or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority."
He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty
to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil
magistrate. But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and
kings should not "have their beneficence and protection to the Church of
Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their
hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail
to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold
upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her
principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the
Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court
language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge
at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the
Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her
government."

The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that some of
its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say how the
spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He does not
explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made compatible
with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of Church and State
must be upon conditions; and once the State had permitted the existence
of creeds other than that of its official adoption, it could not
maintain the exclusive power for which the Church contended. And when
the Church not only complained of State-betrayal, but attempted the use
of political means to enforce remedial measures it was inevitable that
statesmen would use the weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to
their will. The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness
but disestablishment.