this portion of their report, adopting almost verbally the statements made by Bishop Stubbs in his careful and able historical survey constituting Appendix I.,[1] that 'in the historical growth of ecclesiastical judicature in national Churches three principles are involved: (1) the existence of an ecclesiastical law independent of and, in modern states, anterior to the national secular law; (2) the acceptance by the nation of that law, so far as it is of general obligation, as the law of religion of the National Church; and (3) the annexation, by the nation, to the sentence of the law so accepted, under varying limitations, of the coercive power by which alone the sentences can be enforced upon the unwilling.
Now it seems clearly to follow from these three principles (1) that 'the Church' is something anterior to and independent of the nation which accepts it, and (2) that its acceptation by the nation is the act of the nation itself, and, as Lord Penzance rightly says in his own report (p. lxiv.) 'what the sovereign of his own supreme authority with the advice of his Council or Parliament set up and created, the sovereign, with the advice of Parliament, may well alter and amend.'
Hence we must be very careful in this matter to distinguish between 'the Church' and 'the National[2]
- ↑ Reports xvi.
- ↑ The term National Church, though susceptible of a distinct meaning, is often so used as to be ambiguous and misleading. If England had adopted the Roman law, or still better for purposes of illustration the Code Napoléon, would it be right to speak of it as a national system of law? Is it not rather the fact that English law differs from the law of other nations which makes it national? And, similarly, if the English nation accepted the Church with its then existing canon law, does it not tend to obscure rather than to illustrate the history of the Church in England to speak of it as the National Church?
Bishop Stubbs states repeatedly and expressly that the Church of England was not even in Anglo-Saxon times merely the religious organisation of the nation, but a portion of a much greater organisation; the exact limits of its relations to foreign Churches were possibly disputable
