Taylor is a strenuous advocate for an Episcopal Church--yet even here he breaks bounds, and has exposed himself to the correction, if not the censure, of Episcopalian critics. Departing from Hooker’s method in his _Ecclesiastical Polity_, he endorses the Puritan idea, that a precise form of government is laid down in Scripture; and then he proceeds to say, that “the government of the Church is in _immediate_ order to the good and benison of souls.” The first of these peculiar opinions, his biographer pronounces unwise, the second untrue, and both as going too far,--the one as proving too much, the other as an exaggerated conception of what is not to be ranked amongst things of the first importance,--for the sincere word and the means of grace are alone _immediately_ necessary to salvation.[414] Mere government, according to Hooker, rests amongst the non-essentials of Christianity; and any change therein is to change the way of safety, no otherwise than as “a path is changed by altering only the uppermost face thereof, which, be it laid with gravel, or set with grass, or paved with stone, remaineth still the same path.”[415] A further example of running to an extreme of strictness in reference to Church polity, after so much latitude, and even looseness in relation to Christian doctrine, is found in Taylor’s assumption of facts touching Episcopal orders. It is an assumption, says Heber, “in which he is neither borne out by antiquity, nor the tenor of the Gospel history, when he finds in the Apostles, during the abode of their Lord on earth, the first Bishops, and in the seventy-two disciples, whom Christ also selected from His followers, the first presbyters of His Church.”[416] [Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--COSIN.]