'Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro'. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible 'phasis' or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual. The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under the proprieties and necessities of space, is, that it does not, as no concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the individuals, the aggregate of whom constitutes the national church, so that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual, and in every congregation may form an 'ecclesia' or Christian community; and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the 'enclesia', and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the 'ingens desiderium proborum'. 8th Sept, 1826. Ib. c. viii. 7. p. 232. Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned. 'Quære'. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century. B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249. That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law.