Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles Leslie who best summed up the feeling of High Churchmen.  His Case of the Regale (1701) is by far the ablest of his many able performances.  He saw at the outset that the real issue was defined by the Church’s claim to be a divine society, with rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its origin.  If it was divine, invasion did not touch its de jure rights.  “How,” he asked, “can rights that are divine be given up?  If they are divine, no human authority can either supersede or limit them....  How can rights that are inherent be given up?  If they are inherent, they are inseparable.  The right to meet, to consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of the society, is essential to every society as such ... can she then part with what is essential to her?” Nor could it be denied that “where the choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other.”  The Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature of the state or an imperium in imperio; but Leslie would not admit that fruitful stumbling block to the debate.  “The sacred and civil powers were like two parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to control or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority.”  He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil magistrate.  But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and kings should not “have their beneficence and protection to the Church of Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ.”  Nor did he fail to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism.  For the church’s hold upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her principles.  “When they see bishops,” he wrote wisely, “made by the Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her government.”

The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that some of its implications remain undetermined.  Leslie does not say how the spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated.  He does not explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made compatible with freedom.  For it is obvious that the partnership of Church and State must be upon conditions; and once the State had permitted the existence of creeds other than that of its official adoption, it could not maintain the exclusive power for which the Church contended.  And when the Church not only complained of State-betrayal, but attempted the use of political means to enforce remedial measures it was inevitable that statesmen would use the weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to their will.  The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness but disestablishment.