divine and immutable law of primogeniture admit females, or
exclude them? On either supposition half the sovereigns of Europe
must be usurpers, reigning in defiance of the law of God, and
liable to be dispossessed by the rightful heirs. The doctrine
that kingly government is peculiarly favoured by Heaven receives
no countenance from the Old Testament; for in the Old Testament
we read that the chosen people were blamed and punished for
desiring a king, and that they were afterwards commanded to
withdraw their allegiance from him. Their whole history, far from
countenancing the notion that succession in order of
primogeniture is of divine institution, would rather seem to
indicate that younger brothers are under the especial protection
of heaven. Isaac was not the eldest son of Abraham, nor Jacob of
Isaac, nor Judah of Jacob, nor David of Jesse nor Solomon of
David Nor does the system of Filmer receive any countenance from
those passages of the New Testament which describe government as
an ordinance of God: for the government under which the writers
of the New Testament lived was not a hereditary monarchy. The
Roman Emperors were republican magistrates, named by the senate.
None of them pretended to rule by right of birth; and, in fact,
both Tiberius, to whom Christ commanded that tribute should be
given, and Nero, whom Paul directed the Romans to obey, were,
according to the patriarchal theory of government, usurpers. In
the middle ages the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right
would have been regarded as heretical: for it was altogether
incompatible with the high pretensions of the Church of Rome. It
was a doctrine unknown to the founders of the Church of England.
The Homily on Wilful Rebellion had strongly, and indeed too
strongly, inculcated submission to constituted authority, but had
made no distinction between hereditary end elective monarchies,