ese had power to substitute their pythii, ambassadors,
or nuncios, by which, not without concurrence of the Senate, they
held intelligence with the oracle of Apollo at Delphos. And the
ecclesiastical part of the Commonwealth of Rome was governed by the
pontifex maximus, the rex sacrificulus, and the Flamens, all ordained
or elected by the people, the pontifex by the tribes, the King by the
centuries, and the Flamens by the parishes.

"I do not mind you of these things, as if, for the matter, there were
any parallel to be drawn out of their superstitions to our religion,
but to show that for the manner, ancient prudence is as well a rule in
divine as human things; nay, and such a one as the apostles themselves,
ordaining elders by the holding up of hands in every congregation, have
exactly followed; for some of the congregations where they thus ordained
elders were those of Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, the countries of
Lycaona, Pisidia, Pamphilia, Perga, with Attalia. Now that these cities
and countries, when the Romans propagated their empire into Asia, were
found most of them commonwealths, and that many of the rest were endued
with like power, so that the people living under the protection of the
Roman emperors continued to elect their own magistrates, is so known
a thing, that I wonder whence it is that men, quite contrary to the
universal proof of these examples, will have ecclesiastical government
to be necessarily distinct from civil power, when the right of the
elders ordained by the holding up of hands in every congregation to
teach the people, was plainly derived from the same civil power by which
they ordained the rest of their magistrates. And it is not otherwise in
our commonwealth, where the parochial congregation elects or ordains its
pastor. To object the Commonwealth of Venice in this place, were to show
us that it has been no otherwise but where the civil power has lost the
liberty of her conscience by embracing popery; as also that to take away
the liberty of conscience in this administration from the civil power,
were a proceeding which has no other precedent than such as is popish.

"Wherefore your religion is settled after the following manner: the
universities are the seminaries of that part which is national, by which
means others with all safety may be permitted to follow the liberty of
their own consciences, in regard that, however they behave themselves,
the ignorance of the unlearned in th