Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

eserved to Himself during His reign over the Israelites, assigned
to the tribe of Levi (who were to be His public ministers, and had
no portion of land set them out to live on, as their brethren) to be
their inheritance. The Pope therefore (pretending the present Church
to be, as the realms of Israel, the kingdom of God), challenging to
himself and his subordinate ministers the like revenue as the
inheritance of God, the name of clergy was suitable to that claim. And
thence it is that tithes and other tributes paid to the Levites as
God's right, amongst the Israelites, have a long time been demanded
and taken of Christians by ecclesiastics, jure divino, that is, in
God's right. By which means, the people everywhere were obliged to a
double tribute; one to the state, another to the clergy; whereof
that to the clergy, being the tenth of their revenue, is double to
that which a king of Athens (and esteemed a tyrant) exacted of his
subjects for the defraying of all public charges: for he demanded no
more but the twentieth part, and yet abundantly maintained therewith
the Commonwealth. And in the kingdom of the Jews, during the
sacerdotal reign of God, the tithes and offerings were the whole
public revenue.
From the same mistaking of the present Church for the kingdom of God
came in the distinction between the civil and the canon laws: the
civil law being the acts of sovereigns in their own dominions, and the
canon law being the acts of the Pope in the same dominions. Which
canons, though they were but canons, that is, rules propounded, and
but voluntarily received by Christian princes, till the translation of
the Empire to Charlemagne; yet afterwards, as the power of the Pope
increased, became rules commanded, and the emperors themselves, to
avoid greater mischiefs, which the people blinded might be led into,
were forced to let them pass for laws.
From hence it is that in all dominions where the Pope's
ecclesiastical power is entirely received, Jews, Turks, and Gentiles
are in the Roman Church tolerated in their religion as far forth as in
the exercise and profession thereof they offend not against the
civil power: whereas in a Christian, though a stranger, not to be of
the Roman religion is capital, because the Pope pretendeth that all
Christians are his subjects. For otherwise it were as much against the
law of nations to persecute a Christian stranger for professing the
religion of his own country, as an infidel; or rather more, inasmuch
as they that are not against Christ are with him.
From the same it is that in every Christian state there are
certain men that are exempt, by ecclesiastical liberty, from the
tributes and from the tribunals of the civil state; for so are the
secular clergy, besides monks and friars, which in many places bear so
great a proportion to the common people as, if need were, there
might be raised out of them alone an army sufficient for any war the
Church militant should employ them in against their own or other
princes.
A second general abuse of Scripture is the turning of consecration
into conjuration, or enchantment. To consecrate is, in Scripture, to
offer, give, or dedicate, in pious and decent language and gesture,
a man or any other thing to God, by separating of it from common
use; that is to say, to sanctify, or make it God's, and to be used
only by those whom God hath appointed to be His public ministers (as I
have already proved at large in the thirty-fifth Chapter), and thereby
to change, not the thing consecrated, but only the use of it, from
being profane and common, to be holy, and peculiar to God's service.
But when by such words the nature or quality of the thing itself is