of those who are to come to the holy communion,
the ecclesiastical discipline, the ordination of ministers, and the
abdication, deposing, and degrading of them (if they become like unsavoury
salt), the deciding and determining of controversies of faith and cases of
conscience, canonical constitutions concerning the treasury of the church
and collections of the faithful, as also concerning ecclesiastical rites
or indifferent things which pertain to the keeping of decency and order in
the church, according to the general rules of Christian love and prudence
contained in the word of God.

55. It is true that about the same things the civil power is occupied, as
touching the outward man, or the outward disposing of divine things in
this or that dominion, as was said, not as they are spiritual and
evangelical ordinances piercing into the conscience itself, but the object
of the power ecclesiastical is a thing merely and purely spiritual; and in
so far as it is spiritual (for even that jurisdiction ecclesiastical which
is exercised in an outward court or judicatory, and which inflicteth
public censures, forbiddeth from the use of the holy supper, and excludeth
from the society of the church) doth properly concern the inward man, or
the repentance and salvation of the soul.

56. Surely the faithful and godly ministers, although they could do it
unchallenged and uncontrolled, and were therein allowed by the magistrate
(as in the prelatical times it was) yet would not usurp the power of life
and death, or judge and determine concerning men's honours, goods,
inheritance, division of families, or other civil businesses, seeing they
well know these things to be heterogeneous to their office; but as they
ought not to entangle themselves with the judging of civil causes, so if
they should be negligent and slothful in their own office, they shall in
that be no less culpable.

57. To the object also of ecclesiastical power belongeth the assembling of
synods, so far as they are spiritual assemblies proper to the church, and
assembled in the Holy Ghost; for being so considered, the governors of
churches, after the example of the apostles and presbyters, Acts xv., in a
manifest danger of the church, ought to use their own right of meeting
together and convening, that the churches endangered may be relieved and
supported.

58. _Thirdly_, These powers are differenced in respect of their forms, and
that three ways: for, first, the civil p