good, he would undertake they should be the first men that should set bishops about your consciences. For how vile soever you make the blood of faithful Englishmen, they have made such good mar. kets of it, that they would be glad at any time to broach the whole nation at the same price, and afford the treasure of miraculous deliverances, as you call it, into the bargain. This, he added, was easier to be understood, than your brand of gentilism, upon kingship, for which you wrest scripture most unmercifully, to prove, that though Christ said, His kingdom was not of this world; yet his commonwealth is. For if the text which you quote, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and they that exercise authority over them, are called benefactors: But it shall not be so among you, &c. be to be understood of civil government (and to infer commonwealth, as you will have it right or wrong) and not to be meant of his spiritual reign, of which he was then speaking, and expressly calls so; you must prove that he erected a republick of his apostles, and that, notwithstanding the scripture every where calls his government, The kingdom of heaven, it ought to be corrected, and rendered, The commonwealth of heaven, or rather, The commonwealth of this world; and yet the text does as well prove benefactors heathenish as kings; for if our Saviour had meant to brand kingship with any evil character, he would never have stiled himself "King of the Jews, King of Heaven, King of Righteousness," &c. as he frequently does; but no where a state-holder or keeper of the liberties.

To this, a young gentleman made answer, that your writings are best interpreted by themselves; and that he remembered in that book, wherein you fight with the king's picture, you call Sir Philip Sidney's Princess Pamela (who was born and bred of christian parents in England) a heathen woman; and, therefore, he thought that by heathenish, you meant English; and that in calling kingship, heathenish, you inferred it was the only proper and natural government of the English nation, as it hath been proved in all ages. To which another objected, that such a sense was quite contrary to your purpose; to which he immediately replied, that it was no new thing with you to write that, which is as well against as for your purpose. After much debate, they agreed to put it to the ballot, and the young gentleman carried it without any contradiction. That done, a gentleman of good credit here, taking occasion from the former discourse, said, you had shewn yourself as able a divine, as a statesman; for you had made as politick provision for spiritual, as civil liberty, in those pious and orthodox (though seemingly absurd and contradictory) grounds you have laid down, in order thereunto, which being rightly interpreted, do say, or by consequence, infer thus much: That the church of Christ ought to have no head upon earth, but the monster of many heads, the multitude, who are the only supreme judges of all matters that concern him; a privilege they claimed, when he was upon earth, when they took upon them to condemn him, and cried, Crucify: That all christian laws and ordinances have a coercive power,

to see themselves put in execution, and yet they ought to be subject to every man's will and humour (which you call his best light) and no man to them but in his own sense. That the scripture only ought to interpret itself (just as it can read itself) and every man is to take the interpretation in such a sense as best suits with his own capacity, or his occasions: That every man may do what he pleases in matters of religion, but only those that are in authority, who ought not to meddle in such matters, as being of so different a nature from their cognisance (or any other) that if it be their will to command the only true religion to be observed, it presently becomes unchristian, inhuman, and barbarous. That no man can serve God, nor save his own soul, but in a commonwealth; in this certainty you go after your own invention, for no man ever heard it before: But if it should be true, it is a sad thing to think, what is become of the apostles themselves, and all the saints in the primitive times, when there was never a christian commonwealth in the world? That any man may turn away his wife, and take another as often as he pleases, as you have most learnedly proved upon the fiddle, and practised in your life and conversation, for which you have atchieved the honour to be stiled the Founder of a Sect. All this you call liberty of conscience, and christian liberty, which you conclude no government is more inclinable, not only to favour, but protect, than a free commonwealth. In this, he said, you say right; for it is notorious enough, that since we have been but called a commonwealth, such pious doctrines, as these, have been so wonderfully propagated, that England does now abound with new christians, no less than Spain did of late years, and of the same mungrel breed; all which agree in nothing, but the extirpation of christian religion, and subversion of government, to which your discipline does naturally conduce. For certainly, the most ready and easy way to root out religion, is to render it contemptible and ridiculous; which cannot be sooner done, than by giving licence and encouragement to all manner of frenzies, that pretend to new discoveries in matters of faith; these will quickly make it become a sport and mockery to the people, until it be utterly extinct; and this, some of the church of Rome found true, who gave a greater check to the growth of reformation, by cloathing some of the new professors in fools coats, and exposing them to the derision of the multitude, than by persecuting, and putting thousands to death. And this is the way you go, which will never fail you, as long as there are fools and mad-men to carry on the work. And with this, if you could but introduce the wholesome canons of the council of Munster, it would make an admirable model for the ecclesiastical part of the republick, if it were not for one unlucky circumstance, and that is, that Knipper Dolling proclaimed John of Leyden king, and not state-holder. This, he said, was an unhappy mistake, and no less out of your way, than that of the Fifth Monarchy men, who would have been admirable for your purpose, if they had but dreamed of a fifth free state.

By this time, they began to grow weary of your perpetual fals

hoods and mistakes, and a worthy knight of this assembly stood up and said, that, if we meant to examine all the particular fallacies and flaws in your writing, we should never have done; he would therefore, with leave, deliver his judgment upon the whole, which, in brief, was thus: That it is all windy foppery, from the beginning to the end, written to the elevation of that rabble, and meant to cheat the ignorant. That you fight always with the flat of your hand, like a rhetorician, and never contract the logical fist. That you trade altogether in universals, the region of deceits and fallacy, but never come so near particulars, as to let us know which, among divers things of the same kind, you would be at. For you admire commonwealths in general, and cry down kingship as much at large, without any regard to the particular constitutions, which only make either the one or the other good or bad, vainly supposing all slavery to be in the government of a single person, and nothing but liberty in that of many; which is so false, that some kingdoms have had the most perfect form of commonwealths, as ours had, and some republicks have proved the greatest tyrannies, as all have done at one time or other. For many, if they combine, have more latitude to abuse power, than a single person, and less sense of shame, conscience, or honour to restrain them; for what is wickedly done by many, is owned by none, where no man knows upon whom in particular to fix it. And this we have found true by experience in your patriots and assertors (as you call them) for no one person could ever have done half the mischief they have done, nor outlived the infamy they have suffered, without any sense of shame. Beside this, as all your politicks reach but the outside and circumstances of things, and never touch at realities, so you are very sollicitous about words, as if they were charms, or had more in them than what they signify. For no conjurer's devil is more concerned in a spell, than you are in a mere word, but never regard the things which it serves to express. For you believe liberty is safer under an arbitrary unlimited power, by vertue of the name Commonwealth, than under any other government, how just or restrained soever, if it be but called kingship. And therefore, very prudently you would have the name parliament abolished, because it signifies a parly of our commons with their Norman kings. But in this you are too severe a Draco, to punish one word, for holding correspondence with another, when all the liberty, you talk so much of, consists in nothing else but mere words. For though you brag much of the people's managing their own affairs, you allow them no more share of that in your Utopia, as you have ordered it, than only to set up their throats and baul, instead of every three years, which they might have done before, once in an age, or oftener, as an old member drops away, and a new one is to succeed, not for his merit or knowledge in state affairs, but because he is able to bring the greatest and most deep-mouthed pack of the rabble into the field; a more wise and equal way, in your opinion, of chusing counsellors, than any king is capable of. But he added, you had done worst of all, where you are most like

yourself, and that is in that false and malicious aspersion of Popish and Spanish counsels which you cast on the present king. For it is well known to all the world, he hath preferred his conscience before three crowns, and patiently endured to live so many years in exile, rather than change his religion; which if he would have done, or been moved with such counsels, he might long since have procured all the forces of the catholick world upon us; whereas it cannot be denied of his greatest opposers, that they are so jealous of their ill-gotten purchases bought with their crimes, that rather than be in danger of losing a pig, they would, with the Gergesenes, desire Christ to depart out of their coasts. After this said, he moved the assembly that I might be desired to deliver my judgment upon the book, as he and others had done, which being immediately past, I knew not, though unwilling, how to avoid it; and therefore, I told them as briefly as I could, that that which I disliked most in your treatise was, that there is not one word of the balance of propriety, nor the Agrarian, nor Rotation in it, from the beginning to the end; without which, together with a Lord Archon, I thought I had sufficiently demonstrated, not only in my writings but publick exercises in that coffee-house, that there is no possible foundation of a free commonwealth. To the first and second of these, that is, the Balance and the Agrarian, you made no objection, and therefore, I should not need to make any answer. But for the third, I mean Rotation, which you implicitly reject in your design to perpetuate the present members, I shall only add this to what I have already said and written on this subject, that a commonwealth is like a great top, that must be kept up by being whipped round, and held in perpetual circulation, for if you discontinue the Rotation, and suffer the senate to settle, and stand still, down it falls immediately. And if you had studied this point as carefully as I have done, you could not but know, there is no such way under heaven of disposing the vicissitudes of command and obedience, and of distributing equal right and liberty among all men, as this of wheeling, by which, as Chaucer writes, a single fart hath been equally divided among a whole convent of friars, and every one hath had his just share of the savour. I told them, I could not but be sorry to find so learned a man so ignorant, in the nature of government, as to make disproportionate parallels of councils as you do, where you compare the senate of Rome with the grand council of Venice, between which there is no analogy at all; for the senate of Rome was never the supreme power of the people, as the grand council of Venice is, but merely a council of But I wondered most of all, at what politick crack in any man's scull, the imagination could enter of securing hoerty under an oligarchy, seized of the government for term of life, which was never yet seen in the world. The Metropolitan of all commonwealths, the Roman, did but once adventure to trust its whole power and authority, in the hands of one council, and that but for two years, and yet they had like to have lost their liberty for ever; whereas they had frequently in all ages left it wholly in the power

state.

of a single person, and found it so far from danger or inconveni. ence, that the only refuge they had in their greatest extremity was, to create a dictator. But I could not but laugh, as they all had done, at the pleasantness of your fancy, who suppose our noble patriots, when they are invested for term of life, will serve their country at their own charge: This, I said, was very improbable, unless you meant as they do, that all we have is their own, and that to prey and devour is to serve; in which they have appeared so able and industrious, as if they had been made to no other purpose, but, like lobsters, were all claws and belly. For though many laugh at me for accounting 300,000 pounds in wooden ware, towards the erecting of a free-state, in my Oceana, but a trifle to the whole nation; because I am most certain that these little pills the ballots are the only physick that can keep the body politick soluble, and not suffer the humour to settle, I will undertake, that if the present members had but a lease of the government during life, notwithstanding whatsoever impeachment of waste, they would raise more out of it to themselves in one year, than that amounts to; beside the charge we must be at in maintaining of guards to keep the boys off them, and before half the term be expired, they would have it untenantable. To conclude, I told them, you had made good your title in a contrary sense; for you have really proposed the most ready and easy way to establish downright slavery upon the nation that can possibly be contrived, which will clearly appear to any man that does but understand this plain truth, that wheresoever the power of proposing and debating, together with the power of ratifying and enacting laws, is intrusted in the hands of any one person, or any one council, as you would have it, that government is inevitably arbitrary and tyrannical, because they may make whatsoever they please lawful or unlawful. And that ty

ranny hath the advantage of all others that hath law and liberty among the instruments of servitude. J. H.

THE

QUALIFICATIONS OF PERSONS,

DECLARED CAPABLE BY THE

RUMP-PARLIAMENT,

To elect, or be elected, Members to supply their House.

THE

Printed in the year 1660. Quarto, containing sixteen pages.

HE representative of the parliament of England, having for many years employed their constant endeavour, to impose freedom and liberty on the three nations; notwithstanding their ob