Like all High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense that Church and State can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to preserve the personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien body. To be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph. Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles Leslie who best summed up the feeling of High Churchmen. His _Case of the Regale_ (1701) is by far the ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the real issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine society, with rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its origin. If it was divine, invasion did not touch its _de jure_ rights. "How," he asked, "can rights that are divine be given up? If they are divine, no human authority can either supersede or limit them.... How can rights that are inherent be given up? If they are inherent, they are inseparable. The right to meet, to consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of the society, is essential to every society as such ... can she then part with what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other." The Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature of the state or an _imperium in imperio_; but Leslie would not admit that fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The sacred and civil powers were like two parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to control or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority." He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil magistrate. But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and kings should not "have their beneficence and protection to the Church of Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her government."