ABSTRACT
With no small content I read Mr. Hobbes’s book De Cive, and his Leviathan, about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know, hath so amply and judiciously handled: I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it. It may seem strange I should praise his building, and yet mislike his foundation; but so it is, his Jus Naturae, and his Regnum Institutivum, will not down with me: they appear full of contradiction and impossibilities; a few short notes about them, I here offer, wishing he would consider whether his building would not stand firmer upon the principles of Regnum Patrimoniale (as he calls it) both according to scripture and reason.. Since he confesseth the ‘Father being before the institution of a commonwealth was originally an absolute sovereign with power of life and death’, and that ‘a great family, as to the rights of sovereignty is a little monarchy’. If according to the order of nature he had handled paternal government before that by institution, there would have been little liberty left in the subjects of the family to consent to institution of government.
