But as the supreme power can certainly do ten thousand things more than it ought, so there are several things which some people may think it can do, although it really cannot.  For, it unfortunately happens, that edicts which cannot be executed, will not alter the nature of things.  So, if a king and parliament should please to enact, that a woman who hath been a month married, is virgo intacta, would that actually restore her to her primitive state?  If the supreme power should resolve a corporal of dragoons to be a doctor of divinity, law or physic, few, I believe, would trust their souls, fortunes, or bodies to his direction; because that power is neither fit to judge or teach those qualifications which are absolutely necessary to the several professions.  Put the case that walking on the slack rope were the only talent required by act of parliament for making a man a bishop; no doubt, when a man had done his feat of activity in form, he might sit in the House of Lords, put on his robes and his rochet, go down to his palace, receive and spend his rents; but it requireth very little Christianity to believe this tumbler to be one whit more a bishop than he was before; because the law of God hath otherwise decreed; which law, although a nation may refuse to receive it, cannot alter in its own nature.

And here lies the mistake of this superficial man, who is not able to distinguish between what the civil power can hinder, and what it can do.  “If the parliament can annul ecclesiastical laws, they must be able to make them, since no greater power is required for one than the other.”  See pref., p. viii.  This consequence he repeateth above twenty times, and always in the wrong.  He affecteth to form a few words into the shape and size of a maxim, then trieth it by his ear, and, according as he likes the sound or cadence, pronounceth it true.  Cannot I stand over a man with a great pole, and hinder him from making a watch, although I am not able to make one myself.  If I have strength enough to knock a man on the head, doth it follow I can raise him to life again?  The parliament may condemn all the Greek and Roman authors; can it therefore create new ones in their stead?  They may make laws, indeed, and call them canon and ecclesiastical laws, and oblige all men to observe them under pain of high treason.  And so may I, who love as well as any man to have in my own family the power in the last resort, take a turnip, then tie a string to it, and call it a watch, and turn away all my servants, if they refuse to call it so too.

For my own part, I must confess that this opinion of the independent power of the Church, or imperium in imperio, wherewith this writer raiseth such a dust, is what I never imagined to be of any consequence, never once heard disputed among divines, nor remember to have read, otherwise than as a scheme in one or two authors of middle rank, but with very little weight laid on it.  And I dare believe, there is hardly one divine in ten that ever once thought of this matter.  Yet to see a large swelling volume written only to encounter this doctrine, what could one think less than that the whole body of the clergy were perpetually tiring the press and the pulpit with nothing else?