to the human claims of the State.  And since the State must have within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of power assumed without right.  And in later treatises Hoadly did for ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government.  The eucharist became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an announcement—­“a mere external thing”—­that the rules of the fellowship have been broken.  It at no point is related to the sinner’s opportunity of salvation.

In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no monopoly of truth.  It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes.  Nor does its judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of things.  The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to believe.  For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and Corporation Acts have no real political validity.  They have been imposed upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that of a member of the Church of England.

All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine in the mouth of a bishop of that church.  And this, in fact, is the starting-point of Law’s analysis of Hoadly.  No one who reads the unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed, his is the only contribution to the debate which may claim a permanent place in political literature.  In one sense, indeed, the whole of Law’s answer is an ignoratio elenchi, for he assumes the truth of that which Hoadly sets out to examine, with the inevitable result that each writer is, for the most part, arguing from different premises.  But on the assumption that Hoadly is a Christian, Law’s argument is an attack of great power.  He shows conclusively that if the Church of England is no more than Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in any proper historic sense, be called the Church of England at all.  For every one of the institutions which Hoadly calls an usurpation, is believed by Churchmen to be integral to its nature.  And if sincerity alone is to count as the test, then there cannot, for the existing world, be any such thing as objective religious truth.  It subverted not merely absolute authority—­which the Church of England did not claim—­but any authority in the Church.  It impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce religious belief by civil penalties.  Hoadly’s rejection of authority, moreover, is in Law’s view fatal to government of any kind.  For all lawful authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it is to sin.  The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in Christianity is the same thing as to a belief in that Church which can be shown to represent Christ’s teaching.