X. Inaugural Address

In opening our proceedings of the year before last, I made certain observations on the state and tendency of religious thought in England, and on the temper and spirit in which we ought to meet it. And now, in addressing you at the outset of our eighth year, I do not know that I can do better than to take up the same subject where I left off. In the conclusion of the paper I then read were these words, — ' The royal supremacy has perished by the law of mortality which consumes all earthly things.' I need hardly guard my words by saying that I spoke only of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown. The civil and political supremacy was never contested. The power of the Crown, if less absolute in its mode of procedure, was never more supreme, and never so widely spread as now. Its in defeasible prerogatives in the order of civil Government have become more evident and irresistible in proportion as it has disengaged itself from the monstrous pretensions of Henry VIII. The theory of established Churches demands an ecclesiastical supremacy in the civil power. The two come and go together; and when the ecclesiastical supremacy is declining, the days of establishments are numbered. In the year before last, I pointed out the fact that the Tudor Statutes have almost passed away. The greater part are actually erased from the statute-book. Those that remain are almost equally dead. The mind of the country is against them. In Ireland all the tyranny of Tudors and Stuarts failed to impose the royal supremacy upon a Catholic people. Penal laws could not accomplish it. The Established Church has not only utterly failed to conciliate the people of Ireland to the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, but it has rendered the name and thing more than ever intolerable.1 In Scotland the whole people rose against it. In England half the population has gradually rejected it. The remaining half of the people passively endure it; but in the Established Church itself a large class profess to limit the jurisdiction of the Crown in ecclesiastical matters to the temporal accessories of spiritual things, denying altogether its competence to touch any matter purely spiritual, and rejecting all royal acts exceeding these limits, as abuses or excesses of power. Now, though this theory is manifestly not the law of the land, it is nevertheless worthy of our sympathy and respect. It is an additional evidence of the cancelling of the Tudor supremacy from many of the best and highest minds in the Established Church. They who bold this theory protest against all such judgments as that in the case of Mr. Gorbam and of the Essays and Rccicws. They treat them as tyrannical acts of the State, external to

1 Since this was written the Established Church in Ireland has ceased to exist.

the Church of England. They contend that the Church of England is persecuted, but not committed by such acts of the Crown. The facts are not so; but it is a hopeful sign that the members of the Established Church have come to reject these pretensions of the Tudor supremacy. It is equivalent to an admission that the Catholics were right in refusing it from the first; that their instincts are justified by the event. I note this because it is an evidence of the direction in which the stream is running; and both charity and generosity require of us to forward these tendencies with all good-will, and without a word of unkindly comment.

To those whose memories can reach back to the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and to the emancipation of Catholics, it is evident that the changes we now see hurrying onwards like the race of a tide have been long preparing. The Church of England was morally disestablished by the change in our polity which placed its destinies in the hands of a constituency and a legislature in which Dissenters from the State religion form a very powerful element. From that day the Church of England began to appeal to its own spiritual authority and to exert its own internal energies. It became a voluntary body in three distinct ways, — in the multiplication of churches dependent on voluntary offerings, in the founding of schools without endowments, and in the multiplication of colonial bishoprics. Twenty years and more ago those who watched the voluntary churches formed in our colonies foresaw that the colonies would react upon the mother country, and that the unestablished churches of Canada and Australia would insure and hasten the disestablishment of their mother church. But no one, I think, foresaw how soon or how rapidly the question would be raised. They who can remember the political events from 1880 to 1840 will recollect how violent were the outcries against the Established Church, and the demands for the removal of the Bishops from the House of Lords. The Establishment was formidably threatened, but it was not as yet in much danger. The old political and social traditions were too strong: the power of the Establishment in Parliament was para mount. It was confident of its own strength, and defiant of its adversaries. The time of reforming abuses was come, because the time of disestablishment was not yet. As now the time of reforming abuses in the Irish Church is past, because the time of disestablish ing is come. But since 1840 irresistible currents of change have been working within the Church Establishment. It has been parting asunder by the repulsion of two schools, each tending to their ultimate analysis, the Anglo-Catholic and the Critical, or, to use not offensively, but only for clearness-sake, two other terms, the Romanising and the Rationalistic Schools. These two forms of thought and these two intellectual tendencies are so fully launched into activity that nothing can restrain them from reaching their natural points of rest. The Church of England is incapable of con trolling or of holding them together. It cannot do so by authority, for both reject it; the one as incompetent, the other as inadmissible. It cannot do so by intellectual control, for both alike regard the Anglican reformation as intellectually incoherent. It cannot do so by spiritual suasion, for both alike regard it as un attractive in its influences. Still less can it do so by its coercive judgments, for both alike appeal from them to their own standards of Catholicity or of Eeason. This development of two counter and divergent move ments has now been in operation for thirty years, and every successive decade has revealed that for the Church of England to return upon its past, or to retain its present attitude towards its own members, towards the country, towards the Catholic Church, is impossible. It is to be observed that the noted controversies on baptism and inspiration had no sooner ended with the decision of the Crown in Council than a new class of questions was forced upon the supreme tribunal of appeal. The appeals in causes of doctrine had revealed the true pretensions of the royal supremacy in matters of belief. This rendered the royal supremacy intolerable at home. The appeals in matters of jurisdiction from Natal revealed the pretensions, but also the in competence, of the Crown in matters of authority, and this rendered the royal supremacy intolerable in the colonies. Some of the best and most capable minds in the colonies are demanding freedom, which means disestablishment for their Church, and that demand is supported at least for the colonies, and sometimes for even more, by a powerful sympathy at home. Some also of the best and most capable minds in England are prophesying that the Church of England must be disestablished, and are not only preparing for the event, but not obscurely invoking it as a release from the burden of a civil supremacy in matters of conscience.

The Church of England has come to see that the supremacy of Kings has passed into the supremacy of Parliaments. The change in our political constitution is by itself effacing the whole theory of the Tudor supremacy. It is now resolved into the supremacy of the popular will. It was already intolerable to have an appellate jurisdiction in the Crown. It is still more intolerable to have it vested in the electoral constituency. This is powerfully and rapidly estranging men's minds from the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown. While, on the one hand, those who reject it are fashion ing to themselves theories more or less near to the Catholic doctrine, on the other, writers of note are fashioning a new theory of a National Church and of the royal supremacy. Dean Stanley and the Pall Mall Gazette may be taken to represent this new school of pure Erastianism. Dean Stanley is tolerant, comprehensive, and patient of endless contradictions within the communion of the National Church. If the nation be divided in religious opinion, so must, or rather ought to be, the National Church. The Pall Mall Gazette is peremptory in erecting the popular will, exercised through the Government and tribunals of the country, into the ultimate judge and disposer of the National religion. The supremacy of Coesarism is past. The supremacy of the democracy will be the next form of ecclesiastical authority. So long as there is an Establishment, this supreme control will be claimed; but the claim is in itself intolerable, and nothing can more powerfully alienate men from the idea of an Establishment.

There are only the five following conclusions or theories possible:

First, that the Church and the State should stand in relations of mutual recognition, amity, and co-operation, under the supreme direction of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, Pontiff and King; or,

Secondly, that the Church be established, and thereby subjected to the State, as in Constantinople after the schism, in England by Henry VIII., and in Eussia, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; or,

Thirdly, that the State should establish and endow all communions alike, and assume a supreme, control over them all.

Fourthly, that the State, holding itself aloof from all contact with religion and religious communions, shall nevertheless exercise a supreme control over them all.

Fifthly, that all religious communions in a country be disestablished, that is, tolerated, but not incorporated in the public laws, the State ceasing to interfere in any way with them.

The first is the ecclesiastical supremacy for which S. Thomas and Sir Thomas More laid down their lives.

The second is the royal supremacy of Henry VIII.

The third has been proposed by many English statesmen, and is recommended now by many for Ire land.

The fourth is the theory to which the rationalistic liberalism of this country is tending.

The fifth is the state to which a power higher than theory, the irresistible current of events, is carrying us. They who promote it may he adversaries of the Church, but the Church will know how to use it for its own liberty and mission to the v/orld.

It may be not unreasonable to examine these several theories, because with surprise and regret I have observed that even among Catholics the true relations of the Church and the State have been so imperfectly defined, that some confound the union or concord of Church and State with what is called the Establishment of the Church.

It is the more remarkable that such an illusion should have existed, because in the Syllabus of 1864 Pius IX. has condemned the proposition ' that it is lawful to constitute National Churches separate from the Iloman Pontiff.'2 This alone is enough to show that, in condemning the proposition * that the Church ought to be separate from the State and the State from the Church,' the Holy Father had no intention to recog nise in any sense as the Church the national bodies whose very existence he had condemned already.

In order to illustrate what is the union of Church and State which the Holy Father sanctions in the act of condemning the theory of separation, I will take the history of the Church in England, and I do so the more willingly because I have lately had often to speak on the same topic; but the report of my words has in every case omitted the chief evidence on which the whole argument depends.

The earliest historical document in which the

3 Syllabus of Pius IX., prop. 37.

Church in its corporate character is recognised by the public law of England is a canon of the Council of Berghamstede or Barsted in Kent under Withred, king of Kent, in the year 697, that is, a century after S. Augustin. There are three versions of the canon. The tirst is given by Sir Henry Spelman as follows: ' Let the Church be free, and enjoy its judgments, and revenues, and pensions. Let prayers be made for the King, and let men obey his laws, not by coercion of necessity, but of free will.'8 The second version is given by Wilkins: ' Let the Church enjoy immunity and tributes, and let prayer be made for the King, and let him be honoured, not by coercion, but of free will.'* The third in Johnson's Canons runs: ' A freedom from taxes belongs to the Church, and let men pray for the King, and honour him of their own accord, without any compulsory law.'5

Now in all these three versions alike the Church is recognised as a body or corporation, or, to use a later language, as a moral person, and is so treated with by the public law of the land. Secondly, it was declared to have a liberty or an immunity of its own, which the public law respected and preserved. Thirdly, it had its judgments, that is, its tribunals, jurisdictions, and sen tences. Fourthly, it had its revenues, pensions, and tributes, which were held by the Church, and recognised by the State. Lastly, in its prayers for the King it made intercession, not by any royal command, but by the instinct of Christian piety.

3 Spelman's Councils, torn. i. p. 194.

4 Wilkins' Concilia, vol. i. p. 60.

5 Johnsou's Canons, vol. i. sub aniio DCXCVI.

-('|S INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

This corporate character the Church has from its Divine Founder, with the powers of government, legislation, and judicial authority committed to it. The word ' body' was first applied to a multitude of persons taken collectively by S. Paul. This Church is ' the Body of Christ.' It is therefore a corporation by the same metaphor. From this main and primary idea of a corporate existence, the term ' corporation' was com municated in after ages to the integral parts of the Church, such as Bishops, Chapters, Parochial Churches, and the like. They were called corporations, sole and aggregate, because they represent the Church, its powers and rights. Such is the true order of this subject, and not as a pretentious critic, replying to my words, would have it. After a conceited contempt of others, he tells us that the Church is not a corporation, but only its integral parts, such as I have before cited. But the truth is that their corporate character is communicated to them by the Church in behalf of which they hold property and exercise jurisdiction. The parish priest is persona ccclcsia, the representative of the Church, so also the Bishop in a higher sense; but neither would ever have received the title of ' corporation,' if the Church had not been first recognised as a body divinely founded and incorporated. This one canon therefore is enough to show the relation of the Church to the State. It was one of legal recognition, union, amity, and protection. It was a corporation independent, self-sufficing, the sole fountain of its own jurisdiction, endowed with supernatural liberty, holding its own consecrated goods, exercising jurisdiction, both legislative and judicial. Its immunity from civil laws arose from its sovereign rights derived from its Divine Head. This sovereignty within its own sphere included the election of its own pastors, the judgment of its own members, its union with the visible Head of the Church on earth. In the centuries which followed, the Church became largely endowed, its Bishops became important civil personages. The laws of the land recognised its immunity and its jurisdiction. In the Saxon Councils the Church and the State met, each legislating in its own sphere, and each recognising and accepting the other's laws. Johnson, in his preface to the collection of canons, says, ' That it is hard to say whether those assemblies were synods or parliaments.' In fact they were both, but neither crossed the legislation of the other. What the Church decreed as canons, the Parliament enacted as laws. In the administration of justice the King's thane and the world's thane, that is, the Bishop and the Earl, sat together. In all this the Church was recognised as an independent, and, in many things, as a superior, power and jurisdiction. The union of the Church and State in this sense has the sanction of the Catholic Church in all ages. The dissolution or divorce of this union is condemned by Pius IX. as an error.

This state of the law of England continued with occasional violations down to the time of Henry VIII. This state of the law was confirmed by the un broken course of legislation down to the Council of Clarendon. It had been confirmed also by the oaths of Danish, Saxon, and Norman kings. William the

Conqueror swore by his royal oath to observe these liberties; so did his successors, as William Rufus, who persecuted S. Anselm, and Henry II., who martyred S. Thomas. It is true, nevertheless, that both the Saxon and the Norman kings gradually usurped upon the freedom of the Church by customs; that is, by personal and royal influences over persons in the matter of its elections, and over its possessions. The influence of the King was often too great to leave much liberty of election to the Chapters. And this, before the Conquest, was all the more likely to occur from the close union and co-operation of the two powers. The Councils were also Parliaments, and in the County Courts the two jurisdictions ran together. It is there fore undoubtedly true that even the Saxon kings pro moted their favourites to bishoprics, and thereby violated the freedom of election; and also that the royal influence drew to itself the decision of mixed questions, which belonged strictly to the ecclesiastical tribunal. It is, nevertheless, certain that by both the canons of the Church and by the laws of England the Church possessed its immunities or liberties in elections, judgments, appeals to Rome, and in the freehold of its revenues, lands, and goods. This state of the law was confirmed by William the Conqueror on oath, and violated by him more systematically than by any of the Saxon kings. What they had been used to attempt, he claimed as customs of the realm. They were avowedly, prater legem, at variance with the law. They in effect suspended the law without rescinding it. The law required that the Church should be free;

the customs of the Crown deprived it of its freedom. Just as at this day a conge cVelire is attended by a letter of nomination, and the Anglican Chapters choose the man whom they are unable to reject. This is a fair sample of custom overruling law.

This state of the law, then, continued down to the 24 of Henry VIII. It was vindicated by S. Anselm and by S. Thomas; it was incorporated in the first article of Magna Charta, the words of which are almost a transcript of the Canon of Berghamstede. The King says, ' First, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have her whole rights and her liberties un hurt.' The charter goes on to specify in particular the freedom of elections. I have dwelt upon this in order to make clear that no amount of precedents or historical examples of royal influences in contravention of the liberties of the Church during the Saxon or early Norman period affects the assertion that those liberties were recognised and incorporated in the laws of the land, and that the contrary customs were abuses and excesses of royal power, not only not warranted by law, but in direct violation of the same. It is certain, in deed, that from the time of Kichard II. (13 and 16 Ric. II.) the statutes of Provisors and other anti-papal Acts of Parliament began to incorporate these customs in the statutes of the realm; and that, finally, the customs claimed by Henry II. were incorporated in the 24, 25, and 26 of Henry VIII. But I will not anticipate. For the present, I wish only to show that the liberties of the Church were the laws of the land, and the violations of these liberties were not by law but against law, and had no warrant but the alleged customs of kings. In order to place this beyond doubt, I might quote the contemporary lives of S. Thomas, by Edward Grim, Roger of Pontigny, John of Salis bury, Alan of Tewkesbury, William of Canterbury, Henry and Roger of Croyland, and others; but I prefer to make shorter work of it, and to recite a few passages which are decisive. They shall be taken from the letters of S. Thomas to Pope Alexander III.; from the narrative of those who were present at the conflicts between the Archbishop and the King; and, finally, from the Retractation of the Archbishop of York and of the King himself. I need not do more than remind you that the constitutions of Clarendon were drawn up by the order of Henry II., and are the mind of the King expressed in his own words. The 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12 of those constitutions violate the liberties of the Church, in the immunity of the clergy and of its goods, the freedom of its tribunals, elections, and appeals. They made the King's courts and the King's appellate jurisdiction superior to the Archbishop, and final. The sum of the whole contest between Henry II. and S. Thomas, cannot be better expressed than in two lines from an old chronicle:

' That the King be in the Pope's stede, And amend the Archbishop's dede.'

Writing to the Pope, S. Thomas says, ' Be pleased to read over the Bill of those reprobate usages which he claims against the Church, and on account of which I am banished; and your Holiness will see clearly that, before I made any stand, he had, by these same usages, stopped the mouths of all who would appeal to your court; prohibited all ecclesiastical persons from crossing the sea till an oath had been exacted from them; suffocated the rights of elections; drawn all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil, before his own courts; and run his dagger into every liberty of the Church.'

S. Thomas here enumerates four liberties: that is, 1. of appeal; 2. of access to Rome; 3. of election; 4. of tribunals. 'I choose rather,' he adds, 'to be an outcast from the palace, to be exiled, proscribed, and to finish my life in the last wretchedness, than to seal the Church's liberty, and to prefer the iniquitous tra ditions of men to the law of God.'6

John of Salisbury, who was present at the conference between S. Thomas and Henry II., in the presence of the King of France at Montreuil, gives the appeal of Henry II. as follows: ' My Lord King, and you, 0 holy men and nobles, I declare to you I require nothing more from the Archbishop than the observance of certain usages which his five immediate predecessors (some of whom are Saints and have per formed miracles) all observed' (how false this is, the conflict of S. Anselra on investitures is enough to show), ' and to which he himself has pledged himself. Let him again pledge himself to those in your Lord ship's presence, without any mental reservation and subterfuge. This is the sole cause of disagreement between myself and his Lordship.'7 Let it be here observed that the King does not venture to call these

6 S. Thorn. Cant., ed. Giles, torn. iii. p. 53.

7 Froude's Bcmains, second part, vol. ii. p. 376.

VOL. I. T usages, laws, or statutes. He knew, as all men knew. that they bad no letter or particle of law for their support. They were customs in violation of express laws, as the custom of bribery or undue influence is a violation of the purity and freedom of parliamentary election, and of the statutes made to protect it.

S. Thomas, writing to the Pope an account of the same conference, says, ' Certain it is that if the usages he demands obtain force, the authority of the Apostolic See in England will either vanish altogether, or he reduced to a minimum, as indeed it would have been long since, if we may trust the memory of this generation, and the writings of the past, unless princes had been checked. by the Church of Canterbury.'8

In like manner the Archbishop, writing to William of Pa via, says, ' Would that your Lordship had allowed yourself to believe from the first what is now known by our persecutors' own testimony; for lately, in the face of the most Christian King, the Archbishops, Bishops, Earls, nobles, and all present, he publicly declared that the only cause of our exile and proscription was our refusal to observe the usages.' ' And because we do not absolutely pledge ourselves to usages, some of which void the authority of the Apostolic See, and extinguish the liberty of the Church, the King departed without concluding peace.'9

These passages might be multiplied almost without number. I have marked eighteen or twenty equally strong and explicit in which the claim of the King is uniformly made on the ground, not of law, but of custom.

• Fronde's Remains, &c. p. 384. » Ibid. p. 392.

To prove this by final and decisive evidence, we may take the retractations of the Archbishop of York, and of Henry II. after the martyrdom of S. Thomas. Roger, Archbishop of York, was compelled to declare, ' that he had never confirmed, by writing or by oath, the hereditary customs respecting which the controversy between the King and the Archbishop turned.'10 The King in a public document revoked his claim in the following words: ' We, Henry, by the grace of God, King of Eng land, &c., publicly and openly revoke, abdicate, renounce, and resign all those evil customs, at variance with the ancient liberties of the Church in England, sinfully introduced by us, and we altogether renounce, for ourselves and for our heirs, all and every one of them, for which blessed Thomas, late Archbishop of Canterbury, contended even unto death;' ' and we grant, for us and our heirs, that the Church of Canterbury, and all other Churches in England, be free, and have all liberties inviolate as they were used before our coronation.'11

I have dwelt the more fully upon this point because, when of late I made these assertions, I was met by con tradictions and criticisms so confident but so evidently shallow, that I have thought it worth while to justify my assertions by the evidence of the Archbishop and the King. I may add that, in wiser and less pretentious times, the ' Summa causse inter Kegem et Tho-mam' was thoroughly appreciated even by Protestants. Godwin, in his History of the Archbishops of England, says, * The King in order to repress the license of the 10 Vita S. Thoma, vol. ii. p. 268, ed. Giles. » Ibid. p. 267.

prelates and clergy, and to distinguish the rights of the royal from the sacerdotal power, resolved to promulgate certain customs of the realm of England drawn iip by Henry I. his grandfather, but never yet made public:12

It is therefore beyond a doubt that the conflict of S. Thomas was precisely in behalf of the true and legitimate union of Church and State, in which the in dependence, integrity, and liberty of the Church are preserved inviolate, in contact but in harmony with the public authority and laws of the State. * The Jerusalem which is from above is free, which is our mother.' The Church readily unites itself to the greatest of God's works next after itself, the natural and civil society of mankind. It elevates, directs, sanctifies, and consoli dates the civil order which we call the State. It readily co-operates in all its action, in legislation, and in government; but it holds itself absolutely independent, and free in the exercise of all its prerogatives. The ultimate appeal in all things pertaining to its own office, authority, doctrines, elections, and jurisdiction must fall within its own sphere — that is, must be to its own Head. This liberty is more vital than life itself. S. Thomas died for it, as the Roman Pontiffs have died before. Throughout the world at this moment the Catholic Church preserves and transmits the same liberties inviolate. Various and complex as are its relations to the civil powers in such countries as France, Austria, Prussia, and the like, nowhere has it ever yielded the liberty, and therefore the purity, of its

" Godwin, De Prcesulibii* Anglia, pp. 73, 74.

elections, its spiritual judgments and appeals. Such is the Catholic Church, recognised indeed hy human law, but refusing to be established: independent of all authorities, and sustaining the civil order of the world.

This, then, is the union of the Church and State which the Holy Father by the Syllabus confirms. We will now go on to show how little application this has to Established Churches.

The first example of what may be called an Established Church would be in Constantinople, under the Arian Emperors, and finally after the completion of the Greek schism. Beveridge in his Synodicon, or Coun cils of the Greek Church, shows from Balsamon and Zonaras that the Emperors became masters of the Greek Church as soon as it fell from Borne. They made the Patriarchs, and deposed them; they suspended the action of the Synods; they interpreted, modified, and annulled all canons; they decided all cases in appeal. The Greek Church became a National Church separated from the Boman Pontiffs, and for that cause fell under the local civil power. It accepted its position, and became established. How completely the Greek Church has been struck with sterility, how intensely excited by national jealousy, how es tranged from the Holy See and the whole Christian world, every Catholic knows. And yet the Church in Constantinople has a hierarchy, a priesthood, and tra ditions, which sustained it in some degree against the secular influences of the Imperial power.

In England, even then, in every reign the liberties of the Church were expressly declared and confirmed by statutes of Parliament. To show the full force of this statement, I add the words and references.

We have already seen the words of Magna Charta in the reign of John ('Ecclecia Anglicana lihera sit').

The 14 Edward III. c. 1, declares ' That Holy Church have her liberties.'

The 50 Edward III. c. 1, ' That Holy Church have all her liberties.'

The 1 Ric. II. c. 1, * That Holy Church shall have and enjoy all her rights, liberties, and franchises, wholly and without blemish.'

The 2 Ric. II. c. 1, in the same words.

The 3 Ric. II. c. 1, in the same words again.

The 5 Ric. II. c. 1, the same words.

The 6 Ric. II. c. 1, ' That our Holy Mother, the Church of England, have all her liberties whole and unhurt, and the same shall freely enjoy and use.'

The 7 Ric. II. c. 1, as before.

The 8 Ric. II. c. 1, in the same words.

The 12 Ric. II. c. 1, the same.

The 1 Henry IV. c. 1, ' First, that Holy Church have and enjoy all her rights, liberties, and franchises entirely, and without imblemishing.'

The 2, 4, 7, 9, 13 Henry IV.

The 3 Henry V. c. 1, ' First, that Holy Church have all her liberties and franchises.'

The 4 Henry VI. c. 1, the same in fuller terms.13

Here are eighteen statutes declaring as law of Eng land the liberties for which S. Thomas died. And be it observed that the article stands first in every statute 11 Gibson's Codex, vol. i. pp. 5, 6.

as the basis of civil order. It is remarkable that from the Reformation downwards the word; liberties' dis appears. We hear only of ' rights and privileges as by law.'

The full effect and meaning of ' establishment' is to be seen in England. We have already shown that the Church in this land possessed its liberty of elections, of discipline, of administration, of appeals, and of personal recourse to the Holy See. During the centuries from Henry II. to Henry VIII., the royal customs and the civil courts steadily encroached upon the jurisdiction and rights of the Church. The 25 and 26 of Henry VIII. first completed the conversion of what be fore was only custom into statute law. In the preamble of the 25 of Henry VIII. it is declared that England is an empire, and that this, spiritually and temporally, suffices respectively for all government and judgments in matters of religion or law. The Church was thereby declared to be national and self-sufficing in all matters of civil and spiritual law — that is, both in doctrine and in discipline. All jurisdiction hitherto belonging to the Pope was therefore transferred and annexed to the Crown. Whatsoever the Pope could have done in time past, the King could do for the time to come. The University of Oxford has to this day the Crown as visitor, to the exclusion of the Bishop, because until then the Pope excluded the ordinary from visitation. The Crown alone has power to convene and dissolve the Synods or Convocations. Convocation cannot meet without the writ of the Crown, nor, when met, proceed to business without royal license, nor, if it resolve anything, put it in force until it obtains the King's leave. The whole legislative power of the Church is thus suspended. In like manner, also, the judicial. From all its courts an appeal lies to the Crown, whose sentence is final. It is high treason to receive, publish, or put in use any document from Rome. The Church goods are held by favour of the State. Down to 1839 or 1840, the Established Church held its property by tenure of corporations sole and aggregate. Since the creation of the Ecclesiastical Commission, the Established Church has been divested of its corporate character. The Church goods at this day are held by a commission appointed by Parliament, and the corporate character of the Church is extinct. We have here the true notion of establishment. I have said that the Catholic Church, while it readily accepts the recognition and co-operation of the State, refuses establishment, because the effect of establishment is to deprive it of its most vital liberties — the liberty of electing its own Bishops, of judging its own members, of binding and loosing by excommunications and absolutions, and of appealing to the Vicar of Jesus Christ. The royal customs, now the statutes of the realm, have reduced the Anglican Church to a bondage inevitable for all national Churches, but impossible for the Catholic. Its chains are of gold, but chains they are. It would be too long to draw out the detail of this question. The Establishment is so bound that it cannot silence a clergy man who denies the grace of Baptism or the eternity of punishment, nor depose a bishop who rejects the greater part of the Canon of Holy Scripture.

The acts of Henry VIII. have always been defended by the Anglican clergy and English lawyers, not as enacting, but as only declaratory, statutes. It is indeed true, as we have said, that the King and his courts had gradually encroached upon the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and that the customary excesses and abuses of power had gradually become the rule in respect of questions of a temporal kind, such as benefices and patronage. Lord Coke has endeavoured to show that the Crown had always an appellate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters. But Stillingfleet, moved by hostility to James II., proved against Lord Coke that it had not the power it claimed. Again, it is still further certain that the Crown never possessed the supremacy which even Stillingfleet claimed. It never touched a spiritual liberty of the Church but to be defeated. The old supremacy of the Crown recognised and obeyed the supremacy of the Vicar of Christ. They were in harmony and co-operation. The new supremacy not only excluded the authority and jurisdiction of the Pontiff, but annexed it to itself. Such, I conceive, is the true outline of the Established Church — 'a national body, separate from the Roman Pontiff,' claiming to be sufficient within itself for all questions of faith and discipline; protected by law, but suspended by law from all legislative, judicial, and executive powers. To be established is to be subject to an ultimate authority, which is secular and fallible. It was to resist the first entrance of this claim that S. Thomas died. He had a prophetic instinct when he declared to Alexander III. that the King's customs, if not resisted, would have long ago extinguished the authority of the Holy See in England. Henry VIII. extinguished the authority of the Holy See at a blow, with malice aforethought, knowing that dependence on Home is independence of all civil powers, and that separation from Rome places a national Church at the feet of princes. Even the Patriarchal Church of Constantinople could not hold its own when separated from the Vicar of Jesus Christ. The English Church was in the power of kings from the moment it was cut off from his protection. It was this which distinguished the new supremacy from the old, and it was for this distinction that Sir Thomas More won his martyr's crown. No Catholic can surely confound the establishment of a national Church with the union of Church and State. The union of the two powers is, as we have shown, free, independent, mutually helpful and honourable to both. The establishment of a Church is the subjection of the spiritual to the civil, and can never take place except where a Church by heresy or schism is cut off from Catholic unity.

Now, as I have said, the people of these three kingdoms have already passed judgment upon the Royal Supremacy.

Its first and inevitable exercise was to enforce, by coercion and penal laws, if not an inward unity of be lief, which was impossible, at least an outward uniformity of public worship. The history of the world does not contain anything more sanguinary and merciless than the persecutions in England and Ireland. The persecutions in Ireland are fabulous for their refined and relentless cruelty. The whole people recoiled from the Koyal Supremacy as from an accursed thing, and suffered with joy that they might be innocent of the great offence. The Catholics and the Non conformists of England suffered, side by side, under its tyranny and its tortures, and they suffered willingly rather than recognise in Prince or Parliament an authority over conscience, that is, over the Church, or the religion of Jesus Christ. The Eoyal Supremacy has alienated half the people from the established religion. In Scotland the tyrannous and insane attempt to force episcopacy and a liturgy upon the people was supported by cruelties which have made royal authority in religion a treason against the Crown rights of Jesus Christ. It is hardly possible to conceive antipathy deeper or more intense than the hatred with which Ireland, Scotland, and half of England regard the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown. But the Koyal Supremacy and the establishment of the Church are cause and effect. And now nearly two-thirds of the population of the three kingdoms desire that both should cease to be. Time has passed over the Tudor statutes, and for the fair name of England they are being blotted out of our history.

Men, at this day, are profoundly convinced that the Tudor statutes cannot, and ought not, any longer to exist. They see that, if at the first they were politic, they have become not only impolitic, but fatal to the unity, peace, and solidity of the Empire. Men are there fore casting about for theories and schemes to solve the difficulty, and have framed the three I have already stated. And this leads on to the other points, which I will only touch very lightly, and then conclude.

Seeing that the exclusive establishment and endowment of one religious communion is henceforward impossible, some are now proposing to endow all Churches alike. But will the advocates of this theory tell us how many Churches there are, and how they will draw this line? In Ireland alone, besides the Catholic Church, the Anglican and Presbyterian communions, there are a hundred dissenting sects. Are they all to be levelled up? If not, will their members be contented? In like manner, in England and in Scotland the sects are counted by scores. There is, moreover, a large proportion of the most powerful religious bodies of the country who reject endowment altogether. It is a law of their existence to depend on voluntary gifts. Will they likewise consent to be endowed? They hold all interference of the State in religion to be contrary to the genius of Christianity. Will they consent to be established? They think one establishment intolerable: will they be passive under half-a-dozen?

But this facile talk about endowing religious bodies is very shallow. The endowments of Churches were never yet given by votes of Parliament. Before Par liaments existed, the faithful made free-will oblations of lands, houses, and money, which, accumulating from age to age, became, as they are called in the Capitu laries of Charlemagne, ' patrinionia pauperum/ that is, the inheritance whereby both the spiritual and temporal needs of the poor were anticipated and provided for. Every communion gradually endows itself. And such spontaneous self-endowment is peaceful, legitimate, and safe. It is the work of willing hearts and open hands. No man is constrained to give, and no man has a right to complain of the free gift of his neighbour. But the redistribution of endowments, when claimed as national property, must follow the will of the nation. And here the apple of gold is the beginning of discord: and of discord without end. It is not to be doubted that the silent growth of spontaneous endowment tends to consolidate our public order, and to inspire a wise and conservative temper. But to endow by legislative enactment would be to light up popular animosities, of which no man can foresee the issue. If such a policy were ever practicable, it is practicable no longer. The golden opportunity is past, and will never return. There is another reason why the Catholic Church in these kingdoms, strongly as it holds not the lawfulness only, but the expediency of endowments, can never encourage such a policy. The endowment of the Church is never mentioned, but in the same breath we hear of vctos and State control. What politicians aim at is not to endow the Catholic Church, but to control it. They do not commiserate our poverty: they are jealous of our freedom. It is of no use, because it has no relevance, to quote the relation of the Church to the civil powers in France or Prussia.14 In both, those relations are regulated by public and explicit compacts with Eome. In neither France nor Prussia has the Catholic Church been persecuted for centuries by penal laws, of which the memory and the wounds are alike 14 1 leave the text as it stands, to show the instability of States.

fresh, as in Ireland, in the hearts of Catholics. In neither is the Government swayed by the anti-Catholic spirit which produced the Papal Aggression madness, and still perverts- our whole social state. Before the Catholic Church in these realms will accept relations with the civil power, the civil power must cease to proclaim itself by any anti-Catholic title in religion.

We now come to the fourth theory, namely, that the State have no religion, nor be united to any religious communion; that all religious belief and action be relegated to the private life of individuals, but that nevertheless the State retain a supreme control over all. This is a peculiar form of Erastianism, springing from a combination of the Voltairian philosophy and the pretensions of democracy. The first and normal theory of the union of Church and State, which, from Constantine to the Reformation, has sustained the Christian world, and has its source, centre, and head in the temporal power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, may be expressed in the phrase ' Pontiff-King.' The two next schemes are only modifications of the theory of establishment, and may be expressed by the term ' King-Pontiff.' The fourth is the result of the third. Sovereignty is passing rapidly to the people, and Ca3- sarism is merging itself in democracy. The civil power is the representative of the sovereign people, and it claims to legislate for all religions, and to control at least their public acts. In Pagan Rome all the religions of the world were tolerated, side by side, when truth alone was persecuted. The same will probably be hereafter. The period of indifference may indeed be only the prelude of the period of persecution. Re ligions which make no proselytes can abide passively under the shelter of a creedless State. But a religion whose first law is to make disciples of all nations pro vokes, even in its weakness, the animosity of unbe lievers; and in its strength, the persecution of penal laws and their relentless execution. To this society seems drifting. We cannot indeed desire to see the civil power moored to a heresy or a schism by way of retarding its course to this condition, for reasons I will briefly suggest.

It is lastly maintained by a powerful body in this country that all religious communions ought to be placed on a perfect equality before the law. To do this the disestablishment and disendowment of the existing State Churches would follow by necessity; and the civil power would henceforward hold itself neutral and passive in all matters of pure religion, so far as the public peace is not involved.

I have already, I hope, shown that in disestablish ing a national Church there is no question of the union of Church and State. No Catholic will admit that the bodies to be disestablished are Churches. Nor can he maintain the lawfulness of founding ' national Churches separate from the Roman Pontiff;' and if it be not lawful to found them, how is it lawful to uphold them?

The Syllabus alone is enough to restrain any Catholic from the defence of established national Churches. Under cover of all these declarations, I will venture to affirm that the disconnection of all religious bodies from the State in these realms is for our public peace, and for the advantage of religion itself. Forasmuch as the union between Church and State rests upon the providential order, whereby the highest work of the national order, that is, civil society, is united to the highest work of the supernatural order, that is, the Church, — this union is ordained for the elevation, illumination, and direction of the civil or political society by the action of divine truth and law, which is incorporated in the Church.

But for this very reason the union of the State with a heresy or a schism does not elevate, illuminate, and direct it. Nay, it perverts and misdirects the powers and actions of society, and turns them against the truth and law of God. The union of Protestantism with the State has produced two centuries of unexampled persecution of the Catholic faith and Church; and when the State ceased to persecute, it nevertheless kept up, by exclusion, disfranchisement, and unequal dealing, a harassing obstruction to the truth, and cruel spiritual privations against Catholics. To deliver the civil powers from the dominion and perversion of a heresy and a schism, and to restore them to a neutral impartiality, and to a natural equity towards all religious bodies, is a policy evidently wise and just.

If the civil powers are not and cannot be united to the Catholic faith and Church, at least let them no longer be united to a heresy and a schism. The pure state of nature is better than the state of obsession. As to disendowment, let us, for clear understanding, go back, in a few words, to first principles. Whatsoever the faithful laid at the Apostles' feet became the property of the Church, and was hekl by a Divine right of possession. The right of holding property in the Church is the highest exemplar of proprietorship. The Church holds by a higher and more perfect title than civil society. The Apostles therefore had the right either to spend or to keep that which the faithful gave. They might exhaust it before sunset, or lay it up for the morrow. The manna, by divine command, was not to be kept till the morrow; if kept, it became corrupt. But the Church does not lay up for the sake of wealth, or from want of confidence in the providence of God, but for a foreseeing care in holding and trans mitting its possessions in houses and lands for the benefit of posterity. Endowments are both lawful and beneficial. And yet the Church is ready to forego them in a.moment, rather than compromise a principle or endanger an article of faith. Again and again the Church has been sacrilegiously spoiled; and again and again the generosity of the faithful, by the providence of God, has re-endowed it. The Church in Ireland was robbed of everything to enrich the Establishment. But the people of Ireland have endowed it once more. Its poverty with its liberty are a hundredfold more precious than endowment with fetters of gold. The Bishops in Ireland have kindly and charitably refused the endowments of the Establisment. The Catholic Church will take heed for itself, and will trust in the care of its Divine Head. But it may justly demand that the old consecrated property, desecrated now, shall no longer be applied in maintaining the religious

VOL. I. TT ascendency of error, and of a heresy which hoth wounds and insults the instincts of a Catholic people, and per petuates the memory of conquest and confiscation. The disendowment of the Irish Establishment, for I say nothing now about the English, is demanded by bare justice. In the present temper of these kingdoms, the disendowment of the Irish Establishment is also the way of peace. There is but one policy which can tranquillise the religious agitations of Ireland — a perfect equality before the law; and that equality is impossible, so long as five millions of men are unendowed, and half a million absorbs the whole endowment given by our Catholic forefathers for the spiritual welfare of the entire population.

It may, I believe, be safely affirmed that the three bodies which at this time exercise the feeblest religious influence on the masses of these kingdoms are the three Established Churches. In Ireland it is self-evident. In Scotland it is not to be doubted that the religious zeal of the people is to be found, not in the Established Kirk, but in the Free Kirk and the Dis senters. In England the will of the masses is not with the Anglican Establishment, but with the Non conformists, who number half the population, and with the Catholic Church. If these three bodies were dis established to-morrow, the effect would be to stimulate their internal energies, and to make them exert all the powers that are in them. The religious forces of the country would be certainly multiplied, and that not in the way of controversy, but in each body or communion upon itself. The three Establishments would somewhat more adequately do their proper work, and the sum of the religious zeal and activity in the three kingdoms would be increased. If this he so, and it is hardly to be doubted, then the course of public legislation would assuredly not be less Christian. The public opinion of the country would be more so; and the legislature must ultimately be governed by public opinion. It is not my purpose now, and time would forbid me, to trace out the effect of all this upon the Catholic Church in this country. One thing is certain. Kelations with a just and equal civil power, detached from all religious establishments, would be possible. Now they are impossible. The undoing of the Tudor statutes is a first condition to the relaxing of the attitude of anti-Catholic hostility which has rendered a peaceful and cordial co-operation of the Catholic Church with the State hitherto impracticable. In Ireland it would unite the pastors of the people with the civil authority, and make that civil authority a beneficent power to their flocks. In England the Catholic Church would stand to the State in relations more normal and fruitful of public good than in any age since the fatal day when the supremacy of kings violated the liberties of conscience and of the Church, and laid the first germs of our persecution in the past and of our con tentions at this hour.