18
we come home to ourselves, what must we think of the envied constitution under which we live, and, by the virtue and power of laws all enjoy the chief happinesses that human life can wish for? What must we think of that revolution, in which high and low so unanimously joined, chiefly to rescue our laws from a dispensing power, and to divest the executive from all pretences to a superiority over the legislative? And what must we think of those magistrates, whom the present age beholds with veneration, and ages to come will remember with eternal honour; who, though commissioned by the supreme executive power, yet acknowledge no rule of their conduct but what is prescribed to them by the legislative; and account it their chiefest glory to be the guardians of the laws, as they are of the liberties of the people?
The judicious Mr Hooker thinks[1] that human societies first made a trial of government by the will of one man, (as their first essay might well be the worst and most imperfect) and that they were constrained to come to laws as a remedy against the evils of that kind of regimen, after they had found (as his expression is) "that to live by one man's will was the cause of all men's misery." This agrees with St. Paul, who plainly
- ↑ Eccles. polity, book I. §. 10.
