This chapter outlines the Laudian critique of puritan scripturalism, and the ways in which what the Laudians saw as the puritan insistence of the right of every Christian to a private judgement of what the scripture meant and a consequent duty, on the basis of that judgement, to hold the doings of their superiors in church and state to account. This, the Laudians claimed, undermined the authority of both the clergy and the church, not to mention order in church, state and society. At stake was not only a right to interpret scripture, but also claims to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. For the Laudians, such claims upset, indeed inverted, social and gender hierarchies, and utterly subverted the authority of the clergy. Again the result was a de facto, if not all too often, a de jure, separation.

This chapter explains how the centrality of the sacrament and the reorientation of worship towards the altar were used to give external shape and expression to crucial divisions within the social body of the church. The sacerdotal authority of the clergy was embodied through their role in dispensing the sacraments, and given physical expression in their sole access to the holy of holies beyond the rails. There they administered the sacrament to the laity kneeling at the rails. Division between different sorts of Christian were also expressed in terms of their distance from and access to the sacrament. Here some Laudians espoused an attachment to physical forms of differentiation, expressed through the structure of the church to which, in practice, the church of England did not aspire, but which arguably expressed how Laudians thought about the Christian community and its relation to the church, the clergy and the sacrament.