Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/52

 by the members; every man, it argued, was himself a reasoning being. Parker would have hesitated long before ascribing to individual subject the capacity to arrive at valid conclusions i politics. More than this, Scripture And Reaso ascribed to the body of the people the right to sav the state in case the three estates in Parliamen conspired to ruin it. If, it concluded, the thre estates disagreed as to which one was guilty o practice ruinous to the state, only the body of th people could decide between them.

In the trace of Hunton and Scripture And Reason followed the most elaborate of the summaries o the parliamentary argument—Samuel Rutherford’ Lex Rex. The essentials of Rutherford’s positio on the origin of government were not differen from Parker’s; but in discussing the compac between government and people, he lingered i his earlier pages over doctrines of social compact He emphasized the fact that man was naturally free from subjection to magistracy. He admitted that the law of nature—a divine law—authorized government, and that man’s power of ordaining government was, like his social propensities, a gift of God. But, Rutherford added, man was free to accept or reject this gift of God; the union of men in society was purely voluntary; and subjection to magistrates, unlike the subjection of children to parents, was not natural. Though men were born subject to the laws of their society, one generation of men was not bound by the political action of a preceding one; the right to change