The ecclesiastical law of England is in complete dependence upon the authority of the state. The Church of England cannot be said, from a legal point of view, to have a corporate existence or even a representative assembly. The Convocation of York and the Convocation of Canterbury are provincial assemblies possessing no legislative or judicial authority; even such purely ecclesiastical questions as may be formally commended to their attention by “letters of business” from the crown can only be finally settled by act of parliament. The ecclesiastical courts are for the most part officered by laymen, whose subordination to the archbishops and bishops is purely formal, and the final court of appeal is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In like manner changes in the ecclesiastical law are made directly by parliament in the ordinary course of legislation, and in point of fact a very large portion of the existing ecclesiastical law consists of acts of parliament.
The sources of the ecclesiastical law of England are thus described by Dr. Richard Burn (The Ecclesiastical Law, 9th ed., 1842):—“The ecclesiastical law of England is compounded of these four main ingredients—the civil law, the canon law, the common law, and the statute law. And from these, digested in their proper rank and subordination, to draw out one uniform law of the church is the purport of this book. When these laws do interfere and cross each other, the order of preference is this:—’The civil law submitteth to the canon law; both of these to the common law; and all three to the statute law. So that from any one or more of these, without all of them together, or from all of them together without attending to their comparative obligation, it is not possible to exhibit any distinct prospect of the English ecclesiastical constitution.’ Under the head of statute law Burn includes ‘the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, agreed upon in Convocation in the year 1562; and in like manner the Rubric of the Book of Common Prayer, which, being both of them established by Acts of Parliament, are to be esteemed as part of the statute law.’”
The first principle of the ecclesiastical law in England is the assertion of the supremacy of the crown, which in the present state of the constitution means the same thing as the supremacy of parliament. This principle has been maintained ever since the Reformation. Before the Reformation the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope was recognized, with certain limitations, in England, and the Church itself had some pretensions to ecclesiastical freedom. The freedom of the Church is, in fact, one of the standing provisions of those charters on which the English constitution was based. The first provision of Magna Carta is quod ecclesia Anglicana libera sit. By the various enactments of the period of the Reformation the whole constitutional position of the Church, not merely with reference to the pope but with reference to the state, was definitely fixed. The legislative power of convocation was held to extend to the clergy only, and even to that extent required the sanction and assent of the crown. The common law courts controlled the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, claiming to have “the exposition of such statutes or acts of parliament as concern either the extent of the jurisdiction of these courts or the matters depending before them. And therefore if these courts either refuse to allow these acts of parliament, or expound them in any other sense than is truly and properly the exposition of them, the king’s great courts of common law may prohibit and control them.”
The design of constructing a code of ecclesiastical laws was entertained during the period of the Reformation, but never carried into effect. It is alluded to in various statutes of the reign of Henry VIII., who obtained power to appoint a commission to examine the old ecclesiastical laws, with a view of deciding which ought to be kept and which ought to be abolished; and in the meantime it was enacted that “such canons, institutions, ordinances, synodal or provincial or other ecclesiastical laws or jurisdictions spiritual as be yet accustomed and used here in the Church of England, which necessarily and conveniently are requisite to be put in ure and execution for the time, not being repugnant, contrarient, or derogatory to the laws or statutes of the realm, nor to the prerogatives of the royal crown of the same, or any of them, shall be occupied, exercised, and put in ure for the time with this realm” (35 Henry VIII. c. 16, 25 c. 19, 27 c. 8).
The work was actually undertaken and finished in the reign of Edward VI. by a sub-committee of eight persons, under the name of the Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, which, however, never obtained the royal assent. Although the powers of the 25 Henry VIII. c. 1 were revived by the 1 Elizabeth c. 1, the scheme was never executed, and the ecclesiastical laws remained on the footing assigned to them in that statute—so much of the old ecclesiastical laws might be used as had been actually in use, and was not repugnant to the laws of the realm.
The statement is, indeed, made by Sir R. Phillimore (Ecclesiastical Law, 2nd ed., 1895) that the “Church of England has at all times, before and since the Reformation, claimed the right of an independent Church in an independent kingdom, to be governed by the laws which she has deemed it expedient to adopt.” This position can only be accepted if it is confined, as the authorities cited for it are confined, to the resistance of interference from abroad. If it mean that the Church, as distinguished from the kingdom, has claimed to be governed by laws of her own making, all that can be said is that the claim has been singularly unsuccessful. From the time of the Reformation no change has been made in the law of the Church which has not been made by the king and parliament, sometimes indirectly, as by confirming the resolutions of convocation, but for the most part by statute. The list of statutes cited in Sir R. Phillimore’s Ecclesiastical Law fills eleven pages. It is only by a kind of legal fiction akin to the “collegial” theory mentioned above, that the Church can be said to have deemed it expedient to adopt these laws.
The terms on which the Church Establishment of Ireland was abolished, by the Irish Council Act of 1869, may be mentioned. By sect. 20 the present ecclesiastical law was made binding on the members for the time being of the Church, “as if they had mutually contracted and agreed to abide by and observe the same”; and by section 21 it was enacted that the ecclesiastical courts should cease after the 1st of January 1871, and that the ecclesiastical laws of Ireland, except so far as relates to matrimonial causes and matters, should cease to exist as law. (See also [England, Church of]; [Establishment]; &c.)
Authorities.—The number of works on ecclesiastical law is very great, and it must suffice here to mention a few of the more conspicuous modern ones: Ferdinand Walter, Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts aller christlichen Konfessionen (14th ed., Bonn, 1871); G. Phillips, Kirchenrecht, Bde. i.-vii. (Regensburg, 1845-1872) incomplete; the text-book by Cardinal Hergenröther (q.v.); P. Hinschius, Kirchenrecht der Katholiken und Protestanten in Deutschland, 6 Bde. (Berlin, 1869 sqq.), only the Catholic part, a masterly and detailed survey of the ecclesiastical law, finished; Sir Robert Phillimore, Eccl. Law of the Church of England (2nd ed., edited by Sir Walter Phillimore, 2 vols., London, 1895). For further references see [Canon Law], and the article “Kirchenrecht” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (ed. Leipzig, 1901).
ECCLESIASTICUS (abbreviated to Ecclus.), the alternative title given in the English Bible to the apocryphal book otherwise called “The Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach.” The Latin word ecclesiasticus is, properly speaking, not a name, but an epithet meaning “churchly,” so that it would serve as a designation of any book which was read in church or received ecclesiastical sanction, but in practice Ecclesiasticus has become a by-name for the Wisdom of Sirach. The true name of the book appears in the authorities in a variety of forms, the variation affecting both the author’s name and the description of his book. The writer’s full name is given in l. 27 (Heb. text) as “Simeon the son of Jeshua (i.e. Jesus) the son of Eleazar the son of Sira.” In the Greek text this name appears as “Jesus son of Sirach Eleazar” (probably a corruption of the Hebrew reading), and the epithet “of Jerusalem” is added, the translator himself being resident in Egypt. The whole name is shortened sometimes to “Son of Sira,” Ben Sira in Hebrew, Bar Sira in Aramaic, and sometimes (as in the title prefixed in the Greek cod. B) to Sirach. The work is variously described as the Words (Heb. text), the Book (Talmud), the Proverbs (Jerome), or the Wisdom of the son of Sira (or Sirach).