Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/13

 or less degree by most of the bodies which we call "voluntary" or unestablished. What we do mean, as a little reflection will shew, is this—that the rules of an established society are part of the law of the land, and enforced as such; whilst the rules of a voluntary society are not part of the law of the land, and are not enforced as such. When the members, or any of the members, of a religious society have, as such, special rights and obligations, capacities or incapacities, created by the law of the land—when, in two words, they have a legal status—the society is established: they have none when it is not established. A parish clerk has, as parish clerk, a legal status: the President of the Wesleyan Conference, or of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, the Primus of the Scottish Episcopalian Church, a Roman Catholic Bishop of Glasgow, have, as such, no legal status. If the law of the United Kingdom were to cease to regulate, the rights and duties of members of the Established Churches of England and Scotland, these bodies would become voluntary societies. If it undertook to regulate those of members of the Free Church of Scotland, that body would cease to be a voluntary society.

It is evident from this that a religious society may be only partially established, and that different religious societies may be established, not only in different parts of the same kingdom, (as is the case in England and Scotland,) but in the same place at the same time. There is no logical reason, for instance, why particular legal rights, such as that of holding property as corporations or quasi-corporations, should not be granted in the French Empire to Protestant Consistories, or in a British colony to office-holders of