Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/10

 supreme ecclesiastical judge, or as a civil judge authorized to interpret her own Letters Patent, and to determine on their validity, I do not clearly understand: but, whatever jurisdiction she might be supposed to have in either of these characters, she could, I conceive, have none to decide any question but this—whether the sentence of deprivation was, or was not, a legal sentence—a sentence warranted (that is) by ecclesiastical law, or warranted by the Letters Patent. Whether it could be supported on the ground of contract or trust, could not be decided one way or another, except by the civil tribunals having jurisdiction in litigated questions of property or civil rights dependent on contract or trust: and the Queen in Council does not, as far as I am aware, constitute one of those tribunals, except when she receives appeals from civil courts in the colonies.

Be this, however, as it may, the judgment was commonly understood to establish that there were no Bishop and diocese of Natal known to the law.

3. It has now been held by the Master of the Polls, there are a Bishop and a diocese of Natal known to the law, and within the meaning of the founders of the Colonial  bishoprics Fund; and, as a part of the ground of that decision, it has been held, or asserted, that the Bishop of Natal has jurisdiction even to deprive a clergyman officiating in the diocese of Natal for sufficient cause. It was asserted with reason as a ground of the decision; for what sort of a diocesan would he be who had no jurisdiction at all? This judgment appears to be at variance with that of the Judicial Committee "in the matter of the Bishop of