into rebellion against their princes and lawful superiors: "En illa, quam sæpe optastis, libertas," said Catiline, when he would draw the poor people 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

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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 lawfully 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 ill-made 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 conjunction 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