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- negotiation of the balance of powers between king and Parliament, and it therefore pertained to the secular sphere. In the preceding years, the Presbyterian ministers of the Westminster Assembly had claimed for the church the control of the access to the sacraments and the power to excommunicate. Ascham reminded that as God-given ‘right-of dominion’ was a ‘sacred theme’, many ‘divines
appointed by God as ‘seedbed and seminary’ of the commonwealth ‘to teach church, state, and society essential Christian and political norms and habits’ (J. Witte, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Tradition and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, KY, 1991 ), p. 9). Therefore, divorce was rejected insofar as the dissolution of the ‘little commonwealth’ embodied by