Harold J. Laski

Rather will oppression in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience which provokes to action.

Men cannot be confined within the limits of so narrow a logic.

Let their minds but once turn to resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken.

Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to be immune from their evil passions.

What seems to impress it most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine origin.

At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new tradition which Locke had brought into being.

What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the conscience of another?

For, after all, experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of men.

The Church is independent of all civil institution, and must have therefore within herself the powers necessary to her life as a society.

The State, he argues, has no power over bishops whose relationship to their flock is purely spiritual and derived from Christ.

And even if it is said that the policy of James introduced a new situation the answer surely is that Divine Right and non-resistance can, by their very nature, make no allowance for novelty.

Clearly, so far as consistency is in question, the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their side.

The Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in its integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil power.

For if the form and substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental will, then those who obey have left the Church and it is the faithful remnant only who constitute the true fellowship.

It could not be an inherent part of the Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of peace.

The Church of England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.

When they urge the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect.

For it was upon the monarchy that the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope…

That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had declared of vital import to his…

Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past.

In some sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the Oxford Movement.

She cannot be a church unless she is a societas perfecta; she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the king in Parliament.

It is a fact inevitable in the situation of the English Church that the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick resentment.

But Locke's theory was meat too strong for the digestion of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a government could forego the advantage of religious support.

Locke, at least, denied the assumption, and argued that since Churches are voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not to have reciprocal relation with the State.