Page:Remarks on Some Late Decisions Respecting the Colonial Church.djvu/7



ROBABLY I am not the only person who has found it difficult to understand clearly the combined effect of some late decisions on the Colonial Episcopate and the Colonial Church. When such a difficulty occurs, the first thing to be done is to make out as exactly as may be the meaning of the words which we employ, and reduce to as much certainty as they will bear the legal conceptions with which we have to deal. Having tried to do this in the present case for my own satisfaction, I am tempted to print what I have written, for the use of others who may share my difficulty and into whose hands this paper may fall. Such a process is almost inevitably dry and tiresome, and this paper will be dry and tiresome. But it will, at any rate, be short. It has no pretensions to be an examination of the three judgments in question; it is merely an attempt to bring into a stronger light some points which I conceive to be involved in them. If, where great authorities have spoken, I express an opinion of my own, I do so respectfully, as one of the public, on a matter which has been thrown open for discussion.

1. The substantial point decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the appeal case of "Long v. the Bishop of Capetown," was, that persons calling themselves members of the Church of England in the Cape Colony stand,