Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/264

 scheme of belief and morals, and the imperium in imperio which the Papal Court desired to set up in every country. 'If,' he argues in a paper on this subject, 'the Pope's power resemble the sun and that of Kings and Emperours resemble only that of the moon, that is to say, If the power of Kings be but reflex and derivative from that of the Pope, then it is absurd to obey prince or state, when the Pope intimates his pleasure to the contrary, and consequently no man knows whether he be bound to kill rather than defend the King, when the Pope demands it.

'The Pope by his power of the Keys, by his keeping men or letting them out of Purgatory, can give greater rewards and inflict greater punishments, than any other the greatest monarch in the world can doe; and consequently the peace and settlement of all nations and peoples lyes at his meer mercy and discretion only.

'All which pretensions and powers of the Pope having no affinity or likeness to the office of Christ, (whose vicar he would be), Protestants doe well to renounce and have reason to call the Pope Antichrist, and to bind his said wild and unruly power in chaines, that it may no longer hurt the nations of the earth.'

Neither did he think more highly of the claims of General Councils to inspiration. 'If the Holy Ghost,' he says, 'is pleased to inspire infallible truths into a thousand members of a General Council, for the good of the whole Church, why may not the same God immediately inspire into every elect soul, such truth as he himself knoweth to be sufficient for him, without all the perplexities and dangerous dependencies upon Councils, priests, and prelates whom no one can understand.' But it was not Protestants only, Sir William was well aware, who had to fear. Every scientific man knew the fate which 'Councils, priests and prelates' reserved for those who speculated outside the limits prescribed by orthodoxy. The funeral pyre of Bruno had cast a lurid light over the opening years of the century, and remained a standing notice, with the prison cells of Galileo and Campanella, to the founders of