_T. H._ His Lordship either had a strange conscience, or understood not English. Being at Paris when there was no bishop nor church in England, and every man writ what he pleased, I resolved (when it should please God to restore the authority ecclesiastical) to submit to that authority, in whatsoever it should determine. This his Lordship construes for a temporizing and too much indifferency in religion; and says further, that the last part of my words do smell of Jeroboam. To the contrary, I say my words were modest, and such as in duty I ought to use. And I profess still, that whatsoever the church of England (the church, I say, not every doctor) shall forbid me to say in matter of faith, I shall abstain from saying it, excepting this point, _that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for my sins_. As for other doctrines, I think it unlawful, if the church define them, for any member of the church to contradict them. _J. D._ His sixth paradox is a rapper: _The civil laws are the rules of good and evil, just and unjust, honest and dishonest; and therefore what the lawgiver commands, that is to be accounted good, what he forbids, bad_. And a little after: _Before empires were, just and unjust were not, as whose nature is relative to a command, every action in its own nature is indifferent_. That is, _just or unjust proceedeth from the right of him that commandeth. Therefore lawful kings make those things which they command just, by commanding them, and those things which they forbid, unjust by forbidding them._ To this add his definition of a sin, _that which one doth, or omitteth, saith, or willeth, contrary to the reason of the commonwealth, that is, the (civil) laws_. Where by the laws he doth not understand the written laws, elected and approved by the whole commonwealth, but the verbal commands or mandates of him that hath the sovereign power, as we find in many places of his writings. _The civil laws are nothing else but the commands of him, that is endowed with sovereign power in the commonwealth, concerning the future actions of his subjects. And the civil laws are fastened to the lips of that man who hath the sovereign power._ Where are we? In Europe? or in Asia, where they ascribed a divinity to their kings, and, to use his own phrase, made _them mortal gods; O king, live for ever_? Flatterers are the common moths of great palaces, where Alexander’s friends are more numerous than the king’s friends. But such gross, palpable, pernicious flattery as this is, I did never meet with, so derogatory both to piety and policy. What deserveth he who should do his uttermost endeavour to poison a common fountain, whereof all the commonwealth must drink? He doth the same who poisoneth the mind of a sovereign prince.