and peace; or of appointing teachers, and examining what doctrines are conformable or contrary to the defence, peace, and good of the people. Secondly, it is against his duty to let the people be ignorant, or misinformed of the grounds and reasons of those his essential rights; because thereby men are easy to be seduced, and drawn to resist him, when the commonwealth shall require their use and exercise.
And the grounds of these rights have the rather need to be diligently and truly taught; because they cannot be maintained by any civil law, or terror of legal punishment. For a civil law that shall forbid rebellion, (and such is all resistance to the essential rights of the sovereignty,) is not, as a civil law, any obligation, but by virtue only of the law of Nature, that forbiddeth the violation of faith: which natural obligation, if men know not, they cannot know the right of any law the sovereign maketh. And for the punishment, they take it but for an act of hostility; which when they think they have strength enough, they will endeavour by acts of hostility to avoid.
As I have heard some say, that justice is but a word, without substance; and that whatsoever a man can by force or art acquire to himself, not only in the condition of war, but also in a commonwealth, is his own, which I have already showed to be false: so there be also that maintain, that there are no grounds, nor principles of reason, to sustain those essential rights which make sovereignty absolute. For if there were, they would have been found out in some place or other; whereas we see there has not hitherto been any commonwealth, where those rights have been acknowledged or challenged. Wherein they argue as ill, as if the savage people of America should deny there were any grounds, or principles of reason, so to build a house as to last as long as the materials, because they never yet saw any so well built. Time and industry produce every day new knowledge. And as the art of well building is derived from principles of reason, observed by industrious men, that had long studied the nature of materials, and the divers effects of figure and proportion, long after