Lord, and the Lord said unto Samuel, hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say
unto thee, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign
over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them
up out of Egypt even unto this day wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other Gods:
so do they also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice, howbeit, protest solemnly
unto them and show them the manner of the King that shall reign over them,” i.e. not of any
particular King, but the general manner of the Kings of the earth whom Israel was so eagerly
copying after. And notwithstanding the great distance of time and difference of manners, the
character is still in fashion. “And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people, that
asked of him a King. And he said, This shall be the manner of the King that shall reign over
you. He will take your sons and appoint them for himself for his chariots and to be his
horsemen, and some shall run before his chariots” (this description agrees with the present
mode of impressing men) “and he will appoint him captains over thousands and captains over
fifties, will set them to ear his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of
war, and instruments of his chariots, And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries,
and to be cooks, and to be bakers” (this describes the expense and luxury as well as the
oppression of Kings) “and he will take your fields and your vineyards, and your olive yards,
even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed,
and of your vineyards, and give them to his officers and to his servants” (by which we see that
bribery, corruption, and favouritism, are the standing vices of Kings) “and he will take the
tenth of your men servants, and your maid servants, and your goodliest young men, and your
asses, and put them to his work: and he will take the tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his
servants, and ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shell have chosen,
and the Lord will not hear you in that day.” This accounts for the continuation of Monarchy;
neither do the characters of the few good kings which have lived since, either sanctify the
title, or blot out the sinfulness of the origin; the high encomium of David takes no notice of
him officially as a king, but only as a man after God’s own heart. “Nevertheless the people
refused to obey the voice of Samuel, and they said, Nay, but we will have a king over us, that
we may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us, and go out before us and fight
our battles.” Samuel continued to reason with them but to no purpose; he set before them
their ingratitude, but all would not avail; and seeing them fully bent on their folly, he cried
out, “I will call unto the Lord, and he shall send thunder and rain” (which was then a
punishment, being in the time of wheat harvest) “that ye may perceive and see that your
wickedness is great which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking you a king. So
Samuel called unto the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day, and all the people
greatly feared the Lord and Samuel. And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray for thy
servants unto the Lord thy God that we die not, for we have added unto our sins this evil, to
ask a king.” These portions of scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal
construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government
is true, or the scripture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much
of kingcraft as priestcraft in withholding the scripture from the public in popish countries. For
monarchy in every instance is the popery of government.
To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a
degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an
insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could
have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’
himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his
descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of
the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so
frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
Secondly, as no man at first could possess any other public honors than were bestowed upon
him, so the givers of those honors could have no power to give away the right of posterity,
and though they might say “We choose you for our head,” they could not without manifest
injustice to their children say “that your children and your children’s children shall reign over
ours forever.” Because such an unwise, unjust, unnatural compact might (perhaps) in the next
succession put them under the government of a rogue or a fool. Most wise men in their private