om him
it descended to his late majesty king George the second; and from him
to his grandson and heir, our present gracious sovereign, king George
the third.

HENCE it is easy to collect, that the title to the crown is at present
hereditary, though not quite so absolutely hereditary as formerly; and
the common stock or ancestor, from whom the descent must be derived,
is also different. Formerly the common stock was king Egbert; then
William the conqueror; afterwards in James the first's time the two
common stocks united, and so continued till the vacancy of the throne
in 1688: now it is the princess Sophia, in whom the inheritance was
vested by the new king and parliament. Formerly the descent was
absolute, and the crown went to the next heir without any restriction:
but now, upon the new settlement, the inheritance is conditional,
being limited to such heirs only, of the body of the princess Sophia,
as are protestant members of the church of England, and are married to
none but protestants.

AND in this due medium consists, I apprehend, the true constitutional
notion of the right of succession to the imperial crown of these
kingdoms. The extremes, between which it steers, are each of them
equally destructive of those ends for which societies were formed and
are kept on foot. Where the magistrate, upon every succession, is
elected by the people, and may by the express provision of the laws be
deposed (if not punished) by his subjects, this may sound like the
perfection of liberty, and look well enough when delineated on paper;
but in practice will be ever productive of tumult, contention, and
anarchy. And, on the other hand, divine indefeasible hereditary right,
when coupled with the doctrine of unlimited passive obedience, is
surely of all constitutions the most thoroughly slavish and dreadful.
But when such an hereditary right, as our laws have created and vested
in the royal stock, is closely interwoven with those liberties, which,
we have seen in a former chapter, are equally the inheritance of the
subject; this union will form a constitution, in theory the most
beautiful of any, in practice the most approved, and, I trust, in
duration the most permanent. It was the duty of an expounder of our
laws to lay this constitution before the student in it's true and
genuine light: it is the duty of every good Englishman to understand,
to revere, to defend it.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

OF THE KING'S ROYAL FAMILY.