Provincial Organization.

(1) Local conditions soon made a provincial organization necessary, and it was gradually introduced.  The bishop of Calcutta received letters patent as metropolitan of India when the sees of Madras and Bombay were founded; and fresh patents were issued to Bishop Broughton in 1847 and Bishop Gray in 1853, as metropolitans of Australia and South Africa respectively.  Similar action was taken in 1858, when Bishop Selwyn became metropolitan of New Zealand; and again in 1860, when, on the petition of the Canadian bishops to the crown and the colonial legislature for permission to elect a metropolitan, letters patent were issued appointing Bishop Fulford of Montreal to that office.  Since then metropolitans have been chosen and provinces formed by regular synodical action, a process greatly encouraged by the resolutions of the Lambeth conferences on the subject.  The constitution of these provinces is not uniform.  In some cases, as South Africa, New South Wales, and Queensland, the metropolitan see is fixed.  Elsewhere, as in New Zealand, where no single city can claim pre-eminence, the metropolitan is either elected or else is the senior bishop by consecration.  Two further developments must be mentioned:  (a) The creation of diocesan and provincial synods, the first diocesan synod to meet being that of New Zealand in 1844, whilst the formation of a provincial synod was foreshadowed by a conference of Australasian bishops at Sydney in 1850; (b) towards the close of the 19th century the title of archbishop began to be assumed by the metropolitans of several provinces.  It was first assumed by the metropolitans of Canada and Rupert’s Land, at the desire of the Canadian general synod in 1893; and subsequently, in accordance with a resolution of the Lambeth conference of 1897, it was given by their synods to the bishop of Sydney as metropolitan of New South Wales and to the bishop of Cape Town as metropolitan of South Africa.  Civil obstacles have hitherto delayed its adoption by the metropolitan of India.

Freedom from state control.

(2) By degrees, also, the colonial churches have been freed from their rather burdensome relations with the state.  The church of the West Indies was disestablished and disendowed in 1868.  In 1857 it was decided, in Regina v. Eton College, that the crown could not claim the presentation to a living when it had appointed the former incumbent to a colonial bishopric, as it does in the case of an English bishopric.  In 1861, after some protest from the crown lawyers, two missionary bishops were consecrated without letters patent for regions outside British territory:  C.F.  Mackenzie for the Zambezi region and J.C.  Patteson for Melanesia, by the metropolitans of Cape Town and New Zealand respectively.  In 1863 the privy council declared, in Long v. The Bishop of Cape Town, that “the Church of England, in places where there