1717, on the text “My Kingdom is not of this world,” and published by royal command.  Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some simple points emerge.  What he was doing was to deprive the priesthood of claims to supernatural authority that he might vindicate for civil government the right to preserve itself not less against persons in ecclesiastical office than against civil assailants.  To do so he is forced to deny that the miraculous powers of Christ and the Apostles descended to their successors.  For if that assumption is made we grant to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside the category of fallibility.  And, exactly in the fashion of Leslie in the Regale he goes on to show that if a Church is a supernatural institution, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of its prerogative.  It is, in fact, an imperium in imperio and its conflict with the state is inevitable.  But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what is its nature?  Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis of all ecclesiastical debate.  The Church, he claims, is not a visible society, presided over by men who have authority directly transmitted by Christ.  There are not within it “viceregents who can be said properly to supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his subjects are absolutely to depend; no judges over the conscience or religion of his people.  For if this were so that any such absolute viceregent authority, either for the making of new laws, or interpreting old ones, or judging his subjects, in religious matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the consequence would be that what still retains the name of the Church of Christ would not be the kingdom of Christ, but the kingdom of those men invested with such authority.  For whoever hath such an authority of making laws is so far a king, and whoever can add new laws to those of Christ, equally obligatory, is as truly a king as Christ himself.  Nay, whosoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who first wrote and spoke them.”

The meaning is clear enough.  What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of miracle and infallibility erected thereon.  The true Church of Christ is in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice.  Apostolic succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness for men’s sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its own.  The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his possession of some special set of dogmas.  Clearly, therefore, if the Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to oppose