any archbishop or bishop by the dean and chapter made; but that the king might by his letters patent confer on any person a vacant archbishopric or bishopric, and such collation should be as effectual as if the congé d'élire had been given, and the election been duly made and confirmed. This summary method of appointment had already been prescribed by Stat. 31 Henry VIII. c. 9, with respect to the new bishoprics which the king was thereby empowered to create; and is, therefore, strictly speaking, the correct proceeding in the case of a vacancy in the sees of Chester, Peterborough, and Oxford, which were created under that statute.* In practice, however, election and confirmation takes place in promotions to these sees in the same way as in that of the older bishoprics.

The statutes of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., to which we have referred, were all of them repealed in the early part of Queen Mary's reign; and the Act of Supremacy (Stat. 1 Elizabeth c. 1), while it revived Statt. 23 Henry VIII. c. 20, and 25 Henry VIII. c. 20, left the Act of Edward VI. unrepealed. This latter Act, in fact, as far as regards England and Wales, has never been restored to the statute book, but it was reenacted with respect to Ireland by the Irish Stat. 2 Elizabeth c. 4, which is prefaced by the very same recital, and substitutes collation for election and confirmation, in the very same terms as the Act of Edward VI.

From the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth to the present time, the appointment of bishops in England has always been vested in the Crown, under the Act of 1533. It should, however, be mentioned, that in 1681, Charles II., and in 1700, William III., temporarily appointed as commissioners certain bishops and others to examine into the fitness, and make recommendations to the sovereign, of persons to be appointed to bishoprics and other offices in the Church.

In the foregoing brief sketch, we have endeavoured to place succinctly before our readers, in its historical aspect, the question of the confirmation of bishops by the metropolitan of their province, so far as it bears upon the Church of England. From the survey we have made, we gather, on the one hand, that by the general practice of the Christian Church and by the ecclesiastical law, except where superseded or controlled by local state laws, the metropolitan of a province has been invested with authority to confirm, involving a right to veto, the elevation of persons to episcopal sees within his province. We have further seen, that in their discretionary exercise of this autho

By an Order in Council, 5th Oct., 1836, it is provided that the election to the united sees of Gloucester and Bristol, both of which were created under Stat. 31 Henry VIII. c. 9, shall be made by the dean and chapter of the two cathedrals alternately.

rity, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the pope, either indirectly by his appellate jurisdiction over them, or directly by usurping their functions, did, in not a few instances, during a period of our history when the Crown took no prominent part in the appointment of the bishops, reject the persons submitted for their confirmation. On the other hand, it appears that prior to the Stat. 25 Henry VIII. c. 20, there is no recorded case-and during the time when that Act has been in operation, absolutely no instance-of confirmation having been refused to a person appointed to a bishopric by the Crown. The Act which has settled the law upon the subject for the last three centuries, while it expressly precluded the ceremony of confirmation when neglect on the part of the dean and chapter to elect is remedied by letters patent containing a direct nomination to the bishopric, contemplated, apparently as a matter of course, the continued use of that ceremony, with the retention, as may be presumed from the silence on the subject, of its accustomed formalities in cases in which the old form of the congé d'élire and election by the dean and chapter were still observed. But the election is declared to be good and effectual to all intents previously to confirmation, and the reference to confirmation is couched in terms of a peremptory command to the archbishop to perform the ceremony, and contains no hint of the existence in him of any discretion in the matter. The Act does not, it is true, provide for overriding a refusal to confirm, as it does for dispensing with the election by the dean and chapter in the case of delay on their part; but the penalty for disobeying the mandate of the Crown is in both instances one and the same.

Upon this state of historical facts there arise two questions. First, has the archbishop, by the law of England, any discretionary power to refuse confirmation to a bishop elect whom, by letters patent of the Crown, he has been required to confirm. Secondly, if he has such power, is or is not the citation, during the ceremony of confirmation, to opposers of the bishop elect to appear and state their objections, anything more than a mere obsolete form? It is obvious that an affirmative reply to the first question does not necessarily preclude a negative answer to the second; for it might be quite possible that the archbishop possessed a legal right to refuse confirmation, on grounds which appeared to him, in the exercise of his discretion, sufficient; while, at the same time, the invitation to other persons to come forward, at the time of the ceremony, and publicly lay such grounds before him, was, by long-continued custom or positive enactment, reduced to an idle form. This supposition, however, though noticed in the arguments of the counsel who opposed the Mandamus in Dr. Hampden's case, has never been

seriously advanced as the true solution of the question. The right of the objectors at the confirmation to have their objections entertained, and the ceremony suspended until those objections were disposed of, has always been considered to stand or fall with the power of the archbishop to exercise a discretion in the matter. Such was the view taken by the Vicar-General and his assessors* in Dr. Hampden's case, and by the judges of the Queen's Bench, in their judgments on the application for a Mandamus in that case. The same opinion has been more recently expressed by the present Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Travers Twiss, in Dr. Temple's case. It is true that he does not appear to consider the citation of opposers a necessary incident of confirmation.

"On these occasions," he is reported to have said, "it has been the practice to use certain judicial forms which, as far as we are able to ascertain, go back to the earliest period of the Reformation. They were framed to carry out the provisions of the statute with reference to the election of bishops. Those forms are not expressly prescribed in their terms by any statute, and are not obligatory upon the archbishop, who had been pleased to adopt them for convenience, following a practice which has obtained for three centuries."

But he based his refusal to entertain the objections on the ground that, in his opinion, he had no power whatever to review the choice made by the Crown of Dr. Temple as a fit and proper person to be bishop of the see of Exeter.

Sir T. Twiss at the same time laid down that objections might be entertained to the confirmation of a bishop elect at the time of the ceremony on two points; namely, that the election had been, in some manner or form, defective, or that the person presented was not the person on whom the choice of the Crown had fallen.

In permitting the opposers to appear and state their case, and in recognising the admissibility of any objections whatever to the confirmation, Sir T. Twiss adopted a different line from that taken by the Vicar-General and assessors in 1848, who held that the opposers could not be allowed to appear or be heard at all, by reason of the statute of 1533. But it is obvious that objections on either of the two heads, on which alone he considered that they could be raised, so far from hindering the exercise of the prerogative of the Crown, would assist the due execution of it. For since, to use the reported words of Sir T. Twiss, “the Archbishop has power to supply all defects whatever which there may have been in the election," an objection on the former ground would only be raised to be at once removed; while successful opposition on the latter ground

* Dr. Burnaby, Dr. Lushington, and Sir John Dodson.

would ensure to the Crown the observance of its nomination, which was in danger of being inadvertently superseded.

For the arguments which have been advanced for and against the existence of a discretion in an archbishop of the Church of England respecting the confirmation of bishops elect, and for the authorities ecclesiastical and legal, which are arrayed on the one side and the other, we must refer our readers to the published reports of Dr. Hampden's case, where they are to be found at length.* To deal with the historical facts of the question has been all that the limits of the present article have permitted us to do. We may however state with reference to those arguments and authorities, that upon carefully weighing them, the balance will, in our opinion, be found upon the whole to incline in favour of the proposition that, when the letters patent requiring the confirmation of a bishop elect have been issued to the archbishop, the latter has no legal right to refuse confirmation.

What, then, it may be said, is there no power, after the issue of these letters patent, to prevent the consecration and installation of the bishop elect? Suppose that incontrovertible reasons arise, or are brought to light in the interval, for not completing his elevation, are the subsequent steps in all cases absolutely inevitable? By no means, we think; but the power to interrupt them lies in the Crown, and not in the archbishop; and it is to the former, and not to the latter, that application for the arrest of them must be made. Lord Denman has put this very clearly in his judgment in Dr. Hampden's case.

". . . . Confirmation," he says, "is necessary to give the new bishop all his rights. The archbishop is not unlikely to make some inquiry touching the bishop elect, and, if the result should lead him to the opinion that the appointment would be injurious, he may (as we have seen) advise the Crown in the first instance against issuing the congé d'élire and letter missive. Even afterwards, if he is since informed of facts which really convince him of such mischief, he may still resort to the Sovereign, and request to be relieved from the painful duty imposed by the statute. He may make it clear that the congé d'élire and letter missive were obtained in ignorance of the truth, and ought to be set aside.

"Extreme cases are ingeniously devised, but are not, and cannot with decency be thought, possible. But even if the worst be supposed, if the Crown will persist against warning and remonstrance in nominating a bishop whom the metropolitan cannot consent to confirm without violating his conscience, his duty is clear. He must act as some of our predecessors in old times have done when required

*See A Report of the Case of the Right Rev. R. D. Hampden, D.D., by Richard Jebb, Esq., M.A., of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister-at-Law. London, 1849; Adolphus and Ellis, Queen's Bench Reports, vol. xi., pp. 483–666.

to submit to dictation from the Crown: they forfeited their offices by not obeying: he must resign."

We trust that such an extreme case as that hinted at by Lord Denman in the passage above quoted, may be considered morally impossible. That it never has arisen hitherto, is certain. In the case of Dr. Hampden, Lord Denman could express his conviction that the archbishop had formed the deliberate opinion that the objections made to the bishop elect had no solid foundation. We have no doubt that the same may be said with equal truth of the present Archbishop of Canterbury with respect to Dr. Temple. And the supposition that the Crown will ever so abuse its ecclesiastical supremacy as to force upon the Church a person as bishop of a see within either of her provinces in defiance of the deliberate and firmly expressed disapprobation of the archbishop, is one which we think it is not unreasonable to refuse to entertain.

HENDERSON'S DICTIONARY AND CONCORDANCE OF
SCRIPTURAL NAMES.

A Dictionary and Concordance of the Names of Persons and Places, and of some of the more Remarkable Terms which occur in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Compiled by William Henderson, M.D. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1869.

WE hail the appearance of this book with peculiar satisfaction, not only as a work of much intrinsic value, but also as a worthy gift laid upon the altar, as the result of the diligent improvement of the learned leisure of a layman. We are at a loss to understand how any can regard as "an example of misdirected labour" any work which tends to the cultivation of a closer study of, and a more familiar and intelligent acquaintance with, the Book of Books. On the contrary, whilst Concordances are being prepared, at no small cost of time and labour, to facilitate reference to the writings, and to throw light upon the meaning, of our standard authors, we deem it rather a reproach to our Church and nation, that Dr. Henderson's commendable undertaking should so long have remained a desideratum.

The most cursory comparison of Dr. Henderson's Concordance of proper names with the works of his predecessors will suffice to show its immeasurable superiority. Thus, e. g., in