IV


No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of
Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a
plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a
Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control
of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth
their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment
and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to
be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal
and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the
Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the
sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be
drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be
safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine
mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to
impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious
body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they
repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the
State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an
authority not rightly its own.

The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here
the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived
upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the
Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of
rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become