Harold J. Laski

But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what is its nature?

It is, in fact, an imperium in imperio and its conflict with the state is inevitable.

For if that assumption is made we grant to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside the category of fallibility.

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.

Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some simple points emerge.

If God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we must seek a human explanation of political facts.

He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be replaced.

The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness but disestablishment.

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.

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…

For the church's hold upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her principles.

How can rights that are inherent be given up?

If they are divine, no human authority can either supersede or limit them....

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.

To be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must have organs of self-expression.

Like all High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense that Church and State can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to preserve the personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien body.

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.

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.

What really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the Church.

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…

That men who had striven for her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen as tragic as ironical.

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.

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.

That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied.

What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense.