Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/20

 under the authority of the Sovereign; under that authority he declares and applies a portion of the law of the land; and he is armed for that purpose with legal sanctions, which may be effective like deprivation, or ineffective like excommunication in such a community as ours. Such an expedient as the significavit was but a roundabout way of eking out the powers of one legal tribunal by the machinery of another. A penalty exactly the same in substance—deprivation—may be inflicted by the Court of Chancery upon a minister of a Presbyterian congregation who forsakes the doctrines of Presbyterianism, and by the Court of Arches upon a clergyman of the Established Church who "depraves" the Book of Common Prayer. But observe the difference. In the latter case, there is an offence and a punishment—an evil (that is) inflicted by public authority for a public purpose: in the former, there is neither punishment nor offence; there is a private injury, and a redress of it by civil process. In the one case, the law violated is a command, regulating directly and of set purpose the public teaching of religion: in the other, it is only the general rule that property which is held in trust be applied in accordance with the trust. A contract for the sale of a coal-shed, and one which implicitly embodies the whole discipline and teaching of a great religious denomination, are enforced in Chancery on precisely the same grounds, and with the same serene indifference to the nature of the matter in hand. In short, rightly or wrongly, the law declares the teaching of the Established Church to be a matter of public concern, and that of every other religious body whatsoever to be a matter of private concern. It directly regulates the first; it