should be a majority of lunatics, they would vote themselves to be the only people of sense, and pronounce the sober part of the world to be mad. If in such a case there should not be power enough to restrain them, in what a fearful condition should we be! God Almighty deliver us from it! And it is certainly his will that we should be delivered from it, by his appointing law and government amongst us. 1 Let us then ask what this government is? When men are gathered into an orderly society, they are called a body; because, like a body, they are under some head, which rules and directs all the rest of the members. If the head is stricken off from a body, that body falls into convulsions, and becomes a shocking spectacle. If the head is of no effect, the body is like that of a madman, acting extravagantly and doing mischief. Every body therefore must have some effective head to rule and direct, and a people under a government of due authority, and who are themselves in due subordination, are like the body of man when in a rational and healthy state, and in a fair way to continue so. The two cases of an army by land, and a ship at sea, are plain cases, which shew that whatever the constitution of a government may be in theory, it must be, in practice, under some one leader, as as a natural body has one head. The ship then keeps her destined course; but if the crew are mutinous, and rise upon the commander, then the ship turns pirate and plunders the world, or changes her course, and sets sail for some paradise of fools in a remote part of the universe. The history of such a crew would be something like the history of a certain nation, now in a state of piracy against the world, whose directors are nothing but criminals, and, as such, merit the fate of robbers and ruffians, which by the just judgment of God many of them have met with. The sum of the matter is this. Man is not under his own will, but under the will of God: and as man doth not know the will of God, nor can know it; the laws of society must originally come from God; and the authority to execute those laws must be from the same. He that kills a man for his own will and pleasure without law is a murderer: he that kills him with law is a judge or ruler; one into whose hand God, for the maintaining of his own laws, and the safety of the people, puts a sword and if he holds that sword in vain, evil prevails, and the hand is turned against himself. This was the case of the poor unfor tunate 1 tunate King of France; of whom it is said, that by permitting the law to take its course against a few worthless wretches, not fit to live, (as he was intreated to do at a critical moment, when the sword was in his hand); he might have saved the lives of a million of innocent people. How many more we know not: for the confusion being once begun, and among the people who have always given fashions to Europe, may last to the world's end, and be the immediate cause of its end. Look upon the natural world, and see how quiet and orderly it is under the Government of God. There his laws are never broken. The sun shines; the Moon rises; the stars are in their prescribed stations; the tides ebb and flow at their time; the spring gives her flowers; the summer ripens the corn; and the autumn gathers it. Thus tranquil and orderly would human society be, if it would but be as obedient to the laws of God. Oh how devoutly is it to be wished, that the moral world were under an authority as wise and as irresistible! But God has left man, as a free agent, to his own counsel; that, if he sees fit, he may break the divine laws, overturn the whole order of things, and terrify the nations of the earth with "blood and 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, when this 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 illintentioned; or insufficiently informed; or op pressive and tyrannical. If the laws cannot be spoken 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 denominated 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 lusts 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 boasting and vile abuse as honest men 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 is done directly, to raise discontents, and make government itself an odious thing. Their next step is to overturn it, by propagating false principles |