partly already shown, and will
appear more at large by the following model.

The parties that are spiritual are of more kinds than I need mention;
some for a national religion, and others for liberty of conscience,
with such animosity on both sides, as if these two could not consist
together, and of which I have already sufficiently spoken, to show that
indeed the one cannot well subsist without the other But they of all the
rest are the most dangerous, who, holding that the saints must govern,
go about to reduce the commonwealth to a party, as well for the reasons
already shown, as that their pretences are against Scripture, where the
saints are commanded to submit to the higher powers, and to be subject
to the ordinance of man. And that men, pretending under the notion
of saints or religion to civil power, have hitherto never failed to
dishonor that profession, the world is full of examples, whereof I shall
confine myself at present only to a couple, the one of old, the other of
new Rome.

In old Rome, the patricians or nobility pretending to be the godly
party, were questioned by the people for engrossing all the magistracies
of that commonwealth, and had nothing to say why they did so, but that
magistracy required a kind of holiness which was not in the people;
at which the people were filled with such indignation as had come to
cutting of throats, if the nobility had not immediately laid by the
insolency of that plea; which nevertheless when they had done, the
people for a long time after continued to elect no other but patrician
magistrates.

The example of new Rome in the rise and practice of the hierarchy (too
well known to require any further illustration) is far more immodest.

This has been the course of nature; and when it has pleased or shall
please God to introduce anything that is above the course of nature,
he will, as he has always done, confirm it by miracle; for so in his
prophecy of the reign of Christ upon earth he expressly promises, seeing
that "the souls of them that were beheaded for Jesus, shall be seen to
live and reign with him;" which will be an object of sense, the rather,
because the rest of the dead are not to live again till the thousand
years be finished. And it is not lawful for men to persuade us that a
thing already is, though there be no such object of our sense, which God
has told us shall not be till it be an object of our sense.

The saintship of a people as to government,