Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/101

 sure of a future reward so long as he partook of the sacraments of the Church of England. The following quotation is from Robert Coachman in The Cry Of A Stone, Feb. 1641/2, E. 137 (32). “Whereas contrariwise, when all manner of gracelesse men are fed with the seales and pledges of Gods favour, and invested into the full privilege and highest prerogative with the most godly in the Church, and that it is daily told him, there is the body and blood of Christ given for him, how presumptuous doe they grow? Tell them of wicked men and damnation, they’ll send you to Rome, or Turkie, or India, amongst the Heathens or Papists, for why? they are Protestants, and have a sound Religion, and are borne, baptized, and brought up in a Christian common-wealth and Church, and eate the flesh, and drinke the blood of Christ, in whom they say, they trust to be saved, though they never imitate his examples, but notwithstanding all their presumption, they have not stroke one true stroke at sinne ” (P. 15.) Coachman had the fairness unusual among Puritans to protest against attributing such conditions entirely to the sloth and negligence of the bishops, or to the corrupting influence of the ceremonies.

Hermann Weingarten, Die englische Revolutionskirche (p. 290) would appear to assign a greater priority among democratic doctrines than they deserve to certain statements by John Cotton and Roger Williams on the sovereignty of the people in The Bloody Tenent of Persecution (1848 ed.) p. 212. Cotton had said: “First, the proper means whereby the civil power may and should attain its end, are only political First, the erecting and establishing what form of civil government may seem in wisdom most meet, according to general rules of the word, and state of the people.” Williams’s comment is that by this the original of civil power lies in the people “whom they must needs mean by the civil power distinct from the government set up.” Accordingly, Williams concludes, the people may set up a government intrusted with what power they will. However, there is nothing in the passage to show that he actually means more than Parker did by a similar utterance. He uses it as a reductio ad absurdum for the power of the civil state over the church. His gloss on Cotton is unfair. Cotton was writing a “Model of Church and Civil Power” to be sent to the church at Salem. This, and the fact that he prefixed to his statement the postulate that every member of the commonwealth was also a member of the church, should make it clear that his application was narrowed to the freemen of the Massachusetts Bay colony.