Untitled - Electric Scotland

396 1 JFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. xiv.
it) in her daughter Churches in every part of the empire.
Difficult as it was to define the manner in which the
Royal supremacy was to operate in the varying conditions
of Colonial life, Bishop Tait was determined to maintain,
so far as in him lay, the rules and liberties which he
believed that supremacy to guarantee. The principle for
which he and others were contending was well expressed
by Mr. Maurice in a letter which he published during the
controversy :
1
"
If the notion [is sanctioned]," he said,
"
that the jurisdic
tion of the Queen is a inert vulgar, secular jurisdiction, which
must give way, in all graver questions, to the jurisdiction of a
Bishop or Metropolitan,
I believe the minds of the Colonists will
be perplexed as to their political allegiance ; and, as to their
moral duties, I believe the minds of the natives will be still more
perplexed ;
that there will be no continuance of faith among the
first, and no spread of faith among the second. . . . [Bishop Gray]
seeks to establish in his colony one law for the clergy and one for
the laity the first to be administered in the name and by the
authority of the Metropolitan ;
the second to be administered in
the name and by the officers of the Queen. I do not say that
these two laws will be equally administered. I believe the
Queen s officers will struggle, under great obstructions, to follow
some standard of justice. They will be said to obey a secular
instinct. The other tribunal will be what such tribunals have
been in other countries ; what they have already proved them
selves to be in South Africa. Those who are zealous for the
well-being of their own countrymen, and of the heathen among
whom they dwell, should ask themselves whether they will be
parties to so fatal a contradiction. If they are, they may expect
to see the example which has been afforded by the Colonies
will be restored which
copied here : in England a jurisdiction
neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear."
No one knew better than Bishop Tait that the time
must come when the link would be loosened which
united the Colonial dioceses to the Church at home but
, Oct. 4, 1864.