Even more notable are the utterances of George Gillespie, when vindicating against the Erastians of the south that more free government of the church by its own courts from which they feared so many evils. "I dare confidently say," he affirms, "that, if comparisons be rightly made, presbyterial government is the most limited and the least arbitrary government of any other in the world."[267] And, after entering into details to make good this affirmation in regard to the papal and prelatical forms of government, he proceeds to maintain that Independents "must needs be supposed to exercise a much more unlimited or arbitrary power than the presbyterial churches do," because they exempt individual congregations from all control and correction by superior courts, and because it is "one of their three grand principles which disclaimeth the binding of themselves for the future unto their present judgement and practice, and avoucheth the keeping of this reserve to alter and retract."[268] Some who think that, after all recent changes, they more truly hold the opinions of Gillespie than we do, have laid it down very dogmatically that even although the constitution of a national church were in all other respects scriptural, yet if it did not reserve this power to alter and retract without let or hindrance, it would still be at variance with the tenets of the Covenanting times; but you see here that Gillespie affirms that that was a principle of the Independents, not of the Presbyterians, and claims[269] it as a special merit of the latter that they were willing to explain their doctrine and discipline to the civil authorities, and, getting these sanctioned, to abide by them till they were again altered by consent of church and state. He denies that in claiming a distinct government for the church the Presbyterians meant to deprive the Christian magistrate of that power and authority in matters of religion which the Word of God and the earlier Confessions of the Reformed churches recognised as belonging to his office. On the contrary, he maintains that not only in extraordinary cases when church government doth degenerate into tyranny, or those who manage it make defection from the truth, "the Christian magistrate may and ought to do diverse things in and for religion, and interpose his authority diverse wayes so as doth not properly belong to his cognisance, decision and administration ordinarily, and in a reformed and well constituted church";[270] but also that, in ordinary cases, he is free to act as his own conscience directs in giving or refusing his sanction to the government and discipline of the church; and that if he is offended with any sentence of its courts, "they ought to be ready, in all humility and respect, to give him an account and reason of such their proceedings, and by all means to endeavour the satisfaction of the magistrate his conscience, or otherwise to be warned and rectified if themselves have erred."[271]