ng given it first against the laity,
then against the crown, you will now extend it to the Church.

The acts which were made, giving limitation against the laity, were not
acts against the property of those who might be precluded by
limitations. The act of quiet against the crown was not against the
interests of the crown, but against a power of vexation.

If the principle of prescription be not a constitution of positive law,
but a principle of natural equity, then to hold it out against any man
is not doing him injustice.

That _tithes_ are due of common right is readily granted; and if this
principle had been kept in its original straitness, it might, indeed, be
supposed that to plead an exemption was to plead a long-continued
_fraud_, and that no man could _be deceived_ in such a title,--as the
moment he bought land, he must know that he bought land tithed:
prescription could not aid him, for prescription can only attach on a
supposed _bona fide_ possession. But the fact is, that the principle has
been broken in upon.

Here it is necessary to distinguish two sorts of property.

1. Land carries no _mark_ on it to distinguish it as ecclesiastical, as
tithes do, which are a _charge_ on land; therefore, though it had been
made _inalienable_, it ought perhaps to be subject to limitation. It
might _bona fide_ be held.

But, first, it was not originally inalienable, no, not by the Canon Law,
until the restraining act of the 11th [1st?] of Elizabeth. But the great
revolution of the dissolution of monasteries, by the 31st Hen., ch. 13,
has so mixed and confounded ecclesiastical with lay property, that a man
may by every rule of good faith be possessed of it. The statute of Queen
Elizabeth, ann. 1, ch. 1, [?] gave away the bishop's lands.

So far as to _lands_.

As to _tithes_, they are not things in their own nature subject to be
barred by prescription upon the general principle. But tithes and Church
lands, by the statutes of Henry VIII. and the 11th [1st?] Eliz., have
become objects _in commercio_: for by coming to the crown they became
grantable in that way to the subject, and a great part of the Church
lands passed through the crown to the people.

By passing to the king, tithes became property to a mixed party; by
passing from the king, they became absolutely _lay_ property: the
partition-wall was broken down, and tithes and Church possession became
no longer synonymous terms. No [A?] man, therefore, might bec