and common consent: even Harrington, Sidney, and Locke, are defective here, though no men better understood the fundamental laws of society. As they accord in principle, Harrington shall speak for all three: "The centre and basis of every government, (says this profound writer) is no other than the fundamental laws of the same;" and again, "as there is a private reason which is the interest of a private man, so there is that reason which is the interest of mankind, or the whole ;" and government he calls, after Hooker, "the soul of a nation" and what he calls the mind and will of a nation is what others mean by a constitution.

Machiavel comes near the truth, when he says "then a city may be called free, and a state pronounce itself durable, when founded on good laws and orders at first, and has not that necessity of good men to maintain it. Of such laws and principles many ancient commonwealths were anciently constituted; and continued a good while."

Of late years the case has been different. Sometimes the word has been used with a_covert meaning, and sometimes with one of open, public import. In America and France, all manner of changes them with mutual consent, or one mind, as it is expressed. Their teachers were not their masters, but their ministers † or servants. They were elected with the consent of the church, or assembly of the people; and their whole economy, of praying, preaching, administering of ordinances, distributing to the necessities of the poor, and appointment of ministers or teachers was a fellowship, I a union of persons acting on the principles of a covenant by mutual consent.-See Acts, ch. i. v. 15, to the end.— Ch. vi.; Ch. xv. 22, and throughout the ACTS: and the custom of choosing their own officers with the consent of the whole Church, § continued the practice with Christians for many years. (This subject I have considered somewhat more largely in the 2d edition of An Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the 39 Articles, p. 374.) And accordingly, that faithful writer, Granville Sharp, considers "the Act of depriving the Clergy and People of the Right of electing their own Bishops, as among the first innovations of Antichrist."-See An Account of the Ancient Division of the English Nation into Hundreds and Tithings, p. 63.

The observations on Covenants and Constitutions are made primarily in the way of illustration, but, indirectly, may be used as arguments. For certain writers (Mr. Hobbes, too,||) have formed many of their arguments in support of an absolute government, that must eventually exclude the consent of the people, (however it might originate¶) from the writings called the Old and New Testament.

B. 1. This approbation " they give by their own voice, sign, or act, and also when others do it, their name, by right at least, originally derived from them,' as in Parliaments, Counsels, and the like assemblies." Eccles. Pol. B. 1.

Ομοθυμαδόν.

§ Συνευδοκήσασης πάσης της εκκλησίας, Clementis, Ep. 1. ad Corinth, sect. 44.

# See Hobbes de Cive. Cap. 16, 17.

* Διακονοι.

† Κοινωνία.

The whole church or assembly consenting. 3.

Mr. Hobbes admits that the beginning of a State is in the consent of the majority; but that the power granted by the citizens is absolute. Ibid. Cap. 5, 6.

were rung on the word; all manner of experiments made with constitutions; and in England, so common has been the word, that what should always be connected with public feeling, has at length been drawn into the vortex of private interest; till the word has passed into a party word, if not into one of no meaning.

To come then near our own time: "To constitute,” Dr. Johnson defines, "to give formal existence," " to make any thing what it is" and a constitution he defines, " an established form of government, a system of laws and customs." According to Mr. Thomas Paine, a constitution is a "thing antecedent to government and laws, the political bible of a state." "British civil constitution," says Mr. Robert Robinson, "is a phrase expressive, first, of a constitution of rights, native and inherent in the inhabitants of this kingdom, and in all mankind; next, of a body of laws peculiar to this kingdom; and lastly, of a form of making and executing those laws, by King, Lords, and Commons." This definition describes neatly what Judge Blackstone has discussed much at large; though our lawyers are sometimes in the habit of making the body of our laws answer the purpose of a definition, as particularly Lord Fortescue in a Preface to his Records; and hence among them the observation, that our constitution is in our statutes. Major Cartwright, in similar language, defines the British Constitution, "a form of polity, by which the nation has consented to be governed, including a legislature of King, Lords, and Commons, and real representatives of the Commons, as well as trial by jury, together with those principles on which justice and liberty depend."

But the British Constitution,-though, as will hereafter appear, I do not wish to concede to the church any undue weight or influence, should be also considered in its extended sense, as a constitution in church and state. The people of England and the Church of England, according to our professed advocates for the ecclesiastical establishment, Hooker and Warburton, "are one and the same people ;" an inaccurate idea, as a fact, though not more so than some things advanced about the civil constitution : but it has given birth to another definition of the English Constitution; according to which, "civil and ecclesiastical polity is described as a strong arch of government rising from different foundations, but bending towards each other as they rise, and meeting in the centre ;" a definition of Mr. Rotherham's, a writer on establishments; and, accordingly, some have represented the English Constitution consisting of a king and three estates, under the similitude of an equilateral triangle, that is, a triangle of three equal sides, with a crown at the top.

In the describing of this constitution, the word fundamental,

Political Catechism.

2 See the beginning of the Postscript.

which occasionally will be used, is of great concern; it must at least be understood on all those occasions to possess a meaning significant and full. A power may be admitted into a government, which is yet not essential and fundamental in the constitution. Some have written, ás if thinking that the Church of England was an essential part of the English Constitution, according to the idea just laid down; and from hasty opinions on the claims of an established church, they have proceeded in a way, both towards Catholics, and Protestant-dissenters, erroneous in true policy, and full of prejudices and mistakes. This, at least, we should never forget, that, if the Church of England is fundamental, because it is established, so must have been the Romish Church long before, the rights of which are provided for by Magna Charta. The English government should protect both alike; it should protect all, as a shield to the weak, not as a sword to the strong. As to the fundamentals, or the first principles of its constitution, they existed before either the Protestant or the Catholic religion was established here; nor is either essential to the constitution, though both have been occasionally introduced, and though both obtained the supreme sanction of the laws. The inhabitants of this island were Papists before they were Protestants; before they were Papists they were Christians, and had churches; and before they were Christians they were Britons, and had a constitution: just as to a building something may be added, which entered not into the original composition of the fabric.'

The truth on this subject is, that as we had a constitution, or fundamental rules for government in this island before any Christian church existed among us, we should continue to have one, were no Christian church to remain. It is the province of constitutions to be the guardians and friends of all the community alike, to be able to answer all the varying wants of place and

* Concerning the state of things before Christianity, see Gildas de Excidio Brit. and Bede (Hist. Eccles. lib. ii.) and Spelmanni Concil. Brit. tom. i. But we have no guide in ascertaining the wars and civil distractions be tween the Saxons and Britons, but the Saxon Chronicle: in Gildas there is little more than a doleful lamentation, in obscure style, on the depraved state of the Britons in his time. Bede's history is the only one that is to be considered as giving any account of the Britons and Saxons, in a way of narrative, and that strangely mixed up with the idlest legends, and false miracles the latter part is barren of every thing, and, besides, not to be reconciled to the Saxon Chronicle. "In Gilda, in Beda, frustra illorum historia quæritur: ita ut Chronico Saxonico debeamus, quod aliqua illorum temporum notitia ad nostram ætatem pervenerit." I'refat. ad Chron. Saxon. Gibson. The subsequent monkish writers contain little more than what they gleaned from Bede and the Saxon Chronicle, except what they superadded of their own inventions in these they are sometimes not unfertile, but they are of little authority. We must, therefore, be contented with seizing the general features of the characters of those times.

time, such more particulary as arise from religion, in the same manner as we vary our dress, when we advance in years, or as the skin distends, and is strengthened, with the growth of our bodies. As fundamentals should be a rule to laws, so may laws be made quite contrary to fundamentals, and that are a violation of a constitution: as in architecture one part of a building may not harmonise with another, or as a picture may be so disposed in its parts as to have no repose. Trial by a jury of our peers must be allowed, and is allowed by all, however and whenever first acquired, to be a fundamental now in the English Constitution. The privileges of either house of parliament, whatever may be said for or against their existence, depend on, at least should harmonise with, the common law, or statute law. Precedents may certainly, in the question about privileges, be produced on one side giving sanction to a claim, and on the other, destroying that claim. This has lately been done. How then shall we settle the dispute? The proper way is, to refer it to fundamentals, as laws themselves are, according to the principle of Chap. II. of the Confirmation of the Charters of the Liberties of England and of the Forest, made in the 35th year of Edward I.-" And we will, that if any judgment be given from henceforth contrary to the points of the charters aforesaid, it shall be undone and holden for nought."

Precedents, if bad, are the cobwebs in a temple, which should be swept away; laws, injurious or unmeaning, the cabala of superstitious and dark ages, the lumber of the place, over which people are liable to stumble and fall, should be repealed or set aside; but fundamentals are the sacred fire, which should be left always burning on the altar.

Fundamentals in a constitution are a rule for governments, and influential in the whole political system. Statutes, too, sanctioned, and repeatedly confirmed, on constitutional principles, gradually become a part of the constitution itself. A fundamental is, in short, the sap which springs from the root, rises in the trunk, and is transfused through all the ramifications of the tree; the vital principle, which, in animal life, flows in the blood, and operates on all the humors and muscles, the solids and veins; the basis, and buttresses, and rafters, on which the building is raised, or from which it derives all its consistency and strength. It is on this subject I consider William Penn as having written so well.

In speaking of a human body, we say a man is of a good or bad constitution, in reference to that temperature which has a tendency to preserve health and vigor, or which inclines to feebleness, disease, and sickness; though a good constitution may be impaired by sloth, and ruined by intemperance; while a bad one may be improved by exercise, and invigorated by sobriety and good regimen:-the same in a political constitution of a nation.

To be more particular. As men, we have a natural claim to existence, to liberty, to religion, to whatever comes under the denomination of personal rights; as members of a civil society, to frame the laws by which those rights are to be administered, and to share the power by which those laws are made: and on these principles are grounded, as we have just now observed, our present claims to parliaments and juries, the proudest and paramount claims in an Englishman's birth-right and this is the ground taken by Mr. Locke, in his two Treatises of Civil Government, against Sir Robert Filmer, as the foundation of government, of the English government, as settled at the Revolution.

To be still more particular. There are three forms of civil polity, (of which that is the least lawful and natural which Mr. Hobbes and Sir Robert Filmer pronounce most so ;)—the first, where the state is governed by one man; the second, when by a few, supposed to be the best; the third, when it is said to rest with the people. By some ancients, there was conceived a transcendent form, possessing an union of the excellencies of all, without the defects of either, or, in which all the good qualities, and all the bad, should be so intermixed, as by a sublime species of alchymy, to be transmuted into gold: with them indeed ideal, pleasing to talk about, like the music of the spheres, though nowhere to be heard; and supposed to be unattainable in fact, like perfection in man.

Aristotle' thought a polity mixed of many was the best.

Machiavel observes, "there never was, nor is at this day, any government in the world, by which one man has rule and dominion, but it is either a commonwealth or a monarchy."

The English, and the admirers of the English Constitution, lay claim both to the theory and reality of that wonder of antiquity; a constitution, which, they say, unites, as in the links of a chain, the power of monarchy, the wisdom of aristocracy, and the virtue of democracy: this has been called a free monarchy, and proclaimed, whether truly or not, the most excellent form of government in the world. And thus much for general observation.

Of the three powers or estates in the English Constitution, the first is the King: he, in a certain sense, has no superior. Ipse non debet esse sub homine, says Bracton, sed sub Deo, et habet Deum tantum superiorem judicem. "He ought not to be under man but under God, and has God only for his superior judge."

I introduce the above passage for the sake of Sir Robert Cotton's exposition: "The Queen or King of England's power is absolute, in acknowledging no superior, nor in vassalage to Pope or Emperor. For that subjection which by King John was made to

Пegs Hoλrınwv, lib. i. cap. vi,