Here, however, I must commence by stating that, as it appears to me, Lord Coke and others attach to the very word jurisdiction a narrower sense than it bears in popular acceptation, or in the works of canonists--a sense which excludes altogether that of the canonists; and also a sense which appears to be the genuine and legitimate sense of the word in its first intention. Now, when we are endeavouring to appreciate the force and scope of the legal doctrine concerning ecclesiastical and spiritual jurisdiction, it is plain that we must take the term employed in the sense of our own law, and not in the different and derivative sense in which it has been used by canonists and theologians. But canonists themselves bear witness to the distinction which I have now pointed out. The one kind is _Jurisdictio coactiva proprie dicta, principibus data_; the other is _Jurisdictio improprie dicta ac mere spiritualis, Ecclesiae ejusque Episcopis a Christo data_.... Properly speaking, I submit that there is no such thing as jurisdiction in any private association of men, or anywhere else than under the authority of the State. _Jus_ is the scheme of rights subsisting between men in the relations, not of all, but of civil society; and _jurisdicto_ is the authority to determine and enunciate those rights from time to time. Church authority, therefore, so long as it stands alone, is not in strictness of speech, or according to history, jurisdiction, because it is not essentially bound up with civil law. But when the State and the Church came to be united, by the conversion of nations, and the submission of the private conscience to Christianity--when the Church placed her power of self-regulation under the guardianship of the State, and the State annexed its own potent sanction to rules, which without it would have been matter of mere private contract, then _jus_ or civil right soon found its way into the Church, and the respective interests and obligations of its various orders, and of the individuals composing them, were regulated by provisions forming part of the law of the land. Matter ecclesiastical or spiritual moulded in the forms of civil law, became the proper subject of ecclesiastical or spiritual jurisdiction, properly so called.