in act, will serve the turn, I should not much envy it to any of Sir Robert’s friends, that he thought fit graciously to bestow it upon; though even this of act and habit, if it signified anything but our A. ’s skill in distinctions, be not to his purpose in this place. For the question is not here about Adam’s actual exercise of government, but actually having a title to be governor. Government, says our A. was “due to Adam by the right of nature”: what is this right of nature? A right fathers have over their children by begetting them; generatione jus acquiritur parentibus in liberos , says our A. out of Grotius, de J. B. P. L. 2. C. 5. S. 1. The right then follows the begetting as arising from it; so that, according to this way of reasoning or distinguishing of our A. Adam, as soon as he was created, had a title only in habit, and not in act, which in plain English is, he had actually no title at all.
To speak less learnedly, and more intelligibly, one may say of Adam, he was in a possibility of being governor, since it was possible he might beget children, and thereby acquire that right of nature, be it what it will, to govern them, that accrues from thence: but what connection has this with Adam’s creation, to make him say, that, “as soon as he was created, he was monarch of the world?” For it may as well be said of Noah, that as soon as he was born he was monarch of the world, since he was in possibility, (which in our A. ’s sense is enough to make a monarch, “a monarch in habit,”) to outlive all mankind but his own posterity. What such necessary connection there is betwixt Adam’s creation and his right to government, so that a “natural freedom of mankind cannot be supposed without the denial of the creation of Adam,” I confess for my part I do not see; nor how those words, “by the appointment, etc. ” Obs. 254. however explained, can be put together to make any tolerable sense, at least to establish this position with which they end, viz. “Adam was a king from his creation”; a king says our author, “not in act, but in habit,” i.e. actually no king at all.
I fear I have tired my reader’s patience, by dwelling longer on this passage, than the weightiness of any argument in it seems to require: but I have