THE COLONIAL CHURCH CHRONICLE AND Missionary Journal. JULY, 1850. RELATION OF THE CHURCH TO THE STATE IN THE COLONIES. very THE great question of the position of the Church in the Colonies has been opened in both Houses of Parliament. It was impossible that so anomalous a state of things as is presented by the Church in our Colonial Dependencies could fail at a very early period to make itself seen and felt; or that the first disturbance of its affairs should not betray its strange and unnatural position. This unnatural position consists in its being partly established and partly not; and it appears that the practical result of this condition is, that the Colonial Church, while stripped of that help or strength which the Church at home derives from connexion with the State, is still crippled by that connexion, in supplying for itself those deficiencies which its partial separation from the State has caused. The exact state of the grievance appears to be this:-By the patents under which the several Colonial Bishops were appointed to their Sees, all the laws and ordinances affecting the Church and the Clergy at home were extended to the Church and the Clergy abroad. The Bishops were empowered to hear witnesses, and to exercise their ordinary Episcopal power in their own courts. But, on the very first occasion of these powers being put to the test, they were disputed; and on reference being made to the highest legal authorities at home, it was determined, that in granting those powers, the Crown had exceeded its authority. They were therefore withdrawn from all subsequent patents. But now, since the ordinary exercise of authority by the Episcopal courts is altogether banished from the Colonies, what is to be a substitute for it, in order to the right regulation of the Church and of its members? 2 Relation of the Church to the State in the Colonies. This question has naturally arisen. And the ready reply of men who seem unable to appreciate the difficulty, but not unwilling to keep it unsolved, is,-Let Churchmen meet and make their own internal spiritual regulations, as the various denominations of Christians do. But this is exactly what Churchmen cannot do. Here the semi-connexion of the Colonial Church with the Imperial Government, through its connexion with the mother Church, comes in and binds and fetters its action. The Colonial Bishops are suffragans of the Archbishop of Canterbury,—they promise allegiance to him. Appeals from the Clergy in the Colonies lie to the court of the Archbishop at home. The Canons of the English Church are binding upon the Clergy in the Colonies; and (as is maintained by lawyers,) so are the several Ecclesiastical Acts of Henry VIII., particularly that of the 25th Henry VIII. Now, by these it is provided that the members of the Church of England shall not, under severe penalties, meet together to deliberate upon the internal arrangement of their affairs, without obtaining the previous consent of the Crown; and we apprehend, that even if (as the Attorney General took upon him to state) no such penalties as those of fine and præmunire were to be enforced against the Bishop, and Clergy, and Laity, of any one of our Colonial Episcopates for thus meeting together and deliberating,—still it would be ruled, in the Colonial or in any other court, that all regulations there passed were null and void, and would not be binding upon any member of the Church; even, also, though he had given in his adhesion to them,-because he had given his consent to acts unlawfully done. Thus, then, the Colonial Church is fettered and crippled. It has all the encumbrances of an Establishment with none of its benefits. It has thrust upon it the self-dependence of an English dissenting body, without its freedom of action. For this the Church, by means of her two faithful sons, Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons, and the Bishop of Oxford in the House of Lords, asks for a remedy. The remedy suggested was certainly as simple and inoffensive as possible. It was in the form of a Resolution providing, that when members of the Church of England-Bishops, Clergy, and Laity,-assembled together, and by consent laid down rules for their internal government, it should be impossible for persons who had consented to those rules, afterwards to appeal against them to courts at home. It is curious how the question is dealt with. The Church asks simply for freedom; it is replied, That she shall have no privilege. She asks to be as all other Christian bodies:-it is replied, She shall not be placed above them. So wholly is the question misunderstood in the Commons. In the House of Lords it is consolatory to see that the clear and forcible arguments of the Bishop of Oxford elicited, from both Lord Grey and the Marquis of Lansdowne, an admission that a casus for inquiry had been made out, and that a grievance had been brought under their notice which demanded redress. The subject will no doubt be followed up. Too many questions thrust themselves on the mind when we glance distantly forward at the consequence of the Colonial Church being thus loosened from the Imperial state, and enjoying a free, self-directing, selfgoverning power. But it is curious to contrast these practical difficulties, the real grievance which has been substantiated, and the mutation manifested in meeting them, with the assertion of Lord Grey, on August 8th, 1848, that, "with respect to the Colonies, the English Church was no more established than the Roman Catholic Church." MEMOIR OF THE LATE BISHOP COLERIDGE. WILLIAM HART COLERIDGE, the son of Luke Herman Coleridge and Sarah, daughter of Mr. Richard Hart of the city of Exeter, was born at Thorverton, in the county of Devon, on the 27th day of June, 1789. His father was the seventh son of the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar, Chaplain Priest, and Schoolmaster of Ottery St. Mary; and perhaps we may infer from his Christian names that he was therefore destined from his birth to the practice of medicine. He died at the early age of twenty-four, leaving his widow and only child to the fatherly care and protection of his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who then presided, with great reputation, over the King's School (formerly kept by his father), and also held the office of Chaplain Priest in the, once collegiate, church of Ottery, St. Mary. That excellent person-"notus in fratres animi paterni "-deserved at the hands of all his family the touching tribute of affection addressed to him by another brother, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in after days:— "I remember thee, my earliest friend,— The subject of this memoir always felt an honest pride in stating that he had known no other school or master, having been educated, as Bishop Sprat tells of himself, "not at Westminster nor Eton, but at a little school by the churchyard side." After twelve years' pupilage under his good uncle's roof, he entered at Christ Church on the 12th of January, 1808. And it is curious to record that he, who in after life was to find so distant a field of labour, had never travelled further than Exeter (a stage of twelve short miles from Ottery), until he was launched at once, a well-grounded scholar, but without a friend, into the society of the largest college in Oxford. Here, however, his steady diligence and exemplary conduct soon recommended him to the notice of Dr. Cyril Jackson, the Dean; and, at his request, joined with that of the Canons, Dr. Howley, Regius Professor of Divinity, nominated him, in June 1811, to a studentship. And the result of the public examinations, in the following term, amply confirmed the choice of the Chapter, for we find the name of William Hart Coleridge in the first class, both In Literis Humanioribus, and In Disciplinis Mathematicis et Physicis. Mr. Coleridge was ordained Deacon by the Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1812, and Priest by the Bishop of Oxford in 1814. For a few months he held a public tutorship at Christ Church; but soon relinquished it for the more congenial duties of a parish Priest, and accepted, in the same year, the Perpetual Curacy of Cowley, in the gift of his college. About this time, also, he was nominated a Master in the Schools. In 1816 he was called to a larger sphere of duty, and became Assistant Curate of St. Andrew's, Holborn, where he remained for three years, until the sudden death of the Rector, the Rev. G. T. Clare, when he was appointed Preacher of the Society's Chapel in Ely Place. Although thus relieved from the overwhelming labours of his parochial cure, he found ample occupation in the secretaryship of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, jointly with the Rev. W. Parker; and he also did the Church good service by undertaking the editorship of the "Christian Remembrancer," to whose pages he contributed, among other articles, an interesting series of Ecclesiastical Biographies. Meanwhile his early patron, Dr. Howley, now advanced to the See of London, had been no inattentive observer of the sound judgment and practical wisdom of his student; and felt that the same discretion, and zeal, and energy, which had already made the Curate of St. Andrew's a marked man among the London Clergy, would be well employed in laying the foundations, broad and deep, of the Anglican Episcopacy in the West Indies. When, therefore, a wise and Christian ministry determined on extending the blessings of a Church in all its fulness and integrity to those dependencies of the British crown, Mr. Coleridge, at the early age of thirty five, was recommended, by his Diocesan, to Lord Bathurst for the newly constituted See of Barbados and the Leeward Islands. He accordingly received |