Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. BY this time we may perhaps better understand what is the real nature of the process known as "disendowment;" what is the real nature of the "connexion between Church and State" in England, the "establishment" of the Church, as it is called. We have throughout been arguing against two classes of adversaries, against those who hold that ecclesiastical property and ecclesiastical matters generally are something too high and holy for the State to deal with, and against those who hold that the State has a special right to deal with ecclesiastical matters more than it has to deal with other matters. Both these opposite notions, it will be seen, start from the same principle. At the bottom of both lies the idea that ecclesiastical property DISESTABLISHMENT AND DISENDOWMENT. 55 and ecclesiastical matters of all kinds have some special character about them different from other property and other matters. This is a doctrine which may be theologically true, though men, and those not the least devout of men, have been found to call it in question. But we have nothing to do with its theological truth or falsehood. The temporal legislator cannot enter into such questions. He must look upon ecclesiastical property and everything else that is ecclesiastical with the same eyes with which he looks upon all other things. A proposal to alienate ecclesiastical property, a proposal to transfer property from one ecclesiastical purpose to another, a proposal in any other way to alter the laws about ecclesiastical matters, must be judged by the legislator from one point of view only. Will it be for the common good of the country to make any change in these matters, or will it be better to leave them as they are ? We have heard of disestablishment carrying disendowment with it, and we are...