Page:A contribution to the settlement of the burials question.djvu/12

8 of the Church of England. When the Dissenters very naturally resented this, and asked for relief, the Legislature (6 & 7, Will. IV.) did not give the right to Dissenting ministers to marry members of their own denomination in the Church with a service of their own, but provided by law the means of being legally married in any registered chapel, with their own rites, or at the Registrar's office without any service, if they so chose. In all these cases the grievance of non-Churchmen was removed, the Church's rights were equally respected.

But now, when we are asked to remove the last remaining grievance, as it is said, of non-Churchmen, that of being compelled to be buried by the clergyman, and with the Church Service, if buried in the churchyard, we are asked to run off the old lines, entirely to leave all precedents, and to pursue an entirely new method. We are asked to abandon the principle upon which all those changes of the law have been made which have gradually secured to non-Churchmen that full measure of religious liberty which they actually enjoy, and to act upon a new principle which will impose more galling fetters upon the Church than those which it removes from non-Churchmen. And we are asked to do this in order to remove a grievance which has already disappeared from two-thirds of the population, and which is rapidly diminishing every year. Can this be a statesmanlike method of dealing with an important question, which deeply stirs the feelings of a very large portion of the community?

But is the present grievance at all analogous to those previous ones of which we have spoken? The Nonconformist in Charles II.'s reign was not permitted to worship in a house or chapel of his own at all; the child of the Nonconformist in William IV.'s reign could not be registered