Here, then, suddenly emerged a perfect ratification for their own
previous revolutionary doctrine upon the creation of parish clergymen.
This new scruple was, in relation to former scruples, a perfect
linch-pin for locking their machinery into cohesion. For vainly would
they have sought to defeat the patron's right of presenting, unless
through this sudden pause and interdict imposed upon the _latter_ acts
in the process of induction, under the pretext that these were acts
competent only to a spiritual jurisdiction. This plea, by its tendency,
rounded and secured all that they had yet advanced in the way of claim.
But, at the same time, though indispensable negatively, positively it
stretched so much further than any necessity or interest inherent in
their present innovations, that not improbably they faltered and shrank
back at first from the immeasurable field of consequences upon which
it opened. They would willingly have accepted less. But, unfortunately,
it sometimes happens, that, to gain as much as is needful in one
direction, you must take a great deal more than you wish for in another.
Any principle, which _could_ carry them over the immediate difficulty,
would, by a mere necessity, carry them incalculably beyond it. For if
every act bearing in any one direction a spiritual aspect, showing at
any angle a relation to spiritual things, is therefore to be held
spiritual in a sense excluding the interference of the civil power,
there falls to the ground at once the whole fabric of civil authority
in any independent form. Accordingly, we are satisfied that the claim
to a spiritual jurisdiction, in collision with the claims of the state,
would not probably have offered itself to the ambition of the agitators,
otherwise than as a measure ancillary to their earlier pretension of
appointing virtually all parish clergymen. The one claim was found to
be the integration or _sine qua non_ complement of the other. In order
to sustain the power of appointment in their own courts, it was
necessary that they should defeat the patron's power; and, in order