Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and
his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and
provoked seven replies within three months. Thomas Sherlock would not be
either himself or his father's son, were he not caustic, logical and
direct. But Hoadly and Law between them exhaust the controversy, so far
as it has meaning for our own day. The less essential questions like
Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude to prayer, the accuracy of the
details in his account of the Test Act, the cause of his refusal to
answer Law directly, are hardly now germane to the substance of the
debate. Hoadly's position is most fully stated in his _Preservative
against the Principles and Practice of Nonjurors_ which he published in
1716 as a counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31, 1717, on
the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published by royal
command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some
simple points emerge. What he was doing was to deprive the priesthood of
claims to supernatural authority that he might vindicate for civil
government the right to preserve itself not less against persons in
ecclesiastical office than against civil assailants. To do so he is
forced to deny that the miraculous powers of Christ and the Apostles
descended to their successors. For if that assumption is made we grant
to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside
the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the fashion of Leslie in
the _Regale_ he goes on to show that if a Church is a supernatural
institution, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of its prerogative.
It is, in fact, an _imperium in imperio_ and its conflict with the state
is inevitable. But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what
is its nature? Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis
of all ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible
society, presided over by men who have authority directly transmitted by