Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/15

 co-extensive or not with the Establishment itself, according to any legal definition which could possibly be assigned to it), what substantially answers to the conception of a religious society; and this religious society would not, in the supposed case, necessarily or probably cease to exist, though the sudden removal of those legal sanctions on which it has for centuries relied, and which have in practice gradually eclipsed and partially superseded the sanctions of conscience and religion, would be a shock of the severest kind.

To speak, then, of inhabitants of a colony where there is no established Church as being members, or forming; part, of the the established Church of England and Ireland, is nonsense, if we use that phrase in its literal acceptation as meaning the political society constituted under that name by law in England and Ireland. Where they live, the laws which make that society do not exist, and the society itself therefore can have no existence. To use this expression, therefore, is to affirm, what some deny, that there is, under that name, a religious society as well as a political one; and it really amounts to no more than an assertion that there are in the colony persons accepting the same religious beliefs, the same forms of worship, and, so far as may be, the same or a like religious organization as are accepted by the persons composing that religious society in England. I do not see what else it can mean; nor, although persons calling themselves members of the English Church in Natal may have an organization exactly similar to that of the English Church in England, as well as derived originally from the same sources.