And what is the allegiance, but a promise to persevere in what they do
daily, and what they hold as their indispensable duty to do? To grant
the one, then, and refuse the other, is, in effect, to homologate or
acknowledge the constitution, and not to acknowledge it, at the same
time, which is a glaring absurdity.
But here, they would have people attend to their chimerical distinction
between the king's civil and ecclesiastical authority. They have made a
successless attempt (in order to establish their antigovernment scheme)
for the overthrow of a distinction, which Heaven has irreversibly fixed,
between the preceptive and providential will of God; and, for the same
purpose, they will impose this distinction on the generation--a mere
shift and artifice, which has no foundation nor subsistence any where
else, but in their imagination, and serves for no purpose but to cheat
their own and others' consciences, and betray the cause of God. It is
plain, that as a power, both civil and ecclesiastical, belongs to the
essence and constitution of an English diocesan bishop, so the same is
declared to belong now to the essence and constitution of an English
king, who is the head and chief prelate among them all; and it is their
manner to call themselves his bishops (not Christ's), as having their
power, both ecclesiastical and civil, immediately from him, as the
fountain of all power within his dominions So that there is no room for
this distinction of _Seceders_ here, unless they are such expert
logicians, as to distinguish a thing from that which is essential to it,
and so from itself; but this is a destruction, not a distinction.
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