Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/97

 opposite point of view appears in an Independent satire written against the letter. It assigns as an additional reason why the London ministers oppose Independency that, “the Independents will ever bee looking for further light, and go on still in Reformation, and would carry the people along with them to grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ by which meanes things will never be setled perfectly while the Church is militant, therefore Independency is a mischiefe to the Church.”

One corollary of Independent thinking has already been considered so fully that in this summary it need only be mentioned. Once the Independents understood the full implications of their system of church government, they could not logically permit any close relation between church and state, unless the state was itself a theocracy. If, as they believed, the proper material for the building of a church was saints, they assuredly could not admit magistrates chosen by the unregenerate to a directive voice in the church. That might be permissible in a system like seventeenth-century Presbyterianism that regarded a church as a national institution; but it was to the last degree inconsistent with Independency. As the theocracy of Massachusetts Bay disappeared, the doctrine of John Goodwin and Roger Williams that the civil magistrate had noth-