into a conspiracy against the commonwealth. And in that transportation, men are commonly so weak and wilful, that they insensibly submit to conditions of more restraint and compulsion, and in truth to more and heavier penalties for the vindication of their liberty, than they were ever liable to in the highest violation of their liberty of which they complain, by how much the articles of war are more severe and hard to be observed, than the strictest injunctions under any peaceable government. However, no age hath been without dismal and bloody examples of this fury, when the very sound of liberty (which may well be called a charm) hath hurried those who would sacrifice to it, to do and to suffer all the acts of tyranny imaginable, and to make themselves slaves that they may be free. There is no one thing that the mind of man may lawfully desire and take delight in, that is less understood and more fatally mistaken than the word liberty; which, though no man is so mad as to say it consists in being absolved from all obligations of law, which would give every man liberty to destroy him, yet they do in truth think it to be nothing else than not to be subject to those laws which restrain them from doing somewhat they have a mind to do; so that whoever is carried away upon that seditious invitation, hath set his heart upon some liberty that he affects, a liberty for revenge,

a liberty for rapine, or the like: which, if owned and avowed, would seduce very few; but being concealed, every man gratifies himself with such an image of liberty as he worships, and so concur together to overthrow that government that is inconvenient to them all, though disliked by very few in one and the same respect; and therefore the strength of rebellion consists in the private gloss which every man makes to himself upon the declared argument of it, not upon the reasons published and avowed, how specious and popular soever; and thence it comes to pass, that most rebellions expire in a general detestation of the first promoters of them, by those who kept them company in the prosecution, and discover their ends to be very different from their profession.

True and precious liberty, that is only to be valued, is nothing else but that we may not be compelled to do any thing that the law hath left in our choice whether we will do or no; nor hindered from doing any thing we have a mind to do, and which the law hath given us liberty to do, if we have a mind to it: and compulsion and force in either of these cases, is an act of violence and injustice against our right, and ought to be repelled by the sovereign power, and may be resisted so far by ourselves as the law permits. The law is the standard and the guardian of our liberty; it

circumscribes and defends it; but to imagine liberty without a law, is to imagine every man with his sword in his hand, to destroy him who is weaker than himself; and that would be no pleasant prospect to those who cry out most for liberty. Those men, of how great name and authority soever, who first introduced that opinion, that nature produced us in a state of war, and that order and government was the effect of experience and contract, by which man surrendered the right he had by nature, to avoid that violence which every man might exercise upon another, have been the authors of much mischief in the world, by infusing into the hearts of mankind a wrong opinion of the institution of government, and that they may law. fully vindicate themselves from the ill bargains that their ancestors made for that liberty which nature gave them, and they ought only to have released their own interest and what concerned themselves, but that it is most unreasonable and unjust that their posterity should be bound by their illmade and unskilful contracts: and from this, resentment and murmur, war and rebellion have arisen, which commonly leave men under much worse condition than their forefathers had subjected them to. Nor is it strange that philosophers, who could imagine no other way for the world to

be made, but by a lucky convention and conjunc tion of atoms, nor could satisfy their own curiosity in any rational conjecture of the structure of man, or from what omnipotency he could be formed or created; I say, it is no wonder, that men so much in the dark as to matter of fact, should conceive by the light of their reason, that government did arise in that method, and by those argumentations, which they could best comprehend capable to produce such a conformity. But that men, who are acquainted with the scriptures, and profess to believe them; who thereby know the whole history of the creation, and have therein the most lively representations of all the excesses and defects of nature; who see the order and discipline and subjection prescribed to mankind from his creation, by Him who created him; and that that discipline and subjection was complied with till the world was grown very numerous; that we, after so clear information of what was really and in truth done and commanded, should resort to the fancy and supposition of heathen philosophers for the invention of government, is very unreasonable, and hath exposed the peace and quiet of kingdoms, the preservation whereof is the obligation of conscience and religion, to the wild imaginations of men, upon the ungrounded conceptions of the primitive foundation of subjection and obedience, and to their li

eence to enervate both, by their bold definitions and distinctions.

Because very much of the benefit of Christianity consisted in the liberty it gave mankind from that thraldom which it suffered under the law, and in the manumission and deliverance from those observations and ceremonies, the apostles took not more care in the institution of any part of it, than that men might not be intoxicated with the pleasant taste of that liberty, or imagine that it extended to a lawlessness in their actions, well foreseeing, and being jealous lest their opinion of liberty might degenerate into licentiousness; and therefore they circumscribed it with all possible caution, that they might have the whole benefit to themselves in abstaining from what was grievous and burthensome to them, not the presumption to disturb other men: "But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to them that are weak," saith St Paul, (1 Cor. viii. 9.) Do not dissemble and give men cause to believe, by accompanying them in what they do, that thou dost intend as they do, and hast the same thoughts with them. "Use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh," is an injunction of the same apostle (Gal. v. 13.) How good a title soever you have to liberty, be not exalted by it to anger, and provoke a man, who (though by want of understanding)