Selected quad for the lemma: authority_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
authority_n	king_n	law_n	resist_v	2,184	5	9.6676	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A46942	An argument proving, that the abrogation of King James by the people of England from the regal throne, and the promotion of the Prince of Orange, one of the royal family, to throne of the kingdom in his stead, was according to the constitution of the English government, and prescribed by it in opposition to all the false and treacherous hypotheses, of usurpation, conquest, desertion, and of taking the powers that are upon content / by Samuel Johnson.	Johnson, Samuel, 1649-1703.	1692 (1692)	Wing J821; ESTC R2049	28,065	64

AN ARGUMENT PROVING That the Abrogation of King Iames by the People of England from the Regal Throne and the Promotion of the Prince of Orange one of the Royal Family to the Throne of the Kingdom in his stead was according to the Constitution of the English Government and Prescribed by it In Opposition to all the false and treacherous Hypotheses of Usurpation Conquest Desertion and of taking the Powers that Are upon Content By SAMVEL IOHNSON Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus Inciderit Horat. LONDON Printed for the Author 1692. TO THE COMMONS of ENGLAND in Parliament Assembled THE favourable Acceptance which my Bounden Services to my Country as I ever accounted them though they were always difficult and upon the Forlorn have heretofore found in your Honourable House hath caused me to bring you this small Offering In former Days an Appeal to the Parliament was a removal of the Cause from White-Hall but it is our peculiar Happiness in this Reign that we live under a Prince who had no other Business here but to restore the Constitution which as his Declaration speaks was wholly overturned in the former Reigns and who lay under a happy Necessisty of assisting the People to assert their Rights before he could secure His own Right and Remainder in the Crown This Subversion and Overturning of the best Frame of Government in the World was very artificially managed and began at your House which has been run down as an Innovation and no Essential Part of Parliament a Mushroom sprung up in the 49th of H. 3. and founded in Rebellion as if You had no deeper Root in the Government than Corn has upon the House top This scurvy Pedigree of the Commons in Parliament drawn up by Dr. Brady was so well liked by the Loyal Clergy and particularly he was so applauded by Jovian that Mr. Petyt found the Tide so strong against him as not to venture on a Reply though to my knowledg he was furnished with a very good one But that is not so material when you began as what you are and of the two it is better to be an Upstart Authority than a silly Cypher and thus you have been represented to all the degrees of Insignificancy Your Precarious Being was told you by a wonderful Statesman who did not spare to inform you That as the King had Created the House of Commons by his Power so he would Preserve it by his Goodness but then come some of the Clergy and say what little Creatures both you and the House of Lords are Dr. Hicks lodges in the King the whole Legislative or the Power that makes any form of Words a Law He says The Sovereign Power may indeed be limited as to the Exercise of this Legislative Power which may be confined to Bills and Writings prepared by others but still it is the Soveraign Authority who gives Life and Soul to the dead Letter of them Now this is so contrary to the Constitution as nothing can be more For not only King Charles the First acknowledged that the Laws were jointly made by the King Lords and Commons though the Houses insisted upon more but also in every Act of Parliament that is made it is expresly said in the Enacting part that it is made by the Authority of them all whereas by this Doctrine the two Houses have only a Ministerial Office of preparing a Form of Words and furnishing Bills and Writings as the King's Printers use to do you with Pen Ink and Paper And in short the King alone makes Laws and the two Houses only find Stuff Now if this sort of Paradox had been advanced concerning the Parish-Chest of Barking where the Parson has one Key and each of the Church-wardens one they could soon have Mathematically shewn him that his Key had but one Third of the Chest-opening-Power and such a Mistake would only have made a Iest But in a Case of more Consequence than all the Land in the Nation if it were now to be sold is worth such false Positions are very Dangerous For if the Legislative were once contracted in one single Hand it were as absurd to say it could be limited in the Exercise of it as it is to say that your House has not Power over your own Orders to recal and alter them as you think fit What shall hinder the whole Legislative At this rate the Saying of which my Lord Lauderdale has had the Honour would have been true that he hoped to see the King's Edicts to be Laws and above the Laws for all New Laws are always too hard for the old ones And the Arbitrary Proclamation to forbid the Nation to Petition for a Parliament had been a Law if the whole Legislative Authority was in it for the L. C. I. North found it very easy to supply the place of both Houses in drawing up the Form of Words However this is very civil Usage to what you have had from other Hands for in this way you have still left you the Honour of being Clerks and of drawing up a Form of Words But Dr. Womack in his Short Way to a lasting Settlement printed by Robert Clavel the chief Design of which was to out the two Houses from having any share or Authoritative Hand as he calls it in making the Laws and was shortly after made a Bishop for the Service has this very insolent Expression The Houses you say have a hand in the Legislation So hath the Beggar in my Almes As soon as I saw this Odious Comparison I knew it was falsly applied for even the Coronation-Oath acknowledges that the Laws of England are of the Folks choosing and it is certain that Beggars are no Choosers But I humbly beseech both Houses upon this Occasion to have a special care how they suffer this sort of Men to have the Ascendant who treat them in this manner because we have a very harsh English Proverb concerning Beggars In the Year of Jovian 83. wherein these Doctrines were published and rung all over the Nation some of the Honourable Beggars that were for a Bill of Exclusion of the Duke of York in his First Desertion and were for keeping him out when he was out after their Lives had been long hunted by these Men fell into their Nets Which Bill had given us this happy Reign several Years sooner and had saved the Lives of more than an Hundred thousand Men whose Blood lies at their Door but it was then their Hour and the Power of Darkness Let that Year be blotted out of Chronology These Doctrines I conceive are Destructive to the Nation because they undermine the Power and Authority of Parliaments who represent the Nation and are the Conservers of our Liberties if we had any but those are all taken away by another of their new-adopted Church-Doctrines of Passive-Obedience which I therefore look upon as the worst of them because it lays waste all your Laws after you have made

the Nation they sent him to God to give an Account For which Reason I cannot abide that Saying of being Accountable only to God In the mean time the Mishpat Hamelek and the Right of an Arbitrary and Despotick King is revived by this Doctrine and the things which are Caesar's according to their former false Glosses is every thing that is not preingaged to God which we all know is the Church's Portion So that the Church and Caesar divide the World betwixt them Or as Dr. Ball used to lisp it out in his Court-Sermons Lives and Estates Wives and Children all things were Thaethar's all we had was Thaethar's and therefore we were to render it to Thaethar But I suppose no able Lawyer in either Temple of which he was Master was ever able to understand this blaese Divinity It is true the Scripture calls Princes Gods and that is enough for Court-Parasites For when they have got such a Scripture-Metaphor by the end how have I seen them ride on the Ridg of it Then Subjects withdrawing their Obedience from their Lawful Prince is a denying God's Authority Treason against him is a kind of Sacrilege a Revolt from him an Apostacy from God a Resisting him an opposing God rebelling against him fighting with God the setting up the Title of a Counterfeit Prince against the true One an introducing a Plurality of Godheads the obeying of an Usurper Idolatry the slandering his Anointed and his Footsteps a blaspheming God the blaming his Conduct a quarrelling with Providence I have said ye are Gods is divulged Scripture and every Body has heard it aloud an hundred times but there is a neglected Text of Scripture as full of Inspiration as that which never used to be quoted Prov. 28. 15. A roaring Lion and a ranging Bear is a wicked Ruler over the poor People Here are two Metaphors for their one and if any Body were disposed to follow the way of their former Descant it must run thus upon this Text. A Lion is a Beast of Prey seeking whom he may devour therefore give him no Law destroy all his Iackalls deliver the Prey out of his Teeth and wear his Spoils as Hercules did A ranging Bear will kill you if you do not kill him therefore destroy all his Cubs for they will be Bears in time set a Price upon their Heads and let the Church-wardens pay it This Text is so lively a Picture of a bad Prince that the Messieurs of the Port Royal are amazed at it and say thus in their Annotations upon it Il n'appartient qu'à Dieu de dire des Veritez si etonnantes It belongs to no body but God to say such astonishing Truths But he is so good an Authority that any body may safely say such astonishing Truths after him Now an hungry ranging Bear cannot possibly be a God and therefore when David calls Princes Gods he meant Good Princes Benefactors to Mankind and not his Son Solomon's Bears who cannot be called Gods no not by a Figure And this Distinction is so natural that it became Proverbial in several of the Learned Languages Homo Homini Deus Homo Homini Lupus One Man is a God to another and one Man is a Wolf to another And so far as Princes resemble God himself in Iustice and Goodness let them wear the Psalmist's titular Honour of Gods and good Luck may they have with it but when they degenerate into Solomon's Beasts of Prey it would be so harsh a Figure to call them Gods that no Language upon Earth can bear it unless it can be that Figure whereby they use to call things in Scorn And yet our false Pulpits used to treat the Bears as if they had been Divinities when they had just been sucking the best Blood in the Nation and when they had had more Carnage in half a Year's time than Popish Queen Mary had in her whole Reign But if there be no difference betwixt a Good Prince and a Bad why did the Nation a great number of them with the apparent hazard of their Lives give themselves the Trouble and Charge of this present Exchange King James would have served their turn as well How came the Prince of Orange so generously to undertake his Expedition but to rescue us out of the Paw of the Bear If we had been under a God there had been nothing amiss and there had been no cause with Force and Arms to have sent him a travelling where he is to the Head-Quarters of Tyranny But the worried People of England invited the Prince and the Prince assisted the worried People of England who at last laid their Hands on their Swords and were unanimously bent to join him against all their Oppressors And so we came by our Deliverance The People of England if they had not been enslaved by the base Doctrine of Passive Obedience might very easily have done their own Work themselves for whom it was most Proper for his Majesty acknowledges in his Additional Declaration That his Preparations were to Assist the People against the Subverters of their Religion and Laws So that it was their Work principally to which they invited his Assistance and prayed him in Aid And on the other hand his Words were these We do Invite and Require all Persons whatsoever all the Peers of the Realm Spiritual and Temporal all Lords Lieutenants Deputy-Lieutenants and all Gentlemen Citizens and other Commons of all Ranks to come and assist Us in order to the executing of this our Design against all such as shall endeavour to oppose Us that so we may prevent all those Miseries which must needs fall upon the Nation 's being kept under Arbitrary Government and Slavery and that all the Violences and Disorders which have Overturned the whole Constitution of the English Government may be fully Redressed in a Free and Legal Parliament This Invitation sounded the best to me of any that came since the Gospel came but according to the Passive-Obedience-Men it was a Call to Hell and to dip the Nation one and all into Damnation for he that resisteth shall receive to himself Damnation If the Prince had directed this Invitation to them he had spoken to Stocks and Stones that could not stir nay they could not possibly be Neutral for by their forward treacherous Loyalty they had staked down their Lives and Fortunes on the other Side long before and by their Principles were as dangerous to him as so many Grandvalls So that it was only the brave and sound part of the Nation that was not tainted with the Poison of Passive Obedience which Assisted his Majesty in his Arrival to White-Hall and afterwards in his Access to the Throne or else he had never come there There was not an honest Man in England capable of joining the Prince but he that thought it his Right to defend his Right which was always the standing English Principle kept alive in the late Tyranny it self though to the continual hazard of