The Divine Right of Kings: 5

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James's arguments

Theories of divine right did not only rely on Scripture, which is the first of James's arguments, but also on claims about the nature of political society ('policy') and about 'natural philosophy' (what we would call science: a theory of the nature of the physical world). Thus, the second or political argument is that kingship is a natural form of government because it is like the natural hierarchy of the father of a family. And the third sort is that kingship reflects another part of the natural order, namely the physical body, where the head commands the body; (writers often spoke of civil society as a 'body politic').

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