BENEFICE, or 13ExErfcrust (Lat. "a good deed," also "a favor," and hence "a grant." or "a provision" generally, and now more especially, a provision made for an ecclesiastical person), was a term formerly applied to feudal estates, but is now used to denote certain kinds of church preferment, such as rectories, vicarages, and other paro chial cures, as distinguished from bishoprics, deaneries, and other ecclesiastical digni ties or offices. In this sense a distinction is accordingly taken by the 1 mid 2 Viet. c. 100. s. 124. between benefices. and etzthelral preferments; by the former being meant all parochial or district churches, and endowed chapels and chapelries; by the latter, all deaneries, archdeaconries, and canonries,• and generally all diguitics and offices in any cathedral or collegiate church, below the rank of a bishop. See note in 3 Stephen's Coin., p. 27. By the 5 and 0 Vict. c. 27, s. 15, which is an act to enable incumbents to devise lands on farming leases, it is enacted that the word B. shall be construed to com prehend all such parochial preferment as we have nbove described, the incumbent of which, in right thereof, shall be a corporation sole" (q.v.); and by an act passed in the same session, chap. 108, being an act for enabling ecclesiastical corporations to grant long leases, it is. by section 31, declared that B. shall mean every rectory, with or without cure of 6ouls, vicarages, etc., the incumbent or holder of which shall be a cor poration sole. But by a later act, the 13 and 14 Vict. c. 98, which is to extend a former act, the 1 and 2 Vict. c. 100, against pluralities, the term B. is, by section 3, ex
plained to mean B. with the cure rf souls and 'no other, anything in any other act to the contrary notwithstanding. Benefices are also exempt or peculiar, by which is meant that they arc not to be under the ordinary control and administration of the bishop; but, by section 108 of the 1 and 2 Vict. c. 100, above mentioned, it is provided that such exempt or peculiar benetices shall nevertheless, and so far as relates to pluralities and residence, be subject to the archbishop or bishop within whose province or diocese they are locally situated.
There arc, in four requisites to the enjoyment of a benefice. 1st, holy orders, or ordination at the hands of a bishop of the established church or other canoni cal bishop (a Boman '("atholic priest may hold a benefice in the church of England on abjnring the tenets of his church, but he is not ordained again); 2d, Presentation, or the formal gift or grant of the 11. by the lay or ecclesiastical patron; 3d, Institution at the bands of the bishop, by which the cure of souls is committed to the clergyman; and 4th, Induction, which is performed by a mandate from the bishop to the archdeacon to give the possession of the temporalities. Where the bishop is himself also patron, the presentation and histitutiou are one and the same act, and called the colla tion to the benefice. In Scotland, the law on this subject is regulated by the 6 and 7 Viet. c. 61, passed in 1843. and commonly called lord Aberdeen's act. by ESTATE,