Page:Books Condemned to be Burnt - James Anson Farrer.djvu/136

120 splendid passages. Two samples must suffice:—

"Be this right of kings whatever it will, the right of the people is as much from God as it. And whenever any people, without some visible designation from God Himself, appoint a king over them, they have the same right to pull him down as they had to set him up at first. And certainly it is a more Godlike action to depose a tyrant than to set one up; and there appears much more of God in the people when they depose an unjust prince than in a king that oppresses an innocent people. . . . So that there is but little reason for that wicked and foolish opinion that kings, who commonly are the worst of men, should be so high in God's account as that He should have put the world under them, to be at their beck and be governed according to their humour and that for their sakes alone He should have reduced all mankind, whom He made after His own image, into the same condition as brutes."

The conclusion of Milton's Defensio is not more remarkable for its eloquence than it is for its closing paragraph. Addressing his countrymen in an exhortation that reminds one of the speeches of Pericles to the Athenians, he proceeds:—