This Senate, in regard the legislator of Israel was infallible, and the laws given by God such as were not fit to be altered by men, is much different in the exercise of their power from all other senates, except that of the Areopagus in Athens, which also was little more than a supreme judicatory, for it will hardly, as I conceive, be found that the Sanhedrim proposed to the people till the return of the children of Israel out of captivity under Esdras, at which time there was a new law made--namely, for a kind of excommunication, or rather banishment, which had never been before in Israel. Nevertheless it is not to be thought that the Sanhedrim had not always that right, which from the time of Esdras is more frequently exercised, of proposing to the people, but that they forebore it in regard of the fulness and infallibility of the law already made, whereby it was needless. Wherefore the function of this Council, which is very rare in a senate, was executive, and consisted in the administration of the law made; and whereas the Council itself is often understood in Scripture by the priest and the Levite, there is no more in that save only that the priests and the Levites, who otherwise had no power at all, being in the younger years of this commonwealth, those that were best studied in the laws were the most frequently elected into the Sanhedrim. For the courts, consisting of three-and-twenty elders sitting in the gates of every city, and the triumvirates of judges constituted almost in every village, which were parts of the executive magistracy subordinate to the Sanhedrim, I shall take them at better leisure, and in the larger discourse; but these being that part of this commonwealth which was instituted by Moses upon the advice of Jethro the priest of Midian (as I conceive a heathen), are to me a sufficient warrant even from God himself, who confirmed them, to make further use of human prudence, wherever I find it bearing a testimony to itself, whether in heathen commonwealths or others; and the rather, because so it is, that we who have the holy Scriptures, and in them the original of a commonwealth, made by the same hand that made the world, are either altogether blind or negligent of it; while the heathens have all written theirs, as if they had had no other copy; as, to be more brief in the present account of that which you shall have more at large hereafter: Athens consisted of the Senate of the Bean proposing, of the Church or Assembly of the people resolving, and too often debating, which was the ruin of it; as also of the Senate of the Areopagus, the nine archons, with divers other magistrates, executing. Lacedaemon consisted of the Senate proposing, of the Church or congregation of the people resolving only, and never debating, which was the long life of it; and of the two kings, the court of the ephors, with divers other magistrates, executing.