laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who first wrote and spoke them." The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The true Church of Christ is in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice. Apostolic succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness for men's sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its own. The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to oppose to the human claims of the State. And since the State must have within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of power assumed without right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government. The eucharist became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an announcement--"a mere external thing"--that the rules of the fellowship have been broken. It at no point is related to the sinner's opportunity of salvation. In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor does its judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to believe. For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been imposed upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that of a member of the Church of England.