The Voice of Jonadab Our Father

How far a father’s word binds his grown sons, and where God stops it

The sons of Jonadab were grown men with wives and children of their own when Jeremiah set wine before them in the house of the Lord, and they refused it because their father had told them not to drink. God held them up to Judah: “The sons of Jonadab the son of Rechab have kept the word which he commanded his children” (Jer. 42:14). John Locke drew the opposite line. He held that “The power of commanding ends with nonage,” and that past it a son owes his father honor and some deference but no duty to obey. This paper argues from Scripture and from the church before the Reformation that a father’s authority over his son does not end when the son comes of age. It changes form, and God bounds it by matter, not by a birthday.

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The question

Ask a married Christian man whether he must still obey his father, and one answer we hear often is that he must honor him but need not obey him. Obedience, on that answer, belongs to childhood and honor to the rest of life, so a father commands until his son comes of age and then only advises. The line falls at a birthday.

We test that line against Scripture and against the church before the Reformation. By authority we mean the right to be obeyed within a sphere God has set. By honor we mean what the fifth commandment requires: “Honour thy father and thy mother, that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long on the good land, which the Lord thy God gives to thee” (Exod. 20:12). The question is whether God ends a father’s authority at his son’s majority or draws its edges somewhere else.

We argue that Scripture draws them by matter, not by age. A grown son still owes his father obedience in the affairs of the family and the conduct of his life, and God limits the father at four points: God’s word over the father’s, the sword, the son’s own marriage and house, and the father’s own law. We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

The rule in its own words

The clearest statement of the modern rule is the chapter “Of Paternal Power” in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689). Locke begins from the premise of the whole book, that men are born free. “Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it” (§55). A father governs his son while the son lacks reason, “but when he comes to the estate that made his father a freeman, the son is a freeman too” (§58). In the England of his day the law presumed that estate “at the age of one and twenty years” (§59).

Locke did not throw out honor, and a fair reading has to say so. He held that “from this obligation no state, no freedom can absolve children” (§66), and that a grown son owes his parents “respect, honour, gratitude, assistance and support, all his life” (§170). What he removed was command. “The power of commanding ends with nonage,” he wrote, and after it a father has no right “that his will should prescribe to his son’s in all things,” though it may become the son “in many things, not very inconvenient to him and his family, to pay a deference to it” (§69).

Three more pieces complete the rule. Locke grounded a father’s power in his care, not in his fatherhood, so that it “belongs as much to the foster-father of an exposed child, as to the natural father of another” (§65). He measured the honor a grown son owes by what the father put into him, “more or less, as the father’s care, cost, and kindness in his education, has been more or less” (§67). And the hold a father keeps on a grown son through his estate is, in Locke’s words, “no more power than what a French man has over an English man” who hopes to inherit from him (§73).

Where it came from

Locke wrote the Two Treatises against Sir Robert Filmer, who had grounded the authority of kings in the authority of fathers, and he names Filmer in this chapter (§61). To free the subject from the king, Locke had to show that the son is free of the father, and he did it with the premise that runs through the book: “Thus we are born free, as we are born rational” (§61). If a man is born to freedom, a father can only be a guardian who holds the son’s freedom in trust until the son can use it. Locke’s rule for the family follows from his rule for the commonwealth. Our paper He Will Have No Sovereign traced how that separation of paternal and political power ran on into the courts.

The rule Locke replaced was not simply Scripture’s either. Roman law kept a son in his father’s power for as long as the father lived. Justinian’s Institutes, published in 533, state that “The power which we have over our children is peculiar to Roman citizens, and is found in no other nation” (I.9). It reached grandchildren, a son in it married only with “the consent of the parents in whose power they respectively are” (I.10), and it ended at the father’s death, by emancipation, or by a handful of other legal events, never by the son’s age (I.12). The church lived for a thousand years inside that law and the customs that grew from it. Section 07 shows what it kept and what it refused.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and Locke’s rule is built from three.

The son becomes the head of a house. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). A married son rules his own house, and his father does not rule it for him. Aquinas saw it. Marriage is a matter “in which a man is his own master as the father is,” since it is the thing “by which the son also becomes a father” (Supplement q.47 a.6). The twist concludes that a son who heads a house has no father over him. Scripture shows a married Joseph swearing an oath to his father and keeping it, and the married sons of Jonadab keeping their father’s word with their wives and children (Gen. 41:50, 47:29–31, Jer. 42:8).

A father rules for his son’s good. “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). The rod belongs to the years of training, since fathers of the flesh “for a few days chastened us” (Heb. 12:10). The twist concludes that a father’s authority is only a guardian’s and lasts as long as the son needs him. Scripture grounds it in begetting, not in need: “Hearken, my son, to thy father which begot thee, and despise not thy mother because she is grown old” (Prov. 23:22). The verse speaks to a son whose mother has grown old.

A father has no sword. When a son would not hear his father, the law sent him to the elders of the city (Deut. 21:18–21). Aquinas read that law to mean “the paternal authority has the power only of admonition; but not that of coercion” (I-II q.105 a.4). Locke agreed that a father’s power does not “extend to life and death” (§170). The twist concludes that a father without a sword has no command. Command and coercion are different things. A father commands with a word, and the son who hears it is bound before God whether or not anyone can make him keep it.

What God gives the father

Honor is commanded to grown men. God spoke the fifth commandment at Sinai to the whole nation, grown men included, and its promise looks to a long life in the land (Exod. 20:12). The law that guarded it reached a son old enough to strike his father and to revile him: “Whoever smites his father or his mother, let him be certainly put to death,” and “He that reviles his father or his mother shall surely die” (Exod. 21:15–16). Christ applied the commandment to grown sons when he condemned the Pharisees for letting a man say of the support he owed his parents, “It is a gift,” and so “honour not his father or his mother” (Matt. 15:5–6). In Christ’s reading, honor reaches the son’s purse.

A grown son obeys his father’s lawful word in the affairs of the family. Esau and Jacob were twins, and Esau married at forty (Gen. 25:24–26, 26:34). Esau’s wives “were provoking to Isaac and Rebecca” (Gen. 26:35). When Isaac charged Jacob, “Thou shalt not take a wife of the daughters of the Chananites,” and sent him to his mother’s family, Scripture records “that Jacob hearkened to his father and his mother” (Gen. 28:1–2, 7). Esau, “having seen that the daughters of Chanaan were evil before his father Isaac,” went to Ismael and took his daughter as another wife (Gen. 28:8–9). Joseph governed Egypt and had two sons of his own, and he still swore to carry his father’s body to Canaan and kept the oath, and Pharaoh let him go “as he constrained thee to swear” (Gen. 41:50, 47:29–31, 50:5–6). Christ built a parable on the same order: “A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard,” and the son who went was the one who “did the will of his father” (Matt. 21:28–31).

The sons of Jonadab are the plainest case in Scripture. Jonadab rode with Jehu (4 Kingdoms 10:15), two centuries before Jeremiah. He had commanded his sons, “Ye shall on no account drink wine, neither ye, nor your sons for ever,” and told them to live in tents (Jer. 42:6–7). When Jeremiah set wine before their descendants in the house of the Lord, they answered, “And we hearkened to the voice of Jonadab our father, so as to drink no wine all our days, we, and our wives, and our sons, and our daughters” (Jer. 42:8). God did not call it a family custom. He set it against Judah: “The sons of Jonadab the son of Rechab have kept the word which he commanded his children, that they should drink no wine; and they have not drunk it: but I spoke to you early, and ye hearkened not” (Jer. 42:14). And he rewarded it: “there shall never be wanting a man of the sons of Jonadab the son of Rechab to stand before my face while the earth remains” (Jer. 42:19). Men with wives and children were keeping the word of a forefather long dead, and God counted it to them.

A father answers for the grown sons in his house. Eli’s sons were priests, grown men with charge of the altar. Eli spoke to them (1 Kingdoms 2:23–25), and God’s charge against him was still that he had “honoured thy sons above me” (1 Kingdoms 2:29) and that “his sons spoke evil against God, and he did not admonish them” (1 Kingdoms 3:13). Of Adonijah, who rose to take the throne, Scripture says “his father never at any time checked him” (3 Kingdoms 1:5–6). Paul measured a man for the office of elder by “having his children in subjection with all gravity” (1 Tim. 3:4) and “having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly” (Titus 1:6). Those are the children of men old enough to be elders, and children accused of riot are not infants.

A father’s blessing and judgment stand over grown sons. Reuben lost the birthright for going up to his father’s bed, and the Chronicler gives the cause: “because of his going up to his father’s couch, his father gave his blessing to his son Joseph” (1 Chron. 5:1, Gen. 49:3–4). Isaac would not take back the blessing he had given: “I have blessed him, and he shall be blessed” (Gen. 27:33). A father’s word over his grown sons carried a weight before God that no other man’s did.

Where God stops him

Scripture limits the father as plainly as it arms him, and each limit is drawn by the kind of thing commanded, not by the son’s age.

God’s word stands over the father’s. “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37). Moses blessed Levi as the tribe “Who says to his father and mother, I have not seen thee,” because “he kept thine oracles, and observed thy covenant” (Deut. 33:9). At twelve Christ asked his mother, “wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” and then “went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them” (Luke 2:49, 51). Both halves belong to the rule. Jonathan would not help his father kill David, and Saul threw a spear at him for it (1 Kingdoms 20:30–34). He still fought beside his father and died with him, and David sang that “in their death they were not divided” (1 Kingdoms 31:2, 2 Kingdoms 1:23). When a father commands sin, the son refuses that command and keeps the rest.

The father has no sword. The law of the stubborn son is a limit as much as a grant. The son in Deuteronomy is old enough to be called “a reveller and a drunkard,” and his father does not punish him himself. “Then shall his father and his mother take hold of him, and bring him forth to the elders of his city, and to the gate of the place” (Deut. 21:19–20). The father brings the charge, and the city acts. When Saul swore that Jonathan would die, the people would not allow it: “As the Lord lives, there shall not fall to the ground one of the hairs of his head” (1 Kingdoms 14:44–45). Scripture never gives a father the power of life and death over his son.

The son consents to his own marriage and rules his own house. Fathers in Scripture take wives for their sons. Isaac was forty when he took the wife Abraham sent for (Gen. 24:3–4, 25:20), Judah “took a wife for Er his first-born” (Gen. 38:6), and the exiles were told, “take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands” (Jer. 36:6). The law put the ban on marriage with the nations to the father: “thou shalt not give thy daughter to his son, and thou shalt not take his daughter to thy son” (Deut. 7:3). Yet the consent that makes a marriage belongs to the ones who marry. Rebecca was asked, “Wilt thou go with this man?” and answered, “I will go” (Gen. 24:58). Samson pressed his parents to take a Philistine wife for him over their objection, and his father went down to the woman (Judg. 14:2–3, 10). A father arranges, counsels and forbids what God forbids. He does not make the vow for his son, because the son is the one who will keep it, and once married the son “shall cleave to his wife” and rule the house he heads (Gen. 2:24, 1 Tim. 3:4).

The father is under his own law. A father may not hand his firstborn’s double portion to the son of the wife he loves more: “he shall not be able to give the right of the first-born to the son of the loved one, having overlooked the son of the hated, which is the first-born” (Deut. 21:16). Reuben lost the birthright for his sin, and the law let no son lose it to his father’s favor. Paul binds the father the same way: “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged” (Col. 3:21). A father holds his authority under God’s law and answers to God for how he uses it.

Daughters are different. A son leaves his father’s house to head his own. A daughter passes from her father’s authority to her husband’s. The law of vows shows the hand-off. A father may annul the vow of a daughter “in her youth in her father’s house” (Num. 30:4–6), a husband may annul the vow of his wife (Num. 30:7–9, 11–14), and “the vow of a widow and of her that is put away, whatsoever she shall bind upon her soul, shall stand to her” (Num. 30:10). The law sums itself up as the ordinances “between a man and his wife, and between a father and daughter in her youth in the house of her father” (Num. 30:17). A father gives his daughter in marriage (Exod. 22:16, 1 Cor. 7:38), and from then on “the head of the woman is the man” (1 Cor. 11:3), and wives are subject “to their own husbands in every thing” (Eph. 5:24). A married daughter owes her father honor all her life, as every child does, and her obedience belongs to her husband. A son’s obedience never passes to another man. He becomes a head himself, and his father’s lawful word still reaches him there, as Jonadab’s reached his sons and their wives.

His authority does not pass whole to his firstborn. When the father dies, his command dies with him, and what the firstborn inherits is precedence. The law gives him the double portion, “because he is the first of his children, and to him belongs the birthright” (Deut. 21:17). Joseph’s brothers sat before him “the first-born according to his seniority, and the younger according to his youth” (Gen. 43:33), and Reuben, the firstborn, was the one who spoke for Joseph’s life and pledged his own sons for Benjamin’s return (Gen. 37:22, 42:37). Isaac’s blessing made Jacob “lord of thy brother,” and “the sons of thy father shall do thee reverence” (Gen. 27:29). God told Cain, the elder, “to thee shall be his submission, and thou shalt rule over him” (Gen. 4:7). Chrysostom read that verse of Abel, that God would “make his brother subject to him” (Homily 7 on Romans). Augustine read it of sin: “Over his brother, does He mean? Most certainly not” (City of God XV.7). Younger brothers owe the eldest honor all their lives, as the young owe the old (Lev. 19:32, 1 Pet. 5:5), and Aquinas held that the piety owed to parents “includes the worship given to all our kindred” (II-II q.101 a.1).

Three things keep that precedence short of a father’s authority. First, it comes from the father and from God, not from birth alone. Reuben lost it for his sin, and his father gave his blessing to Joseph (1 Chron. 5:1). Jacob crossed his hands and set Ephraim before Manasseh (Gen. 48:14–19). Of a son of Osa, Scripture says, “though he was not the first-born, yet his father made him chief” (1 Chron. 26:10). Before the twins were born God said, “the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23), and he chose David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons (1 Kingdoms 16:11–12). Second, each brother heads his own house (Gen. 2:24). Aquinas, expounding Aristotle, wrote that brothers “are equal except for difference in their ages,” and that “if their ages are far apart, their friendship seems to be in a way paternal and not fraternal” (Commentary on the Ethics VIII, lect. 10). An eldest brother who helped raise the youngest stands nearer to a father to him than to the rest. Third, where Scripture shows a firstborn ruling his brothers, he rules them through an office he inherits, not through his birth. Jehoshaphat “gave the kingdom to Joram, for he was the first-born” (2 Chron. 21:3), and his brothers became his subjects. When Joram killed them, God charged him that he had “slain thy brethren, the sons of thy father, who were better than thyself” (2 Chron. 21:13). Jacob held the blessing of lordship and still bowed to the ground seven times before Esau and called him “my lord” (Gen. 33:3, 8). Joseph held the blessing Reuben lost, and when his brothers came to him after their father’s death saying, “We, these persons, are thy servants,” he answered, “Fear not, I will maintain you, and your families” (Gen. 50:18, 21). That is the shape of the firstborn’s headship. He leads and provides for his father’s house, its land, its name, its widowed mother and its unmarried sisters, and his brothers defer to him there. Basil counted brothers among those with “authority over” an unmarried girl (Letter 199, canon 22). The firstborn does not rule the houses his brothers head.

How the church held the line

The church before the Reformation lived inside Roman law and did not simply adopt it. From Tertullian to Aquinas it held four things together: lifelong honor, obedience in the life of the household, freedom for the son in marriage and in following Christ, and no sword for the father. The record shows it correcting errors on both sides.

Four things stand out. First, the church never let piety cancel honor. Gangra anathematized the son who left his parents in the name of religion, and Aquinas held that a man whose parents could not be supported without him “must not leave them and enter religion, because he would be breaking the commandment prescribing the honoring of parents” (II-II q.101 a.4). Jerome’s letter was the excess, and Jerome himself put it down to youth.

Second, the church drew obedience by matter. Chrysostom bound sons in everything that does not hinder godliness, and Aquinas in the conduct of life and the care of the household. Neither set an age at which the duty ends. When Aquinas explains Paul’s “in all things” (Col. 3:20), he says the Apostle “refers to matters within the sphere of a father’s or master’s authority” (II-II q.104 a.5). The measure is the sphere, not the son’s years.

Third, the church moved two matters from the father to the son, and a critic will press it, so we state it plainly. In Tertullian’s day and Basil’s a marriage without the father’s consent was not lawful. By Nicholas I the Latin church held the couple’s consent to be what makes a marriage, while keeping the father in the betrothal, and by Aquinas a father could not compel a son to marry. The cloister went the same way. Benedict’s father made his son a monk, and by Aquinas’s day a profession made before puberty “does not take effect so as to make him a religious” (II-II q.189 a.5), and after puberty “every freeman enjoys freedom in things concerning the ordering of his state of life” (II-II q.189 a.6). Both matters bind a man before God for life, and the church held that the man who keeps the vow must make it. Section 10 answers the charge that this opened the door to Locke.

Fourth, the church never gave the father a sword. Aquinas read Deuteronomy 21 as proof that a father’s authority has “the power only of admonition,” and that the stubborn son goes to “the rulers of the city” for judgment (I-II q.105 a.4).

Where it leads

Locke’s rule goes three places, and his own sentences show each one.

Honor at the son’s convenience. Locke’s grown son defers to his father “in many things, not very inconvenient to him and his family” (§69). The son decides what is inconvenient. That is the Corban of the Pharisees in a new form, a duty to parents the son may set aside when it costs him, and Christ said of the old form, “Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition” (Matt. 15:6).

Honor as a bill for services. Locke measured a grown son’s honor by the father’s “care, cost, and kindness” (§67). On that measure a father who spent little is owed little. Scripture measures honor by the commandment. When Noah lay drunk and naked, Shem and Japheth covered their father without looking, and the son who exposed him brought a curse on his line (Gen. 9:20–25). A father’s failure did not cancel what his sons owed him.

Authority to whoever provides the care. If a father’s power comes from his care, it “belongs as much to the foster-father” (§65), and it passes to whoever takes over the care. He Will Have No Sovereign traced where that ends, in a court that weighs a child’s welfare against his father. For grown sons the end is quieter. The only hold Locke leaves a father is his estate, “no more power than what a French man has over an English man” (§73). On Locke’s terms, a father with nothing to leave has no hold on his grown son at all.

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers.

He honors and obeys his own father. A grown son seeks his father’s counsel and blessing before he marries and before any decision that touches the family, and he does what his father lawfully asks in the family’s affairs even when the law of the land leaves him free to refuse. He supports his parents when they need it (1 Tim. 5:4, 8). If his father commands sin, he refuses that command, says why, and keeps honoring him.

He rules his sons as men in the making. A father raises sons to be heads of houses, not to stay boys. He commands less of them as they grow and expects more, gives his counsel and his blessing, and does not hold grown sons by money alone. That is Locke’s father. Scripture’s father counsels, blesses and judges, as Jacob did (Gen. 49:1–28). He keeps his own law, with no favorites in inheritance (Deut. 21:16) and no provoking (Col. 3:21), and he gives his daughters in marriage to men fit to be their heads.

He asks his church to teach the fifth commandment to grown men. He asks his elders to preach it as Christ did, to sons with purses (Matt. 15:4–6), to hold their own households to Paul’s standard (Titus 1:6), and to treat a member who abandons his parents as Gangra treated him, as a matter for discipline.

He asks rulers for law that keeps the order of the family. He asks officeholders for law that holds grown children to the support of parents in need before the public purse pays, as Paul told believers to relieve their own widows “and let not the church be charged” (1 Tim. 5:16), and for law that treats a father as the head of his household and not as a guardian on loan from the state.

Seven objections

“‘Children, obey your parents’ is for children.” Paul grounds the command in the fifth commandment and its promise (Eph. 6:1–3), and God gave that commandment to the whole nation, grown men included. Scripture calls grown men their father’s children. Jonadab “commanded his children” (Jer. 42:14), and they had wives and sons. We grant that the form changes. The heir is “under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father” (Gal. 4:2), and after that time he is under tutors no longer. He is still the son, and the time is the father’s to appoint.

“A man shall leave his father and his mother.” He leaves to cleave to his wife and to head a house (Gen. 2:24). The text says whose house he rules. It does not say he stops being his father’s son. Joseph was married with two sons when he swore to his father, and the sons of Jonadab kept their father’s word with their wives beside them (Gen. 41:50, 47:29–31, Jer. 42:8).

“Call no man your father upon the earth.” Christ said it of the titles the scribes took as teachers, “Rabbi” and “masters” (Matt. 23:8–10). In the same Gospel he held grown sons to “Honour thy father and mother” and condemned the men who taught them to escape it (Matt. 15:4–6). The verse forbids making a man the source of what we believe. It does not abolish the fifth commandment.

“The church freed sons in marriage and in the cloister, and Locke only finished the work.” The church freed two matters, and both are vows a man keeps before God for life. It gave the reason, that the one who keeps the vow must make it, and it kept the son bound in the conduct of his life and the care of the household. Aquinas tied the vow to puberty because that is when a person can bind himself, not because a father’s other claims end there. Locke ended command in every matter at once, at a set age, on the ground that the son is born free. The church limited the father by the nature of the thing commanded. Locke ended him by the calendar.

“Aquinas himself says all men are equal by nature.” He does, in the same article: “since by nature all men are equal, he is not bound to obey another man in matters touching the nature of the body” (II-II q.104 a.5). He draws from it only that marriage and virginity lie outside human command, and in the next sentence he binds a son to obey his father “in matters relating to the conduct of his life and the care of the household.” Equal in nature is not equal in authority. Locke took the first and concluded the second.

“Some fathers are cruel or foolish.” Scripture answers an abused office with its limits, not its abolition. The father has no sword, no command to sin, no favorites in inheritance and no license to provoke, and a public court stands over the household (Deut. 21:19). A son whose father commands sin refuses that command. A son whose father is only foolish honors him anyway, as Shem and Japheth covered Noah (Gen. 9:23). Locke’s answer to an abused office was to end it at twenty-one.

“My father is not a Christian.” Gangra names believing parents “particularly,” which means the duty reaches the rest. Jonathan honored a father who was hunting David. A father’s unbelief does not cancel the commandment. It gives his son more occasions to say “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), and more need to say it with honor.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not give a father the sword. No father in Scripture is judge of his son’s life, and none should be now.

It does not put a father’s word beside God’s. A command to sin binds no one, and a son owes his father obedience only in what God has put in the father’s hand.

It does not let a father force a marriage or bar his son from following Christ. The son consents to his marriage and answers to Christ for his calling, as Scripture and the church before the Reformation held.

It does not set the father over his son’s house. A married son rules his own house under God and honors his father’s lawful word within it.

It does not make every whim a command. God commended the sons of Jonadab for keeping a lawful command, one that required nothing God forbids. Nothing here lets a father bind his sons to whatever he likes.

It does not reach past 1517. The Reformers took up the law of marriage and paternal consent in their own way, and that is another paper.

It stands or falls on one premise. If Scripture or the church before the Reformation set an age at which a father’s command ends in every matter, Locke’s line stands. Sections 05 through 07 argue that neither did. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it there.

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Texts and editions

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1689), Second Treatise, ch. VI, §§55–74, and ch. XV, §170, Project Gutenberg.

Justinian, Institutes I.9–12, trans. J. B. Moyle, Project Gutenberg.

Tertullian, To His Wife II.8, trans. S. Thelwall, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4 (1885).

Synod of Gangra, canons 15–16, trans. Henry Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14 (1900).

Jerome, Letters 14 and 52, trans. W. H. Fremantle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 6 (1893).

Basil of Caesarea, Letter 199, canons 22, 38 and 42, trans. Blomfield Jackson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 8 (1895).

John Chrysostom, Homily 35 on Matthew, trans. George Prevost, rev. M. B. Riddle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 10 (1888), and Homily 7 on Romans, trans. J. Walker, J. Sheppard and H. Browne, rev. George B. Stevens, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 11 (1889).

Augustine, City of God XV.7, trans. Marcus Dods, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 2 (1887).

The Rule of Saint Benedict, ch. 59, trans. Leonard J. Doyle, Project Gutenberg.

Nicholas I, Responses to the Questions of the Bulgars (866), ch. III, trans. W. L. North, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.

Thomas of Celano, First Life of St. Francis, trans. David Burr, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.

Fourth Lateran Council (1215), canon 51, trans. H. J. Schroeder, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q.105 a.4, II-II q.101 a.1 and a.4, q.104 a.5, q.189 a.5–6, and the Supplement q.45 a.5, q.47 a.6, compiled after his death from his commentary on the Sentences, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed. (1920).

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics VIII, lect. 10, trans. C. I. Litzinger (Chicago, 1964).

D. J. Kennedy, “St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1912).

He Will Have No Sovereign.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering and spelling (1 to 4 Kingdoms are 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, Jeremias 42 is Jeremiah 35 and Jeremias 36 is Jeremiah 29, Exodus 21:16 is 21:17, Chananites are Canaanites, Ismael is Ishmael, Joram is Jehoram, Osa is Hosah). New Testament from the King James Version. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com