a Church,--who not only have no proper
Clergy, but will not allow a division of majority and minority, nor a
temporary president,--seems to supply an unanswerable confirmation of
this my assertion, and a strong presumption for the validity of my
argument. The Wesleyan Methodists have, I know, a discipline, and the
power is in their consistory,--a general conclave of priests cardinal
since the death of Pope Wesley. But what divisions and secessions this
has given rise to; what discontents and heart-burnings it still
occasions in their labouring inferior ministers, and in the classes, is
no less notorious, and may authorize a belief that as the Sect
increases, it will be less and less effective; nay, that it has
decreased; and after all, what is it compared with the discipline of the
Quakers?--Baxter's inconsistency on this subject would be inexplicable,
did we not know his zealotry against Harrington, the Deists and the
Mystics;--so that, like an electrified pith-ball, he is for ever
attracted towards their tenets concerning the pretended perfecting of
spiritual sentences by the civil magistrate, but he touches only to fly
off again. "Toleration! dainty word for soul-murder! God grant that my
eye may never see a toleration!" he exclaims in his book against
Harrington's Oceana.

Ib. p. 405.

As for the democratical conceit of them that say that the Parliament
hath their governing power, as they are the people's representatives,
and so have the members of the convocation, though those represented
have no governing power themselves, it is so palpably
self-contradicting, that I need not confute it.

Self-contradicting according to Baxter's sense of the words "represent"
and "govern." But every rational adult has a governing power: namely,
that of governing himself.

Ib. p. 412.

That though a subject ought to take an oath in the sense of his rulers
who impose it, as far as he can understand it; yet a man that taketh
an oath from a robber to save his life is not always bound to take it
in the imposer's sense, if he take it not against the proper sense of
the words.

This is a point, on which I have never been able to satisfy myself.--The
only safe conclusion I have been able to draw, being the folly,
mischief, and immorality of all oaths but judicial ones,--and those no
farther excepted than as they are means of securing a deliberate
consciousness of the presence of the Omniscient Judge. The in