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Binding in Conscience: Early Modern English Protestants and Spanish Thomists on Law and the Fate of the Soul

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2015

Richard J. Ross
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In Romans 13:5, St. Paul famously announced that Christians must obey law not only for fear of punishment, but also “for conscience sake.” Early modern Protestants and Catholics agreed that violations of laws that bound conscience, if unrepented, threatened damnation. But not all law obligated conscience. Natural law typically did. So did Jesus's injunctions and God's moral law revealed in the Old Testament, but not His judicial law governing civic affairs or His ceremonial law regulating Jewish religious observance. Human laws about things indifferent, matters neither commanded nor forbidden in scripture and nature, presented the most complicated case. Disobedience to only certain classes of human laws—but not all—imperiled the soul. Catholics and Protestants fiercely debated how to distinguish rulers’ ordinances that bound conscience from those that did not. This article explores the principles that animated the dispute and the methods used for linking human law to the fate of the soul or challenging that connection.

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Law and History Review , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , November 2015 , pp. 803 - 837
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2015 

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References

1. In the King James Bible, the passage reads: “Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.” Early modern commentators also cited other scriptural prooftexts in support of the idea that law could bind the conscience, for example, 1 Peter 2:13–14 and Proverbs 8:15. I will use “Romans 13:5” as a shorthand to refer to this cluster of scriptural verses.

2. For the Catholics, see Fernando Vázquez Menchaca (trans. Fidel Rodríguez Alcalde), Controversiarum Illustrium Aliarumque Usu Frequentium Libri Tres [Three Books Concerning Prominent Disputes] (1564), book 1, ch. 29 (Valladolid, 1931–33), II:188; Francisco Suárez, “De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore (1612),” in Selections from Three Works of Francisco Suárez, book 2, ch. 9 , trans. Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown, and John Waldron (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), II, 224–30. For the Protestants, see William Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience, 1608 ed.”, in William Perkins, 1558–1602, English Puritanist: His Pioneer Works on Casuistry, ed. Thomas F. Merrill (Nieuwkoop: B. De Fraaf, 1966), 11–22; William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (London, 1639 [in Latin, 1632]), 166; William Fenner, The Soul's Looking Glass (Cambridge, 1640), 267; and Robert Sanderson (trans. Chr. Wordsworth), Bishop Sanderson's Lectures on Conscience and Human Law: Delivered in the Divinity School at Oxford (Lincoln: Rivingtons, 1877 [MS, 1647), 113–18. Some advanced Protestants, whom I term “Mosaic legalists,” believed that certain precepts of Old Testament judicial law still bound contemporary Christians. This was a minority position among Calvinists. Ross, Richard J., “Distinguishing Eternal from Transient Law: Natural Law and the Judicial Laws of Moses,” Past and Present 217 (2012): 79–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. As I use the term here, “human law” includes statutes, orders by officials, judicial decisions, and customs, but excludes contracts and vows.

4. See, for example, Francisco Suárez (trans. José Ramón Eguillor Muniozguren), Tratado de las Leyes y de Dios Legislador (De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore/Treatise Concerning the Laws and God the Legislator) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1967), II:288–90 (book 3, ch. 21, para. 8, 12); and Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium: Or, the Rule of Conscience (London, 1660), II:80. The contrary view, expressed by the jurist Fernando Vázquez Menchaca, was that amoral subjects feared immediate, visible temporal punishment more than far-off, invisible divine chastisement. Vázquez Menchaca, Controversiarum, II:190 (book 1, ch. 29).

5. See, for example, Henry R. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London: Longmans, Green, 1949); Elliott Rose, Cases of Conscience: Alternatives to Recusants and Puritans under Elizabeth I and James I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Johann Sommerville, “Conscience, Law, and Things Indifferent: Arguments on Toleration from the Vestiarian Controversy to Hobbes,” in Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Harald E. Braun, and Edward Vallance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 166–79; Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); and Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity During the Seventeenth Century, with Special Reference to Jeremy Taylor (London: S.P.C.K., 1952).

6. See, for example, on literature: Meg Lota Brown, Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); and Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); and on equity: Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 59–86; and Dennis R. Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010).

7. Controversialists put Romans 13:5 at the center of, for example, the Catholic assault on the Elizabethan regime, the royalist and parliamentary cases in the English Civil War, and the Engagement Controversy in 1649–52.

8. Such was the majority view. A strict predestinarian position would hold that lawbreaking did not invite damnation as much as emerge from reprobate status.

9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Q96, article 4; Robert Bellarmine (trans. Kathleen E. Murphy), De Laicis = Or, The treatise on Civil Government, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1928 [1586–93]), 46–47; Luis de Molina (trans. Manuel Fraga Iribarne), Los Seis Libros de la Justicia y el Derecho (De Justitia et Jure/Concerning Justice and Right), (Madrid: J. L. Cosano, 1944 [1593–1609] ]), I:704–5, 723–25 (Disputation 73, “De Si La Ley Humana Obliga en el Fuero de la Conciencia”); Domingo De Soto (trans. P. Marcelino González Ordóñez), De Iustitia et Iure = De la Justicia y del Derecho (Concerning Justice and Right), (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1967–68 [1553]), I:50 (book 1, quest. 6, art. 4).

10. De Soto, De Iustitia, IV:750 (book 8, quest. 2, art. 3).

11. Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [MS, 1533–34 ]), 179; De Soto, De Iustitia, I:53–54 (book 1, quest. 6, art. 4); Bellarmine, De Laicis, 47; Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:302 (book 3, ch. 25).

12. Jerónimo Moreno, Reglas ciertas, y precisamente necessarias para juezes, y ministros de justicia de las Indias, y para sus confessores (Puebla de los Angeles, 1732 [originally published, 1637]), 43–50. I am indebted to Brian Owensby for drawing my attention to Moreno's work. See Owensby, “The Theater of Conscience in the ‘Living Law’ of the Indies,” in New Horizons of Spanish Colonial Law: Contributions to Transnational Early Modern Legal History, ed. Thomas Duve and Heikki Pihlajamäki (forthcoming, Frankfurt, Germany: Max Planck Institute, 2015).

13. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:306 (book 3, ch. 26, para. 4).

14. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III:467 (book 5, ch. 3, para. 10).

15. Bellarmine, De Laicis, 47; Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:304–5 (book 3, ch. 25, para. 8–10); and Suárez, De Legibus, in Selections, II:226–27 (book 3, ch. 9].

16. By the same reasoning, theft exceeded lying in its damage to charity. Bellarmine, De Laicis, 47.

17. De Soto, De Iustitia, III:420–21 (book 5, quest. 3, art. 3).

18. Ibid., 487 (book 5, quest. 10, art. 2).

19. Telling a harmful lie was a mortal sin; telling a helpful lie was a venial sin. Ibid., 421–22, 425–26 (book 5, quest. 3, art. 3). Cursing, normally a mortal sin, could become venial if the offender hoped to inflict only minimal evil or if the curse escaped the mouth of a distracted speaker. Ibid., 503 (book 5, quest. 12, art. 2); and Bellarmine, De Laicis, 47. A law that appeared to deal with a trivial matter could be “upgraded” to obligate mortal sin if the precept was actually the means to an important end. Consider, for example, an order not to enter a particular house. The subject matter of this edict, seemingly unimportant, might be grave enough to warrant the penalty of mortal sin if the order was a means to avoid the temptation to sin. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II,:304–5 (book 3, ch. 25).

20. The starting point for discussion of this matter was Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, Question 96, Article 4. Characteristically, this exception contained an exception: Even at the cost of scandal and public disruption, Catholics must reject human ordinances that violate divine or natural law. De Soto, De Iustitia, I:51 (book 1, quest. 6, art. 4).

21. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:328 (book 3, ch. 30, para. 7), and II:252–53 (Book 3, ch. 25, para. 6).

22. I say “legislator” rather than prince and/or council because customary law could also bind the conscience. Suárez, De Legibus, in Selections, II, 576–78 (book 7, ch. 16, para. 1–3).

23. Rose, Cases, 66. A discussion of the distinction between penal laws and ordinances binding in conscience, as understood by Suárez and Catholics in dialogue with him, can be found in David Cowan Bayne, Conscience, Obligation, and the Law: The Moral Binding Power of the Civil Law (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1966).

24. Theologians commonly distinguished a “pure” from a “mixed” penal law. The latter included a command or prohibition and, therefore, obligated conscience. De Soto, De Iustitia, I:56–57 (book 1, quest. 6, art. 5); and Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III:468–71 (Book 5, ch, 3 and 4).

25. In addition to the notion of the legislator's intent as efficient cause, theorists likened his intent to the soul that animated the law with its obligatory force. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:312 (book 3, ch. 27, para. 10, 11).

26. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:313–14 (book 3, ch. 27, para. 14).

27. Vitoria, Political Writings, 178–79; De Soto, De Iustitia, I:53–54 (book 1, quest. 6, art. 4); and Bellarmine, De Laicis, 52. Although agreeing that the difference between venial and mortal sins comes from the nature of things rather than the legislator's will, Suárez followed a minority approach by going on to say that rulers could choose to obligate under only venial sin in a grave matter if they declared their choice sufficiently. Their liberty to “downgrade” punishment in this fashion did not imply a corresponding power to “upgrade” punishment. Superiors could not bind under mortal sin when legislating about an insubstantial matter. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:305 (book 3, ch. 26, para. 1], and II:309–11 (book 3, ch. 27 para. 3, 6, 7, 9]. By contrast, Jerónimo Moreno specifically denied the legislator's power to “downgrade” and prohibit a grave matter merely under venial sin. Moreno, Reglas ciertas, 48–49.

28. Vázquez Menchaca, Controversiarum, II:189–90 (book 1, ch. 29).

29. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:315–21 (book 3, ch. 28, para. 5, 6, 15, 16, 22–24).

30. Juan de Solórzano Pereira, Política Indiana [Government in the Indies] (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 1996 [1648]), I:521–22 (book II, ch. 24, para. 37–38).

31. Protestants concurred with Catholics in defining unjust ordinances as those contravening divine and natural law, imposing unequal burdens on the community, exceeding the ruler's powers, or furthering his interests rather than the common good. See, for example, Ames, Conscience, 167; John Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached at Hampton Court before the Kings Majesty (London, 1606), B1r ; Fenner, Soul's Looking Glass, 299–302; Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usury (London, 1611), 83–84, 89; Perkins, Discourse, 12, 34–35; Sanderson, Lectures, 127, 132–44, 173, 175; Taylor, Ductor, II:32–33; and Andrew Willet, Hexapla, that is, a Six–fold Commentary upon the Most Divine Epistle of the Holy Apostle Saint Paul to the Romans (Cambridge, 1611), 617. See, generally, Slights, Casuistical Tradition, 24–27.

32. Ames, Conscience, 168–69; Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory; Or A Sum of Practical Cases of Conscience (London, 1673), IV:37–38; Fenton, Usury, 81–82; Joseph Hall, Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practical Cases of Conscience, 3rd ed. (London, 1654), 217–18; Perkins, Discourse, 36–37; Sanderson, Lectures, 126, 243, 245; Taylor, Ductor, II:79–81; and Willet, Hexapla, 617.

33. Ames, Conscience, 168–69; Fenner, Soul's Looking Glass, 305; Hall, Resolutions, 218–19; Perkins, Discourse, 35–36; William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606), in William Perkins, 1558–1602, English Puritanist, 97, 199–200; John Sharp, A Discourse Concerning Conscience: Wherein An Account is Given of the Nature and Rule and Obligation of It (London, 1684), 14–15; Taylor, Ductor, II, 11–15, 36; Willet, Hexapla, 619; Thomas Wilson, A Commentary Upon the Most Divine Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans (London, 1614), 1098–99.

34. John Davenant (trans. Rev. Josiah Allport), A Treatise on Justification = Or the Disputatio de Justitia Habituali et Actuali, Together with Translations of the “Determinationes” of the Same Author, (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1844–46 [in Latin, 1631]), I:343–44 (Disputatio), and II:383 (Determinationes); and Perkins, Whole Treatise, 96. On the Protestant rejection of venial sin, see Brown, Donne, 58–61; Arthur R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 161; McAdoo, Structure, 80, 82, 100, 107; Rose, Cases, 72; and Wood, English Casuistical Divinity, xix, 138–39.

35. Perkins, Discourse, 37; Fenton, Usury, 82; Wilson, Commentary, 1099; and Richard Field, Of the Church (London, 1606), 271.

36. Field, Of the Church, 271.

37. Perkins, Whole Treatise, 96–97. See also Davenant, Determinationes, I, 383–85; Joseph Hall, “Sacred Polemics,” in The Works of Joseph Hall (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1837), XI:342; Robert Sanderson, “Ad Aulum,” Sermon IV, in The Works of Robert Sanderson, ed. William Jacobson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1854), I:86–111; and Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium; Or, The Doctrine and Practice of Repentance (London, 1655), 111–18

38. Sanderson, Lectures, 87–88. Among many other statements of this idea, see, for example, Henry Hammond, Of Conscience (Oxford, 1645), 8–9.

39. Common law principles seldom appeared in the writings of the English participants in the debate, mainly divines, who absorbed some civil and canon law at the universities and in theological works that circulated among nations with dissimilar municipal legal systems.

40. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III:529–35 (book 5, ch. 14,  para. 1, 2, 13).

41. Ibid., III:535–36 (book 5, ch. 15, para. 1, 2).

42. Taylor, Ductor, II:35–36. The ruler did not need to impose burdens with strict parity. The English divine John Buckeridge acknowledged that “an equal proportion of honors and burdens” must take account of the “difference and degree of several estates, conditions, and qualities.” Buckeridge, Sermon, B1r. This interpretation legitimated the hierarchical group-specific—and hence unequal—assignment of duties so common in early modern Europe. But it also afforded, at least in theory, another way to shield the conscience. Subjects could attack laws imposing mathematical parity for being blind to the necessary distinctions required by “conditions and qualities.” To correlate privileges and burdens with the “difference and degree” of groups was no easy matter. Legislative efforts to do so could easily be thought to misconstrue the demands of proper distributive—or in Aristotelian terms, “geometrical”—justice. On this view, rulers who established the wrong sort of equality potentially released the soul from obligation.

43. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:265–68 (book 3, ch. 16, para. 4–13); Sanderson, Lectures, 229–30; and Taylor, Ductor, II:44–45.

44. Sanderson, Lectures, 208, 220–22. For arguments deemphasizing subjects’ right of consent to legislation, see Suárez, De Legibus, in Selections, II, 591 (book 7, ch. 18); and Taylor, Ductor, II:46–48.

45. See, generally, Carleton Kemp Allen, Law in the Making, 7th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 133–46; and Donald R. Kelley, “‘Second Nature’: The Idea of Custom in European Law, Society, and Culture,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 131–72.

46. Taylor, Ductor, II:14, 23; see also Ames, Conscience, 168; Baxter, Christian Directory, IV: 37–38.

47. Catholic sources include: Bellarmine, Laicis, 46; Suarez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:288 (book 3, ch. 21, para. 8], and II:300 (book 3, ch. 24, para. 3). Compare Vázquez Menchaca, Controversiarum Illustrium, II:187 (book 1, ch. 29). For the Protestants: Fenner, Soul's Looking Glass, 268–69, 296–97; Sanderson, Lectures, 125, 198; Taylor, Ductor, II:9, 359–63; and Baxter, Christian Directory, IV:38.

48. Simon À Groenewegen (trans. Victor Sampson), Treatise on Roman Laws Abrogated and Not in Force in Holland & Neighboring Countries, (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, 1908 [originally published in Latin in the Netherlands, 1649]), 15–17, 20–21.

49. Suárez, De Legibus, in Selections, II:419–37 (book 6, ch. 9); Ames, Conscience, 168; Taylor, Ductor, II:411; and George Dawson, Origo Legum: Or, a Treatise of the Origin of Laws, and their Obliging Power (London, 1694), 198–99.

50. Suárez, De Legibus, in Selections, II, 589–98 (book 7, ch. 18): Ames, Conscience, 168; and Dawson, Origo Legum, 218. Villarroel is discussed in Victor Tau Anzoátegui, El poder de la costumbre: Estudios sobre el derecho consuetudinario en América hispana hasta la emancipación (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, 2001), 73–75. Jeremy Taylor dissented from the bulk of Spanish Thomist and English Protestant theologians by denying the power of custom to annul law. He pointed to the textbook uncertainties about custom: Who was to judge the reasonableness of usages, and by what standard? What proportion of a community must consent? Taylor, Ductor, II:430.

51. On interpretation, see Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, IV:647–51 (book 6, ch. 5); Taylor, Ductor, II:407–410; and Dawson, Origo Legum, 187–89. On dispensation, see Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, IV:673–752 (book 6, ch. 10–24); Taylor, Ductor, II:423–26; and Dawson, Origo Legum, 199–209.

52. “Ruin” could be understood in theological as well as physical and economic terms. English minister William Fenner held that magistrates’ commandments do not bind conscience if they tempt the average person to sin. His Protestant imagination came up with the example of an ordinance forbidding marriage among clergy, which would encourage fornication by ministers unable to live alone. Fenner, Soul's Looking Glass, 299–300.

53. De Soto, De Iustitia, I:54–55 (book I, quest. 6, art. 4); Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:326–31 (book 3, ch. 30); Ames, Conscience, 168; Sanderson, Lectures, 128–29, 165–68; Taylor, Ductor, II:26–36; Baxter, Christian Directory, IV, 38; and Dawson, Origo Legum 198.

54. Sanderson, Lectures, 166–167; Taylor, Ductor, II:35; and Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III:554 (book 5, ch. 18, para. 25).

55. Taylor, Ductor, II:423.

56. As a last resort, a theologian could argue that a subject was bound in conscience to obey a law whose reason had ceased, in order to uphold the ruler's authority. This example, and all others in the above paragraph, presuppose that obedience to the ordinance created no ill effects in society. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, IV:652–65 (book 6, ch. 6–8); Suárez, De Legibus, in Selections, II:419–37 (book 6, ch. 9); Ames, Conscience, 168; Taylor, Ductor, II:411–15; and Dawson, Origo Legum, 198–99.

57. Ames, Conscience, 168; Sanderson, Lectures, 127–28, 265–66 (quote, 265); and Taylor, Ductor, II:33, 35.

58. Sanderson, Lectures, 172:176–77.

59. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III:535 (book 5, ch. 15, para. 1). See also ibid. III:550–52 (book 5, ch. 18, para. 16, 20); Suárez, De Legibus, in Selections, II:430 (book 6, ch. 9, para. 12); Ames, Conscience, 169; Sanderson, Lectures, 175–79, 267; and Taylor, Ductor, II:36, (“certain, notorious” quote, 128).

60. “An Ordinance for Taking Away the Book of Common Prayer” (1645), in Charles H. Firth and Robert S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1911), 582–607.

61. William Jacobson, ed. The Works of Robert Sanderson, D.D., Sometime Bishop of Lincoln, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1854), V:37.

62. Robert Sanderson, “The Case of the Use of the Liturgy,” in Nine Cases of Conscience (London, 1678), 157–92. Edward Vallance provides the date of the manuscript, valuable background to the dispute, and an insightful reading of the case in “The Dangers of Prudence: Salus Populi Suprema Lex, Robert Sanderson, and the ‘Case of the Liturgy,’” Renaissance Studies 23 (2009): 534–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar (dating of the manuscript and Sanderson's reaction to the statute, 535–36).

63. Sanderson, “Case of the Liturgy,” 168–71, 175. Compare Lake, Peter G., “Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson,” Journal of British Studies 27 (1988): 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. Sanderson, Lectures, 267, 128–29.

65. Sanderson, “Case of the Liturgy,” 176.

66. On this point, and for a well-selected list of relevant scholars, see Decock, Wim, “From Law to Paradise: Confessional Catholicism and Legal Scholarship,” Rechtsgeschichte 18 (2011): 12–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 13–16, 20–22, (the term “juridification” at 13 n. 18); Wim Decock, Theologians and Contract Law: The Moral Transformation of the Ius Commune (ca. 1500–1650) (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2012), 37–40, 46–56.

67. Decock, “Paradise,” 13–16, 20–22; Decock, Theologians and Contract Law, 37–40, 46–56; Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse, 161, 169–70; and Klinck, Conscience, Equity, 76, 113.

68. Vallance, Edward, “The Kingdom's Case: The Use of Casuistry as a Political Language,” Albion 34 (2002): 558CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69. Vitoria, Political Writings, 174–75; Molina, De Justitia, VI(2):721–22; and Bellarmine, De Laicis, 46–47 (for a slightly different statement of this idea, see 51). Suárez likewise styled human law as a second and proximate cause that is supported by the eternal law, the first cause. Operating as a secondary cause, the ruler's ordinances obligated divine will and, therefore, bound the fuero (jurisdiction) of conscience. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:288, 290 (book 3, ch. 21, para. 7, 11).

70. On this latter point, see Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:291 (book 3, ch. 21, para. 15), and II:300 (book 3, ch. 24, para. 3).

71. Perkins, Discourse, 22.

72. Field, Of the Church, 274. See also, for example, Thomas Barnes, The Court of Conscience (London, 1623), 80–81; Thomas Cobbet, The Civil Magistrates Power in Matters of Religion (London, 1653), 53–54; and Willet, Hexapla, 617.

73. Perkins, Discourse, 33–34; see also Perkins, Whole Treatise, 99–100. In general accord with Perkins’ analysis, see Ames, Conscience, 6, 51, 167; Baxter, Christian Directory, IV:36–37; Fenner, Soul's Looking Glass, 267–68; Fenton, Usury, 82–83; Robert Rollock, Lectures upon the Epistles of Paul to the Colossians (London, 1603), 201–202; and Willet, Hexapla, 617.

74. Perkins’ arguments tend towards the obscure in places. Interpreters have disagreed on how best to understand him. Some scholars read him as denying or severely questioning the ability of human law to bind conscience. See, for example, Sommerville, “Conscience, Law,” 168; Rose, Cases, 187–89; and Breward, Ian, “William Perkins and the Origins of Reformed Casuistry,” Evangelical Quarterly 40 (1968): 14Google Scholar. My reading—that Perkins believed that magistrates’ ordinances could bind conscience not in their own right, but mediately on account of God's divine command to subjects to obey superiors—finds support in, for example, Klinck, Conscience, Equity, 117, and Slights, Casuistical Tradition, 23 (referring to the Reformed tradition more generally rather to Perkins specifically).

75. On the question of why, see Sanderson, Lectures, 143–45; and Taylor, Ductor, II, 6–7, 20–21.

76. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III, 525–55 (book 5, ch. 13–18); and Taylor, Ductor, II:35–36, 124–29.

77. Suárez concludes that natural law, the law of nations, and the early modern European gloss of Roman law (the ius commune) allow taxation without popular consent. The law of the various kingdoms and provinces of Spain sometimes insisted on the people's approval of taxes, and sometimes did not. Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III:543–45 (book 5, ch. 17).

78. Margaret A. Judson, From Tradition to Political Reality: A Study of the Ideas Set Forth in Support of the Commonwealth Government in England, 1649–1653 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1980), 26–29; Vallance, Edward, “Oaths, Casuistry, and Equivocation: Anglican Responses to the Engagement Controversy,” Historical Journal 44 (2001): 59–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vallance, “Kingdom's Case;” John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 9–68.

79. Sanderson, Lectures, 134–43, 203–9, 220–22; Taylor, Ductor, II:46–48, 130–173.

80. For an insightful analysis of Sanderson's treatment of the Engagement controversy as a case of conscience, see Slights, Casuistical Tradition, 43–59.

81. Taylor, Ductor, II:429–30.

82. Ibid., II:35, 39–40, 413. This development was marked among Anglican casuists but not confined to them. By the middle seventeenth century, nonconformists’ cases of conscience evoked notions of desuetude, cessation of reason, contrary custom, and impossibility of performance. See, for example, Ames, Conscience, 168; Baxter, Christian Directory, IV:37–38.

83. De Soto, De Iustitia, I, 58–68 (book 1, quest. 6, art. 6); Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, III:487–507, 545–55 (book 5, ch. 7–9, 18).

84. On how the uncertain division between the internal fuero of conscience and the external fuero of temporal punishment resembled the rivalry of jurisdictions endemic in European legal pluralism, see Richard J. Ross and Philip J. Stern, “Reconstructing Early Modern Notions of Legal Pluralism,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, ed. Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 120–21.

85. Sanderson insisted that “the command of a father is as much a rule of action to the son as the law of ruler is to the subject.” Sanderson, Lectures, 125. See also Baxter, Christian Directory, IV:38; Fenner, Soul's Looking Glass, 268–69, 296–97; Fenton, Usury, 81–82; and Taylor, Ductor, II:9.

86. Sanderson, Lectures, 155–56, 223–24. See also Thomas Scot, God and the King (London, 1631), 12.

87. Sanderson, Lectures, 201–3.

88. McAdoo, Structure, 10–11, 15, 34, 37, 80, 120, 127–30; Wood, English Casuistical Divinity, xii, xvii–xviii, 64–66. Echoes of this position can be heard in Harold E. Braun and Edward Vallance, “Introduction,” in Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Braun and Vallance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), xv.

89. McAdoo, Structure, 60.

90. The leading Catholic opponent was the late medieval French theologian Jean Gerson. Human laws, contended Gerson, could not bind conscience if legislating in their own right, only if declaring or interpreting divine law. Even then, rulers could put the soul under the threat only of venial sin, not mortal sin, except in cases of contempt. Gerson served as a foil for early modern Catholics supporting the power of human rulers to bind conscience. See, for example, De Soto, De Iustitia, I:52–53 (book 1, quest. 6, art. 4); Bellarmine, De Laicis, 41; and Suárez, De Legibus, in Tratado, II:287 (book 3, ch 21, para. 4). Prominent doubters among British Protestants included the Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford, The Divine Right of Church Government and Excommunication (London, 1646), 203–18; and Church of Ireland Bishop James Ussher, A Body of Divinity (London: 1645), 266.

91. Perkins and Ames did not, of course, originate English Protestant reflection on the problem of law binding in conscience. Rather, they rebutted Catholic arguments and set forth alternatives at a length and level of care exceeding their sixteenth century predecessors. On these earlier efforts, see Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean.

92. Jonsen and Toulmin, Abuse, 163; Edmund Leites, “Introduction” and “Casuistry and Character,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge, 1988), 3, 119–20; Margaret Sampson, “Laxity and Liberty in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought,” in Conscience and Casuistry, 86–89, 117; Keith Thomas, “Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 49–54; and Vallance, “Kingdom's Case,” 581–83.