crave any Tax or Subsidies from his Subjects but upon a very just cause and urgent necessity and that if he did otherwise he would not be reputed a King but a Tyrant What is requisite and necessary upon the former accounts the Apostle calls their due and Christ himself the things that are Caesars and Vlpian that famous Lawyer Nerâ—i Reipublicae sine quibus non potest administrari nec consistere Ulpian the sinews of the Common-wealth without which it cannot be governed nor subsist They are granted to them by the Laws of all Nations and therefore the Duty calls more for practice then for proof For notwithstanding they may challenge these by their Charter granted to them by the great God and K. of heaven and earth Applicat yet many there are that part with what is required of them upon that score as unwillingly as with their bloud yea when they were inevitably necessary and that too by a necessity of their own creating to satisfie those debts which their former Rebellion and the fruit thereof had contracted upon their banished Soveraign yet these were not paid without a great deal of murmuring and repining England in the time of the late Usurpation like Issacher and he like an Ass Time was when England like Issacher was as an Ass couching between two burdens and contentedly bore them plying her provender without noise or groaning and seemed willing to purchase her quiet at any rate under a Tyrant who made his Lust his Law but now snuffs at what is imposed not by a boundless Prerogative but by that very authority which was of their own free election like an ungrateful Beast But now like a proud pampered Horse which being eased of a great part of his burden by the mercy of his owner kicks and lashes to quit himself of the rest being very willing that he should bear it himself All that goes this way is set down upon the account of their losses Good Princes like trusty Factors whereas good Princes are like skilful and trusty Factors for their Subjects expending their moneys to their own best advantage and returning them trebly the worth of it in such commodities which most wise men value Or like the Sun Aptly compared to the Sun which by its attractive heat draws up vapours from the Earth which may well be spared and returns them in fruitful showers Custom Tribute c. to Vapors So the Tribute and Custom the Taxes and Impositions which the Higher Powers exhale as Vapours by the force of urgent necessity are richly exchanged into the sweet refreshing Rains of Peace and Plenty And thus I have given an account of the particular Duties included and implied in this general one of Fear as I found dispersed here and there in the holy Scripture The next piece of work which I have to do is to enquire after the subject by whom it must be paid which is every one that comes under the name of a Subject whom Solomon here calls his son 2. Part of the Text viz. the Subject My son fear thou the Lord and the King who in a political sense is a Father and in the same his Subjects are his children So that every one whom the King in that sense may call his son he may upon that very account call upon him for this fear The Apostles rule is general Rom. 13.1 Qui tentat excipere conatur decipere Origen his strange sense of the word soul For what taken in the Scripture and admits of no exception He that goes about to except endeavours to deceive and where there is none excepted there can be none exempted unless that strange sense which is fathered upon Origen concerning the word Soul be Orthodox namely a fleshly and carnal person which is a sense of which I think I may safely say that is never used in Sacred Writ It is used indeed properly for the noblest part of man which is of a divine extraction and stamped with the glorious image of him that did infuse it Sometimes for the will and affections by a Synecdoche of the whole for a part and by the same figure the Soul which is a principal part is put for the whole man God saith to the Prophet Ezech. 18.4 that the soul that sinneth that is that man or woman whoever it be that sinneth if he repent not shall die which includes all and so it doth here in the Text Carnal and Spiritual Saint and Sinner and never is used to signifie a carnal in opposition to a spiritual person We read in one of the Epistles of St. Peter 1 Pet. 3.20 of eight souls that were saved in the Ark which Noah by Gods direction had provided against that Deluge which he threatned to bring upon the old World for its daring impieties Should we understand by those eight souls eight carnal persons as we may upon as good a ground as in the other place we should make that which was one of the most remarkable pieces of Justice that ever was executed upon the World the greatest example of injustice To destroy all the righteous and let such a number of wicked persons escape to send a Floud to drown the one and to provide an Ark to save the other Some put that sense upon it here and offer their reasons I know there is a generation of men in the World that are very willing to embrace that sense there where subjection is required so universally without exception and offer their ground for the exemption of themselves and others which are at least in their own conceits the holy and redeemed of the Lord. 1. Sublata causa tollitur effectus Subjection say they came in by sin but they are freed from sin and so consequently from subjection take away the cause and the effect must cease Christ having freed them from the one he hath freed them from the other also Disproved By the same Argument they may as well dispute themselves out of the reach of death for by one man sin entered into the World Rom. 5.12 and death by sin so death hath seized on all for that all have sinned Yet let them live as blamelesly and as innocently as they can What man is he that liveth and shall not see death shall he deliver his soul from the hand of the grave No man can attain to a life of sinless perfection till he is dead Velis nolis intra fines tuos habitabit Jebuseus subjugari potest exterminari non potest Willing or nilling this Jebusite will continue within thy borders thou mayest keep it under but canst not root it out We may give sin its mortal wound but its full and final expiration is reserved for the stroke of death Religio peperit divitias fâ—lia devoravit matrem As it was said of Riches the daughter of Religion Religion hath brought forth Riches and the Daughter hath
united to the body so neither doth the spirit of God which is the very soul of the Church enliven any member of it that is not united to the rest in the bond of peace and love A blessing which this Nation for many years enjoyed under several of her peaceable Princes That of England the admiration and envy of other Nations even to the admiration and envy of her neighbours who were forced to cry Miserere with a doleful voice when she might sing Te Deum with a chearful heart Which had she done she might have had continued unto this very day without the least interruption But because she did not but abused her peace by using it as a weapon wherewith to fight against the God of her peace he taught her by many years sad experience to know the worth of it by the want of it and how for the future to value the mercy of Peace by the misery of War She unthankfully bestrid and unworthily slighted a peaceable Prince and therefore deserved to be doomed by an irrevocable decree to the Government of devouring Storks Aesops Fable of the Frog morallized Our Jehovah more merciful then their Jupiter as Jupiter did the Froggs in the Fable Yet God in mercy hath heard her Petition and contrary to her deservings hath removed those Birds of prey and hath sent a Dove a Solomon to reign over her who hath had just cause to take up the complaint of David Psal 120.6 7. My soul hath long dwelt with them that hate peace I am for peace but when I speak they are for war Let them prosper that love and seek the peace of Jerusalem and scatter thou the people that delight in war These three blessings are the ground upon which the Apostle presseth this duty of Prayer for those that are in Authority and if they flow down from Heaven upon us through their care as the fruits of our Prayers and our Prayers be seconded with a life answerable to those mercies we may conceive the firmer hopes of their continuance 3. Reason from their temptations wherein their Subjects are concerned either Now because these Guardians of our blessings are so liable to so many temptations and amongst the rest to those sins whereby they may forfeit these blessings from us and to those oppositions and strivings of wicked covetous and ambitious men who will not stick to trample all these under their feet to advantage themselves and work their own sinful ends and interests it behoves us to pray as zealously against these as for the other 1. As to their Cause Against their temptations and the rather because we may possibly be concerned in them either as to their cause or as to their effects Subjects are many times the causes of their Sovereigns temptations This is clear in the history of Davids numbring the People Exemplified in Davids sin 2 Sam. 24. and the sad consequents of that rash and unadvised act which was so in that he did it without any lawful cause as two there were upon which it was justifiable Two cases in which lawful Exod. 30.12 First upon an Ecclesiastical account as that which ye are directed to in the Margine which was commanded by God himself in memory of his blessings and tended to the redemption of their souls In memoriam beneficiorum Dei Gallus in locum as it served for the maintenance of the Tabernacle and the Ministry thereof which was instituted for that very end and purpose Secondly Political in a way of preparation to a War offensive or defensive that so by numbring those that are fit to bear Arms Princes may be the better satisfied of their Subjects strength and furnish themselves out of those numbers with such supplies as are suitable to their occasions A device that always was is still and ever will be lawfully enough made use of upon that occasion But David did it upon neither of these accounts neither for the glory of God that seeing his Subjects increase and multiply and his own honour thereby advanced he might give God his due praise who was the author of it nor for the safety of his Kingdom which was then in no danger being at peace both at home and abroad but rather for ostentation sake rejoicing and which was worse placing his confidence in them This sin whatsoever was the ground of it highly offended God and is severely punished with a sweeping Plague which in the space of three days destroyed threescore and ten thousand people He sinned and his Subjects are punished for it The sin was the Kings the punishment falls heavy upon the Subjects who for ought we read to the contrary did not so much as desire it His General shewed his dislike and desires him by all means to desist from his purpose Is not this according to the Proverb Ezech. 18.2 The Fathers have eaten sowre Grapes and their Childrens teeth are set on edge Ezech. 18.2 and to that of the Poet Quicquid delirant Reges plectuntur Achivi Kings dote and do amiss and their Subjects suffer for their miscarriages David who was eminently if not solely guilty is not so much as touched in that Plague The sin being his in equity the punishment should have been so to This is according to that ruled case the soul that sinneth shall die V. 12. Yea David himself as conscious to himself cries These Sheep David excuseth them and takes the blame upon himself what have they done Done Enough questionless the most innocent of them not only for God to plague him here but to damn him forever hereafter Sins though sometimes they may not be the moving cause yet they are always a meritorious cause of judgment Gods justice acquitted 1. By a distinction No man lives and sins not and the wages of the least sin is death if any be pardoned it argues the mercy of the forgiver and not the quality and quantity of the sin forgiven But we need not fly to this distinction in this case for if we read the History deliberately we shall soon be satisfied 2. By a discovery of the cause of the sin that though David occasioned that Plague by his sin yet their own sins were the cause of it And that according to both these heads of distinction meritorious and moving too 2 Sam. 24.1 the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he moved David against them to say go number Israel and Judah By which it appears clearly that their sins whatever they were that provoked God to anger were the cause why God permitted Satan to tempt David and with-held his restraining grace which should uphold him so that he was both led into temptation and left in temptation upon the account of their sins and what influence theirs had upon him that may the sins of any other Subjects have upon their Princes Applicat Therefore it is equity as well as
ye eat thereof ye shall be as Gods knowing good and evil And all that they for the most part get for themselves and the World by them who are infected with this incurable itch is lively represented unto us in their Tragical History of ambitious Phaeton Phaeton the proper emblem of an ambitious person whom nothing would satisfie but to guide the Chariot of the Sun the consequences of whose rash and indiscreet attempt were the turning of his brain the overturning of his Chariot putting the World into a flame and was himself tumbled down headlong by a Thunderbolt into a River to cool his hot head and teach him more wit The common fate of such is that when the wind of their ambition hath mounted them up to the top of Fortunes Wheel they never descend but by a break-neck precipice Haman Haman tried it and found it true to his cost in one Chapter we find him promoted and advanced by his King to great honour who had set his seat above all the Princes that were with him in another he is fallen into his Lord and Masters displeasure and at the end of that we find him at the end of his ambitious race fallen from honour to dishonour from his Princes love into his hatred from glory to shame he lived the life of a Prince but died the death of a Dog being sentenced to be hanged upon that very Gallows which he had prepared for an honester man then himself whom he while he was in his Ruff deigned not to ranke among the number of his Slaves Thus the righteous is delivered Prov. 11.8 and the wicked brought into his stead he dug a Pit for his innocent brother and is fallen into the midst of it himself This is called a righteous thing with God 2 Thess 1.6 7. Nec lex est justior ulla Quam necis artificem lege perire sua and is the same in the apprehensions of all rational men Indeed that attribute of his is in matters of that natute highly concerned and rather then an unnatural aspiring Absolon ambitious Absolon should scape unpunished which his Fathers indulgence might suggest some hopes to him that after he had plaid all his mad pranks he might do so and from the charge which he gave his General concerning him when he marched against him to reduce him deal gently with the lad together with the sad Lamentation he made at the news of his death gives us sufficient cause to think that he would do so the divine Nemesis will it self pursue the guilty Rebel and make a snare with the hair of his own head in stead of an hempen halter to truss him up to the fatal Tree where he paid down his life for his ambition and all its miserable attendants Ambition a strange disease A strange kind of disease surely this must needs be whose malignity in some degree or other is so epidemically infectious and whose cure was thought by no mean or heady Physician Hippocrates to be so difficult that he projected a consultation of all the Physicians in the World to advise upon the means thereof and yet he himself was a man so famous in his generation for his great skill in that noble Science that Artaxerxes hearing of it His fame sent for him and premised him great honours to live with him in the Persian Court. He practised his own skill so successfully upon his own self Lived to a great Age. Could not cure this feaver by his Physick nor all the Philosophers with their Moral Rules that he lived to a great age having passed his hundred and fourth year yet neither this Master of his Art Faculty or Science call it what ye will no nor all the Philosophers 2000 years since him could by all their learning have found out an effectual expedient for this pestilential Feaver in all they prescribed they have but lost their labour Some diseases Medicorum ludibria Some Diseases make mocking-stocks of their Physicians of which sort this is undoubtedly one which encreaseth under its prescribed remedies One would have thought that if Cambyses had studied all his life time Cambyses his project and called in all the learned Counsel of the Sages then living in the World he could never have found by his own reading nor they have suggested by their advice a more effectual means to keep that young President uncorrupt in that very place of Judicature in the which he before had placed his Father which he so lately by his miscarriages had forfeited together with his life then to keep that sad instance always fresh in his memory and for this purpose commanded him to cover his Chair with his Fathers skin who was executed and excoriated or flayed because he was so ill a Judge that being seated in that woful tribunal upon the bloud of his Father might learn more wit and honesty by a dreadful experience What influence this politick more then Christian project had upon him my Author mentions not But this we see too commonly that some mens eys are so blinded and their hearts so hardned through the deceitfulness of their sin Examples of others take so little with some that they look on them as inania puerorum terriculamenta Exemplified in our common Cutpurses that others examples make no impression of terrour upon them Have we not often heard of Cutpurses and Pickpockets that have exercised their Art under the Gallows where some before their eyes are ending their days for as inconsiderable a crime And do we not ever and anon in our reading both in Divine and Humane Story meet with the like who have had items enough by others harms to make them cautious and yet have pursued the same ways without fearing the like event As that in the Book of the Kings The second Captain of 50. 2 Kings 1.10 11. of the second Captain of fifty sent with his Party to apprehend Elijah more impudent and obstinate then the first who he could not but know had a little before perished by a dreadful and miraculous judgment from Heaven by fire consuming him and his to ashes and therefore more deservedly underwent the same fate and made an example because he would take none In the Annals of our own Kingdom we have the History of Richard 3. Richard 3. his Character who by common report was a Monster in Nature born with his teeth and exceedingly deformed in the composure of his body which was a prognostick of what he would prove in his life a monster in wickedness And so he did Into what a Sea of mischiefs did his boundless ambition carry him Vilifying the honour of his own Mother accusing her as unchast and that she prostituted her body to strangers in the conception of his two elder Brothers to make himself more legitimate then they We find him there stand indicted of several Murders Charged with murder taking out of the way
all that opposed his desires either by death or safe and severe imprisonments Of Fratricide With Fratricide consenting at least to the death of his elder Brother Of Regicide George D. of Clarence With Regicide stabbing K. Henry 6. when a Prisoner in the Tower Besides the bastarding deposing murdering his two innocent Nephews whose Guardian by wicked Policy he had made himself by the enforced consent of those who were concerned in the choice they being in their minority but durst not oppose him I call this Regicide because the elder was a King in re the younger in spe as being heir apparent to the Crown had his Brother died without issue male before him But this Monster of men had usurped the throne in their life time and conceiving he could never be reputed nor truly honoured as a King so long as these were in his way he sent them out of this Kingdom into a better Conceits himself firmly established But is much mistaken Haunted with the terrours of an accusing Conscience And now he thinks himself firmly seated but he reckons without his host and whoever peruseth the latter part of his History will find his sin lying at his dore yea following him at his heels his Conscience facing him with a fresh representation of his guilt at every turn and his disturbed fansie with terrifying visions and apparitions so that while he lived he was as it were in Hell upon Earth He had shed much bloud and at last his bloud was shed in that Battle fought between him and his Successor who had more right to the Crown then himself wherein he fell a sad victim to his ambition and a monument of Gods impartial justice to the World Slain and his dead Carkass slighted and dishonourably interred whose Carkass being found naked in the Field wounded and filthily polluted with gory bloud was cast upon a horse-back behind a Pursuivant at Arms with his hands hanging down on the one side and his legs on the other like a Calf and interred with as base a Funeral as he had bestowed upon his Nephews Martins History Yet for all this I suppose none capable to read that History can be so great strangers to the late transactions in our Israel Rich. matched with an Oliv. both Protectors and both Usurpers but may find his parallel in the bloudy Chronicle of our late Usurper who though he drank not so large a draught of Royal bloud no thanks to his want of will but opportunity yet what he fell short in that he made up as near as he could in noble and loyal bloud Whom I cannot more fitly compare then to our desperate Hectors who meeting with a rich booty A fit comparison resolve to make a ful prey and finding a ring that is unwilling to part with its right owner cut off finger and all So this bloudy miscreant aiming at the Crown and supposing it impossible by any other means to make a Divorce between it and its Royal Master traiterously took off that head that wore it That bramble kingdom which he was about to erect could not as he supposed thrive unless watered with the Kings bloud He that sometime used that expression was not only so but a Prophet also And blessed be God that we have lived to that day to see that those his following words have proved him so The Kings Meditations God will not suffer those men long to prosper in their Babel who build it with the bones and cement it with the bloud of their Kings How many upon this very account have been hurried out of the World by stabbings poisonings and other arts of Murder both in our own and other Nations besides those many Plots and Conspiracies by the divine providence strangely discovered and through his blessing happily prevented and made abortive and that against such a Prince whom God hath so manifestly owned so miraculously preserved and to the admiration of his Friends and the envy of his Enemies setled in the Throne of his Fathers This was the Lords doing and it is marvellous in our eyes It is he that giveth salvation unto Kings and hath delivered his anointed from the hurtful Sword Therefore not unto us O Lord not unto us but to thine own most glorious Name be all the thanks and praise ascribed This very consideration now in hand Tiberius refused the stile of Pater Patriae upon this very account made Tiberius the Emperour refuse the stile of Pater Patriae saying all mortal mens estates are uncertain and the higher their standings are the more slippery and dangerous are their conditions Infer Therefore being so invironed and surrounded with dangers they have the more need of their Subjects prayers that God would protect their persons blast the designs discover the Plots and defeat the attempts of theirs and therein their own enemies The fourth Duty comprehended in this of fear Rom. 13.7 Pay him his due There is yet a fourth Duty remaining namely this To pay readily and chearfully what they are legally charged with rendring tribute to whom tribute custom to whom custom is due These are ordinary Some are called extraordinary required upon urgent and pressing necessity I say necessity for good Princes will not impose unnecessary payments upon their Subjects but delight to have them rich and wealthy rather then poor and needy The Soveraignty of all appertains to Kings Distinction but the propriety to private men So that they have no power in justice and equity to take away or to seize any of their Estates unless justly forfeited by their Delinquency Nabaoths case As appears clearly in the case of Nabaoth who refused to part with his Vineyard What arts were used to possess Ahab with it are not unknown to any that have read the Scriptures but when God called him to an account he reckoned with him not only for a bloudy Murder but also for an unjust possession Hast thou killed 1 Kings 21.19 and also taken possession Their right of Soveraignty gives them a claim to so much as will supply their ordinary and extraordinary occasions what they require more is not equity but exaction And as on the one side God will not allow the Subjects upon such occasions to rebel against their Prince so on the other Deut. 17.17 he forbids them to enrich themselves by impoverishing their Subjects Let it suffice O Princes Ezech. 45.9 remove violence and spoil take away your exactions from the people This hath proved the root and fountain of many inconveniences This made that rent in Rehoboams Kingdom which all his policy and strength could never heal again God hath made them Shepherds not Butchers and allows them for their care over his flock to fleece but not to flay them St. Lewis his prudent advice to his son St. Lewis that good K. among other grave exhortations to his son a little before his death chargeth him never to