But justice must be done even to Parker before handing him over to the Tormentor.  What were his positions?  He was a coarse-fibred, essentially irreligious fellow, the accredited author of the reply to the question “What is the best body of Divinity?” “That which would help a man to keep a Coach and six horses,” but he is a lucid and vigorous writer, knowing very well that he had to steer his ship through a narrow and dangerous channel, avoiding Hobbism on the one side and tender consciences on the other.  Each generation of State Churchmen has the same task.  The channel remains to-day just as it ever did, with Scylla and Charybdis presiding over their rocks as of old.  Hobbes’s Leviathan appeared in 1651, and in 1670 both his philosophy and his statecraft were fashionable doctrine.  All really pious people called Hobbes an Atheist.  Technically he was nothing of the sort, but it matters little what he was technically, since no plain man who can read can doubt that Hobbes’s enthronement of the State was the dethronement of God:—­

“Seeing then that in every Christian commonwealth the civil sovereign is the supreme factor to whose charge the whole flock of his subjects is commuted, and consequently that it is by his authority that all other pastors are made and have power to teach and perform all other pastoral offices, it followeth also that it is from the civil sovereign that all other pastors derive their right of teaching, preaching and other functions pertaining to that office, and that they are but his ministers in the same way as the magistrates of towns, judges in Court of Justice and commanders of assizes are all but ministers of him that is the magistrate of the whole commonwealth, judge of all causes and commander of the whole militia, which is always the Civil Sovereign.  And the reason hereof is not because they that teach, but because they that are to learn, are his subjects.”—­(The Leviathan, Hobbes’s English Works (Molesworth’s Edition), vol. iii. p. 539.)

Hobbes shirks nothing, and asks himself the question, What if a king, or a senate or other sovereign person forbid us to believe in Christ?  The answer given is, “such forbidding is of no effect; because belief and unbelief never follow men’s commands.”  But suppose “we be commanded by our lawful prince to say with our tongue we believe not, must we obey such command?” Here Hobbes a little hesitates to say outright “Yes, you must”; but he does say “whatsoever a subject is compelled to do in obedience to his own Sovereign, and doth it not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws of his country, that action is not his, but his Sovereign’s—­nor is it that he in this case denieth Christ before men, but his Governor and the law of his country.”  Hobbes then puts the case of a Mahomedan subject of a Christian Commonwealth who is required under pain of death to be present at the Divine Service of the Christian Church—­what is he to do?  If, says Hobbes, you say he ought to die, then you authorise all private men to disobey their princes in maintenance of their religion, true or false, and if you say the Mahomedan ought to obey, you admit Hobbes’s proposition and ought to consent to be yourself bound by it. (See Hobbes’s English Works, iii. 493.)