sit in the upper chamber as peers (Pares do Reino) by right,
and there is no restriction on membership of the chamber of
deputies. A more important point is that the king confers all
ecclesiastical benefices and nominates the bishops, instead of
their being chosen, as in Spain, by agreement between the civil
power and the papacy. In Italy, in spite of the feud between
the papacy and the civil power, the fact remains that, by the
Statuto fondamentale, “the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman
religion is the sole religion of the state,” and the king may
nominate “archbishops and bishops of the state” to be senators.
The Legge sulle prerogative del Summo Pontifice, &c., or “Law
of Guarantees,” by which the papal prerogatives are secured,
has been declared by the Council of State to be a fundamental
law; and while many civil restrictions upon the activities of the
Church are removed by it, outside Rome and the suburbicarian
dioceses the royal exequatur is still required before a bishop
is installed. Moreover, the bulk of Church property having
been secularized, the Italian clergy receive a stipend from the
state.
Establishment is, of course, a distinctively English term, but
it implies precisely the same thing as “Staatsreligion” or “église
dominante” does elsewhere, neither more nor less.
It denotes the existence of a special relationship between
Church and state without defining its precise
Church and
State in Britain.
nature. The statement that the Church of England
or the Scottish Kirk is “established by law” denotes that it has
a peculiar status before the law; but that is all. (a) There is no
basis whatever for the once popular assumption that the word
“established” as applied to the Church means “created,” or
the like; on the contrary, the modern use of the word in this
sense is a misleading perversion. To establish is to make firm
or stable; and a thing cannot be established unless it is already
in existence. A few examples will make it clear that this is the
true sense of the word, and that in which it is used here.
“Stablish the thing, O God, that thou hast wrought in us”
(Ps. lxviii. 28, P.B.; A.V. and R.V. “strengthen”) implies
that the thing is already wrought; it could not be “stablished”
else. “Stablish your hearts” (Jas v. 8) implies that the hearts
are already in existence. “Until he had her settled in her raine
With safe assuraunce and establishment” (Faerie Queene, v.
xi. 35) would have been impossible unless the reign had already
begun. This is the meaning of the words in many Tudor acts of
parliament, “be it enacted, ordained and established,” or the
like (21 Hen. VIII. c. 1; 27 Hen. VIII. c. 28, s. 9; 28 Hen.
VIII. c. 13 [Ireland]; 28 Hen. VIII. c. 18 [Ireland]; 33 Hen.
VIII. c. 27; 1 Eliz. c. 1, ss. 15, 17; 1 Eliz. c. 4, s. 4); that
which is then and there enacted is to be valid for the future.
(b) Nor is it necessarily implied that establishment is a process
completed once for all. Every law touching the Church slightly
alters its conditions; everything that affects the relations of
Church and state may be regarded as a measure of establishment
or the reverse. When the two Houses of Parliament, in an
address to William III. after his coronation, spoke of their proposed
measures of toleration, the king said in his reply, “I do
hope that the ease which you design to Dissenters will contribute
very much to the establishment of the Church” (Cobbett, Parl.
Hist. v. 218). And Defoe (in 1702) published an ironical tract
with the title, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, or Proposals
for the Establishment of the Church. (c) Nor is it necessarily implied
that there was any specific time at which establishment took
place. Such may indeed be the case, as with the Kirk in Scotland;
but it certainly cannot be said that the English Church was
established at any particular time, or by any particular legislative
act. There were, no doubt, periods when the existing relations
between Church and state were modified or re-defined, notably
in the 16th and 17th centuries; but the relations themselves
are far older. In fact, they existed from the very first: the
English Church and state grew up side by side, and from the
beginning they were in close relations with one another. But
although the state of things which it represented was there from
the first, the term “established” or “established by law” only
came into use at a later date. Until there was some other religious
society to be compared with it such a distinctive epithet would
have had no point. As, however, there arose religious societies
which had no status before the law, it became more natural; and
yet more so when the formularies of the Church came to be
“established” by civil sanctions (the Books of Common Prayer
by 5 and 6 Edw. VI. c. 1, s. 4, &c; the Articles by 13 Eliz. c. 12;
the new Ordinal by 13 and 14 Car. II. c. 4, title). Accordingly
the Church itself came to be spoken of as established by law;
first, it would seem, in the Canons of 1604, and subsequently
in many statutes (Act of Settlement, 6 Anne, c. 8 and c. 11, &c).
In all such cases the Church is described as already established,
not as being established by the particular canon or statute.
In other words, the constitutional status of the Church is affirmed,
but nothing is said as to how it arose.
The legislative changes of the 16th and 17th centuries brought “establishment” into greater prominence and greatly modified its conditions, but a moment’s thought will show that it did not begin then. If, e.g., all post-Reformation ecclesiastical statutes were non-existent, the relations between Church and state would be very different, but there would still be an “establishment.” The bishops would sit in the House of Lords, the clergy would tax themselves in convocation, the Church courts would possess coercive jurisdiction, and so on. The present relations of Church and state in England may be briefly summed up as follows:—(1) The personal relation of the crown to the Church, including (a) restraints upon the action of convocation (formulated by 25 Hen. VIII. c. 19); (b) nomination of bishops, &c. (25 Hen. VIII. c. 20); (c) power of supervision as visitor, long disused (26 Hen. VIII. c. 1; 1 Eliz. c. 1, s. 17); (d) power of receiving appeals as the fount of civil justice (25 Hen. VIII. c. 19, &c). In connexion with these, it must be borne in mind that (a) the holder of the crown receives coronation from the church and takes an oath having reference to it (1 Will. III. c. 6), and (b) the crown is held on the condition of communion with the Church of England (Act of Settlement; the conditions of communion are laid down in the Prayer Book, which itself is sanctioned by law). (2) The relation of the Church to the crown in parliament. No change has been permitted in its doctrine or formularies without the sanction of an act of parliament. (3) Privileges of the Church and clergy. Of these may be mentioned (a) the coercive jurisdiction of the Church courts; (b) the right of bishops to sit in the House of Lords. It need hardly be said that establishment in England does not include an endowment of the Church by the state. Nothing of the kind ever took place on any large scale, and the grants for Church purposes in the 18th century are comparable with the regium donum to Nonconformists.
The position of the Church of Ireland until its disestablishment (see below) was not dissimilar. With Scotland the case is different. The establishment of the Kirk was an entirely new process, carried out by a more or less definite series of legislative and administrative acts. The Convention of Estates which met at Edinburgh in 1560 ordered the drawing up of a new Confession of Faith, which was done in four days by a committee of preachers, and on the 24th of August it passed three acts, one abolishing the pope’s authority and all jurisdiction of Catholic prelates, another repealing the old statutes in favour of the Old Church, the third forbidding the celebrating and hearing of mass under penalty of imprisonment, exile and death. The intention was to make a clean sweep of the Old Church, which was denounced as “the Kirk Malignant.”[1] The new model thus set up was confirmed by the Scottish act of 1567, c. 6, which declared it to be “the onely true and halie kirk of Jesus Christ within this realme.” Again, after the revolution of 1688 had put an end to the attempts of the Stuart kings to impose the episcopal model on Scotland, by the act of 1690, c. 5, the crown and estates “ratifie and establish the Confession of Faith, . . . as also they do establish, ratifie and confirm the Presbyterian government and
- ↑ Andrew Lang, Hist. of Scotland, ii. p. 75 ff. Compare with this the position of the reformers generally in England, where even so stout a Puritan as William Harrison (Description of England, 1570) does not dream of separating the organic life of the Church of England from that of the pre-Reformation Church. (Ed).
