Sovereigns could not be made and unmade by subjects, neither could Clergymen be made or unmade by States, therefore such a law as that now enacted became, in a spiritual point of view, futile, impertinent, even impious. A strange confusion of truth and error obtained throughout this reasoning of the Nonjurors. No doubt the Church, as a Divine community, is independent of human governments. The pastors and teachers are not the creatures of the Civil power, they are in the hands of Him who walks amidst the golden candlesticks. Of spiritual office and character the Civil power is not competent to denude any servant of Christ. But when chief Ministers of the Church are amongst chief officers of State, when Bishops are Peers, and Clergymen have legally-vested rights, the case is different. Church temporalities are from first to last the creations of secular government; and the authority which gives can take away. Parliament had no business to alter the religious position of Ministers, but it had a right to impose conditions, for its own safety, upon those who added to the character of Ministers that of political legislators and officers of a nationally-endowed Church. Erastianism had been predominant under Charles II. It had lingered under James II. It was to be revived and to be manifested, in some respects more distinctly than ever, under William III.; but, at the Revolution, many who had been Erastian enough through the previous quarter of a century, began to be restless and to sigh for emancipation. Circumstances made them voluntaries in practice, although circumstances did not make them voluntaries in principle. As time rolled on, the doctrine of the Church’s independence came more distinctly within view, notwithstanding their blindness to its consequences; and the assertion of that independency increased in earnestness after the rupture, of which I shall have much to say. [Sidenote: OATH OF ALLEGIANCE.]