Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/100

 Finally, the Independents in prescribing a method whereby their fundamental law might be made binding on men, had evolved a new doctrine of compact. At the same time that they had admitted that the law of nature commanded men’s subjection to civil authority, they had fixed on covenant as the sole source of subjection to ecclesiastical authority. If the magistrate had no authority over offenses of the first table, and if the church had no such authority outside of its own membership, its disciplinary authority over that membership must be traced to the compact and covenant by which each member on entering into church fellowship submitted himself to such deserved ecclesiastical censures as by Christ’s law his fellow members might deem it necessary to inflict on him. Once the Levellers transferred this theory to politics, the doctrine of the social compact took concrete form.

The restricted circle of membership peculiar to Independent churches sometimes gave a flavor of Phariseeism to their institutions. The Presbyterian champions, Bastwick and Edwards, twitted the Independents with the aristocratic exclusiveness of their churches. No doubt there was very much ground for such taunts. Lord Saye, who was an ardent Independent, was by no means a democrat. A chief objection with him to episcopacy seems to have been that it allowed men of low social standing to rise to a plane of political equality with the great nobles. A Speech of Lord Viscount Saye and Seale, E. 198 (16), in Hanbury, II, 132. Lilburne in later days habitually refers to him as “that Guilded fox”. A more honorable motive for the restriction of membership is to be sought in the despair of pious ministers imbued with the deepest Calvinism at the stolid self-complacency of the average communicant in the English parish, content with negative goodness, and