your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of
them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the
peremptory commandments of God; that no mortal man can dispense with
them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining
thereunto?

'Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat
a tanto viro'. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule,
that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as
individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do
belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and
in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any
legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the
nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a
century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing
within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost
in the glory, or all joining to form the visible 'phasis' or disk; and
then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at
various distances, and having a common center of their own round which
they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater
distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I
have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in
the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar
atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun
the churches spiritual.

The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the
incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under
the proprieties and necessities of space, is, that it does not, as no
concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the