Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/87

 law of God it was not, politically speaking, void. Rather it was the duty of all to refuse to conform to it and to submit passively to whatever penalties followed. Both Geree and Bishop Hall declared in their answers that the civil authority must be the judge as to whether a thing were contrary to God’s Word.

A further answer to Burton was necessary from the point of view of men who hoped for the establishment of the Scotch Presbyterian church government. They could not reduce their whole ecclesiastical system to a single proposition based on the words of Christ, as the Independents based their proposition of government by the congregation on “Tell it unto the Church.” The assertion that the imposition of any ecclesiastical form not warranted by Christ’s words was null and void endangered their whole position. Accordingly, Thomas Edwards, a minister who later developed an unusual gift for the collection and arrangement of scandalous gossip, took up the cudgels against Burton. In arguing for the existence of a power in a synod to establish “rules for convenience,” in addition to the outline of church government laid down in the gospels, Edwards almost adopted the bishops’ old claim of authority to prescribe rules in “things of indifference.”