This tenderness to your friends, Sir John, is very obliging. But I would willingly engage your candour, in behalf of our order. Let me presume, for such a purpose, to second Mr. Somers’s observation, “That the English clergy have at length atoned, in some measure, for former miscarriages.”
SIR J. MAYNARD.
By their behaviour in a late critical conjuncture: and yet, to speak my mind frankly, the merit of their services, even on that occasion, is a little equivocal, when one reflects how unwilling they seemed to take the alarm, till they were roused, at length, by their own immediate object, the church’s danger!
BP. BURNET.
And can you wonder that what concerned them most, what they best understood, and was their proper and peculiar charge, should engage their principal attention? Besides, they went on principle, and with reason too, in supposing that no slight or partial breaches of law were sufficient to authorise resistance to the magistrate[28]. But when a general attack was made upon it, and the dispensing power was set up in defiance of all law, and to manifest the subversion of the constitution, the clergy were then as forward as any others to signalize themselves in the common cause of liberty.
SIR J. MAYNARD.
Their old favourite doctrine of non-resistance was, I doubt, at the bottom of this cautious proceeding. But it was high time for them to lay it aside, when they saw it employed as the ready way for the introduction of that popery, which, as you say, it was its first intention to keep out.
BP. BURNET.
It certainly was.—But, not to pursue this argument any further, let me return to the main point I had in view, which was, “to account for the growth of the regal power from the influence of the transferred supremacy.” There is still another instance behind, which shews how well our princes understood the advantage they had gained, and how dextrously they improved it.
It seems prodigious, at first sight, that when the yoke of Rome was thrown off, the new church, erected in opposition to it, should still continue to be governed by the laws of the old. The pretence was, that this was only by way of interim, till a body of ecclesiastical laws could be formed; and, to cover this pretence the better, some steps were, in fact, taken towards the execution of such a design. But the meaning of the crown certainly was, to uphold its darling supremacy, even on the old footing of the CANON LAWS.