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 this portion of their report, adopting almost verbally the statements made by Bishop Stubbs in his careful and able historical survey constituting Appendix I., that 'in the historical growth of ecclesiastical judicature in national Churches three principles are involved: (1) the existence of an ecclesiastical law independent of and, in modern states, anterior to the national secular law; (2) the acceptance by the nation of that law, so far as it is of general obligation, as the law of religion of the National Church; and (3) the annexation, by the nation, to the sentence of the law so accepted, under varying limitations, of the coercive power by which alone the sentences can be enforced upon the unwilling. '

Now it seems clearly to follow from these three principles (1) that 'the Church' is something anterior to and independent of the nation which accepts it, and (2) that its acceptation by the nation is the act of the nation itself, and, as Lord Penzance rightly says in his own report (p. lxiv.) 'what the sovereign of his own supreme authority with the advice of his Council or Parliament set up and created, the sovereign, with the advice of Parliament, may well alter and amend.'

Hence we must be very careful in this matter to distinguish between 'the Church' and 'the National