We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the blessed apostles were here conversant.
Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason. Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name
He would have had superintendents.
Ib.
c. v. 2. p. 204.
A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.
This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged Hooker to shew, first, that the constitution of the Church in Christ was a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators were
bona fide
determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy, — for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies, — were not the substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament.