Ib. c. v. 2. p. 204.

A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge
yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.

This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is
necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the
reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all
liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and
Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor,
Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to
the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline
would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been
justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged
Hooker to shew, first, that the constitution of the Church in Christ was
a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators
were 'bona fide' determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy
and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state
policy,--for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic
potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish
Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies,--were not the
substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two
Houses of Parliament. It is my own belief that the Puritans and the
Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole
errors, were both equally in the wrong;--the Prelatists in contending
for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective
number [Greek: t_on ekkaloumen_on] or 'ecclesia', which only belonged,
but which rightfully did belong, to the National Church as a component