and fire and pillars of smoke;" which words do well describe the present state of war in this last age of the world.

The reason being now plain, why God hath appointed the rule of some over others; and it being fully shewn what a blessing it is, whenthis order is duly observed, and what misery follows when it is broken, we are now to examine what sort of people they are who despise dominion. Evil men you may be sure they must be; and in one respect they act wisely; they do well to hate government; for it is pointed against themselves. A great prilosopher of ancient Greece pronounced it impossible for man to be wise if he were not good; and he spoke the truth: for if you watch evil men closely, you will always discover that they are fools, and that their own tongues will make them fall; insomuch that he who seeth them shall laugh them to scorn. Our text therefore calls them dreamers; their opinions being as monstrous, as incoherent, as unprofitable, as ridiculous and as unaccountable, as those of men that are asleep. One of their first devices is this: when they cannot openly deny the necessity of Government to the good of man; they speak evil of dignities; they rail at the persons that exercise it: either

as

as persons weak in their understandings; or ill-
intentioned; or insufficiently informed; or op-
pressiveand tyrannical. If the laws cannot be spo-
ken against (though they do this as often as they
dare) they fall foul upon them that administer
them, in order to make the laws themselves
odious. The children of disobedience, who
reject all authority, are particularly denomi-
nated as children of Belial, in whom he is said
to work. Now if the Scripture tells us truly,
that the spirit that is in us, our own human
spirit, lusteth to envy, and that envy, and
hatred which always attends it, are natural
Justs of the mind; what must men become,
when there is an Evil Spirit working within, to
impel them, and inflame them, till their tongues
(as the Apostle speaks) are set on fire of hell?
Then does all manner of seditious language
break forth and abound, with such vain boast-
ing and vile abuse as honestmen cannot account
for: but the Evil Spirit knows what he intends
by it: he knows, that as the fiery tongues of
the gospel gave light and peace to the world,
so his fiery tongues will spread discord and
confusion, to the ends of the earth. All this
s done directly, to raise discontents, and make
ernment itself an odious thing. Their next

is to overturn it, by propagating false
principles

principles among the people. I called them prine ciples; but having no foundation, they really are dreams. The first is this, that every man has rights; which is said with this design, that every man may be discontented, and may turn the world upside down by contending for them.

There is no such thing in the world as the absolute right these persons talk about. There is no right without reason; and right will follow reason, so long as men speak sense. But in a dream, reason has no share; so we find little of it here. We must ask, in what state of man is this right to be found? Man can have no right before he is born. To his birth he has no right; for it is the gift of God that he comes into the world at all. In his infancy he may have a right to be fed and nursed, because he cannot feed himself: but then his parents also, so long as he is dependent upon them, have a right to his obedience and service. If as he grows up, he refuses to work, he has no right to eat. If as he grows up he cheats and steals, he has no right to be exempted from suffering punishment as a felon : if he commits murder, he has no right to escape the righteous sentence of death. I say these things to shew that rights are in every case, the rights of justice;

the body in any one respect, and it is no longer a body, but a monster.* Are the men that can reason thus in a dream, or are they not? The man that is awake will know: but he who is himself dreaming will not. But if men were all born equal, like the blades of wheat in a field of corn; or if it were in the power of man to make them equal, nothing could keep them so. If all the lands of a country were equally divided, the share of a single man would be small; and how is a poor man to occupy it? To furnish himself with stock and implements of hus

bandry, he must part with some of his land, which immediately makes him unequal; and so the plan miscarries at the first step. They who have of late invented or revived this equality, are themselves a proof of its absurdity: has equality set them at ease? has it indeed ever taken place amongst them? By no means: they are ravaging and destroying the countries on three

sides

* When the first republic of these last days was begotten by rebellion, (as all republics are) they were going to makea law that all men should be equal: "but hold," says one wiser than the rest, "you must make a law first, that "none shall be industrious: for the industrious will soon be hove the idle, do whatever you will: and certain it is, lity can never be restored again till the idle robs the strious, and seizes the fruit of another's labour."

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5

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sides of them, and they would ravage this country if they could. It is with them as naturalists tell us it is with the kingdom of bees: if their chief be lost, the rest turn thieves, and plunder their neighbours as far as they can. This is exactly verified in the nation who of late destroyed their king; and it is a fact which ought to open the eyes of this whole nation: but when men are under the power of visions in a dream, realities have no effect.

But your enemies, knowing the wildness and weakness of their arguments, and not daring to trust their cause to them, have another deep device to practise upon you; in which, I must no longer say they dream, but shew how nearly they are related to the grand author of mischief, who never sleeps. If they cannot make you foolish all at once, they are persuaded they shall do it at last, if they begin with making you wicked. Therefore every art is tried to spread wickedness among you. You believe the word of God: that keeps you in the fear of God: and that fear will never suffer you to turn robbers and republicans. Therefore the bible, which stands in the way, must first be taken out of the way: Christianity must be ridiculed : argument, mockery, and blasphemy, rise all at once, to perplex you and corrupt you. To

VOL. VII.

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overturn