Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/23

 1. There is, I hope, no disloyalty (we do not live under the Stuarts) in temperately inquiring whether a supposed prerogative really exists, especially a prerogative of so singular a nature; nor yet in asking whether such an office as either of these theories would ascribe to the Crown is consistent with its dignity, or with its constitutional functions and position. I shall not enter into the general question of the Supremacy, the true meaning of the Thirty-Seventh Article, or the proper application of it to a British colony in the nineteenth century, where there is no Established Church, are no ecclesiastical Courts, and can be no "ecclesiastical causes," and where all denominations are on an equal footing. But I think it not disrespectful to observe—

First, that legal language on this subject, borrowed as it is in great measure from Tudor precedents and Tudor legislation, is apt to be somewhat loose and inflated, and requires, before you reason on it, to be carefully reduced to its precise legal value;

Secondly, that the Royal Supremacy is only a collective name for a group of legal powers and attributes in relation to the Established Church—powers and attributes which form part of the prerogative, itself part of the law of the land;

Thirdly, that these powers and attributes, being created by law, are circumscribed by law, and can be exercised only in ways marked out by law;

Fourthly, that the powers of appointing and depriving Bishops and of assigning dioceses to them would not, for the reasons stated above, be legal powers within a colony such as I have been referring to. The right to exert such powers therefore in relation to such a colony cannot be part of the prerogative of the Crown.