It was Cartwright’s political rather than his religious views that alarmed Elizabeth and her Ministers.  As against their theory of a State-controlled Church, he advocated a Church-controlled State.  In fact, the most arrogant and insolent pretensions of the Papacy were surpassed by this Presbyterian divine.  Of course, all his demands were based on the authority of Scripture and the ways and customs of the primitive Christian Church.  The rule of bishops he denounced as begotten of the devil; the absolute rule of presbyters he held to be established by the word of God.  All other forms of Church government were ruthlessly to be suppressed, and heretics were to be punished by death.  For the ministers of the Church he claimed not only all spiritual power and jurisdiction, the decreeing of doctrines, the ordering of ceremonies, and so on, but also the supervision of public morals, under which every branch of human activities was included.  In short, the State, as well as the individual, was to be placed beneath the heel of the Church.  The power of the prince, the secular power, was tolerated only so that it might “protect and defend the councils of the clergy, to keep the peace, to see their decrees executed, and to punish the contemners of them.”  Such doctrines aroused no responsive echo in the minds of the English people.  The nation whose revolt against the papal supremacy had made the Reformation possible, were not disposed to accept Presbyterian supremacy in its place.  The national impatience of ecclesiastical power was not likely suddenly to be removed by any attempt to re-impose it under a new name and in a new garb.  In fact, Cartwright’s work almost seems as if specially written to warn the nation against a possible, if not an imminent, danger, to warn them, in truth, that—­“New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large.”

Cartwright’s narrow-minded dogmatism was crushingly answered in Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, the first volume of which appeared in 1594.  This remarkable book forms, indeed, an important landmark in the history of English political and religious thought.  Its forcible exposition of the basic principles of constitutional civil government makes many portions of it even to-day most attractive and instructive reading.  For the first time in the history of religious controversy, reason is extolled above any and every authority, and accepted as supreme judge and arbiter of spiritual, as well as of temporal, affairs.  Though Hooker thought it fit that the reason of the individual should yield to that of the Church, he did not hesitate to declare “that authority should prevail with man either against or above reason, is no part of our belief.  Companies of learned men, be they never so great and reverend, are to yield unto reason.”  As Buckle well points out,[21:1] if we compare this work with Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England, written some thirty years previously,—­and ordered, together with the Bible and Fox’s Martyrs,