to give this religion an establishment, and these teachers a share in the government. It is thus that religion, to its great dishonour, has been converted into an engine of state. The politician may be pleased with his success, and the teacher with his honours, and even the people be so far misled as to love to have it so; but the mischief resulting from it to religion is incalculable. Even where such establishments have arisen from piety, they have not failed to corrupt the minds of Christians from the simplicity that is in Christ. It was by these means that the church at an early period from being the bride of Christ, gradually degenerated to a harlot, and in the end became the mother of harlots, and abominations of the earth. The good that is done in such communities, is not in consequence of their peculiar ecclesiastical constitution, but in spite of it; it arises from the virtue of individuals, which operates, notwithstanding the disadvantages of their situation. These are the things that afford a handle to unbelievers. They seldom choose to attack Christianity, as it is drawn in the sacred writings, and exemplified in the lives of real Christians, who stand at a distance from worldly parade, political struggles, or state intrigues; but as it is corrupted and abused by worldly men."--Fuller's Gospel its own Witness — Introduction— Works, vol. iii. pp. 14-16. 8vo. Lond. 1824.

NOTE XXXIX.

CHURCH PROPERTY.

SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.

"The author of the opinion, that church lands are national property, was Turgot, a name now too high to be exalted by eulogy, or depressed by invective.* That benevolent and philosophic statesmen delivered it in the article Fondation of the Encyclopedie, as the calm and disinterested opinion of a scholar, at a moment when he could have no view to palliate rapacity or prompt irreligion. It was no doctrine contrived for the occasion by the agents of tyranny; it

Of this most enlightened minister to Louis XVI., Dr Parr, when questioning the soundness of some of his principles, speaks, as “a late celebrated foreigner, who had deeply explored the true science of politics, and was sincerely attached to the best interests of humanity."-Spital Sermon, p. 14. 4to. Lond. 1801.

was a principle discovered in pure and harmless speculation by one of the best and wisest of men. But dismissing the genealogy of doctrines, let us examine their intrinsic value, and listen to no voice but that of truth. Are the lands occupied by the church the PROPERTY of its members?' Various considerations present themselves, which may elucidate the subject.

"1. It has not hitherto been supposed that any class of public servants are proprietors. They are salaried by the state for the performance of certain duties. Judges are paid for the distribution of justice; kings for the execution of the laws; soldiers where there is a mercenary army for public defence, and priests where there is an established religion for public instruction. The mode of their payment is indifferent to the question. It is generally in rude ages by land, and in cultivated periods by money. But a territorial pension is no more property than a pecuniary one. The right of the state to regulate the salaries of those servants, whom it pays in money, has not been disputed. But if it have chosen to provide the revenue of a certain portion of land for the salary of another class of servants, wherefore is its right more disputable, to resume that land, and to establish a new mode of payment?

"2. The lands of the church possess not the most simple and indispensable requisites of property. They are not even pretended to be held for the benefit of those who enjoy them. This is the obvious criterion between private property and a pension for public service. The destination of the first is avowedly the comfort and happiness of the individual who enjoys it; as he is conceived to be the sole judge of this happiness, he possesses the most unlimited rights of enjoyment, alienation, and even abuse. But the lands of the church destined for the support of public servants, exhibit none of the characters of property. They are inalienable; for it would not be less absurd for the priesthood to exercise such authority over these lands, than it would be for seamen to claim the property of a fleet they manned, or soldiers that of a fortress they garrisoned.

"3. It is confessed that no individual priest is a proprietor, and it is not denied that his utmost claim was limited to a possession for life of his stipend. If all the priests taken individually are not proprietors, the priesthood, as a body, cannot claim any such right,-for what is a body but an aggregate of individuals, and what new right can be conveyed by a mere change of name? Nothing can so forcibly illustrate this argument as the case of other corporations. They are voluntary associations of men for their own benefit. Every member of

them is an absolute sharer in their property. It is therefore alienated and inherited. Corporate property is here as sacred as individual, because in the ultimate analysis it is the same. But the priesthood is a corporation endowed by the country, and destined for the benefit of other men. It is hence that the members have no separate, nor the body any collective, right of property. They are only entrusted with the administration of the lands from which their salaries are paid.

"4. It is from this last circumstance that their legal semblance of property arises. In charters, bonds, and all other proceedings of law, they are treated with the same formalities as real property. The argument of prescription will appear to be altogether untenable, for prescription implies a certain period, during which the rights of property have been exercised, but in the case before us they never were exercised, because they never could be supposed to exist. It must be proved that these possessions were of the nature of property, before it can follow that they are protected by prescription, and to plead it, is to take for granted the question in dispute. If they never were property, no length of time can change their nature.

"5. The clamour of sacrilege, by which, at the Reformation, the church attempted to protect its pretended property seems to have fallen into early contempt. The treaty of Westphalia secularized many of the most opulent benefices of Germany. In our own island, on the abolition of Episcopacy in Scotland, the revenues of the church peaceably devolved on the sovereign. When, at a still later period, the Jesuits were suppressed in most Catholic monarchies, the wealth of that formidable and opulent body was every where seized by the sovereign. In all these memorable examples no traces are to be discovered of the pretended property of the church. The salaries of a class of public servants are in all these cases resumed by the state when it ceases to deem their service, or the mode of it, useful.

"6. The whole subject is indeed so evident, that little diversity of opinion could have arisen,-if the question of church property had not been confounded with the claims of the present incumbents. The distinction is extremely simple. The state is the proprietor of the church revenues, but its faith, it may be said, is pledged to those who have entered into the church for the continuance of those incomes for which they abandoned all other pursuits. The right of the state to arrange at its pleasure the revenues of any future priests, may be confessed, while a doubt may be entertained whether it is competent to change the fortune of those to whom it has solemnly

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promised a certain income for life."-Mackintosh's Vindiciæ Gallicæ, pp. 85-96,

The above is the clearest and most satisfactory exposition of the true nature, of what is often termed church property, that we have any where met with. These remarks appear in the "Vindiciæ Gallicæ," a work which an enemy to its principles (Mr Plumer Ward) says, "will ever be read as a first-rate production of genius," and are brought forward with a direct reference to the church lands of the Roman Catholic Church of France-but they are of universal application. The following observations, which follow the expression of a generous regret of the individual sufferings which the change arising out of the state taking the management of these lands into their own hands, are pregnant with most important and interesting truth: "But these sentiments imply no sorrow at the downfall of a great corporation, the determined and implacable enemy of freedom; at the conversion of an immense public property to national use; nor at the reduction of a servile and imperious priesthood to humble utility, as the moral and religious instructors of mankind. The attainment of these great objects consoles us for the portion of evil that was perhaps inseparable from them, and will be justly admired by a posterity too remote to be moved by these minute afflictions, or to be affected by any thing but their general splendour. The enlightened observer of an age thus distant, will contemplate with peculiar astonishment, the rise, progress, decay, and downfall* of spiritual power in Christian Europe. It will attract his attention as an appearance that stands alone in history. Its connexion in all stages of its progress with the civil power, will peculiarly occupy his mind. He will remark the unpresuming humility by which it gradually gained the favour and divided the power of the magistrate; the haughty and despotic tone in which it afterwards gave law to sovereigns and subjects; the zeal with which, in the first desperate moments of decline, it armed the people against the magistrate, and aimed at re-establishing spiritual despotism on the ruins of civil order; and the asylum which it at last found against the hostilities of reason in the prerogatives of temporal despotism, of which it had so long been the implacable foe."—Vind. Gall. pp. 98-100.

* Did we not dread the ridicule of political prediction, it would not seem difficult to assign its period. Church power (unless some revolution auspi cious to priesteraft, should replunge Europe in ignorance), will certainly not survive the nineteenth century.

ANONYMOUS.

"The class denominated High-Churchmen, both in England and Scotland, affirm most positively that the support of the Ecclesiastical Establishments costs nothing to the country. The Established churches, they say, are incorporations possessed of property and revenues, sacred and inalienable, to which they have absolute right, and of which they cannot be deprived without flagrant injustice, and the unsettling of all rights to property of every description, whether public or private.

"Among Voluntary churchmen a different opinion prevails. They generally hold that the burden of supporting the national churches rests upon no particular class or classes of the community, but upon the nation at large. It is, according to them," so far at least as it is derived from tithe, as well as immediately from the exchequer, "a general tax, of which a part falls upon the food and raiment, upon every necessary and comfort of life, used by the humblest member of society. The truth of this theory, it is said, may be strictly demonstrated on the principles of political economy, which may indeed be the case; but whether it be so or not, the subject is a great deal too recondite for present discussion. It is safest to deal with those matters that can be comprehended by persons of ordinary understanding.

"In Scotland, the country in which we are principally interested, the support of the Established clergy, exclusive of manses and glebes, is derived from the three following sources: teinds or tithes, annuity or house-tax, and allowance or bounty bestowed by government. When tithes were first introduced, the persons who paid them would have no doubt, in so far as tithes were concerned, that the clergy were supported at their expense. A man who one year enjoyed the whole produce of his land, and of the labour bestowed on it, and who next year found himself compelled to part with a tenth part of that produce, would understand quite clearly, that a certain portion of his property had been taken from him; he would think so every year after while he lived; and supposing him to have been succeeded in his estate by a son, that son would be equally sure that what the law had taken from his father, continued to be taken from him, and equally sure may be his descendant to the tenth or twentieth generation. The lapse of time makes no alteration in the nature of the case.

"But though this were granted in regard to heirs, it is argued in the case of land acquired by purchase, that the purchaser can have