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ceeded their legitimate authority. Thus their decisions will be held good upon ecclesiastical questions as between members of the Church of England, and thus the Church will have all those rights of citizenship which were bestowed upon her at her first adoption by the State in the days of Constantine, when half the empire was still external to her pale. To preserve a more intimate bond of union in an age when nearly half the population of the country repudiate her claims, is, in theory, an injustice to the people; and, in practice, a hardship to the Church herself.
The abolition of Church Courts would involve the abolition of Church Rates, unless the country were prepared to continue them in a new form, and render them recoverable in the temporal Courts. Church Rates are so essentially of an ecclesiastical nature that they must go with the corruptions of those tribunals which it is proposed to sweep away. I am convinced that it is in vain to endeavour to keep them as a national impost; and that the two propositions of Sir W. Page Wood and Dr. Phillimore, for preserving them as a tax upon all but registered Dissenters, would be galling to the Nonconformists, and disadvantageous to the Church of England.
The reforms contemplated in my propositions may be summed up as follows:—
1. That all causes touching the rights of matrimony, divorces, general bastardy, subtraction and right of tithes and offerings, probate of wills, ad-
