"Let them show us then why the same law may not justify much more a state or whole people, to do justice upon him against whom each private man may lawfully defend himself; seeing all kind of justice done is a defense to all good men, as well as a punishment to bad, and justice done upon a tyrant is no more but the necessary self-defense of a whole commonwealth. To war upon a king that his instruments may be brought to condign punishment, and thereafter to punish them the instruments, and not to spare only, but to defend and honor him the author, is the strangest piece of justice to be called Christian, and the strangest piece of reason to be called human, that by men of reverence and learning, as their style imports them, ever yet was vented. They maintain in the third and fourth section that a judge or inferior magistrate is anointed of God, is his minister, hath the sword in his hand, is to be obeyed by St. Peter's rule, as well as the supreme, and without difference anywhere expressed: and yet will have us fight against the supreme till he remove and punish the inferior magistrate (for such were greatest delinquents); whenas by scripture and reason there can be no more authority be shown to resist the one than the other; and altogether as much to punish or depose the supreme himself as to make war upon him till he punish or deliver up his inferior magistrates, whom in the same terms we are commanded to obey and not to resist."
Christopher Goodman
Of Obedience
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