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: CHAPTER IV. CHURCH LAW AND CHURCH COURTS. Having in the last chapter dealt with the composition of the Church, including clergy and laity, let us now turn to the laws by which the Church is governed and to the courts administering them. Every member of the Church, whether lay or clerical, is, of course, in the present day subject to the ordinary law of the land as administered in the regular courts of justice. It has long ceased to be possible for anyone to claim exemption from this jurisdiction by reason of any ecclesiastical privilege. The ecclesiastical person, whether bishop, dean and chapter, or parson of the parish, has his civil or temporal rights, just as the layman, be he Churchman or Dissenter, has. He owns property, he makes contracts, his own rights may be infringed, or he may infringe the rights of others. He thus may claim the protection of the civil courts and against him such courts may give redress. But besides what are recognised as the civil rights of every subject of the Crown, there exist certain other rights and relationships which have, or are supposed to have, a specially ecclesiastical character, and are, therefore, the subject of the ecclesiastical law. It is not long since all causes of a matrimonial and testamentary character were1v.] CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION. 41 exclusively dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts. Marriage having been in Roman Catholic times treated as a sacrament, and long after the Reformation having been still considered as in the main a religious matter, questions arising out of this relationship naturally came to be dealt with by the spiritual courts. Testaments also fell within their exclusive jurisdiction, and so remained long after all testamentary causes, even in some Roman Catholic countries, were decide...