Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/19

 has jurisdiction which can be called legal only in a secondary sense. The law will enforce the arbitrator's award, if properly made. But the arbitrator is not appointed, directly or indirectly, by the Sovereign to declare the law; his award is not an authoritative declaration of the law; it is binding only on the parties, incorporating itself in fact with the original agreement, and, as a part of that agreement, standing or falling with it; the legal force which it possesses it obtains only from the general law which secures the observance of contracts. But the Sovereign himself speaks through the mouth of a Judge, and arms him with all the sanctions of the law.

The jurisdiction exercised within a voluntary religious society is, like that of an arbitrator, founded on compact; and it is therefore not a legal jurisdiction in the primary and ordinary sense of the phrase. A sentence of deprivation pronounced by the Wesleyan Conference, by the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, by a Bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church, by a Colonial Bishop in a colony where the Church is not established, is an act which may, if it follows the compact which gives the jurisdiction, have legal consequences; for it may work the exclusion of the deprived person from the benefit of an endowment or the use of a place of common worship. But it is not a legal sentence, because it is not the sentence of a judge authorized to declare the law.

The jurisdiction, on the other hand, of an Ecclesiastical Court in England is as strictly a legal jurisdiction as that of the Queen's Bench. The Judge, be he Archbishop or Bishop, or the judicial officer of an Archbishop or Bishop, sits