The Dean of Arches gave judgment in the Owston case,
which involves the right of a Wesleyan Minister to be styled " Reverend," on Saturday. The case was in the form of an appeal from the Consistory Court at Lincoln, where the Chancellor, Mr. Walter Phillimore, had refused a citation, and the Dean of Arches de- cided that the refusal was justified, not because a Wesleyan Minister might not be called " Reverend"—he left that point unsettled—but because the Vicar's conduct in refusing to allow a gravestone on which a Wesleyan was termed" Reverend" was not illegal. The graveyard was his freehold, and he had right of pasturage there. We have analysed this judgment, which will, of course, be appealed against, elsewhere, but there is one sentence in it which deserves attention here. The Judge appears to lay down the doctrine that a vicar who permits an inscription writes it. A Wesleyan, he says, may be socially entitled to be called " Reverend," "but the cause is surely different when the question relates to the alleged obligation of the clergyman to confer by a permanent inscription in his own churchyard upon another person that peculiar religious title by which he alone has been hitherto designated and known to his own parishioners and his own church." We thought the friends of the deceased gave the title. The point is important, because if the Vicar is held not only to tolerate, but to "confer" every title claimed on a tombstone, he will have a new duty imposed upon him, and ought to pass through the College• of Heralds. Is a Vicar lying when a stupid mason describes a pariahioneron his gravestone as Esquire?
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