yards: the law regulates and sanctions its dogma, its constitution, its liberties, its jurisdiction and its ritual: the Queen takes an oath to maintain it, the Government takes part in its administration by nominating high dignitaries and certain incumbents of benefices. In Scotland the Presbyterian Church is the official Church recognized by the Act of 1707, consecrated by law, and put in possession of the edifices and ecclesiastical revenues. There is, indeed, an Episcopal Church in Scotland, but it is a free Church,[1] just as the Presbyterian Church is free in England. Great Britain has therefore two State Churches, the Crown is the legal supporter of two opposite systems of sacerdotal hierarchy on the two sides of the Tweed.
Per contra, Ireland has no official Church at all. The Episcopal Protestant Church of Ireland, formerly one and the same with the Church of England, was disestablished in 1869, i.e. separated from the state and dispossessed of its property under certain reservations which protected the interests of actual incumbents. It has now become a free Church.
The extraordinary diversity which is the characteristic of English public law is patent in all the facts which we have just noted. The French mind has a natural taste for simplicity and uniformity. Its creations bear the impress of these two qualities, and it naively ex-
- ↑ Queen Anne in a letter to the Scotch Parliament in 1703 begged that a little tolerance should be shown to the adherents of the Episcopal Church, she called them “Dissenters” making use of the same name that she would have given to the Presbyterians in addressing the English Parliament. [See Her Majesty’s Letter, Burton, History of Scotland, viii., p. 90 (D).]
