be trampling, they fight for you for tyranny, though under the
name of a commonwealth: the nature of orders in a government
rightly instituted being void of all jealousy, because, let the
parties which it embraces be what they will, its orders are such
as they neither would resist if they could, nor could if they
would, as has been partly already shown, and will appear more at
large by the following model.
The parties that are spiritual are of more kinds than I need
mention; some for a national religion, and others for liberty of
conscience, with such animosity on both sides, as if these two
could not consist together, and of which I have already
sufficiently spoken, to show that indeed the one cannot well
subsist without the other But they of all the rest are the most
dangerous, who, holding that the saints must govern, go about to
reduce the commonwealth to a party, as well for the reasons
already shown, as that their pretences are against Scripture,
where the saints are commanded to submit to the higher powers,
and to be subject to the ordinance of man. And that men,
pretending under the notion of saints or religion to civil power,
have hitherto never failed to dishonor that profession, the world
is full of examples, whereof I shall confine myself at present
only to a couple, the one of old, the other of new Rome.
In old Rome, the patricians or nobility pretending to be the
godly party, were questioned by the people for engrossing all the
magistracies of that commonwealth, and had nothing to say why
they did so, but that magistracy required a kind of holiness
which was not in the people; at which the people were filled with
such indignation as had come to cutting of throats, if the
nobility had not immediately laid by the insolency of that plea;
which nevertheless when they had done, the people for a long time
after continued to elect no other but patrician magistrates.
The example of new Rome in the rise and practice of the
hierarchy (too well known to require any further illustration) is
far more immodest.
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