e voice; an example which I am far from
commending, being such as (if those governments were not cantonized,
divided, and subdivided into many petty sovereignties that balance one
another, and in which the nobility, except they had a prince at the head
of them, can never join to make work) would be the most dangerous
that ever was, but the Gothic, of which it favors. For in ancient
commonwealths you shall never find a nobility to have had a negative
but by the poll, which, the people being far more in number, came to
nothing; whereas these have it, be they never so few by their stamp or
order.

"Ours of Oceana have nothing else but their education and their leisure
for the public, furnished by their ease and competent riches: and their
intrinsic value, which, according as it comes to hold weight in the
judgment or suffrage of the people, is their only way to honor and
preferment. Wherefore I would have your lordships to look upon your
children as such, who, if they come to shake off some part of their
baggage, shall make the more quick and glorious march; for it was
nothing else but the baggage, sordidly plundered by the nobility of
Rome, that lost the victory of the whole world in the midst of her
triumph.

"Having followed the nobility thus close, they bring us, according to
their natural course and divers kinds, to the divers constitutions of
the Senate.

"That of Israel (as was shown by my right noble Lord Phosphorus de Auge,
in the opening of the commonwealth) consisted of seventy elders, elected
at first by the people. But whereas they were for life, they ever after
(though without any divine precept for it) substituted their successors
by ordination, which ceremony was most usually performed by imposition
of hands; and by this means a commonwealth of as popular institution
as can be found became, as it is accounted by Josephus, aristocratical.
From this ordination derives that which was introduced by the Apostles
into the Christian Church; for which cause I think it is that
the Presbyterians would have the government of the Church to be
aristocratical, though the Apostles, to the end, as I conceive, that
they might give no occasion to such a mistake, but show that they
intended the government of the Church to be popular, ordained elders,
as has been shown, by the holding up of hands (or free suffrage of the
people) in every congregation or ecclesia: for that is the word in the
original, being borrowed from th