But the vital error of Filmer was in assuming that the natural authority of the father over the child was either permanent or unlimited; and still more that the authority of the husband over the wife was unlimited. Sir Robert Filmer did not perceive that by the laws of nature and of God every individual human being is born with rights which no other individual, or combination of individuals, can take away; that all exercise of human authority must be under the limitation of right and wrong; and that all despotic power over human beings is exercised in _defiance_ of the laws of nature and of God--all, Sir John Falstaff's law of nature between the young dace and the old pike. The history of Filmer's work was remarkable. It was composed and published in the heat of the struggle between King Charles the First and the Commons of England, which terminated in the overthrow of the monarchy, and in the death of King Charles upon the scaffold. It was the theory of government on which _the cause_ of the house of Stuart was sustained. No man can be surprised that such a cause was swept away by a moral and political whirlwind; that it carried with it all the institutions of civil society, so that its march was a wild desolation. James, by relying on the principles of Filmer's theory, fell back into the arms of the Church of Rome, and vainly struggled to turn back the tide of religious reformation, and revive the divine right of kings, and passive obedience, and non-resistance. The republican spirit had slumbered on the white cliffs of Albion, and in his sleep, like the man-mountain in Lilliput, had been pinned down to the earth by the threads of a spider's web for cords. On the first reaeppearance of Filmer's book, he awoke, and, like the strong man in Israel, at the cost of his own life, shook down the temple of Dagon, and buried himself and the Philistines again under its ruins.