excuses no one. For in breaking the law — which without fear of penalty would not be a law at all, just empty words — he takes on the penalty even if he does not know what it is. Whoever voluntarily does any action accepts all the known consequences of it; and punishment is a known consequence of breaking the laws in every commonwealth. If the punishment is already fixed by law, he is subject to that; if not, he is subject to arbitrary punishment. And this is only reasonable: he who does injury with no limit but his own will should suffer punishment with no limit but the will of him whose law he violated.
But when a penalty is attached to the crime in the law itself, or has usually been inflicted in similar cases, the offender is excused from any greater penalty. For a punishment known in advance, if it is not great enough to deter men from the action, is an invitation to it. When men compare the benefit of their injustice with the harm of their punishment, by necessity of nature they choose what looks best for themselves. So when they are punished more than the law had previously fixed, or more than others were punished for the same crime, it is the law that tempted and deceived them.
No law made after an act is done can make that act a crime. If the act is against the law of nature, then the law existed before the act; and a positive law cannot be taken notice of before it is made, and therefore cannot bind. But when the law forbidding an act was made before the act was done, the man who does it is liable to a penalty ordained afterward — provided no lesser penalty had been made known before, either in writing or by example — for the reason just given.
From defect in reasoning — that is, from error — men are prone to violate the laws in three ways.
First, by presuming false principles. Men observe how, in all places and all ages, unjust actions have been authorized by the force and victories of those who committed them; how powerful men break through the cobweb laws of their country while the weaker sort, and those who failed in their schemes, are counted the only criminals. From this they adopt principles and grounds of reasoning such as: "Justice is just an empty word. Whatever a man can get by his own effort and risk is his own. The practice of all nations cannot be unjust. The examples of former times are good arguments for doing the same again" — and many more of that kind. Grant these, and no act can be a crime in itself; it must be made one not by the law, but by the success of those who commit it. The same act becomes virtuous or vicious as Fortune pleases — so that what Marius makes a crime, Sulla makes meritorious, and Caesar (the same laws still standing) turns back into a crime again, to the perpetual disturbance of the peace of the commonwealth.
Second, by false teachers, who either misinterpret the law of nature so that it contradicts the civil law, or teach as laws their own doctrines, or traditions of former times, that are inconsistent with the duty of a subject.
Third, by erroneous inferences from true principles. This commonly happens to men who are hasty and rash in concluding and deciding what to do — the kind who have a great opinion of their own understanding and believe that matters of this sort require no time or study, only common experience and a good natural wit, which no man thinks himself short of. Yet the knowledge of right and wrong, which is no less difficult, is something no one would claim without great and long study.
Of these defects in reasoning, none can excuse a crime (though some may extenuate one) in any man who claims to manage his own private business — much less in those who take on a public office. For they claim to possess the very reason whose absence they would plead as their excuse.
Of the passions that most often cause crime, one is vainglory — a foolish overrating of one's own worth, as if differences in worth were the effect of one's wit, or riches, or blood, or some other natural quality, rather than depending on the will of those who hold the sovereign authority. From this comes a presumption that the punishments ordained by the laws, and extended generally to all subjects, ought not to be inflicted on them with the same rigor with which they are inflicted on poor, obscure, simple men — the people lumped together under the name of "the vulgar."
So it commonly happens that those who measure their value by the greatness of their wealth venture on crimes, hoping to escape punishment by corrupting public justice, or by buying a pardon with money or other rewards.
And those who have a multitude of powerful relatives, and popular men who have gained a reputation among the multitude, take courage to violate the laws from the hope of overpowering the very authority whose job it is to enforce them.
And those who have a great and false opinion of their own wisdom take it upon themselves to criticize the actions and question the authority of those who govern, and to unsettle the laws with their public talk, so that nothing shall count as a crime except what their own designs require to be one. These same men are also prone to all the crimes that consist in craft and in deceiving their neighbors, because they think their schemes are too subtle to be detected.
These, I say, are the effects of a false presumption of their own wisdom. For of those who are the first movers in the disturbance of a commonwealth — which can never happen without a civil war — very few live long enough to see their new designs established. The benefit of their crimes goes to posterity, and to the very people who would least have wished it: which proves they were not as wise as they thought. And those who deceive in the hope of not being noticed usually deceive themselves — the darkness they believe they hide in being nothing but their own blindness. They are no wiser than children who think everything is hidden when they cover their own eyes.
And in general, all vainglorious men (unless they are also timid) are subject to anger, being more prone than others to read contempt into the ordinary liberties of conversation. And there are few crimes that anger cannot produce.
As for the passions of hate, lust, ambition, and covetousness — what crimes they tend to produce is so obvious to every man's experience and understanding that nothing needs to be said of them, except this: they are infirmities so fastened to the nature of man, and of all other living creatures, that their effects cannot be prevented except by an extraordinary use of reason, or a constant severity in punishing them.
In the things men hate, they find a continual and unavoidable irritation; so either a man's patience must be endless, or he must relieve himself by removing the power of whatever torments him. The first is difficult; the second is often impossible without some violation of the law. Ambition and covetousness are passions that press on a man perpetually, while reason is not perpetually present to resist them — so whenever the hope of impunity appears, their effects follow. And as for lust, what it lacks in duration it makes up in vehemence, which is enough to outweigh the apprehension of any mild or uncertain punishment.
Of all the passions, the one that least inclines men to break the laws is fear. Indeed — setting aside some generous natures — fear is the only thing that makes men keep the laws when breaking them promises profit or pleasure. And yet in many cases a crime may be committed through fear.
For not every fear justifies the action it produces. Only the fear of bodily hurt — what we call bodily fear — and only when a man can see no way to be delivered from it except by the action. A man is attacked, fears immediate death, and sees no escape except by wounding his attacker: if he wounds him to death, this is no crime. For no man, at the making of a commonwealth, is supposed to have abandoned the defense of his life or limbs where the law cannot arrive in time to help him.
But to kill a man because I conclude from his actions or his threats that he will kill me when he can — when I have the time and means to demand protection from the sovereign power — is a crime.
Again: a man receives insulting words, or some petty injuries (the kind for which the lawmakers assigned no punishment, and which they thought no man with the use of reason should even take notice of), and he is afraid that unless he avenges them he will fall into contempt, and so be exposed to the same injuries from others. To avoid this he breaks the law, protecting himself for the future by the terror of his private revenge. This is a crime. For the hurt is not bodily but imaginary — and (though in this corner of the world a custom begun not many years ago, among young and vain men, has made it feel real) it is so slight that a gallant man, sure of his own courage, cannot be bothered to notice it.
A man may also stand in fear of spirits — through his own superstition, or through giving too much credit to other men who tell him of strange dreams and visions — and so be made to believe these spirits will hurt him for doing or not doing various things, when doing or not doing them is contrary to the laws. What is done or omitted on these grounds is not excused by this fear; it is a crime. For as I showed back in the second chapter, dreams are naturally nothing but the imaginings that remain in sleep after the impressions our senses received while awake; and when men, by some accident, are not sure they have been asleep, dreams seem to be real visions. So the man who presumes to break the law on the strength of his own dream, or another man's, or a pretended vision, or any other fancy about the power of invisible spirits beyond what the commonwealth permits, is abandoning the law of nature — which is a certain offense — to follow the imagery of his own or some other private man's brain. He can never know whether it means anything or nothing, nor whether the man who reports his dream is telling the truth or lying. And if every private man were given leave to do this (as they all must be, by the law of nature, if any one of them is), no law could be made to hold, and every commonwealth would dissolve.
From these different sources of crime, it is already clear that not all crimes are of the same weight, as the Stoics of old maintained. There is room not only for EXCUSE, by which what seemed a crime is proved to be none at all, but also for EXTENUATION, by which a crime that seemed great is made less. For though all crimes equally deserve the name of injustice — just as every deviation from a straight line is equally crookedness, which the Stoics rightly observed — it does not follow that all crimes are equally unjust, any more than that all crooked lines are equally crooked. Failing to see this, the Stoics held it as great a crime to kill a hen against the law as to kill one's father.
The only thing that totally excuses an act, and strips it of the nature of a crime, is whatever at the same time takes away the obligation of the law. For once an act is committed against the law, if the one who committed it is bound by that law, it can be nothing other than a crime.
The lack of means to know the law totally excuses: a law a man has no means to inform himself of is not binding on him. But lack of diligence in inquiring shall not count as lack of means. Nor shall any man who claims reason enough to manage his own affairs be supposed to lack the means to know the laws of nature, because they are known by the very reason he claims to have. Only children and madmen are excused from offenses against the natural law.
Where a man is a captive, or in the power of the enemy — and he is in the power of the enemy when his person or his means of living is — and this is through no fault of his own, the obligation of the law ceases. He must obey the enemy or die, and so such obedience is no crime. For no man is obliged, when the protection of the law fails, not to protect himself by the best means he can.
If a man is compelled by the terror of immediate death to do an act against the law, he is totally excused, because no law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation. And even supposing such a law were binding, a man would reason like this: "If I do not do it, I die now; if I do it, I die later; so by doing it, I gain time of life." Nature itself compels him to the act.
When a man lacks food or some other thing necessary for his life, and cannot preserve himself in any way except by some act against the law — as when, in a great famine, he takes by force or stealth the food he cannot obtain for money or by charity, or when, in defense of his life, he snatches away another man's sword — he is totally excused, for the reason just given.
Again, acts done against the law by the authority of another are excused, by that authority, as against the author — for no man ought to accuse, in another who is merely his instrument, an act that is his own. But the act is not thereby excused against any third person injured by it; for in the violation of the law, both the author and the actor are criminals.
From this it follows that when the man or assembly that holds the sovereign power commands a man to do something contrary to a former law, the doing of it is totally excused. The sovereign ought not condemn it, since he is its author; and what cannot justly be condemned by the sovereign cannot justly be punished by anyone else. Besides, when the sovereign commands something to be done against his own former law, the command, as to that particular act, is an abrogation of the law.
If the man or assembly holding the sovereign power disclaims some right essential to sovereignty, and a subject thereby acquires some liberty inconsistent with the sovereign power — that is, with the very existence of a commonwealth — then if the subject refuses to obey a command contrary to that granted liberty, it is nevertheless a sin, and contrary to the duty of a subject. He ought to take notice of what is inconsistent with sovereignty, because sovereignty was erected by his own consent and for his own defense; and he ought to recognize that such a liberty was granted only through ignorance of its evil consequences. But if he not only disobeys, but also resists a public official in the execution of the command, then it is a crime — because he could have had his wrong righted, without any breach of the peace, by complaint.
The degrees of crime are measured on several scales: first, by the malignity of the source or cause; second, by the contagion of the example; third, by the mischief of the effect; and fourth, by the circumstances of times, places, and persons.
The same act against the law is a greater crime if it proceeds from a presumption of strength, riches, or friends to resist those who must enforce the law, than if it proceeds from a hope of not being discovered, or of escaping by flight. For presuming on impunity by force is a root from which springs, at all times and under every temptation, a contempt of all laws; whereas in the latter case, the apprehension of danger that makes a man flee makes him more obedient for the future. A crime we know to be a crime is greater than the same crime committed under a false belief that it is lawful. For he who commits it against his own conscience is presuming on his force or other power, which encourages him to do it again; but he who does it in error, once the error is shown to him, conforms to the law.
He whose error proceeds from the authority of a teacher, or of a publicly authorized interpreter of the law, is not as much at fault as he whose error proceeds from stubbornly following his own principles and reasoning. For what is taught by one who teaches by public authority, the commonwealth teaches; and it carries a resemblance of law until the same authority overrules it. In all crimes that do not contain a denial of the sovereign power, and are not against an evident law, this excuses totally. But he who grounds his actions on his own private judgment ought to stand or fall according to whether that judgment was right or wrong.
The same act is a greater crime if it has been consistently punished in other men than if there have been many prior examples of impunity. For those examples are so many hopes of impunity given by the sovereign himself; and since he who supplies a man with such a hope and presumption of mercy — encouraging him to offend — has his own part in the offense, he cannot reasonably charge the offender with the whole of it.
A crime arising from a sudden passion is not as great as the same crime arising from long deliberation. In the first case there is room for extenuation in the common infirmity of human nature. But he who acts with premeditation has looked around carefully; he has cast his eye on the law, on the punishment, and on the consequences for human society — and in committing the crime, he has held all of these in contempt and ranked them below his own appetite. Yet no suddenness of passion is enough for a total excuse. For all the time between first knowing the law and committing the act shall be counted as time for deliberation, because a man ought, by meditating on the law, to correct the irregularity of his passions.
Where the law is publicly and diligently read and explained before all the people, an act against it is a greater crime than where men are left without such instruction — left to inquire after the law with difficulty, uncertainty, and interruption of their work, and to be informed by private men. In the latter case, part of the fault falls on common infirmity; but in the former there is plain negligence, which carries some contempt of the sovereign power.
Acts that the law expressly condemns, but that the lawmaker by other clear signs of his will tacitly approves, are lesser crimes than the same acts condemned both by the law and by the lawmaker. For since the will of the lawmaker is a law, in this case two contradictory laws appear — which would excuse totally, if men were bound to take notice of the sovereign's approval by any signs other than what his commands express. But because there are punishments attached not only to breaking his law, but also to keeping it, he is in part a cause of the transgression, and so cannot reasonably charge the whole crime to the offender.
Take an example. The law condemns duels, and makes the punishment capital. Yet on the other side, the man who refuses a duel is exposed to contempt and scorn, with no remedy — and is sometimes judged by the sovereign himself unworthy of any command or promotion in war. If, on that account, he accepts the duel — considering that all men lawfully try to win the good opinion of those who hold the sovereign power — he ought not in reason to be punished rigorously, since part of the fault may be laid on the punisher. I say this not because I wish for liberty of private revenge, or any other kind of disobedience, but to urge a care in governors not to wink at anything sideways which they directly forbid. The examples princes set, for those who watch them, are and always have been more powerful in governing men's actions than the laws themselves. And though it is our duty to do not what they do but what they say, that duty will never be performed until it pleases God to give men an extraordinary and supernatural grace to follow that precept.
Again, if we compare crimes by the mischief of their effects: first, the same act is greater when its damage reaches many than when it hurts only a few. And so, when an act hurts not only in the present but also — by example — in the future, it is a greater crime than one that hurts only in the present. The former is a fertile crime, multiplying to the hurt of many; the latter is barren.
To maintain doctrines contrary to the religion established in the commonwealth is a greater fault in an authorized preacher than in a private person. So is living profanely or unchastely, or doing any irreligious act whatsoever. Likewise, for a professor of the law to maintain any point, or do any act, that tends to weaken the sovereign power is a greater crime than in another man. So too with a man whose reputation for wisdom is such that his counsels are followed and his actions imitated by many: his act against the law is a greater crime than the same act in another. For such men do not merely commit a crime — they teach it as law to everyone else. And in general, all crimes are made greater by the scandal they give: by becoming stumbling blocks to the weak, who look not so much at the road they walk as at the light that other men carry before them.
Also, acts of hostility against the present state of the commonwealth are greater crimes than the same acts done to private men, for the damage extends to everyone. Such are betraying the strongholds of the commonwealth, or revealing its secrets to an enemy; all attempts on the representative of the commonwealth, whether a monarch or an assembly; and all endeavors, by word or deed, to diminish its authority, either now or in the succession. The Latins call these crimes crimina laesae majestatis — crimes of injured majesty — and they consist in a design or act contrary to a fundamental law.
Likewise, crimes that make judgments worthless are greater crimes than injuries done to one or a few persons. To take money to give false judgment, or false testimony, is a greater crime than to cheat a man out of the same sum, or even a greater one, by other means. For not only is the man wronged who falls by such judgments, but all judgments are made useless, and the door is opened to force and private revenge.
Also, robbery and embezzlement of the public treasury or revenues is a greater crime than robbing or defrauding a private man, because to rob the public is to rob many at once.
So too the counterfeit usurpation of public office, and the counterfeiting of public seals or public coin, are greater crimes than counterfeiting a private man's person or his seal, because the fraud spreads its damage to many.
Of acts against the law done to private men, the greater crime is the one whose damage, in the common opinion of mankind, is felt most keenly. And therefore:
To kill against the law is a greater crime than any other injury that leaves life preserved.
To kill with torment is greater than simply to kill.
Mutilation of a limb is greater than robbing a man of his goods.
Robbing a man of his goods by terror of death or wounds is greater than by secret theft.
Secret theft is greater than taking by consent fraudulently obtained.
Violation of chastity by force is greater than by seduction.
And of a married woman, greater than of an unmarried one.
For all these things are commonly valued this way — though some men feel a given offense more, and some less. But the law looks not to the particular person, but to the general inclination of mankind.
That is why the offense men take at insults — in words or gestures — when they produce no harm beyond the momentary grief of the man insulted, has been ignored in the laws of the Greeks, the Romans, and other commonwealths both ancient and modern. They supposed the true cause of such grief to lie not in the insult (which gets no grip on men conscious of their own virtue) but in the small-mindedness of the man who is offended by it.
A crime against a private man is also much aggravated by the person, the time, and the place. To kill one's parent is a greater crime than to kill anyone else, for the parent ought to have the honor of a sovereign — though he has surrendered his power to the civil law — because he held it originally by nature. And to rob a poor man is a greater crime than to rob a rich man, because to the poor man it is a damage felt far more keenly.
And a crime committed at a time or place appointed for worship is greater than the same crime committed at another time or place, for it proceeds from a greater contempt of the law.
Many other cases of aggravation and extenuation could be added; but from those I have set down, it is easy for anyone to take the measure of any other crime proposed.
Lastly: because in almost all crimes an injury is done not only to some private man but also to the commonwealth, the same crime is called a PUBLIC CRIME when the accusation is brought in the name of the commonwealth, and a private crime when brought in the name of a private man. The pleas are named accordingly: public pleas — judicia publica, or pleas of the Crown — and private pleas. So in an accusation of murder, if the accuser is a private man, the plea is a private plea; if the accuser is the sovereign, the plea is a public plea.
A PUNISHMENT is an evil inflicted by public authority on a person who has done — or failed to do — something that the same authority has judged to be a violation of the law, for this purpose: that the wills of men may thereby be better disposed to obedience.
Before I draw anything out of this definition, there is a question of great importance that has to be answered first: by what door did the right, or authority, to punish in any case come in?
Here is the puzzle. From everything said before, no man can be supposed bound by covenant not to resist violence. It follows that no man can be understood to have given anyone else a right to lay violent hands on his person. In the making of a commonwealth, every man gives away the right of defending others — but not the right of defending himself. He also obligates himself to assist the one who holds the sovereignty in punishing others — but not in punishing himself. And covenanting to assist the sovereign in hurting another person does not give the sovereign a right to punish, unless the one making the covenant had a right to do that hurt himself. So it is plain: the right which the commonwealth — that is, the man or assembly that represents it — has to punish is not grounded on any concession or gift from the subjects.
But I have also shown earlier that before the institution of the commonwealth, every man had a right to everything, and a right to do whatever he thought necessary for his own preservation — subduing, hurting, or killing any man to that end. And this is the foundation of the right of punishing that is exercised in every commonwealth. The subjects did not give the sovereign that right. Rather, by laying down their own rights, they strengthened him to use his — as he should think fit — for the preservation of them all. The right was not given to him; it was left to him, and left to him alone. And except for the limits set on him by natural law, it remains as entire as it was in the condition of mere nature, in the war of every man against his neighbor.
From the definition of punishment, I draw the following conclusions. First: neither private revenge nor injuries done by private men can properly be called punishment, because they do not proceed from public authority.
Second: to be neglected and passed over by public favor is not a punishment, because no new evil is thereby inflicted on anyone. The man is simply left in the condition he was in before.
Third: an evil inflicted by public authority without a prior public condemnation is not to be called punishment, but a hostile act — because the deed for which a man is punished must first be judged, by public authority, to be a violation of the law.
Fourth: an evil inflicted by usurped power, or by judges without authority from the sovereign, is not punishment but an act of hostility. The acts of a usurped power do not have the condemned person for their author, and therefore they are not acts of public authority.
Fifth: any evil inflicted without the intention — or even the possibility — of disposing the offender, or other men by his example, to obey the laws, is not punishment but an act of hostility. Without that end in view, no hurt done to anyone deserves the name. Punishment exists only for the correction of the offender or the guidance of others — never for revenge.
Sixth: nature itself attaches harmful consequences to certain actions — as when a man assaulting another is himself killed or wounded, or when he falls sick from doing some unlawful act. With respect to God, who is the author of nature, such hurt may be said to be inflicted, and so may be called a divine punishment. But it is not contained under the name of punishment with respect to men, because it is not inflicted by the authority of man.
Seventh: if the harm inflicted is less than the benefit or satisfaction that naturally follows from the crime committed, that harm does not fall within the definition. It is the price, or the purchase, of a crime rather than its punishment. Here is why: it is of the nature of punishment to have for its end the disposing of men to obey the law. If the penalty is less than the benefit of breaking the law, it does not achieve that end — it works the opposite effect. The man simply pays for his crime and counts it a bargain.
Eighth: if a punishment is determined and prescribed in the law itself, and after the crime is committed a greater punishment is inflicted, the excess is not punishment but an act of hostility. For the aim of punishment is not revenge, but terror — and the terror of an unknown great punishment is taken away the moment a lesser one is declared. The unexpected addition is no part of the punishment.
But where the law fixes no punishment at all, whatever is inflicted has the nature of punishment. A man who sets about violating a law in which no penalty is specified expects an indeterminate — that is to say, an arbitrary — punishment.
Ninth: harm inflicted for a deed done before there was any law forbidding it is not punishment, but an act of hostility. Before the law, there is no violation of the law. Punishment presupposes a deed judged to have been a violation of the law. Therefore harm inflicted for a deed done before the law was made is not punishment, but an act of hostility.
Tenth: hurt inflicted on the representative of the commonwealth is not punishment, but an act of hostility. It is of the nature of punishment to be inflicted by public authority — and public authority is the authority of the representative alone.
Lastly: harm inflicted on a declared enemy does not fall under the name of punishment at all. Consider why. Enemies either were never subject to the law, and therefore cannot violate it; or, having been subject to it, they profess to be subject no longer, and by consequence deny that they can violate it. So all the harms that can be done to them must be taken as acts of hostility — and in declared hostility, every infliction of evil is lawful.
From this it follows that if a subject deliberately and knowingly denies, by deed or word, the authority of the representative of the commonwealth, he may lawfully be made to suffer whatever the representative wills — whatever penalty may have been previously laid down for treason. In denying his subjection, he denies the punishment the law has ordained, and therefore he suffers as an enemy of the commonwealth: that is, according to the will of the representative. The punishments set down in the law are for subjects, not for enemies — and enemies are exactly what such men are, who, having been subjects by their own act, deliberately revolt and deny the sovereign power.
The first and most general division of punishments is into divine and human. Of divine punishment I shall have occasion to speak in a more convenient place later on.
Human punishments are those inflicted by the command of man, and they are either corporal, or pecuniary, or ignominy, or imprisonment, or exile, or a mixture of these.
Corporal punishment is that which is inflicted on the body directly, according to the intention of the one inflicting it: lashes, or wounds, or the deprivation of bodily pleasures that were lawfully enjoyed before.
Of these, some are capital, some less than capital. Capital punishment is the infliction of death — either simply, or with torment. Less than capital are lashes, wounds, chains, and any other bodily pain not in its own nature deadly. For if death follows a punishment but was not in the intention of the one inflicting it, the punishment is not to be counted capital, even though the harm proves fatal through some accident that could not be foreseen. In that case death is not inflicted, but hastened.
Pecuniary punishment consists not only in taking away a sum of money, but also lands or any other goods that are usually bought and sold for money. And here a distinction matters. If the law that ordains such a penalty was made with the design of collecting money from those who break it, then it is not properly a punishment at all, but the price of a privilege — an exemption from the law, which does not absolutely forbid the act, but forbids it only to those who cannot afford to pay. The exception is where the law in question is a law of nature, or part of religion; in that case the payment is not an exemption from the law but a violation of it. Where a law exacts a monetary fine from those who take the name of God in vain, paying the fine is not the price of a license to swear — it is the punishment for breaking a law that admits no dispensation. Likewise, if the law requires a sum of money to be paid to the person who was injured, this is merely compensation for the hurt done to him. It cancels the accusation of the injured party, not the crime of the offender.
Ignominy is the infliction of some evil the commonwealth has made dishonorable, or the deprivation of some good the commonwealth has made honorable. Some things are honorable by nature — the effects of courage, magnanimity, strength, wisdom, and other abilities of body and mind. Other things are made honorable by the commonwealth — badges, titles, offices, or any other distinctive mark of the sovereign's favor. The first kind, though they may fail through nature or accident, cannot be taken away by a law, so the loss of them is not punishment. But the second kind can be taken away by the same public authority that made them honorable, and stripping them is properly punishment: degrading condemned men of their badges, titles, and offices, or declaring them incapable of holding the like in the future.
Imprisonment is when a man is deprived of liberty by public authority, and it can happen for two different ends. One is the safe custody of a man who stands accused; the other is the inflicting of pain on a man who stands condemned.
The first is not punishment, because no man is supposed to be punished before he has been judicially heard and declared guilty. Therefore whatever hurt a man is made to suffer by bonds or restraint before his case is heard — over and above what is necessary to assure his custody — is against the law of nature. But the second is punishment, because it is an evil inflicted by public authority for something the same authority has judged a violation of the law.
Under the word imprisonment I include every restraint of motion caused by an external obstacle — whether it is a building, which goes by the general name of a prison; or an island, as when men are said to be confined to one; or a place where men are set to forced labor, as in ancient times men were condemned to the quarries and in our times to the galleys; or a chain, or any other such impediment.
Exile — banishment — is when a man is condemned for a crime to depart from the dominion of the commonwealth, or from a certain part of it, and not to return, either for a fixed time or forever. In its own nature, without other circumstances added, it does not seem to be a punishment at all, but rather an escape — a public command to avoid punishment by running away. Cicero says no such punishment was ever ordained in the city of Rome; he calls exile a refuge for men in danger. For if a banished man is still permitted to enjoy his goods and the income from his lands, the mere change of air is no punishment. Nor does it serve the benefit of the commonwealth for which all punishments are ordained — that is, the forming of men's wills toward observing the law. Often it works to the commonwealth's damage. A banished man is a lawful enemy of the commonwealth that banished him, being no longer a member of it. But if he is also stripped of his lands or goods, then the punishment lies not in the exile, but is to be counted among pecuniary punishments.
All punishments of innocent subjects, whether great or small, are against the law of nature. Punishment is only for violation of the law; therefore there can be no punishment of the innocent.
To punish an innocent subject is a violation, first, of that law of nature which forbids all men, in their revenges, to look at anything but some future good — for no good can come to the commonwealth by punishing the innocent. Second, of the law that forbids ingratitude: since all sovereign power is originally given by the consent of every one of the subjects so that they may be protected as long as they are obedient, the punishment of the innocent is a returning of evil for good. And third, of the law that commands equity — that is, the equal distribution of justice — which is plainly not observed in punishing the innocent.
But inflicting any evil whatsoever on an innocent man who is not a subject — if it is done for the benefit of the commonwealth and without violating any previous covenant — is no breach of the law of nature. All men who are not subjects are either enemies, or else they have ceased to be enemies through some prior covenant. Against enemies whom the commonwealth judges capable of doing it harm, it is lawful by the original right of nature to make war. And in war the sword does not judge; the victor makes no distinction between guilty and innocent as to what is past, and shows no other mercy than what serves the good of his own people.
On this ground, vengeance against subjects who deliberately deny the authority of the established commonwealth is lawfully extended not only to the fathers, but to the third and fourth generation not yet in being — and consequently innocent of the deed for which they are afflicted. The nature of this offense consists in the renouncing of subjection, which is a relapse into the condition of war, commonly called rebellion. Those who offend in this way suffer not as subjects, but as enemies. For rebellion is simply war renewed.
REWARD is either by gift or by contract. When by contract, it is called salary or wages — benefit owed for service performed or promised. When by gift, it is benefit proceeding from the grace of those who bestow it, to encourage men to serve them, or to enable men to do so.
So when the sovereign of a commonwealth attaches a salary to a public office, the man who receives it is bound in justice to perform that office. Otherwise — when there is no salary — he is bound only in honor, to acknowledgment and an effort to repay the favor. It is true that men have no lawful remedy when they are commanded to abandon their private business and serve the public without reward or salary. But they are not bound to such service by the law of nature, nor by the institution of the commonwealth, unless the service cannot be done any other way — because it is presumed the sovereign may make use of all their means. So much is this so that the most common soldier may demand the wages of his service in war as a debt.
The benefits a sovereign bestows on a subject out of fear of some power and ability that subject has to hurt the commonwealth are not properly rewards. They are not salaries, because in this case no contract is supposed — every man is already obliged not to do the commonwealth disservice. Nor are they graces, because they are extorted by fear, which ought never to touch the sovereign power. They are rather sacrifices, which the sovereign — considered in his natural person, not in the person of the commonwealth — makes to appease the discontent of someone he thinks more powerful than himself. And they encourage not obedience, but the opposite: the continuation and escalation of further extortion.
Some salaries are fixed and proceed from the public treasury; others are uncertain and variable, proceeding from the execution of the office for which the salary is established. The second kind is in some cases harmful to the commonwealth — as in the administration of justice. For where the income of judges and the officers of a court arises from the multitude of cases brought before them, two inconveniences must follow. One is the nourishing of lawsuits, for the more suits, the greater the income. The other, which depends on the first, is contention over jurisdiction — each court drawing to itself as many cases as it can. In offices of execution these inconveniences do not arise, because such officers cannot increase their own employment by any effort of their own.
And this shall suffice for the nature of punishment and reward — which are, as it were, the nerves and tendons that move the limbs and joints of a commonwealth.
So far I have set forth the nature of man, whose pride and other passions have compelled him to submit himself to government, together with the great power of his governor — whom I compared to the Leviathan, taking that comparison from the last two verses of the forty-first chapter of Job, where God, having set forth the great power of the Leviathan, calls him King of the Proud. "There is nothing," says he, "on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He sees every high thing below him, and is king of all the children of pride." (Job 41:33-34)
But because he is mortal and subject to decay, as all other earthly creatures are; and because there is something in heaven — though not on earth — that he must stand in fear of, and whose laws he ought to obey: I shall in the next chapters speak of his diseases and the causes of his mortality, and of what laws of nature he is bound to obey.
Nothing that mortals make can be immortal. Still, if men actually had the use of the reason they claim to have, their commonwealths could at least be secured against dying of internal diseases — those seeds of natural mortality I spoke of before. By the nature of their founding, they are designed to live as long as mankind itself, or as long as the laws of nature, or as long as justice itself — the thing that gives them life. So when a commonwealth comes apart, not through outside violence but through internal disorder, the fault does not lie in men as the material; it lies in men as the makers and arrangers of it.
Here is what happens. Men eventually grow weary of the irregular jostling and hacking at one another, and they desire with all their hearts to fit themselves together into one firm and lasting building. But they lack two things: the art of making good laws to square their actions by, and the humility and patience to let the rough, awkward edges of their present greatness be chiseled off. So without the help of a very able architect, they cannot be assembled into anything but a rickety structure — one that barely lasts out their own lifetime, and is certain to fall on the heads of their children.
Among the infirmities of a commonwealth, then, I will count first those that arise from a defective founding. These resemble the diseases of a natural body that come from defective procreation.
Here is one such defect: a man, in order to obtain a kingdom, sometimes settles for less power than the peace and defense of the commonwealth actually require. The result is this. When the power he set aside has to be picked up again for the public safety, taking it back looks like an unjust act — and that appearance disposes great numbers of men, whenever the occasion presents itself, to rebel. It is exactly like the bodies of children begotten by diseased parents: they are subject either to early death, or to purging the bad quality inherited from their flawed conception by breaking out in boils and scabs.
And when kings deny themselves some necessary power like this, it is not always out of ignorance of what their office requires — though sometimes it is. Often it is out of a hope of taking the power back whenever they please. In this they reason badly. Because the people who will hold them to their promises will be propped up against them by foreign commonwealths, which, for the good of their own subjects, let slip few chances to weaken their neighbors. That is how Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was supported against Henry the Second by the Pope — the subjection of churchmen to the commonwealth having been waived by William the Conqueror at his coronation, when he swore an oath not to infringe the liberty of the Church. And that is how the barons — whose power William Rufus had inflated, to win their help in shifting the succession from his elder brother to himself, to a degree incompatible with sovereign power — were backed by the French in their rebellion against King John.
Nor does this happen only in monarchy. The official style of the ancient Roman commonwealth was "The Senate and People of Rome" — and neither senate nor people claimed the whole power. This first produced the seditions of Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Gracchus, Lucius Saturninus, and others; and afterward the wars between the senate and the people under Marius and Sulla, and again under Pompey and Caesar — ending in the extinction of their democracy and the setting up of monarchy.
The people of Athens bound themselves on only one single point: that no man, on pain of death, should propose renewing the war for the island of Salamis. And yet because of that one restriction, they would have had an enemy permanently stationed at the very gates of their city — if Solon had not spread the word that he was mad, and then, in the gestures and costume of a madman, proposed the war in verse to the people who crowded around him. Such is the damage, and such are the tricks, that every commonwealth is forced into when its power is limited even a little.
In the second place, I observe the diseases of a commonwealth that come from the poison of seditious doctrines. One of these is: "Every private man is the judge of good and evil actions."
This is true in the state of nature, where there are no civil laws. It is also true under civil government, in cases the law has not settled. But otherwise it is plain that the measure of good and evil actions is the civil law, and the judge is the legislator — who is always the representative of the commonwealth. From this false doctrine, men are inclined to debate with themselves and dispute the commands of the commonwealth, and then to obey or disobey them as their private judgments see fit. And by that, the commonwealth is distracted and weakened.
Another doctrine repugnant to civil society is: "Whatever a man does against his conscience is sin." It depends on the same presumption — making oneself the judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and just as the judgment can be wrong, so can the conscience.
So yes: a man subject to no civil law sins in everything he does against his conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his own reason. But it is not so for the man who lives in a commonwealth. There, the law is the public conscience — the one he has already agreed to be guided by. Otherwise, in such diversity as there is of private consciences — which are nothing but private opinions; the most their owners actually know is that they think so — the commonwealth would inevitably be torn apart, and no man would dare obey the sovereign power any further than it seemed good in his own eyes.
It has also commonly been taught that "faith and holiness are not attained by study and reason, but by supernatural inspiration, or infusion." Grant that, and I do not see why any man should give a reason for his faith; or why every Christian should not also be a prophet; or why any man should take the law of his country, rather than his own inspiration, as the rule of his conduct. And so we fall back into the same fault: taking it on ourselves to judge of good and evil — or making judges of it out of those private men who claim to be supernaturally inspired — to the dissolution of all civil government.
Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by those circumstances that bring us into the presence of the people who speak to us. Those circumstances are all arranged by God Almighty — and yet they are not supernatural; it is only that the number of them working together in every effect is too great to observe. Faith and holiness are, indeed, not very common; but they are not miracles. They are brought about by education, discipline, correction, and other natural means, by which God works them in his chosen, at whatever time he thinks fit.
And these three opinions, so destructive to peace and government, have in this part of the world come chiefly from the tongues and pens of unlearned theologians, who, stringing together the words of Holy Scripture in ways that do not agree with reason, do all they can to make men think that holiness and natural reason cannot stand together.
A fourth opinion repugnant to the nature of a commonwealth is this: "The holder of the sovereign power is subject to the civil laws."
It is true that sovereigns are all subject to the laws of nature, because those laws are divine and cannot be repealed by any man or any commonwealth. But to the laws that the sovereign himself makes — that is, that the commonwealth makes — he is not subject. To be subject to the laws is to be subject to the commonwealth, that is, to the sovereign representative, that is, to himself; and that is not subjection, but freedom from the laws. And here is why the error matters: because it sets the laws above the sovereign, it also sets a judge above him, and a power to punish him — which is to make a new sovereign. And then, by the same reasoning, a third sovereign to punish the second; and so on forever, to the confusion and dissolution of the commonwealth.
A fifth doctrine that tends to dissolve a commonwealth is: "Every private man has an absolute property in his goods — a property that excludes even the right of the sovereign."
Every man does indeed have a property that excludes the right of every other subject. But he has it only from the sovereign power; without that power's protection, every other man would have an equal right to the same things. If the right of the sovereign is also shut out, then he cannot perform the office they put him into — which is to defend them both from foreign enemies and from each other's injuries — and consequently there is no longer a commonwealth.
And if the property of subjects does not exclude the sovereign representative's right to their goods, much less does it exclude his right to their offices of judging and enforcement, in which they represent the sovereign himself.
There is a sixth doctrine, plainly and directly against the very essence of a commonwealth, and it is this: "The sovereign power may be divided." For what is dividing the power of a commonwealth, other than dissolving it? Powers divided destroy each other. As I showed before, these rights are incommunicable and inseparable. And for these doctrines men are chiefly indebted to certain professors of the law, who labor to make the laws depend on their own learning rather than on the legislative power.
Along with false doctrine, the example of a different form of government in a neighboring nation often disposes men to alter the form already established. That is how the people of the Jews were stirred up to reject God and demand that the prophet Samuel give them a king "after the manner of the nations." That is how the lesser cities of Greece were continually convulsed by the seditions of aristocratic and democratic factions — one party in almost every commonwealth wanting to imitate the Spartans, the other the Athenians. And I have no doubt that many men were content to watch the recent troubles in England out of imitation of the Low Countries — supposing that all it took to grow rich was to change, as the Dutch had done, the form of their government.
For man's nature is, of itself, prone to crave novelty. So when men are provoked toward it by the nearness of neighbors who have grown rich by it, it is almost impossible for them not to embrace the agitators who urge them to change. They love the first beginnings of the disorder even while they are tormented by its continuance — like hot-blooded men who, having caught the itch, tear at themselves with their own nails until they can no longer stand the pain.
As for rebellion against monarchy in particular, one of its most frequent causes is the reading of the political books and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans. From these books, young men — and everyone else who lacks the antidote of solid reason — receive a strong and delightful impression of the great exploits of war achieved by the commanders of those armies, and along with it a pleasing notion of everything else those nations did. They imagine that all that prosperity came not from the rivalry of particular men, but from the virtue of their popular form of government — never considering the constant seditions and civil wars produced by the defects of that very system.
From the reading of such books, I say, men have taken it upon themselves to kill their kings — because the Greek and Latin writers, in their books and discourses on politics, make it lawful and even praiseworthy for any man to do so, provided that before he does it, he first calls his king a tyrant. For they do not say that regicide — the killing of a king — is lawful; they say that tyrannicide — the killing of a tyrant — is lawful. (And a tyrant, remember, is nothing but a monarch disliked.) From the same books, those who live under a monarch form the opinion that subjects in a popular commonwealth enjoy liberty, while in a monarchy they are all slaves. Notice: I say those who live under a monarchy form that opinion — not those who actually live under popular government, for they find no such thing.
In sum, I cannot imagine anything more damaging to a monarchy than allowing such books to be publicly read without immediately applying the correctives of careful teachers, fit to draw out their venom. And that venom I will not hesitate to compare to the bite of a mad dog — a disease the physicians call hydrophobia, or fear of water. The man so bitten suffers a continual torment of thirst, and yet he recoils from water, as if the poison were laboring to turn him into a dog. In just the same way, when a monarchy has once been bitten to the quick by those democratic writers who never stop snarling at that form of government, what it needs most is a strong monarch — and yet, out of a kind of tyrannophobia, a fear of being strongly governed, the people abhor him when they have him.
Just as there have been doctors who hold that there are three souls in a man, so there are also those who think there can be more souls — that is, more sovereigns — than one in a commonwealth. They set up a "supremacy" against the sovereignty; canons against laws; a "ghostly" authority against the civil. They work on men's minds with words and distinctions that in themselves signify nothing, but betray by their very obscurity that there walks abroad — invisibly, some think — another kingdom, a kind of kingdom of fairies, in the dark.
Now it is plain that the civil power and the power of the commonwealth are the same thing; and that supremacy, and the power of making canons and granting church offices, implies a commonwealth. It follows that where one man is sovereign and another supreme — where one can make laws and another can make canons — there must be two commonwealths over the very same subjects. That is a kingdom divided against itself, and it cannot stand. For all the empty distinction between "temporal" and "ghostly," they are still two kingdoms, and every subject is subject to two masters. The ghostly power claims the right to declare what is sin, and so by consequence claims to declare what is law — sin being nothing but the transgression of the law. The civil power, meanwhile, claims to declare what is law. So every subject must obey two masters, each insisting that his commands be treated as law — which is impossible. Or, if there is really only one kingdom, then either the civil power, which is the power of the commonwealth, must be subordinate to the ghostly, or the ghostly must be subordinate to the temporal — in which case there is no supremacy but the temporal.
When these two powers oppose each other, then, the commonwealth cannot help but stand in great danger of civil war and dissolution. The civil authority, being more visible, and standing in the clearer light of natural reason, cannot fail to draw to itself, in every age, a very considerable part of the people. And the spiritual authority, though it stands in the darkness of Scholastic distinctions and hard words, can never lack a party big enough to trouble a commonwealth, and sometimes to destroy it — because the fear of darkness and ghosts is greater than other fears.
And this is a disease that may quite fitly be compared to epilepsy, or the falling sickness — which the Jews took to be a kind of possession by spirits — in the natural body. In that disease, an unnatural spirit, or wind, in the head obstructs the roots of the nerves. Shaking them violently, it takes away the motion they should naturally receive from the power of the soul in the brain, and so causes violent and irregular motions in the limbs — what men call convulsions — so that the person seized by it falls down, sometimes into the water and sometimes into the fire, like a man deprived of his senses. So too in the body politic. When the spiritual power moves the members of a commonwealth by the terror of punishments and the hope of rewards — which are its nerves — in ways other than the civil power, which is the soul of the commonwealth, would move them, and suffocates the people with strange and hard words, it either overwhelms the commonwealth with oppression, or throws it into the fire of a civil war.
Sometimes, even in purely civil government, there is more than one soul. This happens when the power of raising money (which is the nutritive faculty) depends on a general assembly; the power of military conduct and command (which is the motive faculty) depends on one man; and the power of making laws (which is the rational faculty) depends on the chance agreement not only of those two but of a third party as well. This endangers the commonwealth — sometimes for lack of consent to good laws, but most often for lack of the nourishment necessary to its life and motion.
Few people see it, but such a government is not government at all; it is the division of the commonwealth into three factions. Men call it "mixed monarchy," but the truth is that it is not one independent commonwealth but three independent factions — not one representative person, but three. In the kingdom of God there may be three persons who are independent without any breach of unity in the God who reigns; but where men reign — men subject to a diversity of opinions — it cannot be so. So if the king bears the person of the people, and the general assembly also bears the person of the people, and another assembly bears the person of a part of the people, they are not one person and one sovereign, but three persons and three sovereigns.
To what disease in the natural body of man I can exactly compare this deformity of a commonwealth, I do not know. But I once saw a man who had another man growing out of his side, with a head, arms, chest, and stomach of his own. If he had had yet another man growing out of his other side, the comparison would have been exact.
So far I have named the diseases of a commonwealth that pose the greatest and most immediate danger. There are others, not so great, that are nevertheless worth observing.
First: the difficulty of raising money for the necessary uses of the commonwealth, especially as war approaches. This difficulty arises from the opinion every subject holds that he has a property in his lands and goods that excludes the sovereign's right to the use of them. The result is this. The sovereign power, which foresees the necessities and dangers of the commonwealth — finding the flow of money to the public treasury blocked by the tight grip of the people — ought to extend itself to meet and prevent those dangers at their beginnings. Instead it contracts itself as long as it can; and when it can contract no longer, it wrestles with the people through legal stratagems to obtain little sums, which do not suffice; until at last it is forced to break open the way violently for an immediate supply, or perish. Driven often to these extremities, it finally either brings the people back to their proper temper, or the commonwealth must die.
We may compare this distemper very aptly to an ague — a malarial fever. The fleshy parts grow congealed, or are blocked by venomous matter, so that the veins, which by their natural course empty into the heart, are not supplied from the arteries as they should be. First comes a cold contraction and trembling of the limbs; then a hot, violent effort of the heart to force a passage for the blood. Until it can do that, it makes do with the small refreshment of cooling things, until — if nature is strong enough — it finally breaks the resistance of the obstructed parts and sweats out the venom. If nature is too weak, the patient dies.
Again, there is sometimes in a commonwealth a disease resembling pleurisy. That is when the treasure of the commonwealth, flowing out of its proper channels, pools in excessive abundance in one or a few private men, through monopolies or through the farming of the public revenues — just as the blood in a pleurisy, getting into the membrane of the chest, breeds an inflammation there, attended by fever and painful stabbing.
The popularity of a powerful subject is also a dangerous disease, unless the commonwealth has very good security for his loyalty. The people, who ought to receive their motion from the authority of the sovereign, are drawn away from their obedience to the laws by the flattery and reputation of an ambitious man, to follow someone of whose virtues and designs they know nothing. This is generally more dangerous in a popular government than in a monarchy, because an army can easily be made to believe that it is the people. That is how Julius Caesar — set up by the people against the senate — having won the affections of his army, made himself master of senate and people alike. And this maneuver of popular and ambitious men is plain rebellion, and may be compared to the effects of witchcraft.
Another infirmity of a commonwealth is the immoderate size of a single town, when it can supply, out of its own limits, the manpower and the funding of a great army. So too the great number of corporations, which are like so many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater one — like worms in the entrails of a natural man.
To these we may add the liberty of disputing against absolute power, taken by self-styled experts in political prudence. Bred mostly in the dregs of the people, yet animated by false doctrines, they are perpetually meddling with the fundamental laws, to the harassment of the commonwealth — like the little worms physicians call ascarides.
We may further add the insatiable appetite — the bulimia — of enlarging dominion, with the often incurable wounds taken from the enemy in the process; and the wens — those useless lumps of growth — of conquests never united with the body, which are many times a burden, and lost with less danger than they are kept; and likewise the lethargy of ease, and the consumption brought on by riot and extravagant spending.
Lastly: when, in a war foreign or internal, the enemies win a final victory — so that the forces of the commonwealth no longer keep the field, and there is no further protection for subjects in their loyalty — then the commonwealth is DISSOLVED, and every man is at liberty to protect himself by whatever means his own discretion suggests.
For the sovereign is the public soul, giving life and motion to the commonwealth; and when that soul expires, the members are no more governed by it than the carcass of a man is governed by his departed — though immortal — soul. The right of a sovereign monarch cannot be extinguished by anyone else's act; but the obligation of the members can be. A man who lacks protection may seek it anywhere; and when he has found it, he is obliged — without the fraudulent pretense of having submitted merely out of fear — to protect his protector for as long as he is able. But when the power of a sovereign assembly is once suppressed, its right perishes utterly, because the assembly itself is extinct — and so there is no possibility for that sovereignty to ever re-enter.
The OFFICE of the sovereign — whether a monarch or an assembly — consists in the end for which he was trusted with sovereign power: namely, securing the safety of the people. To this he is obliged by the law of nature, and he must render an account of it to God, the author of that law, and to nobody else. This is the old maxim salus populi — "the safety of the people" is the supreme law. But by safety I do not mean bare survival. I mean also all the other contentments of life that every man, by lawful industry, and without danger or harm to the commonwealth, can acquire for himself.
And this is meant to be done not by care applied to individuals — beyond protecting them from injuries when they complain — but by a general providence: by public instruction, in both doctrine and example, and by the making and executing of good laws, which individual persons can then apply to their own cases.
A Sovereign Must Not Give Up Any Essential Right of Sovereignty — Nor Leave the People Untaught About the Grounds of Those Rights
Now, if the essential rights of sovereignty (the ones spelled out back in chapter 18) are taken away, the commonwealth is dissolved by it, and every man returns to the condition and calamity of a war with every other man — which is the greatest evil that can happen in this life. So it is the office of the sovereign to keep those rights entire. And consequently it is against his duty, first, to transfer any of them to someone else, or to lay any of them aside. For he that deserts the means deserts the end. And he deserts the means who, being the sovereign, acknowledges himself subject to the civil laws; or renounces the power of supreme judicature; or the power of making war or peace by his own authority; or of judging what the commonwealth needs; or of levying money and soldiers when, and in whatever amounts, his own conscience judges necessary; or of appointing officers and ministers of both war and peace; or of appointing teachers, and examining which doctrines support — and which undermine — the defense, peace, and good of the people.
Secondly, it is against his duty to let the people remain ignorant or misinformed about the grounds and reasons of those essential rights. Because an ignorant people is easily seduced and drawn into resisting him, just when the commonwealth needs those rights used and exercised.
And the grounds of these rights especially need to be diligently and truly taught, because they cannot be maintained by any civil law or by the terror of legal punishment. A civil law forbidding rebellion (and all resistance to the essential rights of sovereignty is rebellion) does not bind as a civil law at all. It binds only by virtue of the law of nature, which forbids breaking faith — and if men do not know that natural obligation, they cannot know the right of any law the sovereign makes. As for the punishment, they take it for nothing more than an act of hostility — and when they think they have strength enough, they will try to avoid it by acts of hostility of their own.
I have heard some people say that justice is just a word without substance, and that whatever a man can acquire for himself by force or cunning — not only in the condition of war, but inside a commonwealth too — is his own. I have already shown this to be false. In the same spirit, there are also people who maintain that there are no grounds, no principles of reason, to support those essential rights that make sovereignty absolute. If there were, they argue, somebody somewhere would have discovered them by now — whereas, as far as we can see, there has never yet been a commonwealth where those rights were acknowledged or claimed in full.
They argue exactly as badly as if the indigenous peoples of the Americas were to deny that there are any grounds or principles of reason for building a house that lasts as long as its materials — because they had never yet seen one so well built. Time and industry produce new knowledge every day. The art of building well was derived from principles of reason, observed by industrious men who had long studied the nature of materials and the different effects of shape and proportion — and that happened long after mankind had begun (poorly) to build. In the same way, long after men first began to set up commonwealths — imperfect ones, apt to relapse into disorder — principles of reason may be found out, by industrious meditation, to make their constitutions last (except by external violence) forever. And these are the kind of principles I have set down in this discourse.
Whether the men who today have the governing of mankind notice these principles and make use of them, or neglect them, concerns my own personal interest, at this point, very little. But suppose these principles of mine are not principles of reason after all. I am still sure they are principles backed by the authority of Scripture — as I will make clear when I come to speak of the kingdom of God, administered by Moses over the Jews, his peculiar people by covenant.
But then they say: even if the principles are right, common people lack the capacity to be made to understand them. I would be delighted if the rich and powerful subjects of a kingdom, and those accounted the most learned, were no less incapable than the common people are. Everyone knows that the obstructions to this kind of doctrine come not so much from the difficulty of the matter as from the interests of those who are supposed to learn it. Powerful men can hardly digest anything that sets up a power to bridle their passions; and learned men can hardly digest anything that exposes their errors and thereby lessens their authority. Whereas the minds of common people — unless they are tainted by dependence on the powerful, or scribbled over with the opinions of their teachers — are like clean paper, fit to receive whatever public authority chooses to imprint on them.
Shall whole nations be brought to accept the great mysteries of the Christian religion, which are above reason — shall millions of men be made to believe that the same body can be in countless places at one and the same time, which is against reason — and yet men cannot, by teaching and preaching protected by law, get people to receive a doctrine so consonant with reason that any unprejudiced man needs only to hear it to learn it? I conclude, therefore, that in instructing the people in the essential rights of sovereignty (which are the natural and fundamental laws), there is no difficulty — so long as a sovereign keeps his power entire — except what proceeds from his own fault, or the fault of those he trusts with the administration of the commonwealth. And consequently it is his duty to have the people instructed in them. And not only his duty, but his benefit too, and his security against the danger that rebellion poses to his own natural person.
To descend to particulars: the people are to be taught, first, that they ought not to fall in love with any form of government they see in neighboring nations more than with their own — and that whatever present prosperity they see in nations governed differently, they should not desire change. For the prosperity of a people ruled by an aristocratic or democratic assembly does not come from the aristocracy or the democracy, but from the obedience and concord of the subjects. Nor do people flourish in a monarchy because one man has the right to rule them, but because they obey him. Take away the obedience (and with it the concord of the people) in any kind of state, and they will not only fail to flourish — in a short time they will be dissolved.
And those who set out, by disobedience, merely to reform the commonwealth will find that they destroy it instead — like the foolish daughters of Peleus in the fable, who, wanting to renew the youth of their decrepit father, took Medea's advice, cut him in pieces, and boiled him with strange herbs, but did not make a new man of him. This desire for change is like a breach of the first of God's commandments. For there God says, Non habebis deos alienos — thou shalt not have the gods of other nations; and in another place, concerning kings, he says that they are gods.
Secondly, they are to be taught that they ought not to be so carried away by admiration for the virtue of any fellow subject — however high he stands, however conspicuously he shines in the commonwealth — nor for any assembly (except the sovereign assembly itself), as to give them any obedience or honor that belongs to the sovereign alone, whom such men, in their particular stations, merely represent. Nor should the people receive any influence from such men except what is conveyed through them from the sovereign authority. For a sovereign cannot be imagined to love his people as he ought if he is not jealous of them, but lets them be seduced from their loyalty by the flattery of popular men — as they have often been, not only secretly but openly, with preachers proclaiming the marriage between the demagogue and the people in facie ecclesiae — before the face of the church, in full public view — and publishing it in the open streets. This may fitly be compared to a violation of the second of the Ten Commandments.
Thirdly, and as a consequence of this, they ought to be informed how great a fault it is to speak evil of the sovereign representative (whether one man or an assembly of men), or to argue and dispute his power, or in any way to use his name irreverently — by which he may be brought into contempt with his people, and their obedience (on which the safety of the commonwealth rests) loosened. This is the doctrine the third commandment points to, by resemblance.
Fourthly: people cannot be taught all this — nor, once taught, remember it — nor, after one generation has passed, even know in whom the sovereign power is placed — unless certain times are set apart from their ordinary labor, in which they can attend to those appointed to instruct them. So it is necessary that such times be fixed, when they can assemble together and (after prayers and praises given to God, the sovereign of sovereigns) hear their duties told to them, and the positive laws that generally concern them all read and explained, and be reminded of the authority that makes those rules laws.
To this end the Jews had a sabbath every seventh day, in which the law was read and expounded — and in the solemnity of which they were reminded that their king was God; that having created the world in six days, he rested the seventh; and that by their resting from labor on that day, they remembered that this God was their king, who redeemed them from their slavish and painful labor in Egypt, and gave them a time, after they had rejoiced in God, to take joy in themselves too, by lawful recreation. So the first table of the commandments is spent entirely in setting down the sum of God's absolute power — not only as God, but as king, by special covenant, of the Jews. And it may therefore give light to those who hold sovereign power by the consent of men, showing them what doctrine they ought to teach their subjects.
And because the first instruction of children depends on the care of their parents, it is necessary that children be obedient to them while under their tuition — and not only then, but afterwards too (as gratitude requires), acknowledging the benefit of their education by external signs of honor. To this end they are to be taught that originally the father of every man was also his sovereign lord, with power of life and death over him; and that when the fathers of families instituted a commonwealth and resigned that absolute power, it was never intended that they should lose the honor due to them for their children's upbringing. Giving up that honor was not necessary to the institution of sovereign power — and besides, there would be no reason for any man to want children, or to take the trouble to feed and instruct them, if he were afterwards to get no more benefit from them than from strangers. And this accords with the fifth commandment.
Again, every sovereign ought to cause justice to be taught — and since justice consists in taking from no man what is his, that amounts to teaching men not to deprive their neighbors, by violence or fraud, of anything that the sovereign authority has made theirs. Of the things a man holds as his own, the dearest are his own life and limbs; next in degree (for most men) come those that concern married affection; and after them, riches and the means of living. So the people are to be taught to abstain from violence against one another's persons through private revenge; from violation of marital honor; and from forcible robbery and sneaking theft of one another's goods. For the same purpose, it is necessary to show them the evil consequences of false judgment through the corruption of judges or witnesses — for that erases the distinction between mine and thine, and justice becomes of no effect. All of this is intimated in the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth commandments.
Lastly, they are to be taught that not only the unjust deeds, but the designs and intentions to do them — even when something happens to prevent them — are injustice; for injustice consists in the depravity of the will as well as in the irregularity of the act. This is the intention of the tenth commandment, and the sum of the second table — which all reduces to this one commandment of mutual charity: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"; just as the sum of the first table reduces to the love of God, whom the Jews had then newly received as their king.
As for the means and channels by which the people can receive this instruction, we should ask: by what means did opinions so contrary to the peace of mankind, resting on weak and false principles, nevertheless become so deeply rooted in them? I mean the opinions I specified in the previous chapter: that men should judge what is lawful and unlawful not by the law itself but by their own private judgment; that subjects sin in obeying the commands of the commonwealth unless they themselves have first judged those commands lawful; that their property in their riches excludes the dominion the commonwealth has over the same; that it is lawful for subjects to kill those they call tyrants; that the sovereign power may be divided; and the like.
These opinions get instilled into the people in the following way. Those whom necessity or greed keeps attentive to their trades and labor, and those, on the other side, whom abundance or laziness carries after their sensual pleasures — and these two sorts of men make up the greatest part of mankind — are diverted from the deep meditation that learning the truth requires, not only in matters of natural justice but in every other science. So they receive their notions of duty chiefly from divines in the pulpit, and partly from those neighbors and familiar acquaintances who, having a knack for ready and plausible talk, seem wiser and better learned in cases of law and conscience than they are themselves. And the divines, and the others who make a show of learning, derive their knowledge from the universities and the schools of law, or from books published by men eminent in those schools and universities. It is therefore obvious that the instruction of the people depends wholly on the right teaching of youth in the universities.
But (some may say) are not the universities of England learned enough already to do that? Or is it you who would undertake to teach the universities? Hard questions. To the first, I do not hesitate to answer: until toward the latter end of Henry the Eighth, the power of the Pope was always upheld against the power of the commonwealth principally by the universities; and the fact that the doctrines maintained against the sovereign power of the king by so many preachers, and by so many lawyers and others who had their education there, is argument enough that even if the universities were not the authors of those false doctrines, they did not know how to plant the true ones. In such a contradiction of opinions, it is quite certain that they have not been sufficiently instructed; and it is no wonder if they still retain a relish of that subtle liquor against the civil authority with which they were first seasoned. But to the second question, it is neither fitting nor needful for me to say yes or no — for anyone who sees what I am doing can easily perceive what I think.
The safety of the people further requires, from him or them that hold the sovereign power, that justice be equally administered to all degrees of people: that the rich and mighty, as well as poor and obscure persons, may be righted of the injuries done to them — so that the great have no greater hope of impunity when they do violence, dishonor, or any injury to those of meaner sort, than when one of the meaner sort does the like to one of them. For in this consists equity, and to equity, as a precept of the law of nature, a sovereign is as much subject as the lowest of his people. All breaches of the law are offenses against the commonwealth; but some are also offenses against private persons. Those that concern the commonwealth only may be pardoned without any breach of equity — for every man may pardon what is done against himself, at his own discretion. But an offense against a private man cannot, in equity, be pardoned without the consent of the injured party, or reasonable satisfaction.
The inequality of subjects proceeds from the acts of sovereign power, and therefore has no more place in the presence of the sovereign — that is, in a court of justice — than the inequality between kings and their subjects has in the presence of the King of kings. The honor of great persons is to be valued for their beneficence and for the aid they give to men of lower rank — or not at all. And the violence, oppression, and injuries they commit are not extenuated but aggravated by the greatness of their persons, because they have the least need to commit them. The consequences of partiality toward the great unfold like this: impunity makes insolence; insolence, hatred; and hatred, an endeavor to pull down all oppressing and insulting greatness — even at the cost of ruining the commonwealth.
To equal justice belongs also the equal imposition of taxes. And this equality depends not on the equality of riches, but on the equality of the debt that every man owes to the commonwealth for his defense. It is not enough for a man to labor for the maintenance of his life; he must also fight, if need be, to secure his labor. Men must either do as the Jews did after their return from captivity, when they rebuilt the Temple — build with one hand and hold the sword in the other — or else they must hire others to fight for them. For the taxes laid on the people by the sovereign power are nothing else but the wages due to those who hold the public sword, to defend private men in the exercise of their various trades and callings.
Now, since the benefit everyone receives from this is the enjoyment of life — which is equally dear to poor and rich — the debt a poor man owes to those who defend his life is the same a rich man owes for the defense of his. The only difference is that the rich, who have the service of the poor, may be debtors not only for their own persons but for many more. All things considered, then, the equality of taxation consists in the equality of what is consumed, rather than in the riches of the persons who consume it. For what reason is there that a man who labors much and, saving the fruits of his labor, consumes little, should be more heavily charged than one who lives idly, earns little, and spends everything he gets — when the one receives no more protection from the commonwealth than the other? But when taxes are laid on the things men consume, every man pays equally for what he uses, and the commonwealth is not defrauded by the luxurious waste of private men.
And whereas many men become unable to maintain themselves by their labor through unavoidable accident, they ought not to be left to the charity of private persons, but to be provided for — as far as the necessities of nature require — by the laws of the commonwealth. For just as it is uncharitable in any man to neglect those who cannot help themselves, so it is uncharitable in the sovereign of a commonwealth to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain charity.
But for those who have strong bodies, the case is different. They are to be made to work; and to remove the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be laws that encourage every kind of industry — navigation, agriculture, fishing, and all kinds of manufacture that require labor. And if the multitude of poor but able-bodied people keeps increasing, they are to be transplanted into countries not sufficiently inhabited — where, nevertheless, they are not to exterminate the people they find there, but to oblige them to live closer together: not ranging over a great deal of ground to snatch what they find, but courting each little plot with skill and labor, to draw their sustenance from it in due season. And when the whole world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war — which provides for every man, by victory or by death.
To the care of the sovereign belongs the making of good laws. But what is a good law? By a good law I do not mean a just law — for no law can be unjust. The law is made by the sovereign power, and everything done by that power is warranted and owned by every one of the people; and what every man wills in this way, no man can call unjust. It is with the laws of a commonwealth as with the rules of a game: whatever the players all agree on is injustice to none of them. A good law is one that is needful for the good of the people, and at the same time clear.
For the use of laws (which are only rules backed by authority) is not to bind the people from all voluntary actions, but to direct them and keep them in such motion that they do not hurt themselves through their own impetuous desires, rashness, or indiscretion — just as hedges are set, not to stop travelers, but to keep them on the road. So a law that is not needful lacks the true end of a law, and is not good. A law might be thought good when it benefits the sovereign even though it is not necessary for the people — but it is not so. For the good of the sovereign and of the people cannot be separated. It is a weak sovereign that has weak subjects; and it is a weak people whose sovereign lacks the power to rule them at his will. Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money — which, where the right of sovereign power is acknowledged, are superfluous; and where it is not acknowledged, insufficient to defend the people.
The clarity of a law consists not so much in the words of the law itself as in a declaration of the causes and motives for which it was made. That is what shows us the meaning of the legislator; and once the meaning of the legislator is known, the law is more easily understood in few words than in many. For all words are subject to ambiguity, and so multiplying words in the body of the law is multiplying ambiguity. Besides, excessive wordiness seems to imply that whoever can dodge the words is outside the reach of the law. And this is the cause of many unnecessary lawsuits. When I consider how short the laws of ancient times were, and how by degrees they grew ever longer, I seem to see a contest between the drafters of the law and the pleaders of the law — the former seeking to hem in the latter, and the latter seeking to slip out of their fences — and the pleaders have won. It therefore belongs to the office of a legislator (which in all commonwealths is the supreme representative, whether one man or an assembly) to make the reason clear for which the law was made, and to keep the body of the law itself as short as possible, in the most proper and significant terms that can be found.
It also belongs to the office of the sovereign to make a right application of punishments and rewards. And since the end of punishing is not revenge or the venting of anger, but correction — of the offender, or of others through his example — the severest punishments should be inflicted for those crimes that are most dangerous to the public: those that proceed from malice against the established government; those that spring from contempt of justice; those that provoke indignation in the multitude; and those which, left unpunished, seem authorized — as when they are committed by the sons, servants, or favorites of men in authority. For indignation carries men not only against the actors and authors of injustice, but against every power that looks likely to protect them — as in the case of Tarquin, who, for the insolent act of one of his sons, was driven out of Rome, and the monarchy itself dissolved with him.
But crimes of weakness — those that proceed from great provocation, from great fear, great need, or from ignorance of whether the act is a great crime or not — often leave room for lenity without prejudice to the commonwealth; and lenity, when there is room for it, is required by the law of nature. It is the punishment of the leaders and teachers of an uprising — not of the poor, seduced people — that profits the commonwealth by example. To be severe with the common people is to punish an ignorance that may in great part be laid at the sovereign's own door, since it was his fault that they were no better instructed.
In the same way, it belongs to the office and duty of the sovereign always to apply his rewards so that benefit to the commonwealth arises from them — for that is their use and end. And this is done when those who have served the commonwealth well are recompensed — with as little expense of the common treasury as possible — well enough that others are encouraged both to serve it as faithfully as they can and to study the arts that will enable them to serve it better.
But to buy off a popular, ambitious subject with money or promotion, so that he will be quiet and stop making bad impressions on the minds of the people — that has nothing of the nature of reward in it (for reward is ordained for past service, not for disservice), nor is it a sign of gratitude, but of fear; and it tends not to the benefit but to the damage of the public. It is a contest with ambition like that of Hercules with the monster Hydra: the beast had many heads, and for every one cut off, three grew up in its place. In just the same way, when the stubbornness of one popular man is overcome with reward, many more arise — following the example — to do the same mischief in hope of the same payoff. And like every kind of manufacture, malice multiplies by being marketable. A civil war may sometimes be deferred by such methods, but the danger keeps growing greater, and the public ruin more assured. It is therefore against the duty of the sovereign, to whom the public safety is committed, to reward those who aspire to greatness by disturbing the peace of their country — rather than opposing the beginnings of such men, at a little danger now, instead of at a much greater danger later.
Another business of the sovereign is to choose good counselors — I mean men whose advice he takes in the government of the commonwealth. The word counsel — consilium, corrupted from considium — has a broad meaning, and covers all assemblies of men who sit together, not only to deliberate about what is to be done in the future, but also to judge of facts past and of law for the present. I take it here in the first sense only. And in this sense there is no choosing of counsel in a democracy or an aristocracy, because the persons counseling are members of the person counseled. The choice of counselors, then, belongs properly to monarchy — in which the sovereign who does not try to choose, in every field, the most able men, fails to discharge his office as he ought.
The most able counselors are those who have the least hope of benefit from giving evil counsel, and the most knowledge of what conduces to the peace and defense of the commonwealth. It is a hard matter to know who expects benefit from public troubles; but the signs that justify suspicion include the soothing of the people in their unreasonable or irremediable grievances, by men whose estates are not sufficient to cover their accustomed expenses — something easily observed by anyone whose business it is to know it. But to know who has the most knowledge of public affairs is harder still; and those who do know such men have that much less need of them. For to know who knows the rules of almost any art is itself a great degree of knowledge of that art, since no man can be assured of the truth of another's rules unless he is first taught to understand them. The best signs of knowledge of any art are much practice in it and consistently good effects from it.
Good counsel comes neither by lot nor by inheritance; and therefore there is no more reason to expect good advice from the rich or noble in matters of state than in drawing up the dimensions of a fortress — unless we are to think there is no method needed in the study of politics (as there is in the study of geometry), but only spectating. Which is not so. Politics is the harder study of the two. In these parts of Europe it has been taken as the right of certain persons to have a place in the highest council of state by inheritance. This derives from the conquests of the ancient Germans, in which many absolute lords, joining together to conquer other nations, would not enter the confederacy without privileges that would mark the difference, in time to come, between their posterity and the posterity of their subjects. Those privileges are inconsistent with sovereign power; by the favor of the sovereign, they may seem to keep them; but if they contend for them as their right, they must by degrees let them go, and end with no more honor than naturally adheres to their abilities.
And however able the counselors may be in any affair, the benefit of their counsel is greater when each gives his advice, and the reasons for it, separately, than when they do it in an assembly by way of speeches; and greater when they have prepared in advance than when they speak on the spur of the moment — both because they have more time to survey the consequences of the action, and because they are less liable to be carried into contradiction by envy, rivalry, or the other passions that arise from difference of opinion.
The best counsel, in matters that concern not other nations but only the ease and benefit the subjects may enjoy from laws that look only inward, is to be taken from the general reports and complaints of the people of each province, who know their own wants best — and who therefore, when they demand nothing that derogates from the essential rights of sovereignty, ought to be diligently listened to. For without those essential rights, as I have said often enough, the commonwealth cannot subsist at all.
A commander-in-chief of an army, if he is not popular, will be neither loved nor feared by his army as he ought to be, and consequently cannot perform his office with good success. He must therefore be industrious, valiant, affable, generous, and fortunate, so that he gains a reputation both for competence and for loving his soldiers. This is popularity; it breeds in the soldiers both the desire and the courage to recommend themselves to his favor, and it protects the severity of the general when he must punish mutinous or negligent soldiers. But this love of soldiers, if no assurance is given of the commander's fidelity, is a dangerous thing to sovereign power — especially when that power is in the hands of an assembly that is not popular. It therefore belongs to the safety of the people that those to whom the sovereign commits his armies be both good leaders and faithful subjects.
But when the sovereign himself is popular — that is, revered and beloved by his people — there is no danger at all from the popularity of a subject. For soldiers are never so generally unjust as to side with their captain against their sovereign, however much they love him, when they love not only the sovereign's person but also his cause. That is why those who have at any time suppressed the power of their lawful sovereign by violence have always, before they could settle into his place, been put to the trouble of contriving titles for themselves — to save the people from the shame of accepting them. To have a known right to sovereign power is so popular a quality that the man who has it needs nothing more, on his own part, to turn the hearts of his subjects to him, than to be seen able to govern his own household absolutely; and nothing more, on the part of his enemies, than the disbanding of their armies. For the greatest and most active part of mankind has never yet been well contented with the present.
Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another, which are comprehended in the law commonly called the law of nations, I need say nothing here — because the law of nations and the law of nature are the same thing. Every sovereign has the same right, in procuring the safety of his people, that any individual man has in procuring the safety of his own body. And the same law that dictates to men who have no civil government what they ought to do, and what to avoid, with regard to one another, dictates the same to commonwealths — that is, to the consciences of sovereign princes and sovereign assemblies. For there is no court of natural justice except in the conscience alone, where not man but God reigns — whose laws, such of them as oblige all mankind, are natural in respect of God as the author of nature, and are laws in respect of the same God as King of kings. But of the kingdom of God, as King of kings and as king also of a peculiar people, I shall speak in the rest of this discourse.
I have already proved, in everything written so far, the following: that the condition of mere nature — that is, of absolute liberty, the condition of people who are neither sovereigns nor subjects — is anarchy and a condition of war. That the precepts by which men are guided to avoid that condition are the laws of nature. That a commonwealth without sovereign power is just a word without substance, and cannot stand. And that subjects owe their sovereigns simple obedience in everything that does not conflict with the laws of God.
Only one thing is still missing for a complete knowledge of civil duty: knowing what those laws of God are. Without that, a man cannot tell, when the civil power commands him to do something, whether the command is contrary to God's law or not. And so he either offends the Divine Majesty through too much civil obedience, or, out of fear of offending God, breaks the commandments of the commonwealth. To steer clear of both these rocks, it is necessary to know what the divine laws are. And since the knowledge of all law depends on the knowledge of the sovereign power, I will say something in what follows about the KINGDOM OF GOD.
"God is King, let the earth rejoice," says the Psalmist (Psalm 96:1). And again, "God is King though the nations be angry; and he that sitteth on the cherubims, though the earth be moved" (Psalm 98:1). Whether men like it or not, they are always subject to the divine power. By denying God's existence or his providence, men may shake off their ease — but not their yoke.
But to call this power of God a "kingdom" — a power that extends not only to man but to beasts, plants, and lifeless bodies — is only a metaphorical use of the word. For only he properly reigns who governs his subjects by his word: by promising rewards to those who obey it, and by threatening punishment to those who do not. So the subjects in the kingdom of God are not inanimate bodies, and not irrational creatures, because they understand no precepts as his. Nor atheists. Nor those who do not believe that God takes any care of the actions of mankind — because these people acknowledge no word as his, and have no hope of his rewards or fear of his threats. Those, then, who believe there is a God who governs the world, who has given precepts and set out rewards and punishments for mankind — those are God's subjects. All the rest are to be understood as enemies.
To rule by words requires that the words be plainly made known; otherwise they are not laws. For it belongs to the nature of law to be sufficiently and clearly promulgated — published in a way that takes away the excuse of ignorance. In the laws of men there is only one kind of promulgation: proclamation by the voice of man. But God declares his laws three ways: by the dictates of natural reason, by revelation, and by the voice of some man to whom he gives credibility with everyone else through the working of miracles.
From this arises a triple word of God — rational, sensible, and prophetic — and to these correspond three kinds of hearing: right reason, supernatural sense, and faith. As for supernatural sense, which consists in revelation or inspiration, no universal laws have ever been given that way, because God does not speak in that manner except to particular persons, and he says different things to different men.
From the difference between the other two kinds of God's word — the rational and the prophetic — we may attribute to God a twofold kingdom: natural and prophetic. Natural, in which he governs as many of mankind as acknowledge his providence, through the natural dictates of right reason. And prophetic, in which, having chosen out one particular nation (the Jews) as his subjects, he governed them — and them alone — not only by natural reason, but by positive laws, which he gave them through the mouths of his holy prophets. It is the natural kingdom of God I intend to speak of in this chapter.
The right of nature by which God reigns over men, and punishes those who break his laws, is derived not from his having created them — as if he required obedience out of gratitude for his benefits — but from his irresistible power.
I have shown earlier how sovereign right arises from pact. To show how the same right can arise from nature, I need only show in what case it is never given up. By nature, all men had a right to all things — which means every man had a right to reign over all the rest. But because this right could not be obtained by force, it concerned the safety of everyone to lay that right aside, and to set up men with sovereign authority, by common consent, to rule and defend them. Yet if there had been any man with irresistible power, there would have been no reason why he should not, by that power, have ruled and defended both himself and them, according to his own discretion.
To those whose power is irresistible, then, dominion over all men attaches naturally, by the sheer excellence of that power. And consequently it is from that power that the kingdom over men, and the right of afflicting men at his pleasure, belongs naturally to God Almighty — not as Creator, not as gracious, but as omnipotent. And though punishment is due for sin only (because by that word we understand affliction for sin), the right of afflicting is not always derived from men's sin, but from God's power.
Why do evil men often prosper, while good men suffer adversity? The ancients disputed this question endlessly, and it is the same as our question here: by what right does God hand out the prosperities and adversities of this life? It is so difficult a question that it has shaken faith in divine providence — not only among ordinary people, but among philosophers, and, what is more, among the saints. "How good," says David, "is the God of Israel to those that are upright in heart; and yet my feet were almost gone, my treadings had well-nigh slipped; for I was grieved at the wicked, when I saw the ungodly in such prosperity." And Job — how earnestly he argues with God over the many afflictions he suffered despite his righteousness!
In Job's case, the question is decided by God himself — and not with arguments drawn from Job's sin, but from his own power. Job's friends reasoned backward from his affliction to his sin; Job defended himself with the knowledge of his own innocence. Then God himself takes up the matter. He justifies the affliction with arguments drawn from his power — such as "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" and the like — and in doing so he both approved Job's innocence and rebuked the erroneous doctrine of his friends.
Our Savior's words about the man born blind agree with this doctrine: "Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God might be made manifest in him." It is true that Scripture says death entered the world by sin — meaning that if Adam had never sinned, he would never have died, never suffered any separation of his soul from his body. But it does not follow that God could not justly have afflicted him even if he had never sinned — just as God afflicts other living creatures, which cannot sin at all.
Having spoken of the right of God's sovereignty as grounded only on nature, we must consider next what the divine laws are — the dictates of natural reason. These laws concern either the natural duties of one man to another, or the honor naturally due to our divine sovereign. The first are the same laws of nature I have already discussed in chapters 14 and 15 of this treatise: equity, justice, mercy, humility, and the rest of the moral virtues. What remains, then, is to consider what precepts natural reason alone — without any other word of God — dictates to men concerning the honor and worship of the Divine Majesty.
Honor consists in the inward thought and opinion of another's power and goodness. So to honor God is to think as highly of his power and goodness as we possibly can. The external signs of that opinion, appearing in men's words and actions, are called WORSHIP — which is one part of what the Latins understood by the word cultus.
For cultus properly and consistently means the labor a man spends on something with the purpose of getting some benefit from it. Now, the things we get benefit from are of two kinds. Either they are subject to us, and the profit they yield follows our labor as a natural effect; or they are not subject to us, and answer our labor according to their own wills. In the first sense, the labor spent on the earth is called culture — cultivation — and the education of children is a culture of their minds. In the second sense — where men's wills must be won to our purpose not by force, but by pleasing them — it means as much as courting: winning favor by good offices, by praise, by acknowledging their power, and by whatever else is pleasing to those from whom we hope for some benefit. And this, properly, is worship. In this sense Publicola is understood as a worshipper of the people, and cultus Dei as the worship of God.
From internal honor — the opinion of power and goodness — arise three passions: love, which refers to goodness; and hope and fear, which relate to power. And there are three parts of external worship: praise, magnifying, and blessing. The subject of praise is goodness; the subject of magnifying and blessing is power, and its effect, happiness. Praise and magnifying can be expressed both by words and by actions: by words, when we say a man is good or great; by actions, when we thank him for his generosity and obey his power. The opinion of another's happiness can only be expressed by words.
Some signs of honor, both in attributes and in actions, are naturally so: among attributes, "good," "just," "generous," and the like; among actions, prayers, thanks, and obedience. Others are signs of honor by institution or by the custom of men — honorable in some times and places, dishonorable in others, and indifferent in still others. Such are the gestures used in greeting, prayer, and thanksgiving, which different times and places use differently. The first kind is natural worship; the second, arbitrary worship.
And arbitrary worship comes in two varieties: sometimes it is commanded, sometimes voluntary. Commanded, when it is what the one being worshipped requires; free, when it is what the worshipper thinks fit. When worship is commanded, the worship lies not in the words or gestures, but in the obedience. But when it is free, the worship consists in the opinion of the onlookers. For if the words or actions by which we intend honor seem ridiculous to them, or insulting, then they are not worship at all — because a sign is not a sign to the one who gives it, but to the one it is made to: that is, to the spectator.
Again, there is public worship and private worship. Public worship is the worship a commonwealth performs as one person. Private worship is what a private person exhibits. Public worship, with respect to the whole commonwealth, is free; but with respect to particular men, it is not. Private worship is free when done in secret; but done in the sight of the multitude, it is never without some restraint — either from the laws or from the opinion of men — and that is contrary to the nature of liberty.
Among men, the purpose of worship is power. For when a man sees another being worshipped, he supposes him powerful, and is the readier to obey him — which makes his power greater still. But God has no ends. The worship we give him proceeds from our duty, and is directed — as far as our capacity allows — by those rules of honor that reason dictates the weak should perform toward more powerful men: in hope of benefit, in fear of damage, or in thankfulness for good already received from them.
So that we may know what worship of God the light of nature teaches us, I will begin with his attributes.
First, it is obvious that we ought to attribute existence to him. For no man can have the will to honor something he thinks has no being at all.
Secondly, those philosophers who said that the world, or the soul of the world, was God spoke unworthily of him — in fact, they denied his existence. For by "God" we understand the cause of the world; and to say the world is God is to say it has no cause — that is, that there is no God.
Thirdly, to say the world was not created but is eternal is to deny there is a God — since whatever is eternal has no cause.
Fourthly, those who attribute ease to God (as they imagine they do), and so take from him the care of mankind, take from him his honor. For it removes men's love and fear of him — and that is the root of honor.
Fifthly, in things that signify greatness and power, to say God is finite is not to honor him. For it is no sign of a will to honor God to attribute less to him than we can; and finite is less than we can, because to anything finite it is easy to add more.
Therefore, to attribute shape to him is not honor, for all shape is finite.
Nor to say we conceive, or imagine, or have an idea of him in our mind — for whatever we conceive is finite.
Nor to attribute parts to him, or totality — which are attributes only of finite things.
Nor to say he is in this place or that — for whatever is in a place is bounded and finite.
Nor that he moves, or rests — for both of these attributes assign him a place.
Nor that there is more than one God — because that implies they are all finite, for there cannot be more than one infinite.
Nor should we ascribe to him (except metaphorically — meaning not the passion but its effect) passions that partake of grief, such as repentance, anger, or mercy; or of want, such as appetite, hope, or desire; or any passive faculty at all. For passion is power limited by something else.
And therefore when we ascribe a will to God, it is not to be understood as a man's will — a rational appetite — but as the power by which he effects everything.
Likewise when we attribute to him sight and other acts of sense, or knowledge and understanding — which in us are nothing but a tumult of the mind, stirred up by external things pressing on the organs of a man's body. There is no such thing in God; and since these things depend on natural causes, they cannot be attributed to him.
Whoever will attribute to God nothing but what natural reason warrants must use either negative attributes, such as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; or superlatives, such as Most High, Most Great, and the like; or indefinite ones, such as good, just, holy, Creator. And he must use them not as though he meant to declare what God is — for that would be to confine him within the limits of our imagination — but to declare how much we admire him, and how ready we would be to obey him. That is a sign of humility, and of a will to honor him as much as we can. For there is only one name that signifies our conception of his nature, and that is I AM; and only one name of his relation to us, and that is God — in which is contained Father, King, and Lord.
Concerning the actions of divine worship, the most general precept of reason is this: that they be signs of the intention to honor God.
Such as, first, prayers. For it was not the carvers, when they made images, who were thought to make them gods — it was the people who prayed to them.
Secondly, thanksgiving — which differs from prayer in divine worship only in this, that prayers come before the benefit and thanks come after it. The purpose of both is the same: to acknowledge God as the author of all benefits, past and future alike.
Thirdly, gifts — that is, sacrifices and offerings — are signs of honor, provided they are of the best; for they are thanksgivings.
Fourthly, to swear by none but God is naturally a sign of honor. For it is a confession that God alone knows the heart, and that no man's cleverness or strength can protect him against God's vengeance on the perjured.
Fifthly, it is part of rational worship to speak carefully of God; for it shows fear of him, and fear is a confession of his power. From this it follows that the name of God is not to be used rashly and to no purpose — for that is as much as to use it in vain. And it is to no purpose unless it is by way of an oath, by order of the commonwealth, to make judgments certain; or between commonwealths, to avoid war.
It also follows that disputing about God's nature is contrary to his honor. For in this natural kingdom of God, it is supposed there is no way to know anything except by natural reason — that is, from the principles of natural science. And those principles are so far from teaching us anything about God's nature that they cannot even teach us our own nature, or the nature of the smallest living creature. So when men dispute about the attributes of God from the principles of natural reason, they only dishonor him. For in the attributes we give to God, what matters is not the signification of philosophical truth, but the signification of pious intention — the intention to do him the greatest honor we are able. From neglecting this consideration have come whole volumes of disputation about the nature of God, which tend not to his honor, but to the honor of our own wits and learning — and which are nothing but inconsiderate and vain abuses of his sacred name.
Sixthly, in prayers, thanksgivings, offerings, and sacrifices, natural reason dictates that each one should be, of its kind, the best, and the most significant of honor. For example, prayers and thanksgiving should be made in words and phrases that are not hasty, not flippant, not vulgar, but beautiful and well composed — for otherwise we do not give God as much honor as we can. The heathens were absurd to worship images as gods; but their doing it in verse, and with music of both voice and instruments, was reasonable. So too, that the beasts they sacrificed, and the gifts they offered, and their actions in worshipping were full of submission, and commemorated benefits received — that was according to reason, since it proceeded from an intention to honor him.
Seventhly, reason directs us to worship God not only in secret, but also — and especially — in public, in the sight of men. For without that, the thing most acceptable in honor is lost: leading others to honor him.
Lastly, obedience to his laws — which in this case means the laws of nature — is the greatest worship of all. For just as obedience is more acceptable to God than sacrifice, so to make light of his commandments is the greatest of all insults. And these are the laws of divine worship that natural reason dictates to private men.
But since a commonwealth is one person, it ought to exhibit one worship to God. And it does this when it commands that worship to be exhibited by private men publicly. This is PUBLIC WORSHIP, and its defining property is uniformity. For actions done differently by different men cannot be called a public worship. And therefore, where many sorts of worship are allowed, proceeding from the different religions of private men, it cannot be said that there is any public worship — or that the commonwealth has any religion at all.
And because words — and consequently the attributes of God — get their signification by the agreement and constitution of men, those attributes are to be held significant of honor that men intend to be so. And whatever may be done by the wills of particular men, where there is no law but reason, may be done by the will of the commonwealth, through civil laws. And because a commonwealth has no will, and makes no laws, except those made by the will of the man or assembly that holds the sovereign power, it follows that the attributes which the sovereign ordains for signs of honor in the worship of God ought to be taken and used as such by private men in their public worship.
Not all actions, however, are signs by convention. Some are naturally signs of honor, others of contempt. The latter — the things men are ashamed to do in the sight of those they revere — can never be made part of divine worship by any human power. The former — decent, modest, humble behavior — can never be separated from it. But there is an infinite number of actions and gestures of an indifferent nature; and those of them that the commonwealth ordains to be publicly and universally in use, as signs of honor and part of God's worship, are to be taken and used as such by the subjects. As for what Scripture says — "It is better to obey God than men" — that applies in the kingdom of God by pact, not by nature.
Having spoken thus briefly of the natural kingdom of God and his natural laws, I will add to this chapter only a short declaration of his natural punishments.
There is no action of man in this life that is not the beginning of a chain of consequences so long that no human foresight is high enough to see to the end of it. In this chain, pleasing and unpleasing events are linked together — in such a way that whoever does anything for his pleasure must commit himself to suffer all the pains attached to it. These pains are the natural punishments of those actions that begin more harm than good. And so it comes to pass that intemperance is naturally punished with diseases; rashness, with mishaps; injustice, with the violence of enemies; pride, with ruin; cowardice, with oppression; the negligent government of princes, with rebellion; and rebellion, with slaughter. For since punishments follow the breach of laws, natural punishments must naturally follow the breach of the laws of nature — and so they follow them as their natural effects, not arbitrary ones.
And so much for the constitution, nature, and right of sovereigns, and for the duty of subjects, derived from the principles of natural reason.
Now, when I consider how different this doctrine is from the practice of most of the world — especially of these Western parts, which have received their moral learning from Rome and Athens — and how much depth of moral philosophy is required in those who administer the sovereign power, I am at the point of believing this labor of mine as useless as the Commonwealth of Plato. For Plato too was of the opinion that the disorders of state, and the change of governments by civil war, can never be taken away until sovereigns become philosophers.
But then I consider again: that the science of natural justice is the only science necessary for sovereigns and their principal ministers; that they need not be burdened with the mathematical sciences (as Plato would have them), beyond encouraging the study of them by good laws; and that neither Plato nor any other philosopher so far has put in order, and sufficiently or probably proved, all the theorems of moral doctrine, so that men might learn from them both how to govern and how to obey. And then I recover some hope: that one time or other, this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign who will consider it for himself — for it is short, and I think clear — without the help of any interested or envious interpreter; and who, by the exercise of entire sovereignty, in protecting the public teaching of it, will convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice.
Up to this point, I have derived the rights of sovereign power and the duty of subjects from the principles of nature alone — principles that experience has shown to be true, or that agreement about the use of words has made true. That is, I have argued from the nature of human beings as we know it by experience, and from definitions of the words essential to all political reasoning, definitions everyone accepts.
But the subject I take up next is the nature and rights of a CHRISTIAN COMMONWEALTH, and much of that depends on supernatural revelations of the will of God. So the foundation of my argument from here on must be not only the natural word of God, but also the prophetic word.
This does not mean we are to renounce our senses and our experience — or natural reason, which is itself the undoubted word of God. These are the talents God has placed in our hands to trade with until our blessed Savior comes again. They are not to be folded up in the napkin of an unquestioning faith, like the servant in the parable who buried his master's money; they are to be invested — spent in the pursuit of justice, peace, and true religion.
It is true that many things in God's word are above reason. That is, they can neither be demonstrated nor refuted by natural reason. But nothing in it is contrary to reason. And when something seems to be, the fault lies either in our clumsy interpretation or in our faulty reasoning.
So when something written there is too hard for our examination, we are told to take our understanding captive to the words, and not to wear ourselves out trying to extract a philosophical truth, by logic, from mysteries that cannot be comprehended and fall under no rule of natural science. The mysteries of our religion are like medicine for the sick: pills that cure when swallowed whole, but when chewed, are mostly thrown back up without doing any good.
But this captivity of our understanding does not mean submitting our intellect to the opinion of some other man. It means submitting our will to obedience, where obedience is due.
Here is why. Sense, memory, understanding, reason, and opinion are not in our power to change. They are always, and necessarily, whatever the things we see, hear, and consider suggest to us. They are not the effects of our will — our will is the effect of them. We take our understanding and reason captive, then, when we refrain from contradiction; when we speak as we are commanded to speak by lawful authority; and when we live accordingly. In short, it is trust, and faith placed in the one who speaks — even when the mind can form no idea at all from the words spoken.
When God speaks to a man, it must be either immediately — directly — or through another man, to whom God had previously spoken directly himself.
How God speaks to a man directly may be well enough understood by those he has spoken to. But how that should be understood by anyone else is hard, if not impossible, to know. If a man claims to me that God has spoken to him supernaturally and directly, and I doubt it, I cannot easily see what argument he could produce that would oblige me to believe him. It is true that if he is my sovereign, he can oblige me to obedience — meaning I may not declare, by act or word, that I do not believe him. But he cannot oblige me to think anything other than what my reason persuades me of. And if someone with no such authority over me makes the same claim, there is nothing that compels either belief or obedience.
Consider what such claims actually amount to. To say God has spoken to him in the Holy Scripture is not to say God has spoken to him directly, but through the prophets, or the apostles, or the church — the same way God speaks to every other Christian. To say God has spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God spoke to him — which carries no force with anyone who knows that dreams are mostly natural, and can spring from earlier thoughts. And dreams of that particular kind tend to spring from self-conceit, foolish arrogance, and a false opinion of one's own godliness or virtue — the belief that one has earned the favor of an extraordinary revelation. To say he has seen a vision, or heard a voice, is to say he dreamed somewhere between sleeping and waking; that is exactly how a man often mistakes his dream for a vision, having failed to notice that he had dozed off. To say he speaks by supernatural inspiration is to say he feels a burning desire to speak, or holds some strong opinion of himself, for which he can give no natural and sufficient reason.
So although God Almighty certainly can speak to a man by dreams, visions, voices, and inspiration, he obliges no one to believe that he has done so to the man who claims it. That man, being a man, may err — and, what is more, may lie.
How, then, can a person to whom God has never revealed his will directly (except by way of natural reason) know when to obey, and when not to obey, the word of God delivered by someone who says he is a prophet?
Scripture itself shows the problem. Of the 400 prophets the king of Israel consulted about his war against Ramoth Gilead, only Micaiah was a true one (1 Kings 22). And the prophet sent to prophesy against the altar Jeroboam had set up — a true prophet, shown to be sent from God by two miracles performed in his presence — was nevertheless deceived by another, older prophet, who persuaded him, as if speaking from the mouth of God, to eat and drink with him (1 Kings 13). If one prophet can deceive another, what certainty is there of knowing the will of God by any way other than reason?
To this I answer, out of the Holy Scripture itself, that there are two marks by which — together, not separately — a true prophet is to be known. One is the working of miracles. The other is teaching no other religion than the one already established. Separately, I say, neither one is sufficient.
"If a prophet rise among you, or a dreamer of dreams, and shall claim to do a miracle, and the miracle comes to pass; if he says, Let us follow strange gods, which you have not known, you shall not listen to him... But that prophet and dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has spoken to make you revolt from the Lord your God" (Deuteronomy 13:1-5).
Two things should be observed in those words. First: God will not have miracles alone serve as proof of a prophet's calling. As the third verse says, they serve instead as a test of the constancy of our adherence to God himself. After all, the works of the Egyptian sorcerers, though not as great as those of Moses, were still great miracles. Second: however great the miracle may be, if it tends to stir up revolt against the king, or against whoever governs by the king's authority, the man who performs it is to be regarded as nothing other than someone sent to test their allegiance. For in this passage, the words "revolt from the Lord your God" are equivalent to "revolt from your king" — because Israel had made God their king by pact at the foot of Mount Sinai, and God ruled them through Moses alone; only Moses spoke with God, and from time to time he declared God's commandments to the people.
Our Savior Christ did the same. After he had brought his disciples to acknowledge him as the Messiah — that is, as God's anointed, the king the Jewish nation expected daily but refused when he came — he did not fail to warn them of the danger of miracles. "There shall arise," he says, "false Christs, and false prophets, and they shall do great wonders and miracles, even to the seducing (if it were possible) of the very elect" (Matthew 24:24). Which shows that false prophets may have the power of miracles — and yet we are not to take their doctrine for God's word. St. Paul goes further, telling the Galatians that "if he himself, or an angel from heaven, preach another gospel to them than the one he had preached, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8). That gospel was that Christ was king. So by these words, all preaching against the power of the established king stands accursed by St. Paul — for his speech was addressed to people who, through his preaching, had already received Jesus as the Christ, that is, as king of the Jews.
Just as miracles without preaching the doctrine God has established prove nothing, so preaching the true doctrine without working miracles is an insufficient argument for direct revelation. If a man who teaches no false doctrine claims to be a prophet without showing any miracle, his claim deserves no special regard. This is clear from Deuteronomy: "If you say in your heart, How shall we know that the word of the prophet is not what the Lord has spoken? When the prophet has spoken in the name of the Lord something that does not come to pass, that is the word the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it out of the pride of his own heart. Do not fear him" (Deuteronomy 18:21-22).
But here a man may ask again: when the prophet has foretold a thing, how shall we know whether it will come to pass or not? He may foretell it as something to arrive after a long stretch of time — longer than a human life — or indefinitely, as something that will happen sooner or later. In that case, this mark of a prophet is useless. Therefore the miracles that oblige us to believe a prophet must be confirmed by an immediate event, or one not long delayed.
So it is plain: teaching the religion God has established, and showing a present miracle, joined together, were the only marks by which Scripture would have a true prophet — that is, direct revelation — acknowledged. Neither of them alone is sufficient to oblige any other man to heed what he says.
Since miracles have now ceased, we have no sign left by which to recognize the claimed revelations or inspirations of any private man, and no obligation to give ear to any doctrine beyond what conforms to the Holy Scriptures. Since the time of our Savior, the Scriptures supply the place of all other prophecy. From them, by wise and careful reckoning, all the rules and precepts necessary to know our duty to God and man can easily be deduced — without enthusiasm, and without supernatural inspiration.
And this Scripture is the source from which I will take the principles of my argument concerning the rights of those who are the supreme governors of Christian commonwealths on earth, and the duty of Christian subjects toward their sovereigns. To that end, I shall speak in the next chapter of the books, the writers, the scope, and the authority of the Bible.
By the books of Holy Scripture we mean those books that ought to be the CANON — that is to say, the rules of Christian life. And because every rule of life that men are bound in conscience to observe is a law, the question of Scripture is really the question of what counts as law throughout all Christendom, both natural and civil. Scripture does not spell out which laws every Christian king shall set up in his own dominions; but it does determine which laws he shall not set up. And since I have already proved that sovereigns in their own dominions are the sole legislators, it follows that the only books that are canonical — that is, the only books that are law — in any nation are the ones established as such by the sovereign authority.
It is true that God is the sovereign of all sovereigns. So when he speaks to any subject, that subject ought to obey him, whatever any earthly power commands to the contrary. But the question is not whether to obey God. The question is when and what God has said. And subjects who have received no supernatural revelation cannot know that except by natural reason — the same reason that guided them, for the sake of peace and justice, to obey the authority of their commonwealths, that is, of their lawful sovereigns.
Following that obligation, I can acknowledge no books of the Old Testament as Holy Scripture except those that the authority of the Church of England has commanded us to acknowledge. Which books these are is well enough known without a catalogue here. They are the same ones acknowledged by St. Jerome, who counts the rest as Apocrypha — namely the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobias, the first and second books of Maccabees (though he had seen the first in Hebrew), and the third and fourth books of Esdras.
Of the canonical books, Josephus — a learned Jew who wrote in the time of the Emperor Domitian — counts twenty-two, making the number match the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. St. Jerome arrives at the same count, though the two of them divide the books differently. Josephus numbers five books of Moses, thirteen of prophets who wrote the history of their own times (how that squares with the prophets' writings contained in the Bible, we shall see later), and four of hymns and moral precepts. St. Jerome counts five books of Moses, eight of prophets, and nine of other holy writings, which he calls the Hagiographa — the "sacred writings." The Septuagint — the seventy learned Jewish scholars sent for by Ptolemy, King of Egypt, to translate the Jewish law from Hebrew into Greek — have left us no other books as Holy Scripture in the Greek language than the very ones received by the Church of England.
As for the books of the New Testament, they are acknowledged as canon equally by all Christian churches, and by every sect of Christians that admits any books at all as canonical.
Who originally wrote the various books of Holy Scripture has never been established by sufficient testimony from other history — and testimony is the only proof there is for a matter of fact. Nor can it be settled by arguments of natural reason, because reason serves only to establish truths of consequence, not truths of fact. So the light that must guide us in this question has to be the light held out to us by the books themselves. And though that light does not show us the writer of every book, it is still useful: it can tell us the time in which the books were written.
Start with the Pentateuch. The fact that these are called the five Books of Moses is not enough to prove that Moses wrote them — no more than the titles "the Book of Joshua," "the Book of Judges," "the Book of Ruth," and "the Books of the Kings" prove that those books were written by Joshua, by the judges, by Ruth, and by the kings. In book titles, the subject is named as often as the writer. "The History of Livy" names the writer; but "the History of Scanderbeg" is named for its subject.
Now consider what we read in the last chapter of Deuteronomy, verse 6, concerning the tomb of Moses: "no man knoweth of his sepulcher to this day" — that is, to the day those words were written. Plainly, then, those words were written after his burial. It would be a strange reading indeed to say that Moses spoke of his own tomb — even by prophecy — declaring that it had not been found up to a day on which he was still alive.
Perhaps someone will object that only the last chapter was written by another hand, not the whole Pentateuch. So consider what we find in the Book of Genesis (Genesis 12:6): "And Abraham passed through the land to the place of Sichem, unto the plain of Moreh, and the Canaanite was then in the land." These must be the words of someone writing at a time when the Canaanite was no longer in the land — and therefore not the words of Moses, who died before he ever entered it. Likewise, in Numbers 21:14, the writer cites another, more ancient book, titled The Book of the Wars of the Lord, in which were recorded the acts of Moses at the Red Sea and at the brook of Arnon. It is sufficiently evident, then, that the five Books of Moses were written after his time — though how long after is not so clear.
But even though Moses did not compile those books entirely, and not in the form we now have them, he did write everything that he is there said to have written. For example: the Volume of the Law, which is contained, it seems, in chapter 11 of Deuteronomy and the chapters following, up to chapter 27 — the same law that was commanded to be written on stones at their entry into the land of Canaan (Deuteronomy 31:9). This Moses himself wrote and delivered to the priests and elders of Israel, to be read every seventh year to all Israel when they assembled at the Feast of Tabernacles. This is the law God commanded their kings to copy from the priests and Levites — once they had established that form of government — and to lay beside the Ark (Deuteronomy 31:26). And it is the same law that, after being lost, was found again long afterward by Hilkiah and sent to King Josiah, who had it read to the people and so renewed the covenant between God and them (2 Kings 22:8; 23:1-3).
That the Book of Joshua was also written long after the time of Joshua can be gathered from many passages in the book itself. Joshua had set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan as a monument of their crossing (Joshua 4:9), and of these the writer says, "They are there unto this day" (Joshua 5:9) — and "unto this day" is a phrase that signifies a time past, beyond living memory. In the same way, when the Lord said that he had rolled the reproach of Egypt off the people, the writer says, "The place is called Gilgal unto this day" — which would have been an odd thing to say in Joshua's own lifetime. So also with the name of the Valley of Achor, named for the trouble that Achan stirred up in the camp (Joshua 7:26): the writer says the name "remaineth unto this day," which must therefore be long after the time of Joshua. There are many other arguments of this kind, such as Joshua 8:29, 13:13, 14:14, and 15:63.
The same is plain from similar arguments in the Book of Judges — chapters 1:21, 1:26, 6:24, 10:4, 15:19, 17:6 — and in Ruth 1:1. But the clearest of all is Judges 18:30, where it is said that Jonathan "and his sonnes were Priests to the Tribe of Dan, untill the day of the captivity of the land."
That the Books of Samuel were likewise written after his own time, there are arguments of the same kind: 1 Samuel 5:5, 7:13, 7:15, 27:6, and 30:25, where, after David had ruled that those who guarded the supplies should share the spoils equally with those who fought, the writer says, "He made it a Statute and an Ordinance to Israel to this day." Again (2 Samuel 6:4), when David — displeased that the Lord had struck down Uzzah for putting out his hand to steady the Ark — called the place Perez-Uzzah, the writer says it is called so "to this day." The writing of that book, then, must come long after the time of the events; that is, long after the time of David.
As for the two Books of the Kings and the two Books of the Chronicles: besides the passages mentioning monuments that, as the writer says, remained until his own days — such as 1 Kings 9:13, 9:21, 10:12, 12:19; 2 Kings 2:22, 8:22, 10:27, 14:7, 16:6, 17:23, 17:34, 17:41; 1 Chronicles 4:41, 5:26 — there is a sufficient argument that they were written after the captivity in Babylon: their history is carried right up to that time. For the deeds recorded in a register are always more ancient than any book that mentions and quotes that register — and these books do exactly that in many places, referring the reader to the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah, to the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel, to the books of the prophet Samuel, of the prophet Nathan, of the prophet Ahijah, to the Vision of Jehdo, and to the books of the prophet Serveiah and of the prophet Addo.
The Books of Esdras — that is, Ezra — and Nehemiah were certainly written after the return from captivity, because they contain the return itself, the rebuilding of the walls and houses of Jerusalem, the renewal of the covenant, and the reordering of their government.
The history of Queen Esther belongs to the time of the captivity; the writer, therefore, must have lived at that time or after it.
The Book of Job carries no mark of the time it was written. And though it is clear enough (Ezekiel 14:14; James 5:11) that Job was no invented person, the book itself seems to be not a history but a treatise on a question much disputed in ancient times: why wicked men have often prospered in this world while good men have suffered. The strongest evidence is this: from the beginning of the book to the third verse of the third chapter, where Job's complaint begins, the Hebrew is in prose (as St. Jerome testifies); from there to the sixth verse of the last chapter, it is in hexameter verse; and the rest of that final chapter is prose again. So the whole dispute is in verse, and the prose is added only as a preface at the beginning and an epilogue at the end. And verse is not the usual style of people in great pain, like Job, or of people who come to comfort them, like his friends — but it was common in philosophy, especially moral philosophy, in ancient times.
The Psalms were written for the most part by David, for the use of the choir. To these were added some songs of Moses and other holy men, and some written after the return from the captivity — such as Psalm 137 and Psalm 126. From this it is plain that the Psalter was compiled, and put into the form it now has, after the return of the Jews from Babylon.
The Proverbs are a collection of wise and godly sayings — partly Solomon's, partly those of Agur the son of Jakeh, and partly those of the mother of King Lemuel. It is hardly likely that Solomon collected them rather than Agur or Lemuel's mother. The sayings are theirs; but the collecting and compiling of them into this one book was the work of some other godly man who lived after them all.
The Books of Ecclesiastes and the Canticles — the Song of Songs — contain nothing that was not Solomon's, except the titles or inscriptions. For "The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King in Jerusalem," and "the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," seem to have been added for the sake of distinguishing the books later, when the books of Scripture were gathered into one body of the law — so that not only the doctrine but the authors too would be on record.
Of the prophets, the most ancient are Zephaniah, Jonah, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, who lived in the time of Amaziah and Azariah — also called Uzziah — kings of Judah. But the Book of Jonah is not properly a record of his prophecy — his whole prophecy comes down to these few words: "Fourty dayes and Ninivy shall be destroyed" — but rather a history, a narrative, of his stubbornness in disputing God's commands. So it is hardly likely that Jonah is its author, since he is its subject. The Book of Amos, on the other hand, is his prophecy.
Jeremiah, Obadiah, Nahum, and Habakkuk prophesied in the time of Josiah.
Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, and Zechariah prophesied during the captivity.
When Joel and Malachi prophesied is not evident from their writings. But considering the inscriptions, or titles, of their books, this much is plain enough: the whole Scripture of the Old Testament was set forth in the form we now have it after the return of the Jews from their captivity in Babylon, and before the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who had it translated into Greek by the seventy men sent to him out of Judea for that purpose.
And if the books of the Apocrypha — which the Church commends to us not as canonical, but as profitable for our instruction — may be believed on this point, then Scripture was set forth in its present form by Esdras, that is, Ezra. This appears from what he himself says in the second book (2 Esdras 14:21-22 and following), where, speaking to God, he says: "Thy law is burnt; therefore no man knoweth the things which thou hast done, or the works that are to begin. But if I have found Grace before thee, send down the holy Spirit into me, and I shall write all that hath been done in the world, since the beginning, which were written in thy Law, that men may find thy path, and that they which will live in the later days, may live." And at verse 45: "And it came to passe when the forty dayes were fulfilled, that the Highest spake, saying, 'The first that thou hast written, publish openly, that the worthy and unworthy may read it; but keep the seventy last, that thou mayst deliver them onely to such as be wise among the people.'" And so much for the time when the books of the Old Testament were written.
The writers of the New Testament all lived within less than a generation after Christ's ascension, and all of them had seen our Savior or been his disciples — except St. Paul and St. Luke. Consequently, whatever they wrote is as ancient as the time of the apostles themselves. But the time when the books of the New Testament were received and acknowledged by the Church as their writing is not nearly so ancient. For just as the books of the Old Testament come down to us from no earlier a time than that of Ezra — who, by the direction of God's Spirit, restored them when they were lost — so the books of the New Testament, of which the copies were few and could not easily all be in any one private man's hands, cannot be traced back to any earlier time than when the governors of the Church collected, approved, and recommended them to us as the writings of those apostles and disciples whose names they bear.
The first complete list of all the books of both the Old and New Testaments appears in the Canons of the Apostles, supposedly collected by Clement, the first Bishop of Rome after St. Peter. But because that attribution is only supposed, and questioned by many, the Council of Laodicea is the first we know of that recommended the Bible to the Christian churches of the day as the writings of the prophets and apostles — and that council was held in the year 364 after Christ.
By that time, ambition had so far gotten the better of the great doctors of the Church that they no longer regarded emperors, even Christian ones, as the shepherds of the people, but as sheep — and non-Christian emperors as wolves. They worked to pass off their doctrine not as counsel and information, the way preachers should, but as laws, the way absolute governors do; and they thought pious any fraud that tended to make people more obedient to Christian doctrine. Yet even so, I am persuaded they did not falsify the Scriptures. The copies of the New Testament books were in the hands of the churchmen alone — and if they had intended to corrupt them, they would surely have made them more favorable to their own power over Christian princes and civil sovereignty than they actually are. I see no reason, therefore, to doubt that the Old and New Testaments, as we now have them, are the true registers of the things done and said by the prophets and apostles.
And the same may be true of some of the books called Apocrypha — if they were left out of the canon not because their doctrine conflicts with the rest, but only because they are not found in Hebrew. For after the conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great, there were few learned Jews who were not fluent in Greek. The seventy interpreters who turned the Bible into Greek were all Hebrews; and we still have the works of Philo and Josephus, both Jews, written by them eloquently in Greek. But in the end, it is not the writer that makes a book canonical — it is the authority of the Church.
Although these books were written by many different men, it is plain that the writers were all filled with one and the same Spirit, because they all work together toward one and the same end: setting forth the rights of the kingdom of God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
The Book of Genesis traces the genealogy of God's people from the creation of the world to the going into Egypt. The other four books of Moses contain the election of God as their king and the laws he prescribed for their government. The books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Samuel, up to the time of Saul, describe the acts of God's people until the time they cast off God's yoke and demanded a king, after the manner of their neighbor nations. The rest of the Old Testament history traces the succession of the line of David down to the captivity — the line from which would spring the restorer of the kingdom of God, our blessed Savior, God the Son, whose coming was foretold in the books of the prophets. After him, the evangelists wrote his life and actions and his claim to the kingdom during the time he lived on earth. And lastly, the Acts and the Epistles of the apostles declare the coming of God the Holy Ghost, and the authority he left with the apostles and their successors, for the direction of the Jews and the invitation of the Gentiles.
In sum: the histories and prophecies of the Old Testament, and the Gospels and Epistles of the New, have all had one and the same scope — to convert men to the obedience of God: first, in Moses and the priests; second, in the man Christ; and third, in the apostles and the successors to apostolic power. For these three, at different times, represented the person of God: Moses and his successors, the high priests and kings of Judah, in the Old Testament; Christ himself, during the time he lived on earth; and the apostles and their successors, from the day of Pentecost (when the Holy Ghost descended on them) to this day.
There is a question much disputed among the various sects of the Christian religion: from where do the Scriptures derive their authority? The question is sometimes put in other terms — how do we know them to be the word of God? or, why do we believe them to be so? And the difficulty of answering it comes mainly from the sloppy wording of the question itself.
For it is believed on all hands that the first and original author of the Scriptures is God; so that is not the point in dispute. Again, it is obvious that no one can know they are God's word — though all true Christians believe it — except those to whom God himself has revealed it supernaturally; so the question is wrongly framed as a question of our knowledge. Lastly, if the question is framed as one of our belief, then — since some are moved to believe for one reason and others for other reasons — no single general answer can serve for them all.
The question, truly stated, is this: by what authority are they made law?
So far as the Scriptures do not differ from the laws of nature, there is no doubt that they are the law of God, and they carry their authority with them, legible to every man who has the use of natural reason. But this is no other authority than that of all other moral doctrine consonant with reason — whose dictates are laws not made, but eternal.
If they are made law by God himself, then they are of the nature of written law, and written laws are laws only to those to whom God has published them sufficiently — so sufficiently that no man can excuse himself by saying he did not know they were his.
Therefore, a man to whom God has not supernaturally revealed that these writings are his, nor that those who published them were sent by him, is not obliged to obey them by any authority except the authority of him whose commands already have the force of laws — that is to say, by no other authority than that of the commonwealth, residing in the sovereign, who alone has the legislative power.
Consider the alternative. If it is not the legislative authority of the commonwealth that gives the Scriptures the force of laws, it must be some other authority derived from God, either private or public.
If private, it obliges only the particular man to whom God has been pleased to reveal it. For suppose every man were obliged to accept as God's law whatever particular men, claiming private inspiration or revelation, chose to press upon him — and consider how many men there are who, out of pride and ignorance, take their own dreams, wild fancies, and madness for testimonies of God's Spirit, or who, out of ambition, claim such divine testimony falsely and against their own consciences. It would be impossible for any divine law to be acknowledged at all.
If public, then it is the authority either of the commonwealth or of the Church. But the Church, if it is one person, is the same thing as a commonwealth of Christians — called a commonwealth because it consists of men united in one person, their sovereign, and called a Church because it consists of Christian men united in one Christian sovereign. And if the Church is not one person, then it has no authority at all. It can neither command nor perform any action whatsoever; it is incapable of having any power or right to anything; it has no will, no reason, no voice — for all these qualities belong to a person. So if the whole number of Christians is not contained in one commonwealth, they are not one person, and there is no universal Church with any authority over them; and therefore the Scriptures are not made laws by a universal Church. And if Christendom is one commonwealth, then all Christian monarchs and states are private persons, subject to being judged, deposed, and punished by a universal sovereign of all Christendom.
So the question of the authority of the Scriptures comes down to this: whether Christian kings, and the sovereign assemblies in Christian commonwealths, are absolute in their own territories, immediately under God — or subject to one Vicar of Christ, set over the universal Church, to be judged, condemned, deposed, and put to death as he judges expedient or necessary for the common good.
This question cannot be resolved without a more particular consideration of the kingdom of God — and from the kingdom of God we must also judge the authority to interpret Scripture. For whoever has a lawful power over any writing, to make it law, has also the power to approve or disapprove any interpretation of it.
The foundation of all true reasoning is the constant meaning of words. And in the doctrine that follows, that meaning does not depend (as in natural science) on the will of the writer, nor (as in everyday conversation) on common usage, but on the sense the words carry in Scripture. So before I go any further, I need to determine, out of the Bible itself, the meaning of certain words whose ambiguity could make whatever I build on them obscure or open to dispute. I will begin with the words BODY and SPIRIT — which in the language of the Scholastics are called "corporeal substance" and "incorporeal substance."
The word "body," in its most general sense, means that which fills or occupies some definite space, or imagined place; something that does not depend on our imagination, but is a real part of what we call the universe. For since the universe is the sum of all bodies, there is no real part of it that is not also a body, and nothing is properly a body that is not also part of that sum of all bodies, the universe. And because bodies are subject to change — that is, to appearing differently to the senses of living creatures — a body is also called a substance, meaning a subject of various properties: sometimes moving, sometimes standing still; seeming to our senses sometimes hot, sometimes cold; now one color, smell, taste, or sound, now another. This diversity of seeming, produced by the different ways bodies act on the organs of our senses, we attribute to alterations in the bodies that act on us, and we call these their "accidents" — their changing properties. Taken this way, "substance" and "body" mean the same thing. And therefore "incorporeal substance" is a pair of words that, when joined together, destroy each other — as if a man were to say "an incorporeal body."
But ordinary people do not call the whole universe "body" — only those parts of it they can detect by touch, resisting their force, or by sight, blocking their view of what lies beyond. So in common speech, air and airy substances are usually not counted as bodies. Instead, whenever people notice their effects, they call them wind, or breath, or (because the Latin word for these is spiritus) spirits — as when they call the airy substance that gives life and motion to the body of a living creature its "vital and animal spirits." As for those idols of the brain that show us bodies where no bodies are — in a mirror, in a dream, or to a fevered brain awake — they are (as the Apostle says of all idols generally) nothing. Nothing at all, I say, in the place where they seem to be; and in the brain itself, nothing but commotion, arising either from the action of external objects or from the disordered agitation of our organs of sense. People too busy to search into the causes of these things do not know, on their own, what to call them. So they are easily persuaded by those whose learning they revere: some to call them bodies, and to think them made of air compacted by supernatural power, because sight judges them to be solid; others to call them spirits, because touch finds nothing in the place where they appear to resist the fingers. So the proper meaning of "spirit" in common speech is either a subtle, fluid, invisible body, or else a ghost — some other idol or phantasm of the imagination. Beyond that, the word has many metaphorical meanings. Sometimes it stands for a disposition or inclination of the mind: the disposition to contradict what other men say is "a spirit of contradiction"; a disposition to uncleanness, "an unclean spirit"; perverseness, "a froward spirit"; sullenness, "a dumb spirit"; and an inclination to godliness and God's service, "the Spirit of God." Sometimes it stands for some exceptional ability, or extraordinary passion, or disease of the mind — as when great wisdom is called "the spirit of wisdom," and madmen are said to be "possessed with a spirit."
I find no other meaning of "spirit" anywhere. And where none of these meanings can make sense of the word in Scripture, the passage simply lies beyond human understanding, and our faith in it consists not in our opinion but in our submission — as in all the places where God is said to be a spirit, or where "the Spirit of God" means God himself. For the nature of God is incomprehensible: we understand nothing of what he is, only that he is. And therefore the attributes we give him are not meant to tell one another what he is, nor to express our opinion of his nature, but to express our desire to honor him with the names we count most honorable among ourselves.
Genesis 1:2 — "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Here, if "the Spirit of God" meant God himself, then motion would be attributed to God, and consequently place — and motion and place are intelligible only of bodies, not of "incorporeal substances." In that case the passage is beyond our understanding; for we can conceive of nothing that moves without changing place, or that has no dimension, and whatever has dimension is body. But the meaning of these words is best understood from a similar passage, Genesis 8:1. When the earth was covered with water, as in the beginning, and God intended to make the waters recede and uncover the dry land again, he uses similar words: "I will bring my Spirit upon the earth, and the waters shall be diminished." There, "Spirit" means a wind — that is, air, or spirit, in motion — which might well be called (as in the earlier passage) the Spirit of God, because it was God's work.
Genesis 41:38 — Pharaoh calls the wisdom of Joseph "the Spirit of God." Joseph having advised him to find a wise and discreet man and set him over the land of Egypt, Pharaoh says: "Can we find such a man as this, in whom is the Spirit of God?" And in Exodus 28:3, God says, "You shall speak to all who are wise-hearted, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, to make Aaron garments, to consecrate him." Here extraordinary skill — even though only in making garments — is called the Spirit of God, because it is the gift of God. The same usage appears again in Exodus 31:3-6 and 35:31. And in Isaiah 11:2-3, the prophet, speaking of the Messiah, says: "The Spirit of the Lord shall abide upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and fortitude, and the spirit of the fear of the Lord." Plainly this does not mean so many ghosts, but so many eminent graces that God would give him.
In the Book of Judges, an extraordinary zeal and courage in defense of God's people is called the Spirit of God — as when it stirred Othniel, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson to deliver them from servitude (Judges 3:10, 6:34, 11:29, 13:25, 14:6, 19). And of Saul, on the news of the Ammonites' outrage against the men of Jabesh-Gilead, it is said (1 Samuel 11:6) that "the Spirit of God came upon Saul, and his anger" (or, as the Latin has it, his fury) "was kindled greatly." It is not likely that a ghost is meant here, but an extraordinary zeal to punish the cruelty of the Ammonites. In the same way, the Spirit of God that came upon Saul when he was among the prophets praising God with songs and music (1 Samuel 19:20) should be understood not as a ghost, but as an unexpected and sudden zeal to join them in their devotions.
The false prophet Zedekiah says to Micaiah (1 Kings 22:24), "Which way did the Spirit of the Lord go from me to speak to you?" This cannot be understood of a ghost; for Micaiah had declared the outcome of the battle to the kings of Israel and Judah as something seen in a vision, not as something a spirit spoke inside him.
In the same way it appears throughout the books of the prophets that although they spoke "by the Spirit of God" — that is, by a special grace of prediction — their knowledge of the future came not from a ghost within them, but from some supernatural dream or vision.
Genesis 2:7 says, "God made man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils (spiraculum vitae — the breath of life) the breath of life, and man became a living soul." There, the breath of life breathed in by God means nothing more than that God gave him life. And Job 27:3, "as long as the Spirit of God is in my nostrils," means nothing more than "as long as I live." So in Ezekiel 1:20, "the spirit of life was in the wheels" is equivalent to "the wheels were alive." And in Ezekiel 2:30, "the spirit entered into me, and set me on my feet" means "I recovered my vital strength" — not that any ghost or incorporeal substance entered into his body and possessed it.
In Numbers 11:17, God says, "I will take of the spirit which is upon you, and will put it upon them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with you" — meaning the seventy elders. Then two of the seventy are said to have prophesied in the camp; some complained about it, and Joshua asked Moses to forbid them, which Moses would not do. From this it appears that Joshua did not know they had received authority to prophesy — and that they prophesied according to the mind of Moses; that is, by a spirit, or authority, subordinate to his own.
In the same sense we read (Deuteronomy 34:9) that "Joshua was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands upon him" — that is, because Moses had ordained him to carry forward the work he himself had begun (bringing God's people into the promised land) but, cut short by death, could not finish.
In the same sense it is said (Romans 8:9), "If any man does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his" — meaning not the ghost of Christ, but submission to his doctrine. So also 1 John 4:2: "By this you shall know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God." What is meant is the spirit of unfeigned Christianity — submission to the central article of Christian faith, that Jesus is the Christ — which cannot be interpreted as a ghost.
Likewise the words of Luke 4:1, "And Jesus, full of the Holy Ghost" (that is, as Matthew 4:1 and Mark 1:12 express it, "of the Holy Spirit"), may be understood as zeal to do the work for which he was sent by God the Father. But to interpret it as a ghost is to say that God himself (for so our Savior was) was filled with God — which is improper and meaningless. How we ever came to translate "spirits" by the word "ghosts" — a word that signifies nothing, in heaven or on earth, except the imaginary inhabitants of man's brain — I will not examine. But this I do say: the word "spirit" in the text means no such thing. It means either, properly, a real substance, or, metaphorically, some extraordinary ability or passion of the mind or of the body.
The disciples of Christ, seeing him walk on the sea (Matthew 14:26 and Mark 6:49), supposed him to be a spirit — meaning by that an airy body, not a phantasm. For it is said that they all saw him, which cannot be true of delusions of the brain (those are not common to many people at once, the way visible bodies are, but private to each, because everyone's imagination differs); it can be true only of bodies. The same applies where the same apostles took him for a spirit (Luke 24:3, 7). So also in Acts 12:15: when St. Peter was delivered out of prison and no one would believe it, and the servant girl said he was at the door, they said, "It is his angel." By that they must have meant a corporeal substance — or else we must say the disciples themselves followed the common opinion of both Jews and Gentiles that some such apparitions were not imaginary but real, things that did not need a man's imagination in order to exist. The Jews called these "spirits" and "angels," good or bad — just as the Greeks called the same things "demons." And some such apparitions may indeed be real and substantial: that is, subtle bodies, which God can form by the same power by which he formed all things, and can use as ministers and messengers — that is to say, angels — to declare his will and carry it out when he pleases, in an extraordinary and supernatural way. But once he has formed them, they are substances endowed with dimension; they take up room and can be moved from place to place, which is the distinctive mark of bodies. Therefore they are not incorporeal ghosts — that is, ghosts that are in no place; that is, that are nowhere; that is, that seeming to be something, are nothing. But if "corporeal" is taken in the most common sense, for substances perceptible by our external senses, then an "incorporeal substance" is something not imaginary but real: namely, a thin, invisible substance, but one that has the same dimensions found in grosser bodies.
The name ANGEL signifies, in general, a messenger — and most often, a messenger of God. And "a messenger of God" means anything that makes known his extraordinary presence: that is, an extraordinary manifestation of his power, especially by a dream or vision.
Concerning the creation of angels, Scripture delivers nothing at all. That they are spirits is often repeated; but by the name of "spirit" is meant — in Scripture and in common speech alike, among Jews and Gentiles alike — sometimes thin bodies, like the air, the wind, or the vital and animal spirits of living creatures; and sometimes the images that rise in the imagination in dreams and visions, which are not real substances but accidents of the brain. Yet when God raises such images supernaturally, to signify his will, it is not improper to call them God's messengers — that is to say, his angels.
The Gentiles commonly mistook the imagery of the brain for things really existing outside them, independent of imagination, and out of those images they built their opinions of demons, good and evil — which, because they seemed to exist on their own, they called substances, and because they could not feel them with their hands, incorporeal. In just the same way the Jews, on the same grounds — with nothing in the Old Testament compelling them to it — held the general opinion (the sect of the Sadducees excepted) that those apparitions, which it pleased God sometimes to produce in men's imaginations for his own service (and which he therefore called his angels), were substances independent of the imagination: permanent creatures of God. Those they thought favorable to them they esteemed the angels of God; those they thought would hurt them they called evil angels, or evil spirits — such as the spirit of Python, and the spirits of madmen, of lunatics, and of epileptics. For they considered anyone troubled with such diseases to be possessed by demons.
But if we examine the places in the Old Testament where angels are mentioned, we will find that in most of them nothing can be understood by the word "angel" except some image raised, supernaturally, in the imagination, to signify the presence of God in the performance of some supernatural work. And therefore in the remaining places, where the angels' nature is not spelled out, it may be understood the same way.
For we read in Genesis 16 that the same apparition is called not only an angel but God: what verse 7 calls "the angel of the Lord" says to Hagar in verse 10, "I will multiply your descendants exceedingly" — that is, it speaks in the person of God. And this apparition was not even a visible figure, but a voice. From this it is plain that "angel" there signifies nothing but God himself, who caused Hagar, supernaturally, to apprehend a supernatural voice testifying to God's special presence there. Why, then, should the angels that appeared to Lot — who are called "men" in Genesis 19:13, and whom Lot, though they were two, addresses (verse 18) as one, and that one as God (for the words are, "Lot said to them, Oh, not so, my Lord") — not be understood as images of men supernaturally formed in the imagination, just as before, by "angel," a fancied voice was understood? When the angel called to Abraham from heaven to stay his hand from slaying Isaac (Genesis 22:11), there was no apparition at all, only a voice — which was nevertheless properly enough called a messenger, or angel, of God, because it declared God's will supernaturally; and this spares us the trouble of supposing any permanent ghosts. The angels Jacob saw on the ladder of heaven (Genesis 28:12) were a vision of his sleep — therefore only imagination, and a dream; yet because they were supernatural, and signs of God's special presence, those apparitions are not improperly called angels. The same is to be understood in Genesis 31:11, where Jacob says, "The angel of the Lord appeared to me in my sleep." For an apparition made to a man in his sleep is what all men call a dream, whether the dream is natural or supernatural. And what Jacob there calls an angel was God himself; for the same angel says (verse 13), "I am the God of Bethel."
So too in Exodus 14:9: the angel that went before the army of Israel to the Red Sea, and then moved behind it, is (verse 19) the Lord himself. And he appeared not in the form of a beautiful man, but by day in the form of a pillar of cloud and by night in the form of a pillar of fire; and yet this pillar was the entire apparition — the whole angel promised to Moses (Exodus 14:9) to guide the army. For this cloudy pillar is said to have descended, and stood at the door of the Tabernacle, and talked with Moses.
There you see motion and speech — the things commonly attributed to angels — attributed to a cloud, because the cloud served as a sign of God's presence; and it was no less an angel than if it had had the form of a man, or of a child of the greatest imaginable beauty, or wings, as angels are usually painted, for the false instruction of common people. For it is not their shape but their use that makes them angels: and their use is to be signs of God's presence in supernatural operations. So when Moses (Exodus 33:14) asked God to go along with the camp, as he had always done before the making of the golden calf, God did not answer "I will go," nor "I will send an angel in my place," but this: "My presence shall go with you."
To list every place in the Old Testament where the name "angel" occurs would take too long. So, to cover them all at once, I say this: there is no text in that part of the Old Testament which the Church of England holds canonical from which we can conclude that there is, or ever has been created, any permanent thing — understood by the name of spirit or angel — that does not have quantity; that cannot be divided by the understanding, that is, considered in parts, so that one part is in one place and the next part in the next place; and, in sum, that is not (taking "body" for whatever is something, or somewhere) corporeal. In every such place, the sense will bear the interpretation of "angel" as "messenger" — just as John the Baptist is called an angel, and Christ the Angel of the Covenant; and just as (by the same analogy) the dove and the fiery tongues, being signs of God's special presence, might also be called angels. We do find in Daniel two names of angels, Gabriel and Michael. But it is clear from the text itself (Daniel 12:1) that by Michael is meant Christ — not as an angel, but as a prince; and that Gabriel (like the similar apparitions made to other holy men in their sleep) was nothing but a supernatural phantasm, by which it seemed to Daniel, in his dream, that two saints were talking, and one of them said to the other, "Gabriel, let us make this man understand his vision." For God has no need to distinguish his celestial servants by names, which are useful only to the short memories of mortals. Nor is there any place in the New Testament from which it can be proved that angels — except where the word stands for those men whom God has made the messengers and ministers of his word or works — are things both permanent and incorporeal. That they are permanent may be gathered from the words of our Savior himself (Matthew 25:41), where he says it shall be said to the wicked on the last day, "Go, you cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the Devil and his angels." This passage is clear evidence for the permanence of evil angels (unless we suppose that "the Devil and his angels" may be understood as the Church's adversaries and their ministers) — but then it is incompatible with their immateriality, because everlasting fire is no punishment to substances incapable of suffering, as all incorporeal things would be. Angels, therefore, are not proved incorporeal from that text. Likewise where St. Paul says (1 Corinthians 6:3), "Do you not know that we shall judge the angels?" and 2 Peter 2:4, "For if God did not spare the angels that sinned, but cast them down into hell," and Jude 1:6, "And the angels that did not keep their first estate, but left their own habitation, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness until the judgment of the last day" — though these prove the permanence of angelic nature, they also confirm its materiality. And Matthew 22:30: "In the resurrection men neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." But in the resurrection men will be permanent and not incorporeal; so, therefore, are the angels.
There are various other passages from which the same conclusion can be drawn. To anyone who understands what the words "substance" and "incorporeal" signify — taking "incorporeal" to mean not a subtle body, but no body at all — they imply a contradiction: so that to say an angel or spirit is, in that sense, an incorporeal substance is in effect to say there is no angel or spirit at all. Considering, therefore, what the word "angel" signifies in the Old Testament, and the nature of dreams and visions that come to men in the ordinary course of nature, I was inclined to this opinion: that angels were nothing but supernatural apparitions of the imagination, raised by the special and extraordinary operation of God, to make his presence and his commandments known to mankind, and chiefly to his own people. But the many passages of the New Testament, and our Savior's own words — in texts where there is no suspicion that the Scripture has been corrupted — have extorted from my feeble reason an acknowledgment and belief that there are also angels that are substantial and permanent. But to believe they are in no place — that is to say, nowhere; that is to say, nothing — as those who insist they are incorporeal (though indirectly) do say, cannot be proved from Scripture.
On the meaning of the word "spirit" depends the meaning of the word INSPIRATION. Taken properly, inspiration is nothing but the blowing into a man of some thin and subtle air or wind, the way a man fills a bladder with his breath. Or, if spirits are not corporeal but exist only in the imagination, then it is the blowing in of a phantasm — which is improper to say, and impossible, for phantasms do not exist; they only seem to be something. The word, therefore, is used in Scripture only metaphorically. When it is said (Genesis 2:7) that God inspired into man the breath of life, nothing more is meant than that God gave him vital motion. We are not to think that God first made a living breath and then blew it into Adam after he was made — whether that breath was real or only apparent — but only, as Acts 17:25 puts it, "that he gave him life and breath": that is, made him a living creature. And when it is said (2 Timothy 3:16) that "all Scripture is given by inspiration from God" — speaking there of the Scripture of the Old Testament — it is an easy metaphor, signifying that God inclined the spirit, or mind, of those writers to write what would be useful for teaching, reproving, correcting, and instructing men in the way of righteous living. But where St. Peter (2 Peter 1:21) says that "prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit," by "the Holy Spirit" is meant the voice of God in a dream or supernatural vision — which is not inspiration. Nor, when our Savior breathed on his disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit," was that breath the Spirit; it was a sign of the spiritual graces he gave to them. And though it is said of many, and of our Savior himself, that he was "full of the Holy Spirit," that fullness is not to be understood as an infusion of the substance of God, but as an accumulation of his gifts — such as the gift of holiness of life, of tongues, and the like — whether attained supernaturally or by study and hard work; for in every case they are the gifts of God. So likewise where God says (Joel 2:28), "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions," we are not to take this in the literal sense, as if his Spirit were like water, subject to pouring out or pouring in; rather, it is as if God had promised to give them prophetic dreams and visions. For the strict use of the word "infused," in speaking of the graces of God, is an abuse of the word; those graces are virtues, not bodies to be carried here and there and poured into men as into barrels.
In the same way, to take "inspiration" in its literal sense — to say that good spirits entered into men to make them prophesy, or evil spirits into those who became frenzied, lunatic, or epileptic — is not to take the word as Scripture uses it. For "the Spirit" there stands for the power of God, working by causes unknown to us. So too the wind (Acts 2:2) that is said to fill the house where the apostles were assembled on the day of Pentecost is not to be understood as the Holy Spirit, which is the Deity itself, but as an external sign of God's special working on their hearts — working to produce in them the internal graces and holy virtues he thought necessary for the performance of their apostleship.
When theologians write about the kingdom of God — especially in sermons and devotional books — they almost always mean one of two things. Usually they mean eternal happiness after this life, up in the highest heaven, which they also call the kingdom of glory. Sometimes they mean the down payment on that happiness — sanctification — which they call the kingdom of grace. What they never mean is a monarchy: that is, the sovereign power of God over actual subjects, acquired by those subjects' own consent. And yet that is the proper meaning of the word kingdom.
I find the opposite. In most places where Scripture uses the phrase, the KINGDOM OF GOD means a kingdom properly so called — a real one, established by the votes of the people of Israel in a special way. They chose God as their king by a covenant made with him, and God, for his part, promised them possession of the land of Canaan. Only rarely is the phrase used metaphorically, and then it means dominion over sin — and that only in the New Testament. The metaphor works because every subject will have that kind of dominion in the kingdom of God, without taking anything away from the sovereign.
From the very creation, God did not only reign over all mankind naturally, by his might. He also had special subjects, whom he commanded by a voice, the way one man speaks to another. That is how he reigned over Adam, commanding him not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Adam disobeyed — when he tasted the fruit and took it upon himself to play God, judging between good and evil not by his Creator's commandment but by his own sense of things — his punishment was to lose the state of eternal life in which God had first created him. Afterward God punished Adam's descendants for their vices with a universal flood, sparing only eight persons. And in those eight, at that time, the kingdom of God consisted.
After this, it pleased God to speak to Abraham and to make a covenant with him (Genesis 17:7-8) in these words: "I will establish my covenant between me and thee, and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee; and I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession." And as a memorial and a token of this covenant, God ordained (verse 11) the sacrament of circumcision.
This is what is called the Old Covenant, or Old Testament. It contains a contract between God and Abraham, by which Abraham binds himself and his descendants, in a special way, to be subject to God's positive law — the law God explicitly lays down. To the moral law he was bound already, as by an oath of allegiance. And though the name of king is not yet given to God here, nor the name of kingdom to Abraham and his seed, the thing itself is the same: an institution, by pact, of God's special sovereignty over the descendants of Abraham. When Moses renewed this same covenant at Mount Sinai, it was expressly called a peculiar kingdom of God over the Jews. And it is of Abraham — not of Moses — that St. Paul says (Romans 4:11) that he is "the father of the faithful." That is, the father of those who are loyal, and do not violate the allegiance they swore to God — sworn then by circumcision, and afterward, in the New Covenant, by baptism.
This covenant was renewed by Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:5), where the Lord commands Moses to speak to the people this way: "If you will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar people to me, for all the earth is mine; and ye shall be unto me a sacerdotal kingdom, and an holy nation."
Take that phrase "peculiar people." The Latin Vulgate has peculium de cunctis populis — "a private treasure out of all the peoples." The English translation made at the start of King James's reign has "a peculiar treasure unto me above all nations," and the Geneva French has "the most precious jewel of all nations." But the truest translation is the first one, and St. Paul himself confirms it (Titus 2:14) when, alluding to this very passage, he says that our blessed Savior "gave himself for us, that he might purify us to himself, a peculiar (that is, an extraordinary) people." The Greek word there is periousios, which is commonly set against the word epiousios. Epiousios means ordinary, everyday — as in the Lord's Prayer, where it describes our "daily" bread. Periousios means the opposite: something extra, stored up, enjoyed in a special manner — what the Latins call a peculium, a private treasure. And this reading is confirmed by the reason God gives immediately afterward, when he adds, "For all the earth is mine." It is as if he had said: "All the nations of the world are mine — but not the way you are mine. They are all mine by reason of my power. But you shall be mine by your own consent and covenant." That is something added on top of his ordinary title to all nations.
The same text confirms the point again, in express words: "Ye shall be to me a sacerdotal kingdom, and an holy nation." The Vulgate has regnum sacerdotale — a priestly kingdom — which matches the translation of 1 Peter 2:9, sacerdotium regale, a royal priesthood. It also matches the institution itself, under which no man could enter the Sanctum Sanctorum — the Holy of Holies — which is to say, no man could inquire God's will directly from God himself, except the High Priest alone. The English translation mentioned above, following Geneva, has "a kingdom of priests." Either that means the succession of one High Priest after another, or it contradicts both St. Peter and the actual practice of the high priesthood. For there was never anyone but the High Priest alone whose job it was to inform the people of God's will; and no assembly of priests was ever allowed into the Sanctum Sanctorum.
The title "holy nation" confirms the same thing. For holy means what belongs to God by special right, not by general right. All the earth, as the text says, is God's; but all the earth is not called holy. Only that is holy which is set apart for his special service, as the nation of the Jews was. So this one passage is evidence enough that by the kingdom of God is properly meant a commonwealth — instituted, by the consent of those who were to be its subjects, for their civil government and the regulation of their behavior: not only toward God their king, but toward one another in matters of justice, and toward other nations in both peace and war. It was, properly, a kingdom in which God was king, and in which the High Priest, after the death of Moses, was to be his sole viceroy or lieutenant.
But many other passages clearly prove the same thing. First (1 Samuel 8:7): when the elders of Israel, fed up with the corruption of Samuel's sons, demanded a king, Samuel was displeased and prayed to the Lord. And the Lord answered him: "Hearken unto the voice of the people, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them." From this it is evident that God himself was their king at that time, and that Samuel did not command the people — he only delivered to them what God appointed him to deliver, from time to time.
Again (1 Samuel 12:12), Samuel says to the people: "When ye saw that Nahash, king of the children of Ammon, came against you, ye said unto me, Nay, but a king shall reign over us — when the Lord your God was your king." It is plain that God was their king, and governed the civil state of their commonwealth.
And after the Israelites had rejected God, the prophets foretold his restoration. Isaiah (24:23): "Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion, and in Jerusalem" — where he speaks expressly of God's reign in Zion and Jerusalem; that is, on earth. And Micah (4:7): "And the Lord shall reign over them in Mount Zion" — and Mount Zion is in Jerusalem, on the earth. And Ezekiel (20:33): "As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand, and a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out, I will rule over you"; and (verse 37) "I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant." That is: I will reign over you, and make you stand to the covenant you made with me through Moses — the covenant you broke in your rebellion against me in the days of Samuel, when you elected another king.
And in the New Testament, the angel Gabriel says of our Savior (Luke 1:32-33): "He shall be great, and be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord shall give him the throne of his father David; and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end." This too is a kingdom on earth. It was for claiming this kingdom, as an enemy of Caesar, that he was put to death. The title on his cross was "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." He was crowned, in mockery, with a crown of thorns. And for proclaiming him, it is said of the disciples (Acts 17:7) "that they did all of them contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there was another king, one Jesus."
The kingdom of God, therefore, is a real kingdom, not a metaphorical one — and it is taken that way not only in the Old Testament but in the New. When we say, "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory," we mean God's kingdom by force of our covenant, not by the right of God's power. A kingdom of the second sort God always has, so it would be pointless to pray "Thy kingdom come" — unless we mean the restoration of that kingdom of God which Christ will bring, the kingdom that was interrupted when the Israelites revolted and elected Saul. Nor would it have made sense to announce "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," or to pray "Thy kingdom come," if that kingdom had still been standing.
There are so many other passages confirming this interpretation that it would be a wonder no more notice is taken of it — except that it sheds too much light on the right of Christian kings to govern the church, and certain people have noticed that. That is why, instead of "a sacerdotal kingdom," they translate "a kingdom of priests" — by the same logic they might translate St. Peter's "royal priesthood" into "a priesthood of kings." And where the text has "a peculiar people," they put "a precious jewel" or "treasure" — by which standard a man might as well call a general's special regiment, or his own company, the general's precious jewel, or his treasure.
In short: the kingdom of God is a civil kingdom. It consisted, first, in the obligation of the people of Israel to the laws Moses would bring them from Mount Sinai — and which afterward the High Priest of the day was to deliver to them from before the cherubim in the Sanctum Sanctorum. This kingdom was cast off in the election of Saul. The prophets foretold it would be restored by Christ. Its restoration is what we pray for daily when we say in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy kingdom come." Its rightful claim is what we acknowledge when we add, "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen." Its proclamation was the preaching of the apostles; and men are prepared for it by the teachers of the Gospel. To embrace that Gospel — that is, to promise obedience to God's government — is to be in the kingdom of grace, because God has freely (gratis) given to such people the power to be subjects — that is, children — of God hereafter, when Christ comes in majesty to judge the world and actually to govern his own people. And that is what is called the kingdom of glory.
If the kingdom of God (also called the kingdom of heaven, for the gloriousness and astonishing height of that throne) were not a kingdom that God exercised on earth, through his lieutenants or vicars who deliver his commandments to the people — then there would never have been so much contention and war over the question of who it is through whom God speaks to us. No priest would have troubled himself with "spiritual jurisdiction," and no king would have bothered to deny it to him.
From this literal interpretation of the kingdom of God arises the true interpretation of the word HOLY. It is the word which, in God's kingdom, answers to what men in their own kingdoms call public, or the king's.
The king of any country is the public person, the representative of all his subjects. And God, the king of Israel, was the Holy One of Israel. The nation that is subject to one earthly sovereign is the nation of that sovereign — that is, of the public person. So the Jews, who were God's nation, were called (Exodus 19:6) "a holy nation." By holy is always understood either God himself, or that which is God's own property; just as by public is always meant either the person of the commonwealth itself, or something that belongs to the commonwealth in such a way that no private person can claim any property in it.
That is why the Sabbath — God's day — is a holy day; the Temple — God's house — a holy house; sacrifices, tithes, and offerings — God's tribute — holy duties; priests, prophets, and anointed kings under Christ — God's ministers — holy men; the celestial ministering spirits — God's messengers — holy angels; and so on. Wherever the word holy is taken properly, there is always something implied about ownership, acquired by consent. When we say "Hallowed be thy name," we are simply praying to God for grace to keep the first commandment: to have no other gods but him. Mankind is God's nation by right of ownership — but only the Jews were a holy nation. Why? Because they became his property by covenant.
The word profane is usually used in Scripture to mean the same as common; and so their opposites — holy and proper, one's own — must, in the kingdom of God, mean the same as each other too. Figuratively, it is true, men are also called holy who led such godly lives that they seemed to have abandoned all worldly ambitions and devoted themselves entirely to God. But in the proper sense, that which is made holy by God's appropriating it or setting it apart for his own use is said to be sanctified by God — like the seventh day in the fourth commandment, or like the elect in the New Testament, who were said to be sanctified when they were endowed with the spirit of godliness. And that which is made holy by the dedication of men — given to God so that it may be used only in his public service — is called SACRED, and is said to be consecrated: temples and other houses of public prayer, and their utensils; priests and ministers; victims, offerings, and the physical materials of the sacraments.
There are degrees of holiness. For of the things set apart for the service of God, some may be set apart again, for a nearer and more special service. The whole nation of the Israelites was a people holy to God; yet within Israel, the tribe of Levi was a holy tribe; among the Levites, the priests were holier still; and among the priests, the High Priest was the most holy. In the same way, the land of Judea was the Holy Land; but the holy city where God was to be worshipped was more holy; the Temple more holy than the city; and the Sanctum Sanctorum more holy than the rest of the Temple.
A SACRAMENT is the separation of some visible thing from common use, and its consecration to God's service, as a sign — either of our admission into the kingdom of God, to be counted among his peculiar people, or of the commemoration of that admission. In the Old Testament, the sign of admission was circumcision; in the New Testament, baptism. The commemoration of it in the Old Testament was the eating, at a fixed yearly time, of the paschal lamb, which reminded the people of the night they were delivered from their bondage in Egypt. In the New Testament it is the celebration of the Lord's Supper, which reminds us of our deliverance from the bondage of sin by our blessed Savior's death on the cross.
The sacraments of admission are used only once, because a person needs to be admitted only once. But because we need to be reminded often of our deliverance and of our allegiance, the sacraments of commemoration must be repeated. These are the principal sacraments — they are, as it were, the solemn oaths we swear of our allegiance. There are other consecrations that may be called sacraments, insofar as the word implies nothing more than consecration to God's service. But insofar as the word implies an oath, or promise of allegiance to God, there were no others in the Old Testament but circumcision and the Passover; nor are there any others in the New Testament but baptism and the Lord's Supper.
When Scripture speaks of the word of God, or the word of man, it does not mean a part of speech — what grammarians call a noun or a verb, or any single sound that signifies nothing until it is strung together with other words. It means a complete speech or discourse, by which the speaker affirms, denies, commands, promises, threatens, wishes, or asks. In this sense the right Latin term is not vocabulum — a single word — but sermo (in Greek, logos): a speech, a discourse, a saying.
Both the Words Spoken by God and the Words Concerning God Are Called God's Word in Scripture
Notice, too, that "the word of God" (or of man) can point in two different directions. Sometimes it points to the speaker — the words that God has spoken, or that a man has spoken. In this sense, when we say "the Gospel of St. Matthew," we mean that Matthew wrote it. But sometimes it points to the subject. When we read in the Bible of "the words of the days of the kings of Israel, or Judah," the meaning is that the acts done in those days were the subject of those words.
And in the Greek of the Scriptures, which keeps many Hebrew turns of phrase, "the word of God" very often means not what is spoken by God, but what is spoken concerning God and his government — that is, the doctrine of religion. So much so that logos Theou — the word of God — and theologia — theology — come to the same thing: the doctrine we usually call divinity. The following passages make this plain.
In Acts 13:46, "Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you, but seeing you put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles." What is here called the word of God was the doctrine of the Christian religion, as the context before it makes evident. And in Acts 5:20, an angel tells the apostles, "Go stand and speak in the Temple, all the words of this life." By "the words of this life" is meant the doctrine of the Gospel — as is clear from what they actually did in the Temple, expressed in the last verse of that same chapter: "Daily in the Temple, and in every house, they ceased not to teach and preach Christ Jesus." Plainly, Jesus Christ was the subject of this "word of life" — or, what is the same thing, the subject of the words of that eternal life which our Savior offered them.
Likewise in Acts 15:7 the word of God is called the word of the Gospel, because it contains the doctrine of the kingdom of Christ. The same word is called in Romans 10:8-9 the word of faith — that is, as the passage itself spells out, the doctrine of Christ come, and raised from the dead. Again, Matthew 13:19: "When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom" — that is, the doctrine of the kingdom taught by Christ. And the same word is said in Acts 12:24 "to grow and to be multiplied" — which is easy to understand of the gospel doctrine, but hard and strange to understand of the voice or speech of God. In exactly the same sense, "the doctrine of devils" (1 Timothy 4:1) does not mean words spoken by any devil, but the doctrine of the pagans concerning demons, and those phantasms which they worshipped as gods.
Considering these two senses of the WORD OF GOD as Scripture uses it, one thing is clear: in the second sense — where it means the doctrine of the Christian religion — the whole of Scripture is the word of God. In the first sense, it is not. For example, the words "I am the Lord thy God," and so on to the end of the Ten Commandments, were spoken by God to Moses; but the preface — "God spake these words and said" — must be understood as the words of the man who wrote the holy history.
The word of God taken as that which God has spoken is itself understood sometimes properly, sometimes metaphorically. Properly: the words he has spoken to his prophets. Metaphorically: his wisdom, power, and eternal decree in making the world. In this sense those fiats of Genesis 1 — "Let there be light," "Let there be a firmament," "Let us make man" — are the word of God. In the same sense it is said in John 1:3, "All things were made by it, and without it was nothing made that was made." And Hebrews 1:3, "He upholdeth all things by the word of his power" — that is, by the power of his word; that is, by his power. And Hebrews 11:3, "The worlds were framed by the word of God" — and many other places to the same effect. The Romans used the word the same way: their name Fate properly signifies "the word spoken," and carries this very sense.
Secondly, "the word of God" is sometimes put for the effect of his word — that is, for the thing itself which his word affirmed, commanded, threatened, or promised. So in Psalm 105:19, Joseph is said to have been kept in prison "till his word was come": that is, until the thing came to pass which he had foretold to Pharaoh's butler (Genesis 40:13) concerning his restoration to office. "His word was come" means the thing itself had come to pass. So also in 1 Kings 18:36, Elijah says to God, "I have done all these thy words," instead of "I have done all these things at thy word," or command. And Jeremiah 17:15, "Where is the word of the Lord?" is put for "Where is the evil he threatened?" And Ezekiel 12:28, "There shall none of my words be prolonged any more" — where by "words" are understood those things which God promised to his people. And in the New Testament, Matthew 24:35: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" — that is, there is nothing I have promised or foretold that shall not come to pass.
It is in this sense that St. John the Evangelist — and, I think, St. John only — calls our Savior himself, as he was in the flesh, the word of God. As in John 1:14, "the Word was made flesh": that is to say, the word, or promise, that Christ should come into the world. He "in the beginning was with God" — that is, it was in the purpose of God the Father to send God the Son into the world, to light men's way to eternal life; but that purpose was not put into execution, not actually made flesh, until then. So our Savior is there called "the Word" not because he was the promise, but because he was the thing promised.
Those who seize on this passage to call him "the Verb of God" only make the text more obscure. They might as well call him the Noun of God. By "noun," as by "verb," men understand nothing but a part of speech — a voice, a sound — that neither affirms, nor denies, nor commands, nor promises; it is no substance at all, bodily or spiritual, and therefore cannot be said to be either God or man. Our Savior is both.
This Word, which St. John in his Gospel says was with God, is in his first Epistle (verse 1) called "the Word of life," and in verse 2, "the eternal life, which was with the Father." So he can be called the Word in no other sense than that in which he is called eternal life — that is, "he that hath procured us eternal life" by his coming in the flesh. So also in Revelation 19:13, where the apostle, describing Christ clothed in a garment dipped in blood, says his name is "the Word of God." This is to be understood as if he had said his name was "He that was come according to the purpose of God from the beginning, and according to his word and promises delivered by the prophets." There is nothing here about the incarnation of a word, but about the incarnation of God the Son — called the Word because his incarnation was the performance of the promise. In just the same way the Holy Ghost is called "the Promise" (Acts 1:4; Luke 24:49).
There are also places in Scripture where "the word of God" signifies words that agree with reason and equity, even though they were spoken neither by a prophet nor by a holy man. Pharaoh Necho was an idolater; yet his words to the good King Josiah, sent by messengers to advise him not to oppose his march against Carchemish, are said to have proceeded from the mouth of God — and Josiah, not listening to them, was killed in the battle. You can read it in 2 Chronicles 35:21-23. It is true that the same story, as told in the first book of Esdras, has not Pharaoh but Jeremiah speaking these words to Josiah from the mouth of the Lord. But we are to credit the canonical Scripture, whatever may be written in the Apocrypha.
The word of God is likewise to be taken for the dictates of reason and equity whenever Scripture says that word is written in man's heart — as in Psalm 36:31, Jeremiah 31:33, Deuteronomy 30:11 and 14, and many similar places.
The name PROPHET signifies in Scripture sometimes a prolocutor — a spokesman, one who speaks from God to man, or from man to God. Sometimes it signifies a praedictor — a foreteller of things to come. And sometimes it signifies one who speaks incoherently, like a man out of his mind.
It is most frequently used in the sense of speaking from God to the people. In this sense Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others were prophets. In this sense the High Priest was a prophet, for he alone went into the Sanctum Sanctorum — the Holy of Holies — to inquire of God, and was to declare God's answer to the people. That is why, when Caiaphas said it was expedient that one man should die for the people, St. John says (John 11:51) that "he spake not this of himself, but being High Priest that year, he prophesied that one man should die for the nation." Those who taught the people in Christian congregations are likewise said to prophesy (1 Corinthians 14:3). And it is in this same sense that God says to Moses concerning Aaron (Exodus 4:16), "He shall be thy spokesman to the people; and he shall be to thee a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God." What is "spokesman" here is in Exodus 7:1 rendered "prophet": "See," says God, "I have made thee a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet."
In the sense of speaking from man to God, Abraham is called a prophet in Genesis 20:7, where God speaks to Abimelech in a dream: "Now therefore restore the man his wife, for he is a prophet, and shall pray for thee." From this we may also gather that the name of prophet may be given, not improperly, to those in Christian churches whose calling is to say public prayers for the congregation.
In the same sense, the prophets who came down from the high place — the hill of God — with a psaltery, a tabret, a pipe, and a harp (1 Samuel 10:5-6), with Saul among them (verse 10), are said to prophesy: they were praising God, publicly, in that manner. In the same sense Miriam is called a prophetess (Exodus 15:20). And it is to be taken the same way in 1 Corinthians 11:4-5, where St. Paul speaks of "every man that prayeth or prophesieth with his head covered" and "every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered." Prophecy in that place means nothing more than praising God in psalms and holy songs — which women might do in church, though it was not lawful for them to speak to the congregation.
And it is in this signification that the poets of the pagans, who composed hymns and other poems in honor of their gods, were called vates — prophets — as anyone versed in the books of the gentiles knows well, and as is evident in Titus 1:12, where St. Paul says of the Cretans that "a prophet of their own said, they were liars." Not that St. Paul held their poets to be prophets; he merely acknowledges that the word "prophet" was commonly used for those who celebrated the honor of God in verse.
When prophecy means prediction — the foretelling of future contingents — then the name covered not only those who were God's spokesmen and foretold to others what God had foretold to them, but also all those impostors who pretend, by the help of familiar spirits, or by superstitious divination from past events and false causes, to foretell similar events in time to come. Of these (as I have already shown in chapter 12 of this discourse) there are many kinds — men who gain more reputation for prophecy among the common sort by one chance event that can be twisted to their purpose than they can ever lose by any number of failures.
Prophecy is not an art; nor, when it is taken for prediction, is it a permanent vocation. It is an extraordinary and temporary employment from God — most often of good men, but sometimes also of the wicked. The woman of Endor, who is said to have had a familiar spirit and by it to have raised a phantasm of Samuel and foretold Saul his death, was not on that account a prophetess. She possessed no science by which she could raise such a phantasm; nor does it appear that God commanded the raising of it. God only guided that imposture to be a means of Saul's terror and discouragement — and, in consequence, of the defeat by which he fell.
As for incoherent speech: among the gentiles it was taken for one sort of prophecy, because the prophets of their oracles — intoxicated by a spirit, or vapor, from the cave of the Pythian oracle at Delphi — were for the time genuinely mad, and spoke like madmen. Out of their loose words a meaning could be made to fit any event whatsoever — the way all bodies are said to be made of materia prima, first matter, which fits anything because it is nothing in particular. And I find incoherent speech taken for prophecy in Scripture as well (1 Samuel 18:10): "And the evil spirit came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house."
Among so many significations of the word "prophet" in Scripture, the most frequent is this: one to whom God speaks immediately — directly — telling him what he is to say from God to some other man, or to the people. And here a question naturally arises: in what manner does God speak to such a prophet? Can it properly be said (some may ask) that God has voice and language, when it cannot properly be said that he has a tongue, or other organs, as a man does?
The prophet David argues, "Shall he that made the eye, not see? Or he that made the ear, not hear?" But this kind of speech is meant, not (as usually supposed) to describe God's nature, but to declare our intention to honor him. To see and to hear are honorable attributes, and may be given to God to declare — as far as our capacity can conceive it — his almighty power. But if the argument were taken in its strict and proper sense, then from God's making of all the parts of man's body one could conclude that he also uses them as we use them — and many of those uses are so unseemly that to attribute them to him would be the greatest insult in the world.
Therefore, when we read that God spoke to men immediately, we are to understand it of whatever way it may be by which God makes them understand his will. And the ways by which he does this are many, and to be sought only in Holy Scripture — where, although it is often said simply that God spoke to this or that person without declaring how, there are also many places that record the signs by which the prophets were to recognize his presence and his command. From these we may understand how he spoke to many of the rest.
In what manner God spoke to Adam and Eve, and to Cain, and to Noah, is not expressed; nor how he spoke to Abraham, until Abraham had come out of his own country to Sichem in the land of Canaan. Then (Genesis 12:7) God is said to have appeared to him. So there is one way by which God made his presence manifest: by an apparition, or vision. And again (Genesis 15:1), "The word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision" — that is to say, something appeared as a sign of God's presence, as God's messenger, to speak to him.
Again, the Lord appeared to Abraham (Genesis 18:1) by an apparition of three angels; and to Abimelech (Genesis 20:3) in a dream; to Lot (Genesis 19:1) by an apparition of two angels; and to Hagar (Genesis 21:17) by the apparition of one angel; and to Abraham again (Genesis 22:11) by the apparition of a voice from heaven; and to Isaac in the night (Genesis 26:24) — that is, in his sleep, or by dream; and to Jacob in a dream (Genesis 28:12) — that is to say, as the text itself puts it, "Jacob dreamed that he saw a ladder"; and again (Genesis 32:1) in a vision of angels; and to Moses (Exodus 3:2) in the apparition of a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. And after the time of Moses — wherever the Old Testament expresses the manner in which God spoke immediately to a man — he spoke always by a vision or by a dream: so to Gideon, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the rest of the prophets. And often in the New Testament too: to Joseph, to St. Peter, to St. Paul, and to St. John the Evangelist in the Apocalypse.
Only to Moses did he speak in a more extraordinary manner, on Mount Sinai and in the Tabernacle; and to the High Priest, in the Tabernacle and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple. Moses, and after him the High Priests, were prophets of a more eminent place and degree in God's favor; and God himself declares in express words that to other prophets he spoke in dreams and visions, but to his servant Moses in the way a man speaks to his friend. The words are these (Numbers 12:6-8): "If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known to him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all my house; with him I will speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold." And Exodus 33:11: "The Lord spake to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend."
And yet even this speaking of God to Moses was by the mediation of an angel, or angels — as appears expressly from Acts 7:35 and 53, and from Galatians 3:19 — and was therefore a vision, though a clearer vision than was given to other prophets. Consistent with this, when God says (Deuteronomy 13:1), "If there arise amongst you a prophet, or dreamer of dreams," the second phrase is only an interpretation of the first. And in Joel 2:28 — "Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions" — the word "prophesy" is again expounded by dream and vision. It was in the same manner that God spoke to Solomon, promising him wisdom, riches, and honor; for the text says (1 Kings 3:15), "And Solomon awoke, and behold, it was a dream."
So, in general, the extraordinary prophets of the Old Testament took notice of the word of God in no other way than from their dreams or visions — that is to say, from the imaginations they had in their sleep, or in an ecstasy. In every true prophet these imaginations were supernatural; in false prophets they were either natural, or faked.
The same prophets were nevertheless said to speak "by the Spirit" — as in Zechariah 7:12, where the prophet, speaking of the Jews, says, "They made their hearts hard as adamant, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of Hosts hath sent in his Spirit by the former prophets." From this it is clear that speaking by the Spirit, or by inspiration, was not some particular manner of God's speaking, distinct from vision — not when those said to speak by the Spirit were extraordinary prophets, who for every new message needed a particular new commission, which is to say a new dream or vision.
To the Supreme Prophets of Perpetual Calling, God Spoke from the Mercy Seat, in a Manner Not Expressed in Scripture
Of prophets who held the office by a perpetual calling in the Old Testament, some were supreme and some subordinate. Supreme was first Moses, and after him the High Priests, each for his own time, as long as the priesthood was royal. And after the people of the Jews had rejected God, that he should no more reign over them, those kings who submitted themselves to God's government were also his chief prophets, and the High Priest's office became ministerial — an office of service. When God was to be consulted, the priests put on the holy vestments and inquired of the Lord as the king commanded them, and they were removed from office when the king thought fit.
For King Saul (1 Samuel 13:9) commanded the burnt offering to be brought; and (1 Samuel 14:18) he commands the priest to bring the Ark near him — and then (verse 19) to let it alone, because he saw an advantage over his enemies. And in the same chapter, Saul asks counsel of God. In like manner King David, after his anointing, though before he had possession of the kingdom, is said to "enquire of the Lord" (1 Samuel 23:2) whether he should fight the Philistines at Keilah; and (verse 10) David commands the priest to bring him the ephod, to inquire whether he should stay in Keilah or not. And King Solomon (1 Kings 2:27) took the priesthood from Abiathar and gave it (verse 35) to Zadok.
Therefore Moses, and the High Priests, and the pious kings — who inquired of God on all extraordinary occasions how they were to conduct themselves, or what outcome they should expect — were all sovereign prophets. But in what manner God spoke to them is not manifest. To say that when Moses went up to God on Mount Sinai it was a dream, or a vision, such as other prophets had, contradicts the distinction God himself drew between Moses and all other prophets (Numbers 12:6-8). To say God spoke or appeared as he is in his own nature is to deny his infiniteness, invisibility, and incomprehensibility. To say he spoke by inspiration, or by the infusion of the Holy Spirit — taking "Holy Spirit" to mean the Deity itself — is to make Moses equal with Christ, in whom alone (as St. Paul says, Colossians 2:9) the Godhead dwells bodily. And finally, to say he spoke by the Holy Spirit in the sense of the graces or gifts of the Holy Spirit is to attribute nothing supernatural to Moses at all; for God disposes men to piety, justice, mercy, truth, faith, and every sort of virtue, moral and intellectual, by doctrine, by example, and by many natural and ordinary occasions.
And as none of these ways can be applied to God's speaking to Moses at Mount Sinai, so none of them can be applied to his speaking to the High Priests from the Mercy Seat. Therefore, in what manner God spoke to those sovereign prophets of the Old Testament, whose office it was to inquire of him, is simply not intelligible. In the time of the New Testament there was no sovereign prophet but our Savior — who was both the God that spoke and the prophet to whom he spoke.
As for subordinate prophets of perpetual calling, I find no passage proving that God spoke to them supernaturally — only in the way he naturally inclines men to piety, to belief, to righteousness, and to the other virtues, as he does all other Christian men. That way works through constitution, instruction, education, and the occasions and invitations men have toward Christian virtue; yet it is truly attributed to the operation of the Spirit of God, or Holy Spirit (which in our language we call the Holy Ghost). For there is no good inclination that is not of the operation of God. But these operations are not always supernatural. So when a prophet is said to speak in the Spirit, or by the Spirit of God, we are to understand no more than this: that he speaks according to God's will as declared by the supreme prophet. For the most common acceptation of the word "spirit" is a man's intention, mind, or disposition.
In the time of Moses there were seventy men, besides himself, who prophesied in the camp of the Israelites. In what manner God spoke to them is declared in Numbers 11:25: "The Lord came down in a cloud, and spake unto Moses, and took of the Spirit that was upon him, and gave it to the seventy elders. And it came to pass, when the Spirit rested upon them, they prophesied, and did not cease."
From this, two things are manifest. First, that their prophesying to the people was subservient and subordinate to the prophesying of Moses; for God took of the Spirit of Moses to put upon them, so that they prophesied as Moses would have them — otherwise they would not have been allowed to prophesy at all. Indeed, a complaint was made against them to Moses (verse 27), and Joshua wanted Moses to forbid them — which he did not do, but said to Joshua, "Be not jealous on my behalf."
Second, that the Spirit of God in that place signifies nothing but the mind and disposition to obey and assist Moses in the administration of the government. For if it meant they had the substantial Spirit of God — the divine nature itself — breathed into them, then they had it in no less measure than Christ himself, in whom alone the Spirit of God dwelt bodily. It is meant, therefore, of the gift and grace of God that guided them to cooperate with Moses — from whom their spirit was derived. And it appears (verse 16) that they were men whom Moses himself was to appoint as elders and officers of the people; for the words are, "Gather unto me seventy men, whom thou knowest to be elders and officers of the people" — where "thou knowest" is the same as "thou appointest," or "hast appointed to be such." For we are told earlier (Exodus 18) that Moses, following the counsel of Jethro his father-in-law, appointed judges and officers over the people, men who feared God; and out of these came those seventy, whom God, by putting Moses' spirit upon them, inclined to aid Moses in the administration of the kingdom.
It is in this same sense that the Spirit of God is said (1 Samuel 16:13-14), immediately upon the anointing of David, to have come upon David and departed from Saul: God giving his graces to the man he chose to govern his people, and taking them away from the man he rejected. So "the Spirit" means an inclination to God's service — not any supernatural revelation.
God also spoke many times by the outcome of lots — lots ordered by those he had put in authority over his people. So we read that God revealed, by the lots which Saul caused to be drawn (1 Samuel 14:43), the fault Jonathan had committed in eating a honeycomb, contrary to the oath the people had taken. And (Joshua 18:10) God divided the land of Canaan among the Israelites by "the lots that Joshua did cast before the Lord in Shiloh." In the same manner, it seems, God exposed the crime of Achan (Joshua 7:16 and following). These, then, are the ways by which God declared his will in the Old Testament.
And he used all the same ways in the New Testament. To the Virgin Mary, by a vision of an angel; to Joseph, in a dream; to Paul, on the road to Damascus, in a vision of our Savior; to Peter, in the vision of a sheet let down from heaven with all sorts of flesh, of clean and unclean beasts — and, in prison, by the vision of an angel; to all the apostles and writers of the New Testament, by the graces of his Spirit; and to the apostles again, at the choosing of Matthias in the place of Judas Iscariot, by lot.
All prophecy, then, supposes a vision or a dream (and these two, when they are natural, are the same thing), or some special gift of God so rarely observed in mankind that it is a thing to marvel at where it does appear. And such gifts, like the most extraordinary dreams and visions, may proceed from God not only by his supernatural and immediate operation, but also by his natural operation, through the mediation of second causes. So reason and judgment are needed to discern between natural and supernatural gifts, and between natural and supernatural visions or dreams.
Consequently, men need to be very circumspect and wary about obeying the voice of a man who, claiming to be a prophet, requires us to obey God in the way that he, in God's name, tells us is the way to happiness. For he who pretends to teach men the way to such great felicity pretends to govern them — that is, to rule and reign over them — which is a thing all men naturally desire, and which is therefore rightly suspected of ambition and imposture. Such a claim ought to be examined and tested by every man before he yields obedience to it — unless he has yielded that obedience already, in the institution of a commonwealth, as when the prophet is the civil sovereign, or is authorized by the civil sovereign.
If this examination of prophets and spirits were not permitted to every one of the people, it would have been pointless to set out the marks by which every man might distinguish between those he ought to follow and those he ought not. Such marks are set out — in Deuteronomy 13:1 and following, to know a prophet by, and in 1 John 4:1 and following, to know a spirit by. And seeing there is so much prophesying in the Old Testament, and so much preaching against prophets in the New, and ordinarily a far greater number of false prophets than of true ones, everyone must beware of obeying their directions — at his own peril.
First, that there were many more false prophets than true appears from this: when Ahab consulted four hundred prophets (1 Kings 22), they were all lying impostors, except the one man Micaiah. And a little before the time of the Captivity, the prophets were liars generally. "The prophets," says the Lord through Jeremiah (14:14), "prophesy lies in my name. I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, nor spake unto them; they prophesy to you a false vision, a thing of naught, and the deceit of their heart." So far did it go that God commanded the people, by the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah (23:16), not to obey them: "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, hearken not unto the words of the prophets, that prophesy to you. They make you vain; they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord."
In the time of the Old Testament, then, there were quarrels among the visionary prophets — one contesting with another, demanding, "When did the Spirit depart from me, to go to thee?" as between Micaiah and the rest of the four hundred — and prophets flatly calling one another liars (as in Jeremiah 14:14). And there are just such controversies in the New Testament's terms today, among the "spiritual" prophets of our own time. Every man, then as now, is bound to make use of his natural reason, and to apply to all prophecy the rules God has given us for discerning the true from the false.
Of these rules, in the Old Testament there were two: first, that the doctrine conform to what Moses, the sovereign prophet, had taught them; and second, the miraculous power of foretelling what God would bring to pass — both together, as I have already shown from Deuteronomy 13:1 and following. In the New Testament there was one mark only: the preaching of this doctrine, that JESUS IS THE CHRIST — that is, the King of the Jews promised in the Old Testament. Whoever denied that article was a false prophet, whatever miracles he might seem to work; and he who taught it was a true prophet.
For St. John (1 John 4:2 and following), speaking expressly of the means to examine spirits, whether they are of God or not, after telling them that false prophets would arise, says this: "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God" — that is, is approved and allowed as a prophet of God. Not that he is therefore a godly man, or one of the elect, merely because he confesses, professes, or preaches Jesus to be the Christ — but he is an avowed prophet. For God sometimes speaks by prophets whose persons he has not accepted: as he did by Balaam, and as he foretold Saul of his death by the witch of Endor. And again, in the next verse: "Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of Christ. And this is the spirit of Antichrist." So the rule is complete on both sides: he is a true prophet who preaches the Messiah already come, in the person of Jesus; and he is a false one who denies him come, and looks for him in some future impostor who will falsely claim that honor — the impostor whom the apostle there properly calls Antichrist.
Every man therefore ought to consider who is the sovereign prophet — that is, who is God's viceregent on earth, holding, next under God, the authority to govern Christian men — and to take for his rule the doctrine which that sovereign prophet has, in the name of God, commanded to be taught; and by that rule to examine and test the truth of whatever doctrines pretended prophets, with miracles or without, shall at any time put forward. If he finds a doctrine contrary to that rule, he should do as those men did who came to Moses and complained that there were some prophesying in the camp whose authority to do so they doubted — leave it to the sovereign, as they left it to Moses, to uphold or to forbid them, as he shall see cause. If the sovereign disavows them, obey their voice no more; if he approves them, obey them as men to whom God has given a part of the spirit of their sovereign.
For when Christian men do not take their Christian sovereign for God's prophet, one of two things must follow. Either they must take their own dreams for the prophecy they mean to be governed by, and the swelling of their own hearts for the Spirit of God; or they must let themselves be led by some foreign prince, or by some of their fellow subjects — men who can bewitch them into rebellion by slandering the government, with no miracle to confirm their calling beyond the occasional extraordinary success, and impunity. And by this means, destroying all laws, both divine and human, they reduce all order, all government, and all society to the first chaos of violence and civil war.
By miracles we mean the admirable works of God — which is why they are also called wonders. And because they are usually performed to signal what God commands, in situations where people would otherwise doubt (following their own private natural reasoning) what he has commanded and what he has not, Scripture commonly calls them signs — in the same sense the Latins called them ostenta and portenta, words meaning "showings" and "foreshadowings" of what the Almighty is about to bring to pass.
So to understand what a miracle is, we first have to understand what kinds of works make people wonder and call them admirable. There are only two things that make anyone wonder at an event. The first is that it is strange — that is, nothing like it has ever been produced, or only very rarely. The second is that when it is produced, we cannot imagine it was done by natural means, but only by the immediate hand of God. But the moment we see some possible natural cause for a thing, however rarely the like has been done, we stop wondering. And if the like has been done often, however impossible it is to imagine a natural means for it, we likewise stop wondering, and no longer count it a miracle.
So if a horse or a cow were to speak, that would be a miracle — because the thing is strange, and a natural cause is hard to imagine. The same goes for seeing some strange deviation of nature produce a living creature of an entirely new shape. But when a man, or any other animal, fathers offspring like himself, that is no miracle — even though we understand how it happens no better than the other case — simply because it is usual. In the same way, if a man were transformed into a stone or a pillar, it would be a miracle, because it is strange. But if a piece of wood is changed into stone, that is no miracle, because we see it often. And yet we know no more by what operation of God the one is brought to pass than the other.
The first rainbow ever seen in the world was a miracle, because it was the first — and therefore strange — and it served as a sign from God, placed in heaven to assure his people that the world would never again be universally destroyed by water. But today, because rainbows are frequent, they are not miracles — not to those who know their natural causes, and not to those who don't. Likewise, there are many rare works produced by human skill and craft. But when we know they were made by men — because then we also know the means by which they were made — we do not count them as miracles, since they were not wrought by the immediate hand of God but through the mediation of human industry.
Furthermore, since admiration and wonder depend on the knowledge and experience a person happens to have — some more, some less — it follows that the same thing may be a miracle to one man and not to another. That is why ignorant and superstitious people make great wonders out of works that other people don't marvel at in the least, knowing they proceed from nature (which is not the immediate, but the ordinary work of God). Eclipses of the sun and moon have been taken for supernatural works by the common people — even while there were others who, from their natural causes, could predict the very hour they would arrive. Or take the man who, by conspiracy and secret information-gathering, learns the private doings of some ignorant, unwary person, and then tells him what he did in times past. To the victim it seems a miraculous thing. But among wise and wary men, "miracles" like that are not so easily performed.
Again, it belongs to the very nature of a miracle that it be wrought to procure credit for God's messengers, ministers, and prophets — so that people may know they are called, sent, and employed by God, and so be more inclined to obey them. That is why the creation of the world, and after it the destruction of every living creature in the universal flood, are not usually called miracles, admirable works though they were: they were not done to procure credit for any prophet or other minister of God. For however admirable a work may be, the wonder does not lie in the fact that it could be done — people naturally believe the Almighty can do all things — but in the fact that he does it at the prayer or word of a man.
The works of God in Egypt, done by the hand of Moses, were properly miracles, because they were done with the intention of making the people of Israel believe that Moses came to them not from any scheme of his own self-interest, but as one sent from God. After God had commanded him to deliver the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, Moses said (Exodus 4:1), "They will not believe me, but will say, the Lord has not appeared to me." So God gave him power to turn the rod in his hand into a serpent and back into a rod again; and by putting his hand into his bosom, to make it leprous, and by pulling it out again, to make it whole — all to make the children of Israel believe (as it says in verse 5) that the God of their fathers had appeared to him. And if that were not enough, God gave him power to turn their waters into blood. And when he had done these miracles before the people, it is said (verse 31) that "they believed him." Nevertheless, out of fear of Pharaoh, they did not yet dare to obey him. So the other works, done to plague Pharaoh and the Egyptians, all tended to make the Israelites believe in Moses — and were properly miracles.
In the same way, if we consider all the miracles done by the hand of Moses and all the rest of the prophets up to the Captivity, and those of our Savior and his apostles afterward, we will find that their purpose was always to create or confirm belief that these men did not come on their own initiative, but were sent by God.
We can observe something further in Scripture: the purpose of miracles was to produce belief not universally, in all men, elect and reprobate alike, but in the elect only — that is, in those whom God had determined should become his subjects. The miraculous plagues of Egypt were not aimed at converting Pharaoh; God had told Moses beforehand that he would harden Pharaoh's heart so that he would not let the people go. And when Pharaoh finally did let them go, it was not the miracles that persuaded him — it was the plagues that forced him. So too with our Savior. It is written (Matthew 13:58) that he did not perform many miracles in his own country because of their unbelief; and in Mark 6:5, instead of "he did not perform many," it reads "he could perform none." This was not because he lacked the power — to say that would be blasphemy against God. Nor was it because the purpose of miracles was something other than converting unbelievers to Christ; the purpose of all the miracles of Moses, the prophets, our Savior, and his apostles was to add men to the Church. It was because the purpose of their miracles was to add to the Church not all men, but those who should be saved — that is, those whom God had elected. Since our Savior was sent from his Father, he could not use his power to convert those whom his Father had rejected. As for the commentators on this passage of St. Mark who say that his phrase "he could not" stands for "he would not" — they do so without a single example in the Greek language (where "would not" is sometimes put for "could not" in inanimate things that have no will, but "could not" for "would not," never). And by doing so they lay a stumbling block before weak Christians, as if Christ could do miracles only among the credulous.
From what I have set down here about the nature and use of a miracle, we may define it this way: a MIRACLE is a work of God (apart from his operation by the way of nature, ordained in the creation), done to make manifest to his elect the mission of an extraordinary minister for their salvation.
From this definition we may draw two conclusions. First: in all miracles, the work done is not the effect of any power in the prophet, because it is the effect of the immediate hand of God — that is to say, God has done it without using the prophet as a subordinate cause.
Second: no devil, angel, or other created spirit can do a miracle. For such a being would have to do it either by virtue of some natural science, or by incantation — that is, by the power of words. If enchanters do it by a power of their own, independent of God, then there is some power that does not proceed from God — which all men deny. And if they do it by a power given to them, then the work is not from the immediate hand of God, but natural — and consequently no miracle.
There are some texts of Scripture that seem to attribute the power of working wonders — equal to some of those immediate miracles wrought by God himself — to certain arts of magic and incantation. For example, we read that after the rod of Moses, cast on the ground, became a serpent, "the magicians of Egypt did the like by their enchantments" (Exodus 7:11); and that after Moses had turned the waters of the Egyptian streams, rivers, ponds, and pools into blood, "the magicians of Egypt did so likewise, with their enchantments" (Exodus 7:22); and that after Moses had, by the power of God, brought frogs upon the land, "the magicians also did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt" (Exodus 8:7). Wouldn't a man be apt to attribute miracles to enchantments — that is, to the efficacy of the sound of words — and think it well proved from these and similar passages? And yet there is no passage of Scripture anywhere that tells us what an enchantment actually is. If, therefore, enchantment is not what many take it to be — a working of strange effects by spells and words — but rather imposture and delusion, wrought by ordinary means, and so far from supernatural that the impostors need no study even of natural causes, but only the ordinary ignorance, stupidity, and superstition of mankind to pull it off — then those texts that seem to support the power of magic, witchcraft, and enchantment must have a different sense than the one they seem to carry at first sight.
For it is plain enough that words have no effect except on those who understand them — and then their only effect is to signify the intentions or passions of the speaker, and thereby produce hope, fear, or other passions or ideas in the hearer. So when a rod seems to become a serpent, or water seems to become blood, or any other miracle seems to be done by enchantment — if it is not for the edification of God's people, then it is not the rod, nor the water, nor anything else that has been enchanted. That is to say, the thing worked upon by the words is not the object. It is the spectator. The whole "miracle" consists in this: the enchanter has deceived a man. And that is no miracle at all. It is a very easy thing to do.
For such is the ignorance and proneness to error of all men generally — and especially of those who know little about natural causes, or about the nature and interests of other men — that they can be taken in by countless easy tricks. Before it was known that there is a science of the course of the stars, imagine what reputation for miraculous power a man might have gained by telling people, "At this hour, on this day, the sun will go dark." A juggler, by his handling of cups and other trinkets, would be thought to do his wonders by the power of the devil at the very least, if his act were not common practice today. A man who has trained himself to speak by drawing in his breath (the kind of men the ancients called ventriloqui — "belly-speakers"), making the weakness of his voice seem to come not from the weak push of his speech organs but from far away, can make a great many people believe it is a voice from heaven, saying whatever he pleases to tell them. And for a crafty man who has dug into the secrets and private confessions that one person ordinarily makes to another about his past actions and adventures, it is no hard matter to repeat them back — and yet there are many who, by exactly such means, gain the reputation of being conjurers.
It would take too long to catalogue all the kinds of men the Greeks called thaumaturgi — workers of wonders — and yet everything they do, they do by their own simple dexterity. And if we look at the impostures wrought by confederacy — by accomplices working together — there is nothing, however impossible to do, that is impossible to be believed. Two men conspiring, one to seem lame and the other to cure him with a charm, will deceive many. But many men conspiring — one to seem lame, another to "cure" him, and all the rest to bear witness — will deceive many more.
Given this readiness of mankind to give over-hasty belief to pretended miracles, there can be no better caution — and I think no other — than the one God has prescribed: first through Moses, as I said in the previous chapter, at the beginning of Deuteronomy 13 and the end of Deuteronomy 18. We are to take no one for a prophet who teaches any other religion than the one established by God's lieutenant (which at that time was Moses); nor anyone — even if he teaches the same religion — whose prediction we do not see come to pass. So Moses in his time, and Aaron and his successors in theirs, and the sovereign governor of God's people, next under God himself — that is, the head of the Church in every age — are to be consulted about what doctrine has been established, before we give credit to a pretended miracle or prophet.
And once that is done, when men claim something is a miracle, we must both see it done and use every possible means to consider whether it was really done — and not only that, but whether it is the kind of thing no man could do by his natural power, so that it requires the immediate hand of God. And in this too we must have recourse to God's lieutenant, to whom we have submitted our private judgments in all doubtful cases. For example: suppose a man claims that after certain words are spoken over a piece of bread, God has instantly made it not bread, but a god, or a man, or both — and yet it still looks exactly as much like bread as it ever did. There is no reason for anyone to think this has really been done, nor consequently to fear the man who claims it, until he inquires of God, through his vicar or lieutenant, whether it has been done or not. If the lieutenant says no, then what Moses said follows (Deuteronomy 18:22): "he has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not fear him." If the lieutenant says it is done, then the man is not to contradict it.
Likewise, if we do not see a miracle but only hear tell of one, we are to consult the lawful Church — that is, its lawful head — about how far to credit those who report it. And this is chiefly the situation of people who, in these days, live under Christian sovereigns. For miracles have now ceased: in these times I do not know of one man who ever saw any wondrous work, done by the charm or word or prayer of a man, that anyone with even a moderate share of reason would think supernatural. The question now is no longer whether what we see done is a miracle, or whether the miracle we hear or read of was a real work and not merely the act of a tongue or pen — but, in plain terms, whether the report is true or a lie.
In that question, we are not to make our own private reason or conscience the judge, but the public reason — that is, the reason of God's supreme lieutenant. And in fact we have made him judge already, if we have given him sovereign power to do everything necessary for our peace and defense. A private man always has the liberty — because thought is free — to believe or not believe in his heart those acts that have been put forward as miracles. He may weigh what benefit would flow, from people's belief in them, to those who claim or promote them, and from that conjecture whether they are miracles or lies. But in forming that judgment, we are not to renounce our senses and experience, nor our natural reason — that undoubted word of God. When it comes to public confession of the faith, however, private reason must submit to the public reason — that is, to God's lieutenant. But who this lieutenant of God and head of the Church is, we shall consider in its proper place hereafter.
Civil society depends on justice, and justice depends on the power of life and death — along with the lesser rewards and punishments — which resides in those who hold the sovereignty of the commonwealth. It is therefore impossible for a commonwealth to stand where anyone other than the sovereign has the power to give rewards greater than life, or to inflict punishments greater than death. Now, eternal life is a greater reward than this present life, and eternal torment is a greater punishment than natural death. So for everyone who wants to avoid the calamities of confusion and civil war by obeying authority, it is well worth considering carefully what Holy Scripture means by eternal life and eternal torment; for what offenses, committed against whom, men are to be eternally tormented; and for what actions they are to obtain eternal life.
First, we find that Adam was created in such a condition of life that, had he not broken God's commandment, he would have enjoyed it in the paradise of Eden everlastingly. For the tree of life was there, and he was allowed to eat from it for as long as he refrained from eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which was forbidden to him. And so, as soon as he had eaten from it, God thrust him out of paradise, "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and live forever" (Genesis 3:22).
From this it seems to me — with submission, nevertheless, in this and in all questions whose resolution depends on Scripture, to the interpretation of the Bible authorized by the commonwealth whose subject I am — that if Adam had not sinned, he would have had an eternal life on earth, and that mortality entered into him and his descendants through his first sin. Not that actual death entered then; for in that case Adam could never have had children, whereas in fact he lived long afterward and saw numerous descendants before he died. But where it is said, "In the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die," the meaning must be his mortality — the certainty of death.
Since eternal life was lost by Adam's forfeiture in committing sin, whoever was to cancel that forfeiture would thereby recover that life again. Now, Jesus Christ has satisfied for the sins of all who believe in him, and has therefore recovered for all believers that ETERNAL LIFE which was lost by the sin of Adam. And it is in this sense that St. Paul's comparison holds (Romans 5:18-19): "As by the offense of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men to justification of life." The same point is delivered even more clearly in these words (1 Corinthians 15:21-22): "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
Concerning the place where men shall enjoy that eternal life which Christ has obtained for them, the texts just cited seem to put it on earth. For if, as in Adam, all die — that is, all have forfeited paradise and eternal life on earth — even so, in Christ, all shall be made alive; then all men shall be made to live on earth, for otherwise the comparison would not hold.
The Psalmist seems to agree (Psalm 133:3): "Upon Zion God commanded the blessing, even life for evermore" — and Zion is in Jerusalem, on earth. So does St. John (Revelation 2:7): "To him that overcomes I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God." That was the tree of Adam's eternal life — and his life was to have been on earth. The same seems confirmed again by St. John (Revelation 21:2), where he says, "I John saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" — and again at verse 10 to the same effect. As if he were saying: the new Jerusalem, the paradise of God, at the second coming of Christ, will come down to God's people from heaven; they will not go up to it from earth.
This matches exactly what the two men in white clothing — that is, the two angels — said to the apostles as they watched Christ ascend (Acts 1:11): "This same Jesus, who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him go up into heaven." Which sounds as if they had said: he will come down to govern them, under his Father, eternally here — not take them up to govern them in heaven. And this agrees with the restoration of the kingdom of God instituted under Moses, which was a political government of the Jews on earth.
Again, our Savior's saying (Matthew 22:30) "that in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven" is a description of an eternal life resembling the one we lost in Adam, on the point of marriage. For since Adam and Eve, had they not sinned, would have lived on earth eternally in their individual persons, it is obvious they would not have gone on procreating forever. If immortals reproduced the way mankind does now, the earth in a short time could not have offered them so much as a place to stand. The Jews who asked our Savior whose wife the woman who had married many brothers would be in the resurrection did not understand the consequences of immortality: that there will be no generation, and consequently no marriage — any more than there is marriage or generation among the angels.
The comparison between the eternal life Adam lost and the eternal life our Savior recovered by his victory over death holds in this point too: just as Adam lost eternal life by his sin and yet lived on for a time afterward, so the faithful Christian has recovered eternal life through Christ's passion, even though he dies a natural death and remains dead for a time — namely, until the resurrection. For just as death is reckoned from Adam's condemnation, not from its execution, so life is reckoned from the absolution, not from the resurrection, of those who are elected in Christ.
That the place where men are to live eternally after the resurrection is the heavens — meaning by heaven those parts of the world most remote from earth, where the stars are, or above the stars in another, higher heaven called caelum empyreum, the "empyrean heaven" (of which there is no mention in Scripture, nor any ground in reason) — is not easily drawn from any text I can find.
By the kingdom of heaven is meant the kingdom of the King who dwells in heaven; and his kingdom was the people of Israel, whom he ruled through the prophets, his lieutenants — first Moses, and after him Eleazar and the sovereign priests — until in the days of Samuel they rebelled and demanded a mortal man for their king, after the manner of other nations. And when our Savior Christ, through the preaching of his ministers, shall have persuaded the Jews to return and called the Gentiles to his obedience, then there shall be a new kingdom of heaven — because our King will then be God, whose throne is heaven — without any necessity, evident in Scripture, that man shall ascend to his happiness any higher than God's footstool, the earth.
On the contrary, we find it written (John 3:13) that "no man has ascended into heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, that is in heaven." And I observe in passing that these words are not, like the ones immediately before them, the words of our Savior, but of St. John himself — for Christ was at that time not in heaven, but on earth. The same is said of David (Acts 2:34), where St. Peter, in order to prove the ascension of Christ, takes the words of the Psalmist (Psalm 16:10), "You will not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer your Holy One to see corruption," and says they were spoken not of David but of Christ — and to prove it, adds this reason: "For David is not ascended into heaven."
But to this a man may easily answer: though their bodies were not to ascend until the general day of judgment, their souls were in heaven as soon as they departed from their bodies. And this seems to be confirmed by the words of our Savior (Luke 20:37-38), who, proving the resurrection out of the words of Moses, says this: "That the dead are raised, even Moses showed, at the bush, when he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for they all live to him." But if these words are to be understood only of the immortality of the soul, they do not prove at all what our Savior intended to prove — which was the resurrection of the body, that is to say, the immortality of the man. Therefore our Savior means that those patriarchs were immortal not by some property that follows from the essence and nature of mankind, but by the will of God, who was pleased, of his mere grace, to bestow eternal life on the faithful. And though at that time the patriarchs and many other faithful men were dead, yet — as the text says — they lived to God; that is, they were written in the Book of Life with those who were absolved of their sins and ordained to eternal life at the resurrection.
That the soul of man is by its own nature eternal, a living creature independent of the body — or that any mere man is immortal otherwise than by the resurrection on the last day (Enoch and Elijah excepted) — is a doctrine not apparent in Scripture. The whole of chapter 14 of Job, which is the speech not of his friends but of Job himself, is a complaint about this mortality of our nature — and yet no contradiction of immortality at the resurrection. "There is hope of a tree," he says at verse 7, "if it be cast down. Though the root of it grows old, and the stock of it dies in the ground, yet when it scents the water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dies, and wastes away; yes, man gives up the ghost, and where is he?" And at verse 12: "man lies down, and rises not, till the heavens be no more."
But when is it that the heavens shall be no more? St. Peter tells us: at the general resurrection. For in his second epistle, chapter 3, verse 7, he says that "the heavens and the earth that are now, are reserved unto fire against the day of judgment, and perdition of ungodly men"; and at verse 12, "looking for, and hastening to the coming of God, wherein the heavens shall be on fire, and shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, we according to the promise look for new heavens, and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness." So when Job says man does not rise until the heavens are no more, it is the same as if he had said: the immortal life (and soul and life in Scripture usually signify the same thing) does not begin in man until the resurrection and day of judgment, and its cause is not his specific nature and generation, but the promise. For St. Peter does not say, "We look for new heavens and a new earth from nature," but "from promise."
Lastly: it has already been proved, from many clear places of Scripture, in chapter 35 of this book, that the kingdom of God is a civil commonwealth, in which God himself is sovereign — by virtue first of the Old Covenant and then of the New — and in which he reigns by his vicar, or lieutenant. Those same places therefore also prove that after the second coming of our Savior in his majesty and glory, to reign actually and eternally, the kingdom of God is to be on earth. But because this doctrine, though proved out of places of Scripture neither few nor obscure, will strike most men as a novelty, I do no more than propose it. I maintain nothing in this, or in any other paradox of religion. I am waiting for the end of that dispute of the sword — not yet decided among my countrymen — concerning the authority by which all sorts of doctrine are to be approved or rejected, and whose commands, in speech and in writing, whatever the opinions of private men, must be obeyed by everyone who means to be protected by their laws. For the points of doctrine concerning the kingdom of God have so great an influence on the kingdom of man that they are not to be determined by anyone except those who, under God, hold the sovereign power.
The Place, After Judgment, of Those Who Were Never in the Kingdom of God, or Who Were Cast Out of It
Just as the kingdom of God and eternal life have their place on earth, so also, by the Scripture, do God's enemies and their torments after judgment. The name of the place where all men remain until the resurrection — those who were buried, or swallowed up by the earth — is usually given in Scripture by words that signify under ground; which the Latins generally read as infernus and inferni, and the Greeks as Hades, that is to say, a place where men cannot see. It includes the grave as well as any other, deeper place.
But as for the place of the damned after the resurrection, neither the Old Testament nor the New fixes it by any marker of location — only by the company. It shall be where those wicked men were whom God, in former times, destroyed from the face of the earth in extraordinary and miraculous ways. For example, the damned are said to be in inferno, in Tartarus, or in the bottomless pit, because Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were swallowed up alive into the earth. Not that the writers of Scripture would have us believe there could be, in the globe of the earth — which is not only finite but, compared to the height of the stars, of no considerable size at all — a pit without a bottom, a hole of infinite depth, such as the Greeks in their demonology (that is, their doctrine concerning demons), and the Romans after them, called Tartarus. Of it Virgil says:
Bis patet in praeceps, tantum tenditque sub umbras,
Quantus ad aethereum coeli suspectus Olympum
— "it gapes sheer downward into the shadows twice as far as the upward gaze from earth to heavenly Olympus." The proportion of earth to heaven simply cannot bear such a thing. Rather, we should believe the damned are there, indefinitely, where those men are on whom God inflicted that exemplary punishment.
Again: those mighty men of the earth who lived in the time of Noah, before the flood — whom the Greeks called heroes and the Scripture giants, and who, both agree, were begotten by copulation of the children of God with the children of men — were destroyed for their wicked lives by the general deluge. The place of the damned is therefore also sometimes marked out by the company of those dead giants. So Proverbs 21:16: "The man that wanders out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the giants." And Job 26:5: "Behold the giants groan under water, and they that dwell with them." Here the place of the damned is under the water. And Isaiah 14:9: "Hell is troubled how to meet thee" — that is, the king of Babylon — "and will displace the giants for thee." Here again the place of the damned, if the sense is literal, is under water.
Thirdly: because the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed for their wickedness, by the extraordinary wrath of God, with fire and brimstone, and the country around them turned with them into a stinking, bituminous lake, the place of the damned is sometimes expressed by fire, and by a fiery lake. So in the Apocalypse (Revelation 21:8): "But the fearful, unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone; which is the second death."
So it is plain that hell fire, which is expressed here by metaphor from the real fire of Sodom, does not signify any particular kind or place of torment, but is to be taken indefinitely, for destruction — as in chapter 20, verse 14 (Revelation 20:14), where it is said that "Death and Hell were cast into the lake of fire"; that is to say, they were abolished and destroyed. As if to say: after the day of judgment there shall be no more dying, and no more going into hell — that is, no more going to Hades (from which word, perhaps, our word hell is derived) — which is the same as saying: no more dying.
Fourthly: from the plague of darkness inflicted on the Egyptians — of which it is written (Exodus 10:23), "They saw not one another, neither rose any man from his place for three days; but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings" — the place of the wicked after judgment is called utter darkness, or, as it stands in the original, darkness without. So it is expressed in Matthew 22:13, where the king commands his servants "to bind hand and foot the man that had not on his wedding garment, and to cast him out," eis to skotos to exoteron — into the external darkness, the darkness without. Though this is translated "utter darkness," the phrase does not signify how great the darkness is, but where it is to be: namely, outside the dwelling of God's elect.
Lastly: there was a place near Jerusalem called the Valley of the Children of Hinnom. In one part of it, called Tophet, the Jews had committed the most grievous idolatry, sacrificing their children to the idol Moloch; there too God had afflicted his enemies with the most grievous punishments; and there Josiah had burned the priests of Moloch upon their own altars, as appears at length in 2 Kings 23. Afterward the place served to receive the filth and garbage carried out of the city, and fires were made there from time to time, to purify the air and take away the stench of rotting flesh. From this abominable place the Jews ever after called the place of the damned by the name Gehenna, or Valley of Hinnom. And this Gehenna is the word that is now usually translated HELL; and from the fires burning there from time to time, we get the notion of everlasting and unquenchable fire.
Now, no one interprets Scripture to mean that after the day of judgment the wicked are all to be eternally punished in the Valley of Hinnom; or that they shall rise again only to live forever underground or underwater; or that after the resurrection they shall never see one another again, or never stir from one place to another. It follows, it seems to me, quite necessarily, that what is said about hell fire is spoken metaphorically — and that there is therefore a proper sense to be sought out (for every metaphor has some real ground that can be expressed in proper words), both for the place of hell and for the nature of hellish torment and the tormentors.
First, as for the tormentors: we have their nature and properties exactly and properly delivered in their names — the Enemy, or Satan; the Accuser, or Diabolus; the Destroyer, or Abaddon. These significant names — Satan, Devil, Abaddon — do not set before us any individual person, as proper names do, but only an office or quality. They are therefore appellatives — common nouns, titles — and ought not to have been left untranslated, as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles. Left untranslated, they look like the proper names of demons, and men are the more easily seduced into believing the doctrine of devils — which in those days was the religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to the religion of Moses and of Christ.
And because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and the Destroyer is meant the enemy of those who shall be in the kingdom of God, it follows that if the kingdom of God after the resurrection is on earth (as I have shown from Scripture, in the previous chapter, it seems to be), then the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth too. So it was, after all, in the time before the Jews deposed God: God's kingdom was in Palestine, and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy. And consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church.
The torments of hell are expressed sometimes by "weeping and gnashing of teeth," as in Matthew 8:12; sometimes by "the worm of conscience," as in Isaiah 66:24 and Mark 9:44, 46, 48; sometimes by fire, as in the place just quoted — "where the worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched" — and many places besides; sometimes by "shame and contempt," as in Daniel 12:2: "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." All these places designate, metaphorically, a grief and discontent of mind at the sight of that eternal happiness in others which they themselves, through their own unbelief and disobedience, have lost. And because such happiness in others cannot be felt except by comparison with one's own actual miseries, it follows that the damned are to suffer such bodily pains and calamities as fall upon those who not only live under evil and cruel governors, but have for their enemy the eternal King of the saints, God Almighty.
And among these bodily pains is to be reckoned, for every one of the wicked, a SECOND DEATH. For though Scripture is clear about a universal resurrection, we nowhere read that any of the reprobate is promised an eternal life. St. Paul, answering the question of what bodies men shall rise with (1 Corinthians 15:42-43), says that "the body is sown in corruption, and is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power." But glory and power cannot be applied to the bodies of the wicked. Nor can the name of second death be applied to those who can never die more than once. And although in metaphorical speech an everlasting calamitous life may be called an everlasting death, it cannot reasonably be understood as a second death.
The fire prepared for the wicked is an everlasting fire — that is to say, the condition in which no man can be free of torture, of body and mind alike, after the resurrection, shall endure forever. In that sense the fire shall be unquenchable, and the torments everlasting. But it cannot be inferred from this that anyone cast into that fire, or tormented with those torments, shall endure and withstand them in such a way as to be eternally burnt and tortured and yet never be destroyed, never die. And though there are many places that affirm everlasting fire and torments — into which men may be cast, one after another, successively, forever — I find none that affirm there shall be an eternal life in that fire for any individual person. On the contrary, they affirm an everlasting death, which is the second death (Revelation 20:13-14): "For after Death and the Grave shall have delivered up the dead which were in them, and every man be judged according to his works, Death and the Grave shall also be cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death." From which it is evident that there is to be a second death for everyone who shall be condemned at the day of judgment — after which he shall die no more.
The Joys of Eternal Life and Salvation Are the Same Thing; Salvation from Sin and from Misery Are One
The joys of eternal life are all comprehended in Scripture under the name of SALVATION, or being saved. To be saved is to be made secure — either against particular evils, or absolutely, against all evil, including want, sickness, and death itself. And because man was created in an immortal condition, not subject to corruption, and consequently subject to nothing that tends to the dissolution of his nature, and fell from that happiness by the sin of Adam, it follows that to be saved from sin is to be saved from all the evil and calamities that sin has brought upon us. And therefore, in Holy Scripture, remission of sin and salvation from death and misery are the same thing — as appears from the words of our Savior who, having cured a man sick with palsy by saying (Matthew 9:2), "Son, be of good cheer, your sins are forgiven you," and knowing the scribes took it for blasphemy that a man should claim to forgive sins, asked them (verse 5) "whether it were easier to say, Your sins are forgiven you, or, Arise and walk" — signifying that, as far as saving the sick man went, it was all one to say "Your sins are forgiven" and "Arise and walk," and that he used the first form of speech only to show that he had the power to forgive sins. And it is evident in reason, besides: since death and misery were the punishments of sin, the discharge of sin must also be a discharge of death and misery. That is salvation absolute — the salvation the faithful are to enjoy after the day of judgment, by the power and favor of Jesus Christ, who for that reason is called our SAVIOR.
Concerning particular salvations, such as are meant in 1 Samuel 14:39, "as the Lord lives that saves Israel" — that is, saves them from their temporary enemies — and in 2 Samuel 22:4, "You are my Savior, you save me from violence," and in 2 Kings 13:5, "God gave the Israelites a Savior, and so they were delivered from the hand of the Assyrians," and the like, I need say nothing; for there is neither difficulty nor any vested interest to corrupt the interpretation of texts of that kind.
But concerning the general salvation, because it must take place in the kingdom of heaven, there is great difficulty about the place. On one side: by kingdom — which is an estate ordained by men for their perpetual security against enemies and want — it would seem that this salvation should be on earth. For what salvation sets before us is a glorious reign of our King, by conquest, not a safety by escape. So wherever we look for salvation, we must also look for triumph; and before triumph, victory; and before victory, battle — which can hardly be supposed to happen in heaven. But however good this reasoning may be, I will not trust to it without very clear places of Scripture.
The state of salvation is described at length in Isaiah 33:20-24:
"Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities; your eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of its stakes shall ever be removed, neither shall any of its cords be broken.
But there the glorious Lord will be to us a place of broad rivers and streams, where no galley with oars shall go, neither shall gallant ship pass by.
For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; he will save us.
Your riggings are loosed; they could not strengthen their mast; they could not spread the sail. Then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey.
And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick; the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity."
In these words we have the place from which salvation is to proceed: "Jerusalem, a quiet habitation." Its eternity: "a tabernacle that shall not be taken down," and so on. Its Savior: "the Lord, their judge, their lawgiver, their king — he will save us." The salvation itself: "the Lord shall be to them as a broad moat of swift waters," and so on. The condition of their enemies: their riggings loose, their masts weak, the lame taking their spoils. The condition of the saved: "the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick." And lastly, all of it is comprehended in the forgiveness of sin: "the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity." From this it is evident that salvation shall be on earth, at the time when God shall reign in Jerusalem, at the second coming of Christ; and that from Jerusalem shall proceed the salvation of the Gentiles who shall be received into God's kingdom.
This is declared even more expressly by the same prophet (Isaiah 66:20-21): "And they" — that is, the Gentiles who held any Jew in bondage — "shall bring all your brethren, for an offering to the Lord, out of all nations, upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain, Jerusalem, says the Lord, as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel into the house of the Lord. And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, says the Lord." From this it is manifest that the chief seat of God's kingdom — the place from which the salvation of us who were Gentiles shall proceed — shall be Jerusalem.
The same is confirmed by our Savior in his conversation with the woman of Samaria about the place of God's worship. He tells her (John 4:22) that the Samaritans worship they know not what, but the Jews worship what they know: "For salvation is of the Jews" — ex Judaeis, that is, it begins at the Jews. As if he were saying: you worship God, but you do not know by whom he will save you, as we do, who know it shall be one of the tribe of Judah — a Jew, not a Samaritan. And that is why the woman, not at all beside the point, answered him, "We know the Messiah shall come." So what our Savior says — salvation is from the Jews — is the same as what Paul says (Romans 1:16-17): "The Gospel is the power of God to salvation to every one that believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith" — from the faith of the Jew, to the faith of the Gentile.
In the same sense the prophet Joel, describing the day of judgment (Joel 2:30-31) — that God would "show wonders in heaven and in earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come" — adds at verse 32: "and it shall come to pass, that whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion, and in Jerusalem shall be salvation." And Obadiah, verse 17, says the same: "Upon Mount Zion shall be deliverance; and there shall be holiness, and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions" — that is, the possessions of the heathen, which he spells out in the following verses: the Mount of Esau, the land of the Philistines, the fields of Ephraim, of Samaria, Gilead, and the cities of the south; and he concludes with these words: "the kingdom shall be the Lord's."
All these places stand for salvation, and the kingdom of God after the day of judgment, on earth. On the other side, I have found no text that can plausibly be made to prove any ascension of the saints into heaven — that is to say, into any caelum empyreum or other ethereal region — except that it is called the kingdom of heaven. And it may have that name because God, who was King of the Jews, governed them by his commands, sent to Moses by angels from heaven, to bring them back to obedience, and shall send him from there again, to rule both them and all other faithful men, from the day of judgment, everlastingly. Or because the throne of this our great King is in heaven, while the earth is but his footstool. But that the subjects of God should have any place as high as his throne, or higher than his footstool — that hardly seems suitable to the dignity of a king, nor can I find any clear text for it in Holy Scripture.
From what has been said about the kingdom of God and about salvation, it is not hard to interpret what is meant by the WORLD TO COME. There are three worlds mentioned in Scripture: the old world, the present world, and the world to come. Of the first, St. Peter speaks (2 Peter 2:5): "If God spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing the flood upon the world of the ungodly," and so on. So the first world ran from Adam to the general flood. Of the present world, our Savior speaks (John 18:36): "My kingdom is not of this world" — for he came only to teach men the way of salvation, and to renew the kingdom of his Father by his doctrine. Of the world to come, St. Peter speaks (2 Peter 3:13): "Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth." This is that world in which Christ, coming down from heaven in the clouds, with great power and glory, shall send his angels and gather together his elect from the four winds and from the uttermost parts of the earth, and from then on reign over them, under his Father, everlastingly.
The salvation of a sinner presupposes a prior REDEMPTION. For whoever is once guilty of sin is liable to the penalty for it, and must pay — or someone else must pay for him — whatever ransom the offended party, who has him in his power, shall require. And since the person offended is Almighty God, in whose power are all things, the ransom to be paid before salvation can be acquired is whatever ransom God has been pleased to require.
By this ransom is not meant a satisfaction for sin equivalent to the offense — something no sinner could ever make for himself, nor any righteous man for another. The damage a man does to another man he can make amends for by restitution or compensation; but sin cannot be taken away by compensation, for that would make the liberty to sin a thing for sale. But sins may be pardoned to the repentant — either freely, or upon such penalty as God is pleased to accept. What God usually accepted in the Old Testament was some sacrifice or offering. To forgive sin is not an act of injustice, even where the punishment has been threatened. Even among men, though the promise of good binds the promiser, threats — that is to say, promises of evil — do not bind them; much less shall they bind God, who is infinitely more merciful than men.
Our Savior Christ, therefore, in redeeming us, did not satisfy for the sins of men in the sense that his death, by its own virtue, could make it unjust in God to punish sinners with eternal death. Rather, he made that sacrifice and offering of himself, at his first coming, which God was pleased to require for the salvation, at his second coming, of all who in the meantime should repent and believe in him. And though this act of our redemption is not always called a sacrifice and offering in Scripture, but sometimes a price, by price we are not to understand anything by whose value he could claim a right to a pardon for us from his offended Father — but only that price which God the Father was pleased, in mercy, to demand.
The word "church" — in Greek, ecclesia — means several different things in the books of Holy Scripture. Sometimes, though not often, it means God's house: a temple where Christians gather to perform their holy duties in public. That is the sense in "Let your women keep silence in the churches" (1 Corinthians 14:34). But even there the word is used metaphorically, standing for the congregation gathered inside the building. Since then it has come to be used for the building itself, to distinguish the temples of Christians from the temples of idolaters.
The Temple of Jerusalem was God's house, the house of prayer; and in the same way, any building that Christians dedicate to the worship of Christ is Christ's house. That is why the Greek Fathers called such a building Kuriake — "the Lord's house" — and from that word, in our own language, came "kirk," and then "church."
When "church" does not mean a building, it means what ecclesia meant in the Greek commonwealths: a congregation, an assembly of citizens called together to hear the magistrate speak to them. In the Roman commonwealth the same thing was called a concio, and the man who spoke was called ecclesiastes or concionator — the speaker, the addresser of assemblies. When the citizens were called together by lawful authority, as in (Acts 19:39), the gathering was ecclesia legitima — a lawful church, in Greek ennomos ecclesia. But when they were stirred up by riotous and seditious shouting, it was a confused church — ecclesia sugkechumene.
Sometimes the word is used for all the people who have the right to belong to the congregation, even when they are not actually assembled — that is, for the whole multitude of Christians, however widely scattered they may be. That is the sense in which "Saul made havoc of the church" (Acts 8:3), and the sense in which Christ is called the head of the church. Sometimes it means a particular group of Christians, as in "Salute the church that is in his house" (Colossians 4:15). Sometimes it means the elect only, as in "a glorious church, without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish" (Ephesians 5:27) — which refers to the church triumphant, the church that is to come. And sometimes it means a congregation actually assembled, made up of people who profess Christianity, whether their profession is sincere or counterfeit. That is how it is understood in (Matthew 18:17): "Tell it to the church, and if he neglect to hear the church, let him be to thee as a Gentile or publican."
Only in this last sense can the church be considered one person — one body that can be said to have the power to will, to pronounce, to command, to be obeyed, to make laws, or to perform any other action at all. Here is why. Without authority from a lawful congregation, whatever act is done by a crowd of people is the particular act of each individual who was present and lent a hand to it. It is not the act of them all together, as one body. Still less is it the act of those who were absent, or of those who were present but did not want it done.
According to this sense, I define a CHURCH to be: a company of men professing Christian religion, united in the person of one sovereign, at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.
And because in every commonwealth an assembly that gathers without warrant from the civil sovereign is unlawful, it follows that a church assembled in any commonwealth that has forbidden it to assemble is an unlawful assembly.
It also follows that there is no universal church on earth that all Christians are bound to obey — because there is no power on earth to which all the commonwealths of the world are subject. There are Christians living under many different princes and states, but each of those Christians is a subject of the commonwealth he himself belongs to, and so he cannot be subject to the commands of any other person.
Therefore a church capable of acting — capable of commanding, judging, absolving, condemning, or doing anything else — is the same thing as a civil commonwealth made up of Christians. It is called a civil state because its subjects are men, and a church because its subjects are Christians. Temporal and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign.
It is true that after the resurrection the bodies of the faithful will be not only spiritual but eternal. In this life, however, they are coarse and corruptible. So in this life there is no government of either state or religion except temporal government; and no doctrine may lawfully be taught to any subject if the governor of both state and religion forbids it to be taught. And that governor must be one. Otherwise faction and civil war must follow in the commonwealth — between church and state; between the party of the spiritual and the party of the temporal; between the sword of justice and the shield of faith; and, worse than all of these, a war inside every Christian's own breast, between the Christian and the man.
The doctors of the church are called pastors. So are civil sovereigns. But if pastors are not subordinated one to another, so that there is one chief pastor, men will be taught contrary doctrines — both of which may be false, and one of which must be. Who that one chief pastor is, according to the law of nature, has already been shown: it is the civil sovereign. And to whom Scripture has assigned that office, we shall see in the chapters that follow.
The father of the faithful, and the first member of the kingdom of God by covenant, was Abraham. The covenant was made with him first. In it, he bound himself — and his descendants after him — to acknowledge and obey the commands of God. Not just the commands he could discover for himself by the light of nature, as moral laws, but also whatever commands God should deliver to him in a special way, by dreams and visions.
Think about why that distinction matters. As far as the moral law was concerned, Abraham and his family were already obligated to obey it. There was no need to purchase their obedience with the promise of the land of Canaan. No contract could add anything to, or strengthen, the obligation by which they — and all people everywhere — were already naturally bound to obey God Almighty. So the covenant Abraham made with God came down to this: to accept as the commandment of God whatever was commanded to him in God's name, in a dream or vision, and to deliver it to his family, and make sure they observed it.
In this contract between God and Abraham, we can observe three points of major consequence for the government of God's people.
First: when this covenant was made, God spoke only to Abraham. He made no contract with any member of Abraham's family or any of his descendants — except in the sense that their wills (which are the essence of every covenant) were already wrapped up in the will of Abraham before the contract was made. Abraham, in other words, was assumed to have lawful power to make his people perform everything he covenanted on their behalf. Scripture says exactly this (Genesis 18:18-19): "All the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him, for I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord."
From this we can draw our first conclusion: those to whom God has not spoken directly are to receive the positive commandments of God from their sovereign — just as Abraham's family and descendants received them from Abraham, their father, their lord, and their civil sovereign. And consequently, in every commonwealth, those who have no supernatural revelation to the contrary ought to obey the laws of their own sovereign in the external acts and profession of religion. As for the inward thoughts and beliefs of men — which human governors cannot take notice of, for God alone knows the heart — these are not voluntary. They are not the effect of laws, but of the unrevealed will and power of God, and so they fall under no obligation at all.
From the same contract follows a second point. Suppose one of Abraham's subjects claimed a private vision, or spirit, or some other revelation from God, to support a doctrine Abraham had forbidden. It was not unlawful for Abraham to punish that person — and to punish anyone who followed or sided with such a pretender. And consequently, it is lawful now for the sovereign to punish any man who sets up his "private spirit" against the laws. For the sovereign holds the same place in the commonwealth that Abraham held in his own family.
And from the same contract arises a third point: just as no one but Abraham in his family could take notice of what was, or was not, the word of God, so no one but the sovereign in a Christian commonwealth can do so. God spoke only to Abraham, and Abraham alone was in a position to know what God said and to interpret it to his family. Therefore those who hold the place of Abraham in a commonwealth are the only interpreters of what God has spoken.
The same covenant was renewed with Isaac, and afterwards with Jacob — but then no more, until the Israelites were freed from the Egyptians and arrived at the foot of Mount Sinai. There it was renewed by Moses (as I said before, in chapter 35), in such a way that from that time forward the Israelites became the peculiar kingdom of God, whose lieutenant was Moses for his own lifetime, with the succession to that office settled on Aaron and his heirs after him — to be to God a priestly kingdom forever.
By this constitution, a kingdom is acquired to God. But notice a difficulty. Moses had no authority to govern the Israelites as a successor to Abraham's right, because he could not claim it by inheritance. So it does not yet appear that the people were obligated to take him for God's lieutenant any longer than they believed that God actually spoke to him. His authority — despite the covenant they had made with God — still depended entirely on the opinion they held of his holiness, of the reality of his conversations with God, and of the truth of his miracles. And if that opinion changed, they were no longer obligated to accept anything he proposed to them in God's name as the law of God.
We have to ask, then: what other ground was there for their obligation to obey him? It could not be the commandment of God itself, because God did not speak to them directly — only through the mediation of Moses himself. Our Savior says of himself (John 5:31), "If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true." If that holds for Christ, then much less should Moses' testimony about himself be accepted — especially when he was claiming kingly power over God's people. His authority, therefore, like the authority of all other princes, must be grounded on the consent of the people and their promise to obey him.
And so it was. For the people (Exodus 20:18), "when they saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, moved back and stood far off. And they said to Moses: speak thou with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die." Here was their promise of obedience. By this promise they obligated themselves to obey whatever he delivered to them as the commandment of God.
Moses Was Sovereign of the Jews (Under God) All His Lifetime, Though Aaron Held the Priesthood
Now, the covenant did establish a priestly kingdom — that is, a kingdom hereditary to Aaron. But that must be understood of the succession after Moses was dead. Whoever orders and establishes the political system, as first founder of a commonwealth — whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy — must necessarily have sovereign power over the people the whole time he is doing it. And that Moses held that power his whole lifetime is plainly affirmed in Scripture.
First, in the text just cited: the people promised obedience to him, not to Aaron.
Second (Exodus 24:1-2): "And God said unto Moses, Come up unto the Lord, thou, and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. And Moses alone shall come near the Lord, but they shall not come nigh, neither shall the people go up with him." This makes it plain that Moses — who alone was called up to God, not Aaron, not the other priests, not the seventy elders, not the people, who were forbidden to come up — was alone the one who represented the person of God to the Israelites. That is to say, he was their sole sovereign under God. It is true that afterwards (verse 9) we read: "Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet, as it were, a paved work of a sapphire stone," and so on. But this did not happen until after Moses had been with God before, and had already brought down to the people the words God had spoken to him. He alone went up on the people's business; the others, like the nobles of his retinue, were admitted purely as an honor, to a special grace not allowed to the people — which was (as the following verse shows) to see God and live: "God laid not his hand upon them; they saw God, and did eat and drink" — that is, they lived — but they carried no commandment from him to the people.
Third: everywhere the text says "The Lord spoke unto Moses" — in all matters of government, and also in the ordering of the ceremonies of religion contained in chapters 25 through 31 of Exodus and throughout Leviticus. To Aaron, rarely. Indeed, the calf that Aaron made, Moses threw into the fire.
Fourth: the question of Aaron's authority — raised when he and Miriam mutinied against Moses — was judged by God himself in Moses' favor (Numbers 12).
And likewise in the dispute between Moses and the people, when Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly "gathered themselves together against Moses, and against Aaron" (Numbers 16:3), "and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is amongst them; why lift you up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?" God caused the earth to swallow Korah, Dathan, and Abiram alive, with their wives and children, and consumed those two hundred and fifty princes with fire.
So: not Aaron, not the people, not any aristocracy of the chief princes of the people — Moses alone had, next under God, the sovereignty over the Israelites. And not only in matters of civil policy, but in religion too. For only Moses spoke with God, and therefore only Moses could tell the people what it was that God required of them. No man, on pain of death, could be so presumptuous as to approach the mountain where God talked with Moses. "Thou shalt set bounds to the people round about," says the Lord (Exodus 19:12), "and say, Take heed to yourselves that you go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it; whosoever toucheth the mount shall surely be put to death." And again (verse 21): "Get down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze."
From all this we may conclude: whoever in a Christian commonwealth holds the place of Moses is the sole messenger of God and interpreter of his commandments. Accordingly, no man ought, in interpreting Scripture, to go beyond the bounds set by his own sovereign. For the Scriptures — since God now speaks in them — are Mount Sinai, and its boundaries are the laws of those who represent God's person on earth. To look upon the Scriptures, and behold in them the wondrous works of God, and learn to fear him — that is allowed. But to interpret them — that is, to pry into what God says to the man he has appointed to govern under him, and to make ourselves judges of whether he governs as God commands him or not — is to transgress the bounds God has set us, and to gaze upon God irreverently.
In Moses' time there was no prophet, and no claimant to the spirit of God, except those Moses had approved and authorized. There were in his time only seventy men who are said to prophesy by the spirit of God, and all seventy were of Moses' own choosing. Concerning them, God says to Moses (Numbers 11:16): "Gather to me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people." To these God imparted his spirit — but it was not a different spirit from the spirit of Moses. For the text says (verse 25): "God came down in a cloud, and took of the spirit that was upon Moses, and gave it to the seventy elders."
Now, as I showed before (chapter 36), by "spirit" is understood the mind. So the meaning of the passage is simply this: God endowed them with a mind conformable and subordinate to the mind of Moses, so that they might prophesy — that is, speak to the people in God's name — in such a way as to promote, as ministers of Moses and by his authority, doctrine that agreed with Moses' doctrine. They were only ministers. And when two of them prophesied in the camp, it was considered a new and unlawful thing; as verses 27 and 28 of the same chapter show, they were accused of it, and Joshua advised Moses to forbid them — not realizing that it was by Moses' own spirit that they prophesied. From which it is plain that no subject ought to claim prophecy, or the spirit, in opposition to the doctrine established by the man whom God has set in the place of Moses.
When Aaron was dead, and after him Moses, the kingdom — being a priestly kingdom — descended, by virtue of the covenant, to Aaron's son Eleazar, the high priest. And God declared him sovereign, next under himself, at the very moment he appointed Joshua general of the army. For God says expressly concerning Joshua (Numbers 27:21): "He shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask counsel for him before the Lord; at his word shall they go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he, and all the children of Israel with him." The supreme power of making war and peace, then, was in the priest. The supreme power of judicature belonged to the high priest as well: the Book of the Law was in the priests' keeping, and the priests and Levites alone were the subordinate judges in civil cases, as appears in Deuteronomy 17:8-10. And as for the manner of God's worship, no one ever doubted that the high priest, until the time of Saul, had the supreme authority over it.
Therefore the civil and the ecclesiastical power were both joined together in one and the same person — the high priest. And they ought to be so joined in whoever governs by divine right; that is, by authority that comes immediately from God.
After the death of Joshua, until the time of Saul, the Book of Judges notes repeatedly "that there was in those days no king in Israel" — sometimes adding that "every man did that which was right in his own eyes." By "there was no king" we should understand "there was no sovereign power" in Israel. And so it was — if we consider the actual exercise of such power. For after the deaths of Joshua and Eleazar, "there arose another generation" (Judges 2:10) "that knew not the Lord, nor the works which he had done for Israel, but did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim." The Jews had that quality St. Paul notes — they "look for a sign" — not only before they would submit to the government of Moses, but even after they had bound themselves by their submission. Yet signs and miracles had as their purpose to produce faith, not to keep men from violating faith once given; for to keep faith, men are already obligated by the law of nature.
But if we consider not the exercise of governing but the right of it, the sovereign power was still in the high priest. So whatever obedience was given to any of the Judges — men chosen by God in an extraordinary way, to rescue his rebellious subjects from the hands of their enemies — cannot be used as an argument against the right of the high priest to sovereign power in all matters, both of policy and of religion. Neither the Judges nor Samuel himself had an ordinary calling to government, but an extraordinary one; and the Israelites obeyed them not out of duty, but out of reverence for their evident favor with God, displayed in their wisdom, their courage, or their success. Up to this point, then, the right of regulating the state and the right of regulating religion were inseparable.
After the Judges came kings. And whereas before, all authority — in religion and in policy alike — had been in the high priest, now it was all in the king. For the sovereignty over the people, which had rested not only on God's divine power but also on the particular pact the Israelites made with God, belonged next under him to the high priest, as his viceregent on earth. And that sovereignty was cast off by the people, with the consent of God himself. When they said to Samuel (1 Samuel 8:5), "make us a king to judge us, like all the nations," they were declaring that they would no longer be governed by the commands laid on them by the priest in the name of God, but by a man who would command them the same way all other nations were commanded. So in stripping the high priest of royal authority, they deposed that peculiar government of God. And yet God consented to it, saying to Samuel (verse 7): "Hearken unto the voice of the people, in all that they shall say unto thee; for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them."
Having rejected God, in whose right the priests had governed, the people left the priests no authority at all except whatever the king was pleased to allow them — and that was more or less, depending on whether the kings were good or evil. As for the government of civil affairs, it was obviously all in the king's hands. In the same chapter (verse 20) the people say they want to be like all the nations: their king shall be their judge, and go before them, and fight their battles. In other words, he shall have the whole authority, in peace and in war alike. And that authority contained the ordering of religion within it — because in those days there was no other word of God by which to regulate religion than the Law of Moses, which was their civil law.
The kings' actual conduct confirms this. We read (1 Kings 2:27) that Solomon "thrust out Abiathar from being priest before the Lord." So he had authority over the high priest, exactly as over any other subject — which is a great mark of supremacy in religion. We read (1 Kings 8) that Solomon dedicated the Temple, that he blessed the people, and that he himself, in person, made that excellent prayer now used in the consecration of all churches and houses of prayer — another great mark of supremacy in religion. Again, we read (2 Kings 22) that when a question arose about the Book of the Law found in the Temple, it was not the high priest who decided it; Josiah sent both him and others to inquire about it from Huldah the prophetess — another mark of supremacy in religion. Lastly, we read (1 Chronicles 26:30) that David made Hashabiah and his brothers, Hebronites, officers of Israel on the west side of Jordan, "in all business of the Lord, and in the service of the king"; and likewise (verse 32) that he made other Hebronites "rulers over the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh" — the rest of Israel, who lived beyond Jordan — "for every matter pertaining to God, and affairs of the king." Is that not full power, both "temporal" and "spiritual" — as those who would like to divide it call the two halves?
To conclude: from the first institution of God's kingdom down to the Captivity, the supremacy in religion was in the same hand as the civil sovereignty. And after the election of Saul, the office of the priests was not magisterial but ministerial — they served; they did not rule.
Now, although the government of policy and religion was joined — first in the high priests, and afterwards in the kings — as far as the right was concerned, the same holy history shows that the people never understood it that way. A great part of them — probably the greatest part — gave sufficient credit to the fame of Moses, or to the conversations between God and the priests, only so long as they saw great miracles, or (what is equivalent to a miracle) great abilities or great success in the undertakings of their governors. So whenever their governors displeased them, they seized the occasion — blaming sometimes the policy, sometimes the religion — to change the government or revolt from their obedience whenever they pleased. And from this came, time after time, the civil troubles, divisions, and calamities of the nation.
For example: after the deaths of Eleazar and Joshua, the next generation — which had not seen the wonders of God, and was left to its own weak reason — did not consider itself bound by the covenant of a priestly kingdom. They paid no further attention to the commandment of the priest, nor to any law of Moses, but every man did what was right in his own eyes. In civil affairs they obeyed whatever men they thought, from time to time, were able to deliver them from the neighboring nations that oppressed them. And they consulted not God (as they ought to have done), but whatever men or women they guessed to be prophets by their predictions of things to come. Even with an idol in their chapel, if they had a Levite for their chaplain, they reckoned they were worshipping the God of Israel.
And later, when they demanded a king after the manner of the nations, it was not with any design of abandoning the worship of God their King. Despairing of justice from the sons of Samuel, they wanted a king to judge them in civil matters — but not a king they would allow to change the religion they believed had been handed down to them by Moses. So they always kept a pretext in reserve — either justice or religion — to release themselves from their obedience whenever they had hope of prevailing. Samuel was displeased with the people for desiring a king (for God was their king already, and Samuel had only an authority under him); yet Samuel himself, when Saul failed to follow his counsel by destroying Agag as God had commanded, anointed another king — namely David — to take the succession away from Saul's heirs. Rehoboam was no idolater; but when the people thought him an oppressor, that civil pretext carried ten tribes away from him to Jeroboam, who was an idolater. And throughout the whole history of the kings, of Judah and of Israel alike, there were always prophets rebuking the kings for transgressing the religion — and sometimes for errors of state as well. Jehoshaphat was reproved by the prophet Jehu for aiding the king of Israel against the Syrians (2 Chronicles 19:2); Hezekiah was reproved by Isaiah for showing his treasures to the ambassadors of Babylon.
All of this shows that although the power of both state and religion was in the kings, none of them exercised it uncontested — except those who were popular for their own natural abilities or their good fortune. So from the practice of those times, no argument can be drawn that the right of supremacy in religion was not in the kings. Unless, that is, we place it in the prophets — and conclude that because Hezekiah, praying to the Lord before the cherubim, was not answered from there and then, but afterwards by the prophet Isaiah, Isaiah was therefore the supreme head of the Church. Or that because Josiah consulted Huldah the prophetess about the Book of the Law, neither he nor the high priest but Huldah the prophetess held the supreme authority in matters of religion. Which, I think, is not the opinion of any theologian.
During the Captivity, the Jews had no commonwealth at all. After their return, though they renewed their covenant with God, no promise of obedience was made — not to Esdras, not to anyone else. And shortly afterwards they became subjects of the Greeks, from whose customs and demonology, and from the doctrine of the Cabalists, their religion became badly corrupted. The result is such confusion, in state and religion alike, that nothing can be gathered from that period concerning the supremacy in either.
And therefore, as far as the Old Testament is concerned, we may conclude this: whoever held the sovereignty of the commonwealth among the Jews also held the supreme authority in the matter of God's external worship, and represented God's person — that is, the person of God the Father. Though he was not called by the name of Father until the time when God sent into the world his Son, Jesus Christ, to redeem mankind from their sins and bring them into his everlasting kingdom, to be saved forevermore. Of which we are to speak in the chapter that follows.
We find in Holy Scripture three parts of the office of the Messiah. The first is that of a REDEEMER, or savior. The second is that of a pastor, counselor, or teacher — that is, of a prophet sent from God to convert those whom God has elected to salvation. The third is that of a king — an eternal king, but under his Father, as Moses and the high priests were in their several times.
And to these three parts correspond three different times. Our redemption he accomplished at his first coming, by the sacrifice in which he offered himself up for our sins on the cross. Our conversion he worked partly then, in his own person, and partly works now, through his ministers — and he will continue working it until his coming again. And after his coming again shall begin his glorious reign over his elect, which is to last eternally.
To the office of a redeemer — that is, of one who pays the ransom of sin, and that ransom is death — it belongs that he was sacrificed, and thereby bore upon his own head, and carried away from us, our iniquities, in the manner God had required. Not that the death of one man, even a man without sin, can satisfy for the offenses of all men by the strict rigor of justice. It satisfies through the mercy of God, who ordained such sacrifices for sin as he was pleased, in his mercy, to accept.
Under the old law (as we may read in Leviticus 16), the Lord required that once every year an atonement be made for the sins of all Israel, priests and people alike. To perform it, Aaron alone was to sacrifice a young bull for himself and the priests; and for the rest of the people, he was to receive from them two young goats. One of these he was to sacrifice. But the other was the SCAPEGOAT: Aaron was to lay his hands on its head, and by confessing the iniquities of the people, lay them all on that head; and then, by some suitable man, he was to have the goat led into the wilderness, there to escape — and carry away with it the iniquities of the people.
As the sacrifice of the one goat was a sufficient price for the ransom of all Israel — sufficient because acceptable to God — so the death of the Messiah is a sufficient price for the sins of all mankind, because no more was required. Our Savior Christ's sufferings seem to be prefigured here as clearly as in the offering of Isaac, or in any other type — prophetic foreshadowing — of him in the Old Testament. He was both the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat. "He was oppressed, and he was afflicted; he opened not his mouth; he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep is dumb before the shearer, so he opened not his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7) — there he is the sacrificed goat. "He has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows" (verse 4); and again, "the Lord has laid on him the iniquities of us all" (verse 6) — and so he is the scapegoat. "He was cut off from the land of the living for the transgression of my people" (verse 8) — there again he is the sacrificed goat. And once more, "he shall bear their sins" (verse 11) — there he is the scapegoat. Thus the Lamb of God is equivalent to both of those goats: sacrificed, in that he died; and escaping, in his resurrection — raised at the fitting moment by his Father, and removed from the dwelling place of men in his ascension.
Now, a redeemer has no title to the thing he redeems before the redemption is complete and the ransom paid; and this ransom was the death of the redeemer himself. So it is plain that our Savior, as man, was not king of those he redeemed before he suffered death — that is, during the time he lived bodily on the earth. I say he was not then king in the present, by virtue of the pact which the faithful make with him in baptism. Nevertheless, by renewing their pact with God in baptism, they were obliged to obey him as king — under his Father — whenever he should be pleased to take the kingdom upon him.
And this is exactly what our Savior himself says expressly: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Now Scripture speaks of only two worlds: this one, which stands until the day of judgment — which is therefore also called the last day — and the one that shall be a new heaven and a new earth. So the kingdom of Christ is not to begin until the general resurrection. That is what our Savior means when he says, "The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works" (Matthew 16:27). To reward every man according to his works is to exercise the office of a king; and this is not to happen until he comes in the glory of his Father, with his angels.
When our Savior says, "The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat; all therefore whatsoever they bid you do, that observe and do" (Matthew 23:2), he declares plainly that he assigns kingly power, for that time, not to himself but to them. He does the same where he says, "Who made me a judge or a divider over you?" (Luke 12:14), and "I came not to judge the world, but to save the world" (John 12:47).
And yet our Savior did come into this world so that he might be a king, and a judge, in the world to come. For he was the Messiah — that is, the Christ; that is, the anointed priest and the sovereign prophet of God. He was to have, in other words, all the power that was in Moses the prophet, in the high priests who succeeded Moses, and in the kings who succeeded the priests. And St. John says expressly, "The Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment to the Son" (John 5:22). This does not contradict the other passage, "I came not to judge the world" — for that one is spoken of the present world, the other of the world to come. So also with what is said of the second coming of Christ: "You that have followed me in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, you shall also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel" (Matthew 19:28).
The Purpose of Christ's Coming Was to Renew the Covenant of the Kingdom of God, and to Persuade the Elect to Embrace It — the Second Part of His Office
If, then, Christ had no kingdom in this world while he was on earth, what was the purpose of his first coming? It was to restore to God, by a new covenant, the kingdom which was his by the old covenant, but had been cut off by the rebellion of the Israelites in the election of Saul. To do this, he was to preach to them that he was the Messiah — that is, the king promised to them by the prophets — and to offer himself as a sacrifice for the sins of those who would, by faith, submit themselves to him; and, if the nation as a whole should refuse him, to call to his obedience such of the Gentiles as would believe in him.
So there are two parts of our Savior's office during his stay on earth: one, to proclaim himself the Christ; the other, by teaching and by working miracles, to persuade men — and prepare them — to live in such a way as to be worthy of the immortality that believers were to enjoy when he comes in majesty to take possession of his Father's kingdom. That is why he himself often calls the time of his preaching the REGENERATION. The regeneration is not properly a kingdom, and so it gave no one a warrant to deny obedience to the magistrates who then ruled — for he commanded his followers to obey those who sat in Moses' chair, and to pay tribute to Caesar. It was only an earnest — a down payment — of the kingdom of God that was to come, given to those to whom God had given the grace to be his disciples and to believe in him. For this reason the godly are said to be already in the kingdom of grace, as people already naturalized in that heavenly kingdom.
So far, then, there is nothing done or taught by Christ that tends to diminish the civil rights of the Jews or of Caesar. As for the commonwealth that then existed among the Jews: both those who ruled and those who were governed were all expecting the Messiah and the kingdom of God — which they could not have done if their laws had forbidden him, when he came, to manifest and declare himself. Since he did nothing but go about proving himself, by preaching and miracles, to be that very Messiah, he did nothing in this against their laws. The kingdom he claimed was to be in another world. He taught all men to obey, in the meantime, those who sat in Moses' seat. He allowed them to give Caesar his tribute, and he refused to take it upon himself to be a judge. How then could his words or actions be seditious, or tend to the overthrow of their civil government at the time?
But God had determined Christ's sacrifice as the means of bringing his elect back to their formerly covenanted obedience; and as the instrument for bringing this about, he made use of their malice and ingratitude. Nor was any of it contrary to the laws of Caesar. For though Pilate himself, to gratify the Jews, delivered him up to be crucified, yet before he did so, he pronounced openly that he found no fault in him. And as the title of his condemnation, Pilate put not what the Jews demanded — "that he pretended to be king" — but simply, "that he was King of the Jews"; and despite their clamor, he refused to alter it, saying, "What I have written, I have written."
As for the third part of his office, which was to be king, I have already shown that his kingdom is not to begin until the resurrection. But then he shall be king — not only as God, in which sense he is king already, and ever shall be, of all the earth, by virtue of his omnipotence; but also, in a special way, king of his own elect, by virtue of the pact they make with him in their baptism. That is why our Savior says (Matthew 19:28) that his apostles shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, "when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory" — signifying that he shall reign then in his human nature. And again: "The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels, and then he shall reward every man according to his works" (Matthew 16:27). We may read the same in Mark 13:26 and 14:26, and — more expressly as to the time — in Luke 22:29-30: "I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father has appointed to me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." From all this it is plain that the kingdom of Christ, appointed to him by his Father, is not to be until the Son of man comes in glory and makes his apostles judges of the twelve tribes of Israel.
But here a man may ask: since there is no marriage in the kingdom of heaven, shall men really eat and drink there? What kind of eating is meant in this place? Our Savior expounds it himself: "Labor not for the meat which perishes, but for that meat which endures unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give you" (John 6:27). So eating at Christ's table means eating of the tree of life — that is to say, enjoying immortality in the kingdom of the Son of man. From these passages, and many more, it is evident that our Savior's kingdom is to be exercised by him in his human nature.
Again, he is to be king then in no other way than as subordinate — a viceregent of God the Father, as Moses was in the wilderness, as the high priests were before the reign of Saul, and as the kings were after it. For it is one of the prophecies concerning Christ that he should be like Moses in his office: "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words into his mouth," says the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:18).
And this likeness to Moses shows plainly in the actions of our Savior himself while he lived on earth. As Moses chose twelve princes of the tribes to govern under him, so our Savior chose twelve apostles, who shall sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel. As Moses authorized seventy elders to receive the Spirit of God and to prophesy to the people — that is, as I have said before, to speak to them in the name of God — so our Savior also ordained seventy disciples to preach his kingdom and salvation to all nations. And as Moses, when a complaint was brought to him against certain of the seventy who prophesied in the camp of Israel, justified them in it, as serving under his government, so our Savior, when St. John complained to him of a certain man who cast out devils in his name, justified the man, saying, "Forbid him not, for he that is not against us is on our side" (Luke 9:50).
Again, our Savior resembled Moses in instituting sacraments — both the sacrament of admission into the kingdom of God, and the sacrament of commemoration of his deliverance of his elect from their miserable condition.
As the children of Israel had, for the sacrament of their reception into the kingdom of God before the time of Moses, the rite of circumcision — a rite that was omitted in the wilderness, and restored as soon as they came into the promised land — so also the Jews, before the coming of our Savior, had a rite of baptizing: washing with water all those Gentiles who embraced the God of Israel. St. John the Baptist used this rite in receiving all those who gave their names to the Christ, whom he preached as already come into the world; and our Savior instituted the same rite as a sacrament to be taken by all who believed in him.
Where the rite of baptism first came from is not formally stated in Scripture. But it may plausibly be thought an imitation of the law of Moses concerning leprosy, by which a leprous man was commanded to be kept out of the camp of Israel for a certain time; after which, being judged clean by the priest, he was admitted into the camp again after a solemn washing. This may well be a type of the washing in baptism, in which men cleansed of the leprosy of sin by faith are received into the Church with the solemnity of baptism. There is another conjecture, drawn from the ceremonies of the pagans of the past, in a case that rarely happens: when a man who was thought dead chanced to recover, other men were reluctant to keep company with him — as they would be reluctant to keep company with a ghost — unless he were received back into the number of men by washing, just as newborn children were washed from the uncleanness of their birth, which was a kind of new birth. This Greek ceremony, in the days when Judaea was under the dominion of Alexander and the Greeks who succeeded him, may plausibly enough have crept into the religion of the Jews. But since it is not likely our Savior would countenance a heathen rite, it is most likely that baptism proceeded from the legal ceremony of washing after leprosy.
As for the other sacrament — the eating of the paschal lamb — it is manifestly imitated in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, in which the breaking of the bread and the pouring out of the wine keep in memory our deliverance from the misery of sin by Christ's passion, just as the eating of the paschal lamb kept in memory the deliverance of the Jews out of the bondage of Egypt.
Since the authority of Moses, then, was only subordinate — he was but a lieutenant to God — it follows that Christ, whose authority as man was to be like that of Moses, was no more than subordinate to the authority of his Father. The same is signified even more expressly by his teaching us to pray, "Our Father, thy kingdom come," and "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory"; by the saying that he "shall come in the glory of his Father"; by what St. Paul says — "then comes the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father" (1 Corinthians 15:24) — and by many other most express passages.
Our Savior, therefore, both in teaching and in reigning, represents — as Moses did — the person of God; the God who from that time forward, but not before, is called the Father. And being still one and the same substance, God is one person as represented by Moses, and another person as represented by his Son, the Christ. For since "person" is a term relative to a representer, a plurality of representers necessarily brings with it a plurality of persons — even though the substance represented is one and the same.
To understand ECCLESIASTICAL POWER — what it is, and who holds it — we have to divide the time since our Savior's ascension into two periods: one before kings and men holding sovereign civil power converted to Christianity, the other after their conversion. For it was a long time after the ascension before any king or civil sovereign embraced the Christian religion and publicly allowed it to be taught.
For the time in between, it is plain where ecclesiastical power resided: in the apostles; and after them, in those whom the apostles ordained to preach the gospel — to convert men to Christianity and to direct the converted in the way of salvation; and after these, the power was handed on again to others, whom they in turn ordained. This was done by the laying on of hands upon those ordained, which signified the giving of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, to those they made ministers of God, to advance his kingdom. So the laying on of hands was nothing else but the seal of their commission to preach Christ and teach his doctrine; and the giving of the Holy Spirit by that ceremony of laying on hands was an imitation of what Moses did. For Moses used the same ceremony with his minister Joshua, as we read: "And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands upon him" (Deuteronomy 34:9). Our Savior, then, gave his Spirit to the apostles between his resurrection and his ascension: first by breathing on them and saying, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22); and after his ascension, by sending down upon them "a mighty wind, and cloven tongues of fire" (Acts 2:2-3) — not by the laying on of hands, just as God laid no hands on Moses. And the apostles afterward transmitted that same Spirit by the laying on of hands, as Moses did to Joshua. So it is clear from this in whom ecclesiastical power continually remained in those first times, when there was no Christian commonwealth: namely, in those who received it from the apostles by the successive laying on of hands.
Here we have the person of God borne now a third time. For as Moses and the high priests were God's representative in the Old Testament, and our Savior himself, as man, was during his stay on earth, so the Holy Spirit — that is to say, the apostles and their successors in the office of preaching and teaching, who had received the Holy Spirit — have represented him ever since. But a person (as I showed back in chapter 16) is the one who is represented, as often as he is represented. And therefore God, who has been represented — that is, personated — three times, may properly enough be said to be three persons, even though neither the word "person" nor the word "Trinity" is ever applied to him in the Bible. St. John does indeed say, "There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one" (1 John 5:7). But this does not disagree with three persons in the proper meaning of the word "person" — which is, that which is represented by another — rather, it fits exactly. For God the Father, as represented by Moses, is one person; as represented by his Son, another person; and as represented by the apostles, and by the teachers who taught by authority derived from them, a third person. And yet every person here is the person of one and the same God.
But someone may ask here: what was it that these three bore witness to? St. John tells us (verse 11): they bear witness that "God has given us eternal life in his Son." And if it should be asked where that testimony shows itself, the answer is easy. He testified to it by the miracles he worked — first through Moses, secondly through his Son himself, and lastly through his apostles, who had received the Holy Spirit. All of these, each in their own time, represented the person of God, and either prophesied of Jesus Christ or preached him. As for the apostles, it was the very mark of apostleship, in the twelve first and great apostles, to bear witness to his resurrection — as appears expressly where St. Peter, when a new apostle was to be chosen in place of Judas Iscariot, uses these words: "Of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out amongst us, beginning at the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection" (Acts 1:21-22). Those words interpret the "bearing of witness" mentioned by St. John.
In the same place St. John mentions another trinity of witnesses — on earth. For he says, "There are three that bear witness in earth: the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one" (verse 8). That is to say: the graces of God's Spirit, and the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, which all agree in one testimony — to assure the consciences of believers of eternal life. Of this testimony he says, "He that believeth on the Son of man hath the witness in himself" (verse 10). In this trinity on earth, the unity is not a unity of the thing itself, for the Spirit, the water, and the blood are not the same substance, though they give the same testimony. But in the trinity of heaven, the persons are the persons of one and the same God, though represented on three different times and occasions.
To sum up: the doctrine of the Trinity, as far as it can be gathered directly from Scripture, is in substance this — that God, who is always one and the same, was the person represented by Moses; the person represented by his Son incarnate; and the person represented by the apostles. As represented by the apostles, the Holy Spirit by which they spoke is God. As represented by his Son, who was God and man, the Son is that God. As represented by Moses and the high priests, the Father — that is to say, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — is that God. And from this we can gather the reason why the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as signifying the Godhead, are never used in the Old Testament. For they are persons — that is, they take their names from representing — and that could not happen until different men had represented God's person in ruling, or in directing under him.
Thus we see how ecclesiastical power was left by our Savior to the apostles, and how — so that they might exercise that power the better — they were endowed with the Holy Spirit. That is why the Spirit is sometimes called in the New Testament Paracletus — an assister, one called in for help — though it is commonly translated "Comforter." Let us now consider the power itself: what it was, and over whom.
Cardinal Bellarmine, in his third general Controversy, has handled a great many questions concerning the ecclesiastical power of the Pope of Rome, and he begins with this one: whether it ought to be monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic. All those kinds of power are sovereign and coercive. So if it should turn out that our Savior left them no coercive power at all, but only a power to proclaim the kingdom of Christ and to persuade men to submit to it; and, by precepts and good counsel, to teach those who have submitted what they must do to be received into the kingdom of God when it comes; and that the apostles and the other ministers of the gospel are our schoolmasters and not our commanders, their precepts not laws but wholesome counsel — then that whole dispute was in vain.
I have already shown (in the last chapter) that the kingdom of Christ is not of this world. Therefore neither can his ministers — unless they are kings — require obedience in his name. For if the supreme King does not exercise his royal power in this world, by what authority can obedience be required toward his officers? "As my Father sent me," says our Savior, "so send I you." But our Savior was sent to persuade the Jews to return to the kingdom of his Father, and to invite the Gentiles to receive it — not to reign in majesty, not even as his Father's lieutenant, until the day of judgment.
The time between the ascension and the general resurrection is called not a reigning but a regeneration — that is, a preparation of men for the second and glorious coming of Christ at the day of judgment. This appears in the words of our Savior — "You that have followed me in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, you shall also sit upon twelve thrones" (Matthew 19:28) — and in the words of St. Paul: "Having your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace" (Ephesians 6:15).
Our Savior also compares this work to fishing — that is, to winning men to obedience not by coercion and punishment, but by persuasion. That is why he did not tell his apostles he would make them so many Nimrods, hunters of men, but fishers of men. It is compared also to leaven, to the sowing of seed, and to the multiplication of a grain of mustard seed. All of these images exclude compulsion; and consequently, in this time, there can be no actual reigning. The work of Christ's ministers is evangelization — that is, a proclamation of Christ and a preparation for his second coming, just as the evangelization of John the Baptist was a preparation for his first.
Again, the office of Christ's ministers in this world is to make men believe and have faith in Christ. But faith has no relation to compulsion or command, and no dependence on them at all. It rests only on certainty, or on the probability of arguments drawn from reason, or from things men believe already. Therefore the ministers of Christ in this world have no power, by that title, to punish any man for not believing, or for contradicting what they say. By the title of Christ's ministers, I say, they have no such power. But if they hold sovereign civil power by political institution, then they may indeed lawfully punish any contradiction of their laws whatsoever. And St. Paul, speaking of himself and of the other preachers of the gospel of that time, says in express words: "We have no dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy" (2 Corinthians 1:24).
Another argument that the ministers of Christ in this present world have no right of commanding can be drawn from the lawful authority Christ has left to all princes, Christian and infidel alike. St. Paul says, "Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing to the Lord" (Colossians 3:20). And again: "Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, as fearing the Lord" (verse 22). This is spoken to men whose masters were infidels — and yet they are told to obey them in all things. Again, concerning obedience to princes, exhorting us to "be subject to the higher powers," he says "that all power is ordained of God," and that we ought to be subject to them not only for fear of incurring their wrath, "but also for conscience' sake" (Romans 13:1-6). And St. Peter: "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man, for the Lord's sake, whether it be to the king, as supreme, or unto governors, as to them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well; for so is the will of God" (1 Peter 2:13-15). And St. Paul again: "Put men in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, and to obey magistrates" (Titus 3:1). These princes and powers, of whom St. Peter and St. Paul here speak, were all infidels. How much more, then, are we to obey those Christians whom God has ordained to hold sovereign power over us? How can we be obliged to do anything contrary to the command of the king, or other sovereign representative of the commonwealth of which we are members, and from whom we look for protection? It is therefore plain that Christ has not left his ministers in this world any authority to command other men — unless they are also endowed with civil authority.
But someone may object: what if a king, or a senate, or some other sovereign person forbids us to believe in Christ? To this I answer that such forbidding has no effect, because belief and unbelief never follow men's commands. Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give nor take away by promises of reward or threats of torture.
And if it is asked further — what if our lawful prince commands us to say with our tongue that we do not believe? Must we obey such a command? Profession with the tongue is only an external thing — no more than any other gesture by which we signify our obedience. A Christian who holds firmly in his heart the faith of Christ has, in that case, the same liberty the prophet Elisha allowed to Naaman the Syrian. Naaman was converted in his heart to the God of Israel, for he says: "Thy servant will henceforth offer neither burnt offering nor sacrifice unto other gods, but unto the Lord. In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant: that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon — when I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing" (2 Kings 5:17). The prophet approved this, and told him, "Go in peace." Here Naaman believed in his heart; but by bowing before the idol Rimmon, he denied the true God in effect just as much as if he had done it with his lips.
But then what shall we answer to our Savior's saying, "Whosoever denies me before men, I will deny him before my Father which is in heaven"? We may say this: whatever a subject is compelled to do in obedience to his sovereign — as Naaman was — doing it not from his own mind but in deference to the laws of his country, that action is not his, but his sovereign's. Nor is it he who in that case denies Christ before men, but his governor, and the law of his country.
If any man accuses this doctrine of being contrary to true and sincere Christianity, I put a question to him. Suppose there were a subject in some Christian commonwealth who was inwardly, in his heart, of the Muslim religion, and his sovereign commanded him, on pain of death, to attend the divine service of the Christian church. Does he think that man is obliged in conscience to suffer death for that cause, rather than obey the command of his lawful prince? If he says the man ought rather to suffer death, then he authorizes every private man to disobey his prince in defense of his religion, true or false. If he says the man ought to obey, then he is allowing to himself what he denies to another — contrary to the words of our Savior, "Whatsoever you would that men should do unto you, that do ye unto them," and contrary to the law of nature, which is the indubitable, everlasting law of God: "Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself."
But what then shall we say of all the martyrs we read of in the history of the Church? Did they throw their lives away needlessly? To answer this, we have to distinguish among the persons who have been put to death for that cause. Some of them had received a calling to preach and to profess the kingdom of Christ openly; others had no such calling, and nothing more was required of them than their own faith.
The former sort, if they were put to death for bearing witness to this point — that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead — were true martyrs. For a MARTYR is (to give the word its true definition) a witness of the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah; and no one can be such a witness except those who lived alongside him on earth and saw him after he was risen. For a witness must have seen what he testifies to, or else his testimony is no good. That none but such can properly be called martyrs of Christ is plain from the words of St. Peter: "Wherefore of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out amongst us, beginning from the baptism of John unto that same day he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a martyr (that is, a witness) with us of his resurrection" (Acts 1:21-22). Notice here: the one who is to be a witness of the truth of the resurrection of Christ — that is to say, of the truth of this fundamental article of the Christian religion, that Jesus was the Christ — must be some disciple who lived with him, and saw him before and after his resurrection; and consequently must be one of his original disciples. Those who came later can witness no more than that their predecessors said it. They are witnesses only of other men's testimony — second martyrs, so to speak: martyrs of Christ's witnesses.
A man who, in order to maintain every doctrine he himself draws out of the history of our Savior's life, or out of the Acts or the Epistles of the apostles — or which he believes on the authority of some private man — will oppose the laws and authority of the civil state, is very far from being a martyr of Christ, or even a martyr of his martyrs. There is one article only that earns a man so honorable a name when he dies for it, and that article is this: JESUS IS THE CHRIST — that is to say, the one who has redeemed us, and who shall come again to give us salvation and eternal life in his glorious kingdom. To die for every tenet that serves the ambition or the profit of the clergy is not required. Nor is it the death of the witness that makes the martyr, but the testimony itself; for the word means nothing else but a man who bears witness, whether he is put to death for his testimony or not.
Also, a man who has not been sent to preach this fundamental article, but takes it upon himself by his private authority — even though he is a witness, and consequently a martyr, whether a primary martyr of Christ or a secondary martyr of his apostles, disciples, or their successors — is not obliged to suffer death for that cause. Not being called to it, it is not required at his hands; nor should he complain if he loses the reward he expects from those who never set him to work. No one, therefore, can be a martyr of either the first or the second degree who has no warrant to preach Christ come in the flesh — that is to say, no one but those who are sent to the conversion of unbelievers. For no man is a witness to him who already believes, and therefore needs no witness — only to those who deny it, or doubt it, or have not heard it. Christ sent his apostles and his seventy disciples with authority to preach; he did not send everyone who believed. And he sent them to unbelievers: "I send you," he says, "as sheep amongst wolves" — not as sheep to other sheep.
Lastly, the points of their commission, as they are expressly set down in the gospel, contain — not one of them — any authority over the congregation.
First, we have it (Matthew 10) that the twelve apostles were sent "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" and commanded to preach "that the kingdom of God was at hand." Now preaching, in the original, is the act a crier, herald, or other officer performs when he publicly proclaims a king. But a crier has no right to command anyone. Likewise the seventy disciples are sent out "as laborers, not as lords of the harvest" (Luke 10:2), and are told to say, "The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you" (verse 9). And the kingdom meant here is not the kingdom of grace but the kingdom of glory; for they are commanded to pronounce it as a threat against the cities that will not receive them — that it shall be more tolerable on that day for Sodom than for such a city (verse 11). And our Savior tells his disciples, who were seeking priority of place, that their office was to minister, "even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister" (Matthew 20:28). Preachers, therefore, have not magisterial power but ministerial — they serve; they do not rule. "Be not called masters," says our Savior, "for one is your master, even Christ" (Matthew 23:10).
Another point of their commission is to teach all nations — as it stands in Matthew 28:19, or as St. Mark has it, "Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). Teaching and preaching, then, are the same thing. For those who proclaim the coming of a king must also make known by what right he comes, if they expect men to submit themselves to him. So St. Paul did with the Jews of Thessalonica, when "three Sabbath days he reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus is Christ." But to teach out of the Old Testament that Jesus was the Christ — that is to say, the king — and that he rose from the dead, is not to say that men, once they believe it, are bound to obey those who tell them so against the laws and commands of their sovereigns. It is to say that they will do wisely to await the coming of Christ hereafter in patience and faith, with obedience to their present magistrates.
Another point of their commission is to baptize, "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." What is baptism? Dipping into water. But what is it to dip a man into water in the name of anything? The meaning of these words of baptism is this. He that is baptized is dipped, or washed, as a sign of becoming a new man and a loyal subject: to that God whose person was represented in old time by Moses and the high priests, when he reigned over the Jews; and to Jesus Christ his Son, God and man, who has redeemed us, and who shall, in his human nature, represent his Father's person in his eternal kingdom after the resurrection; and as a sign that he acknowledges the doctrine of the apostles — who, assisted by the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, were left as guides to bring us into that kingdom — to be the only sure way there. This is our promise in baptism. And the authority of earthly sovereigns is not to be put down until the day of judgment — for that is expressly affirmed by St. Paul, where he says: "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, afterward they that are Christ's at his coming; then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all rule, and all authority and power" (1 Corinthians 15:22-24). So it is plain that in baptism we do not set up over ourselves another authority by which our external actions are to be governed in this life; we promise to take the doctrine of the apostles as our guide on the way to eternal life.
The power of remitting and retaining sins — called also the power of loosing and binding, and sometimes the KEYS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN — is a consequence of the authority to baptize, or to refuse baptism. For baptism is the sacrament of allegiance of those who are to be received into the kingdom of God — that is to say, into eternal life; that is to say, into the remission of sin. For as eternal life was lost by the committing of men's sins, so it is recovered by their remission. The end of baptism is the remission of sins. That is why St. Peter, when those converted by his sermon on the day of Pentecost asked him what they were to do, advised them to "repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus, for the remission of sins." And therefore, since to baptize is to declare a man's reception into God's kingdom, and to refuse baptism is to declare his exclusion, it follows that the power to declare men cast out of it, or retained in it, was given to the same apostles, and to their substitutes and successors. And so, after our Savior had breathed upon them, saying, "Receive the Holy Ghost" (John 20:22), he adds in the next verse: "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained."
These words do not grant an authority to forgive or retain sins simply and absolutely, as God forgives or retains them — God, who knows the heart of man and the truth of his penitence and conversion. They grant it conditionally: to the penitent. And this forgiveness, or absolution, in case the absolved man's repentance is feigned, is by that very fact made void — without any further act or sentence by the absolver — and has no effect at all toward salvation, but on the contrary toward the aggravation of his sin. Therefore the apostles and their successors are to follow only the outward marks of repentance. Where those marks appear, they have no authority to deny absolution; where they do not appear, they have no authority to absolve. The same is to be observed in baptism: the apostles had no power to deny baptism to a converted Jew or Gentile, nor to grant it to the unrepentant.
But since no man can discern the truth of another man's repentance further than by external marks, drawn from his words and actions — which are subject to hypocrisy — another question arises: who is constituted judge of those marks? And this question our Savior himself decides: "If thy brother shall trespass against thee," he says, "go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone; if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church; let him be unto thee as a heathen man, and a publican" (Matthew 18:15-17). From this it is plain that the judgment concerning the truth of repentance belonged not to any one man, but to the Church — that is, to the assembly of the faithful, or to those who have authority to be their representative. But besides the judgment, the pronouncing of the sentence is also necessary; and this always belonged to the apostle, or to some pastor of the church, as its spokesman. Of this our Savior speaks in verse 18: "Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
And the practice of St. Paul conforms to this, where he says: "For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have determined already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed: in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to deliver such a one to Satan" (1 Corinthians 5:3-5) — that is to say, to cast him out of the Church, as a man whose sins are not forgiven. Paul here pronounces the sentence; but the assembly was first to hear the cause (for St. Paul was absent), and consequently to condemn him. But in the same chapter the judgment in such a case is attributed even more expressly to the assembly: "But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, etc. — with such a one, no, not to eat. For what have I to do to judge them that are without? Do not ye judge them that are within?" (verses 11-12). The sentence by which a man was put out of the Church, then, was pronounced by the apostle or pastor; but the judgment on the merits of the case lay with the Church — that is to say (these being the times before the conversion of kings and of men holding sovereign authority in the commonwealth), with the assembly of the Christians dwelling in the same city. In Corinth, for instance, with the assembly of the Christians of Corinth.
This part of the power of the keys, by which men were thrust out of the kingdom of God, is what is called EXCOMMUNICATION; and to excommunicate is, in the original, aposunagogon poiein — to cast out of the synagogue, that is, out of the place of divine service. The word is drawn from the custom of the Jews of casting out of their synagogues anyone they considered contagious in conduct or in doctrine — just as lepers, by the law of Moses, were separated from the congregation of Israel until the priest should pronounce them clean.
While excommunication was not yet reinforced with civil power, its whole use and effect was this: those who were not excommunicated were to avoid the company of those who were. It was not enough to regard them as heathens who had never been Christians, for with heathens one might eat and drink — which with excommunicated persons one might not do. This appears in the words of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 5:9-10), where he tells them he had formerly forbidden them to keep company with fornicators; but because that could not be done without going out of the world altogether, he restricts the ban to such fornicators and otherwise vicious persons as were of the brethren — "with such a one," he says, they ought not to keep company, "no, not to eat." And this is no more than what our Savior says: "Let him be to thee as a heathen, and as a publican" (Matthew 18:17). For publicans — tax farmers, the collectors of the commonwealth's revenue — were so hated and detested by the Jews who had to pay them that "publican" and "sinner" were taken among them for the same thing; so much so that when our Savior accepted the invitation of Zacchaeus, a publican, it was held against him as a crime, even though his purpose was to convert him. And therefore, when our Savior added "publican" to "heathen," he was forbidding them to eat with an excommunicated man.
As for keeping excommunicated men out of their synagogues, or places of assembly, the Church had no power to do it except the power of whoever owned the place, whether Christian or heathen. And because all places are, by right, in the dominion of the commonwealth, the man who had been excommunicated, no less than the man who had never been baptized, might enter them by commission from the civil magistrate — as Paul, before his conversion, entered the synagogues at Damascus (Acts 9:2) to arrest Christians, men and women, and carry them bound to Jerusalem, by commission from the high priest.
From this it appears that upon a Christian who turned apostate, in a place where the civil power persecuted the Church, or declined to assist it, excommunication carried nothing — neither damage in this world, nor terror. No terror, because of their unbelief; no damage, because casting them out simply returned them to the favor of the world, and in the world to come they would be no worse off than those who had never believed. The damage fell rather on the Church: casting them out provoked them to a freer exercise of their malice.
Excommunication, therefore, had its effect only on those who believed that Jesus Christ was to come again in glory, to reign over and to judge both the living and the dead, and that he would refuse entrance into his kingdom to those whose sins were retained — that is, to those who had been excommunicated by the Church. And that is why St. Paul calls excommunication a delivering of the excommunicated person to Satan: for outside the kingdom of Christ, all other kingdoms after the judgment are comprehended in the kingdom of Satan. This is what the faithful stood in fear of, so long as they stood excommunicated — that is to say, in a state in which their sins were not forgiven. From this we can understand that excommunication, in the time when the Christian religion was not authorized by the civil power, was used only for the correction of conduct, not of errors of opinion. For it is a punishment that no one could feel except those who believed in, and expected, our Savior's coming again to judge the world; and those who so believed needed no other opinion — only uprightness of life — to be saved.
Excommunication applies to injustice — as in Matthew 18: if your brother offends you, tell him privately; then with witnesses; lastly, tell the church; and then, if he still does not obey, "let him be to thee as a heathen man, and a publican." And excommunication applies to a scandalous life, as in 1 Corinthians 5:11: "If any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a drunkard, or an extortioner — with such a one ye are not to eat." But for excommunicating a man who held this foundation — that Jesus was the Christ — over a difference of opinion on other points, by which that foundation was not destroyed, there appears no authority in Scripture, and no example in the apostles.
There is, indeed, a text in St. Paul that seems to say the contrary: "A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject" (Titus 3:10). For a HERETIC is one who, though a member of the Church, nevertheless teaches some private opinion the Church has forbidden; and such a man, St. Paul advises Titus, after a first and second admonition, to reject. But "to reject," in this place, is not to excommunicate the man. It is to give up admonishing him, to let him alone, to set aside disputing with him, as one who can only be convinced by himself. The same apostle says, "Foolish and unlearned questions avoid" (2 Timothy 2:23); and the word "avoid" in this place and "reject" in the other are the same word in the original, paraitou — but foolish questions may be set aside without excommunication. And again, "Avoid foolish questions" (Titus 3:9), where the original word, periistaso — set them by — is equivalent to the former word, "reject."
There is no other passage that can be drawn, with even a show of plausibility, to countenance the casting out of the Church of faithful men — men who believed the foundation, and differed only in some singular structure of their own built on top of it, proceeding perhaps from a good and pious conscience. On the contrary, all the passages that command the avoiding of such disputes are written as a lesson to pastors (such as Timothy and Titus were): not to make new articles of faith by settling every small controversy, which burdens men with a needless load on their consciences, or provokes them to break the union of the Church. And this lesson the apostles themselves observed well. St. Peter and St. Paul, though their controversy was great (as we may read in Galatians 2:11), did not cast one another out of the Church. Nevertheless, even in the apostles' time there were other pastors who did not observe it — such as Diotrephes (3 John 9), who cast out of the church men whom St. John himself thought fit to be received into it, out of the pride he took in preeminence. So early had vainglory and ambition found their way into the Church of Christ.
For a man to be liable to excommunication at all, several conditions have to be met. First, he must be a member of some community — that is, of some lawful assembly, that is, of some Christian church that has the power to judge the matter for which he is to be excommunicated. Where there is no community, there can be no excommunication; and where there is no power to judge, there can be no power to pass sentence.
From this it follows that one church cannot excommunicate another. Either the two churches have equal power to excommunicate each other — in which case excommunication is not discipline, not an act of authority, but schism and the breakdown of charity — or one church is subordinate to the other in such a way that the two speak with a single voice, in which case they are really one church, and the part that gets excommunicated is no longer a church at all, but a scattered crowd of individual persons.
And because the sentence of excommunication amounts to advice not to keep company with the excommunicated person, not even to eat with him, the sentence has no effect if the one excommunicated is a sovereign prince or assembly. All subjects are bound by the law of nature to be in the company and presence of their own sovereign whenever he requires it. They cannot lawfully expel him from any place in his own dominion, sacred or ordinary; they cannot leave his dominion without his permission; and least of all, if he invites them to that honor, can they refuse to eat with him. As for other princes and states: since they are not parts of one and the same congregation, they need no sentence to keep them away from the excommunicated state. The very institution of a commonwealth, which unites many men into one community, also separates one community from another. So excommunication is not needed for keeping kings and states apart; it has no effect beyond what lies in the nature of politics itself — unless its effect is to goad princes into making war on one another.
Nor does the excommunication of a Christian subject have any effect, so long as he obeys the laws of his own sovereign, whether that sovereign is Christian or heathen. For if he believes that "Jesus is the Christ, he has the Spirit of God" (1 John 4:1), "and God dwells in him, and he in God" (1 John 4:15). But a man who has the Spirit of God, who dwells in God, in whom God dwells, can receive no harm from the excommunication of men. Therefore, whoever believes Jesus to be the Christ is free from all the dangers threatened against the excommunicated. And whoever does not believe it is no Christian in the first place. So a true and sincere Christian is not liable to excommunication. Neither is a professed Christian, until his hypocrisy shows in his behavior — that is, until his conduct goes against the law of his sovereign, which is the rule of behavior, and which Christ and his apostles have commanded us to obey. The church cannot judge a man's morals except by his external actions, and external actions can never be unlawful except when they break the law of the commonwealth.
If a man's father, or mother, or master is excommunicated, the children are still not forbidden to keep them company or to eat with them. To forbid that would, in most cases, be to oblige them not to eat at all, since they have no other way to get food — and it would authorize them to disobey their parents and masters, contrary to the teaching of the apostles.
In sum: the power of excommunication cannot be stretched any further than the purpose for which the apostles and pastors of the church hold their commission from our Savior — which is not to rule by command and coercion, but to teach and to direct men on the road to salvation in the world to come. A master of any science may give up on a student who stubbornly refuses to practice his rules; but he cannot accuse the student of injustice, because the student was never bound to obey him. In the same way, a teacher of Christian doctrine may abandon disciples who stubbornly persist in an unchristian life; but he cannot say they have wronged him, because they are not obliged to obey him. To a teacher who complains that way, one may apply God's answer to Samuel in a similar case: "They have not rejected thee, but me" (1 Samuel 8).
Excommunication, then, when it lacks the backing of the civil power — as it does whenever a Christian state or prince is excommunicated by some foreign authority — is without effect, and consequently ought to be without terror. The name fulmen excommunicationis — the thunderbolt of excommunication — came from a fantasy of the Bishop of Rome who first used it: that he was King of Kings, just as the pagans made Jupiter king of the gods and gave him, in their poems and pictures, a thunderbolt to subdue and punish any giants who dared deny his power. That fantasy rested on two errors. The first: that the kingdom of Christ is of this world — contrary to our Savior's own words, "My kingdom is not of this world." The second: that the Pope is Christ's vicar not only over his own subjects, but over all the Christians of the world — for which there is no basis in Scripture, and the contrary will be proved in its proper place.
When St. Paul came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews, he, "as his manner was, went in unto them, and three Sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus whom he preached was the Christ" (Acts 17:2-3). The Scriptures mentioned here were the Scriptures of the Jews — the Old Testament. The men to whom he had to prove that Jesus was the Christ, risen from the dead, were also Jews, and they already believed those Scriptures were the word of God. The result: some of them believed (verse 4), and some did not (verse 5).
Why is that? They all believed the Scripture. Why did they not all believe alike — some accepting, others rejecting, the interpretation of St. Paul who cited it, each man interpreting it for himself? Here is the reason. St. Paul came to them with no legal commission, in the manner of a man who would not command but persuade. And persuade he must, either by miracles, as Moses did with the Israelites in Egypt, so that they might see his authority in God's works; or by reasoning from the Scripture they already accepted, so that they might see the truth of his doctrine in God's word. But whoever persuades by reasoning from written principles makes the person he is speaking to the judge — both of what those principles mean, and of how strong his inferences from them are. If these Jews of Thessalonica were not the judges of what St. Paul alleged out of Scripture, who else was? If St. Paul was the judge, why did he need to quote any passages at all to prove his doctrine? It would have been enough to say: I find it so in Scripture — that is, in your laws — of which I am the interpreter, sent by Christ. Therefore there was no interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation the Jews of Thessalonica were bound to accept. Every one of them was free to believe or not believe, according to whether the citations seemed to him to fit, or not to fit, the meaning of the passages cited.
And this holds generally, in every case in the world: whoever offers a proof makes the person he addresses the judge of that proof. As for the Jews in particular, they were bound by express words (Deuteronomy 17) to accept the resolution of all hard questions from the priests and judges of Israel then in office. But that applies to the Jews who were not yet converted.
For the conversion of the Gentiles, there was no point in citing Scriptures they did not believe. So the apostles labored by reason to refute their idolatry; and that done, they worked to persuade them to faith in Christ by their testimony of his life and resurrection. So at that stage there could not yet be any controversy about the authority to interpret Scripture — since no man, while still an unbeliever, was obliged to follow anyone's interpretation of any Scripture except his own sovereign's interpretation of the laws of his country.
Now consider the conversion itself, and ask what there was in it that could create such an obligation. Men were converted to nothing other than belief in what the apostles preached. And the apostles preached nothing but this: that Jesus was the Christ — that is, the King who was to save them and reign over them eternally in the world to come — and consequently that he was not dead but risen from the dead, gone up into heaven, and coming again one day to judge the world (which would also rise again to be judged), and to reward every man according to his works. None of them preached that he himself, or any other apostle, was an interpreter of Scripture whose interpretation everyone who became a Christian ought to take for law. To interpret the laws is part of administering a present kingdom — and the apostles had no present kingdom. They prayed, as all pastors have prayed ever since, "Thy kingdom come"; and they urged their converts to obey the pagan princes they then lived under.
The New Testament had not yet been published as one body. Each evangelist was the interpreter of his own gospel; each apostle, of his own epistle. And as for the Old Testament, our Savior himself said to the Jews, "Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they that testify of me" (John 5:39). If he had not meant for them to interpret the Scriptures themselves, he would not have told them to draw from them the proof that he was the Christ. He would either have interpreted the Scriptures himself, or referred them to the interpretation of the priests.
When a difficulty arose, the apostles and elders of the church assembled and settled what should be preached and taught, and how they should interpret the Scriptures to the people — but they did not take from the people the liberty to read the Scriptures and interpret them for themselves. The apostles sent various letters to the churches, and other writings for their instruction — which would have been pointless if the people had not been allowed to interpret them, that is, to consider what they meant. And as it was in the apostles' time, so it had to remain until there were pastors who could authorize an interpreter whose interpretation would generally be accepted as final. And that could not happen until kings were pastors, or pastors kings.
There are two senses in which a writing may be called canonical. Canon means a rule; and a rule is a precept by which a man is guided and directed in any action whatsoever. Such precepts, even when given by a teacher to his student, or by a counselor to his friend, with no power to compel obedience, are still canons — because they are rules. But when they are given by someone whom the receiver is bound to obey, then those canons are not only rules but laws. The question here, therefore, is about the power to make the Scriptures — which are the rules of Christian faith — into laws.
The first part of Scripture to become law was the Ten Commandments, written on two tablets of stone, delivered by God himself to Moses, and made known to the people by Moses. Before that time there was no written law of God. Having not yet chosen any people to be his peculiar kingdom, God had given men no law but the law of nature — that is, the precepts of natural reason, written in every man's own heart.
Of these two tablets, the first contains the law of sovereignty:
1. That they should not obey or honor the gods of other nations — "Non habebis Deos alienos coram me," that is, "Thou shalt not have for gods the gods that other nations worship, but only me." By this they were forbidden to obey or honor, as their king and governor, any god other than the one who spoke to them then through Moses, and afterward through the High Priest.
2. That they should not make any image to represent him. That is, they were not to pick out for themselves, in heaven or on earth, any representative of their own imagining, but were to obey Moses and Aaron, whom God had appointed to that office.
3. That they should not take the name of God in vain. That is, they should not speak rashly of their King, nor dispute his right, nor question the commissions of Moses and Aaron, his lieutenants.
4. That every seventh day they should abstain from their ordinary labor and spend that time doing him public honor.
The second tablet contains the duty of one man toward another: to honor parents; not to kill; not to commit adultery; not to steal; not to corrupt judgment by false witness; and finally, not even to plan in their hearts any injury to one another.
The question now is: who gave these written tablets the binding force of laws? There is no doubt that they were made laws by God himself. But a law does not bind anyone — is not law to anyone — except those who acknowledge it as the act of the sovereign. So how could the people of Israel, who were forbidden to approach the mountain to hear what God said to Moses, be obliged to obey all the laws Moses set before them? Some of those laws were indeed laws of nature — all of the second tablet — and so were to be acknowledged as God's laws not by the Israelites alone, but by all people. But for the laws peculiar to the Israelites, those of the first tablet, the question stands — except for this: immediately after the laws were proposed, the people had bound themselves to obey Moses, in these words: "Speak thou to us, and we will hear thee; but let not God speak to us, lest we die" (Exodus 20:19). It was therefore Moses alone at that time — and after him the High Priest, whom God (through Moses) declared should administer this his peculiar kingdom — who had the power on earth to make that short Scripture, the Ten Commandments, law in the commonwealth of Israel. But Moses, and Aaron, and the succeeding High Priests were the civil sovereigns. So up to this point, the canonizing of Scripture — the making of Scripture into law — belonged to the civil sovereign.
The judicial law — the laws God prescribed to the magistrates of Israel as the rule for administering justice, and for the sentences and judgments they were to pronounce in disputes between man and man — and the Levitical law — the rule God prescribed concerning the rites and ceremonies of the priests and Levites — were all delivered to the people by Moses only; and so they too became laws by virtue of that same promise of obedience to Moses. Whether those laws were written down at the time, or simply dictated to the people by Moses by word of mouth after his forty days with God on the mountain, the text does not say. But they were all positive laws, equivalent to holy Scripture, and made canonical by Moses, the civil sovereign.
After the Israelites had come into the plains of Moab opposite Jericho, ready to enter the promised land, Moses added various other laws to the earlier ones. These are therefore called Deuteronomy — that is, the second laws. They are, as it is written, "the words of a covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel, besides the covenant which he made with them in Horeb" (Deuteronomy 29:1). For after explaining the earlier laws at the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, he adds others, beginning at chapter 12 and continuing to the end of chapter 26 of the same book. This law the people were commanded to write upon great plastered stones at their crossing of the Jordan (Deuteronomy 27:1). This law was also written by Moses himself in a book and delivered into the hands of the priests and the elders of Israel (Deuteronomy 31:9), with the command (verse 26) that it be placed at the side of the Ark — for in the Ark itself there was nothing but the Ten Commandments. This was the law Moses commanded the kings of Israel to keep a copy of (Deuteronomy 17:18). And this is the law which, after being lost for a long time, was found again in the Temple in the days of Josiah, and by his authority received as the law of God. But note: both Moses at the writing of it, and Josiah at the recovery of it, held the civil sovereignty. So thus far, the power of making Scripture canonical lay with the civil sovereign.
Besides this book of the Law, no other book was received among the Jews as the law of God from the time of Moses until after the Captivity. The prophets, with few exceptions, lived during the Captivity itself, and the rest only a little before it; and so far were their prophecies from being generally received as laws that the prophets themselves were persecuted — partly by false prophets, and partly by kings whom those false prophets had seduced. And even this book, which Josiah confirmed as the law of God, was lost — along with all the history of the works of God — in the Captivity and the sack of Jerusalem, as appears from 2 Esdras 14:21: "Thy Law is burnt; therefore no man knoweth the things that are done of thee, or the works that shall begin." And before the Captivity, between the time the Law was first lost (which Scripture does not mention, but which was probably the time of Rehoboam, when Shishak king of Egypt carried off the treasures of the Temple — 1 Kings 14:26) and the time of Josiah, when it was found again, the Jews had no written word of God at all. They governed themselves by their own discretion, or by the direction of whoever each of them took for a prophet.
From all this we may infer that the Scriptures of the Old Testament as we have them today were not canonical — were not a law to the Jews — until the renewal of their covenant with God at their return from the Captivity, and the restoration of their commonwealth under Esdras. From that time forward they were counted the law of the Jews, and as such were translated into Greek by seventy elders of Judaea, placed in the library of Ptolemy at Alexandria, and approved as the word of God. Now since Esdras was the High Priest, and the High Priest was their civil sovereign, it is plain that the Scriptures were never made laws except by the sovereign civil power.
From the writings of the Fathers who lived before the Christian religion was received and authorized by the Emperor Constantine, we can see that the books we now have of the New Testament were held by the Christians of that age — except a few, whose small numbers led the rest to be called the Catholic Church, and the others heretics — to be the dictates of the Holy Spirit, and consequently the canon, or rule, of faith. Such was the reverence and esteem they had for their teachers — and in general, the reverence disciples bear toward their first masters, in every kind of doctrine they receive from them, is no small thing. So there is no doubt that when St. Paul wrote to the churches he had converted, or any other apostle or disciple of Christ wrote to those who had already embraced Christ, the recipients received those writings as the true Christian doctrine. But in that age it was not the power and authority of the teacher that made men receive the writings — it was the faith of the hearer. It was not the apostles who made their own writings canonical; every convert made them canonical to himself.
But the question here is not what any Christian made a law or canon to himself — which he might reject again by the same right he received it. The question is what was made a canon to them in such a way that they could not, without injustice, act contrary to it. That the New Testament should be canonical in this sense — a law — in any place where the law of the commonwealth had not made it so, is contrary to the very nature of a law. For a law, as has already been shown, is the command of that man or assembly to whom we have given sovereign authority to make such rules for the direction of our actions as he thinks fit, and to punish us when we do anything contrary to them. When any other man offers us rules the sovereign ruler has not prescribed, those rules are nothing but counsel and advice — which the person counseled may refuse to follow without injustice, whether the advice is good or bad; and which, when it is contrary to the laws already established, he cannot follow without injustice, no matter how good he thinks it is.
I say he cannot in that case follow it in his actions, nor in his conversation with other men — though he may, without blame, believe his private teachers, wish he had the liberty to practice their advice, and wish it were publicly received as law. For internal faith is by its own nature invisible, and consequently exempt from all human jurisdiction; but the words and actions that proceed from it, when they are breaches of our civil obedience, are injustice before both God and man.
Since, then, our Savior has denied that his kingdom is in this world; since he has said he came not to judge but to save the world — he has not subjected us to any laws other than the laws of the commonwealth. That is: the Jews to the law of Moses (which he says he came not to destroy but to fulfill — Matthew 5), other nations to the laws of their various sovereigns, and all men to the laws of nature. The keeping of these laws both he himself and his apostles recommended to us in their teaching as a necessary condition of being admitted by him, at the last day, into his eternal kingdom, where there will be protection and life everlasting. Since, then, our Savior and his apostles left us no new laws to bind us in this world, but new doctrine to prepare us for the next, the books of the New Testament — which contain that doctrine — were not, until obedience to them was commanded by those God has given power on earth to be legislators, obligatory canons, that is, laws. They were only good and safe advice for the direction of sinners on the road to salvation, which every man might take or refuse at his own peril, without injustice.
Consider, too, the commission our Savior Christ gave to his apostles and disciples: to proclaim his kingdom — not present, but to come; to teach all nations; to baptize those who believed; to enter the houses of those who received them; and where they were not received, to shake the dust off their feet against that house — but not to call down fire from heaven to destroy them, and not to compel them to obedience by the sword. In all of this there is nothing of power; only persuasion. He sent them out as sheep among wolves, not as kings to their subjects. They had no commission to make laws, but to obey, and to teach obedience to, laws already made. Consequently they could not make their writings obligatory canons without the help of the sovereign civil power. And therefore the Scripture of the New Testament is law only where the lawful civil power has made it law. And there, the king or sovereign makes it a law to himself as well — by which he subjects himself not to the teacher or apostle who converted him, but to God himself and his Son Jesus Christ, as immediately as the apostles did.
What might seem to give the New Testament the force of law, for those who had embraced Christian doctrine in the times and places of persecution, is the decrees the Christians made among themselves in their synods. We read the formula of the council of the apostles, the elders, and the whole church (Acts 15:28), in this style: "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things," and so on — a style that seems to signify a power to lay a burden on those who had received their doctrine. And "to lay a burden on someone" sounds like the same thing as "to oblige" — so the acts of that council, one might think, were laws to the Christians of that time.
Nevertheless, they were no more laws than these other precepts are: "Repent"; "Be baptized"; "Keep the commandments"; "Believe the gospel"; "Come unto me"; "Sell all that thou hast, give it to the poor"; "Follow me." These are not commands but invitations — callings of men to Christianity — like that of Isaiah 55:1: "Ho, every man that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; come, and buy wine and milk without money."
For first, the apostles' power was no different from our Savior's own: to invite men to embrace the kingdom of God — a kingdom which they themselves acknowledged to be not present, but to come. And those who have no kingdom can make no laws. And second, if the acts of their council were laws, then they could not be disobeyed without sin. But we read nowhere that those who rejected the doctrine of Christ sinned in doing so — only that they died in their sins; that is, that their sins against the laws they already owed obedience to were not pardoned. And those laws were the laws of nature and the civil laws of the state, to which every Christian man had submitted himself by pact. The "burden" the apostles could lay on those they had converted is therefore not to be understood as laws, but as conditions — conditions proposed to those who sought salvation, which they might accept or refuse at their own peril, without committing any new sin, though not without the hazard of being condemned and shut out of the kingdom of God for their sins past. That is why St. John does not say of unbelievers that the wrath of God shall come upon them, but that "the wrath of God remaineth upon them"; not that they shall be condemned, but that "they are condemned already" (John 3:36, 3:18). And it is impossible to conceive that the benefit of faith is the remission of sins unless we also conceive that the damage of unbelief is the retention of those same sins.
But then, someone may ask, what was the point of the apostles, and the church's pastors after them, meeting together to agree on what doctrine should be taught, both for faith and for conduct, if no one was obliged to observe their decrees? The answer: the apostles and elders of that council were obliged — by their very entrance into it — to teach the doctrine concluded and decreed there, so far as no prior law they owed obedience to stood against it. But all other Christians were not obliged to observe what they taught. For though the members of the council could deliberate about what each of them should teach, they could not deliberate about what others should do — unless their assembly had legislative power, which none can have but civil sovereigns. For though God is the sovereign of all the world, we are not bound to take for his law whatever any man propounds in his name, nor anything contrary to the civil law, which God has expressly commanded us to obey.
Since, then, the acts of the council of the apostles were not laws at the time, but counsels, much less are the acts of any other doctors or councils since then laws — if those councils assembled without the authority of the civil sovereign. Consequently, the books of the New Testament, though the most perfect rules of Christian doctrine, could not be made laws by any authority other than that of kings or sovereign assemblies.
The first council that made the Scriptures we now have into the canon is not extant. The collection attributed to the first Bishop of Rome after St. Peter is open to question: though the canonical books are listed there, the words "Sint vobis omnibus Clericis et Laicis Libri venerandi" — "Let these books be venerated by all of you, clergy and laity" — contain a distinction between clergy and laity that was not in use so near St. Peter's time. The first surviving council that settled the canonical Scripture is that of Laodicea (canon 59), which forbids the reading of any other books in the churches. But that is a mandate addressed not to every Christian, but only to those who had the authority to read anything publicly in church — that is, to churchmen only.
Among church officers in the time of the apostles, some were magisterial, some ministerial. Magisterial were the offices of preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God to unbelievers; of administering the sacraments and divine service; and of teaching the rules of faith and conduct to the converted. Ministerial was the office of deacons — those appointed to manage the worldly necessities of the church, in the days when Christians lived on a common fund of money raised from the voluntary contributions of the faithful.
Among the magisterial officers, the first and principal were the apostles. At first there were only twelve, chosen and appointed by our Savior himself; and their office was not only to preach, teach, and baptize, but also to be martyrs — witnesses of our Savior's resurrection. This testimony was the specific, essential mark distinguishing the apostleship from every other church office. To be an apostle, a man had either to have seen our Savior after his resurrection, or to have kept company with him before it and seen his works and the other evidence of his divinity, so that he could count as a sufficient witness. That is why, at the election of a new apostle to replace Judas Iscariot, St. Peter says: "Of these men that have companied with us, all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection" (Acts 1:21-22). That word "must" implies a necessary property of an apostle: to have kept company with the first and original apostles during the time our Savior showed himself in the flesh.
The first apostle not appointed by Christ during his time on earth was Matthias, and he was chosen in this manner. About a hundred and twenty Christians were assembled in Jerusalem (Acts 1:15). They nominated two men, Joseph the Just and Matthias (verse 23), and had lots drawn; "and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was numbered with the apostles" (verse 26). So here we see that the ordination of this apostle was the act of the congregation — not of St. Peter, nor of the eleven, except as members of the assembly.
After Matthias, no other apostles were ever ordained except Paul and Barnabas, and that was done (as we read in Acts 13:1-3) in this manner: "There were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. As they ministered unto the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, 'Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.' And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away."
From this it is clear that though they were called by the Holy Spirit, their calling was declared to them, and their mission authorized, by the particular church of Antioch. That this calling was to the apostleship is shown by the fact that both of them are called apostles (Acts 14:14). And that it was by virtue of this act of the church of Antioch that they were apostles, St. Paul declares plainly (Romans 1:1), for he uses the very word the Holy Spirit used at his calling: he styles himself "an apostle separated unto the gospel of God," alluding to the words of the Holy Spirit, "Separate me Barnabas and Saul."
But since the work of an apostle was to be a witness of the resurrection of Christ, someone may ask how St. Paul — who never kept company with our Savior before his passion — could know that he had risen. The answer is easy: our Savior himself appeared to him on the road to Damascus, from heaven, after his ascension, "and chose him for a vessel to bear his name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel." Having seen the Lord after his passion, Paul was a competent witness of his resurrection. As for Barnabas, he was a disciple before the passion. It is therefore evident that Paul and Barnabas were apostles — and yet they were chosen and authorized not by the first apostles alone, but by the church of Antioch, just as Matthias was chosen and authorized by the church of Jerusalem.
Bishop is a word formed in our language out of the Greek episcopus, which means an overseer or superintendent of any business — and in particular a pastor, or shepherd. From there it was taken up by metaphor, not only among the Jews (who were originally shepherds), but among the pagans too, to mean the office of a king or any other ruler or guide of a people, whether he ruled by laws or by doctrine. In this sense the apostles were the first Christian bishops, instituted by Christ himself — which is why the apostleship of Judas is called his bishopric (Acts 1:20). Later, when elders were appointed in the Christian churches with the charge of guiding Christ's flock by their doctrine and advice, these elders were also called bishops. Timothy was an elder (and in the New Testament, "elder" is the name of an office, not just of an age), yet he was also a bishop. And bishops in those days were content with the title of elder. Even St. John himself, the apostle our Lord loved, begins his second epistle with the words "The Elder to the Elect Lady."
From all this it is plain that bishop, pastor, elder, and doctor — that is, teacher — were just so many different names for the same office in the time of the apostles. For there was then no government by coercion, but only by doctrine and persuasion. The kingdom of God was still to come, in a new world; so there could be no authority to compel in any church until the commonwealth had embraced the Christian faith. And that means there could be no diversity of authority, though there was diversity of employments.
Besides these magisterial employments in the church — namely apostles, bishops, elders, pastors, and doctors, whose calling was to proclaim Christ to the Jews and the unbelievers, and to direct and teach those who believed — we read of no others in the New Testament. The names evangelist and prophet signify no office at all, but particular gifts by which particular men were useful to the church. Evangelists were useful by writing the life and acts of our Savior — such as the apostles St. Matthew and St. John, and the disciples St. Mark and St. Luke, and whoever else wrote on that subject (as St. Thomas and St. Barnabas are said to have done, though the Church has not received the books that have gone under their names). Prophets were useful by the gift of interpreting the Old Testament, and sometimes by declaring their special revelations to the church. But neither these gifts, nor the gift of languages, nor the gift of casting out devils or curing diseases, nor anything else made a man an officer in the church. Only one thing did that: the due calling and election to the charge of teaching.
The apostles Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas were not made apostles by our Savior himself. They were elected by the Church — that is, by the assembly of Christians: Matthias by the church of Jerusalem, and Paul and Barnabas by the church of Antioch. In the same way, the presbyters and pastors in other cities were elected by the churches of those cities.
For proof, consider first how St. Paul proceeded in the ordination of presbyters in the cities where he had converted men to the Christian faith, immediately after he and Barnabas had received their apostleship. We read (Acts 14:23) that "they ordained elders in every church" — which at first glance might be taken as an argument that the apostles themselves chose the elders and gave them their authority. But if we look at the original text, it becomes clear that the elders were authorized and chosen by the assembly of the Christians of each city. The Greek words there are cheirotonesantes autois presbuterous kat ekklesian — that is, "when they had ordained them elders by the holding up of hands in every congregation." Now it is well known that in all those cities, the way of choosing magistrates and officers was by majority vote; and because the ordinary way of telling the yes votes from the no votes was by the holding up of hands, to "ordain" an officer in any of those cities was nothing more than to bring the people together and elect him by majority — whether by a majority of raised hands, or of voices, or of balls, or beans, or small stones, each man casting one into a vessel marked for yes or for no. Different cities had different customs on that point.
So it was the assembly that elected its own elders. The apostles were only presidents of the assembly: they called it together for the election, pronounced the winners elected, and gave them the blessing that is now called consecration. That is why those who presided over the assemblies — as the elders did in the absence of the apostles — were called proestotes, and in Latin antistites: words that mean the principal person of the assembly, whose office was to count the votes, declare who was chosen, and, when the votes were tied, decide the question by adding his own. That is simply the office of a president in a council.
And because all the churches had their presbyters ordained in this same way, wherever the word is "constitute" — as in Titus 1:5, ina katasteses kata polin presbuterous, "For this cause I left you in Crete, that you should constitute elders in every city" — we are to understand the same thing: that Titus should call the faithful together and ordain them presbyters by majority vote. It would have been a strange thing if, in a town where men had perhaps never seen a magistrate chosen any other way than by an assembly, the townspeople, on becoming Christians, had so much as thought of any other way of electing their teachers and guides — that is, their presbyters, otherwise called bishops — than this election by majority vote, which is exactly what St. Paul's word cheirotonesantes implies (Acts 14:23). Nor was there ever any choosing of bishops, before the emperors found it necessary to regulate them in order to keep the peace among them, except by the assemblies of the Christians in every separate town.
The same point is confirmed by the continual practice, even to this day, in the election of the bishops of Rome. For if the bishop of any place had the right to choose another man to succeed to the pastoral office in any city when he left it to plant the faith somewhere else, then surely he would have had all the more right to appoint his successor in the place where he last lived and died. And yet we never find that any bishop of Rome appointed his own successor. For a long time they were chosen by the people — as we can see from the riot raised over the election between Damasus and Ursinus, which Ammianus Marcellinus says was so violent that Juventius the prefect, unable to keep the peace between the factions, was forced to leave the city, and more than a hundred men were found dead on that occasion in the church itself. And though afterward the popes were chosen first by the whole clergy of Rome, and later by the cardinals, no pope was ever appointed to the succession by his predecessor. If, then, the popes never claimed the right to appoint their own successors, I think I may reasonably conclude they had no right to appoint themselves any new power — a power that no one could take from the Church and bestow on them except someone with lawful authority not only to teach the Church but to command it. And no one could do that but the civil sovereign.
The word minister, in the original diakonos, means someone who voluntarily does another man's business. A minister differs from a servant only in this: servants are obliged by their condition to do whatever they are commanded, while ministers are obliged only by what they have undertaken — and so are bound to no more than they have undertaken. By this measure, both those who teach the Word of God and those who manage the secular affairs of the Church are ministers; but they are ministers of different persons. The pastors of the Church, called "the ministers of the Word" (Acts 6:4), are ministers of Christ, whose Word it is. But the ministry of a deacon — called "serving of tables" in verse 2 of the same chapter — is a service done to the church, that is, to the congregation. So neither any one man nor the whole church could ever say of their pastor that he was their minister. But of a deacon — whether his charge was to serve tables, or to distribute support to the Christians when they lived in each city on a common stock or on collections (as they did in the earliest times), or to take care of the house of prayer, or of the revenue, or of any other worldly business of the church — the whole congregation could properly call him their minister.
Their employment as deacons was to serve the congregation; though when the occasion arose they did not fail to preach the Gospel and uphold the doctrine of Christ, each according to his gifts — as St. Stephen did — and even to preach and baptize, as Philip did. For the Philip who preached the Gospel at Samaria (Acts 8:5) and baptized the eunuch (verse 38) was Philip the deacon, not Philip the apostle. This is clear from verse 1: when Philip preached in Samaria, the apostles were at Jerusalem; and (verse 14) "when they heard that Samaria had received the Word of God, they sent Peter and John to them." It was by the laying on of Peter and John's hands that those who had been baptized received the Holy Spirit (verse 15) — which by Philip's baptism alone they had not received. For the conferring of the Holy Spirit, their baptism had to be administered or confirmed by a minister of the Word, not by a minister of the church. And so, to confirm the baptism of those Philip the deacon had baptized, the apostles sent two from their own number, Peter and John, from Jerusalem to Samaria; and they conferred on those who until then were merely baptized the graces that were the signs of the Holy Spirit, which at that time accompanied all true believers.
What those signs were, we can learn from what St. Mark says (Mark 16:17): "These signs shall follow them that believe in my name: they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." This was what Philip could not give but the apostles could — and, as this passage shows, actually did give to every man who truly believed and was baptized by a minister of Christ himself. From which it follows that either Christ's ministers in our own age cannot confer this power, or else there are very few true believers — or Christ has very few ministers.
That the first deacons were chosen not by the apostles but by a congregation of the disciples — that is, by Christian men of every sort — is clear from Acts 6. There we read that the Twelve, after the number of disciples had multiplied, called them together; and having told them it was not fitting that the apostles should leave the Word of God to serve tables, said to them (verse 3), "Brethren, look out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business." It is plain here that though the apostles declared them elected, the congregation chose them — which verse 5 says even more expressly: "the saying pleased the multitude, and they chose seven," and so on.
Under the Old Testament, only the tribe of Levi was eligible for the priesthood and the other lesser offices of the Church. The land was divided among the other tribes (Levi excepted), which — by the subdivision of the tribe of Joseph into Ephraim and Manasseh — still numbered twelve. The tribe of Levi was assigned certain cities to live in, with the surrounding land for their cattle; but for their portion, they were to have a tenth of the fruits of the land of their brethren. The priests, in turn, had for their maintenance a tenth of that tenth, together with part of the offerings and sacrifices. For God had said to Aaron (Numbers 18:20), "You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have any part among them: I am your part and your inheritance among the children of Israel."
God was then king; and having appointed the tribe of Levi to be his public ministers, he allowed them for their maintenance the public revenue — that is, the part God had reserved to himself, which was the tithes and offerings. That is what is meant where God says, "I am your inheritance." And for this reason the Levites might fittingly be given the name of clergy, from kleros, which means "lot" or "inheritance" — not because they were heirs of the kingdom of God any more than other men, but because God's inheritance was their maintenance. Now, seeing that in this period God himself was their king, and Moses, Aaron, and the succeeding high priests were his lieutenants, it is plain that the right of tithes and offerings was established by the civil power.
After the Jews rejected God by demanding a king, the Levites still enjoyed the same revenue; but their right to it now rested on the fact that the kings never took it from them. For the public revenue was at the disposal of whoever was the public person — and until the Captivity, that was the king. And again, after the return from the Captivity, the people paid their tithes to the priest as before. Up to this point, then, church livings were determined by the civil sovereign.
Of the maintenance of our Savior and his apostles, we read only that they had a purse (carried by Judas Iscariot); that those apostles who were fishermen sometimes worked at their trade; and that when our Savior sent the twelve apostles out to preach, he forbade them "to carry gold, and silver, and brass in their purses, for the workman is worthy of his hire" (Matthew 10:9-10). From this it is likely that their ordinary maintenance was not out of keeping with their employment — for their employment was "freely to give, because they had freely received" (verse 8), and their maintenance was the free gift of those who believed the good news they carried about the coming of the Messiah, their Savior. To this we may add what was contributed out of gratitude by those our Savior had healed of diseases — among whom are mentioned (Luke 8:2-3) "certain women which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils; and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward; and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance."
After our Savior's ascension, the Christians of every city lived in common (Acts 4:34), on the money raised from the sale of their lands and possessions and laid down at the apostles' feet — out of good will, not duty. For as St. Peter said to Ananias (Acts 5:4), "While the land remained, was it not yours? And after it was sold, was it not in your power?" — which shows that Ananias had no need to save his land or his money by lying, since he was not bound to contribute anything at all unless he pleased. And as in the time of the apostles, so all the way down until after Constantine the Great, we find that the maintenance of the bishops and pastors of the Christian Church was nothing but the voluntary contribution of those who had embraced their doctrine. There was still no mention of tithes. But by the time of Constantine and his sons, such was the affection of Christians toward their pastors that — as Ammianus Marcellinus says, describing the riot between Damasus and Ursinus over the bishopric — the office was worth fighting over: the bishops of those times, thanks to the generosity of their flocks, and especially of wealthy matrons, lived splendidly, were carried about in coaches, and were lavish in their food and dress.
Here someone may ask whether the pastor in those days was bound to live on voluntary contribution, as on alms. "For who," says St. Paul (1 Corinthians 9:7), "goes to war at his own expense? Or who feeds a flock and does not eat of the milk of the flock?" And again (1 Corinthians 9:13), "Do you not know that they which minister about holy things live of the things of the Temple, and they which wait at the altar partake with the altar?" — that is to say, have part of what is offered at the altar for their maintenance. And then he concludes, "Even so has the Lord appointed, that they which preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel."
From this passage we may indeed infer that the pastors of the Church ought to be maintained by their flocks — but not that the pastors were to determine the amount or the kind of their own allowance, and carve out their own portions, so to speak. Their allowance, then, had to be determined either by the gratitude and generosity of each individual member of the flock, or by the whole congregation. It could not be by the whole congregation, because in those days the congregation's acts were not laws. Therefore the maintenance of pastors, before emperors and civil sovereigns had made laws to settle it, was nothing but benevolence. Those who served at the altar lived on what was offered. In what court could they have sued for more, when they had no tribunals? Or if they had arbitrators among themselves, who would have executed their judgments, when they had no power to arm their officers? It remains, therefore, that no fixed maintenance could be assigned to any pastors of the Church except by the whole congregation — and then only when its decrees came to have the force not merely of canons but of laws; and such laws could be made by no one but emperors, kings, or other civil sovereigns. Nor could the right of tithes in Moses' law be applied to the ministers of the Gospel of that age — because Moses and the high priests were the civil sovereigns of the people under God, whose kingdom among the Jews was then present, whereas the kingdom of God by Christ is yet to come.
So far, then, we have shown what the pastors of the Church are; what the points of their commission are (to preach, to teach, to baptize, to preside in their several congregations); what ecclesiastical censure — excommunication — is (namely: where Christianity was forbidden by the civil laws, the Christians removing themselves from the company of the excommunicated person, and where Christianity was commanded by the civil law, the excommunicated person being put out of the congregations of Christians); who elected the pastors and ministers of the Church (the congregation); who consecrated and blessed them (the pastor); and what their due revenue was (none but their own possessions, their own labor, and the voluntary contributions of devout and grateful Christians). We are now to consider what office belongs to those persons who, being civil sovereigns, have also embraced the Christian faith.
First, we must remember that the right of judging which doctrines are fit for peace and fit to be taught to the subjects is, in all commonwealths, inseparably attached to the sovereign civil power, whether that power lies in one man or in one assembly of men — as has already been proved in chapter 18. For it is obvious to the meanest understanding that men's actions flow from the opinions they hold about the good or evil those actions will bring upon themselves. Consequently, once men are possessed of the opinion that obeying the sovereign power will hurt them more than disobeying it, they will disobey the laws — and thereby overthrow the commonwealth and bring in confusion and civil war, the very things all civil government was ordained to avoid. That is why, in all the commonwealths of the pagans, the sovereigns bore the name of pastors of the people: because no subject could lawfully teach the people except by their permission and authority.
This right of the pagan kings cannot be thought to have been taken from them by their conversion to the faith of Christ — who never ordained that kings, for believing in him, should be deposed (that is, subjected to anyone but himself), or, which comes to the same thing, be stripped of the power necessary for preserving peace among their subjects and defending them against foreign enemies. Therefore Christian kings are still the supreme pastors of their people, and have the power to ordain whatever pastors they please to teach the Church — that is, to teach the people committed to their charge.
Again, suppose the right of choosing pastors remains (as it was before the conversion of kings) in the Church — for so it was in the time of the apostles themselves, as has already been shown in this chapter. Even so, the right will still belong to the Christian civil sovereign. For insofar as he is a Christian, he allows the teaching; and insofar as he is the sovereign — which is as much as to say, the Church by representation — the teachers he elects are elected by the Church. And when an assembly of Christians chooses its pastor in a Christian commonwealth, it is the sovereign who elects him, because it is done by his authority — just as when a town chooses its mayor, it is the act of the one who holds the sovereign power. For every act done is the act of him without whose consent it would be invalid. And therefore, whatever examples may be drawn out of history of pastors being elected by the people or by the clergy, they are no argument against the right of any civil sovereign, because those who elected them did it by his authority.
Since, then, in every Christian commonwealth the civil sovereign is the supreme pastor, to whose charge the whole flock of his subjects is committed, and since it is consequently by his authority that all other pastors are made and have power to teach and to perform all other pastoral offices, it follows that it is from the civil sovereign that all other pastors derive their right of teaching, preaching, and every other function belonging to that office — and that they are nothing but his ministers. They are his ministers in the same way that town magistrates, judges in courts of justice, and commanders of armies are all ministers of him who is the magistrate of the whole commonwealth, the judge of all causes, and the commander of the whole militia — which is always the civil sovereign. And the reason for this is not that the teachers are his subjects, but that the learners are.
For suppose a Christian king were to hand over the authority of ordaining pastors in his dominions to another king — as various Christian kings allow that power to the Pope. He does not thereby set up a pastor over himself, nor a sovereign pastor over his people. To do that would be to strip himself of the civil power itself — which, since it depends on the opinion men have of their duty to him and the fear they have of punishment in another world, would then depend also on the skill and loyalty of teachers of religion, who are no less subject to ambition, and to ignorance, than any other sort of men. So wherever a foreigner has authority to appoint teachers, that authority is given to him by the sovereign in whose dominions he teaches. Christian doctors are our schoolmasters in Christianity; but kings are the fathers of families, and they may receive schoolmasters for their subjects on the recommendation of a foreigner, but not on his command — especially when teaching the subjects badly would work to the great and obvious profit of the one recommending them. Nor can kings be obliged to keep such teachers any longer than it serves the public good — the care of which remains in their charge for as long as they retain any other essential right of the sovereignty.
Only the Sovereign's Pastoral Authority Is Jure Divino; All Other Pastors Hold Theirs Jure Civili
If a man should ask a pastor, in the execution of his office, the question the chief priests and elders of the people asked our Savior (Matthew 21:23) — "By what authority do you do these things, and who gave you this authority?" — he can give no other honest answer than that he does it by the authority of the commonwealth, given him by the king or the assembly that represents it. All pastors, except the supreme one, execute their charges in the right — that is, by the authority — of the civil sovereign: that is, jure civili, by civil right. But the king, and every other sovereign, executes his office of supreme pastor by immediate authority from God — that is to say, in God's right, or jure divino, by divine right. And that is why none but kings may put into their titles the mark of their submission to God alone: Dei Gratia Rex — "King by the grace of God," and so forth. Bishops ought to say at the beginning of their official documents, "By the favor of the King's Majesty, Bishop of such-and-such a diocese," or, as civil ministers, "In his Majesty's name." For when they write Divina Providentia — "by Divine Providence," which is just Dei Gratia in disguise — they deny that they received their authority from the civil state, and slyly slip the collar of their civil subjection off their necks, contrary to the unity and defense of the commonwealth.
But if every Christian sovereign is the supreme pastor of his own subjects, it would seem he also has the authority not only to preach (which perhaps no one will deny), but also to baptize, to administer the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and to consecrate both temples and pastors to God's service. Most men deny this — partly because sovereigns do not customarily do these things, and partly because the administration of sacraments and the consecration of persons and places to holy uses is thought to require the laying on of hands by men who, through a chain of such impositions reaching back to the apostles, have themselves been ordained to that ministry. So to prove that Christian kings have the power to baptize and to consecrate, I must explain two things: why they do not customarily do it, and how, without the ordinary ceremony of laying on of hands, they are nevertheless qualified to do it whenever they please.
There is no doubt that any king, if he happened to be skilled in the sciences, could by the very right of his office deliver lectures in them himself — the same right by which he authorizes others to deliver them in the universities. Nevertheless, because the care of the whole business of the commonwealth takes up his entire time, it would not be practical for him to apply himself in person to that particular task. A king may also, if he pleases, sit in judgment and hear and decide all manner of cases, just as well as give others the authority to do it in his name; but the burden of command and government that lies on him forces him to stay continually at the helm and commit the ministerial offices to others under him. In just the same way our Savior — who surely had the power to baptize — baptized no one himself, but sent his apostles and disciples to baptize (John 4:2). So also St. Paul, pressed by the necessity of preaching in many far-distant places, baptized few: among all the Corinthians he baptized only Crispus, Gaius, and Stephanas (1 Corinthians 1:14, 16), and the reason was that his principal charge was to preach (1 Corinthians 1:17). From this it is clear that the greater charge — such as the government of the Church — is a dispensation from the lesser. The reason Christian kings do not customarily baptize is therefore obvious, and it is the same reason why, to this day, few people are baptized by bishops — and by the Pope, fewer still.
As for the laying on of hands — whether it is needed to authorize a king to baptize and consecrate — we may consider the matter as follows.
The laying on of hands was a very ancient public ceremony among the Jews, by which the person or thing intended in a man's prayer, blessing, sacrifice, consecration, condemnation, or other speech was designated and made certain. So Jacob, in blessing the children of Joseph (Genesis 48:14), "laid his right hand on Ephraim the younger, and his left hand on Manasseh the firstborn" — and he did this deliberately (though the boys were presented to him by Joseph in the opposite order, so that he had to stretch his arms crosswise to do it) in order to mark which one he intended the greater blessing for. So also in the sacrificing of the burnt offering, Aaron is commanded (Exodus 29:10) "to lay his hands on the head of the bullock," and (verse 15) "to lay his hand on the head of the ram." The same is said again in Leviticus 1:4 and 8:14. Likewise, when Moses ordained Joshua to be captain of the Israelites — that is, consecrated him to God's service — he "laid his hands upon him and gave him his charge" (Numbers 27:23), designating and making certain who it was they were to obey in war. And in the consecration of the Levites (Numbers 8:10), God commanded that "the children of Israel should put their hands upon the Levites." And in the condemnation of the man who had blasphemed the Lord (Leviticus 24:14), God commanded that "all that heard him should lay their hands on his head, and that all the congregation should stone him." Why should only those who heard him lay their hands on him, rather than a priest, a Levite, or some other minister of justice? Because no one else was able to designate and demonstrate to the eyes of the congregation who it was that had blasphemed and deserved to die. To point a man out — or anything else — by the hand to the eye is less subject to mistake than to do it by a name to the ear.
So carefully was this ceremony observed that even in blessing the whole congregation at once — which cannot be done by laying on of hands — "Aaron lifted up his hand toward the people when he blessed them" (Leviticus 9:22). And we read of a similar ceremony in the consecration of temples among the pagans: the priest laid his hands on some post of the temple the whole time he was speaking the words of consecration. So natural is it, in matters of God's public service, to designate any individual thing by the hand, to assure the eyes, rather than by words, to inform the ear.
This ceremony, then, was nothing new in our Savior's time. Jairus, whose daughter was sick (Mark 5:23), begged our Savior — not simply to heal her, but — "to lay his hands upon her, that she might be healed." And (Matthew 19:13) "they brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them and pray."
Following this ancient rite, the apostles, the presbyters, and the presbytery itself laid hands on those they ordained as pastors, praying at the same time that they might receive the Holy Spirit — and not only once, but sometimes more than once, whenever a new occasion arose. But the purpose was always the same: a precise and religious designation of the person, ordained either to the pastoral charge in general or to a particular mission. So "the apostles prayed and laid their hands" on the seven deacons (Acts 6:6) — which was done not to give them the Holy Spirit (for they were full of the Holy Spirit before they were chosen, as appears just before, in verse 3), but to designate them to that office. And after Philip the deacon had converted certain persons in Samaria, Peter and John went down "and laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit" (Acts 8:17). Nor was this power confined to apostles: a presbyter had it too. For St. Paul advises Timothy (1 Timothy 5:22), "Lay hands suddenly on no man" — that is, designate no man rashly to the office of a pastor. The whole presbytery laid their hands on Timothy, as we read in 1 Timothy 4:14; but this is to be understood as meaning that some did it by the appointment of the presbytery — most likely their proestos, or presiding officer, who may well have been St. Paul himself. For in his second epistle to Timothy (verse 6) he says to him, "Stir up the gift of God which is in thee, by the laying on of my hands." Note in passing that by "the Holy Spirit" here is meant not the third Person of the Trinity, but the gifts necessary for the pastoral office. We read also that St. Paul himself received the laying on of hands twice: once from Ananias at Damascus (Acts 9:17-18), at the time of his baptism, and again at Antioch (Acts 13:3), when he was first sent out to preach.
The use of this ceremony in the ordination of pastors, then, was to designate the person to whom the power was being given. But suppose there had been, in those days, a Christian who already possessed the power of teaching before his baptism. Baptizing him — that is, making him a Christian — would have given him no new power; it would only have directed him to preach true doctrine, that is, to use the power he already had rightly. So the laying on of hands would have been unnecessary; baptism itself would have been sufficient. Now, every sovereign, before Christianity existed, had the power of teaching and of ordaining teachers. Christianity therefore gave sovereigns no new right; it only directed them in the way of teaching truth. And consequently they needed no laying on of hands — beyond the one performed in baptism — to authorize them to exercise any part of the pastoral function, such as baptizing and consecrating. And in the Old Testament, though only the priest had the right to consecrate during the time when the sovereignty was in the high priest, it was not so when the sovereignty was in the king. For we read (1 Kings 8) that Solomon blessed the people, consecrated the Temple, and pronounced the public prayer that is the pattern to this day for the consecration of all Christian churches and chapels. From this it appears that he possessed not only the right of ecclesiastical government, but also the right of exercising ecclesiastical functions.
From this consolidation of political right and ecclesiastical right in Christian sovereigns, one thing is evident: they have every kind of power over their subjects that can possibly be given to a man for governing people's external actions, in politics and in religion alike. They may make whatever laws they judge best for governing their own subjects — both as those subjects make up the commonwealth and as they make up the church. For state and church are the same men.
So if they please, Christian sovereigns may do what many Christian kings now do: hand the government of their subjects in matters of religion over to the Pope. But in that case the Pope is, on that point, subordinate to them. He exercises that charge inside another's dominion jure civili — by civil right, the right of the civil sovereign — not jure divino — by God's right. And he may therefore be dismissed from that office whenever the sovereign judges it necessary for the good of his subjects.
They may also, if they please, commit the care of religion to one supreme pastor, or to an assembly of pastors, and give them whatever power over the church — or over one another — they think most convenient, and whatever titles of honor they like: bishops, archbishops, priests, or presbyters. They may make whatever laws they please for the clergy's upkeep, whether by tithes or by other means — provided they do it out of a sincere conscience, of which God alone is the judge.
It is the civil sovereign who appoints the judges and interpreters of canonical Scripture, for it is he who makes them laws. It is he, too, who gives force to excommunication — which, without laws and punishments to humble obstinate freethinkers and bring them back into union with the rest of the church, would simply be shrugged off.
In sum: the sovereign holds the supreme power in all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil, as far as actions and words are concerned. For only actions and words can be known, and only they can be accused. As for what cannot be accused, there is no judge at all but God, who alone knows the heart.
And these rights belong to all sovereigns, whether monarchs or assemblies. For those who represent a Christian people represent the church — because a church and a commonwealth of Christian people are the same thing.
Now, what I have said here and elsewhere in this book seems to me clear enough to establish that supreme ecclesiastical power belongs to Christian sovereigns. But the Pope of Rome's claim to that power over all the world has been defended — chiefly, and I think as strongly as it can be defended — by Cardinal Bellarmine, in his treatise De Summo Pontifice — "On the Supreme Pontiff." So I have thought it necessary to examine, as briefly as I can, the grounds and the strength of his argument.
He wrote five books on this subject. The first takes up three questions. First: which is simply the best government — monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy? He concludes: none of them, but rather a government mixed of all three. Second: which of these is the best government for the church? He concludes: the mixed kind again, but with the largest share of monarchy in it. Third: in this mixed monarchy, did St. Peter hold the place of the monarch?
As for his first conclusion, I have already sufficiently proved (chapter 18) that all governments which men are bound to obey are simple and absolute. In a monarchy there is only one man supreme; everyone else who holds any kind of power in the state holds it by his commission, during his pleasure, and exercises it in his name. In an aristocracy or a democracy there is only one supreme assembly, with the very same power that belongs to the monarch in a monarchy. That is not a mixed sovereignty but an absolute one.
And as for which of the three forms is best — that is not a question to be debated anywhere one of them is already established. The present government always ought to be preferred, maintained, and counted the best, because it is against both the law of nature and God's positive law to do anything tending to its overthrow.
Besides, the question of which government is best contributes nothing to the power of any pastor (unless he also holds the civil sovereignty). For a pastor's calling is not to govern men by command, but to teach them and persuade them by arguments, and then leave it to them to consider whether they will embrace or reject the doctrine taught. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy mark out for us three sorts of sovereigns — not three sorts of pastors. Or, as we might put it: three sorts of masters of families, not three sorts of schoolmasters for their children.
For the same reason, his second conclusion — about the best form of government for the church — has nothing to do with the question of the Pope's power outside his own dominions. For in every other commonwealth, his power (if he has any at all) is only the power of the schoolmaster, not of the master of the family.
As for the third conclusion — that St. Peter was monarch of the church — his chief argument is the passage in Matthew (Matthew 16:18-19): "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church... And I will give thee the keys of Heaven; whatsoever thou shalt bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven."
Considered carefully, this passage proves no more than this: that the Church of Christ has one single article for its foundation — namely the article which Peter, professing it in the name of all the Apostles, gave our Savior the occasion to speak the words quoted here. To understand this clearly, consider that our Savior — in his own person, through John the Baptist, and through his Apostles — preached nothing but this one article of faith: that Jesus is the Christ. Every other article requires faith only insofar as it rests on that one.
John began it first (Matthew 3:2), preaching only this: "The kingdom of God is at hand." Then our Savior himself preached the same (Matthew 4:17). And when he gave his twelve Apostles their commission (Matthew 10:7), there is no mention of preaching any other article but that. This was the fundamental article — the foundation of the church's faith.
Afterward, when the Apostles had returned to him, he asked them all (Matthew 16:13) — not Peter only — who men said he was. They answered that some said John the Baptist, some Elijah, others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. Then (verse 15) he asked them all again — not Peter only — "Whom say ye that I am?" And Peter answered, for them all: "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God." That, as I said, is the foundation of the faith of the whole church. And from it our Savior takes the occasion to say, "Upon this stone I will build my Church." Which makes it plain that by the foundation-stone of the church was meant the fundamental article of the church's faith.
But then why, someone will object, does our Savior slip in the words "Thou art Peter"? If the original of this text had been strictly translated, the reason would be obvious. The Apostle Simon was surnamed Stone — that is what the Syriac word Cephas means, and the Greek word Petrus too. So after Peter confessed that fundamental article, our Savior, playing on his name, said — as if it were in English — "Thou art Stone, and upon this stone I will build my Church." Which is as much as to say: this article, that "I am the Christ," is the foundation of all the faith I require in those who are to be members of my church. There is nothing unusual about punning on a name in ordinary speech. But it would have been a strange and obscure way of talking if our Savior, intending to build his church on the person of St. Peter, had said "thou art a stone, and upon this stone I will build my Church" — when he could so easily and unambiguously have said "I will build my Church on thee," and kept the very same play on the name.
As for the words that follow — "I will give thee the keys of Heaven," and so on — this is no more than what our Savior also gave to all the rest of his disciples (Matthew 18:18): "Whatsoever ye shall bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven." But however the passage is interpreted, there is no doubt the power granted here belongs to all supreme pastors — and that is what all Christian civil sovereigns are, in their own dominions. So much so that if St. Peter, or our Savior himself, had converted one of those sovereigns to believe in him and acknowledge his kingdom, then — because his kingdom is not of this world — he would have left the supreme care of converting that sovereign's subjects to no one but the sovereign himself. Otherwise he would have had to strip him of the sovereignty, to which the right of teaching is inseparably attached.
And that is enough in refutation of his first book, in which he tries to prove St. Peter was the universal monarch of the church — that is, of all the Christians in the world.
The second book has two conclusions: one, that St. Peter was Bishop of Rome and died there; the other, that the Popes of Rome are his successors. Others have disputed both points. But suppose them both true. Even so, if by "Bishop of Rome" we mean either the monarch of the church or its supreme pastor, then that bishop was not Sylvester but Constantine — the first Christian emperor. And as with Constantine, so with all the other Christian emperors: they were by right the supreme bishops of the Roman Empire. I say of the Roman Empire — not of all Christendom. For other Christian sovereigns held the same right in their own territories, as an office essentially attached to their sovereignty. And that will serve as answer to his second book.
In the third book he takes up the question of whether the Pope is Antichrist. For my part, I see no argument that proves he is — not in the sense in which Scripture uses the name. Nor will I draw any argument from the character of Antichrist to contradict the authority the Pope exercises, or has in the past exercised, in the dominions of any other prince or state.
It is evident that the prophets of the Old Testament foretold, and the Jews expected, a Messiah — that is, a Christ — who would re-establish among them the kingdom of God, which they had rejected in the time of Samuel, when they demanded a king after the manner of the other nations. This expectation of theirs left them exposed to the imposture of anyone who had both the ambition to attempt the kingdom and the skill to deceive the people — by counterfeit miracles, by a hypocritical life, or by plausible speeches and doctrine. So our Savior and his Apostles warned men against false prophets and false Christs.
False Christs are those who pretend to be the Christ but are not. They are properly called Antichrists, in the same sense in which, when a schism in the church produces the election of two Popes, each calls the other Antipapa — the false Pope. So Antichrist, in the proper meaning of the word, has two essential marks. One: he denies that Jesus is the Christ. The other: he professes himself to be the Christ. The first mark is set down by St. John (1 John 4:3): "Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is the spirit of Antichrist." The other mark is expressed in the words of our Savior (Matthew 24:5): "Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ" — and again, "If any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, there is Christ, believe it not." So Antichrist must be a false Christ — one of those who pretend that they themselves are Christ. And from these two marks — denying that Jesus is the Christ, and affirming oneself to be the Christ — it follows that he must also be an adversary of the true Christ, which is another usual meaning of the word Antichrist.
Now, among these many Antichrists there is one special one: O Antichristos — THE Antichrist, definitely, one particular person; not indefinitely, an Antichrist. And seeing that the Pope of Rome neither claims to be the Christ nor denies that Jesus is the Christ, I do not see how he can be called Antichrist. That word does not mean someone who falsely pretends to be Christ's lieutenant or vicar-general — it means someone who pretends to be Christ himself.
There is also a mark of the time of this special Antichrist (Matthew 24:15): when that abominable destroyer spoken of by Daniel (Daniel 9:27) shall stand in the holy place, and there shall be such tribulation as has not been since the beginning of the world, nor ever shall be again — so severe that if it were to last long (verse 22), "no flesh could be saved; but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened" — made fewer. But that tribulation has not yet come. For it is to be followed immediately (verse 29) by a darkening of the sun and moon, a falling of the stars, a shaking of the heavens, and the glorious coming again of our Savior in the clouds. Therefore The Antichrist has not yet come — whereas many Popes have both come and gone.
It is true that the Pope, in taking upon himself to give laws to all Christian kings and nations, usurps a kingdom in this world which Christ did not take on himself. But he does it not as Christ — he does it as standing in for Christ. And in that there is nothing of the Antichrist.
In the fourth book, to prove that the Pope is the supreme judge in all questions of faith and manners — which amounts to being the absolute monarch of all the Christians in the world — he brings three propositions: first, that his judgments are infallible; second, that he can make laws, and punish those who do not observe them; third, that our Savior conferred all ecclesiastical jurisdiction on the Pope of Rome.
For the infallibility of his judgments, he cites the Scriptures — and first, Luke 22:31: "Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren." According to Bellarmine's exposition, Christ here gave Simon Peter two privileges: one, that his faith should never fail; the other, that neither he nor any of his successors should ever define any point of faith or manners wrongly, or contrary to a former Pope's definition. Which is a strange — a very strained — interpretation.
But whoever reads that chapter with attention will find there is no passage in the whole of Scripture that makes more against the Pope's authority than this very one. Here is the scene. The priests and scribes were seeking to kill our Savior at the Passover, and Judas was already resolved to betray him. The day for killing the Passover lamb having come, our Savior celebrated it with his Apostles — saying he would do so no more until the kingdom of God was come — and told them, besides, that one of them was to betray him. At that, they fell to questioning which of them it would be. And then — since the next Passover their Master celebrated would be when he was king — they slid into a quarrel over who would then be the greater man.
So our Savior told them: the kings of the nations have dominion over their subjects, and are called by a name that (in Hebrew) means Bountiful; but I cannot be that to you. You must strive to serve one another. I ordain you a kingdom — but it is such a kingdom as my Father has ordained me: a kingdom I am now about to purchase with my blood, and shall not possess until my second coming. Then you shall eat and drink at my table, and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And then, turning to St. Peter, he says: Simon, Simon, Satan seeks — by dangling present domination before you — to weaken your faith in the future; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith shall not fail. Thou therefore (note this), once converted, and understanding my kingdom as a kingdom of another world, confirm that same faith in thy brethren. To which St. Peter answered — as a man who no longer expected any authority in this world — "Lord, I am ready to go with thee, not only to prison, but to death."
From this it is plain that St. Peter was not only given no jurisdiction in this world — he was given a charge to teach all the other Apostles that they should have none either. And as for the infallibility of St. Peter's definitive sentence in matters of faith, no more can be drawn from this text than that Peter would continue in the belief of this one point: that Christ would come again, and possess the kingdom at the day of judgment. The text did not give that to all his successors — for we see they claim the kingdom in the world that now is.
The second passage is Matthew 16: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." By this — as I have already shown in this chapter — no more is proved than that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the confession of Peter, which gave occasion to that speech: namely, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.
The third text is John 21:16-17: "Feed my sheep." This contains no more than a commission of teaching. And if we grant that the rest of the Apostles are included in that word "sheep," then it is the supreme power of teaching — but only for the time when there were no Christian sovereigns already in possession of that supremacy. I have already proved that Christian sovereigns are the supreme pastors in their own dominions, instituted to that office by virtue of their being baptized — and without any other laying-on of hands. For such imposition of hands, being a ceremony for designating the person, is needless when the person is already designated to the power of teaching whatever doctrine he will, by his institution to absolute power over his subjects. As I have proved before, sovereigns are supreme teachers in general by their office, and therefore by their baptism they oblige themselves to teach the doctrine of Christ. And when they let others teach their people, they do it at the peril of their own souls — for it is at the hands of the heads of families that God will demand the account of how his children and servants were instructed. It is of Abraham himself, not of some hireling, that God says (Genesis 18:19), "I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, and do justice and judgment."
The fourth passage is Exodus 28:30: "Thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim" — which, he says, the Septuagint interprets as delosin kai aletheian, that is, "evidence and truth." From this he concludes that God had given evidence and truth — which is nearly infallibility — to the High Priest. Very well: whether what was given was evidence and truth itself, or merely an admonition to the priest to inform himself clearly and judge uprightly — either way, what was given to the High Priest was given to the civil sovereign. For in the commonwealth of Israel, the High Priest stood next under God. So this is actually an argument for evidence and truth — that is, for the ecclesiastical supremacy of civil sovereigns over their own subjects — and against the pretended power of the Pope.
These are all the texts he brings for the infallibility of the Pope's judgment in points of faith.
For the infallibility of his judgment concerning manners, he brings one text: John 16:13, "When the Spirit of truth is come, he will lead you into all truth" — where, says Bellarmine, "all truth" means at least all truth necessary to salvation. But with that softening, he attributes no more infallibility to the Pope than to any man who professes Christianity and is not to be damned. For if any man errs on a point where not erring is necessary to salvation, it is impossible he should be saved — since "necessary to salvation" means precisely that without which being saved is impossible. What those points are, I shall set out from Scripture in the chapter that follows. Here I will say only this: even granting that the Pope could not possibly teach any error at all, that still would not entitle him to any jurisdiction in the dominions of another prince — unless we are also prepared to say that a man is bound in conscience to hire the best workman for every job, even when he has already promised the work to someone else.
Besides the text, he argues from reason, like this: if the Pope could err in things necessary, then Christ has not sufficiently provided for the church's salvation, because he has commanded the church to follow the Pope's directions. But this reasoning is worthless unless he can show when and where Christ commanded any such thing — or took any notice of a Pope at all. No: even granting that whatever was given to St. Peter was given to the Pope, still, since there is in Scripture no command to any man to obey St. Peter, no man can be acting justly who obeys him when his commands run contrary to those of his lawful sovereign.
Lastly, it has never been declared — not by the church, not by the Pope himself — that he is the civil sovereign of all the Christians in the world. Therefore all Christians are not bound to acknowledge his jurisdiction in point of manners. For civil sovereignty and supreme judicature in controversies of manners are the same thing. And the makers of civil laws are not merely the declarers but the makers of the justice and injustice of actions — for there is nothing in men's manners that makes them righteous or unrighteous except their conformity with the law of the sovereign. So when the Pope claims supremacy in controversies of manners, he is teaching men to disobey the civil sovereign — which is an erroneous doctrine, contrary to the many precepts of our Savior and his Apostles delivered to us in Scripture.
To prove the Pope has power to make laws, he cites many passages. First, Deuteronomy 17:12: "The man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest (that standeth to minister there before the Lord thy God, or unto the judge), even that man shall die, and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel." For the answer to this, remember that the High Priest — next and immediately under God — was the civil sovereign, and all judges were to be appointed by him. The words cited therefore amount to this: "The man who presumes to disobey the civil sovereign for the time being, or any of his officers in the execution of their offices, that man shall die," and so on. Which is clearly for civil sovereignty, and against the universal power of the Pope.
Second, he cites Matthew 16, "Whatsoever ye shall bind," and interprets that binding as the kind attributed (Matthew 23:4) to the scribes and Pharisees — "They bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders" — by which, he says, is meant the making of laws; and he concludes from this that the Pope can make laws. But this, too, argues only for the legislative power of civil sovereigns. For the scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses' chair — and Moses, next under God, was sovereign of the people of Israel. That is why our Savior commanded the people to do everything the scribes and Pharisees said, but not everything they did: obey their laws, but do not follow their example.
The third passage is John 21:16, "Feed my sheep" — which is not a power to make laws, but a command to teach. Making laws belongs to the lord of the family, who chooses, at his own discretion, his chaplain — and likewise a schoolmaster to teach his children.
The fourth passage, John 20:21, actually works against him. The words are: "As my Father sent me, so send I you." But our Savior was sent to redeem, by his death, such as should believe, and — by his own preaching and his Apostles' — to prepare them for their entrance into his kingdom. That kingdom, he himself says, is not of this world; he taught us to pray for its coming hereafter, though he declined (Acts 1:6-7) to tell his Apostles when it would come; and in that kingdom, when it comes, the twelve Apostles shall sit on twelve thrones — every one, perhaps, as high as St. Peter's — to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. Since, then, God the Father did not send our Savior to make laws in this present world, we may conclude from the text that neither did our Savior send St. Peter to make laws here. He sent him to persuade men to await his second coming with a steadfast faith — and in the meantime, if they were subjects, to obey their princes; and if they were princes, both to believe it themselves and to do their best to make their subjects do the same. Which is the office of a bishop. So this passage argues most strongly for joining the ecclesiastical supremacy to the civil sovereignty — the exact opposite of what Cardinal Bellarmine cites it for.
The fifth passage is Acts 15:28: "It hath seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication." Here he seizes on the phrase "laying of burdens" as the legislative power. But who can read this text and say that the Apostles' style here could not just as properly be used in giving counsel as in making laws? The style of a law is "We command." But "We think good" is the ordinary style of those who merely give advice — and advisers do lay a burden of sorts, though a conditional one: binding only if those who receive the advice want to attain their ends. And that is exactly the kind of burden this is — abstaining from things strangled and from blood: not absolute, but binding only in case they do not wish to err. I have shown before (chapter 25) that law is distinguished from counsel in this: the reason of a law is drawn from the design and benefit of the one who prescribes it, but the reason of a counsel from the design and benefit of the one to whom the counsel is given. And here the Apostles aim only at the benefit of the converted Gentiles — namely their salvation — not at their own benefit; for having done their part, they shall have their reward whether they are obeyed or not. Therefore the acts of this council were not laws, but counsels.
The sixth passage is Romans 13: "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God" — which, he says, is meant not only of secular princes but of ecclesiastical ones too. To which I answer, first, that there are no ecclesiastical princes except those who are also civil sovereigns — and their principalities do not extend one inch beyond the bounds of their civil sovereignty. Outside those bounds, they may be received as teachers, but they cannot be acknowledged as princes. For if the Apostle had meant that we should be subject both to our own princes and to the Pope, he would have been teaching us a doctrine Christ himself has told us is impossible — namely, "to serve two masters." And though the Apostle says in another place, "I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath given me," this does not mean he claimed a power to put any of them to death, or imprison, banish, whip, or fine them — which are punishments. He claimed only the power to excommunicate — which, without the civil power behind it, is nothing more than leaving a man's company and having no more to do with him than with a heathen or a tax collector. And on many occasions that might be a greater pain to the one doing the excommunicating than to the one excommunicated.
The seventh passage is 1 Corinthians 4:21: "Shall I come unto you with a rod, or in love, and the spirit of lenity?" But here again, the rod does not mean a magistrate's power to punish offenders. It means only the power of excommunication — which is not, by its own nature, a punishment, but only an announcement of the punishment Christ shall inflict when he is in possession of his kingdom, at the day of judgment. And even then it will not properly be a punishment — as upon a subject who has broken the law — but a revenge, as upon an enemy or a rebel who denies our Savior's right to the kingdom. So this proves no legislative power in any bishop who does not also hold the civil power.
The eighth passage is 1 Timothy 3:2: "A bishop must be the husband but of one wife, vigilant, sober," and so on — which, he says, was a law. I had thought no one could make a law in the church but the monarch of the church, St. Peter. But suppose this precept was made by St. Peter's authority. Even so, I see no reason to call it a law rather than a piece of advice — since Timothy was not St. Paul's subject but his disciple, and the flock under Timothy's charge were not his subjects in a kingdom but his students in the school of Christ. If every precept Paul gives Timothy is a law, why is this not a law too: "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy health's sake"? And why aren't the prescriptions of good physicians so many laws? The answer is that it is not the imperative manner of speaking that makes a precept a law — it is absolute subjection to a person.
In the same way the ninth passage, 1 Timothy 5:19 — "Against an elder receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses" — is a wise precept, but not a law.
The tenth passage is Luke 10:16: "He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me." No doubt about it: whoever despises the counsel of those who are sent by Christ despises the counsel of Christ himself. But who are those sent by Christ now, if not those who are ordained pastors by lawful authority? And who is lawfully ordained, who is not ordained by the sovereign pastor? And who is ordained by the sovereign pastor in a Christian commonwealth, who is not ordained by the authority of its sovereign? From this passage, then, it follows that he who hears his sovereign — his sovereign being a Christian — hears Christ; and he who despises the doctrine his Christian king authorizes despises the doctrine of Christ. Which is not what Bellarmine set out to prove here, but its exact contrary.
And in any case, none of this amounts to a law. More than that: a Christian king, as pastor and teacher of his subjects, does not thereby make his doctrines laws. He cannot oblige men to believe. As civil sovereign, he may indeed make laws to suit his doctrine, and those laws may oblige men to certain actions — sometimes to actions they would not otherwise do, and which he ought not to command. Yet when they are commanded, they are laws; and the external actions done in obedience to them, without inward approval, are the actions of the sovereign, not of the subject — who is, in that case, merely an instrument, with no motion of his own at all, because God has commanded obedience to sovereigns.
The eleventh is every passage where the Apostle uses, for counsel, some word men ordinarily use to signify command, or calls the following of his counsel by the name of obedience. So they cite 1 Corinthians 11:2: "I commend you for keeping my precepts as I delivered them to you." The Greek actually says: "I commend you for keeping those things I delivered to you, as I delivered them" — which is far from signifying that they were laws, or anything other than good counsel. And 1 Thessalonians 4:2: "You know what commandments we gave you" — where the Greek phrase, paraggelias edokamen, is equivalent to paredokamen — "what we delivered to you," just as in the passage before. This does not prove the traditions of the Apostles to be anything more than counsels — even though, as verse 8 says, "he that despiseth them, despiseth not man, but God." For our Savior himself came not to judge — that is, not to be king in this world — but to sacrifice himself for sinners, and to leave teachers in his church to lead men to Christ, not to drive them. For Christ never accepts forced actions, which are all that law produces; he accepts the inward conversion of the heart — which is not the work of laws, but of counsel and doctrine.
And then 2 Thessalonians 3:14: "If any man obey not our word by this Epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed." From the word "obey," Bellarmine would infer that this epistle was a law to the Thessalonians. Now, the epistles of the emperors were indeed laws. So if the epistle of St. Paul were also a law, the Thessalonians were to obey two masters. But the word "obey," as it stands in the Greek — upakouei — signifies hearkening to, or putting in practice: not only what is commanded by one who has the right to punish, but also what is delivered by way of counsel for our good. And notice that St. Paul does not bid them kill the man who disobeys, nor beat him, nor imprison him, nor fine him — all of which lawmakers may do. He bids them avoid his company, that he may be ashamed. From which it is evident that what the Christians stood in awe of was not the empire of an Apostle, but his reputation among the faithful.
The last passage is Hebrews 13:17: "Obey your leaders, and submit yourselves to them, for they watch for your souls, as those that must give account." Here too the obedience intended is a following of their counsel. For the reason for our obedience is not drawn from the will and command of our pastors, but from our own benefit — it is the salvation of our souls they watch for, not the exaltation of their own power and authority. If this verse meant that everything pastors teach is law, then not only the Pope but every pastor in his parish would have legislative power. Again: if men were bound to obey their pastors, they would have no power to examine their commands. And what then shall we say to St. John, who tells us (1 John 4:1) "not to believe every spirit, but to test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world"?
It is plain, therefore, that we may dispute the doctrine of our pastors — but no man can dispute a law. The commands of civil sovereigns are granted on all sides to be laws. And if anyone besides the sovereign could make a law, then all commonwealth — and with it all peace and justice — must cease; which is contrary to all laws, both divine and human. Nothing, therefore, can be drawn from these or any other passages of Scripture to prove that the decrees of the Pope are laws anywhere he does not also hold the civil sovereignty.
The last point he tries to prove is this: "that our Savior Christ committed ecclesiastical jurisdiction immediately to none but the Pope." Notice that here he is not handling the question of supremacy between the Pope and Christian kings, but between the Pope and the other bishops.
First, he says it is agreed that the jurisdiction of bishops is, at least in general, de jure divino — by divine right. For this he cites St. Paul (Ephesians 4:11), where he says that Christ, after his ascension into heaven, "gave gifts to men: some apostles, some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors, and some teachers." From this he infers that bishops do indeed hold their jurisdiction in God's right — but he will not grant that they have it immediately from God. It must come, he says, derived through the Pope.
But if a man can be said to hold his jurisdiction by divine right and yet not immediately, then what lawful jurisdiction, even a merely civil one, is there in a Christian commonwealth that is not also by divine right? Christian kings have their civil power from God immediately, and the magistrates under a king exercise their several offices by virtue of his commission. What those magistrates do is no less de jure divino mediato — by divine right at one remove — than what bishops do by virtue of the Pope's ordination. All lawful power is from God: immediately in the supreme governor, and mediately in those who hold authority under him. So he must either grant that every constable in the state holds his office by the right of God, or else admit that no bishop holds his office that way — except the Pope himself.
But this whole dispute — whether Christ left jurisdiction to the Pope only, or to the other bishops as well — is, outside the territories where the Pope holds the civil sovereignty, a contention de lana caprina — a quarrel over goat's wool; that is, over nothing. For where they are not sovereigns, none of them has any jurisdiction at all. Jurisdiction is the power of hearing and deciding cases between man and man; and it can belong to no one but the man who has the power to prescribe the rules of right and wrong — that is, to make laws — and to compel men with the sword of justice to obey his decisions, whether pronounced by himself or by the judges he appoints. And no one can lawfully do that but the civil sovereign.
So when he cites Luke 6 — that our Savior called his disciples together and chose twelve of them, whom he named apostles — he proves only that Christ elected them (all except Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas) and gave them power and command to preach. Not to judge cases between man and man; for that is a power Christ refused to take upon himself, saying, "Who made me a judge or a divider over you?" — and in another place, "My kingdom is not of this world." And he that has no power to hear and decide cases between man and man cannot be said to have any jurisdiction at all. None of this prevents our Savior from having given them power to preach and baptize in all parts of the world — supposing they were not forbidden by their own lawful sovereign. For Christ himself, and his apostles, have in many places expressly commanded us to be obedient to our own sovereigns in all things.
The arguments by which he would prove that bishops receive their jurisdiction from the Pope are therefore all in vain, since the Pope, in the dominions of other princes, has no jurisdiction himself. Yet because those same arguments prove the contrary — that all bishops, when they have jurisdiction at all, receive it from their civil sovereigns — I will not omit to run through them.
The first is from Numbers 11, where Moses, unable to bear alone the whole burden of administering the affairs of the people of Israel, was commanded by God to choose seventy elders; and God took part of the spirit of Moses and put it upon those seventy elders. This is to be understood not as God weakening the spirit of Moses — that would not have eased him at all — but as showing that the elders all had their authority derived from him. In this, Bellarmine interprets the passage truly and honestly. But since Moses held the entire sovereignty in the commonwealth of the Jews, what the passage plainly signifies is that they had their authority from the civil sovereign. So this passage proves that bishops in every Christian commonwealth have their authority from the civil sovereign — and from the Pope in his own territories only, not in the territories of any other state.
The second argument is from the nature of monarchy, in which all authority resides in one man, and in others only by derivation from him; and the government of the Church, he says, is monarchical. But this too works in favor of Christian monarchs. For they really are monarchs of their own people — that is, of their own church, since the church is the same thing as a Christian people. Whereas the power of the Pope, even if he were St. Peter himself, is not monarchy at all; it has nothing in it of the archical — ruling — or the cratical — commanding — but only of the didactical — teaching. For God accepts not a forced, but a willing obedience.
The third is that the See of St. Peter is called by St. Cyprian the Head, the Source, the Root, and the Sun, from which the authority of bishops is derived. But by the law of nature — which is a better principle of right and wrong than the word of any doctor who is but a man — the civil sovereign in every commonwealth is the head, the source, the root, and the sun from which all jurisdiction is derived. Therefore the jurisdiction of bishops is derived from the civil sovereign.
The fourth is taken from the inequality of bishops' jurisdictions. For if God (says he) had given jurisdiction to bishops immediately, he would have given them equality of jurisdiction along with equality of order. But we see that some are bishops of only one town, some of a hundred towns, and some of many whole provinces — differences that were never determined by any command of God. Their jurisdiction, therefore, is not from God but from man; one has a greater share and another a lesser, as it pleases the prince of the Church. Now this argument would have served his purpose — if he had first proved that the Pope holds a universal jurisdiction over all Christians. But that has not been proved. And it is notoriously well known that the Pope's large jurisdiction was given him by those who had it to give — namely, the emperors of Rome. (The Patriarch of Constantinople, on the very same title — being bishop of the capital city of the empire and seat of the emperor — claimed to be the Pope's equal.) It follows that all other bishops have their jurisdiction from the sovereigns of the places where they exercise it. And just as, for that reason, they do not hold their authority by divine right, neither does the Pope hold his by divine right — except only where he is also the civil sovereign.
His fifth argument is this: "If bishops have their jurisdiction immediately from God, the Pope could not take it from them, for he can do nothing contrary to God's ordination." This consequence is good, and well proved. "But," says he, "the Pope can do this, and has done it." This too is granted — provided he does it in his own dominions, or in the dominions of any other prince who has given him that power; but not universally, in right of the papacy. For that power belongs to every Christian sovereign within the bounds of his own empire, and is inseparable from the sovereignty. Before the people of Israel, by God's command to Samuel, set a king over themselves after the manner of the other nations, the high priest held the civil government, and none but he could make or depose an inferior priest. But afterward that power was in the king — as can be proved by this very argument of Bellarmine's. For if the priest (high priest or any other) had his jurisdiction immediately from God, then the king could not take it from him, "for he could do nothing contrary to God's ordinance." Yet it is certain that King Solomon deprived Abiathar the high priest of his office (1 Kings 2:26) and placed Zadok in his room (verse 35). Kings, therefore, may in the same way ordain and depose bishops as they see fit for the good governing of their subjects.
His sixth argument is this: if bishops have their jurisdiction de jure divino — that is, immediately from God — then those who maintain it should produce some word of God to prove it; but they can produce none. The argument is good; I have nothing to say against it. But it is an equally good argument to prove that the Pope himself has no jurisdiction in the dominion of any other prince.
Lastly, he brings as an argument the testimony of two Popes, Innocent and Leo. And I do not doubt that he might, with just as good reason, have cited the testimony of nearly every Pope since St. Peter. Considering the love of power naturally planted in mankind, whoever was made Pope would be tempted to uphold the same opinion. Nevertheless, all of them would only be doing what Innocent and Leo did: bearing witness on their own behalf — and therefore their witness is no good.
In his fifth book he has four conclusions. The first is "that the Pope is not lord of all the world." The second, "that the Pope is not lord of all the Christian world." The third, "that the Pope, outside his own territory, has no temporal jurisdiction DIRECTLY." These three conclusions are easily granted. The fourth is "that the Pope has, in the dominions of other princes, the supreme temporal power INDIRECTLY." This is denied — unless by "indirectly" he means that he has gotten it by indirect means; in which case that too is granted. But that is not what he means. When he says the Pope has it indirectly, he means that such temporal jurisdiction belongs to him by right, but that this right is merely a consequence of his pastoral authority, which he could not exercise without it. Therefore (so the doctrine runs) to the pastoral power — which he calls spiritual — the supreme civil power is necessarily annexed; and the Pope thereby has the right to change kingdoms, giving them to one and taking them from another, whenever he thinks it conduces to the salvation of souls.
Before I come to consider the arguments by which he would prove this doctrine, it will not be amiss to lay open its consequences — so that the princes and states who hold the civil sovereignty in their several commonwealths may consider for themselves whether it is convenient for them, and conducive to the good of their subjects, of whom they must give an account at the day of judgment, to admit it.
When it is said that the Pope does not hold the supreme civil power in the territories of other states directly, we are to understand that he does not claim it the way other civil sovereigns do — from the original submission of those who are to be governed. For it is evident, and has already been sufficiently demonstrated in this treatise, that the right of all sovereigns is derived originally from the consent of every one of those who are to be governed: whether those who choose a sovereign do it for their common defense against an enemy, as when they agree among themselves to appoint a man or an assembly of men to protect them, or whether they do it to save their lives, by submission to a conquering enemy. So when the Pope disclaims the supreme civil power over other states "directly," all he denies is that his right comes to him by that route. He does not, for all that, cease to claim it by another route — namely (without the consent of those who are to be governed), by a right given him by God in his elevation to the papacy; and this he calls "indirect." But by whatever route he pretends to it, the power is the same. And if it is granted to be his right, he may depose princes and states as often as it is necessary for the salvation of souls — that is, as often as he wants. For he also claims the sole power to judge whether something is for the salvation of men's souls or not.
And this is the doctrine not only that Bellarmine here, and many other doctors, teach in their sermons and books, but that some councils have decreed, and that Popes have, when occasion served them, put into practice. For the Fourth Lateran Council, held under Pope Innocent III, has this canon (in the third chapter, De Haereticis — on heretics): "If a king, at the Pope's admonition, does not purge his kingdom of heretics, and, being excommunicated for the same, does not make satisfaction within a year, his subjects are absolved of their obedience." And the practice of this doctrine has been seen on various occasions: in the deposing of Chilperic, King of France; in the transfer of the Roman Empire to Charlemagne; in the oppression of John, King of England; in the transferring of the Kingdom of Navarre; and, in recent years, in the League against Henry III of France — and in many more instances.
I think there are few princes who do not consider this unjust and inconvenient. But I wish they would all resolve to be either kings or subjects. Men cannot serve two masters. Princes ought therefore to relieve their people, either by holding the reins of government wholly in their own hands, or by delivering them wholly into the hands of the Pope — so that the men who are willing to be obedient may be protected in their obedience. For this distinction of temporal and spiritual power is but words. Power is as really divided, and as dangerously for all purposes, by sharing it with an indirect power as with a direct one. But now to his arguments.
The first is this: "The civil power is subject to the spiritual. Therefore he that has the supreme spiritual power has the right to command temporal princes, and to dispose of their temporal goods in order to the spiritual end."
As for this distinction of temporal and spiritual, let us consider in what sense it can intelligibly be said that the temporal, or civil, power is subject to the spiritual. There are only two ways those words can be made into sense. When we say one power is subject to another power, we mean either that the holder of the one is subject to the holder of the other, or that the one power stands to the other as means to an end. For we cannot understand that one power has power over another power, or that one power can have right or command over another power. Subjection, command, right, and power are properties not of powers, but of persons. One power may be subordinate to another the way the art of a saddle-maker is subordinate to the art of a rider. Suppose we grant, then, that civil government is ordained as a means to bring us to spiritual happiness. It still does not follow that if a king has the civil power and the Pope the spiritual, the king is therefore bound to obey the Pope — any more than every saddle-maker is bound to obey every rider. Just as the subordination of an art does not imply the subjection of its practitioner, so the subordination of a government does not imply the subjection of the governor.
So when he says the civil power is subject to the spiritual, his meaning is that the civil sovereign is subject to the spiritual sovereign. And then the argument stands thus: "The civil sovereign is subject to the spiritual; therefore the spiritual prince may command temporal princes." The conclusion is the very thing he was supposed to prove as his premise.
To prove it, he first offers this reason: "Kings and Popes, clergy and laity, make but one commonwealth — that is, but one Church. And in all bodies the members depend on one another. But things spiritual do not depend on things temporal. Therefore things temporal depend on things spiritual, and so are subject to them." In this argument there are two gross errors.
One is the claim that all Christian kings, Popes, clergy, and all other Christian men make but one commonwealth. For it is evident that France is one commonwealth, Spain another, and Venice a third, and so on. These consist of Christians, and so they are several bodies of Christians — that is to say, several churches. And their several sovereigns represent them, which is what makes them capable of commanding and obeying, of doing and suffering, like a natural man. No general or universal church has that capacity until it has a representative — which it does not have on earth. If it had one, there is no doubt that all Christendom would be one commonwealth, whose sovereign would be that representative, in things spiritual and temporal alike. And the Pope, to make himself this representative, lacks three things our Savior has not given him: to command, to judge, and to punish — beyond the punishment of excommunication, which is only to withdraw from those who will not learn from him. For even if the Pope were Christ's only vicar, he cannot exercise his government until our Savior's second coming. And even then it is not the Pope, but St. Peter himself, together with the other apostles, who are to be judges of the world.
The other error in this first argument is his saying that the members of every commonwealth depend on one another, like the members of a natural body. It is true that they cohere together; but they depend only on the sovereign, who is the soul of the commonwealth. When the sovereign fails, the commonwealth dissolves into civil war — no one man so much as cohering with another, for want of a common dependence on a known sovereign — just as the members of a natural body dissolve into earth for want of a soul to hold them together. So there is nothing in this comparison from which to infer a dependence of the laity on the clergy, or of the temporal officers on the spiritual — only the dependence of both on the civil sovereign. And the sovereign ought indeed to direct his civil commands toward the salvation of souls; but he is not, for all that, subject to anyone but God himself. So now you see the labored fallacy of the first argument: it is built to deceive men who do not distinguish between the subordination of actions as means toward an end, and the subjection of persons to one another in the administration of those means. For the means to every end are determined by nature, or by God himself supernaturally; but the power to make men use the means is, in every nation, resigned (by the law of nature, which forbids men to violate the faith they have given) to the civil sovereign.
His second argument is this: "Every commonwealth — because it is supposed to be perfect and sufficient in itself — may command any other commonwealth not subject to it, and force it to change the administration of its government, and even depose its prince and set another in his place, if it cannot otherwise defend itself against the injuries that prince attempts against it. Much more, then, may a spiritual commonwealth command a temporal one to change the administration of its government, and may depose princes and institute others, when it cannot otherwise defend the spiritual good."
That a commonwealth, to defend itself against injuries, may lawfully do everything he says here is very true, and has already been sufficiently demonstrated earlier in this book. And if it were also true that there now exists in this world a spiritual commonwealth distinct from the civil commonwealth, then its prince might, upon injury done to him, or for want of security against injury to come, repair and secure himself by war — which is, in sum, deposing, killing, subduing, or doing any act of hostility. But by the same reasoning, it would be no less lawful for a civil sovereign, upon like injuries done or feared, to make war upon the spiritual sovereign — which, I believe, is more than Cardinal Bellarmine intended to have inferred from his own proposition.
But there is no spiritual commonwealth in this world. For a spiritual commonwealth is the same thing as the kingdom of Christ — which Christ himself says is not of this world, but shall be in the next world, at the resurrection, when those who have lived justly and believed that he was the Christ shall rise (though they died natural bodies) as spiritual bodies. Then it is that our Savior shall judge the world, conquer his adversaries, and make a spiritual commonwealth. In the meantime, seeing there are no men on earth whose bodies are spiritual, there can be no spiritual commonwealth among men who are still in the flesh — unless we call the preachers, who have a commission to teach and to prepare men for their reception into the kingdom of Christ at the resurrection, a commonwealth; and I have proved that they are none.
The third argument is this: "It is not lawful for Christians to tolerate an infidel or heretical king, if he tries to draw them into his heresy or unbelief. But it belongs to the Pope to judge whether a king is drawing his subjects to heresy or not. Therefore the Pope has the right to determine whether a prince is to be deposed or not deposed."
To this I answer that both assertions are false. For Christians — and men of whatever religion — who do not tolerate their king, whatever law he makes, even a law concerning religion, violate their faith, contrary to the divine law, both natural and positive. Nor is there any judge of heresy among subjects but their own civil sovereign. For heresy is nothing else but a private opinion, obstinately maintained, contrary to the opinion which the public person — that is, the representative of the commonwealth — has commanded to be taught. From which it is plain that an opinion publicly appointed to be taught cannot be heresy, and that the sovereign princes who authorize such opinions are not heretics. Heretics are none but private men who stubbornly defend some doctrine prohibited by their lawful sovereigns.
To prove that Christians are not to tolerate infidel or heretical kings, he cites a passage in Deuteronomy 17 where God forbids the Jews, when they set a king over themselves, to choose a foreigner; and from this he infers that it is unlawful for a Christian to choose a king who is not a Christian. And it is true that a Christian — that is, a man who has already pledged himself to receive our Savior, when he comes, as his king — would tempt God too far by choosing as his king in this world one whom he knows will try, by terror and by persuasion, to make him violate his faith. But, says he, it is the same danger to choose a non-Christian for king and then not to depose him once he is chosen. To this I say: the question is not about the danger of not deposing him; it is about the justice of deposing him. To choose him may, in some cases, be unjust. But to depose him, once he is chosen, is in no case just. For it is always a violation of faith, and consequently against the law of nature, which is the eternal law of God. Nor do we read that any such doctrine was accounted Christian in the time of the apostles, or in the time of the Roman emperors, until the Popes gained the civil sovereignty of Rome.
To this he has replied that the Christians of old did not depose Nero, or Diocletian, or Julian, or Valens (an Arian), for this one reason only: that they lacked the temporal forces. Perhaps so. But did our Savior — who, had he called for them, might have had twelve legions of immortal, invulnerable angels to assist him — lack the forces to depose Caesar, or at least Pilate, who unjustly, finding no fault in him, delivered him to the Jews to be crucified? Or if the apostles lacked temporal forces to depose Nero, was it therefore necessary for them, in their epistles to the newly made Christians, to teach them (as they did) to obey the powers constituted over them — of whom Nero, at that time, was one — and to obey them not for fear of their wrath, but for conscience's sake? Shall we say they not only obeyed, but also taught what they did not mean, for want of strength? It is not for want of strength, then, but for conscience's sake, that Christians are to tolerate their heathen princes, or princes who authorize the teaching of an error (for I cannot call anyone whose doctrine is the public doctrine a heretic).
And whereas, in support of the Pope's temporal power, he further alleges that St. Paul (1 Corinthians 6) appointed judges under the heathen princes of those times — judges not ordained by those princes — this is not true. St. Paul only advises them to take some of their brethren to settle their differences as arbitrators, rather than to go to law with one another before the heathen judges: a wholesome precept, full of charity, fit to be practiced in the best Christian commonwealths too. And as for the danger that may arise to religion from subjects tolerating a heathen or an erring prince — that is a point of which a subject is no competent judge. Or if he is, then the Pope's own temporal subjects may likewise judge of the Pope's doctrine. For every Christian prince, as I have proved before, is no less supreme pastor of his own subjects than the Pope is of his.
The fourth argument is taken from the baptism of kings: that in being made Christians, they submit their scepters to Christ, and promise to keep and defend the Christian faith. This is true; for Christian kings are no more than Christ's subjects. But they may, for all that, be the Pope's fellows. For they are supreme pastors of their own subjects; and the Pope is no more than king, and pastor, even in Rome itself.
The fifth argument is drawn from the words spoken by our Savior, "Feed my sheep" — by which, he says, was given all the power necessary for a pastor: the power to chase away wolves, such as heretics; the power to shut up rams, if they are mad or butt the other sheep with their horns, such as evil (though Christian) kings; and the power to give the flock convenient food. From this he infers that St. Peter had these three powers given him by Christ.
To this I answer that the last of these powers is nothing more than the power — or rather the command — to teach. As for the first, the power to chase away wolves, that is, heretics: the passage he quotes is Matthew 7:15, "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves." But heretics are not false prophets — they are not prophets at all. And even granting that heretics are the wolves meant there, the apostles were not commanded to kill them, or, if they were kings, to depose them — but to beware of them, flee from them, and avoid them. Nor was that counsel to beware of false prophets given to St. Peter, or to any of the apostles, but to the crowd of Jews who followed him up the mountain — men for the most part not yet converted. So if the passage confers a power of chasing away kings, it was given not only to private men, but to men who were not even Christians.
And as to the power of separating and shutting up furious rams — by which he means Christian kings who refuse to submit themselves to the Roman pastor — our Savior refused to take that power upon himself in this world, and advised letting the wheat and the weeds grow up together until the day of judgment. Much less did he give it to St. Peter; nor can St. Peter give it to the Popes. St. Peter, and all other pastors, are told to treat those Christians who disobey the Church — that is, who disobey the Christian sovereign — as heathen men and tax collectors. And since no one claims for the Pope any authority over heathen princes, they ought to claim none over princes who are to be treated as heathen.
But from the power to teach alone, he infers also a coercive power in the Pope over kings. The pastor, says he, must give his flock convenient food; therefore the Pope may, and ought to, compel kings to do their duty. From which it follows that the Pope, as pastor of Christian men, is King of Kings — which all Christian kings ought indeed either to confess, or else take upon themselves the supreme pastoral charge, every one in his own dominion.
His sixth and last argument is from examples. To which I answer, first, that examples prove nothing; and second, that the examples he cites do not establish so much as a probability of right. The act of Jehoiada in killing Athaliah (2 Kings 11) was done either by the authority of King Joash, or else it was a horrible crime in the high priest — who, ever after the election of King Saul, was a mere subject. The act of St. Ambrose in excommunicating the Emperor Theodosius (if it is true that he did so) was a capital crime. And as for the Popes — Gregory I, Gregory II, Zachary, and Leo III — their judgments are void, as judgments given in their own cause; and the acts done by them in conformity with this doctrine are the greatest crimes (especially that of Zachary) that human nature is capable of.
And this is as much as I have to say of ecclesiastical power. I would have been briefer, and spared the examination of these arguments of Bellarmine's, if they had been his as a private man — and not as the champion of the papacy against all other Christian princes and states.
The most frequent pretext for sedition and civil war in Christian commonwealths has long come from a single difficulty, never yet sufficiently resolved: how to obey both God and man at the same time, when their commands contradict each other. One point is obvious enough. When a man receives two contrary commands, and knows that one of them is God's, he ought to obey that one and not the other — even if the other is the command of his lawful sovereign (whether a monarch or a sovereign assembly), or the command of his own father. The real difficulty is this: when men are commanded in the name of God, they often cannot tell, in many cases, whether the command actually comes from God, or whether the man giving it is merely abusing God's name for private ends of his own. For just as the Church of the Jews had many false prophets who built reputations with the people on invented dreams and visions, so the Church of Christ has had, in every age, false teachers who seek reputation with the people through fantastic and false doctrines — and who use that reputation (as is the nature of ambition) to govern them for their own private benefit.
The Difficulty Vanishes for Those Who Can Distinguish What Is, and What Is Not, Necessary to Salvation
But this difficulty of obeying both God and the civil sovereign on earth carries no weight at all for those who can distinguish between what is necessary and what is not necessary for their reception into the kingdom of God. If the civil sovereign's command is one that can be obeyed without forfeiting eternal life, then it is unjust not to obey it, and the apostle's precept applies: "Servants, obey your masters in all things," and "Children, obey your parents in all things" — along with our Savior's precept: "The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' chair; all therefore that they tell you to observe, observe and do." But if the command is one that cannot be obeyed without being condemned to eternal death, then it would be madness to obey it, and our Savior's counsel applies (Matthew 10:28): "Fear not those that kill the body, but cannot kill the soul." Everyone, therefore, who wants to avoid both kinds of punishment — the punishments inflicted in this world for disobedience to an earthly sovereign, and those to be inflicted in the world to come for disobedience to God — needs to be taught to distinguish well between what is, and what is not, necessary to eternal salvation.
All that is necessary to salvation is contained in two virtues: faith in Christ, and obedience to laws. The second of these, if it were perfect, would be enough by itself. But because we are all guilty of disobedience to God's law — not only originally, in Adam, but also actually, by our own transgressions — something more is now required of us than obedience for the rest of our days. We also need remission of sins for the time past; and that remission is the reward of our faith in Christ. That nothing else is necessarily required for salvation is plain from this: the kingdom of heaven is shut to no one but sinners — that is, to the disobedient, the transgressors of the law — and not even to them, if they repent and believe all the articles of Christian faith that are necessary to salvation.
The obedience God requires of us — God, who in all our actions accepts the will for the deed — is a serious endeavor to obey him; and it goes by every name that signifies that endeavor. So obedience is sometimes called charity and love, because those imply a will to obey, and our Savior himself makes our love of God and of one another a fulfilling of the whole law. Sometimes it is called righteousness, for righteousness is nothing but the will to give everyone his own — that is to say, the will to obey the laws. And sometimes it is called repentance, because to repent implies a turning away from sin, which is the same thing as the will returning to obedience. Whoever sincerely desires to fulfill the commandments of God, or truly repents of his transgressions, or loves God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself, has all the obedience necessary for his reception into the kingdom of God. For if God required perfect innocence, no flesh could be saved.
But which commandments are the ones God has given us? Are all the laws given to the Jews by the hand of Moses the commandments of God? If they are, why aren't Christians taught to obey them? If they are not, what laws are God's, besides the law of nature? For our Savior Christ did not give us new laws, but counsel to observe the laws we are already subject to — that is, the laws of nature and the laws of our several sovereigns. Even in the Sermon on the Mount he made no new law for the Jews; he only expounded the laws of Moses, to which they were subject already. The laws of God, therefore, are none other than the laws of nature — chief among them the law that we must not violate our faith: that is, a commandment to obey the civil sovereigns we set up over ourselves by mutual pact with one another. And this law of God, which commands obedience to the civil law, commands by consequence obedience to all the precepts of the Bible — which (as I proved in the previous chapter) is law only where the civil sovereign has made it law, and everywhere else is only counsel, which a man may refuse to obey at his own peril, without injustice.
Knowing now what obedience is necessary to salvation, and to whom it is owed, we must consider faith next: whom we believe, and why; and what articles, or points, must necessarily be believed by those who are to be saved. First, the person whom we believe. Since it is impossible to believe any person before we know what he says, the person believed must be someone we have heard speak. The person whom Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets believed, then, was God himself, who spoke to them supernaturally. And the person whom the apostles and disciples who lived alongside Christ believed was our Savior himself. But of those to whom neither God the Father nor our Savior ever spoke, it cannot be said that the person they believed was God. They believed the apostles, and after them the pastors and doctors of the Church, who recommended to their faith the history of the Old and New Testaments. So the faith of Christians, ever since our Savior's time, has had for its foundation, first, the reputation of their pastors, and afterward the authority of those who made the Old and New Testaments be received as the rule of faith — and none could do that but Christian sovereigns, who are therefore the supreme pastors, and the only persons whom Christians now hear speak from God; except for any to whom God still speaks supernaturally in these days. But because many false prophets "are gone out into the world," other men must examine such spirits (as St. John advises us, 1 John 4:1) "whether they be of God, or not." And so, since the examination of doctrines belongs to the supreme pastor, the person whom everyone without special revelation is to believe is, in every commonwealth, the supreme pastor — that is to say, the civil sovereign.
The causes that lead men to believe any Christian doctrine are various; for faith is the gift of God, and he works it in each man by whatever means seem good to himself. The most ordinary immediate cause of our belief in any point of Christian faith is that we believe the Bible to be the word of God. But why we believe the Bible to be the word of God is much disputed — as every question must be that is badly framed. For people frame the question not as "Why do we believe it?" but as "How do we know it?" — as if believing and knowing were the same thing. And so one side grounds its supposed knowledge on the infallibility of the Church, and the other side on the testimony of the private spirit, and neither side proves what it claims. For how shall a man know the infallibility of the Church, except by first knowing the infallibility of the Scripture? Or how shall a man know that his own private spirit is anything more than a belief grounded on the authority and arguments of his teachers — or on a presumption about his own gifts? Besides, there is nothing in Scripture from which the infallibility of the Church can be inferred; much less the infallibility of any particular church; and least of all the infallibility of any particular man.
It is plain, therefore, that Christian men do not know, but only believe, the Scripture to be the word of God; and the means God is ordinarily pleased to use to make men believe it follows the way of nature — that is to say, it comes from their teachers. This is St. Paul's doctrine concerning Christian faith in general (Romans 10:17): "Faith cometh by hearing" — that is, by hearing our lawful pastors. He also says (Romans 10:14-15): "How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?" From this it is evident that the ordinary cause of believing that the Scriptures are the word of God is the same as the cause of believing every other article of our faith: namely, hearing those whom the law allows and appoints to teach us — our parents in their houses, and our pastors in the churches. Experience makes this even plainer. What other reason can be given why, in Christian commonwealths, everyone believes — or at least professes — the Scripture to be the word of God, while in other commonwealths scarcely anyone does, except that in Christian commonwealths people are taught it from infancy, and in other places they are taught otherwise?
But if teaching is the cause of faith, why doesn't everyone believe? It is certain, then, that faith is the gift of God, and he gives it to whom he will. Nevertheless, because he gives it — to those he gives it to — by means of teachers, the immediate cause of faith is hearing. In a school where many are taught, some profit and others do not; the cause of learning in those who profit is the master — yet no one can infer from this that learning is not the gift of God. All good things proceed from God; yet not everyone who has them can say he is inspired, for that implies a supernatural gift and the immediate hand of God — and whoever claims that, claims to be a prophet, and is subject to the examination of the Church.
But whether men know, or believe, or merely grant the Scriptures to be the word of God: if, from passages of Scripture that contain no obscurity, I can show which articles of faith are necessary for salvation — and the only ones necessary — then those men must of necessity know, believe, or grant the same.
The only article of faith that Scripture makes simply necessary to salvation — the unum necessarium, the one thing needed — is this: that JESUS IS THE CHRIST. By the name "Christ" is understood the king whom God had promised, through the prophets of the Old Testament, to send into the world: to reign under him eternally over the Jews, and over those of other nations who would believe in him; and to give them that eternal life which was lost by the sin of Adam. When I have proved this out of Scripture, I will go on to show when, and in what sense, certain other articles may also be called necessary.
For proof that belief in this one article — Jesus is the Christ — is all the faith required for salvation, my first argument is from the aim of the evangelists, which was, by describing the life of our Savior, to establish that one article. The sum of St. Matthew's gospel is this: that Jesus was of the line of David, and born of a virgin — which are the marks of the true Christ; that the Magi came to worship him as King of the Jews; that Herod, for the same reason, sought to kill him; that John the Baptist proclaimed him; that he preached, by himself and through his apostles, that he was that king; that he taught the law not as a scribe, but as a man with authority; that he cured diseases by his word alone, and did many other miracles that the Christ was foretold to do; that he was hailed as king when he entered Jerusalem; that he warned his followers to beware of all others who would claim to be Christ; that he was arrested, accused, and put to death for saying that he was king; and that the charge of his condemnation, written on the cross, was JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. All of this points to one end and no other: that men should believe that Jesus is the Christ. Such, then, was the aim of St. Matthew's gospel. And the aim of all the evangelists, as anyone may see by reading them, was the same. Therefore the aim of the whole gospel was the establishing of that one article. And St. John expressly makes it his conclusion (John 20:31): "These things are written, that you may know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God."
My second argument is taken from the subject of the apostles' sermons, both while our Savior lived on earth and after his ascension. In our Savior's time, the apostles were sent (Luke 9:2) to preach the kingdom of God; for neither there, nor in Matthew 10:7, does he give them any commission other than this: "As ye go, preach, saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand" — that is, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the king who was to come. That their preaching after his ascension was the same is plain from Acts 17:6: "They drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city" (says St. Luke), "crying, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also, whom Jason hath received. And these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus." And from verses 2 and 3 of the same chapter, where it is said that St. Paul, "as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus, whom he preached, is Christ."
The third argument is from those places of Scripture that declare all the faith required for salvation to be easy. For if an inward assent of the mind to all the doctrines of Christian faith now taught — most of which are disputed — were necessary to salvation, there would be nothing in the world so hard as being a Christian. The thief on the cross, though repentant, could not have been saved for saying, "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom" — words that testify to no other article than this: that Jesus was the king. Nor could it be said (Matthew 11:30) that "Christ's yoke is easy, and his burden light." Nor that "little children believe in him," as in Matthew 18:6. Nor could St. Paul have said (1 Corinthians 1:21), "It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." Nor could St. Paul himself have been saved — much less become so great a doctor of the Church so suddenly — when he had perhaps never once thought of transubstantiation, or purgatory, or many of the other articles now forced on believers.
The fourth argument is taken from texts that are express, and admit no controversy of interpretation. First, John 5:39: "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they that testify of me." Our Savior here speaks only of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, for the Jews at that time could not search the Scriptures of the New Testament, which were not yet written. But the Old Testament contains nothing of Christ except the marks by which men might know him when he came: that he would descend from David, be born at Bethlehem, and of a virgin; that he would do great miracles, and the like. Therefore to believe that this Jesus was he was sufficient for eternal life. But more than sufficient is not necessary — and consequently no other article is required.
Second (John 11:26): "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall not die eternally." Therefore to believe in Christ is faith sufficient for eternal life, and consequently no more faith than that is necessary. And to believe in Jesus, and to believe that Jesus is the Christ, are one and the same thing, as the verses immediately following make clear. For when our Savior asks Martha (verse 26), "Believest thou this?" she answers (verse 27), "Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world." Therefore this article alone is faith sufficient for eternal life, and more than sufficient is not necessary.
Third, John 20:31: "These things are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name." There, to believe that Jesus is the Christ is faith sufficient for obtaining life; and therefore no other article is necessary.
Fourth, 1 John 4:2: "Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God." And 1 John 5:1: "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God." And verse 5: "Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?"
Fifth, Acts 8:36-37: "See," says the eunuch, "here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? And Philip said, If thou believest with all thy heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Therefore this article believed — Jesus is the Christ — is sufficient for baptism, that is to say, for our reception into the kingdom of God; and by consequence, it is the only article necessary. And generally, wherever our Savior says to anyone, "Thy faith hath saved thee," the occasion for saying it is some confession that directly, or by consequence, implies a belief that Jesus is the Christ.
The last argument is from the places where this article is made the foundation of faith — for he that holds the foundation shall be saved. The first such place is Matthew 24:23-24: "If any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not; for there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders," and so on. Here we see that this article — Jesus is the Christ — must be held even if the man who teaches the contrary works great miracles.
The second place is Galatians 1:8: "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." But the gospel which Paul and the other apostles preached was only this article, that Jesus is the Christ. Therefore, for the belief of this article, we are to reject the authority of an angel from heaven — much more of any mortal man — if he teaches the contrary. This, then, is the fundamental article of Christian faith.
A third place is 1 John 4:1-2: "Beloved, believe not every spirit. Hereby ye shall know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God." From this it is evident that this article is the measure and rule by which all other articles are to be weighed and examined — and is therefore the only fundamental one.
A fourth is Matthew 16:18, where, after St. Peter had professed this article, saying to our Savior, "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God," our Savior answered, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." From which I infer that this article is the rock on which all the other doctrines of the Church are built, as on their foundation.
A fifth is 1 Corinthians 3:11-15: "Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid: Jesus is the Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man's work shall be made manifest; for the Day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work, of what sort it is. If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward; if any man's work shall be burnt, he shall suffer loss — but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire." These words are partly plain and easy to understand, and partly allegorical and difficult. From the plain part this much may be inferred: pastors who teach this foundation — that Jesus is the Christ — may still be saved even if they draw false consequences from it (something all men are sometimes prone to). And much more may those be saved who are not pastors but hearers, and who believe what their lawful pastors teach them. Therefore belief in this article is sufficient; and by consequence, no other article of faith is necessarily required for salvation.
Now for the allegorical part — that "the fire shall try every man's work," and that "they shall be saved, but so as by fire," or "through fire" (the original Greek is dia puros) — it takes nothing away from the conclusion I have drawn from the plain words. Nevertheless, because this passage has been used as an argument to prove the fire of purgatory, I will offer here my own conjecture about the meaning of this trial of doctrines, and this saving of men as if by fire. The apostle here seems to allude to the words of the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 13:8-9), who, speaking of the restoration of the kingdom of God, says: "Two parts therein shall be cut off, and die, but the third shall be left therein; and I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried; they shall call on the name of the Lord, and I will hear them." The day of judgment is the day of the restoration of the kingdom of God; and on that day, St. Peter tells us (2 Peter 3:7, 10, 12), will come the conflagration of the world, in which the wicked shall perish — but the remnant whom God will save shall pass through that fire unhurt, and in it be tried and refined of their idolatry (as silver and gold are refined by fire from their dross), and be brought to call on the name of the true God. Alluding to this, St. Paul says here that the Day — that is, the day of judgment, the great day of our Savior's coming to restore the kingdom of God in Israel — shall try every man's doctrine, judging which are gold, silver, precious stones, and which are wood, hay, stubble. And then those who have built false consequences on the true foundation shall see their doctrines condemned; nevertheless they themselves shall be saved, pass unhurt through this universal fire, and live eternally, calling on the name of the true and only God. Taken in this sense, there is nothing here that does not agree with the rest of Holy Scripture — and not so much as a glimpse of the fire of purgatory.
But here a man may ask whether it is not just as necessary to salvation to believe that God is omnipotent; that he is creator of the world; that Jesus Christ is risen; and that all other men shall rise again from the dead at the last day — as it is to believe that Jesus is the Christ. To which I answer: it is; and so are many more articles. But they are articles contained in this one, and they can be deduced from it with more or less difficulty. For who does not see that those who believe Jesus to be the Son of the God of Israel, and that the Israelites had for their God the omnipotent creator of all things, thereby also believe that God is the omnipotent creator of all things? Or how can a man believe that Jesus is the king who shall reign eternally, unless he also believes that Jesus rose again from the dead? A dead man cannot exercise the office of a king. In sum: he that holds this foundation — Jesus is the Christ — holds expressly all that he sees rightly deduced from it, and implicitly all that follows from it, even if he lacks the skill to work out the consequences himself. And so it still stands good that belief in this one article is faith sufficient to obtain remission of sins for the penitent, and consequently to bring them into the kingdom of heaven.
Now I have shown that all the obedience required for salvation consists in the will to obey the law of God — that is to say, in repentance — and that all the faith required for it is comprehended in the belief of this article: Jesus is the Christ. I will now cite the places in the gospel that prove that all that is necessary to salvation is contained in these two joined together.
The men to whom St. Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, just after our Savior's ascension, asked him and the rest of the apostles (Acts 2:37), "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" St. Peter answered, in the next verse, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you, for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." Therefore repentance and baptism — that is, believing that Jesus is the Christ — is all that is necessary to salvation.
Again, when a certain ruler asked our Savior (Luke 18:18), "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" he answered (verse 20), "Thou knowest the commandments: Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother." And when the ruler said he had kept all these, our Savior added, "Sell all thou hast, give it to the poor, and come and follow me" — which was as much as to say: rely on me, who am the king. Therefore to fulfill the law, and to believe that Jesus is the king, is all that is required to bring a man to eternal life.
Third, St. Paul says (Romans 1:17), "The just shall live by faith" — not everyone, but the just. Therefore faith and justice (that is, the will to be just, or repentance) are all that is necessary to eternal life.
And in Mark 1:15 our Savior preached, saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent, and believe the gospel" — that is, the good news that the Christ had come. Therefore to repent, and to believe that Jesus is the Christ, is all that is required for salvation.
Since, then, it is necessary that faith and obedience (implied in the word "repentance") both work together for our salvation, the question of which of the two justifies us is pointlessly disputed. Still, it will not be pointless to make clear in what manner each of them contributes, and in what sense it is said that we are justified by the one and by the other.
First: if by "righteousness" is understood the justice of the works themselves, then no man can be saved, for there is no one who has not transgressed the law of God. So when we are said to be justified by works, it must be understood of the will — which God always accepts for the work itself, in good men and in evil men alike. In this sense, and this sense only, a man is called just or unjust; and his justice justifies him in this sense: it gives him, in God's acceptance, the title of "just," and makes him capable of living by his faith, which before he was not. So justice justifies in the sense in which "to justify" means to declare a man just — not in the sense of discharging the law, which would make the punishment of his sins unjust.
But a man is also said to be justified when his plea, though insufficient in itself, is accepted — as when we plead our will, our endeavor to fulfill the law, and our repentance for our failings, and God accepts the plea in place of the performance itself. And because God accepts the will for the deed only in the faithful, it is faith that makes our plea good; and in this sense it is that faith alone justifies. So faith and obedience are both necessary to salvation; yet each of them, in a different sense, is said to justify.
Obedience to God and to the Civil Sovereign Do Not Conflict — When the Sovereign Is a Christian
Having now shown what is necessary to salvation, it is not hard to reconcile our obedience to God with our obedience to the civil sovereign — who is either a Christian or an infidel. If he is a Christian, he allows the belief of this article, that Jesus is the Christ, and of all the articles contained in it, or evidently deduced from it — which is all the faith necessary to salvation. And because he is a sovereign, he requires obedience to all his own laws — that is, to all the civil laws — in which are also contained all the laws of nature, that is, all the laws of God. For besides the laws of nature and the laws of the Church, which are part of the civil law (since the church that can make laws is the commonwealth), there are no other divine laws. Whoever obeys his Christian sovereign, therefore, is hindered neither from believing God nor from obeying him.
But suppose a Christian king, starting from this foundation — Jesus is the Christ — should draw some false consequences from it; that is, build some superstructure of hay or stubble; and command it to be taught. Since St. Paul says that such a builder shall be saved, much more shall the man be saved who teaches it by the king's command; and much more still the man who does not teach it at all, but only believes his lawful teacher. And if a subject is forbidden by the civil sovereign to profess some of his own opinions — on what grounds can he disobey? Christian kings may err in deducing a consequence; but who shall judge? Shall a private man judge, when the question is his own obedience? Or shall anyone judge but the one appointed to it by the Church — that is, by the civil sovereign who represents it? And if the Pope, or an apostle, judges — may not he too err in deducing a consequence? Did not one of the two, St. Peter or St. Paul, err in a superstructure, when St. Paul withstood St. Peter to his face? There can therefore be no contradiction between the laws of God and the laws of a Christian commonwealth.
And when the civil sovereign is an infidel, any one of his own subjects who resists him sins against the laws of God (for the laws of nature are God's laws), and rejects the counsel of the apostles, who admonish all Christians to obey their princes, and all children and servants to obey their parents and masters in all things. As for their faith, it is internal and invisible. They have the license that Naaman had — the Syrian who bowed in the house of Rimmon at his master's side — and they need not put themselves in danger for it. But if they do, they ought to expect their reward in heaven, not complain of their lawful sovereign — much less make war upon him. For a man who is not glad of any just occasion of martyrdom does not have the faith he professes; he only pretends it, to put some color on his own defiance. And besides, what infidel king is so unreasonable that — knowing he has a subject who waits for the second coming of Christ after the present world is burned, and who intends then to obey him (which is what believing that Jesus is the Christ amounts to), and who in the meantime thinks himself bound to obey the laws of that infidel king (as all Christians are obliged in conscience to do) — he would put such a subject to death, or persecute him?
And this much shall suffice concerning the kingdom of God and church government. In all of it I claim to advance no position of my own, but only to show the consequences that seem to me deducible from the principles of Christian politics — which are the holy Scriptures — in confirmation of the power of civil sovereigns and the duty of their subjects. In citing Scripture, I have tried to avoid texts of obscure or disputed interpretation, and to cite none except in the sense that is plainest and most agreeable to the harmony and aim of the whole Bible, which was written for the re-establishment of the kingdom of God in Christ. For it is not the bare words, but the aim of the writer, that gives the true light by which any writing is to be interpreted. Those who insist on single texts, without considering the main design, can derive nothing from them clearly. Instead, by throwing atoms of Scripture like dust into men's eyes, they make everything more obscure than it is — the usual trick of those who seek not the truth, but their own advantage.
Besides the sovereign powers I have discussed so far — divine and human — Scripture mentions another power: that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world" (Ephesians 6:12), "the kingdom of Satan" (Matthew 12:26), and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons" (Matthew 9:34) — that is, over phantasms that appear in the air. For this reason Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2); and, because he rules in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world" (John 16:11). And accordingly, those under his dominion — in opposition to the faithful, who are the children of the light — are called the children of darkness. Since Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, the inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion all signify, allegorically, the same thing.
With this in mind, the KINGDOM OF DARKNESS, as it is set out in these and other places of Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers who, in order to obtain dominion over men in this present world, work by dark and erroneous doctrines to extinguish in them the light both of nature and of the gospel — and so to leave them unprepared for the kingdom of God to come.
Men who have been utterly deprived of bodily sight from birth have no idea of light at all; and no man can imagine any greater light than the greatest he has at some time actually perceived with his outward senses. The same holds for the light of the gospel and the light of the understanding: no one can conceive of a greater degree of it than the degree he has already attained. And so the only means men have of recognizing their own darkness is to reason backward from the unforeseen disasters that befall them along their way.
The darkest part of Satan's kingdom is the part outside the Church of God — among those who do not believe in Jesus Christ. But we cannot say that the Church therefore enjoys, like the land of Goshen, all the light necessary for the work God has assigned us. If it is not night among us, or at least a mist, then how has it come about that in Christendom, almost from the time of the apostles, there has been such jostling of one another out of their places, by foreign war and civil war alike? Such stumbling at every little roughness in their own fortune, and every little eminence in another man's? Such a diversity of roads taken in running toward the same goal — happiness? We are, therefore, still in the dark.
The Enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance and sown the tares — the weeds — of spiritual error. He did it, first, by abusing and putting out the light of the Scriptures; for we err by not knowing the Scriptures. Second, by introducing the demonology of the heathen poets — their fabulous doctrine concerning demons, which are nothing but idols, phantasms of the brain, with no real nature of their own distinct from human imagination: dead men's ghosts, and fairies, and the other stuff of old wives' tales. Third, by mixing into Scripture various relics of the religion of the Greeks, and much of their vain and erroneous philosophy — especially Aristotle's. Fourth, by mingling with both of these false or uncertain traditions, and feigned or uncertain history.
And so we come to err by "giving heed to seducing spirits," and to the demonology of those "that speak lies in hypocrisy" — or, as it reads in the original (1 Timothy 4:1-2), "of those that play the part of liars" — "with a seared conscience"; that is, against their own knowledge. Concerning the first of these — the seducing of men by the abuse of Scripture — I intend to speak briefly in this chapter.
The greatest and main abuse of Scripture — the one to which nearly all the rest are either consequences or servants — is the wresting of it to prove that the kingdom of God, mentioned so often in Scripture, is the present Church: the multitude of Christians now living, or now living together with those who, being dead, are to rise again at the last day. Whereas in fact the kingdom of God was first instituted by the ministry of Moses, over the Jews only — who were for that reason called his peculiar people — and it ceased afterward in the election of Saul, when they refused to be governed by God any longer and demanded a king after the manner of the nations; and God himself consented to it, as I proved at length in Chapter 35. After that time there was no other kingdom of God in the world by any covenant. God, of course, always was, is, and shall be king of all men and all creatures in another sense — governing according to his will, by his infinite power.
Nevertheless, he promised through his prophets to restore his government to them again, when the time he has appointed in his secret counsel has fully come, and when they turn back to him in repentance and amendment of life. And not only that: he also invited the Gentiles to come in and enjoy the happiness of his reign, on the same conditions of conversion and repentance. And he promised to send his Son into the world, to expiate the sins of them all by his death, and to prepare them by his teaching to receive him at his second coming. Since that second coming has not yet happened, the kingdom of God is not yet come; and we are now under no kings by covenant except our civil sovereigns — with this one qualification, that Christians are already in the kingdom of grace, inasmuch as they already have the promise of being received at his coming again.
Watch what follows from this error — that the present Church is Christ's kingdom. If it were true, there would have to be some one man or assembly by whose mouth our Savior, now in heaven, speaks and gives law, and who represents his person to all Christians; or else several men or assemblies who do the same for the several parts of Christendom. This regal power under Christ is claimed universally by the Pope, and within particular commonwealths by assemblies of the local pastors — when Scripture gives it to none but civil sovereigns. And the claim comes to be disputed so passionately that it puts out the light of nature, and causes so great a darkness in men's understanding that they cannot see who it is they have pledged their obedience to.
From the Pope's claim to be Vicar General of Christ in the present Church — supposed to be that very kingdom of Christ to which the gospel directs us — follows the doctrine that a Christian king must receive his crown from a bishop; as if it were from that ceremony that he derives the phrase Dei gratia — "by the grace of God" — in his title; as if he were made king by God's favor only when he is crowned by the authority of God's universal viceregent on earth. And it follows likewise that every bishop, whoever his sovereign may be, takes at his consecration an oath of absolute obedience to the Pope.
From the same claim follows the doctrine of the Fourth Lateran Council, held under Pope Innocent III (Chapter 3, De Haereticis — "On Heretics"): that if a king, at the Pope's admonition, does not purge his kingdom of heresies, and, being excommunicated for it, does not give satisfaction within a year, his subjects are absolved of the bond of their obedience. Where by "heresies" are understood all opinions the Church of Rome has forbidden to be maintained. And by this means, whenever the political designs of the Pope clash with those of other Christian princes — as they very often do — there arises such a mist among their subjects that they cannot tell a stranger who has thrust himself into the throne of their lawful prince from the man they themselves placed there. And in this darkness of mind they are made to fight one against another, unable to tell their enemies from their friends, under the conduct of another man's ambition.
From the same opinion — that the present Church is the kingdom of God — it comes about that pastors, deacons, and all other ministers of the Church take to themselves the name of "the clergy," and give all other Christians the name of "laity," that is, simply "the people." For "clergy" signifies those whose maintenance is that revenue which God, having reserved it to himself during his reign over the Israelites, assigned to the tribe of Levi to be their inheritance — they were to be his public ministers, and had no portion of land set out for them to live on, as their brethren had. The Pope, therefore, pretending the present Church to be, like the realm of Israel, the kingdom of God, claimed for himself and his subordinate ministers the same kind of revenue, as the inheritance of God; and the name "clergy" suited that claim. And that is why tithes and other tributes, paid to the Levites as God's right among the Israelites, have for a long time been demanded and taken from Christians by ecclesiastics, jure divino — that is, "in God's right."
By this means the people everywhere were obliged to pay a double tribute: one to the State, another to the clergy. And the clergy's share — a tenth of their revenue — is double what a certain king of Athens, a man counted a tyrant, exacted from his subjects to cover all public expenses. He demanded no more than a twentieth part, and maintained the commonwealth abundantly with it. And in the kingdom of the Jews, during the priestly reign of God, the tithes and offerings were the entire public revenue.
From the same mistaking of the present Church for the kingdom of God came the distinction between the civil and the canon laws: the civil law being the acts of sovereigns in their own dominions, and the canon law being the acts of the Pope in those same dominions. These canons, though they were only canons — that is, rules proposed, and received voluntarily by Christian princes — became rules commanded once the Empire passed to Charlemagne and the Pope's power increased; and the emperors themselves, to avoid the greater mischiefs a blinded people might be led into, were forced to let them pass for laws.
Hence it is that in all dominions where the Pope's ecclesiastical power is fully received, Jews, Turks, and pagans are tolerated by the Roman Church in their religion, so far as they do not offend against the civil power in exercising and professing it; whereas for a Christian, even a foreigner, not to be of the Roman religion is a capital offense — because the Pope claims that all Christians are his subjects. Otherwise it would be just as much against the law of nations to persecute a Christian stranger for professing the religion of his own country as to persecute an infidel — or rather more so, since those who are not against Christ are with him.
From the same source it comes that in every Christian state there are certain men exempt, by "ecclesiastical liberty," from the taxes and the tribunals of the civil state. So are the secular clergy, besides the monks and friars — who in many places make up so great a proportion of the common people that, if the need arose, an army could be raised out of them alone, sufficient for any war the Church militant might choose to employ them in, against their own princes or anyone else's.
A second general abuse of Scripture is the turning of CONSECRATION into CONJURATION, or enchantment. To consecrate, in Scripture, is to offer, give, or dedicate a man or any other thing to God, in pious and decent language and gesture, by separating it from common use — that is, to sanctify it, to make it God's, to be used only by those whom God has appointed to be his public ministers (as I have already proved at length in Chapter 35). Consecration changes not the thing consecrated, but only the use of it: from profane and common, to holy and set apart for God's service. But when such words are claimed to change the very nature or quality of the thing itself, that is not consecration. It is either an extraordinary work of God, or a vain and impious conjuration. And since they claim a change of nature in their consecrations constantly — far too frequently for it to be counted an extraordinary work — it is nothing other than a conjuration or incantation, by which they would have men believe in an alteration of nature that is not there, against the testimony of a man's own sight and of all the rest of his senses.
Take the example. In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the priest's task is to consecrate bread and wine to God's particular service — which is nothing but a separating of them from common use, to signify, that is, to put men in mind of, their redemption by the passion of Christ, whose body was broken and blood shed upon the cross for our transgressions. Instead, the priest pretends that by speaking the words of our Savior — "Take, eat: this is my body," and "This is my blood" — the nature of bread is no longer there at all, but Christ's very body; even though nothing appears to the sight, or to any other sense of the receiver, that did not appear before the consecration.
The Egyptian conjurers who are said to have turned their rods into serpents and the water into blood are thought only to have deluded the spectators' senses with a false show of things — and yet they are counted enchanters. But what should we have thought of them if there had appeared in their rods nothing like a serpent, and in the enchanted water nothing like blood, nor like anything else but water — and they had simply faced down the king, insisting that these were serpents that looked like rods, and that it was blood that seemed to be water? That would have been both enchantment and lying. And yet in this daily act of the priest, they do the very same thing. They turn the holy words into the manner of a charm — a charm which now produces nothing at all to the senses — and then they face us down that it has turned the bread into a man; no, more than that: into a god; and they require men to worship it as if it were our Savior himself, present as God and man, and thereby to commit the grossest idolatry. For if it is enough to clear the practice of idolatry to say, "it is no longer bread, but God" — why should not the same excuse have served the Egyptians, supposing they had had the face to say that the leeks and onions they worshipped were not really leeks and onions, but a divinity hidden under their "species," or likeness?
The words "This is my body" are equivalent to "This signifies, or represents, my body." That is an ordinary figure of speech. To take it literally is an abuse; and even taken literally, it can extend no further than to the bread which Christ himself, with his own hands, consecrated. For he never said that whatever bread any priest whatsoever pronounces the words "This is my body" or "This is Christ's body" over should instantly be transubstantiated. Nor did the Church of Rome ever establish this transubstantiation until the time of Innocent III — not much more than five hundred years ago, when the power of the Popes was at its highest, and the darkness of the times had grown so thick that men could no longer make out the bread that was given them to eat; especially when it was stamped with the figure of Christ upon the cross — as if they would have men believe it was transubstantiated not only into the body of Christ, but into the wood of his cross as well, and that they ate both together in the sacrament.
The same incantation, in place of consecration, is used also in the sacrament of baptism. There the abuse of God's name in each separate person, and in the whole Trinity, with the sign of the cross at each name, makes up the charm. First, in making the holy water, the priest says: "I conjure thee, thou creature of water, in the name of God the Father Almighty, and in the name of Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and in virtue of the Holy Ghost, that thou become conjured water, to drive away all the powers of the Enemy, and to eradicate and supplant the Enemy," and so on. The same in the blessing of the salt to be mingled with it: "That thou become conjured salt, that all phantasms and knavery of the Devil's fraud may fly and depart from the place wherein thou art sprinkled, and every unclean spirit be conjured by Him that shall come to judge the quick and the dead." The same in the blessing of the oil: "That all the power of the Enemy, all the host of the Devil, all assaults and phantasms of Satan, may be driven away by this creature of oil."
And the infant who is to be baptized is subject to many charms of his own. First, at the church door, the priest blows three times in the child's face and says, "Go out of him, unclean spirit, and give place to the Holy Ghost the Comforter" — as if all children, until blown on by the priest, were demoniacs. Again, before the child enters the church, the priest says as before, "I conjure thee, etc., to go out and depart from this servant of God." And the same exorcism is repeated once more before the baptism itself. These and certain other incantations and consecrations fill the administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper — in which everything that serves those holy men, except the unhallowed spittle of the priest, has its own set form of exorcism.
Nor are the other rites — marriage, extreme unction, visitation of the sick, the consecrating of churches and churchyards, and the like — exempt from charms; for they too involve the use of enchanted oil and water, together with the abuse of the cross and of David's holy words, Asperges me Domine hyssopo — "Purge me with hyssop, O Lord" — used as things with power in themselves to drive away phantasms and imaginary spirits.
Another general error comes from misinterpreting the words "eternal life," "everlasting death," and "the second death." Read Holy Scripture plainly and you find this. God created Adam in a condition of living forever — but conditionally; that is, on condition that he did not disobey the commandment. That immortality was not essential to human nature; it was a consequence of the virtue of the tree of life, which Adam was free to eat from as long as he had not sinned. And after he sinned, he was thrust out of paradise precisely so that he would not eat of that tree and live forever. And Christ's passion is a discharge of sin to all who believe in him — and therefore a restoration of eternal life to all the faithful, and to them only.
Yet the doctrine now — and for a long time past — has been far otherwise: namely, that every man has eternal life by nature, because his soul is immortal. On that view, the flaming sword at the entrance of paradise may keep a man from reaching the tree of life, but it does not keep him from the immortality God took from him for his sin; nor does it leave him needing the sacrifice of Christ to recover it. And the consequence follows: not only the faithful and righteous, but the wicked too, and the heathen, shall enjoy eternal life, without any death at all — much less a second and everlasting death. To patch this up, they say that by "second and everlasting death" is meant a second and everlasting life — but in torments: a figure of speech never used anywhere but in this very case.
All of this doctrine is founded only on some of the obscurer places of the New Testament — places which, when the whole scope of Scripture is considered, are clear enough in a different sense, and unnecessary to the Christian faith. For suppose that when a man dies, nothing remains of him but his carcass. Cannot God, who raised inanimate dust and clay into a living creature by his word, just as easily raise a dead carcass to life again by another word, and continue him alive forever — or make him die again? The "soul," in Scripture, always signifies either the life, or the living creature; and "body and soul" together signify the body alive. On the fifth day of creation, God said, let the water produce reptile animae viventis — "the creeping thing that hath in it a living soul"; the English translates it, "that hath life." Again, God created whales et omnem animam viventem, which in the English is "every living creature." And likewise of man: God made him of the dust of the earth, and breathed in his face the breath of life, et factus est homo in animam viventem — that is, "and man was made a living creature." And after Noah came out of the ark, God says he will no more smite omnem animam viventem — that is, "every living creature." And Deuteronomy 12:23: "Eat not the blood, for the blood is the soul" — that is, "the life."
If "soul" in these places meant an incorporeal substance, with an existence separate from the body, then the same could be inferred just as well of any other living creature as of man. No: the souls of the faithful remain in their bodies, from the resurrection to all eternity, not by their own nature, but by God's special grace — which I think I have already sufficiently proved out of the Scriptures in Chapter 38. And as for the places of the New Testament where it is said that a man shall be cast body and soul into hell fire, that means no more than body and life; that is to say, they shall be cast alive into the perpetual fire of Gehenna.
This is the window that lets in the dark doctrine, first, of eternal torments; and after that, of purgatory; and consequently of the walking abroad — especially in consecrated, solitary, or dark places — of the ghosts of the dead; and from there, the pretenses of exorcism and the conjuring of phantasms; and likewise the invocation of dead men; and the doctrine of indulgences — that is, of exemption, for a time or forever, from the fire of purgatory, in which these incorporeal substances are supposedly cleansed by burning and made fit for heaven. Here is how it happened. Before the time of our Savior, men were generally possessed — by contagion from the demonology of the Greeks — of the opinion that the souls of men were substances distinct from their bodies; and therefore that when the body died, the soul of every man, godly or wicked, had to subsist somewhere by virtue of its own nature, without acknowledging any supernatural gift of God in the matter. The doctors of the Church doubted for a long time what place these souls were to wait in, until they should be reunited with their bodies at the resurrection — supposing, for a while, that they lay under the altars. But afterward the Church of Rome found it more profitable to build for them this place of purgatory; which some other churches, in this later age, have demolished.
Let us now consider which texts of Scripture seem most to confirm these three general errors I have touched on here. As for the texts Cardinal Bellarmine alleges in favor of the present kingdom of God administered by the Pope — and none make a better show of proof — I have answered them already, and made it evident that the kingdom of God instituted by Moses ended in the election of Saul. After that time, the priest never, by his own authority, deposed any king. What the high priest did to Athaliah was done not in his own right, but in the right of the young king Joash, her son. Solomon, on the other hand, in his own right deposed the high priest Abiathar, and set up another in his place.
The most difficult passage of all that can be brought to prove that the kingdom of God through Christ is already in this world is alleged not by Bellarmine, nor by anyone else of the Church of Rome, but by Beza — who would have the kingdom begin at the resurrection of Christ. Whether he intends by this to entitle the presbytery to the supreme ecclesiastical power in the commonwealth of Geneva (and consequently every presbytery in every other commonwealth), or to entitle princes and other civil sovereigns to it, I do not know. For the presbytery has claimed the power to excommunicate its own kings, and to be the supreme moderator in religion wherever that form of church government exists, no less than the Pope claims it universally.
Answer to the Text from Which Beza Infers That the Kingdom of Christ Began at the Resurrection
The words are these (Mark 9:1): "Verily I say unto you, that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." Taken grammatically, these words make one of two things certain: either some of the men who stood by Christ at that time are still alive, or else the kingdom of God must already be in this present world.
But then there is another, harder place. When the apostles, after our Savior's resurrection and immediately before his ascension, asked him (Acts 1:6), "Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" — he answered them: "It is not for you to know the times and the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power; but ye shall receive power by the coming of the Holy Ghost upon you, and ye shall be my (martyrs) witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." Which is as much as to say: my kingdom is not yet come, and you shall not know in advance when it will come, for it will come like a thief in the night; but I will send you the Holy Ghost, and by him you shall have power to bear witness to all the world, by your preaching, of my resurrection, of the works I have done, and of the doctrine I have taught, so that men may believe in me and expect eternal life at my coming again. How does that square with Christ's kingdom coming at the resurrection?
And there is what St. Paul says (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10): "that they turned from idols, to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven." To wait for his Son from heaven is to wait for his coming to be king in power — which would not be necessary if his kingdom were present already. Again: if the kingdom of God began at the resurrection, as Beza on that place (Mark 9:1) would have it, what reason have Christians had, ever since the resurrection, to say in their prayers, "Thy kingdom come"? It is therefore plain that the words of St. Mark are not to be interpreted that way. "There be some of them that stand here," says our Savior, "that shall not taste of death till they have seen the kingdom of God come in power." If this kingdom were to come at the resurrection of Christ, why does he say "some of them," rather than all? For they all lived until after Christ had risen.
But those who demand an exact interpretation of this text should first interpret the similar words of our Savior to St. Peter concerning St. John (John 21:22): "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" On those words was grounded a report that John would never die; yet the truth of that report was neither confirmed as well grounded, nor refuted as ill grounded, by those words. It was simply left as a saying not understood. The same difficulty stands in the place in St. Mark. And if it is lawful to make a guess at the meaning from what immediately follows — both here and in St. Luke, where the same words are repeated — it is not improbable that they refer to the Transfiguration, which is described in the very next verses. There it is said that "after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John" — not all, but some of his disciples — "and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them. And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them. And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses: and they were talking with Jesus," and so forth. So they saw Christ in glory and majesty, as he is to come — so much so that "they were sore afraid." And thus the promise of our Savior was fulfilled by way of vision. For it was a vision, as may probably be inferred from St. Luke, who recites the same story (Luke 9:28) and says that Peter and those with him were heavy with sleep; and most certainly from Matthew 17:9, where the same is related again, for our Savior charged them, saying, "Tell no man the vision, until the Son of man be risen from the dead." However it may be, no argument can be drawn from this passage to prove that the kingdom of God begins before the day of judgment.
Besides Bellarmine's arguments, there are some other texts pressed into service to prove the Pope's power over civil sovereigns. For instance: the two swords that Christ and his apostles had among them are said to be the spiritual sword and the temporal sword, both supposedly given to St. Peter by Christ. And the two great lights in the sky? The greater one signifies the Pope, they say, and the lesser one the king.
By that method of reading, one might just as well conclude from the first verse of the Bible that "heaven" means the Pope and "earth" means the king. This is not arguing from Scripture. It is wanton insult flung at princes — a fashion that came in after the Popes had grown so secure in their greatness that they could treat all Christian kings with contempt. Treading on the necks of emperors, they mocked both the emperors and the Scripture at once, using the words of Psalm 91: "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder; the young lion and the dragon thou shalt trample under thy feet."
As for the rites of consecration: these depend, for the most part, on the discretion and judgment of the governors of the Church, not on Scripture. But even so, those governors are bound by one obvious standard — the nature of the action itself. The ceremonies, words, and gestures must be decent and meaningful, or at least appropriate to what is being done.
Look at how it was actually done in Scripture. When Moses consecrated the tabernacle, the altar, and their vessels (Exodus 40), he anointed them with the oil God had commanded to be made for that purpose — and they were holy. Nothing was exorcised. No phantasms were driven away. The same Moses — the civil sovereign of Israel — when he consecrated Aaron the high priest and his sons, washed them with water (not exorcised water), put their garments on them, and anointed them with oil. And they were sanctified to minister to the Lord in the priest's office. It was a simple, decent cleansing and adorning of them before he presented them to God to be his servants.
When King Solomon — the civil sovereign of Israel — consecrated the temple he had built (2 Kings 8), he stood before the whole congregation of Israel. He blessed them. He gave thanks to God for putting it into his father's heart to build the temple, and for giving him the grace to finish it. Then he prayed: first, that God would accept that house, though it was not remotely adequate to his infinite greatness; second, that God would hear the prayers of his servants who prayed in it, or — if they were far away — toward it. And last, he offered a sacrifice of peace offerings, and the house was dedicated.
Notice what was missing. No procession — the king stood still in his place. No exorcised water. No Asperges me — "sprinkle me," words lifted from a psalm and applied where they do not belong — nor any other irrelevant recycling of words spoken on some other occasion. Just a decent, rational speech, exactly suited to the occasion of presenting God with his newly built house.
We never read that St. John exorcised the water of the Jordan, or that Philip exorcised the river where he baptized the eunuch. Nor did any pastor in the apostles' time take his own spittle, put it to the nose of the person being baptized, and say In odorem suavitatis — "for a sweet savor unto the Lord." No human authority can justify that ceremony: not the spittle, which is unclean; not the application of that Scripture, which is frivolous.
Now to the foundation under all of this. Some maintain that the soul, separated from the body, lives eternally — and not only the souls of the elect, by special grace, by the restoration of the eternal life Adam lost through sin and our Savior bought back for the faithful by the sacrifice of himself. No: they claim the souls of the reprobate live forever too, as a property that naturally belongs to the essence of mankind, requiring no grace of God beyond what is given universally to everyone.
There are various passages that at first glance seem to support this. But when I compare them with the passage from Job 14 that I cited back in chapter 38, they seem to me far more open to a different interpretation than the words of Job are.
Take them in order. First, the words of Solomon (Ecclesiastes 12:7): "Then shall the dust return to dust, as it was, and the spirit shall return to God that gave it." If no other text stood directly against it, this could perfectly well mean that God alone knows — and man does not — what becomes of a man's spirit when he dies. And the same Solomon, in the same book (Ecclesiastes 3:20-21), delivers the same thought in exactly that sense: "All go (man and beast) to the same place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again; who knoweth that the spirit of man goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast goeth downward to the earth?" That is: nobody knows but God. And it is hardly an unusual way of speaking — we still say of things we do not understand, "God knows what" and "God knows where."
Then there is Genesis 5:24: "Enoch walked with God, and he was not; for God took him." The epistle to the Hebrews expounds it: "He was translated, that he should not die; and was not found, because God had translated him. For before his translation, he had this testimony, that he pleased God." Notice that this passage argues for the immortality of the body just as much as of the soul. And what it actually proves is that this translation was peculiar to those who please God — not common to them and the wicked alike — and that it depended on grace, not on nature.
But on the other side, what interpretation can we possibly give — other than the literal one — to Solomon's words in Ecclesiastes 3:19? "That which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts, even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so doth the other; yea, they have all one breath (one spirit); so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast, for all is vanity." Taken literally, there is no natural immortality of the soul here — and yet nothing that contradicts the eternal life the elect shall enjoy by grace. And again (Ecclesiastes 4:3): "Better is he that hath not yet been, than both they" — better, that is, than those who live or have lived. If the souls of all who have ever lived were immortal, that would be a hard saying, for then having an immortal soul would be worse than having no soul at all. And again (Ecclesiastes 9:5): "The living know they shall die, but the dead know not any thing" — that is, naturally, and before the resurrection of the body.
Another passage that seems to support a natural immortality of the soul is where our Savior says that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living. But this is said of the promise of God, and of their certainty of rising again — not of a life then actual. It is in the same sense that God told Adam that on the day he ate the forbidden fruit he would certainly die: from that moment forward Adam was a dead man by sentence, though not by execution until almost a thousand years later. So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alive by promise when Christ spoke, but they are not actually alive until the resurrection. And the story of Dives and Lazarus makes nothing against this, if we take it — as it is — for a parable.
But there are other places in the New Testament where an immortality seems to be attributed directly to the wicked. It is evident that they shall all rise to judgment. And it is said in many places that they shall go into "everlasting fire, everlasting torments, everlasting punishments," and that "the worm of conscience never dieth." All of this gets bundled into the phrase "everlasting death" — which is then ordinarily interpreted as everlasting life in torments. And yet I can find nowhere in Scripture that any man shall live in torments everlastingly.
It also seems hard to say that God — the Father of mercies; who does in heaven and earth all that he wills; who has the hearts of all men at his disposal; who works in men both the doing and the willing; without whose free gift a man has neither any inclination to good nor any repentance of evil — should punish men's transgressions without any end of time, and with every extremity of torture that men can imagine, and more. So we must consider what "everlasting fire" and the other phrases like it actually mean.
I have shown already that the kingdom of God by Christ begins at the day of judgment. That on that day the faithful shall rise again with glorious and spiritual bodies, and be his subjects in that kingdom, which shall be eternal. That they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, nor eat and drink as they did in their natural bodies, but live forever in their individual persons, with no need for the eternity-of-the-species that comes by reproduction. That the reprobate also shall rise again, to receive punishment for their sins. And that those of the elect still alive in their earthly bodies on that day shall have their bodies suddenly changed and made spiritual and immortal.
But here is what Scripture nowhere says: that the bodies of the reprobate — who make up the kingdom of Satan — shall also be glorious or spiritual bodies; or that they shall be like the angels of God, neither eating, nor drinking, nor reproducing; or that their life shall be eternal in their individual persons, the way the life of every faithful man is, or the way Adam's life would have been had he not sinned. There is no passage of Scripture to prove any of it — except those passages about eternal torments, which can be interpreted otherwise.
From this we may infer the symmetry of the whole matter. As the elect, after the resurrection, shall be restored to the state Adam was in before he sinned, so the reprobate shall be in the state Adam and his posterity were in after the sin was committed — with this difference: God promised a Redeemer to Adam, and to those of his seed who should trust in him and repent, but not to those who die in their sins, as the reprobate do.
With all that on the table, the texts that mention eternal fire, eternal torments, or the worm that never dies do not contradict the doctrine of a second and everlasting death, taking the word "death" in its proper and natural sense.
The fire or torments prepared for the wicked — in Gehenna, in Tophet, or wherever — may continue forever. And there may never be a shortage of wicked men to be tormented in them. But that does not mean every wicked man, or any one wicked man, is tormented eternally. For the wicked, being left in the state they were in after Adam's sin, may at the resurrection live as they lived before: marry, give in marriage, have gross and corruptible bodies as all mankind now has — and consequently may reproduce perpetually after the resurrection, as they did before. There is no passage of Scripture against it.
For when St. Paul speaks of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15), he means only the resurrection to eternal life, not the resurrection to punishment. Of the first he says that the body is "sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, raised in honor; sown in weakness, raised in power; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body." Nothing of the sort can be said of the bodies of those who rise to punishment.
The key text is Luke 20:34-36 — a fertile text. "The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage; but they that shall be counted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: neither can they die any more; for they are equal to the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection."
Read it closely. The children of this world — those left in the state Adam left them in — shall marry and be given in marriage; that is, they shall be corruptible and generate one generation after another. That is an immortality of the kind, but not of the persons of men. They are not counted worthy to obtain the next world and an absolute resurrection from the dead; they get only a short time as lodgers in that world, and only in order to receive the punishment their defiance has earned. The elect are the only children of the resurrection — that is, the sole heirs of eternal life. They alone can die no more. It is they who are equal to the angels and are the children of God — not the reprobate.
For the reprobate there remains, after the resurrection, a second and eternal death. Between their resurrection and their second and eternal death there is only a time of punishment and torment — a fire kept burning by the succession of sinners coming into it, lasting as long as mankind endures by propagation, which is eternally.
On this doctrine of the natural eternity of separated souls is founded, as I said, the doctrine of purgatory. For if eternal life comes by grace only, then there is no life but the life of the body, and no immortality until the resurrection — and purgatory has nowhere to exist and no one to hold.
So let us examine the texts Bellarmine alleges for purgatory, starting with those from the canonical Scripture of the Old Testament.
First, the fasting of David for Saul and Jonathan (2 Kings 1:12), and again for the death of Abner (2 Samuel 3:35). This fasting of David, Bellarmine says, was to obtain something for them at God's hands after their death — because when David fasted to procure the recovery of his own child, he called for food the moment he learned the child was dead. The argument runs: the soul has an existence separate from the body; nothing can be obtained by fasting for souls already in heaven or in hell; therefore there must be some souls of dead men that are neither in heaven nor in hell; therefore they must be in some third place — which must be purgatory.
That is hard straining. He has wrested these passages into a proof of purgatory when the real explanation is plain. The ceremonies of mourning and fasting, when used for the death of men whose life was of no profit to the mourners, are used out of honor to their persons. When done for the death of men by whose life the mourners benefited, they proceed from the mourners' own particular loss. So David honored Saul and Abner with his fasting; and at the death of his own child, he comforted himself by taking his ordinary food.
As for the other places he alleges out of the Old Testament, there is not so much as a show or shadow of proof in them. His method is simple: he brings in every text containing the word "anger," or "fire," or "burning," or "purging," or "cleansing," provided any of the Fathers ever rhetorically applied it in a sermon to the doctrine of purgatory — a doctrine already believed before the text was consulted. Take the first verse of Psalm 37: "O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath, nor chasten me in thy hot displeasure." What would this have to do with purgatory, if Augustine had not assigned the "wrath" to the fire of hell and the "displeasure" to the fire of purgatory? And what does Psalm 66:12 have to do with purgatory — "We went through fire and water, and thou broughtest us to a moist place"? These and other texts like them — which the doctors of those times reached for to decorate or stretch out their sermons and commentaries — have been hauled to their purposes by sheer force of wit.
But Bellarmine alleges other places, from the New Testament, that are not so easy to answer.
The first is Matthew 12:32: "Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come." Here he insists that "the world to come" is purgatory — a place where some sins may be forgiven that were not forgiven in this world.
But it is manifest that there are only three worlds. One, from the creation to the flood, destroyed by water, and called in Scripture the old world. Another, from the flood to the day of judgment, which is the present world, and shall be destroyed by fire. And the third, from the day of judgment forward, everlasting, which is called the world to come — and in which, by everyone's agreement, there shall be no purgatory. So "the world to come" and purgatory are inconsistent. The very text he builds on excludes the thing he builds.
What, then, can our Savior's words mean? I confess they are very hard to reconcile with all the doctrines now unanimously received. And it is no shame to confess that the depth of Scripture is too great to be sounded by the shortness of human understanding. Nevertheless, I can propose, for the consideration of more learned divines, what the text itself suggests.
First: since to speak against the Holy Ghost — the third person of the Trinity — is to speak against the Church, in which the Holy Ghost resides, it seems the comparison is between the gentleness of our Savior in bearing with offenses done to him while he was on earth, and the severity of the pastors after him toward those who would deny their authority, which came from the Holy Ghost. As if he had said: You that deny my power — even you that shall crucify me — shall be pardoned by me as often as you turn to me in repentance. But if you deny the power of those who teach you hereafter by virtue of the Holy Ghost, they shall be inexorable. They shall not forgive you. They shall persecute you in this world and leave you without absolution (though you turn to me, unless you turn to them as well), consigned — as far as lies in their power — to the punishments of the world to come. On this reading, the words may be taken as a prophecy, a prediction of the times — and the history of the Christian Church has borne it out.
Or, if that is not the meaning (for I am not dogmatic about such difficult places), perhaps there may be room left, after the resurrection, for the repentance of some sinners. There is another passage that seems to agree with this. Considering the words of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:29) — "What shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why also are they baptized for the dead?" — a man may plausibly infer, as some have, that in St. Paul's time there was a custom of receiving baptism for the dead: standing in for the persons of one's deceased friends — much as believers today are sureties and undertakers for the faith of infants who are not yet capable of believing — and undertaking that they should be ready to obey and receive our Savior as their king at his coming again. If so, then the forgiveness of sins in the world to come has no need of a purgatory.
But there is so much paradox in both of these interpretations that I do not trust them. I propose them to those thoroughly versed in the Scripture, to inquire whether some clearer passage contradicts them. This much, however, I do see in evident Scripture: there is neither the word "purgatory" nor the thing itself, not in this text nor in any other. Nor is there anything that can prove a necessity of a place for the soul without the body — not for the soul of Lazarus during the four days he was dead, nor for the souls the Roman Church claims are being tormented in purgatory right now. For God, who could give life to a piece of clay, has the same power to give life again to a dead man, and to renew his lifeless, rotten carcass into a glorious, spiritual, and immortal body.
Another place is 1 Corinthians 3, where it is said that those who build stubble, hay, and the like on the true foundation shall see their work perish, but "they themselves shall be saved; yet so as by fire." This fire, Bellarmine will have to be the fire of purgatory. But the words, as I have said before, are an allusion to Zechariah 13:9: "I will bring the third part through the fire, and refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried" — which is spoken of the coming of the Messiah in power and glory, that is, at the day of judgment and the conflagration of the present world. In that fire the elect shall not be consumed but refined: they shall shed their erroneous doctrines and traditions, have them singed off, as it were, and afterward call on the name of the true God. In the same way the Apostle says of those who hold the foundation — Jesus is the Christ — but build erroneous doctrines on it, that they shall not be consumed in the fire that renews the world, but shall pass through it to salvation: yet in such a way as to see and abandon their former errors. The builders are the pastors; the foundation, that Jesus is the Christ; the stubble and hay, the false conclusions drawn from it through ignorance or frailty; the gold, silver, and precious stones are their true doctrines; and the refining or purging is the abandoning of their errors. In all of this there is no shadow of support for the burning of incorporeal — that is to say, impassible — souls: souls incapable of suffering anything at all.
A third place is that of 1 Corinthians 15, already mentioned, concerning baptism for the dead. From it Bellarmine concludes, first, that prayers for the dead are not unprofitable, and from that, that there is a fire of purgatory. Neither conclusion follows.
Of the many interpretations of the word "baptism," he ranks first the one that takes baptism (metaphorically) as a baptism of penance — so that men are "baptized" when they fast, and pray, and give alms; and thus baptism for the dead and prayer for the dead are the same thing. But this is a metaphor without one single example, either in Scripture or in any other use of language — and it clashes with the harmony and drift of Scripture besides. The word "baptism" is used (Mark 10:38; Luke 12:59) for being dipped in one's own blood, as Christ was on the cross and as most of the apostles were in bearing witness to him. But it is hard to say that prayer, fasting, and alms bear any resemblance to dipping. The word is also used (Matthew 3:11) — and this might seem to do something for purgatory — for a purging with fire. But it is evident that the fire and purging mentioned there are the same the prophet Zechariah speaks of (Zechariah 13:9): "I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them," and so on. And St. Peter after him (1 Peter 1:7): "That the trial of your faith, which is much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise, and honour, and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ." And St. Paul (1 Corinthians 3:13): "The fire shall try every man's work, of what sort it is." But St. Peter and St. Paul speak of the fire that shall come at the second appearing of Christ, and the prophet Zechariah of the day of judgment. So the place in St. Matthew may be interpreted the same way — and then there is no necessity for the fire of purgatory.
The other interpretation of baptism for the dead is the one I mentioned above, which Bellarmine ranks second in probability — and from it he likewise infers the usefulness of prayer for the dead. For if, after the resurrection, those who never heard of Christ or never believed in him may be received into Christ's kingdom, then it is not in vain for their friends to pray for them after their death, until they should rise. Grant all of it. Grant that God, at the prayers of the faithful, may convert to himself some of those who never heard Christ preached and so cannot have rejected him; grant that men's charity in that point cannot be blamed. It still concludes nothing for purgatory. Because to rise from death to life is one thing; to rise from purgatory to life is quite another — that would be a rising from life to life, from a life in torments to a life in joy.
A fourth place is Matthew 5:25: "Agree with thine adversary quickly, whilest thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing." In this allegory, the offender is the sinner; both the adversary and the judge are God; the way is this life; the prison is the grave; the officer is death. And from that prison the sinner shall not rise again to eternal life, but to a second death — unless the uttermost farthing is paid, or Christ pays it for him by his passion, which is a full ransom for every kind of sin, lesser sins and greater crimes alike, both made equally forgivable by the passion of Christ. No purgatory: a grave, and a ransom.
The fifth place is Matthew 5:22: "Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause, shall be guilty in judgment. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Racha" — an Aramaic insult, roughly "worthless" — "shall be guilty in the council. But whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be guilty to hell fire." From these words Bellarmine infers three sorts of sins and three sorts of punishments, with only the last punished by hellfire — and consequently, that after this life there is punishment of lesser sins in purgatory.
There is no shadow of support for that inference in any interpretation ever given of these words. Shall there be, after this life, a system of separate courts of justice, like the ones the Jews had in our Savior's time to hear and determine different sorts of crimes — the judges here, the council there? Shall not all judgment belong to Christ and his apostles? To understand the text, we must not read it in isolation but together with the words before and after it. In this chapter our Savior is interpreting the law of Moses, which the Jews thought they had fulfilled so long as they had not violated its grammatical sense — however thoroughly they had violated the intent of the Legislator. They thought the sixth commandment was broken only by killing a man, and the seventh only when a man lay with a woman not his wife. So our Savior tells them: the inward anger of a man against his brother, if it is without just cause, is homicide. You have heard the law of Moses — "Thou shalt not kill," and "Whosoever shall kill shall be condemned before the judges," or before the session of the seventy. But I say to you: to be angry with one's brother without cause, or to call him Racha, or fool, is homicide — and shall be punished at the day of judgment, at the session of Christ and his apostles, with hellfire.
So the words were never meant to distinguish between different crimes, different courts, and different punishments. They were meant to rebuke the Jews' way of ranking sin against sin — drawn not from the difference of the will in obeying God, but from the difference of their temporal courts — and to show them that whoever has the will to hurt his brother, even if the effect goes no further than an insult, or never shows at all, shall be cast into hellfire by the judges and the session, which at the day of judgment shall be one and the same court, not different ones. With all this considered, what can be drawn from this text to support purgatory, I cannot imagine.
The sixth place is Luke 16:9: "Make ye friends of the unrighteous Mammon, that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting tabernacles." This he alleges to prove the invocation of departed saints. But the sense is plain: we should use our riches to make friends of the poor, and thereby obtain their prayers while they live. "He that giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord."
The seventh is Luke 23:42: "Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." Therefore, says Bellarmine, there is remission of sins after this life. But the inference does not hold. Our Savior forgave him then and there; and at his coming again in glory, he will remember to raise him again to eternal life.
The eighth is Acts 2:24, where St. Peter says of Christ "that God had raised him up, and loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible he should be holden of it." This he interprets as a descent of Christ into purgatory, to loose some souls there from their torments. But it is manifest that it was Christ who was loosed; it was Christ who could not be held by death, or the grave — not the souls in purgatory. And if what Beza says in his notes on this place is well observed — that instead of "pains" the word should be "bands" — then there is no further reason to go hunting for purgatory in this text at all.
When light strikes the organs of sight — whether it comes straight from a luminous body, or bounces off an opaque one, or bends as it passes through something transparent — it produces, in any living creature God has equipped with such organs, an imagination of the object the light came from. That imagination is what we call sight. And it does not feel like a mere imagination; it feels like the body itself, out there, outside us. It is exactly like what happens when a man presses hard on his own eye: a light appears outside him and in front of him, a light no one else can see — because there is in fact nothing out there at all, only a motion in the inner organs, pressing outward by resistance, that makes him think there is. And when that motion continues after the object that caused it is gone, we call it imagination, and memory, and — in sleep, or when the organs are badly disordered by sickness or violence — a dream. I covered all of this briefly back in Chapters 2 and 3.
The ancient pretenders to natural knowledge never discovered this nature of sight; still less did ordinary people, who do not bother with things so remote from daily use. So it was hard for men to think of those images in the imagination and the senses as anything other than things really existing outside us. Some — because the images vanish away, they know not where or how — insist they are absolutely incorporeal, that is, immaterial: forms without matter; color and shape without any colored or shaped body; able to put on airy bodies, like a garment, whenever they wish to make themselves visible to our bodily eyes. Others say they are bodies, and living creatures, but made of air or some other finer, more ethereal matter, which condenses when they want to be seen. But both camps agree on one general name for them: DEMONS. As if the dead people they dreamed of were not inhabitants of their own brains, but of the air, or of heaven, or hell — not phantasms, but ghosts. They had exactly as much reason for this as a man would have for saying he saw his own ghost in a mirror, or the ghosts of the stars in a river, or for calling the ordinary appearance of the sun — about a foot wide, as it looks — the demon, or ghost, of that great sun that lights the whole visible world.
And having invented these demons, men feared them as things of unknown — which is to say, unlimited — power to do them good or harm. That fear gave the governors of the pagan commonwealths their opening: they regulated it by establishing DEMONOLOGY (a field in which the poets, as the principal priests of pagan religion, were specially employed and revered), and they aimed it at the public peace, and at the obedience of subjects necessary to that peace. They sorted the demons into good ones and evil ones — the good as a spur to keep men observing the laws, the evil as reins to hold them back from breaking them.
What sort of things they were that got the name of demons appears partly in the genealogy of their gods written by Hesiod, one of the most ancient of the Greek poets, and partly in other histories — some of which I noted earlier, in Chapter 12 of this book.
The Greeks, through their colonies and conquests, carried their language and writings into Asia, Egypt, and Italy — and with them, by necessary consequence, their demonology, or (as St. Paul calls it) their "doctrines of devils." By that route the contagion reached the Jews as well, both those of Judaea and those of Alexandria and the other places where they were scattered. But the Jews did not apply the name "demon," as the Greeks did, to good spirits and evil ones alike. They reserved it for the evil only. The good demons they called the Spirit of God, and they considered anyone such a spirit entered to be a prophet. In short: anything extraordinary, if good, they credited to the Spirit of God; if evil, to some demon — but always a kakodaimon, an evil demon, that is, a devil.
And so they used the word "demoniacs" — people possessed by the devil — for those we would call madmen or lunatics; or for those who had the falling sickness — epilepsy; or for anyone who said something that they, for lack of understanding, thought absurd. Of a notoriously unclean person they would say he had an unclean spirit; of a mute man, that he had a dumb devil. Of John the Baptist they said, because of his extraordinary fasting, that he had a devil (Matthew 11:18). And of our Savior, because he said that whoever keeps his sayings shall not see death in aeternum — forever — they said, "Now we know you have a devil; Abraham is dead, and the prophets are dead" (John 8:52). And again, because he said they were trying to kill him, the people answered, "You have a devil; who is trying to kill you?" (John 7:20). All of which makes it plain that the Jews held the same opinion about phantasms that the Greeks did — namely, that they were not phantasms at all, not idols of the brain, but real things, independent of the imagination.
If this doctrine is false, someone may ask, why did our Savior not contradict it and teach the contrary? Indeed, why does he on various occasions use forms of speech that seem to confirm it?
To this I answer: first, where Christ says "a spirit has not flesh and bone," he shows that spirits exist, but he does not deny that they are bodies. And where St. Paul says "we shall rise spiritual bodies," he acknowledges the nature of spirits — but as bodily spirits. That is not hard to understand. Air and many other things are bodies, though they are not flesh and bone or any other gross body the eye can pick out.
But when our Savior speaks to the devil and commands him to come out of a man — if by "the devil" is meant a disease, such as frenzy or lunacy, or else a corporeal spirit, isn't the speech improper? Can a disease hear? And can there be a corporeal spirit in a body of flesh and bone that is already full of vital and animal spirits? Doesn't it follow that there must be spirits that neither have bodies nor are mere imaginations?
To the first objection I answer that addressing a command to the madness or lunacy he is curing is no more improper than his rebuking of the fever, or of the wind and the sea — for those do not hear either. Nor is it more improper than God's command to the light, to the firmament, to the sun and stars, when he commanded them to be — for they could not hear before they existed. Those speeches are not improper, because they signify the power of God's word. And so it is no more improper to command madness or lunacy — under the name of devils, which is how everyone then commonly understood those conditions — to depart out of a man's body. To the second objection, concerning spirits being incorporeal: I have not yet found any place in Scripture from which it can be gathered that any man was ever possessed by any corporeal spirit except his own — the one by which his body is naturally moved.
Immediately after the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove, our Savior is said by St. Matthew (Matthew 4:1) to have been "led up by the Spirit into the wilderness"; and the same event is told by St. Luke (Luke 4:1) in these words: "Jesus, being full of the Holy Spirit, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness." It is evident that "the Spirit" there means the Holy Spirit. And this cannot be interpreted as a possession — for Christ and the Holy Spirit are one and the same substance, and one substance cannot be "possessed" by itself.
In the verses that follow, he is said to have been "taken up by the devil into the holy city, and set upon a pinnacle of the temple." Shall we conclude from this that he was possessed by the devil, or carried there by force? And again, he was "carried from there by the devil onto an exceedingly high mountain, who showed him from it all the kingdoms of the world." Here we are not to believe he was either possessed or forced by the devil — and no mountain is high enough, taken literally, to show a man one whole hemisphere, let alone all the kingdoms of the world. What, then, can this passage mean, except that he went into the wilderness of his own accord, and that this carrying of him up and down — from the wilderness to the city, and from there onto a mountain — was a vision? St. Luke's phrasing agrees with this: he says Jesus was led into the wilderness not by, but in, the Spirit; while concerning the mountain and the pinnacle of the temple he speaks as St. Matthew does. All of which suits the nature of a vision.
Again, where St. Luke says of Judas Iscariot that "Satan entered into him," and that he thereupon went and conferred with the chief priests and captains about how to betray Christ to them — it may be answered that by the entering of Satan (that is, the Enemy) is meant his hostile and traitorous intention of selling his Lord and Master. For just as "the Holy Spirit" in Scripture frequently means the graces and good inclinations the Holy Spirit gives, so "the entering of Satan" may mean the wicked thoughts and designs of the adversaries of Christ and his disciples. It is hard to say the devil entered Judas before he had any such hostile design; and it is pointless to say he was first Christ's enemy in his heart and that the devil only entered him afterward. The entering of Satan and his wicked purpose were one and the same thing.
But if there is no immaterial spirit, and no possession of men's bodies by any corporeal spirit, the question comes back again: why did our Savior and his apostles not teach the people so, in words so clear that no one could doubt it any longer? My answer is that questions like these are more curious than necessary for a Christian man's salvation. One might as well ask why Christ, who could have given faith, piety, and every moral virtue to all men, gave them to some only and not to all; or why he left the search for natural causes and the sciences to the natural reason and industry of men, instead of revealing them supernaturally to everyone, or to anyone; and many other such questions. And yet probable and pious reasons can be offered. When God brought the Israelites into the Promised Land, he did not secure them in it by subduing all the nations around them; he left many of them there, as thorns in their sides, to awaken the Israelites' piety and industry from time to time. In the same way our Savior, in conducting us toward his heavenly kingdom, did not clear away every difficulty in natural questions; he left them standing, to exercise our industry and reason. The whole scope of his preaching was to show us the plain and direct way to salvation — namely, belief in this article: that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himself for our sins, and at his coming again to reign gloriously over his elect and save them from their enemies eternally. The opinion that spirits or phantasms can possess people is no obstacle on that road — though for some it is an occasion to wander off the road and follow their own inventions.
If we demand that Scripture settle every question that might be raised to trouble us in performing God's commands, we may as well complain of Moses for not having set down the time when such spirits were created, alongside the creation of the earth and sea and of men and beasts. To conclude: I find in Scripture that there are angels and spirits, good and evil. I do not find that they are incorporeal, like the apparitions men see in the dark, or in a dream, or in a vision — the things the Latins called spectra, and took for demons. I find that there are corporeal spirits, though subtle and invisible; but not that any man's body was ever possessed or inhabited by them. And I find that the bodies of the saints shall be of that kind — spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.
Nevertheless, the contrary doctrine — that there are incorporeal spirits — has prevailed in the Church so far that the practice of exorcism (that is, the ejection of devils by conjuration) is built upon it; and though it is rarely and faintly practiced now, it has not yet been given up entirely. That there were many demoniacs in the early Church and few madmen and other such singular diseases, whereas in our times we hear of and see many madmen and few demoniacs, comes not from any change in nature, but from a change in names.
But how it came about that the apostles, and for a time the pastors of the Church after them, cured those singular diseases, which now they are not seen to do; and likewise why it is not in the power of every true believer now to do everything the faithful did then — that is, as we read (Mark 16:17), in Christ's name to cast out devils, to speak with new tongues, to take up serpents, to drink deadly poison without harm, and to cure the sick by the laying on of their hands, all with no other words than "in the name of Jesus" — that is another question. And the probable answer is this: those extraordinary gifts were given to the Church for no longer than the time men trusted wholly in Christ and looked for their happiness only in his kingdom to come. When instead they began to seek authority and riches, and to trust their own cunning to win a kingdom of this world, these supernatural gifts of God were taken from them again.
Another relic of paganism is the worship of images. It was instituted neither by Moses in the Old Testament nor by Christ in the New; nor was it imported from the pagans — it was simply left among them, still in place, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Savior preached, the general religion of the pagans was to worship as gods the appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies on the organs of sense — the things commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits. These are representations of the external bodies that cause them, and they have no more reality in them than the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. That is why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing." Not that he thought an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing — but that the thing men honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, with no place, no habitation, no motion, no existence at all, except in the motions of the brain.
The worship of these figments with divine honor is what Scripture calls idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God was King of the Jews, and his lieutenant was first Moses and afterward the High Priest. If the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images — which are representations of their own imaginations — they would have had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no likeness, nor on his prime ministers, Moses and the High Priests. Every man would have governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter overthrow of the commonwealth and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was that they should not take for gods alienos deos — the gods of other nations — but only that one true God who deigned to commune with Moses, and through him to give them laws and directions for their peace and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second law was that they should not make for themselves any image of their own invention to worship. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he is set up by a neighboring nation or by ourselves.
The places of Scripture claimed to support setting up images to worship them — or setting them up at all in the places where God is worshipped — are these. First, two examples: the cherubim over the Ark of God, and the bronze serpent. Second, certain texts in which we are commanded to worship certain creatures for their relation to God — as, to worship his footstool. And last, certain other texts said to authorize a religious honoring of holy things. But before I examine the force of these passages to prove what is claimed, I must first explain what is to be understood by worshipping, and what by images and idols.
I have already shown, earlier in this book, that to honor is to value highly the power of a person, and that such value is measured by comparing him with others. But because nothing can be compared with God in power, we do not honor him — we dishonor him — by any valuation less than infinite. Honor, properly speaking, is by its own nature secret, internal, in the heart. But the inward thoughts of men, when they appear outwardly in words and actions, are the signs of our honoring; and these go by the name of worship — in Latin, cultus. Therefore, to pray to someone, to swear by him, to obey him, to be diligent and attentive in serving him — in short, all words and actions that show fear of offending or desire to please — is worship, whether those words and actions are sincere or feigned. And because they appear as signs of honoring, they are ordinarily also called honor.
The worship we offer to those we believe to be merely men — kings, and men in authority — is civil worship. But the worship we offer to what we think to be God, whatever the words, ceremonies, gestures, or other actions may be, is divine worship. To fall prostrate before a king, by a man who thinks him only a man, is merely civil worship. But a man who so much as takes off his hat in church, because he thinks it the house of God, worships with divine worship.
Those who try to ground the distinction between divine and civil worship not in the intention of the worshipper, but in the Greek words douleia and latreia, deceive themselves. There were two sorts of servants. One sort were those absolutely in the power of their masters — slaves taken in war, and their children — whose bodies were not their own, whose lives depended on their masters' will so completely as to be forfeited at the least disobedience, and who were bought and sold like beasts. These were called douloi, properly "slaves," and their service douleia. The other sort were those who served voluntarily, for hire or in hope of benefit from their masters. These were called thetes — domestic servants — to whose service the masters had no further right than was contained in the covenants made between them. These two kinds of servants have this much in common: their labor is appointed for them by another, whether they serve as a slave or as a voluntary servant. And the word latris is the general name for both, meaning anyone who works for another, slave or volunteer. So latreia signifies service in general, while douleia signifies the service of bondmen only, and the condition of slavery. And in Scripture, both words are used for our service of God interchangeably: douleia, because we are God's slaves; latreia, because we serve him. And in every kind of service is contained not only obedience but also worship — that is, the actions, gestures, and words that signify honor.
An IMAGE, in the strictest sense of the word, is the resemblance of something visible. In this sense, the phantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight are nothing but images: the appearance of a man or some other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or the stars seen directly through the air. These appearances are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be. Their sizes and shapes are not the same as the object's, but change with the variation of the organs of sight, or with lenses. They are often present in our imagination and in our dreams when the object is absent, or changed into other colors and shapes — things that depend only on the imagination. These are the images that were originally and most properly called ideas and IDOLS, words derived from the language of the Greeks, in which eido means "to see." They are also called PHANTASMS, which in the same language means "apparitions." And it is from these images that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. From all this it is plain that there neither is, nor can be, any image of a thing that is invisible.
It is equally evident that there can be no image of a thing that is infinite. All the images and phantasms made by the impression of visible things have a shape; but shape is a quantity bounded in every direction. Therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits — only of visible bodies, that is, bodies that have light in themselves or are lit by bodies that do.
A man can, of course, imagine shapes he never saw — making up a figure out of the parts of various creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras, and other monsters never seen. And he can give matter to those shapes too, and make them in wood, clay, or metal. These are also called images — not for their resemblance to any corporeal thing, but for their resemblance to some phantastical inhabitant of the brain of their maker. But between these idols as they exist originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved, molded, or cast in matter, there is a likeness of the one to the other; and for that likeness, the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the phantastical idol made by nature.
But in a broader use of the word, "image" also includes any representation of one thing by another. So an earthly sovereign may be called the image of God, and an inferior magistrate the image of an earthly sovereign. And in the idolatry of the pagans, there was often little regard for whether the material idol resembled the idol in their imagination — yet it was still called its image. An unhewn stone has been set up for Neptune, along with various other shapes far different from the shapes men conceived of their gods. And at this day we see many images of the Virgin Mary and other saints, unlike one another and corresponding to no one man's imagination, that nevertheless serve well enough for the purpose they were set up for — which was no more than to represent, by their names alone, the persons mentioned in the history; to which every man applies a mental image of his own making, or none at all. And so an image, in the largest sense, is either the resemblance, or the representation, of something visible — or both together, as it most often happens.
But Scripture stretches the name of idol even further. It covers the sun, or a star, or any other creature, visible or invisible, whenever that creature is worshipped as a god.
Having shown what worship is, and what an image is, I will now put the two together and examine what that IDOLATRY is which the Second Commandment, and other places of Scripture, forbid.
To worship an image is voluntarily to perform those external acts which are signs of honoring one of three things: the material of the image — the wood, stone, or metal, or some other visible creature; or the phantasm in the brain that the material was shaped and figured to resemble; or both together, as one living body composed of the matter and the phantasm, the way a man is composed of body and soul.
Now compare that with civil honor. To remove your hat before a man of power and authority, or before the throne of a prince, or in whatever other places he appoints for that purpose in his absence, is to worship that man or prince with civil worship. It is a sign of honoring not the chair, and not the place, but the person — and that is not idolatry. But if the man who does it supposed the soul of the prince to be in the chair, or presented a petition to the chair, that would be divine worship, and idolatry.
To pray to a king for things he is actually able to do for us — even if we prostrate ourselves before him — is only civil worship, because we acknowledge no power in him beyond the human. But voluntarily to pray to him for fair weather, or for anything only God can do, is divine worship, and idolatry.
On the other side, if a king compels a man to such worship by the terror of death or other severe bodily punishment, it is not idolatry. The worship that a sovereign commands to be paid to himself through the terror of his laws is not a sign that the man obeying inwardly honors him as a god. It is a sign that the man wants to save himself from death, or from a miserable life. And what is no sign of internal honor is no worship — and therefore no idolatry. Nor can it be said that such a man scandalizes his brother, or lays a stumbling block in his path. However wise or learned the man worshipping in that manner may be, no one else can conclude from his behavior that he approves of it — only that he does it out of fear, and that it is not his act, but the act of the sovereign.
To worship God in some particular place, or turning your face toward an image or a fixed spot, is not to worship or honor the place or the image. It is to acknowledge it as holy — that is, to acknowledge that the image or place has been set apart from common use. That is all the word holy means here. It implies no new quality in the place or image, only a new relation: appropriation to God. And therefore it is not idolatry — no more than it was idolatry to worship God before the bronze serpent; or for the Jews, when they were out of their own country, to turn their faces toward the Temple of Jerusalem when they prayed; or for Moses to take off his shoes before the burning bush on the ground belonging to Mount Sinai. That place was the one God had chosen to appear in and to give his laws to the people of Israel, and so it was holy ground — not by any inherent sanctity, but by being set apart to God's use. Just so, it is no idolatry for Christians to worship in churches once solemnly dedicated to God for that purpose by the authority of the king, or whoever else truly represents the Church.
But to worship God as animating or inhabiting such an image or place — that is, to worship an infinite substance in a finite place — is idolatry. Such finite gods are mere idols of the brain, nothing real, and Scripture commonly calls them by their right names: vanity, and lies, and nothing. It is also idolatry to worship God — not as present in the place or image, but simply to be reminded of him or of some of his works — in a place or before an image dedicated or set up by private authority, without the authority of those who are our sovereign pastors. For the Commandment is: "You shall not make to yourself any graven image." God commanded Moses to set up the bronze serpent; Moses did not make it to himself; so it was not against the Commandment. But the making of the golden calf by Aaron and the people, being done without any authority from God, was idolatry — not only because they held it for God, but also because they made it for a religious use without warrant either from God their sovereign, or from Moses, who was his lieutenant.
The pagans of the past worshipped as gods Jupiter and the rest — who in life were perhaps men who had done great and glorious deeds. And they worshipped as children of God various men and women, supposing them to have been begotten between an immortal deity and a mortal human. This was idolatry, because they made these gods for themselves, with no authority from God — neither in his eternal law of reason, nor in his positive and revealed will. But though our Savior was a man, whom we also believe to be God immortal and the Son of God, this is no idolatry; because we build that belief not on our own fancy or judgment, but on the Word of God revealed in the Scriptures.
As for the adoration of the Eucharist: if the words of Christ, "This is my body," really mean that he himself, and the seeming bread in his hand — and not only that, but every seeming morsel of bread that has ever since been or shall ever hereafter be consecrated by priests — are so many bodies of Christ, and yet all of them only one body, then that is no idolatry, because our Savior authorized it. But if the text does not mean that — and no other text can be brought forward for it — then, because it is a worship of human institution, it is idolatry. It is not enough to say that God can transubstantiate the bread into Christ's body. The pagans also held God to be omnipotent, and on that ground they could just as easily have excused their idolatry by claiming the transubstantiation of their wood and stone into God Almighty.
There are also those who claim divine inspiration is a supernatural entering of the Holy Spirit into a man, rather than an acquisition of God's grace through doctrine and study. I think those people are caught in a very dangerous dilemma. If they do not worship the men they believe to be so inspired, they fall into impiety — failing to adore God's supernatural presence. But if they do worship them, they commit idolatry — for the Apostles would never permit themselves to be worshipped like that. The safest course, therefore, is to believe that the descending of the dove upon the Apostles, and Christ's breathing on them when he gave them the Holy Spirit, and the giving of it by laying on of hands, were the signs God was pleased to use, or ordain to be used, of his promise to assist those men in their study to preach his kingdom, and in their conduct of life — so that it might not be scandalous, but edifying to others.
Besides the idolatrous worship of images, there is also a scandalous worship of them — which is also a sin, but not idolatry. Idolatry is worship by signs of an internal and real honor. Scandalous worship is only seeming worship. It may sometimes go along with an inward, hearty detestation both of the image and of the imaginary demon or idol it is dedicated to, and proceed only from the fear of death or other grievous punishment. Even so, it is a sin in those who worship this way, if they are men whose actions others look to as guiding lights. For those who follow their example cannot help but stumble and fall in the way of religion. Whereas the example of people we pay no attention to does not work on us at all; it leaves us to our own diligence and caution, and so is no cause of our falling.
If, therefore, a pastor lawfully called to teach and direct others — or anyone else whose knowledge is held in high regard — pays external honor to an idol out of fear, then unless he makes his fear and his unwillingness as evident as the worship itself, he scandalizes his brother by seeming to approve idolatry. His brother, reasoning from the action of his teacher, or of a man whose knowledge he respects, concludes that the thing is lawful in itself. That scandal is sin, and a scandal given.
But if someone who is no pastor, and has no eminent reputation for knowledge of Christian doctrine, does the same thing, and another follows him — that is no scandal given, for the follower had no reason to follow such an example. It is only a pretense of scandal, which he takes up himself as an excuse before men. For an unlearned man in the power of an idolatrous king or state, commanded on pain of death to worship before an idol: if he detests the idol in his heart, he does well — though if he had the fortitude to suffer death rather than worship it, he would do better. But if a pastor — who, as Christ's messenger, has undertaken to teach Christ's doctrine to all nations — should do the same, it would be not only a sinful scandal with respect to other Christians' consciences, but a treacherous desertion of his post.
Here, then, is the sum of everything I have said so far about the worship of images. Whoever worships, in an image or in any creature, either the matter of it, or some fancy of his own which he thinks dwells in it, or both together — or believes that such things hear his prayers or see his devotions, without ears or eyes — commits idolatry. Whoever counterfeits such worship out of fear of punishment, if he is a man whose example carries weight among his brethren, commits a sin. But whoever worships the Creator of the world before such an image, or in such a place, as he has not made or chosen for himself, but has taken from the commandment of God's Word — as the Jews did in worshipping God before the cherubim, and before the bronze serpent for a time, and in or toward the Temple of Jerusalem, which was also only for a time — commits no idolatry.
Now, as for the worship of saints, and images, and relics, and the other things practiced today in the Church of Rome, I say this: they are not allowed by the Word of God, and they were not brought into the Church of Rome by the doctrine taught there. They were partly left in it at the first conversion of the pagans — and afterwards countenanced, confirmed, and enlarged by the Bishops of Rome.
As for the proofs alleged out of Scripture — those examples of images that God himself appointed to be set up — they were not set up for the people, or for anyone, to worship. They were set up so that the people should worship God himself before them: before the cherubim over the Ark, and before the bronze serpent. We never read that the priest, or anyone else, worshipped the cherubim. On the contrary, we read (2 Kings 18:4) that Hezekiah broke the bronze serpent that Moses had set up into pieces — because the people were burning incense to it.
Besides, those examples were not given for our imitation, as if we too should set up images under the pretense of worshipping God before them. The words of the second Commandment — "You shall not make to yourself any graven image" — draw a line between the images God commanded to be set up and those we set up for ourselves. And therefore the argument from the cherubim or the bronze serpent to images of man's devising — from the worship commanded by God to the will-worship of men — is no good argument at all.
Consider this too: just as Hezekiah broke the bronze serpent in pieces because the Jews worshipped it, so that they would do so no more, so also Christian sovereigns ought to break down the images their subjects have grown accustomed to worshipping, so there is no further occasion for such idolatry. For at this day, where images are worshipped, the ignorant people really do believe there is a divine power in the images. Their pastors tell them that some of these images have spoken, and have bled, and that miracles have been done by them — which the people understand as done by the saint, who they think either is the image itself or is inside it. The Israelites, when they worshipped the calf, thought they were worshipping the God who brought them out of Egypt; and yet it was idolatry, because they thought the calf either was that God or had him in its belly.
Some may think it impossible for people to be so stupid as to take the image for God, or for a saint, or to worship it under that notion. But Scripture plainly says otherwise. When the golden calf was made, the people said (Exodus 32:2), "These are your gods, O Israel." And the images of Laban (Genesis 31:30) are called his gods. And we see by daily experience, in all sorts of people, that men who study nothing but their food and their ease are content to believe any absurdity rather than trouble themselves to examine it. They hold their faith the way a family holds an entailed estate — unalienable, except by an express and new law.
But they infer from certain other passages that it is lawful to paint angels, and even God himself: from God's walking in the garden, from Jacob's seeing God at the top of the ladder, and from other visions and dreams. But visions and dreams, whether natural or supernatural, are only phantasms. The man who paints an image of any of them is making an image not of God, but of his own phantasm — which is the making of an idol. I do not say that drawing a picture from your imagination is a sin. But once it is drawn, to hold it up as a representation of God is against the second Commandment, and can serve no purpose but worship.
The same goes for images of angels, and of the dead — unless they stand as monuments of friends, or of men worth remembering. That use of an image is not worship of the image, but a civil honoring of the person — not the person who is, but the person who was. But when it is done to the image we make of a saint, for no other reason than that we think he hears our prayers and is pleased with the honor we pay him — when he is dead and without sense — then we attribute to him more than human power, and that is idolatry.
So then: there is no authority, in the Law of Moses or in the Gospel, for the religious worship of images or other representations of God which men set up for themselves, nor for the worship of the image of any creature in heaven, or earth, or under the earth. And Christian kings — who are God's living representatives — are not to be worshipped by their subjects with any act signifying a greater esteem of their power than mortal human nature can carry. Given all that, it cannot be imagined that the religious worship now in use was brought into the Church through a misunderstanding of Scripture. The only remaining explanation is that it was left in the Church — because, when the pagans who worshipped the images were converted, the images themselves were never destroyed.
And here is how that happened. The images were held in immoderate esteem and carried high prices as works of craftsmanship. So their owners — though converted from worshipping them religiously, as they once had, for demons — kept them in their houses anyway, on the pretense of doing it in honor of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, of the Apostles, and of the other pastors of the primitive Church. It was easy: just give them new names. What had perhaps been called the image of Venus and Cupid became an image of the Virgin Mary and her Son our Savior. A Jupiter became a Barnabas; a Mercury, a Paul; and so on. And as worldly ambition crept by degrees into the pastors, it drew them to try to please these newly made Christians — and also to develop a liking for this kind of honor themselves, which they could hope to receive after their own deaths, just like those who had already gained it. So the worshipping of the images of Christ and his Apostles grew more and more idolatrous. True, somewhat after the time of Constantine, various emperors and bishops and general councils noticed the unlawfulness of it, and opposed it — but too late, or too weakly.
The canonizing of saints is another relic of pagan religion. It is neither a misunderstanding of Scripture nor a new invention of the Roman Church, but a custom as ancient as the commonwealth of Rome itself. The first man ever canonized at Rome was Romulus — and that on the story of Julius Proculus, who swore before the Senate that he had spoken with Romulus after his death, and had it from his own mouth that he dwelt in heaven, was called there Quirinius, and would look kindly on the fortunes of their new city. On the strength of that, the Senate gave public testimony of his sanctity. Julius Caesar, and other emperors after him, received the same testimony — that is, they were canonized as saints. For that is what canonization, now properly defined, amounts to: it is the same thing as the apotheosis — the god-making — of the heathen.
It is also from the Roman heathen that the Popes have received the name and power of PONTIFEX MAXIMUS. This was the title of the man who, in the ancient commonwealth of Rome, held the supreme authority — under the Senate and people — for regulating all ceremonies and doctrines concerning their religion. And when Augustus Caesar turned the state into a monarchy, he took to himself no more than this office and that of tribune of the people — which is to say, the supreme power in both state and religion. The succeeding emperors enjoyed the same.
But in the days of the Emperor Constantine — the first emperor to profess and authorize the Christian religion — it suited his profession to have religion regulated, under his authority, by the Bishop of Rome. Not that the bishops appear to have taken the name of Pontifex that early; rather, the later bishops assumed it on their own, to dress up the power they were exercising over the bishops of the Roman provinces. For it was never any privilege of St. Peter that gave them such authority over other bishops. It was the privilege of the city of Rome, which the emperors were always willing to uphold. That is plain from this: the Bishop of Constantinople, when the emperor made that city the seat of the empire, claimed to be equal to the Bishop of Rome. In the end — not without a fight — the Pope carried the point and became the Pontifex Maximus. But he held it only by right of the emperor; and not beyond the bounds of the empire; and nowhere at all after the emperor had lost his power in Rome — even though it was the Pope himself who took that power from him. From this we may observe, in passing, that there is no ground for the Pope's superiority over other bishops, except in territories where he is himself the civil sovereign, or where an emperor holding sovereign civil power has expressly chosen the Pope as chief pastor under himself over his Christian subjects.
The carrying of images about in procession is another relic of the religion of the Greeks and Romans. They too carried their idols from place to place in a kind of chariot specially dedicated to that use, which the Latins called the thensa, the vehiculum deorum — the carriage of the gods. The image rode in a frame or shrine called the ferculum. And what they called the pompa is exactly what is now called a procession. Accordingly, among the divine honors the Senate granted to Julius Caesar was this: that in the pompa — the procession — at the Circaean games, he should have a thensa and ferculum, a sacred chariot and a shrine; which was as much as to be carried up and down as a god. Just as the Popes, at this day, are carried about by their Swiss Guards under a canopy.
Part of those processions, too, was the bearing of burning torches and candles before the images of the gods, among both the Greeks and the Romans. Later, the emperors of Rome received the same honor. We read of Caligula that at his reception to the empire he was carried from Misenum to Rome through a throng of people, the roads lined with altars, beasts for sacrifice, and burning torches. And of Caracalla, that he was received into Alexandria with incense, with the scattering of flowers, and with dadouchiai — that is, with torches; for the dadouchoi were the men who, among the Greeks, carried lighted torches in the processions of their gods. In the course of time, the devout but ignorant people began honoring their bishops with the same pomp of wax candles, and paying it constantly to the images of our Savior and the saints in the church itself. And that is how wax candles came into use — a use afterwards established by some of the ancient councils.
The heathens also had their aqua lustralis — that is to say, holy water. The Church of Rome imitates them in its holy days as well. They had their Bacchanalia, and we have our wakes, which answer to them. They had their Saturnalia, and we our carnivals and the Shrove Tuesday liberty of servants. They had their procession of Priapus; we our fetching in, setting up, and dancing around maypoles — and dancing is one kind of worship. They had their procession called the Ambarvalia; and we our procession around the fields in Rogation Week.
Nor do I think these are all the ceremonies left in the Church from the first conversion of the pagans. They are only all that I can presently call to mind. If a man were to look carefully at what the histories tell us about the religious rites of the Greeks and Romans, I have no doubt he would find many more of these old empty bottles of paganism — bottles which the doctors of the Roman Church, whether by negligence or by ambition, have filled up again with the new wine of Christianity, which will not fail, in time, to break them.
By PHILOSOPHY is understood the knowledge acquired by reasoning — reasoning from the way a thing is generated to its properties, or from its properties to some possible way of generating it — with the aim of being able to produce, as far as matter and human power permit, the effects that human life requires. So the geometrician, by reasoning from the construction of figures, discovers many of their properties; and from those properties, new ways of constructing them — all so that he can measure land and water, and for countless other uses. So the astronomer, from the rising, setting, and movement of the sun and stars in different parts of the heavens, discovers the causes of day and night and of the different seasons of the year, and by this keeps an account of time. And the same goes for the other sciences.
From this definition it is evident that we should not count as any part of philosophy that original knowledge called experience, which is what prudence consists of. Prudence is not attained by reasoning. It is found in brute beasts as well as in man, and it is nothing but a memory of how events have followed one another in the past — where leaving out any little circumstance that changes the outcome defeats the expectation of even the most prudent. Whereas right reasoning produces nothing but general, eternal, and unchanging truth.
Nor should we give the name philosophy to any false conclusions. For whoever reasons rightly, in words he understands, can never conclude an error.
Nor to what any man knows by supernatural revelation — because that is not acquired by reasoning.
Nor to what is gotten by reasoning from the authority of books — because that is not reasoning from cause to effect, nor from effect to cause; and it is not knowledge, but faith.
Since the faculty of reasoning follows from the use of speech, it could not be otherwise: some general truths must have been found out by reasoning almost as long ago as language itself. The indigenous peoples of the Americas, as Hobbes' century knew of them, are not without some good moral sayings; they also have a little arithmetic, enough to add and divide numbers that are not too large. But that does not make them philosophers. Think of it this way. There were scattered plants of grain and grapevine growing in small quantities in the fields and woods before men knew their value, or used them for food, or planted them apart in fields and vineyards — and in that time men fed on acorns and drank water. In the same way, there have been various true, general, and profitable speculations from the beginning, since they are the natural plants of human reason. But at first they were few. Men lived on crude experience. There was no method — that is, no sowing or planting of knowledge by itself, set apart from the weeds and common plants of error and guesswork. And the cause of this was the lack of leisure: men were too busy getting the necessities of life and defending themselves against their neighbors. Until great commonwealths were erected, it could not be otherwise.
Leisure is the mother of philosophy, and commonwealth is the mother of peace and leisure. Where there were first great and flourishing cities, there was first the study of philosophy. The Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the priests of Chaldea and Egypt are counted the most ancient philosophers — and those countries were the most ancient kingdoms. Philosophy had not yet risen among the Greeks and the other peoples of the West, whose commonwealths — no bigger, perhaps, than Lucca or Geneva — never had peace except when their fears of one another were evenly matched, and never had the leisure to observe anything but each other. At length, when war had united many of these smaller Greek cities into fewer and greater ones, then seven men from various parts of Greece began to get the reputation of being wise — the Seven Sages of Greece — some of them for moral and political sayings, others for the learning of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, which was astronomy and geometry. But we still hear nothing of any schools of philosophy.
After the Athenians, by defeating the Persian armies, had won dominion of the sea — and with it all the islands and coastal cities of the Aegean, in Asia as well as Europe — and had grown wealthy, the men who had no employment, at home or abroad, had little else to do with themselves but (as St. Luke says, Acts 17:21) "telling and hearing news," or holding forth on philosophy in public to the young men of the city. Every master took some spot for the purpose. Plato taught in certain public walks called the Academia, after one Academus. Aristotle taught in the walk of the temple of Pan, called the Lyceum. Others taught in the Stoa — a covered walkway where the merchants' goods were brought ashore. Others taught in other places, where they spent their leisure time teaching or disputing their opinions — and some in any place at all where they could gather the youth of the city to hear them talk. This is exactly what Carneades did at Rome, when he was there as an ambassador — which led Cato to advise the Senate to send him home quickly, for fear of corrupting the morals of the young men who delighted in hearing him say what they took to be fine things.
This is how the place where any of them taught and disputed came to be called schola, which in their language means leisure, and their disputations diatribae — that is to say, passing the time. The philosophers themselves got the names of their sects, in some cases, from their schools. The followers of Plato's doctrine were called Academics; the followers of Aristotle, Peripatetics, from the walk where he taught; and those Zeno taught, Stoics, from the Stoa. It is as if we were to name men after Moorfields, after St. Paul's church, and after the Exchange, because they often meet there to chatter and loiter.
Nevertheless, men were so taken with this custom that in time it spread over all of Europe and the best part of Africa, so that schools were publicly erected and maintained for lectures and disputations in almost every commonwealth.
There were also schools, in ancient times, both before and after the time of our Savior, among the Jews — but they were schools of their Law. For though they were called synagogues, that is to say, congregations of the people, yet since the Law was read, expounded, and disputed in them every Sabbath, they differed from public schools in name only, not in nature. And they existed not only in Jerusalem but in every Gentile city where the Jews lived. There was such a school at Damascus, which Paul entered to persecute. There were others at Antioch, Iconium, and Thessalonica, which he entered to dispute in. And such was the synagogue of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and those of Asia — that is to say, the school of the Libertines and of Jews who were foreigners in Jerusalem. It was members of this school who disputed with St. Stephen.
But what good have those schools ever done? What science do we possess today that was acquired by their readings and disputings? The geometry we have — which is the mother of all natural science — we do not owe to the schools. Plato, the best philosopher of the Greeks, forbade entrance into his school to anyone who was not already something of a geometrician. Many men studied that science to the great advantage of mankind; but there is no mention of their schools, there was never any sect of geometricians, and they did not pass under the name of philosophers.
The natural philosophy of those schools was rather a dream than science, and it was set forth in senseless and insignificant language — which cannot be avoided by anyone who tries to teach philosophy without first attaining real knowledge of geometry. For nature works by motion, and the ways and degrees of motion cannot be known without knowing the proportions and properties of lines and figures.
Their moral philosophy is nothing but a description of their own passions. The rule of conduct, where there is no civil government, is the law of nature; and where there is civil government, it is the civil law — that is what determines what is honest and dishonest, just and unjust, and in general what is good and evil. But these philosophers made the rules of good and bad according to their own likes and dislikes. And with so great a diversity of taste, the result is that nothing is generally agreed on; everyone does (as far as he dares) whatever seems good in his own eyes — to the subversion of the commonwealth.
Their logic, which should be the method of reasoning, is nothing but word-traps: tricks invented to stump anyone who tries to pin them down.
To sum up: there is nothing so absurd that some of the old philosophers have not maintained it — as Cicero says, and he was one of them. And I believe that scarcely anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy than what is now called Aristotle's Metaphysics; nor anything more repugnant to government than much of what he said in his Politics; nor anything more ignorant than a great part of his Ethics.
The school of the Jews was originally a school of the Law of Moses, who commanded (Deuteronomy 31:10) that at the end of every seventh year, at the Feast of Tabernacles, the Law should be read to all the people, so that they might hear it and learn it. So the reading of the Law every Sabbath (a practice in use after the Captivity) ought to have had no purpose but acquainting the people with the commandments they were to obey, and expounding to them the writings of the prophets. But it is plain, from our Savior's many rebukes of them, that they corrupted the text of the Law with their false commentaries and vain traditions, and understood the prophets so little that they recognized neither Christ nor the works he did — the very works the prophets had prophesied. So by their lectures and disputations in their synagogues, they turned the doctrine of their Law into a fantastical kind of philosophy about the incomprehensible nature of God and of spirits. They cooked this up out of the vain philosophy and theology of the Greeks, mixed with their own fancies drawn from the obscurer passages of Scripture — the ones most easily twisted to their purpose — and from the fabulous traditions of their ancestors.
What is now called a university is a joining together — an incorporation under one government — of many public schools in one and the same town or city. In a university, the principal schools were established for the three professions: Roman religion, Roman law, and the art of medicine. As for the study of philosophy, it has no place there except as a handmaid to the Roman religion. And since the authority of Aristotle is the only currency accepted there, that study is not properly philosophy (whose nature does not depend on authors) but Aristotelity. As for geometry, until very recently it had no place at all — since it serves nothing but rigid truth. And if any man, by the ingenuity of his own nature, attained any degree of perfection in it, he was commonly thought a magician, and his art diabolical.
Now let us descend to the particular tenets of vain philosophy that were handed down to the universities, and from there into the Church — derived partly from Aristotle, partly from sheer blindness of understanding. I shall first consider their principles.
There is a certain philosophia prima — first philosophy — on which all other philosophy ought to depend. It consists principally in correctly limiting the meanings of the most universal names of all. These limitations serve to avoid ambiguity and equivocation in reasoning, and are commonly called definitions: definitions of body, time, place, matter, form, essence, subject, substance, accident, power, act, finite, infinite, quantity, quality, motion, action, passion, and various others necessary for explaining a man's conceptions about the nature and generation of bodies.
The explication — that is, the settling of the meaning — of these and similar terms is commonly called, in the universities, metaphysics, this being part of the philosophy of Aristotle that bears that title. But the title means something different there. In Aristotle it signifies only "the books written, or placed, after his natural philosophy." The Scholastics, however, take them for books of supernatural philosophy — for the word "metaphysics" will bear both senses. And in truth, what is written there is for the most part so far beyond any possibility of being understood, and so repugnant to natural reason, that whoever thinks there is anything in it to be understood must necessarily conclude that it is supernatural.
From this metaphysics, mixed with Scripture to make what they call School divinity, we are told that there exist in the world certain essences separated from bodies, which they call "abstract essences" and "substantial forms." To interpret this jargon, more than ordinary attention is needed here. I also beg the pardon of those who are not used to this kind of discussion, because here I am addressing those who are.
The world — and I mean not just the earth, which gives the lovers of it the name "worldly men," but the universe, the whole mass of all things that exist — is corporeal. That is to say: body. It has the dimensions of magnitude, namely length, breadth, and depth. Every part of body is likewise body, and has the same dimensions. Consequently, every part of the universe is body, and whatever is not body is no part of the universe. And because the universe is everything, whatever is no part of it is nothing — and consequently, nowhere.
It does not follow from this that spirits are nothing. Spirits have dimensions, and are therefore really bodies — even though, in common speech, the name "body" is given only to bodies that are visible or touchable, that is, bodies with some degree of opacity. As for spirits, men call them incorporeal — which is a name of greater honor, and may therefore with more piety be attributed to God himself. For when we speak of God, we are not considering which attribute best expresses his nature, which is incomprehensible, but which best expresses our desire to honor him.
Now, to know on what grounds they say there are "abstract essences" or "substantial forms," we must consider what those words properly signify.
The use of words is to register our thoughts and conceptions to ourselves, and to make them known to others. Of these words, some are names of the things conceived — like the names of all sorts of bodies that work on the senses and leave an impression in the imagination. Others are names of the imaginations themselves — that is, of the ideas or mental images we have of all the things we see or remember. Others again are names of names, or of different kinds of speech: "universal," "plural," "singular," "negation," "true," "false," "syllogism," "interrogation," "promise," "covenant" — these are names of certain forms of speech. And still others serve to show the connection, or the contradiction, between one name and another. When someone says "a man is a body," he means that the name "body" necessarily follows from the name "man," since they are simply different names of the same thing — man. And that connection is signified by coupling the two names together with the word "is."
As we use the verb "is," so the Latins used their verb est, and the Greeks their esti through all its forms. Whether all the other nations of the world have a word answering to it in their various languages, I cannot say — but I am sure they have no need of one. Simply placing two names side by side could serve to signify their connection, if that were the custom (for custom is what gives words their force), just as well as the words "is," or "be," or "are," and the like.
And suppose there were a language with no verb answering to est, or "is," or "be." The men who used it would be not one bit less capable of inferring, concluding, and every kind of reasoning than the Greeks and Latins were. But then what would become of these terms — "entity," "essence," "essential," "essentially" — which are derived from that verb, along with the many more that depend on them, applied the way they most commonly are? They are not names of things at all. They are signs by which we make known that we conceive one name or attribute as following from another. When we say "a man is a living body," we do not mean that the man is one thing, the living body another, and the "is" or "being" a third. We mean that the man and the living body are the same thing — because the inference "if he is a man, he is a living body" is a true inference, and that is what the word "is" signifies. Therefore "to be a body," "to walk," "to be speaking," "to live," "to see," and similar infinitives — and likewise "corporeity," "walking," "speaking," "life," "sight," and the like, which signify just the same — are the names of nothing. I have explained this more fully elsewhere.
But someone may ask: what is the point of such fine-grained analysis in a work like this, where I claim to deal with nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? The point is this: that men may no longer let themselves be abused by those who, using this doctrine of "separated essences" built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would frighten them away from obeying the laws of their country with empty names — the way men frighten birds from the corn with an empty coat, a hat, and a crooked stick.
For it is on this ground that they say, when a man is dead and buried, that his soul (that is, his life) can walk around separated from his body, and is seen by night among the graves. On the same ground they say that the shape, color, and taste of a piece of bread have a being in a place where, they tell us, there is no bread. And on the same ground they say that faith, and wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes "poured" into a man, sometimes "blown" into him from heaven — as if the virtuous and their virtues could exist apart — along with a great many other things that serve to weaken the dependence of subjects on the sovereign power of their country. For who will make any effort to obey the laws, if he expects obedience to be poured or blown into him? Who will not obey a priest who can make God, rather than obey his sovereign — rather, indeed, than obey God himself? And who that is afraid of ghosts will not show great respect to those who can make the holy water that drives the ghosts away?
Let this serve as one example of the errors brought into the Church from the "entities" and "essences" of Aristotle. It may be that Aristotle himself knew it was false philosophy, but wrote it as something agreeable to, and supportive of, the religion of his time — fearing the fate of Socrates.
Once fallen into this error of "separated essences," they are necessarily entangled in many other absurdities that follow from it. Since they insist these forms are real, they are obliged to assign them some place. But because they hold them to be incorporeal, without any dimension of quantity — and everyone knows that place is dimension, and can be filled only by what is corporeal — they are driven to prop up their credibility with a distinction: the forms are not anywhere "circumscriptively," but "definitively." These terms are mere words, and in this case insignificant; they pass current only in Latin, so that their emptiness can be concealed. For the circumscription of a thing is nothing other than the determination — the defining — of its place; both terms of the distinction mean exactly the same thing. And regarding the essence of a man in particular, which they say is his soul, they affirm that all of it is in his little finger, and all of it in every other part of his body, however small — and yet there is no more soul in the whole body than in any one of those parts. Can any man think God is served by such absurdities? And yet all of this must be believed by anyone who will believe in the existence of an incorporeal soul separated from the body.
And when they are asked to explain how an incorporeal substance can be capable of pain, and be tormented in the fire of hell or purgatory, they have no answer at all — except that it cannot be known how fire can burn souls.
Again: motion is change of place, and incorporeal substances are not capable of occupying any place. So the Scholastics are hard pressed to make it seem possible how a soul can leave here and go — without its body — to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory; and how the ghosts of men (and, I may add, the ghosts of the clothes they appear in) can walk by night in churches, churchyards, and other burial places. I do not know what they can answer to this, unless they want to say that ghosts walk "definitively, not circumscriptively," or "spiritually, not temporally." Such magnificent distinctions are equally applicable to any difficulty whatsoever — which is exactly what is wrong with them.
Then there is the meaning of eternity. They refuse to let eternity be an endless succession of time, because then they could not explain how God's will and his preordaining of things to come would not have to exist before his foreknowledge of those same things — the way an efficient cause comes before its effect, or an agent before its action — nor could they defend many of their other bold opinions about the incomprehensible nature of God. So instead, they teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans — "a standing now," as the Schools call it. Neither they nor anyone else understands this, any more than anyone would understand a hic-stans — "a standing here" — for an infinite greatness of place.
When we divide a body in our thoughts, we do it by counting its parts; and in counting the parts, we also count the parts of the place that body filled. We cannot make many parts without making just as many places for those parts. No mind on earth can conceive of more parts, or fewer parts, than there are places for them. Yet they would have us believe that, by the almighty power of God, one body can be in many places at one and the same time, and many bodies in one place at one and the same time — as if it were a tribute to divine power to say that what is, is not; or that what has been, has not been.
And these are only a small sample of the absurdities they are forced into by insisting on disputing philosophically about God, instead of admiring and adoring his divine and incomprehensible nature — whose attributes cannot tell us what he is, but ought to express our desire to honor him with the best names we can think of. Those who venture to reason about God's nature from these attributes of honor lose their understanding at the very first step, and then tumble from one blunder into another, without end and without number. They are like a man ignorant of the ceremonies of court who comes into the presence of someone far greater than he is used to addressing: he stumbles at the entrance; to keep from falling, he lets slip his cloak; to recover his cloak, he drops his hat; and with one disorder after another, he reveals his bewilderment and his bad breeding.
Then there is their physics — the knowledge of the subordinate, secondary causes of natural events. Here they offer no causes at all, only empty words.
If you want to know why some kinds of bodies sink naturally down toward the earth while others naturally rise away from it, the Schools will tell you, out of Aristotle, that the bodies that sink downward are heavy, and that this heaviness is what causes them to descend. But if you ask what they mean by heaviness, they will define it as an endeavor to go to the center of the earth. So the cause of things sinking downward is — an endeavor to be below. Which is as much as to say that bodies descend, or ascend, because they do.
Or they will tell you that the center of the earth is the place of rest and preservation for heavy things, and that is why heavy things endeavor to be there. As if stones and metals had desires; or could discern the place they want to be in, the way a man does; or loved rest, which man does not; or as if a pane of glass were less safe sitting in the window than falling into the street.
If we want to know why the same body seems greater at one time than another, without anything being added to it, they say: when it seems less, it is condensed; when greater, rarefied. And what are "condensed" and "rarefied"? Condensed is when there is less quantity in the very same matter than before; rarefied, when there is more. As if there could be matter without some determinate quantity — when quantity is nothing but the determination of matter, that is, of body: the measure by which we say one body is greater or less than another, by this much or that much. As if a body could be made without any quantity at all, and then more or less quantity poured into it afterward, depending on how dense the body is intended to be.
For the cause of the soul of man, they say: Creatur infundendo, and Creando infunditur — that is, "It is created by being poured in," and "poured in by being created." That is the entire explanation.
For the cause of sense, they offer a ubiquity of "species" — that is, of the shows or apparitions of objects: which, when they are apparitions to the eye, is sight; when to the ear, hearing; to the palate, taste; to the nostril, smelling; and to the rest of the body, feeling.
For the cause of the will to do any particular action — which is called volitio — they assign the faculty, that is, the general capacity that men have to will sometimes one thing and sometimes another, which is called voluntas. In other words, they make the power the cause of the act. That is like naming, as the cause of men's good or evil deeds, their ability to do them.
And on many occasions they put forward, as the cause of natural events, their own ignorance — disguised in other words. As when they say that fortune is the cause of contingent things; that is, of things whose cause they do not know. Or when they attribute many effects to "occult qualities" — that is, qualities unknown to them, and therefore (so they think) unknown to everyone else too. Or to "sympathy," "antipathy," "antiperistasis," "specifical qualities," and other such terms — which signify neither the agent that produces the effect, nor the operation by which it is produced.
If metaphysics and physics like this are not vain philosophy, then there never was any, and St. Paul need not have warned us to avoid it.
As for their moral and civil philosophy, it has the same absurdities, or greater. If a man commits an act of injustice — that is, an action contrary to the law — they say God is the prime cause of the law, and also the prime cause of that action and all other actions, but no cause at all of the injustice, which is the failure of the action to conform to the law. This is vain philosophy. One might as well say that one man makes both a straight line and a crooked one, and a different man makes their failure to match. Such is the philosophy of all men who settle on their conclusions before they know their premises; who pretend to comprehend what is incomprehensible; and who turn attributes of honor into attributes of nature — as this particular distinction was invented to prop up the doctrine of free will, that is, of a human will not subject to the will of God.
Aristotle and other heathen philosophers define good and evil by human appetite — and fairly enough, so long as we consider each man governed by no law but his own. In the condition of men who have no law but their own appetites, there can be no general rule of good and evil actions. But in a commonwealth this measure is false. It is not the appetite of private men, but the law — which is the will and appetite of the state — that is the measure.
And yet this doctrine is still practiced. Men judge the goodness or wickedness of their own actions, and of other men's actions, and of the actions of the commonwealth itself, by their own passions; and no man calls anything good or evil except what is so in his own eyes, without any regard at all to the public laws — except only monks and friars, who are bound by vow to that simple obedience to their superior which every subject ought to consider himself bound to render to the civil sovereign by the law of nature. This private measure of good is a doctrine that is not merely vain, but pernicious to the public state.
It is also vain and false philosophy to say that the work of marriage is repugnant to chastity or continence, and so to make them moral vices — as they do who plead chastity and continence as the ground for denying marriage to the clergy. For they admit it is nothing more than a regulation of the Church, requiring that those in holy orders who continually attend the altar and administer the Eucharist practice continual abstinence from women, under the name of continual chastity, continence, and purity. By this they call the lawful use of wives a lack of chastity and continence, and so make marriage a sin — or at least a thing so impure and unclean that it renders a man unfit for the altar. But follow the logic. If the law was made because the use of wives is incontinence and contrary to chastity, then all marriage is vice. If it was made because marriage is too impure and unclean for a man consecrated to God, then other natural, necessary, daily functions that all men perform should disqualify men from the priesthood far more, since they are more unclean.
But the secret foundation of this prohibition of priests' marriage was probably not laid so carelessly as on such errors in moral philosophy. Nor was it laid on the preference of the single life over the married state — a preference that came from the wisdom of St. Paul, who saw how inconvenient it was for the preachers of the Gospel in those times of persecution, forced to flee from one country to another, to be weighed down with the care of a wife and children. No: it was laid on the design of the popes and priests of later times to make themselves "the clergy" — that is, the sole heirs of the kingdom of God in this world. And for that purpose it was necessary to take the use of marriage away from them; because our Savior says that at the coming of his kingdom the children of God shall "neither marry, nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the angels in heaven" — that is to say, spiritual. Having taken on themselves the name of spiritual men, to have allowed themselves wives (when there was no need) would have been an incongruity.
From Aristotle's civil philosophy they have learned to call every kind of commonwealth except the popular kind (which was the state of Athens in his day) by the name of tyranny. All kings they called tyrants; and the aristocracy of the Thirty Governors, set up in Athens by the Spartans who had conquered them, they called the Thirty Tyrants. Likewise they learned to call the condition of the people under a democracy liberty.
Now, a tyrant originally meant nothing more than a monarch, plain and simple. But after that kind of government was abolished in most parts of Greece, the name came to signify not only what it had meant before, but along with it the hatred the popular states bore toward monarchy — just as the name of king became odious in Rome after the kings were deposed. It is natural to all men to assume that some great fault is signified by any label that is hurled in spite at a great enemy. And when these same men become displeased with those who administer a democracy or an aristocracy, they do not have to hunt for disgraceful names to vent their anger: they readily call the one anarchy and the other oligarchy, the tyranny of a few.
And what is it that actually offends the people? Nothing but this: that they are governed not as each one of them would govern himself, but as the public representative — whether one man or an assembly of men — thinks fit. That is, by an arbitrary government. For this they give evil names to their superiors, never knowing (until perhaps a little while after a civil war) that without such arbitrary government, war must be perpetual; and that it is men and arms, not words and promises, that make the force and power of the laws.
And therefore this is another error of Aristotle's politics: that in a well-ordered commonwealth, not men but the laws should govern. What man with his natural senses intact — even if he can neither read nor write — does not find himself governed by those he fears, those he believes can kill or hurt him if he disobeys? Who believes that the law itself can hurt him — that is, words and paper, without the hands and swords of men? This error belongs on the list of pernicious ones, for it leads men, whenever they dislike their governors, to attach themselves to those who call the governors tyrants, and to think it lawful to raise war against them. And yet this doctrine is many times nurtured from the pulpit, by the clergy.
There is another error in their civil philosophy, and this one they never learned from Aristotle, nor Cicero, nor any other of the heathens: to extend the power of the law — which is the rule of actions only — to the very thoughts and consciences of men, by examination and inquisition into what they hold in their hearts, even when their speech and actions conform. By this practice, men are either punished for answering with the truth of their thoughts, or forced to answer with a lie for fear of punishment.
It is true that a civil magistrate, intending to employ a minister as a teacher, may ask him whether he is willing to preach such and such doctrines, and may deny him the job if he refuses. But to force a man to accuse himself of opinions, when his actions are not forbidden by law, is against the law of nature. And it is especially monstrous in those who teach that a man will be damned to eternal and extreme torments if he dies holding a false opinion about an article of the Christian faith. For who is there who, knowing there is such great danger in an error, and whom the natural care of himself compels, would not rather hazard his soul on his own judgment than on the judgment of some other man who has no stake whatsoever in his damnation?
For a private man, without the authority of the commonwealth — that is, without permission from its representative — to interpret the law by his own spirit, is another error in politics; but this one is not drawn from Aristotle, nor from any other heathen philosopher. None of them denied that the power of making laws includes the power of explaining them when there is need. And are not the Scriptures, in every place where they are law, made law by the authority of the commonwealth — and consequently a part of the civil law?
It is an error of the same kind when anyone but the sovereign restrains in any man a power that the commonwealth has not restrained — as they do who claim the preaching of the Gospel as the exclusive property of one particular order of men, in places where the laws have left it free. If the state gives me leave to preach or teach — that is, if it does not forbid me — then no man can forbid me. Suppose I find myself among the idolaters of America. Shall I, a Christian, though not ordained, think it a sin to preach Jesus Christ until I have received orders from Rome? And once I have preached, shall I not answer their doubts, and expound the Scriptures to them — that is, shall I not teach? Some may say that in such a case, as also for administering the sacraments to them, the necessity is to be counted a sufficient commission — which is true. But this is also true: wherever a dispensation would be due because of necessity, no dispensation is needed at all when there is no law that forbids the thing. Therefore to deny these functions to those whom the civil sovereign has not denied them is to take away a lawful liberty — which is contrary to the doctrine of civil government.
More examples of vain philosophy brought into religion by the doctors of School-divinity could be produced, but other men may observe them for themselves if they please. I shall only add this: the writings of the School-divines are, for the most part, nothing but meaningless trains of strange and barbarous words — or words used otherwise than in the ordinary use of the Latin tongue — such as would stump Cicero, and Varro, and all the grammarians of ancient Rome. If anyone wants this proved, let him (as I have said once before) try whether he can translate any School-divine into any of the modern tongues — French, English, or any other language rich in words. For whatever cannot be made intelligible in most of these languages is not intelligible in the Latin either. This meaninglessness of language I cannot quite mark down as false philosophy; but it has a quality of its own: it not only hides the truth, but makes men think they already have it — and so they stop searching.
Lastly, consider the errors brought in from false or uncertain history. What is the whole legend of fictitious miracles in the lives of the saints; and all the histories of apparitions and ghosts alleged by the doctors of the Roman Church to shore up their doctrines of hell and purgatory, the power of exorcism, and other doctrines that have no warrant in either reason or Scripture; and all those traditions they call the unwritten word of God — what is all this, but old wives' fables?
It is true that scraps of such things can be found scattered in the writings of the ancient Fathers. But those Fathers were men, and men who might too easily believe false reports. Producing their opinions as testimony to the truth of what they believed carries no force with anyone who — following the counsel of St. John (1 John 4:1) — examines the spirits. On the contrary: in everything that concerns the power of the Roman Church (whose abuse they either did not suspect, or profited by), their testimony is discredited by their too-hasty belief in reports. The most sincere men, when they lack great knowledge of natural causes (as the Fathers did), are usually the most prone to such credulity; for it is natural that the best men are the least suspicious of fraudulent purposes. Pope Gregory and St. Bernard have something about apparitions of ghosts who said they were in purgatory; and so does our own Bede. But nowhere, I believe, except by report from others. And if they, or anyone else, should relate such stories as matters of their own firsthand knowledge, they would not thereby make such vain reports any more credible; they would only expose their own weakness, or their own fraud.
To the introduction of false philosophy we may add the suppression of true philosophy — by men who, having neither lawful authority nor sufficient study, are not competent judges of the truth. Our own voyages of navigation make it plain, and all men learned in the human sciences now acknowledge, that there are antipodes — people standing on the opposite side of the globe. And every day it appears more and more clearly that the years and the days are determined by the motions of the earth. Nevertheless, men who have done no more in their writings than suppose such doctrine, as an occasion to lay out the reasons for and against it, have been punished for it by ecclesiastical authority.
And what reason is there for that? Is it because such opinions are contrary to true religion? That cannot be, if they are true. Let the truth first be examined by competent judges, or refuted by those who claim to know the contrary. Is it because they are contrary to the established religion? Then let them be silenced by the laws of those to whom their teachers are subject — that is, by the civil laws; for disobedience may lawfully be punished even in those who teach true philosophy against the law. Is it because they tend toward disorder in government, by encouraging rebellion or sedition? Then let them be silenced, and their teachers punished, by the power of the one to whom the care of the public peace is committed — which is the civil authority. For whatever power churchmen take upon themselves in their own right, in any place where they are subject to the state — though they call it God's right — is nothing but usurpation.
Cicero makes honorable mention of one of the Cassii, a stern judge among the Romans, for a custom he kept in criminal cases. When the testimony of the witnesses was not sufficient, he would ask the accusers: Cui bono? — who benefits? What profit, honor, or other satisfaction did the accused gain, or expect to gain, from the deed? For among all presumptions, none points to the author of an action so plainly as the benefit that comes of it.
By that same rule I intend, in this place, to examine who it can be that has kept the people of this part of Christendom possessed for so long by these doctrines — doctrines contrary to the peaceful societies of mankind.
Begin with the first error: that the present church, still militant here on earth, is the kingdom of God — meaning the kingdom of glory, the Promised Land itself, and not the kingdom of grace, which is only a promise of the land. To this error are attached the following worldly benefits.
First, the pastors and teachers of the church are entitled by it, as God's public ministers, to a right of governing the church — and consequently, since the church and the commonwealth are the same persons, to be rectors and governors of the commonwealth. It was by this title that the Pope prevailed upon the subjects of all Christian princes to believe that to disobey him was to disobey Christ himself, and, in every quarrel between him and other princes, to abandon their lawful sovereigns — charmed by the words "spiritual power." Which is, in effect, a universal monarchy over all Christendom.
For the popes were first invested with the right of being supreme teachers of Christian doctrine by Christian emperors, and under them, within the limits of the Roman Empire — as they themselves acknowledge — under the title of Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of Rome, an officer subject to the civil state. But after the empire was divided and dissolved, it was not hard to press upon a people already subject to them another title: the right of St. Peter — not only to keep their pretended power intact, but to extend it over those same Christian provinces, even though they were no longer united in the empire of Rome.
This benefit of a universal monarchy — considering how much men desire to rule — is presumption enough that the popes who claimed it, and who enjoyed it for a long time, were the authors of the doctrine by which it was obtained: namely, that the church now on earth is the kingdom of Christ. For grant that, and it must follow that Christ has some lieutenant among us, through whom we are to be told what his commandments are.
After certain churches renounced this universal power of the Pope, you would reasonably expect the civil sovereigns in all those churches to have recovered the portion of it that had been their own right, in their own hands, all along — before they so carelessly let it go. And in England that is, in effect, what happened — except that the men through whom the kings administered the government of religion, by insisting that they held their employment by God's own right, seemed to claim, if not supremacy, then at least independence from the civil power. And they only seemed to claim it, since they acknowledged the King's right to strip them of the exercise of their functions whenever he pleased.
But in those places where the presbytery took over that office, many other doctrines of the Church of Rome were indeed forbidden to be taught — yet this one doctrine, that the kingdom of Christ has already come, and that it began at the resurrection of our Savior, was retained. But cui bono? What profit did they expect from it? The same profit the popes expected: sovereign power over the people.
For what does it mean for men to excommunicate their lawful king, if not to bar him from every place of God's public service in his own kingdom — and to resist him with force when he tries with force to correct them? And what does it mean to excommunicate any person without authority from the civil sovereign, if not to take away his lawful liberty — that is, to usurp an unlawful power over their brethren? The authors of this darkness in religion, therefore, are the Roman and the Presbyterian clergy.
Under this same head I place all the doctrines that serve them to keep possession of this spiritual sovereignty once it has been gotten. First, that the Pope, in his public capacity, cannot err. For who is there that believes this to be true, and will not readily obey him in whatever he commands?
Secondly, that all other bishops, in whatever commonwealth they live, hold their right neither immediately from God nor mediately from their civil sovereigns, but from the Pope. This is a doctrine by which every Christian commonwealth comes to contain many powerful men — for that is what bishops are — who depend on the Pope and owe obedience to him, even though he is a foreign prince. By this means he is able, as he has done many times, to raise a civil war against any state that will not submit to be governed according to his pleasure and interest.
Thirdly, the exemption of these bishops, and of all other priests, and of all monks and friars, from the power of the civil laws. By this means a great part of every commonwealth enjoys the benefit of the laws and the protection of the civil state, yet pays no share of the public expense, and is not liable, as other subjects are, to the penalties due for its crimes. Consequently these men stand in fear of no one but the Pope, and adhere to him alone, to uphold his universal monarchy.
Fourthly, giving their priests the name of sacerdotes — that is, sacrificers — when in the New Testament they are nothing more than presbyters, that is, elders. "Sacrificer" was the title of the civil sovereign and his public ministers among the Jews, in the days when God was their king. Likewise, making the Lord's Supper a sacrifice serves to make the people believe the Pope has the same power over all Christians that Moses and Aaron had over the Jews — that is to say, all power, both civil and ecclesiastical, just as the High Priest had then.
Fifthly, teaching that matrimony is a sacrament gives the clergy the judging of which marriages are lawful — and thereby of which children are legitimate — and consequently of the right of succession to hereditary kingdoms.
Sixthly, the denial of marriage to priests serves to secure this power of the Pope over kings. For if a king is a priest, he cannot marry and pass his kingdom to his posterity. And if he is not a priest, then the Pope claims this ecclesiastical authority over him, and over his people.
Seventhly, from auricular confession — confession whispered privately into the priest's ear — they obtain, for the security of their power, better intelligence of the designs of princes and great persons in the civil state than those princes can ever have of the designs of the ecclesiastical state.
Eighthly, by the canonization of saints, and by declaring who are martyrs, they secure their power by leading simple men into obstinacy against the laws and commands of their civil sovereigns — obstinacy even to the death — whenever the Pope's excommunication declares those sovereigns heretics or enemies of the church; that is, as they interpret it, enemies of the Pope.
Ninthly, they secure the same power by what they ascribe to every priest: the power of making Christ; the power of ordaining penance; and the power of remitting and retaining sins.
Tenthly, by the doctrine of purgatory, of justification by external works, and of indulgences, the clergy is enriched.
Eleventhly, by their demonology, and the use of exorcism, and the other things belonging to it, they keep the people — or think they keep them — in greater awe of their power.
Lastly, the metaphysics, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, and the frivolous distinctions, barbarous terms, and obscure language of the Scholastics, taught in the universities — all of which were erected and regulated by the Pope's authority — serve them to keep these errors from being detected, and to make men mistake the ignis fatuus — the fool's fire, the will-o'-the-wisp — of vain philosophy for the light of the Gospel.
If these did not suffice, other dark doctrines of theirs could be added, whose profit plainly flows toward the same ends: toward setting up an unlawful power over the lawful sovereigns of Christian people; or toward sustaining that power once it is set up; or toward the worldly riches, honor, and authority of those who sustain it. And therefore, by the rule of cui bono stated above, we may justly pronounce the authors of all this spiritual darkness: the Pope, and the Roman clergy, and all those besides who labor to settle in the minds of men this erroneous doctrine — that the church now on earth is the kingdom of God spoken of in the Old and New Testament.
But the emperors, and the other Christian sovereigns, under whose government these errors and the like encroachments of churchmen upon their office first crept in — to the disturbance of their possessions and of the peace of their subjects — are not blameless either. Though they suffered it through lack of foresight of the consequences, and lack of insight into the designs of their teachers, they may nevertheless be counted accessories to their own damage, and to the public's. For without their authority, no seditious doctrine could have been publicly preached in the first place. I say they could have stopped it at the beginning.
But once the people were possessed by those spiritual men, no human remedy remained that anyone could invent. As for the remedies God provides — and he never fails, in his good time, to destroy all the machinations of men against the truth — for those we must wait upon his good pleasure. Many times he allows the prosperity of his enemies, together with their ambition, to grow to such a height that its very violence opens the eyes that the caution of their predecessors had sealed shut, and makes men, by grasping too much, lose their hold on everything — as Peter's net was broken by the struggling of too great a multitude of fish. Whereas the impatience of those who tried to resist such encroachment before their subjects' eyes were opened only increased the power they were resisting.
I do not, therefore, blame the Emperor Frederick for holding the stirrup for our countryman Pope Adrian. Such was the disposition of his subjects at the time that if he had not done it, he was not likely to have succeeded in the empire. But I do blame those who, in the beginning, when their power was still whole, allowed such doctrines to be forged in the universities of their own dominions — and so held the stirrup for all the succeeding popes, while they mounted into the thrones of all Christian sovereigns, to ride and tire both them and their people at their pleasure.
But as the inventions of men are woven, so also they are unraveled: the path is the same, but the order is reversed. The web begins at the first elements of power — wisdom, humility, sincerity, and the other virtues of the apostles, whom the people they converted obeyed out of reverence, not obligation. Their consciences were free, and their words and actions were subject to none but the civil power.
Afterwards, as the flocks of Christ increased, the presbyters assembled to consider what they should teach; and by binding themselves to teach nothing against the decrees of their assemblies, they made it be thought that the people were bound to follow their doctrine too — and when anyone refused, they refused to keep him company. That was what excommunication then meant: the man was shunned not as an infidel, but as disobedient. And this was the first knot upon Christian liberty.
Then, as the number of presbyters grew, the presbyters of the chief city or province got themselves authority over the parish presbyters, and appropriated to themselves the name of bishops. And this was the second knot on Christian liberty.
Lastly, the Bishop of Rome, on the strength of the imperial city, took upon himself an authority over all the other bishops of the empire — partly by the will of the emperors themselves and by the title of Pontifex Maximus, and at last, when the emperors had grown weak, by the privileges of St. Peter. And this was the third and last knot, and the whole synthesis and construction of the pontifical power.
And therefore the analysis — the untying — proceeds by the same path, but beginning with the knot that was tied last. We can watch it happen in the dissolution of the praeterpolitical church government in England — the church government that stood outside, and above, the civil order.
First, the power of the popes was dissolved totally by Queen Elizabeth; and the bishops, who before had exercised their functions in the right of the Pope, afterwards exercised them in the right of the Queen and her successors — though by keeping the phrase jure divino — "by divine right" — they were thought to claim them by immediate right from God. And so the first knot was untied: the one that had been tied last.
After this, the Presbyterians in England lately obtained the putting down of episcopacy. And so the second knot was dissolved.
And almost at the same time, the power was taken from the Presbyterians too. And so we are reduced to the independency of the primitive Christians: to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he likes best. Which — if it comes without contention, and without measuring the doctrine of Christ by our affection for the person of his minister (the fault the Apostle rebuked in the Corinthians) — is perhaps the best arrangement of all. First, because there ought to be no power over the consciences of men but the power of the Word itself, working faith in every one of us — not always according to the purpose of those who plant and water, but according to the purpose of God himself, who gives the increase. And secondly, because it is unreasonable for those who teach that there is danger in every little error to demand that a man endowed with reason of his own follow the reason of some other man, or the majority vote of many other men — which is little better than staking his salvation on a game of cross and pile: a coin toss.
Nor should those teachers be displeased at this loss of their ancient authority. For no one should know better than they that power is preserved by the same virtues by which it is acquired — by wisdom, humility, clearness of doctrine, and sincerity of life. Not by suppressing the natural sciences and the morality of natural reason. Not by obscure language. Not by claiming more knowledge than they let appear. Not by pious frauds. Nor by the other faults that, in the pastors of God's church, are not merely faults but scandals — stumbling blocks apt to make men trip, one time or another, into throwing off their authority altogether.
But after this doctrine — "that the church now militant is the kingdom of God spoken of in the Old and New Testament" — was received in the world, the ambition and campaigning for the offices that belong to it, and especially for that great office of being Christ's lieutenant, and the pomp of those who obtained the principal public charges in it, became by degrees so obvious that men lost the inward reverence due to the pastoral function. So much so that the wisest men, among those who had any power in the civil state, needed nothing but the authority of their princes to refuse them any further obedience.
For from the time the Bishop of Rome got himself acknowledged as universal bishop, by pretense of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy — their kingdom of darkness — may be compared, not unfittingly, to the kingdom of fairies: that is, to the old wives' tales of England about ghosts and spirits, and the tricks they play in the night. And if a man considers the origin of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so the Papacy started up, all of a sudden, out of the ruins of that heathen power.
The language they use, too, both in their churches and in their public acts, is Latin — which is not the common speech of any nation now in the world. What is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?
The fairies, in whatever nation they keep company, have but one universal king, whom some of our poets call King Oberon — but whom Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The churchmen likewise, in whatever dominions they are found, acknowledge but one universal king: the Pope.
The churchmen are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The churchmen walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and churchyards.
The churchmen have their cathedral churches, which, in whatever town they are erected, have the power — by virtue of holy water, and certain charms called exorcisms — to make those towns cities, that is to say, seats of empire. The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts that lord it over all the regions round about them.
The fairies cannot be seized and brought to answer for the harm they do. So also the churchmen vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.
The churchmen take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture — after which they are good for nothing else but to execute what the churchmen command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles and change them into natural fools — which the common people therefore call elves, and which are prone to mischief.
In what shop or workshop the fairies make their enchantments, the old wives have not determined. But the workshops of the clergy are well enough known: they are the universities, which received their discipline from papal authority.
When the fairies are displeased with somebody, they are said to send their elves to pinch him. The churchmen, when they are displeased with any civil state, likewise make their elves — that is, their superstitious, enchanted subjects — pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or they use one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.
The fairies do not marry; but there are among them incubi, which nevertheless couple with flesh and blood. The priests also do not marry.
The churchmen skim the cream of the land, by the donations of ignorant men who stand in awe of them, and by tithes. So also it is in the fable of the fairies, that they slip into the dairies and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk.
What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies, the story does not record. But the churchmen, in what they take in, accept the same money we do — though when they have any payment to make, they pay it in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.
To these and other such resemblances between the Papacy and the kingdom of fairies, one more may be added: that just as the fairies have no existence except in the fancies of ignorant people, rising out of the traditions of old wives or old poets, so the spiritual power of the Pope — outside the bounds of his own civil dominion — consists only in the fear that seduced people stand in of his excommunication, upon hearing false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of Scripture.
It was not, therefore, a very difficult matter for Henry VIII to cast them out by his exorcism, nor for Queen Elizabeth by hers. But who knows whether this spirit of Rome — now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, which yield him little fruit — may not return? Or rather, whether an assembly of spirits worse than he may not enter and inhabit this clean-swept house, and make the end of it worse than the beginning? For the Roman clergy are not the only ones who claim that the kingdom of God is of this world, and who claim, on that ground, a power in it distinct from the power of the civil state.
And this is all I had a design to say concerning the doctrine of POLITICS. When I have reviewed it, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my country.
Some people have argued, from the way certain natural faculties of the mind work against each other — and certain passions against other passions — that no one man could ever be fit for every kind of civil duty. Severity of judgment, they say, makes men harsh critics, slow to pardon the errors and weaknesses of others. Quickness of imagination, on the other side, makes the thoughts less steady than they need to be to tell right from wrong exactly. Again, in every deliberation and every courtroom argument, solid reasoning is necessary — without it, men's decisions are rash and their verdicts unjust. And yet without powerful eloquence to win attention and consent, reason accomplishes almost nothing. But these two are contrary faculties: reasoning is grounded on principles of truth, while eloquence is grounded on opinions already received, true or false, and on the passions and interests of men, which are different and always shifting.
And among the passions, courage — by which I mean contempt for wounds and violent death — inclines men toward private revenge, and sometimes toward unsettling the public peace; while timidity often disposes them to desert the public defense. Both of these, they say, cannot live in the same person.
And when you consider how much men's opinions and manners differ in general, it is impossible, they say, to keep up a steady civil friendship with everyone the business of the world forces us to deal with — a business that consists in almost nothing else but a perpetual contest for honor, riches, and authority.
To this I answer: these are indeed great difficulties, but not impossibilities. By education and discipline they can be reconciled, and sometimes are. Judgment and imagination can both have a place in the same man — but by turns, as the goal he is aiming at requires. Just as the Israelites in Egypt were sometimes tied to their labor of making bricks, and at other times ranged abroad to gather straw, so the judgment can sometimes be fixed on one particular question, and the imagination at another time go wandering about the world. So too reason and eloquence can stand very well together — perhaps not in the natural sciences, but certainly in the moral ones. For wherever there is room to dress up and promote error, there is far more room to dress up and promote truth, if you have truth to dress. Nor is there any contradiction between fearing the laws and not fearing a public enemy; nor between refraining from injury yourself and pardoning it in others. So there is no such incompatibility between human nature and civil duties as some people think. I have known clearness of judgment and largeness of imagination, strength of reason and graceful speech, courage for war and fear of the laws, all eminently combined in one man — and that was my most noble and honored friend, Mr. Sidney Godolphin: who, hating no man and hated by none, was unfortunately killed at the start of the late civil war, in the public quarrel, by an undiscerned and undiscerning hand.
To the laws of nature set out in Chapter 15, I would have this one added: that every man is bound by nature, as far as in him lies, to protect in war the authority by which he is himself protected in time of peace. For a man who claims a right of nature to preserve his own body cannot claim a right of nature to destroy the very power by whose strength he is preserved. That is a plain contradiction of himself. He is obliged to protect his protector. And though this law can be deduced from some of those already listed there, the times require that it be drummed in and remembered.
And because I find from various English books lately printed that the civil wars have not yet sufficiently taught men at what point in time a subject becomes obliged to a conqueror — nor what conquest is, nor how it comes about that conquest obliges men to obey the conqueror's laws — I will say it plainly, for their further satisfaction. The point in time at which a man becomes the subject of a conqueror is the point at which, having the liberty to submit to him, he consents — either by express words or by some other sufficient sign — to be his subject. As for when a man has the liberty to submit, I showed that already at the end of Chapter 21: for a man who has no obligation to his former sovereign beyond that of an ordinary subject, it is when the means of his life lie within the guards and garrisons of the enemy. For at that point he no longer has protection from his old sovereign, but is protected by the opposing side in exchange for his contribution. The end of obedience is protection. And since such contribution is everywhere treated as lawful, as an unavoidable thing — even though it is assistance to the enemy — total submission, which is nothing more than assistance to the enemy, cannot be treated as unlawful. Besides, consider this: those who submit assist the enemy with only part of their estates, while those who refuse assist him with the whole of theirs. So there is no reason to call their submission, or their settlement with the conqueror, assistance to the enemy. It is rather a loss to him.
But if a man, on top of his obligation as a subject, has taken on the new obligation of a soldier, then he does not have the liberty to submit to a new power as long as the old one keeps the field and provides him the means of subsistence, either in its armies or in its garrisons. In that case he cannot complain of lacking protection and the means to live as a soldier. But when that fails too, a soldier also may seek his protection wherever he has the most hope of finding it, and may lawfully submit himself to his new master. So much for the time when he may do it lawfully, if he chooses. And if he does do it, he is without question bound to be a true subject: for a contract lawfully made cannot lawfully be broken.
From this a man can also understand when people may be said to be conquered, and what the nature of conquest and the right of a conqueror consist in — for this act of submission contains them all. Conquest is not the victory itself, but the acquisition, by victory, of a right over the persons of men. The man who is killed is overcome, but not conquered. The man who is captured and put in prison or in chains is not conquered, though he is overcome — for he is still an enemy, and may save himself if he can. But the man who, on a promise of obedience, is allowed his life and liberty — he is then conquered, and a subject, and not before. The Romans used to say that their general had "pacified" such-and-such a province — that is to say, in plain English, conquered it — and that the country was pacified by victory when its people had promised imperata facere — to do what the Roman people commanded them. That was what it meant to be conquered. But this promise may be either express or tacit: express, by an actual promise; tacit, by other signs. For example, a man who has never been called on to make an express promise (perhaps because his power is not considerable enough to matter) is nevertheless understood to submit himself to the government if he lives openly under its protection. But if he lives there secretly, he is liable to anything that may be done to a spy and enemy of the state. I do not say he commits any injustice — acts of open hostility do not bear that name — but I do say he may justly be put to death. Likewise, if a man is out of his country when it is conquered, he is not conquered, and not a subject; but if on his return he submits to the government, he is bound to obey it. So conquest, to define it, is the acquiring of the right of sovereignty by victory. And that right is acquired in the people's submission, by which they contract with the victor, promising obedience in exchange for life and liberty.
In Chapter 29 I set down, as one of the causes of the dissolution of commonwealths, their imperfect generation — their lacking an absolute and unconditional legislative power, for want of which the civil sovereign is forced to handle the sword of justice waveringly, as if it were too hot to hold. One reason for this, which I did not mention there, is that sovereigns will all insist on justifying the war by which their power was first gotten, as if their right depended on the goodness of that old cause and not on their present possession. As if, for example, the right of the kings of England depended on the goodness of William the Conqueror's cause, and on their lineal and most direct descent from him — by which standard there would perhaps be no tie of obedience binding any subject to any sovereign anywhere in the world today. In needlessly trying to justify themselves this way, they justify every successful rebellion that ambition shall ever raise against them and their successors. Therefore I set this down as one of the most effective seeds of the death of any state: that conquerors demand not only a submission of men's actions for the future, but also an approval of all their own actions past — when there is scarcely a commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in good conscience be justified.
And because the name of tyranny signifies nothing more and nothing less than the name of sovereignty — whether in one man or many — except that those who use the word "tyranny" are understood to be angry at the men they call tyrants, I think that tolerating a professed hatred of tyranny is tolerating a hatred of commonwealth in general, and is another evil seed, not much different from the first. For to justify the cause of a conqueror, men generally find it necessary to vilify the cause of the conquered — but neither the one nor the other is necessary for the obligation of the conquered. And this much I have thought fit to say on review of the first and second parts of this discourse.
In Chapter 35 I showed sufficiently from Scripture that in the commonwealth of the Jews, God himself was made the sovereign by pact with the people — who were therefore called his peculiar people, to distinguish them from the rest of the world, over whom God reigned not by their consent but by his own power — and that in this kingdom Moses was God's lieutenant on earth, and it was he who told them what laws God had appointed. But I did not then deal with who was to carry out those laws, especially in capital punishments — not thinking it then a matter requiring as much consideration as I have since found it does. We know that in commonwealths generally, the execution of corporal punishments was either assigned to the guards or other soldiers of the sovereign power, or given to men in whom poverty, contempt for honor, and hardness of heart combined to make them apply for such an office. But among the Israelites it was a positive law of God their sovereign that whoever was convicted of a capital crime should be stoned to death by the people — and that the witnesses should cast the first stone, and after the witnesses, the rest of the people. This was a law that designated who the executioners were to be. It did not allow anyone to throw a stone before conviction and sentence, where the congregation was the judge. The witnesses still had to be heard before the execution proceeded, unless the deed had been committed in the presence of the congregation itself, or in the sight of the lawful judges — for then no other witnesses were needed but the judges themselves. Nevertheless, because this procedure has not been thoroughly understood, it has given occasion to a dangerous opinion: that any man may kill another, in some cases, by a "right of zeal" — as if the executions done upon offenders in the kingdom of God in ancient times proceeded not from the sovereign's command, but from the authority of private zeal. If we look at the very texts that seem to favor this idea, they say quite the contrary.
First, when the Levites fell upon the people who had made and worshipped the golden calf, and killed three thousand of them, it was by the commandment of Moses, from the mouth of God — as is plain in (Exodus 32:27). And when the son of an Israelite woman blasphemed God, those who heard it did not kill him, but brought him before Moses, who put him in custody until God should give sentence against him — as appears in (Leviticus 24:11-12). Again, in (Numbers 25:6-7), when Phinehas killed Zimri and Cozbi, it was not by right of private zeal. Their crime was committed in the sight of the whole assembly, so no witness was needed; the law was known; Phinehas was heir apparent to the sovereignty; and — the principal point — the lawfulness of his act depended entirely on a subsequent ratification by Moses, of which he had no cause to doubt. And this presumption of a future ratification is sometimes necessary to the safety of a commonwealth: in a sudden rebellion, any man who can suppress it by his own power, in the place where it begins, may lawfully do so, and arrange to have his act ratified or pardoned while it is being done, or after it is done. Also, (Numbers 35:30) says expressly, "Whosoever shall kill the murderer shall kill him upon the word of witnesses" — but witnesses presuppose a formal court, and so this text condemns the whole pretense of jus zelotarum — the supposed right of zealots. The law of Moses concerning a man who entices others to idolatry — that is to say, in the kingdom of God, to a renouncing of their allegiance — forbids concealing him (Deuteronomy 13:8) and commands the accuser to have him put to death and to cast the first stone at him: but not to kill him before he is condemned. And in (Deuteronomy 17:4-6) the legal process against idolatry is set down exactly. God there speaks to the people as judge, and commands them, when a man is accused of idolatry, to inquire diligently into the fact; and if they find it true, then to stone him — but still the hand of the witness throws the first stone. This is not private zeal; it is public condemnation. In the same way, when a father has a rebellious son, the law (Deuteronomy 21:18) is that he shall bring him before the judges of the town, and all the people of the town shall stone him. Lastly, it was under pretense of these laws that St. Stephen was stoned — not under any pretense of private zeal: for before he was carried away to execution, he had pleaded his cause before the High Priest. There is nothing in all this, nor in any other part of the Bible, to support executions by private zeal — which, being most of the time nothing but a combination of ignorance and passion, is against both the justice and the peace of a commonwealth.
In Chapter 36 I said that it is not declared in what manner God spoke supernaturally to Moses. I did not mean that he never spoke to Moses by dreams and visions and by a supernatural voice, as he did to other prophets. The manner in which God spoke to him from the mercy-seat is set down expressly in (Numbers 7:89), in these words: "From that time forward, when Moses entered into the Tabernacle of the Congregation to speak with God, he heard a Voice which spake unto him from over the Mercy-Seat, which is over the Ark of the Testimony; from between the Cherubims he spake unto him." But what is not declared is what made the manner of God's speaking to Moses superior to his speaking to other prophets — to Samuel, say, or to Abraham, to whom he also spoke by a voice, that is, by vision — unless the difference lay in the clearness of the vision. For "face to face" and "mouth to mouth" cannot be understood literally of the infiniteness and incomprehensibility of the divine nature.
As for the doctrine of this book as a whole, I still cannot see anything wrong with it: the principles of it are true and proper, and the reasoning solid. For I ground the civil right of sovereigns, and both the duty and the liberty of subjects, on the known natural inclinations of mankind and on the articles of the law of nature — things no man ought to be ignorant of who claims even reason enough to govern his own household. And as for the ecclesiastical power of those same sovereigns, I ground it on texts that are both evident in themselves and in harmony with the aim of the whole of Scripture. And therefore I am persuaded that whoever reads this book with no other purpose than to be informed, will be informed by it. But those who by their writing, or public speaking, or prominent actions have already committed themselves to maintaining the contrary opinions will not be so easily satisfied. In such cases it is natural for men to do two things at once: to keep reading, and to lose their attention in hunting for objections to what they read before. And in a time when men's interests have changed — since much of the doctrine that serves to establish a new government must necessarily run contrary to the doctrine that helped dissolve the old — there cannot help but be very many such objections.
In the part that deals with a Christian commonwealth there are some new doctrines which, in a state where the contrary had already been fully settled, it would perhaps be a fault for a subject to publish without permission — that would be usurping the place of a teacher. But in this time, when men are calling not only for peace but also for truth, to offer such doctrines as I think true — doctrines that plainly tend toward peace and loyalty — for the consideration of those who are still deliberating, is nothing more than offering new wine to be put into new casks, so that both may be preserved together. And I suppose that when novelty can breed no trouble or disorder in a state, men are not generally so devoted to the reverence of antiquity as to prefer ancient errors over new and well-proved truth.
There is nothing I distrust more than my own style — which nevertheless I am confident is not obscure, apart from the accidents of the printing press. As for my having neglected the fashionable ornament of quoting ancient poets, orators, and philosophers, contrary to the custom of recent times — whether I have done well or badly in it — that came from my own judgment, grounded on many reasons. First, all truth of doctrine depends either on reason or on Scripture, both of which lend credibility to many writers but never receive credibility from any. Second, the matters in question here are not matters of fact but matters of right, in which there is no place for witnesses. Third, there is scarcely one of those old writers who does not sometimes contradict both himself and the others, which makes their testimony insufficient. Fourth, opinions taken purely on the credit of antiquity are not really the judgment of those who cite them, but words that pass — like yawning — from mouth to mouth. Fifth, men often have a fraudulent design when they stud their corrupt doctrine with the cloves of other men's wit. Sixth, I do not find that the ancients they cite considered it an ornament to do the same with those who wrote before them. Seventh, it is a sign of indigestion when Greek and Latin sentences come back up unchewed, as they usually do — unchanged. Lastly, though I revere those men of ancient times who either wrote the truth clearly or set us on a better path to find it out for ourselves, I think nothing is owed to antiquity itself. For if we are going to revere age, the present is the oldest age there is. And if it is the age of the writer we revere — I am not sure that the men generally given such honor were any more ancient when they wrote than I am, who am writing now. But consider it carefully, and the praise of ancient authors proceeds not from reverence for the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.
To conclude: there is nothing in this whole discourse, nor in what I wrote before on the same subject in Latin, that I can perceive to be contrary either to the Word of God or to good morals, or that tends to disturb the public tranquility. Therefore I think it may profitably be printed, and even more profitably taught in the universities — if those to whom the judgment of such things belongs agree. For since the universities are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine, from which the preachers and the gentry draw such water as they find there and sprinkle it on the people (both from the pulpit and in their conversation), there certainly ought to be great care taken to keep that water pure — pure both from the venom of heathen politicians and from the incantation of deceiving spirits. By that means most men, knowing their duties, will be less liable to serve the ambition of a few discontented persons in their schemes against the state; they will be less aggrieved by the taxes necessary for their peace and defense; and the governors themselves will have less cause to maintain, at the common expense, any larger army than is necessary to secure the public liberty against the invasions and encroachments of foreign enemies.
And so I have brought to an end my discourse of civil and ecclesiastical government, occasioned by the disorders of the present time — without partiality, without aiming at any person, and with no other design than to set before men's eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience, of which the condition of human nature and the laws of God, both natural and positive, require an inviolable observance. And though in the upheaval of states there can be no very favorable constellation for truths of this kind to be born under — facing the angry glare of those who are dissolving an old government, and seeing only the backs of those who are erecting a new one — still I cannot think this book will be condemned at this time, either by the public judge of doctrine or by anyone who desires the continuance of the public peace. And in that hope I return to my interrupted speculation on natural bodies, in which — if God gives me the health to finish it — I hope the novelty will please as much as the novelty in this doctrine of the artificial body has tended to offend. For such truth as opposes no man's profit, nor his pleasure, is to all men welcome.