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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The former rules may easily be applied to a particular church, for it's a spiritual commonwealth, and must as such, have governors, and them invested with a supreme power, yet such and of the same nature as the church is: that is, spiritual and ecclesiastical. This power, as all other in civil states, is derivative from Heaven, and of a very narrow scantling. And, that I may be more perspicuous and direct the reader by some line or thread of method, I will say something of the power: […] as it is spiritual; […] as supreme; [and] as divisible into several branches.
In the first place it's spiritual, and that in many respects, as the authors of Jus divinum regiminis ecclesiastici have sufficiently demonstrated. For the person's rule, actions and end are to be considered, not under a civil, but a spiritual notion. As styled by divines, and that according to the spirit's language, and the phrase of Holy Writ, to be potestas clavium. And the acts thereof are opening, shutting; or which are the same, binding, loosing. These are metaphorical terms, taken out of the Old into the New Testament. For our Saviour did love to use the spirit's words. The first and chief place where we read these words in a political sense with reference to government, is that of the evangelical prophet. ‘And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder, so he shall open and none shall shut, and he shall shut and none shall open’ (Isa. 22.22).
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