Mr. Osborne Morgan made a good speech to his constituents
at Wrexham on Tuesday, in reply to objections raised against his Burials Bill. He pointed out that the churchyards are in no sense Church property. They are' parish land vested in the incumbent, as to the herbage o surface, for his own use ; and as to the soil, for the use of the entire body of the parishioners, every person dying in the parish having at common law an equal right of interment A Malay native washed ashore on the Cornish coast has just the same right of interment as the Rector Hence it is childish to say that the churchyards are Church property. They are national property for special purposes, mostly sanitary, and the ecclesiastical monopoly which the National Church has of reading the burial service is, strictly speaking, quite out of keeping with the trusts of the churchyard. The earliest parochial
graveyards were removed from the church, and quite unconnected with it. Mr. Osborne Morgan quoted a wonderful statement of the Bishop of Lincoln's (Dr. Wordsworth's) which would hardly -have been uttered, we suspect, even by the Bishop of Montreal :- The Bishops and clergy, he said, are "not owners of the church- yards, but only trustees of them under God, and they cannot, without breach of trust, and without being guilty of a heinous offence in His sight, take away from- God a single yard of the
10- churchyard for the purpose of giving a share in it for public funeral services to persons who rend asunder his Church by schism, which is condemned by Him in his Holy Word as a deadly sin." We venture to say that the majority of Churchmen are much further removed in creed from Dr. Wordsworth than they are from the schismatics whom Dr. Wordsworth thus bitterly judges and condemns.
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