Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/22

 courtesy any title or precedence which may be accorded to him, may yet in fact exercise important functions, and wield considerable powers. He may do this by appealing to the religious sentiments and convictions of the members of his communion; he may do it also as being himself the object of a trust, or as the person to whom, under a trust or compact, obedience is due as a condition attached to the enjoyment of a stipend, or the right to officiate in a church. And his authority in cases of the latter kind will be upheld, as an integral part of the trust or compact, by the civil Courts, which all the while regard him personally as a mere private man. As a Bishop, he is nothing to them; the law they administer knows nothing of Bishops. It appears to be held by some that a right to appoint and to control persons whose situation is to be such as I have described, is among the prerogatives of the Crown. The Master of the Rolls stigmatizes with severity from the Bench those who would "elevate the Church over the throne, or depose the Sovereign from being the Head of the Church in the colonies dependent on her." It seems also to be supposed that this power of appointment and control on the Part of the Crown must be deemed an element in the trust or contract among members of the voluntary society itself, as being a fundamental tenet of the English Church. The declaration in the Thirty-Seventh Article that "the Queen's Majesty hath the chief power in this realm of England and other her dominions, unto whom the chief government of all estates of this Realm, whether they be ecclesiastical or civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not nor ought to be subject to any foreign jurisdiction," is construed by Lord Romilly into an assertion of such a tenet.