should, without any sentence, carry with it the consequences (and indeed more than the consequences) of a sentence pronounced in the same behalf. It was difficult to see to what practical anomalies and complications a form of legislation so singular might not introduce us. It was plain, on the other hand, that since, by the law of the Church, as expounded in her courts, a judicial act is held to be necessary in order to give effect even to a penalty accruing ipso facto, the form at least of a judicial act was required by decency and consistency in order to fill up the gap. And the omission of it, important in itself, would have appeared as a token of our intention wholly to ignore the regular processes of ecclesiastical law, and, finally, to break up its machinery altogether.

At the same time, if we aim at treating this important question -a bracelet miniature of the great controversy which has agitated more or less the Christian world for so many ages-not as advocates, but as peace-makers, we must not scruple to avow that the subject is one of real difficulty. The proceedings of those clergy who abandon their sacred calling is a high crime in the view of the Church: and, speaking with reference to the act and not the motive, it is highest of all when this abandonment is with a view to the erection of a rival altar, and to making a new breach in the unity of the body of Christ. But when we view these same proceedings from the standing ground of the politician, who either believes, or must often act as if he believed, that truth is for public purposes but what each man troweth, they are the assertion of a high privilege, the exercise of an important civil duty. Passing by the question of religious error, nothing remains to him but to honour the man who acts upon his convictions, and to take care that he shall have a clear stage for so acting, free from care and from question, from stigma and from slur, as well as from the coarser and material hinderances of prison-doors and costs of suit. If therefore it is difficult for the Church, such as she has always been, and must always be, to allow such acts to remain without a note of her disapproval, it is also difficult for the State, such as it now is, and is likely for a good while to be, to become a party to any such indication, as being at apparent variance with that unqualified theory of religious freedom which has become the rule of the proceedings of Parliament, although it is far from being as yet the universal characteristic of our law.

The second defect in Mr. Bouverie's Bill was one opening a still wider range of observation. It contained no legal definition of the relation of the deposed clerk to the Church after his secession, although it settled fully the question of his relation to her ministry, by totally and for ever dissolving it. At present,

as

as we have stated, the obstinate non-conformity and schism of a clerk are punishable by excommunication; that is to say, by his formal and legal exclusion from the society from which he has already effected his own moral and spiritual exclusion in declaring himself a dissenter, which we take to be equivalent to a simple renunciation of his obedience. This remedy, however, not civil and temporal, but ecclesiastical in its nature, the Bill of Mr. Bouverie as it stood took away, and brought about the extraordinary anomaly that a clergyman deposed by the law and act of the Church as well as the State, and declared excommunicate by her canons, should, by an act of the State, be absolutely, and under all circumstances, protected from further process, replaced in the condition of lay communion, and left inalienably invested with the legal claims to all the ordinances of the Church which belong to that condition. Had the measure only removed the temporal incidents of excommunication—nay, had it only done away with the judicial form of it, and left the ecclesiastical consequences to follow, like those of deposition, upon the simple entry of the declaration of the party-this anomaly would have been avoided. But besides the very flagrant violation of the principles of Church law, a way was opened by it to most serious personal grievance. Surely it would be a personal grievance of the most cruel nature that (for example) the vicar of the parish in which Mr. Shore lately officiated as a clergyman, and in which he has now become the leader and minister of a dissenting body, should be compellable, at the hazard of beggary and imprisonment, to administer to Mr. Shore himself, if Mr. Shore think fit to demand them, the ordinances, or any of the ordinances, of that Church with which, so far as in him lay, he has broken all his religious ties.

We shall proceed to explain the manner in which these two defects were dealt with as the measure advanced. There were early indications in the House of Commons of various feelings likely to disturb its progress. On the one hand-there was the conservative dislike to change in an ancient portion of our law, which had not until within the last twelvemonth or thereabouts become a subject of jealousy. On the other there was a disposition to give the measure a completely new form-by converting it from one for the relief of dissidence to one for the emancipation of all indolent, worldly, or crotchety clergymen, by enabling them to lay down their orders for any cause whatever, or for none. However, Mr. Bouverie wisely determined upon having these matters discussed in detail by a select committee, rather than in the House, hoping without doubt that an amicable settlement might ensue. The committee was nominated, we believe, in the usual course by the mover of the Bill. It comprised Mr. Bouverie himself,

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and Mr. Lushington, jointly responsible with him for the introduction of the measure, and well known as a representative of the dissenting interest in Parliament; Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Napier, representatives of two of our universities; Mr. Stafford, who had borne a share in the previous discussions on the Bill; Mr. Lacy, who had given notice of an amendment in the latitudinarian sense we have above described: Mr. Horsman, who had taken a leading part in the discussion of many questions relating to the Church; Sir W. Clay, a gentleman of long parliamentary experience, who represents a population of the first order in point of number among the boroughs, and in respect of the quantities of dissent and radicalism which it comprises; and last, but not least, three legal gentlemen, Mr. Headlam, Mr. Roundell Palmer, and Mr. F. Peel, all highly competent, and two of them highly distinguished members of Parliament.

The result of the labours of this committee was the third edition of Mr. Bouverie's Bill, ordered to be printed on the 3rd of last April. From its composition it is plain that the committee could not, and from its acts that it did not, approach the question in a spirit of partizanship. As a measure of religious liberty the bill amended by them was larger than it had been before it came into their hands. Then it only gave relief to Protestants upon condition of having conformed to the conditions of the existing Toleration Acts: but now it required no other oath, declaration, or subscription than the simple declaration in its own first clause of the fact of dissent from the Church. The mere desire to be released from any obedience to her, solemnly and formally expressed, was thenceforward to be the sole condition of a title to entire emancipation. But the committee set an example which we hope will be frequently followed in future and perhaps better times-for, while they enlarged the scope of the Bill on the side of the religious freedom of the seceding clergyman, they did the same for those clergymen who should not secede in their solicitude for the one, they did not forget the nine hundred and ninety-nine.

With respect to the first of the points which we have noticednamely that the Bill, pro tanto, went to extinguish the judicial office of the Church in regard to her own clergy-the committee met it by providing that the bishop, besides recording in the registry of his diocese the declaration of the party, should likewise record a sentence of deprivation and of deposition against him, and that the legal consequences affecting him, both as to freedom and as to disqualifications, should spring from and follow upon this sentence. For the sake of clearness we reprint Clause IV. as it stood in each of these prints of the Bill :

Bill of March 5th. 'And be it enacted, that the bishop to whom such copy of the certificate shall have been transmitted, within days of the receipt of such copy shall record the same in his registry; and the entry thereof shall have the same operation, and be attended with the same consequences as to the rights and liabilities of such person, as a sentence of deprivation of such person of the preferment he may hold within the diocese of such bishop, and also as sentence of deposition of such person from Holy Orders.'

Bill of April 3rd.

'And be it enacted, that the bishop to whom such copy of the certificate shall have been transmitted shall, within thirty days of the receipt of such copy, record the same in his registry, and shall further record in his registry sentence of deprivation of such person of the preferment, whether donative or otherwise, he may hold within the diocese of such bishop, and also sentence of deposition of such person from Holy Orders; and such sentences respectively shall have the like effect to all intents and purposes, and shall be followed by the same consequences as to the rights and liabilities of such person, and as to the rights of patrons and all other persons, as if such sentences respectively had been duly pronounced by an ecclesiastical court having competent jurisdiction in that behalf.'

By this latter arrangement the judicial act and its consequences were retained; but the act was divested of all publicity and show, and the consequences were such as there could be no just dispute about, as they amounted simply to that entire separation from the clerical office which Mr. Bouverie had himself proposed. It was impossible, we think, to make any compromise between the contending principles of order and liberty to which we have above referred, that should award less to the Church and more to the seceding person: and those whom in this view it did not satisfy, must have been such as were determined to make no composition whatever with the principle of Church-law, but simply to trample it in the dust.

With respect to the second of the two points, the committee made a less complete and satisfactory provision: but one perhaps as fair as the very complex circumstances of the case would permit. They introduced into the clause standing sixth in their Bill these words :

'No clergyman shall be prosecuted, or proceeded against, or punished, or held liable in any action for damages or otherwise, in any court, for refusing to administer any rite or sacrament of the said united Church to or in respect of any such person.'

It should be observed that what the committee thus proposed to enact fell very far short of the full claim of the Church as a spiritual body. She has a clear right to effective and secure provisions for bringing to justice offences which in her view are capital; and the proceeding of a clergyman who declares himself a Dissenter is to her very much what Treason is to the State-a crime which, for the sake of public order, must be visited in a marked manner within the respective spheres of State and Church-the one of corporal penalty, the other of simply spiritual privation—although, both in the one case and the other, it may happen that the moral character of the act in the individual does not correspond with the rank of the offence in the judicial scale. To leave it therefore optional by statute to each individual clergyman out of so many thousands to give or withhold the rites of the Church in such cases, is very much less than she is entitled to ask, and allows a large portion of her right to remain unprotected by the new law, while the existing provisions are, as we have already shown, so unsatisfactory to all parties. Nothing can satisfy the full justice of the case short of this: that a person becoming a Dissenter by a formal act shall thereupon, ipso facto, lose all capacity to receive her offices until such time as he shall have been re-admitted to communion within her body by such process as she, in concert with the State, may fix for the purpose.

But we have now to consider the further course of the Bill. On its return to the House from the Select Committee it was reprinted and recommitted to a committee of the whole House. In the mean time an agitation out of doors against it had commenced, on the part of the professing friends-we will not call them the pretended friends only, because we believe in the sincerity of their self delusion of religious liberty; and the writers of the Daily News had the effrontery to state that the amendments made, and as it afterwards appeared unanimously made, by the Select Committee, of the composition we have described, were owing to the machinations of a particular party in the Church. First, a warning was issued by advertisement against further petitioning in favour of the Bill; by-and-bye notice was given by a member of Parliament belonging, we believe, to the denomination of Baptists, that he would move to alter the proviso in favour of clergy declining to administer to the seceders the offices of the Church, by excepting from the scope of it the rite of burial-and finally the attack was restricted to this single though capital point, namely, the proviso; but the indications out of doors, on the part both of the so-called friends of Mr. Shore and of certain Dissenters, were much more comprehensive in their scope. At a meeting held April 13, 1849, Mr. J. R. Mills in the chair, a committee of the deputies of the

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