monarchy, condemned
twenty-seven propositions as impious and seditious, and most of
them as heretical and blasphemous, and condemned the works of
nineteen writers to the flames, would alone entitle his name to
remembrance.[160:1] So incensed indeed were the Commons, that
they also condemned to be burnt the very _Collections of Passages
referred to by Dr. Sacheverell in the Answer to the Articles of
his Impeachment_.

But Parliament was in a burning mood; for Sacheverell's friends,
wishing to justify his cry of the Church in danger, which he had
ascribed to the heretical works lately printed, easily succeeded
in procuring the burning of Tindal's and Clendon's books, before
mentioned. Nor can any one who reads that immortal work, _The
Rights of the Christian Church, asserted against the Romish and
all other Priests who claim an independent power over it_, wonder
at their so urging the House, however much he may wonder at their
succeeding.

The first edition of _The Rights of the Christian Church_
appeared in 1706, published anonymously, but written by the
celebrated Matthew Tindal, than whom All Souls' College has never
had a more distinguished Fellow, nor produced a more brilliant
writer. In those days, when the question that most agitated men's
minds was whether the English Church was of Divine Right, and so
independent of the civil power, or whether it was the creature
of, and therefore subject to, the law, no work more convincingly
proved the latter than this work of Tindal; a work which, even
now, ought to be far more generally known than it is, no less for
its great historical learning than for its scathing denunciations
of priestcraft.

As the subordination of the Church to the State is now a
principle of general acceptance, there is less need to give a
summary of Tindal's arguments, than to quote some of the passages
which led the writer to predict, when composing it, that he was
writing a book that would drive the clergy mad. The promoting the
independent power of the clergy has, he says, "done more mischief
to human societies than all the gross superstitions of the
heathen, who were nowhere ever so stupid as to entertain such a
monstrous contradiction as two independent powers in the same
society; and, consequently, their priests were not capable of
doing so much mischief to the Commonwealth as some since have
been." The fact, that in heathen times greater differences in
religion never gave rise to such d