How so? If they admitted the King's right to deny, they must admit the
subject's right to entreat.
Ib.
Had they endeavoured the ejection of lay-chancellors, and the reducing
of the dioceses to a narrower compass, or the setting up of a
subordinate discipline, and only the correcting and reforming of the
Liturgy, perhaps it might have been borne more patiently.
Did Baxter find it so himself--and when too he had the formal and
recorded promise of Charles II. for it?
Ib.
But when the same men (Ussher, Williams, Morton, &c.) saw that greater
things were aimed at, and episcopacy itself in danger, or _their
grandeur and riches at least_, most of them turned against the
Parliament.
This, and in this place, is unworthy of Baxter. Even he, good man, could
not wholly escape the jaundice of party.
Ib. p. 34.
They said to this;--that as all the courts of justice do execute their
sentences in the King's name, and this by his own law, and therefore
by his authority, so much more might his Parliament do.
A very sound argument is here disguised in a false analogy, an
inapplicable precedent, and a sophistical form. Courts of justice
administer the total of the supreme power retrospectively, involved in
the name of the most dignified part. But here a part, as a part, acts as
the whole, where the whole is absolutely requisite,--that is, in passing
laws; and again as B. and C. usurp a power belonging to A. by the
determination of A.
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