"He stands," says the chancellor, "convicted of the offences alleged against him by the sentence of the spiritual body of which he was a voluntary member, and whose proceedings he had bound himself to abide. It belongs not to the civil power to enter into or review the proceedings of a spiritual court. The structure of our government has for the preservation of religious liberty rescued the temporal institutions from religious interference; on the other hand, it has secured religious liberty from the invasion of the civil authority. The judgments, therefore, of religious associations, bearing on their own members, are not examinable here; and I am not to enquire whether the doctrines attributed to Mr. Dreher were held by him, or whether, if held, were anti-Lutheran, or whether his conduct was or was not in accordance with the duty he owed to the synod or to his denomination.... When a civil right depends upon an ecclesiastical matter, it is the civil court and not the ecclesiastical which is to decide. But the civil tribunal tries the civil right, and no more, taking the ecclesiastical decisions out of which the civil right arises as it finds them." This principle is reaffirmed by the same court in the John's Island Church case.[9] And in Den _v._ Bolton[10] the Supreme Court of New Jersey asserts the same principle. The Supreme Court of Illinois, in the case of Ferraria _v._ Vascouelles, refers to the case of Shannon _v._ Frost with approval, and adopts the language of the court, that the judicial eye cannot penetrate the veil of the church for the forbidden purpose of vindicating the alleged wrongs of excised members; when they became members, they did so upon the condition of continuing or not as they and their churches might determine, and they thereby submit to the ecclesiastical power, and cannot now invoke the supervisory power of the civil tribunals. And in the case of Chase _v._ Cheney, recently decided in the same (Illinois) court, Judge Lawrence says: "The opinion implies that in the administration of ecclesiastical discipline, and where no other right of property is involved, their loss of the clerical office or salary incident to such discipline, a spiritual court is the exclusive judge of its own jurisdiction, and that its decision of that question is binding on the secular courts." In the case of Watson _v._ Ferris,[11] which was a case growing out of the schism in the Presbyterian Church in Missouri, the court held that whether a case was regularly or irregularly before the assembly, was a question which the assembly had the right to determine for itself, and no civil court could reverse, modify, or impair its action in a matter of merely ecclesiastical concern.