Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/77

 Probably only a few scholars could follow Selden’s reasoning; but in so far as his conclusion implied the supremacy of civil power over the church it was welcomed by men having no desire to submit their lives to the control and censure of the clerical elderships that the Assembly sought to establish. Many of the members of the Long Parliament had read law in the Inns of Court while men still remembered Coke’s championship of the supremacy of the common law against the claim of the canon law to be its co-ordinate. The same motives that led such men in 1640 into a war on the courts dispensing the canon law, led them in 1645 to oppose the Presbyterian attempt to impose on England a religious code claiming a higher authority than the assent of Parliament. Presbyterian Robert Baillie, a Scotch commissioner to the Assembly, grouped Hebraist and common lawyer under the elastic term Erastian.

After gauging the underlying principles of the three groups, it will be seen that while the theories of both the Presbyterians and the Independents conflicted with Erastianism, the theory of the Independents was diametrically opposed to it. Erastianism demanded freedom for Parliament to legislate as it saw fit in ecclesiastical matters; and the Independents would be more unflinching than the Presbyterians in declaring such legislation worthless where it ran counter to divine law, because the Independents were more uncompromising in their