spiritual and temporal. And the Pope, to make himself this representant, wanteth three things that our Saviour hath not given him, to “command,” and to “judge,” and to “punish,” otherwise than, by excommunication, to run from those that will not learn of him. For though the Pope were Christ’s only vicar, yet he cannot exercise his government, till our Saviour’s second coming: and then also it is not the Pope, but St. Peter himself with the other apostles, that are to be judges of the world.
The other error in this his first argument is, that he says, the members of every commonwealth, as of a natural body, depend one of another. It is true, they cohere together, but they depend only on the sovereign, which is the soul of the commonwealth; which failing, the commonwealth is dissolved into a civil war, no one man so much as cohering to another for want of a common dependence on a known sovereign; just as the members of the natural body dissolve into earth for want of a soul to hold them together. Therefore there is nothing in this similitude from whence to infer a dependence of the laity on the clergy, or of the temporal officers on the spiritual; but of both