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the Church; and although (as is maintained by those who apologize for this secular intrusion into the sphere of spiritual functions) he does not exercise any direct spiritual office, he nevertheless occupies an anomalous position. In the reign of Henry VIII. conscientious members of the Episcopate, clergy, and laity protested (as did the Puritans and Nonconformists in later reigns), at the risk of imprisonment or death, against the encroachment of the State on the rights of the Church.

"The first act of the Church of England, in coming out from Popery, was to sanction and allow the sacrilegious robbery of her property; the first part of the price she paid to obtain the support of the king and the nobles. Her clergy should never have ceased to protest against the robbery, and to have reclaimed her property from the spoilers. But she dared not offend the secular power on whom at the very outset her dependence was placed, and not on God alone. Next, the Church of England not only acknowledged the subjection of all men in the realm, as members of the State, to the king, to the exclusion of all foreign powers from authority in the realm (which was the pretence alleged); but they seated him on the throne of Christ, in a manner which had never been done in any community of Christians in the world. The clergy, in convocation, and by Acts of Parliament, to which, in the persons of their prelates, they fully assented, and under which to this day, without protest of any kind, they are content to hold their possessions, submitted and consented that they would not presume to enact or execute any new canons or constitutions without the king's assent; and that no person in the realm, religious or otherwise, should go out of the king's dominions to any general council.

"And they further consented that the free election of bishops should be taken from ecclesiastical persons or bodies, and virtually vested in the king. The former of these was in effect as schismatical an act as is recorded of any heretic, or body of heretics, in the history of the Church; for by it the Church of England cast off their allegiance to Christ in the unity of the

body, and disabled themselves from adopting, of their own independent will, any regulation, or from uniting in any protest against error, which, by the universal consent of the whole of the rest of the Church, might be deemed necessary. They voluntarily cut themselves off from the universal Church. All the Protestant Churches established themselves as distinct ecclesiastical polities; and so far all countenanced, in some degree, the separateness of the Church of England; but they never went so far as to preclude themselves from the possibility of union in the future, except with the consent of a lay, and it might be an excommunicated person.'

" I

Now could this be better set forth, typically or pictorially, than by the Prince of Tyre saying “I sit in the seat of God in the midst of the seas"-and isolating himself on his island rock from the rest of the worldas England has done ecclesiastically, both in the letter and in the spirit? (Ezek. xxviii. 2.)

Is there any parallel, in England, to the charge brought against the Prince of Tyrus, that by his wisdom and traffic he had increased his riches? (Ezek. xxviii. 5.) Although in the Middle Ages, many of the dignitaries of the Church were noted for their wealth and luxury; this cannot be imputed to the Church of England as she now exists, for few cases survive of ecclesiastical abuses, in pluralities, and in the sale of livings and advowsons; while many of her most deserving and devoted clergy are disinterested and self-forgetful, poor, and struggling with financial difficulties, especially in this present season of depression.

In 1901 the Church of England possessed 14,080 parishes, registered churches and chapels.

In 1891 (the latest return) her income from ancient endowments was returned as £5,469,171; voluntary contributions (1902-1903), about £8,107,836.

Among the Protestant Dissenters the total number of sittings provided amounted to 7,641,166.

"Testimony to the Archbishops and Bishops of the United Church of England and Ireland": delivered January, 1836.

In past times, scandals existed, connected with bishops whose incomes exceeded £20,000 a year, with the inclusion of rich canonries to which no parochial work was attached. Simony was a sin not unknown in the Church of England, and not long ago pluralism, or the holding of more livings than one, was a crying evil; in short, so recently as the early part of the nineteenth century a great number of the clergy were pluralists. Thus, about 1820, there was one man who had thirty-four livings; one who had twenty-five; one who had twenty two who had fifteen. One bishop had five other livings. The income of the Archbishop of Canterbury was once £26,000 a year, and that of Winchester £28,000. All this exists no longer the Church in this land, has been, in a great measure, cleansed from this evil, and adapted to the spirit and wants of the age in which we live; but the sin of traffic in holy things has long been more or less rampant throughout the Church Catholic ! Alas! God might say of her, as He did of Israel of old, that the priests were gone after covetousness, and that they would not shut the doors, nor kindle fire on His altar for nought (Mal. i. 10). The public sale of livings or advowsons has long been a popular scandal ; and though the practice is not yet extinct, the glaring cases, which obtained some eighty years ago, exist no longer. It was a common practice, when a family living fell vacant and the next claimant was too young to occupy it, for a very old man to be sought for, in order to fill it temporarily; and thus enable the youth to finish his college course, and, after his ordination, take possession of the living, with its emoluments, and serious spiritual responsibilities. Such have been some of the shortcomings of the Established Church in this favoured land of England.

These sins spring from the mingling of things spiritual and temporal, which is not according to the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of His Body the Church, which cannot, therefore, present a pattern of the perfect way of God, in His Sanctuary.

III. The sins of the MONARCHY of England, as set forth by those of the KING of Tyre, may now be reviewed.

In considering the sins of the Monarchy of England, and comparing them with the prophetic type of the king of Tyre; we treat the monarchy of England as an historic whole but it is necessary to refer again to one king in particular, and to his personal acts, as being chiefly responsible for the present relation which exists between the Church and State in this land.

It must be borne in mind that as the king represents the country over which he reigns; so the State or Nation is represented in his headship: therefore it may be asked, in what way have the sins, charged against the king of Tyre-viz., violence, pride, neglected and lost privileges, defiling the sanctuary by the multitude of his iniquities and by the iniquity of his traffic-found their spiritual counterparts in the antitype of the English Monarchy, which, as we have seen, includes the State or Nation?

In Ezek. xxviii. 16, in connection with the violence wrought in the midst of Tyre, these words are addressed to the king, "and thou hast sinned." This may refer to personal acts of violence; for in one century no less than four Tyrian kings assassinated their predecessors on the throne, so as to seize the regal power. With such an example before her eyes, no wonder that Tyre was filled with violence; and her citizens would thus be incited to obtain their desires by force. Thank God, for many centuries, no king has ascended the throne of England through the murder of the previous sovereign. But, at the same time, may not a monarch have been guilty of violence in other forms, when, using his position and power unjustly, he robbed others of property-and repeatedly of life also-according to his royal caprice? Many of the kings of England acted thus, their violence culminating in the sacrilegious acts of Henry VIII.-in his confiscation of ecclesiastical property, and in his wholesale suppression of the abbeys, monasteries and convents,

This spoliation was an act of the Crown, rather than of the people, at the time of Henry's rejection of the Papal supremacy; and he must be held responsible for the martyrdom of Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and others, because of their conscientious refusal to acknowledge the king's supremacy in things spiritual and ecclesiastical.

It must, however, be admitted that the Bishops failed to discharge the responsibilities of their high office; for when the Commons presented a petition to King Henry VIII., attributing the growth of heresy to the uncharitable behaviour of divers Ordinaries, and remonstrated against the legislation of the clergy in Convocation without the king's consent, and against the oppressive procedure of the Church Courts; when they remonstrated against the abuses of ecclesiastical patronage, and the excessive number of holy days; the king referred their petition to the Bishops: who, however, could not suggest any means of redress; and the Ministry persisted in pushing their Bill for ecclesiastical reform, through the Houses of Parliament. Likewise, in the earlier reign of Henry II. it was owing to the gross abuse of their position, and to crimes of the deepest dye committed with impunity, that the ecclesiastics (who regarded themselves as immune from secular jurisdiction), drew upon themselves the royal displeasure and interference. The king summoned a Council of Prelates and Barons to Clarendon, near Salisbury (A.D. 1164); where the ancient laws and customs of the kingdom were formulated-known since as the Constitutions of Clarendon. These were at once agreed to by the barons, but were accepted with much reluctance by Archbishop Becket. By the 15th Article of these Constitutions, the election of a bishop was to take place, only with the king's consent; but Henry II. was unable to enforce this resolution.

During the reign of Edward III., the Statute of Provisors was enacted (A.D. 1344), rendering it penal to procure any presentation to benefices from the Court of Rome, and securing the rights of all patrons and

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