Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

and not complain of their lawful sovereign, much less make war upon
him. For he that is not glad of any just occasion of martyrdom has not
the faith he professeth, but pretends it only, to set some colour upon
his own contumacy. But what infidel king is so unreasonable as,
knowing he has a subject that waiteth for the second coming of Christ,
after the present world shall be burnt, and intendeth then to obey Him
(which is the intent of believing that Jesus is the Christ), and in
the meantime thinketh himself bound to obey the laws of that infidel
king, which all Christians are obliged in conscience to do, to put
to death or to persecute such a subject
And thus much shall suffice, concerning the kingdom of God and
policy ecclesiastical. Wherein I pretend not to advance any position
of my own, but only to show what are the consequences that seem to
me deducible from the principles of Christian politics (which are
the Holy Scriptures), in confirmation of the power of civil sovereigns
and the duty of their subjects. And in the allegation of Scripture,
I have endeavoured to avoid such texts as are of obscure or
controverted interpretation, and to allege none but in such sense as
is most plain and agreeable to the harmony and scope of the whole
Bible, which was written for the re-establishment of the kingdom of
God in Christ.
For it is not the bare words, but the scope of the writer, that
giveth the true light by which any writing is to be interpreted; and
they that insist upon single texts, without considering the main
design, can derive no thing from them clearly; but rather, by
casting atoms of Scripture as dust before men's eyes, make
everything more obscure than it is, an ordinary artifice of those that
seek not the truth, but their own advantage.
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THE FOURTH PART
OF THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS
CHAPTER XLIV
OF SPIRITUAL DARKNESS FROM MISINTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE
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Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have
hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power,
namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world,"* "the
kingdom of Satan,"*(2) and "the principality of Beelzebub over
demons,"*(3) that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air:
for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the
air";*(4) and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the
prince of this world":*(5) and in consequence hereunto, they who are
under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the
"children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For
seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion
of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons,
phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same
thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in
these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a
confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this
present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to
extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so
to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.
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* Ephesians, 6. 12
*(2) Matthew, 12. 26