Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/656

Rh 632 R O M R O M under NONCONFORMITY (7.*'.) as to the legal position of nonconformity may be applied to the Roman Catholic faith. The effect of 2 and 3 Will. IV. c. 115 is to place Roman Catholic schools, places of worship and education, and charities, and the property held therewith, under the laws applying to Protestant nonconformists. The Tolera- tion Act does not apply to Roman Catholics, but legisla- tion of a similar kind, especially the Relief Act of 1791 (31 Geo. III. c. 32), exempts the priest from parochial offices, such as those of churchwarden and constable, and from serving in the militia or on a jury, and enables all Roman Catholics scrupling the oaths of office to exercise the office of churchwarden and some other offices by de- puty. The priest is, unlike the nonconformist minister, regarded as being in holy orders. He cannot, therefore, sit in the House of Commons, but there is nothing to pre- vent a peer who is a priest from sitting and voting in the House of Lords. If a priest becomes a convert to the Church of England he need not be re -ordained. The remaining law affecting Roman Catholics may be classed under the following five heads. (1) Office. There are certain offices still closed to Roman Catholics. By the Act of Settlement a Papist or the husband or wife of a Papist cannot be king or queen. The Act of 1829 provides that nothing therein contained is to enable a Roman Catholic to hold the office of guardian and justice of the United Kingdom, or of regent of the United Kingdom ; of lord chancellor, lord keeper, or lord commissioner of the great seal of Great Britain or Ireland or lord lieutenant of Ireland ; of high commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, or of any office in the Church of England or Scotland, the ecclesiastical courts, cathedral founda- tions, and certain colleges. The disability in the case of the lord chancellor of Ireland was removed by statute in 1867, with neces- sary limitations as to ecclesiastical patronage, and the office has been held twice since that date by the late Lord O'Hagan. The Act of 1829 preserved the liability of Roman Catholics to take cer- tain oaths of office, but these have been modified by later legisla- tion (see 29 and 30 Viet. c. 19 ; 30 and 31 Viet. c. 75"; 31 and 32 Viet. c. 72). Legislation has been in the direction of omitting words which might be supposed to give offence to Roman Catholics. (2) Title. The Act of 1829 forbids the assumption by any person, other than the person authorized by law, of the name, style, or title of an archbishop, bishop, or dean of the Church of England. The Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 1851, went further and forbade the as- sumption by an unauthorized person of a title from any place in the United Kingdom, whether or not such place were the seat of an archbishopric, bishopric, or deanery. This Act was, however, repealed in 1867, but the provisions of the Act of 1829 are still in force. (3) Religious Orders. It was enacted by the Act of 1829 that " every Jesuit and every member of any other religious order, com- munity, or society of the Church of Rome bound by monastic or religious vows " was, within six months after the commencement of the Act, to deliver to the clerk of the peace of the county in which he should reside a notice or statement in the form given to the schedule to the Act, and that every Jesuit or member of such religious order coming into the realm after the commence- ment of the Act should be guilty of a misdemeanour and should be banished from the United Kingdom for life (with an exception in favour of natural-born subjects duly registered). A secretary of state, being a Protestant, was empowered to grant licences to Jesuits, &c., to come into the United Kingdom and remain there for a period not exceeding six months. An account of these licences was to be laid annually before parliament. The admission of any person as a regular ecclesiastic by any such Jesuit, &c., was made a misdemeanour, and the person so admitted was to be ban- ished for life. Nothing in the Act was to extend to religious orders of females. These provisions exist in posse only, and have, it is believed, never been put into force. (4) Superstitious Uses. Gifts to superstitious uses are void both at common law and by statute. It is not easy to determine what gifts are to be regarded as gifts to superstitious uses. Like contracts contrary to public policy, they depend to a great extent for their illegality upon the discretion of the court in the particular case. The Act of 23 Hen. VIII. c. 10 makes void any assurance of lands to the use (to have obits per- petual) or the continual service of a priest for ever or for threescore or fourscore years. The Act of 1 Edw. VI. c. 14 (specially directed to the suppression of chantries) vests in the crown all money paid by corporations and all lands appointed to the finding or maintenance of any priest or any anniversary or obit or other like thing, or of any light or lamp in any church or chapel maintained within five years before 1547. The Act may still be of value in the construc- tion of old grants, and in affording examples of what the legislature regarded as superstitious uses. Gifts which the courts have held void on the analogy of those mentioned in the Acts of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. are a devise for the good of the soul of the testator, a bequest to certain Roman Catholic priests that the testator may have the benefit of their prayers and masses, a bequest in trust to apply a fund to circulate a book teaching the supremacy of the pope in matters of faith, a bequest to maintain a taper for evermore before the image of Our Lady. The court may compel discovery of a secret trust for superstitious uses. Since 2 and 3 Will. IV. c. 115 gifts for the propagation of the Roman Catholic faith are not void as made to superstitious uses. It should be noticed that the doctrine of superstitious uses is not confined to the Roman Catholic religion, though the question has generally arisen in the case of gifts made by persons of that religion. The Roman Catholic Charities Act, 1860, enables the court to separate a lawful charit- able trust from any part of the estate subject to any trust or provision deemed to be superstitious. It also provides that in the absence of any written document the usage of twenty years is to be conclusive evidence of the application of charitable trusts. (5) Patronage. A Roman Catholic cannot present to a benefice, pre- bend, or other ecclesiastical living, or collate or nominate to any free school, hospital, or donative (3 Jac. I. c. 5). Such patronage is by the Act vested in the universities, Oxford taking the city of London and twenty -five counties in England and Wales, mostly south of the Trent, Cambridge the remaining twenty-seven. The principle is affirmed in subsequent Acts (1 Will, and Mary, sess. 1, c. 26 ; 12 Anne, st. 2, c. 14 ; 11 Geo. II. c. 17). If the right of presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice belongs to any office under the crown, and that office is held by a Roman Catholic, the archbishop of Canterbury exercises the right for the time being (10 Geo. IV. c. 7, s. 17). No Roman Catholic may advise the crown as to the exercise of its ecclesiastical patronage (ib., s. 18). A Roman Catholic, if a member of a lay corporation, cannot vote in any ecclesiastical appointment (ib., s. 15). Grants and devises of aclvowsons, &c., by Roman Catholics are void, unless for valuable consideration to a Protestant purchaser (11 Geo. II. c. 17, s. 5). Where a quare impcdit is pending before any court, the court may compel the patron to take an oath that there is no secret trust for the benefit of a Roman Catholic. See QUAKE IMPEDIT, (J. Wt.) EOM AN CE "OOMANCE 1 in its widest sense includes the entire _[X literature of fiction, as well as the early narrations in which fact and legend were blended in historical form, before the simple minds of the people had acquired a clear conception of their distinctness. There are, however, certain ill -defined limitations in the analysis of fiction which enable us to assign distinct places to the legend, the ballad, the epic, the fable, the tale, the romance, and the novel. As usual in all attempts at precise classifica- tion, we find that the lines of demarcation cannot be 1 In the 9th century the Romana or Romance language made its first appearance in writing. For many centuries, however, it was only used to embody the tales and ballads of each country in which one or other form of the speech was vernacular, so that the word " romance " became finally appropriated to the compositions which were the staple literature of the Lingua Romana or Romance, drawn with rigid exactness, and that many works may be referred to more than one division. But the general con- ception of romance is the one which will here be followed, and which roughly divides the subject into (i.) Romances of Chivalry chiefly their prose forms and (ii.) the Romances of Love and Adventure, which follow them. Romance, as a distinct branch of the literature of fiction, belongs essentially to the Middle Ages and to Europe. The romance of chivalry, as it is called, prevailed during Ron the four centuries of knighthood, and there can be little of doubt that the institutions of chivalry were considerably c1 '" influenced by the works of the early romancers. The establishment of the orders of St John and the Temple was based upon an exalted conception of duty and devo- tion, which the hard test of experience soon modified, and which would have perished utterly but for the em-