[1160] Hallam, as last cited, p. 162. Bayle notes (art. "Althusius," and notes) that the treatise was much denounced in Germany.
[1161] Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. i, ch. x, § 8.
[1162] Amsterdam, 1689-90, 2 vols.
[1163] It is to be noted that "Passive Obedience" had different degrees of meaning for those who professed to believe in it. For some it meant merely not taking arms against the sovereign, and did not imply that he was entitled to active obedience in all things. See Hallam, ii, 463.
[1164] Filmer begins his Patriarcha (1680) with the remark that the doctrine of natural freedom and the right to choose governments had been "a common opinion ... since the time that school divinity began to flourish." Like Salmasius, he fathers the doctrine on the Papacy; and, indeed, the Church of Rome had notoriously employed it in its strifes with kings, at its own convenience; but it had as notoriously been put forward by many lay communities on their own behalf, and had been practically acted on in England over and over again. And it is clearly laid down in the third century by Tertullian, Ad Scapulam, ii.
[1165] Memoirs, 2nd ed. p. 177.
[1166] Though it is substantially maintained by Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, 1625, I, iii, 9-12.
[1167] Johnson was moved to pronounce Dryden the most excessive of the writers of his day in the "meanness and servility of hyperbolical adulation," excepting only Aphra Behn in respect of her address to "Eleanor Gwyn." But Malone vindicates the poet by citing rather worse samples, in particular Joshua Barnes's "Ode to Jefferies" (Life, in vol. i of Prose Works of Dryden, 1800, pp. 244-47). They all indicate the same corruption of judgment and character, special to the royalist atmosphere.
[1168] Toland's ed., 1700, p. 55.
[1169] Essay (xvi of pt. ii) on the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth. Cp. Essay vii, on the tendencies of the British Government, where Harrington's unpracticality is sufficiently indicated.