Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/79

 a spiritual anarchy. The Independents, on the contrary, opposed Presbyterianism because it imposed more on the conscience than Christ had set there. Again they returned to the idea of a complete and perfect ecclesiastical constitution or supreme law bequeathed by Christ to his church.

Naturally, therefore, the Independents at first sought Erastian support by depicting in vivid colors the danger to civil authority to be expected from the hierarchy of semi-clerical assemblies. Men like Nye argued that the Presbyterian system erected a state within a state; a state that claimed its order to be of divine right, and therefore independent of the civil magistrate, save when the highest ecclesiastical assembly bade him draw the civil sword to cut off heretics, or to punish the contumacious. Independency, they said, had no