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.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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The Church of England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.
It could not be an inherent part of the Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of peace.
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.
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.
Clearly, so far as consistency is in question, the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their side.
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.
The State, he argues, has no power over bishops whose relationship to their flock is purely spiritual and derived from Christ.
The Church is independent of all civil institution, and must have therefore within herself the powers necessary to her life as a society.
For, after all, experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of men.
What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the conscience of another?
At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new tradition which Locke had brought into being.
What seems to impress it most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine origin.
Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to be immune from their evil passions.
Let their minds but once turn to resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken.
Men cannot be confined within the limits of so narrow a logic.
Rather will oppression in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience which provokes to action.
What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense.
But greater things were in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have been admitted to the Church.
The hatred of the Church for dissent can only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars.
That men who had striven for her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen as tragic as ironical.
Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very existence of the Church and that concession…
What really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the Church.
So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship of Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental view of expedient conduct.
Where the avoidance of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence that no Church can live without an assembly to debate its problems, and that no assembly can be real which is subject to external control.
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