Selected quad for the lemma: power_n
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A46960
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Reflections on the History of passive obedience by Samuel Johnson.
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Johnson, Samuel, 1649-1703.
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1689
(1689)
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Wing J838; ESTC R2473
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7,933
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12
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such a one for if I prove him One sort of Tyrant what need I prove him Two but this I say that he came into the Government against the Consent of the whole Nation for the House of Commons by their Bill of Exclusion banished him 500 Miles from his Kingdom and the House of Lords by Bills of their own ordering banished him 500 Miles from his Kingship For they ordered a Bill of an Association a Bill for the last Parliament in being to come without his calling and sit several Months without his leave and to dispose of all the Offices and places of Trust in the Kingdom a Bill to impower the People to pursue and destroy his Forces if he raised any without consent of Parliament and the like whereby it appears they would trust him with nothing of the Government but only left him an empty Crown Now these Proceedings of both Houses did declare him to be a Publick Enemy only with this difference that the House of Commons were for treating him as a Foreign Enemy and the Lords were for suffering him to be a Domestick one and for standing upon their Guard against him And if in the strictest Successions which that of England never was Ideots and Lunaticks by common Construction have always been excepted much more I am sure ought a known Enemy to be But let that pass The latter sort of Tyrant is he who having a just Title to the Government of a People abuses it to the Destruction or tormenting of them And in this sort of Tyranny the late King did so infinitely abound that he made use of every Branch of his Authority for that Purpose and it would be endless to recount the Particulars of it His Power of raising Forces in time of War he perverted into a standing Army in time of Peace his Power of making Protestant Officers throughout the Kingdom he applied to the making of Popish and thereby put our Lives and Liberties into the Hands of our Enemies by his Power of makeing Judges he got the Dispensing Power to the Destruction of our Laws which is the wholesale destruction of a Nation As for his Tormenting part that is best understood by those whom he had gotten in great numbers piled up in Jails like Faggots and were otherwise ruined and barbarously used who still feel it in their surviving Miseries but so far as my share was in it God forgive him for it for I heartily do I cannot omit his Dropping some parcels of this Tyranny when the Prince of Orange was coming over as Men do their stolen Goods when they are in danger of being feized with them which put the Prince upon a necessity of an additional Declaration to his First because this is a very plain Acknowledgment of the thing I was proving For why were the Charters restored to all Corporations and Magdalen-Colledg to the right Owners and the High Commission which was the very Tyranny and Usurpation of the Popes of Rome only brought to White-hall and so much the worse by being nearer us why was this dissolved and the Seal broken I say why were all these things Dropt if they had not been purloined or if any King of England could have justified the keeping of them That which follows is the closest inference that can be So that all Tyrants are at the same time Usurpers either of the whole which is the case of a Tyrant in Title or at least of a Part of that Power which they assume to themselves which is the Case of a Tyrant in Exercise For all the Power which the Law does not give a Prince which is both the Foundation and the Measure and the Rule of a Prince's Authority is assumed and usurped it is without Law beyond Law and against the Intention of the Law And therefore it is not the Power of an English King which as Chancellor Fortescue says he receiveth from the People for their better Protection and cannot govern them by any other Power but it is an Arbitrary and boundless Power which he gives to himself and uses as he pleases to the Peoples destruction And such in every respect was the late King 's High Commission Court. The last Clause is this And no less are they to be accounted Rebels since no Man can usurp Authority over others but by rebelling against them who had it before or at least against those Laws which were his Superiors I need not exemplify this in the Dispensing Power which was an open Invasion of the Legislative and a Rebellion against them who have always had an Unquestionable Right in that Soveraign Authority And as for his Superiours the Laws which the same Laws tell us more than forty times the King is under and subject to he made more bold with them than any King of England ever did in so short a time Here then I fix my foot and will maintain it against all the Champions of the Passive Doctrine That the late King for many Years past has had no Right at all to the Duties enjoined by St. Paul in the 13th of the Romans and that he has been an out-cast from that Text ever since he was an out-law to the English Constitution That from the Time he turned aside to a course of Injustice he has not been the Minister of God but as Bracton expresly says the Minister of the Devil nor has he been one of St. Paul's higher Powers for the Power of a King of England is potestas juris non injuria a Power of doing Right not of doing Wrong and consequently there was not a Soul Subject to him or that owed him Non-resistance That he was so far from being the Ordinance of God that he dissipated and destroyed that Ordinance which is the Legal Constitution as Melancthon truly affirms And lastly that all this while amongst his other Usurpations he usurped the Name of a King which did not belong to him for governing by Law is the Essence of an English King and where there is Arbitrary Government there is no King says Bracton He loses the Name of a King says the 17th Chapter of the Laws of King Edward the Confessor It cannot be said that I write these things to serve a present Turn because I have long since demonstrated all this and all that I hold in Politicks beside and because it is Demonstration all that I ever will hold in one single Sheet of Paper which was commonly called the Chapters and is exâ—â—nt P. 88. of my Collection But I am forced to repeat these Truths over again because I see the Passive-Men will never have done for when all their Arguments are bassled still their Doctrine will serve to make a History I humbly leave it to the Legislative to put a stop to the Continuation of this History because they are most concern'd to do it for if there be no difference betwixt Law and no Law in the point of the People of England's subjection then they may even shut up their two Houses at Westminster and save themselves the needless trouble of all their publick Consultations And while the Passive Doctrine remains all the Lords and Commons of England have no other Property in their Lives Liberties and Estates than the Duke of Lorrain would have had in his Country with the French King 's four High-ways of a quarter of a Mile broad quite through it For it is the very Doctrine of the Bowstring or of the Goal and Block as this History describes it P. 126. or of the Halter for I will never contend about Names but in short it makes Slaves and Sacrifices of a whole Nation whenever a Tyrant comes that will take the advantage of it and exercise the Right of a King p. 88. Now we are taught in this History That in such cases a Nation ought to call upon God p. 129. which is a Cheat of a Remedy for God has expresly said that he will not Hear in that Case 1. Sam. 8. 18. but if Men will have an Oppressor leaves them to abide by their own Folly and Madness As to the Observations upon my Preface to the Remarks upon Dr. Sherlock's Book I shall say but this That if that Preface be so weakly written as to be overthrown by such empty Observations and such impotent Reflections as those are let it take its chance As to Bishop Lake's Legacy I shall only say this That if Passive Obedience be the Characteristick of the Church then those Confessors who in Q. Elizabeth's Time restored and established the Church were not of it London Printed for Richard Baldwin 1689. P. 100. P. 110 129.
since I have known the Pacquet of Advice to the Men of Shaftsbury to have been one of those Orders I can see nothing more which looks with any Face of a Publick Authority unless it be the Censures of our Universities but every Body knows what cheap things those are and that an Oxford Decree is nothing else but a Cambridg Address As for the Martyrs and Confessors Doctrine in Q. Mary's Time which is brought in by the Head and Shoulders into this History for it has no affinity with it it was Submission to the Law and not to Arbitrary Government His Popish Bishops Stokesly Tonstal and Bonner's Authorities I give him Here are indeed left in this History abundance of private Doctors Opinions and their flights of Flattery are very high especially in their Court-Sermons but these are in opposition to the Established Doctrine of the Church of England and to six Acts of Parliament as I shewed before and therefore their Authority is worse and less than Nothing But if they must have an Answer they are only fit to be confuted by a Second Edition of Dissenters Sayings And here I have reason to enter a just Complaint against the pretended Church-of England Men of the two last Reigns who not only left me the grinning Honour of maintaining the Establish'd Doctrine of the Church all alone which I kept alive till it pleased God to make it a Means of our Deliverance with the perpetual hazard of my own Life for many Years and with suffering Torments and Indignities worse than Death but also besides this were very zealous in running me down and very officious in degrading me as an Apostate from the Church of England for this very Service While at the same time they themselves were making their Court with their own Renegado Doctrine of Passive Obedience and wearing out all Pulpits with it as if it had been not only the First and great Commandment but the Second too and cramming it down the reluctant Throats of dying Patriots as the Terms of their Salvation And now in this Reign for want of recanting their Passive Doctrine they suffer it to be made use of against the present Government and to be compiled into such an History as is a Seed-Plot of Rebellion and a standing Common-place-Book for Treasonable Practices And this is the more to be complained of because they themselves must needs now clearly see if they did not before the mischievous Consequence of their Passive Doctrine which bound us not to Resist but to Assist our Prince though a Tyrant which if it had taken place in Mens Minds and inward Belief had for ever inslaved the Nation But God be thanked though this Doctrine filled the Ears of the Nation for a long time yet it never bored them for if it had the Prince of Orange with all the Power of Holland could never have brought us a Deliverance nor have been able to have rescued these three Kingdoms from themselves and from their own chosen and voluntary Bondage And while this Doctrine continues to be believed by any deluded Party amongst us they are bound in Conscience either to be doing Mischief here or else to go and join the Irish Camp at Drogheda For which Reason till it be publickly recanted or condemn'd I shall here fully confute it in a few words All their Proof that a Tyrant may not be Resisted but must be Assisted by his Subjects wholly centers in the 13th of the Romans In order therefore to know whether a Tyrant is any way concerned or has any part or portion in that Text we must first consider what a Tyrant is And because I will not be my own Judg nor make Definitions of my own I will take that exact one of Mr. Abraham Cowley approved and published by the present Lord Bishop of Rochester I call him a Tyrant who either intrudes himself forcibly into the Government of his Fellow-Citizens without any legal Authority over them or who having a just Title to the Government of a People abuses it to the destruction or tormenting of them So that all Tyrants are at the same time Usurpers either of the whole or at least of a part of that Power which they assume to themselves and no less are they to be accounted Rebels since no Man can usurp Authority over others but by rebelling against them who had it before or at least against those Laws which were his Superiors It is plain by this Definition that a Tyrant though he had a legal Title and is a Tyrant only in Exercise as they term it is both an Usurper and a Rebel and if neither of these are contained in the Text nor can lay any claim to the Duties of Subjection Non-resistance Assistance Tribute c. So neither can a Tyrant who is both of them in one As I have many Years since shewn in my Answer to Constantius that the Illegal Violence of inferiour Magistrates is excluded out of this Text by letting the Text speak for it self so let any Man try whether the Text will admit of a Rebel or Usurper and you may soon see how well they will become the Place For then St. Paul's words run thus Let every Soul be subject to a Rebel though he be neither higher Power nor lower Power nor any Power at all for there is no Rebel but of God the Rebels that be are ordained of God Whosoever therefore resisteth a Rebel resisteth the Ordinance of God and they that resist shall receive to themselves Damnation For a Rebel is the Minister of God to thee for Good and so is the Devil and the Inquisition Whereby it is demonstrable That St. Paul here describes a Just and Righteous Government which is employed for the Publick Good and requires subjection only to that for if you put in any other into the Text it quite overthrows it and turns it into Blasphemy And it is likewise demonstrable that no Tyrant can put in so much as his Nose at the 13th of the Romans The next thing is to consider whether the late King was a Tyrant or not by this Definition Perhaps the proving him so will as much displease some very courtly People as the calling a Crowned Head by that Name heretofore did but God be thanked they were so far mistaken for he was an Uncrowned Head at that time However pleasing and displeasing is not my Business but doing all the Right and Service I can to my Country and to that Just and Rightful Government which is now over us and so that be done I care not who is pleased or displeased This Definition then is very full and contains both a Tyrant in Title and a Tyrant in Exercise or in the Administration of the Government as Writers of Politicks call them The former is he who intrudes himself forcibly into the Government of his Fellow Citizens without any legal Authority over them I will not make my self more work than I need in saying the late King was