Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/21

 refuses to take any notice, otherwise than incidentally, of the second.

Unless this cardinal distinction is kept clearly in view, the whole subject is lost in obscurity and confusion.

Let us apply the notions we have gained to the case of a colony where the Church is not established, and where the Crown possesses no power of legislation. What is the legal status of a Bishop in such a colony? None. What legal jurisdiction has he as a Bishop? None. What legal jurisdiction is he as a Bishop subject to? None. What legal authority or supremacy can he, as Bishop, exercise over others, or can anyone else, from the Queen downwards, exercise over him? None. What power has the Crown to clothe him with a legal status? None. A new legal status means a new set of legal rights and obligations: to create new legal rights and obligations is to make new laws, which the Crown, by hypothesis, has no power to do. The legal control of the Crown over him vanishes of necessity together with his legal control over his clergy. That a legal supremacy in matters ecclesiastical has no existence in such a colony is a plain corollary of the proposition that the colony has no Established Church. The Supremacy is a part of the law of the Established Church, and in such a colony the Established Church is, as has been justly said, not a part of the Constitution. Plain as all this is, there is an evident reluctance to recognise it fully, at which we can hardly wonder, when we consider what it involves. But, whatever it may involve, it is true.

It is at the same time true that a Bishop, though in the eye of the law a mere private gentleman owing to