Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/90

 Prynne really submit to any form of church government Parliament should set up—even episcopacy? Prynne replied that if Parliament should set up a government contrary to God’s Word, men should passively submit or suffer. For his own part, he had attacked episcopacy in the days before 1640, because bishops had claimed to be by divine right and had “innovated” against acts of Parliament. While Parliament might have nothing to do with matters of doctrine, it assuredly had everything to do with church government. Prynne refused to be driven from his ground by the application of a reductio ad absurdum to his major premise.

Prynne based on the law of nature a further argument for submission to a church government ordained by Parliament. The law of nature, he said, taught men submission to a central government in civil affairs; the same law might by analogy be presumed to dictate submission to a central church government. Both Goodwin and Robinson who here entered the lists answered that, on the contrary, to force a man’s conscience was against nature. Prynne’s analogy, they said, did not hold for two reasons. First, Christ was sole lawgiver for his church. Second, such actions as a man might be justly commanded by a civil magistrate to perform were performable solely by the outer man. But an act of worship or religious observance must have the assent of the conscience before the body could perform it; and no civil government