Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/25

 society which we call the Church of God, and its real claims on the heart and conscience—on the question whether it is intrinsically desirable that the organization of a Church should be vigorous and firmly strung, or lax and pliant—on these and other questions lying outside the range of the foregoing remarks every man has a right to his own opinions, and I have mine. It is in the power of Parliament—it is within the competence of Colonial Legislatures—to remove some existing doubts, to give to the Crown powers which it does not now possess, to create new legal relations between the State and religion, such as we have not seen before. But I am strongly persuaded that, whatever we may think or desire, whatever troubles and difficulties the Colonial Church may have to encounter in time to come, whatever theories may be spun, or expedients imagined, neither judgments of Courts, nor acts of local Legislatures, nor statutes of the Imperial Parliament, can establish or perpetuate in the colonies an ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown over a single denomination; and I should see with regret endeavours in this direction, which must, as I think, in the long run multiply embarrassments, and could only end in failure. The view on which the Colonial Office has acted during a long course of years, in respect of Episcopal appointments, was supported originally by the authority of some of the greatest English lawyers, and has received a kind of implicit sanction from several Parliaments; but it has broken down at last, when judicially tested, in a Court of law, and it would certainly, sooner or later, have broken down in practice. The principle that the Church in the Colonies is a voluntary society must be recognised frankly and thoroughly, by the law and by Churchmen themselves; and