Reformed Covenanter
Cancelled Commissioner
M.—Certainly I cannot deny that such princes deserved, and still deserve, to be fettered by laws; for no monster is more outrageous, or more pernicious than man, when, as in the fables of the poets, he has once degenerated into a brute.
B.—On this assertion you would insist still more if you had remarked what a complicated animal man is, and of what various monsters he is composed. This truth the ancient poets discerned with great acuteness, and expressed with no less elegance, when they record that, in the formation of man, Prometheus borrowed from the several animals certain particles with which he constituted his mingled frame. To recount the natures of all separately would be endless; but, undoubtedly, there appear evidently in man two abominable monsters, anger and lust.
And what else is the effect, or the object of laws, but to render these monsters obedient to reason, and to coerce them, while not obedient, by the power of their mandates. He, therefore, who releases either a king, or any other man, from the shackles of law, releases not only a single man, but sets loose against reason two of the most cruel monsters, and arms them for breaking through the barriers of order; so that truth and rectitude seem to have guided the tongue of Aristotle, when he said that “He who obeys the laws, obeys God and the law; and that he who obeys man, obeys man and a wild beast.”
For the reference, see George Buchanan on kings being bound by law.
B.—On this assertion you would insist still more if you had remarked what a complicated animal man is, and of what various monsters he is composed. This truth the ancient poets discerned with great acuteness, and expressed with no less elegance, when they record that, in the formation of man, Prometheus borrowed from the several animals certain particles with which he constituted his mingled frame. To recount the natures of all separately would be endless; but, undoubtedly, there appear evidently in man two abominable monsters, anger and lust.
And what else is the effect, or the object of laws, but to render these monsters obedient to reason, and to coerce them, while not obedient, by the power of their mandates. He, therefore, who releases either a king, or any other man, from the shackles of law, releases not only a single man, but sets loose against reason two of the most cruel monsters, and arms them for breaking through the barriers of order; so that truth and rectitude seem to have guided the tongue of Aristotle, when he said that “He who obeys the laws, obeys God and the law; and that he who obeys man, obeys man and a wild beast.”
For the reference, see George Buchanan on kings being bound by law.