TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 25 March 1936, Page 5

TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL

RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE Sir Cbailts Orrr.it RobeWson, speaking oil “The State in its relation 1.0 r-digious nodics” to the Manchester brunch, of the Historical Association, spoke of the variations arid inr cnsistoncies in t!ic re lation between Church and State both within and outside the British Empire. One undecided question, lie said, was that of marriage, on which all .societies were founded. In England one could be married in a. consecrated building belonging to a religious body or one could be married in a building, not const crated belonging to the State. In some countries one must take the civil form of marriage and afterward, if one wished, one could go through a religious ceremony. “We have not lost, in England at any rate, all traces of the medieval condition of things, when there were two states— really two faces of the same thing—the state civil and the state ecclesiastical,"’ he said. “Historically as a fact, to take secular things in one bundle and religious things in another, and to say that, one being civil and the other religions, they are quite distinct, has never been done. 1 should not like the job of sitting on any commission that attempted to separate them.” Sir Charles pointed out that there are in the- British Empire alone about nine separate relations of Church and State. “If.you are a member of the Church of England, you become a dissenter as soon as you cross •the Tweed, and as I have often fold my old friend the Archbishop of Canterbury, he ; s a Nonconformist in the land where lie was born, because lie differs from the Church of Scotland.” The first act of a new king was to promise-to maintain the Church of Scotland ns by iaw established before lie promised to maintain the Church ot England as bv law established King Edward VIII. had just done this. Queen Victoria no doubt thought she was doing right when she attended the services of the Church of England when she was in this country and those of the Church of Scotland when she was in Scotland. Yet there were substantial differences