Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/84

 enough specific instances of the evil effect of ecclesiastical encroachments on the civil power—the canons, the “Et Cetera Oath,” the abuses of the ecclesiastical courts. Henry Parker, in a pamphlet of 1641, had allowed but a narrow extent of legislative power to the church—a power of framing canons and ecclesiastical regulations that would take the force of law only from the assent of king and Parliament.

Such a doctrine indicated the course that the reaction against the Laudian system was taking. Men saw the danger of allowing ecclesiastics to force on the kingdom a church government, doctrine, and ceremony to which all must conform; but they did not propose to avoid the danger by separating church and state; rather they assigned to the civil authority the power they refused to the ecclesiastical. If the church was to be reformed, it was the duty of the civil power to reform it according to the Word of God; the civil rulers might, perhaps must, obtain the pronouncement of divines as to what the law of God was; but they themselves were judges of the sufficiency of the clergy’s proofs for the lawfulness of their recommendations, and they themselves must give those recommendations the force of law. The whole course of the transactions between the Parliament and the Westminster Assembly accorded with this theory. The civil authority had the right to frame legislation for the church, according to what it