The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1850-04-02 00:00:00

,n with• all other ;

rar of Lc

le notice Was correc

ticl, as it did not giv
eigli.

t the case

gistrar was then pu

Fisher then pm to the facts of te case, wich
were substantially the desaeosed ►as opened by the cohunsel for the
prosecution. In reply to a question by the Judge, Fisher said
they did not gtt married because he wanted the case to be tried
as a question of law. The Judge thought such a course very
foolish.

Ann Hardman, a young woman about twenty, of interesting
opearante, said she was not yet married. She was confirmed

bout six years ago

IE.-Why don't they marry you now? Arc yol
's from any body not to be married until this case

yVitness.—Yes • I w
this was tried.

under orders not to I

The JUDGE
se may be tried

so you live in a state of sin in order that this

The JUDGE.-I,§o that you have been kept in a state of sin in
order to try this cause. Very well ; if that is not sin I don't
know what sin is. At the present day there seems to be a de,
termination to push every thing to extremities on both sides.
The young woman declined to give a reason as to why
was not married, upon which Fisher was re-called, and, in
answer to a question relative to the notice, said he thought the
Itev. Mr. James ought to marry them, and he had received
-;tig from the superintendont-registrar's office to remr.in
until the affair was settled.
duss then addressed the jury for the defence, contend-
that, according to the law and discipline of the church, the
defendant was quite right in refusing to marry these people ;
the man never having been confirmed, and not being desirous
to be confirmed, he argued that the defendant had obeyed the
law and the canons. This was a case for the Ecclesiastical
Court; • they had no jurisdiction here. The defendant had
been guilty of no offence within the statute. First of all, the
'ause alleged by the defendant was a just cause; secondly, the
'se did not come within the words of the statute ; and,
'rdly, it was a case for ecclesiastical consideration. The
• point was, that the notice did not maintain the descrip-
, the notice in the indictment, and it did not state the
the district.

reason as to why st

The Learned .Toocm,lrisumming up, thought that most of
the objections raised by Mr. Bliss would fall to the ground. If
he were called upon for the first time to absolutely decide the
question whether the rev. gentleman was right in refusing to
marry people oft the ground of their not being confirmed, and
who declined to state that they were ready to be confirmed, it
appeared to him, as at_ present_ advised, that he was wrong.
After recommending that the objections of Mr. Bliss should
not be considere.l, he expressed an opinion that the construc-
tion of the first section nf the Marriage Act, and all the sections,
meant merely to put banns and certificates in exactly the same
position that banns previously were; and all the effect pro-
duced by this certificate of the registrar being, in point of fact,
that the clergyman to whom it was produced must deal and
take the banns to be duly published in the manner in which
they had to be published by the ecclesiastical forms. But when
these banns had been published according to law, he could not
be indicted for refusing to marry according to the banns. There
should be a remedy for it, and this re , edy would be that the
clergVman who disobeyed the rubric in this respect, by not
numving the persons whose banns had been published, must
answer to the Ecclesiastical Court for having committed an
ecclesiastical offence, and so construing the act would make the
whole act perfectly consistent, and just, and free, and would
leave tke consciences of all free and unembarrassed by restric-
tions of any description whatever. So that if a Roman Catholic
priest refused to calebrate a marriage, he had to answer to his
superiors for his conduct for so doing, and if it was a Wesleyan
clergyman, he had to answer to the Conference, and the minis-
ters of other churches to those who governed in their respective
congregations, and all would be subject to the same discipline