itself,
or the usurpation of power by eminent individual presbyters, assuming
the name of "bishops" in a new sense. Nay, the one usurpation had
prepared the way for the other; and, especially after the establishment
of Christianity in the Roman Empire by the civil power, the two
usurpations had gone on together, until the church became a vast
political machinery of councils, smaller or larger, regulated by a
hierarchy of bishops, archbishops, and patriarchs, all pointing to the
popedom. The error of the Presbyterians, it is maintained, lies in their
not perceiving this natural and historical connection of the two
usurpations, and so retaining the synodical tyranny while they would
throw off the prelatic.

Not having recovered the true original idea of an _ecclesia_ as
consisting simply of a society of individual Christians meeting together
periodically and united by a voluntary compact, while the great
invisible church of a nation or of the world consists of the whole
multitude of such mutually independent societies harmoniously moved by
the unseen Spirit present in all, Presbyterians, it is said, substitute
the more mechanical image of a visible collective church for each
community or nation, try to perfect that image by devices borrowed from
civil polity, and find the perfection they seek in a system of national
assemblies, provincial synods, and district courts of presbyters,
superintending and controlling individual congregations. Independency,
on the other hand, would purify the aggregate Church to the utmost, by
throwing off the synodical tyranny as well as the prelatic, and
restoring the complete power of discipline to each particular church or
society of Christians formed in any one place.

So, I believe, though with varieties of expression, English
Independents argue now. But, while they thus seek the original warrant
for their views in the New Testament and in the practice of the
primitive Church, and while they maintain also that the essence of these
views was rightly revived in old English Wycliffism, and perhaps in some
of the speculations which accompanied Luther's Reformation on the
Continent, they admit that the theory of Independency had to be worked
out afresh by a new process of the English mind in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and they are content, I believe, that the crude,
immediate beginning of that process should be sought in the opinions
propagated, between 1580 and 1590, by the err