Note 8 — Chapter I

A State can, of course, endow, as well as establish, any form of religion it selects. It has a perfect right to do so. But the State has never endowed the Church of England, and it can only disendow it in the sense that it can rob it of its own endowments—just as it can, by Act of Parliament, rob any business man of his money. It has done this once already. At the Great Rebellion, the Church of England was, in this sense, disestablished and disendowed. By the Act of Uniformity of Charles II, it was reinstated into the rights and liberties from which it had been deposed. But it remained the same Church which Augustine established in England all the time. Its reinstatement no more made the Church a new Church, than the restoration of Charles II made the monarchy a new monarchy.