… is from the mid-17th-century Boston minister John Cotton‘s address entitled now (I think) “Limitation of Government“; I can find no date for this address; I first encountered notice of it in Daniel Boorstin’s 1958 volume, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (spelling modernized):
It is therefore most wholesome for magistrates and officers in church and commonwealth never to affect more liberty and authority than will do them good, and the people good: for whatever transcendent power is given will certainly overrun those that give it and those that receive it. There is a strain in a man’s heart that will sometime or other run out to excess, unless the Lord restrain it; but it is not good to venture it.
It is necessary, therefore, that all power that is on earth be limited, church-power or other….. It is counted a matter of danger to the state to limit prerogatives; but it is a further danger not to have them limited: they will be like a tempest if they be not limited.
