worldly men who wished not to be meddled with, and by Puritans, who approved highly of the principle of interference, but desired to keep it in their own hands, and to use it against social gaiety as well as against faulty living. The result was that at the Restoration there was a general and strong reaction against the exercise of Church authority in any shape. It was not extinguished suddenly; but it had to content itself more and more with obscure offenders, till it became an anomaly and ridiculous. Like most abuses in England, it has remained on the Statute Book long after it had died out in practice. Less than fifty years ago an Englishman could be punished for not attending church or a registered chapel on Sunday;[1] and later still the Ecclesiastical Court retained the theoretical right to punish him for incest and incontinence. Indeed, these were in England the only courts taking cognisance of such offences, except as private injuries; yet even this has not tended to the preservation of their use or influence. The modern State habitually prefers to legislate on secular principles for such offences against morality—incest, unnatural vice, seduction, and the like—as it finds it desirable not to tolerate.
Now the practical effect of this change is, that where the Church has always aimed at substituting a perfect rule of thought and life for liberty of opinion and moral conduct, the State has never attempted to do more than to protect its own existence against the excesses of liberty.
- ↑ Homersham Cox, Institutions of English Society, p. 463, note. The penalties incurred for non-attendance at church under 1 Eliz. c. 2, 14, and 3 Jac. I. 14, were repealed by the 9th and 10th Victoria, c. 59, 1. I believe they were last put in force against men suspected of poaching. The law of sacrilege was abolished by 24 and 25 Victoria, c. 96, 50. Breaking into a church, however, is more heavily punished than breaking into other buildings.—Stephen's Blackstone, vol. iv. pp. 203, 204.
