THE NEW COURT[9]

[9] Guardian, 15th May 1889.

The claim maintained by the Archbishop in his Judgment, by virtue of his metropolitical authority and by that alone, to cite, try, and sentence one of his suffragans, is undoubtedly what is called in slang language "a large order." Even by those who may have thought it inevitable, after the Watson case had been so distinctly accepted by the books as a precedent, it is yet felt as a surprise, in the sense in which a thing is often a surprise when, after being only talked about it becomes a reality. We can imagine some people getting up in the morning on last Saturday with one set of feelings, and going to bed with another. Bishops, then, who in spite of the alleged anarchy, are still looked upon with great reverence, as almost irresponsible in what they say and do officially, are, it seems, as much at the mercy of the law as the presbyters and deacons whom they have occasionally sent before the Courts. They, too, at the will of chance accusers who are accountable to no one, are liable to the humiliation, worry, and crushing law-bills of an ecclesiastical suit. Whatever may be thought of this now, it would have seemed extravagant and incredible to the older race of Bishops that their actions should be so called in question. They would have thought their dignity gravely assailed, if besides having to incur heavy expense in prosecuting offending clergymen, they had also to incur it in protecting themselves from the charge of being themselves offenders against Church law.

The growth of law is always a mysterious thing; and an outsider and layman is disposed to ask where this great jurisdiction sprung up and grew into shape and power. In the Archbishop\'s elaborate and able Judgment it is indeed treated as something which had always been; but he was more successful in breaking down the force of alleged authorities, and inferences from them, on the opposite side, than he was in establishing clearly and convincingly his own contention. Considering the dignity and importance of the jurisdiction claimed, it is curious that so little is heard about it till the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is curious that in its two most conspicuous instances it should have been called into activity by those not naturally friendly to large ecclesiastical claims—by Low Churchmen of the Revolution against an offending Jacobite, and by a Puritan association against a High Churchman. There is no such clear and strong case as Bishop Watson\'s till we come to Bishop Watson. In his argument the Archbishop rested his claim definitely and forcibly on the precedent of Bishop Watson\'s case, and one or two cases which more or less followed it. That possibly is sufficient for his purpose; but it may still be asked—What did the Watson case itself grow out of? what were the precedents—not merely the analogies and supposed legal necessities, but the precedents—on which this exercise of metropolitical jurisdiction, distinct from the legatine power, rested? For it seems as if a formidable prerogative, not much heard of where we might expect to hear of it, not used by Cranmer and Laud, though approved by Cranmer in the Reformatio Legum, had sprung into being and energy in the hands of the mild Archbishop Tenison. Watson\'s case may be good law and bind the Archbishop. But it would have been more satisfactory if, in reviving a long-disused power, the Archbishop had been able to go behind the Watson case, and to show more certainly that the jurisdiction which he claimed and proposed to exercise in conformity with that case had, like the jurisdiction of other great courts of the Church and realm, been clearly and customarily exercised long before that case.

The appearance of this great tribunal among us, a distinctly spiritual court of the highest dignity, cannot fail to be memorable. It is too early to forecast what its results may be. There may be before it an active and eventful career, or it may fall back into disuse and quiescence. It has jealous and suspicious rivals in the civil courts, never well disposed to the claim of ecclesiastical power or purely spiritual authority; and though its jurisdiction is not likely to be strained at present, it is easy to conceive occasions in the future which may provoke the interference of the civil court.

But there is this interest about the present proceedings, that they illustrate with curious closeness, amid so much that is different, the way in which great spiritual prerogatives grew up in the Church. They may have ended disastrously; but at their first beginnings they were usually inevitable, innocent, blameless. Time after time the necessity arose of some arbiter among those who were themselves arbiters, rulers, judges. Time after time this necessity forced those in the first rank into this position, as being the only persons who could be allowed to take it, and so Archbishops, Metropolitans, Primates appeared, to preside at assemblies, to be the mouthpiece of a general sentiment, to decide between high authorities, to be the centre of appeals. The Papacy itself at its first beginning had no other origin. It interfered because it was asked to interfere; it judged because there was no one else to judge. And so necessities of a very different kind have forced the Archbishop of Canterbury of our day into a position which is new and strange to our experience, and which, however constitutional and reasonable it may be, must give every one who is at all affected by it a good deal to think about.