they were contracted, are held to have no civil rights at all, tens of thousands of them being declared illigitimate. By a recent decision of the House of Lords, Charles Armitage Brook, the issue of an exactly similar marriage, born in 1864, is declared illigitimate, and his inheritance forfeited to the Crown. We utter not a word of reproach against His Grace, or the amiable and estimable ladies of the Beaufort family; but the public welfare demands that the existence of such an anomaly should be clearly made known, in order to its being immediately remedied."
The British House of Commons have repeatedly, and by large majorities, passed a Bill to repeal the partial and self-contradictory Act of 1835; but the House of Lords, by varying majorities, have persisted in rejecting it. Every just man must feel and say that there can be no justice or principle in an Act which declares the same marriage illegal if contracted since 1835, and which robs a child of his inheritance if born since 1835, while it gives him, if born before that period, vast wealth, the patronage of 26 Church livings, the first rank in the peerage, and even exalts him to be an officer of Her Majesty's household.
FUTILE EFFORTS OF THE WRITER—HIS IGNORANCE OF FACTS.
We are mistaken if the Churchman's Magazine, with all the writers it can command, will be able to delude any considerable number of the clergy or laymen of our Church to countenance a course characterized by legislative partiality and injustice, and at variance with the plain teachings of the Bible and the unvarying voice of antiquity.
The writer in the magazine pamphlet-article alluded to at the commencement of these remarks, seems, in his rural isolation, to be in blissful ignorance of what has been transpiring in the mother country on this subject during the last quarter of a century. He says: "It is only of late years that the present subject has been brought into the region of controversy." (p. 3.) "The first sounds of the conflict at home have at length reached us." (p. 4.)
