Untitled - Electric Scotland

350 LIFE OF ARCHIUSHO! TAIT [CH. xin.
few weeks drawn up by the Dean of Capetown and two
others. Bishop Colenso remained in England, where he
received, on July 1st, the formal citation of his Metropo
litan to appear for trial in the Cathedral of Capetown in
the following November. 1 He took no notice of the
summons, and in the meantime Bishop Gray s authority
received a somewhat serious check. On June 24, 1863,
the Privy Council gave decision in the case of Long
v. TJie
RisJiop of Capetown, reversing a sentence of deposition
which Bishop Gray had pronounced against the Rev.
William Long, an incumbent in Capetown, for refusing to
recognise the authority of the Bishop s Synod. The Privy
Council judgment entered elaborately into the whole
history of Bishop Gray s position.- It expressly declared
that he would have been entitled to deprive a clergyman
for any cause which would authorise a deprivation in
England, but that this was not such a cause, the Synod
being a voluntary association of Churchmen, whose decrees
can only bind those who have already agreed, as in the
case of any other contract, to be so bound. All this was
important, as running directly in the teeth of Bishop
Gray s diocesan action ; but, what concerned the Colenso
case more closely, the judges declared the Bishop s Letters
Patent, formally given him by the Crown in 1853, to be
practically worthless, and to convex no such coercive
jurisdiction as they professed to 1
give/
Bishop Gray did not greatly regard this judgment, as
he had always determined to rest his case less upon the
jurisdiction conferred by Letters Patent, than upon what
he believed to be his inherent rights as Metropolitan.
1 These
various documents may be seen in full in the Appendices to
Bishop Gray s Life, vol. ii. pp. 591-618.
- The full text appears in Bishop Gray s Life, vol. ii. pp. 577-591. The
judges were Lord Kingsdown, the Dean of the Arches, Sir Edward Ryan,
and Sir John T. Coleridge.
3 See above, page 333.