Page:Church courts and church rates.djvu/8

4 point of view, than the adoption of a new system, that I am tempted, however feebly, to urge upon your consideration the expediency of abolishing the present tribunals and transferring all civil questions whatever—whether of probate, matrimony, tithe, or others—either to the County Courts or to new tribunals, thus leaving the Bishops of the Church of England simply clothed with a sufficient legal authority to adjudicate upon all such questions of internal discipline as other religious denominations in the country settle according to their own rules.

I am further induced to present these considerations to your notice from a conviction that the abolition of the Ecclesiastical Courts should be accompanied by the abolition of Church Rates—a species of tax upon the person (in personam) recoverable only in the Spiritual Courts, and an institution of the common law of the Church of England when that Church comprised, in theory if not in fact, the whole of the nation.

I shall not think it necessary to enter deeply into the grievance of Church Rates, since, notwithstanding certain speeches during the debate of the 26th of May last, I am persuaded that no person who has candidly perused the evidence taken before the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1851, can fail to acknowledge the fact that his dissenting fellow subjects are labouring under an injustice by the existence of these rates—and that, for this reason as well as others, the Church of