There is and always must be a competition between the prerogative of the Prince or State and that of Conscience, which on this occasion is defined as “every private man’s own judgment and persuasion of things.”  “Do subjects rebel against their Sovereign?  ’Tis Conscience that takes up arms.  Do they murder Kings?  ’Tis under the conduct of Conscience.  Do they separate from the communion of the Church?  ’Tis Conscience that is the Schismatick.  Everything that a man has a mind to is his Conscience.” (Ecc.  Politie, p. 6.)

How is this competition to be resolved?  Parker answers in exact language which would have met with John Austin’s warm approval.

“The Supreme Government of every Commonwealth, wherever it is lodged, must of necessity be universal, absolute and uncontrollable.  For if it be limited, it may be controlled, but ’tis a thick and palpable contradiction to call such a power supreme in that whatever controls it must as to that case be its Superior.  And therefore affairs of Religion being so strongly influential upon affairs of State, they must be as uncontrollably subject to the Supreme Power as all other Civil concerns.” (Ecc.  Politie, p. 27.)

If the magistrate may make penal laws against swearing and blasphemy, why not as to rites and ceremonies of public worship? (39.) Devotion towards God is a virtue akin to gratitude to man; religion is a branch of morality.  The Puritans’ talk about grace is a mere imposture, (76) which extracts from Parker vehement language.  What is there to make such a fuss about? he cries.  Why cannot you come to Church?  You are left free to think what you like.  Your secret thoughts are your own, but living as you do in society, and knowing as you must how, unless the law interferes, “every opinion must make a sect, and every sect a faction, and every faction when it is able, a war, and every war is the cause of God, and the cause of God can never be prosecuted with too much violence” (16), why cannot you conform to a form of worship which, though it does not profess to be prescribed in all particulars, contains nothing actually forbidden in the Scriptures?  What authority have Dissenters for singing psalms in metre?  “Where has our Saviour or his Apostles enjoined a directory for public worship?  What Scripture command is there for the three significant ceremonies of the Solemn League and Covenant, viz. that the whole congregation should take it (1) uncovered, (2) standing, (3) with their right hand lift up bare” (184), and so on.

In answer to the objection that the civil magistrate might establish a worship in its own nature sinful and sensual, Parker replies it is not in the least likely, and the risk must be run.  “Our enquiry is to find out the best way of settling the world that the state of things admit of—­if indeed mankind were infallible, this controversy were at an end, but seeing that all men are liable to errors