Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/400

Rh 380 ENGLAND [CHURCH. statement to the dogmatic decrees of the Council of Trent. They were reviewed by the two houses of the convocation of Canterbury and some members of the northern convoca tion in 1563, and having been reduced to 39, and some additions and alterations made in them, were ratified by the queen, and subscribed first by the convocations, and then by all the clergy. In 1571 an Act of Parliament was passed making subscription to the articles necessary for all clergy as the condition of holding benefices ; and the articles were again revised by convocation, and republished both in Latin and English. Together with the homilies and prayer-book, they form a complete exposition of the tenets of the English Church on all the main points both of doctrine and of discipline. III. Constitutional Status. The Church of England, or the Spiritualty, is one of the estates of the realm, and has an integral part in all legislation. It was on the ground of this constitutional position of the spiritualty that the famous protest was made, in 1641, as to the proceedings in the House of Lords in the absence of the bishops. This is pronounced by Mr Hallam to be in accordance with the plainest principles of law (Const. Hist., i. 553). The church is accepted by the state as the religious body in England, which is the legitimate possessor of all property set apart and devoted to religious uses, except the rights of some other religious body be specially expressed. It is the possessor of the ancient religious fabrics of the land and of the cemeteries attached to them. Its rights are carefully guarded by law, the incumbent of each parish being a corporation sole with certain duties and privileges. This position of the church towards the state is called its Establishment. It has arisen not from any definite Act of Parliament or the state, but from the gradual iuterpeuetra- tion of the state by the church, and from their having mutually grown up together. The organization of the church in England was anterior to that of the state. When the country was still divided into separate kingdoms, the church had become one throughout the land, and looked generally to a common centre. This had been the work of Archbishop Theodore (668), who, by subdividing dioceses and establishing parish churches, had given form to the Christianity of the country. The church thus settled adapted itselt to the civil organiza tions. The mark, vicus, or township became the sphere of duty of a single priest, the kingdom the diocese of a bishop, the whole land the province of the metropolitan : the rival archbishops head rival nationalities ; the greater dioceses are divided on the lines of the earlier under-kingdoms ; the shires become the archdeaconries, and the hundreds the deaneries of a later age. The archdeacon or bishop presided with the ealdorman and sheriff in the shire-mot ; the parish priest led his people to the hundred-mot; the Witenagemot had its most distinct and permanent constituent in the clergy, bishops, and abbots. The church in England had th us from the very first a territorial organization, the land was divided and parcelled out to it, or rather by it. A* the nation grew towards unity the territorial claims of the church became only the more firmly fixed ; its right to endowments, which had in the first place been voluntarily given, was ratified and confirmed. The church was not endowed any more than established by any definite act of the state, but growing up together with the state it obtained sources of revenue from the piety of the faithful, its position and its revenues being, not created, but defended and secured by law. The Church of England has always had the constitutional power, recognized by the law, of meeting in synod to discuss and settle matters touching the spiritualty, the metropolitan of each province having his separate synod. After the Conquest, when secular and spiritual things were carefully divided one from the other, the metropolitan summoned the synod by his own authority, and it consisted merely of his suffragan bishops, with the prelates that is to say. deans, abbots, archdeacons with out any representatives of the parochial clergy. These first appeared in a legatine synod at Westminster in 1255, but it was not till the time of Edward I. that the synods of the Church of England acquired that special organization which they have preserved ever since. The necessity that the clergy were then placed under of yielding to the king s heavy demands for taxes was the cause of the introduction of the representative system into the church. In the presence of more rigid demands for money payments, it was felt that those upon whom the taxes fell must have a voice in voting them. Accordingly the clergy of each diocese were now called upon to elect two proctors to sit in convocation. The first summons of elected representatives of the clergy to convocation bears date 1279. In 1295 the king, thinking that these representatives of the clergy sit ting actually in parliament would be more amenable to pressure that when they sat in a house of their own, ordered two clergy from each diocese to be summoned to parlia ment. But the clergy shrank from this, and it soon fell into disuse. The convocations thus constituted under Edward I. consisted in each of the two provinces of Can terbury and York, first of the metropolitan, who was president; next of all diocesan bishops; then of all prelates, that is to say, dignified clergy, deans, archdeacons, abbots; lastly, of representatives chosen by the chapters of the cathedrals and the clergy of the diocese. The numbers of these have varied at different times, and may be changed at the will of the president. These convocations voted all the money payments of the clergy to the crown, and also, before the time of Henry VIII., legislated for the clergy by canons without any check from the state. But in 1532 these bodies were constrained, by the great danger in which they then stood, to accept whatwas called the Submission of the Clergy to the crown. By this the archbishops abandoned their right of summoning their convocations independently, and undertook only to summon them on receiving the writ of the crown. They undertook also not to promulgate any canons save those which were ratified by the crown. This act of the clergy was embodied in an Act of Parliament and made law (1534), and it is under this law that the con vocations of the two provinces have since met and acted. Their constitutional position at present is to be the advisers of the crown and parliament in all things spiritual and ecclesiastical, but they have no legislative power save in so far as what they have agreed upon may be made the sub stance of an Act of Parliament. The convocations have thus in many instances procured their determinations to become the law of the land, as, notably in the Act of Uni formity of 1662, and recently in the Shortened Service Act. But convocation may not only thus indirectly make statute law ; it may also make, with the consent of the crown, canons which bind the clergy where they are not contrariant to statute law. The canon does not in any way come before parliament, but merely requires the royal licence and approval to become valid. It was thus that the body of canons by which the clergy are at present governed were made in 1604. The meetings of convocation have always coincided with those of parliament, and only* in two instances, in 1584 and 1640, has either convocation sat after the rising of parliament. In several instances the northern convocation, being the smaller, has consented to send representatives to the southern, and thus to constitute one synod. The convocations cl j not in reality consist of two houses, though they are thus divided for the purposes of discussion and voting, but only of one house each, the lower clergy being in fact the assessors of the bishops. In 1664 the clergy abandoned their right of taxing themselves