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OF POLITICAL THEORIES. 33questions chiefly debated were those to which the transactions of the day naturally led, and the decision of which wasinvested with a direct practical importance. All these questions may be reduced under one head, viz. Whether thekingly power should be absolute or not ? or, what was considered equivalent. Whether the sovereignty belonged to theking or to the people On ? such a subject as this, no one,who bore the least affection to his country could remain3wholly without interest : we must not therefore be astonishedat the earnestness with which the dispute was carried on.It would appear almost incredible to any one unversed inthe writings of the time, to what an extent the assessors ofthe kingly power proceeded, and on what grounds theysought to rest their claim. One of these must be here mentioned, who, it is true, has long sunk into the oblivion whichhe deserved, but who must not be passed over in this place,as his treatise entitled u Patriarchs, or the Natural Power ofKings/' 1 served as a whetstone on which the great writersof the opposite side sharpened and improved their wits. Itwas to the extravagant, and in some degree ludicrous tenetsof Filmer and his school, that the cause which they advocated chiefly owed its fall.For, as they derived the kinglypower immediately from God, they were forced into historical deductions for their proof. They had recourse, therefore, to the sacred annals but :as, unfortunately, the kinglypower does not there date beyond a particular era, they fellback upon the patriarchs, and asserted boldly that Abrahamand Noah, and lastly, that Adam himself had been kings.In order to make this ^ood o thev endeavoured to show that*the kingly power proceeded from the paternal.,and that, accordingly, kings, being the fathers of their people, mightexercise as unrestricted an authority over them as fathersover their children. But as all children, by the very fact oftheir birth, become subjected to the government of theirfather, it follows of course that no man can be born free :and again, as the paternal authority has been transferred tcthe kings of the earth, allmen come bytheir birth underthis absolute power, and are in fact born as a sort of property and appendage to it. By these steps Filmer arrived1It forms part of The Political Dkcmr&es of ROBERT FILMER, Bart London, 16S2.Y 2