Church would have to be consenting

To separate justly Church and state when the union has been so historic and complex will need to be by mutual consent and good will, both here and in England – not a declaration or an action by a future island government.

Disestablishment was achieved in Ireland, where the Protestant Church of Ireland came to be increasingly offensive to the Roman Catholic majority. Gladstone's bill to effect it was thought by historians to be the most able piece of administrative and consensual drafting to appear in the 19th century. A comparison with the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, 50 years later, one of muddle and requiring subsequent correction, shows how skilful was the Irish plan.

The disestablishment of the Guernsey church would be an undertaking of equal complexity. It could not be achieved without a concurrent desire in England, where there is no immediacy for a separation of Church and state – the need for reform of the House of Lords is of greater importance and that has been waiting for years. Present-day lawyers would find it very difficult to compete with Gladstone's bill, which took over 30 years to evolve, both in the immensity of the religious, historical and legal knowledge required and the inordinate length of time needed to deal with it.

Interestingly, the argument on the disestablishment of the Irish Church began not in the English parliament but with a sermon on 'national apostasy' preached by John Keble, professor of poetry, before the judges of the assize in St Mary's, Oxford, in July 1833, the year of the Irish Church Temporalites Act. This Act had very modest proposals for the reform of the Irish dioceses by abolishing 10 bishoprics and sharing their unsuitable wealth, but it was seen by many churchmen as state interference.

The occasion was also the anniversary of the accession of King William IV, and Keble took as his text Isaiah 49, 23, 'Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers'. That is to say, 'Kings shall act as nurses or guardians of the Church's children.

The State will serve the Church, not the Church be kept by the State.'

The deduction being that, in the

Old Testament, Church and state were one society.

The New Testament points to a yet higher conception of the office of the State. Even heathen rulers are 'powers ordained by God' – though they might not be Christians, they are ministers of God to the Christians for good.

But by Keble's day, it was already evident that whatever the ideal might be, Church and state in England were not in fact one society and when, in 1928, a revised prayer book was rejected by Parliament, many thought church establishment was morally discredited and beyond recovery.

There are many who appreciate the patronage and privilege that church establishment might bestow and enjoy the opportunity it provides for flamboyancy of dress and the encouragement to being thought somebody of importance, but not all would want to cling to it. Those who went to serve in missionary stations abroad soon found they could get on very well without it and that to have had it might well have led to a restriction of liberty of expression.

If disestablishment is attained in this island, it will be by consent and not by the unilateral political pronouncement of Deputy Gollop's imagination. I wish him and his committee a long and happy life, in sure and certain expectation that like old soldiers, they will never die: only fade away.

THE REV. LESLIE CRASKE,

3, Mount Row,

St Peter Port.