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The Ordinary shall not give his consent unless he prudently foresees that the necessary fluids for the building and upkeep of the new church, for the support of its personnel, and for the other expenses of worship will be forthcoming.
Two things thus follow from this. The first is that the church is a place where the public, that is, the faithful have a right of worship and the second thing is that the church must be furnished with the wherewithal for the support of the necessary ministers and for meeting the expenditure of the cult. This is because it will be impossible for the religious services to be conducted unless provision is made for the -the person, who represents the legally living church to which all citizens belong. The church and its funds cannot, however, be regarded as a private property of the incumbent of the pariah or of any one else. This would be clear from the observations of Greer J. in Commissioners of Church Temporalities in Wales v. Gustard [1923] 1 K.B. 640, 647, 648. There one of the questions to be considered was whether tithes or tithe rent charge were the personal property of any individual. Dealing with this question the learned Judge observed:-
...In the old pre-Reformation days, when the right to tithe originated and became firmly satablished, tithes were regarded not as the property of the individual rector or vicar who received them, but rather as the portion of the fruits of the earth devoted by divine law to the service of religion, it being impossible that religious services could be conducted throughout the country unless provision was made for the person or parson who represented locally the living Church to which all citizens belonged. I think that at the time when the powers of the Commissioners were created, tithes, which could only be held by ecclesiastical persons, were treated in law as a special form of property devoted to pious uses, and they were not dealt with as the individual property of the incumbent of the pariah.