Orders-Non-Episcopal valid.-None of the prelates of the Church appear to have had at first any decided leanings to Episcopacy; it was only after a time that these leanings became very manifest, and when their alliance with the Court made it highly useful and expedient. "The founders of the Anglican Church," says Macaulay, “had retained Episcopacy as an ancient, a decent, and a convenient ecclesiastical polity, but had not declared that form of church government to be of divine institution. We have already seen how low an estimate Cranmer had formed of the office of a bishop. In the reign of Elizabeth, Jewel, Cooper, Whitgift, and other eminent doctors defended prelacy as innocent, as useful, as what the State might lawfully establish; as what, when established by the State, was entitled to the respect of every citizen. But they never denied that a Christian community without a bishop might be a pure Church.1 On the con

1 Whitgift was not likely to gratuitously disparage his own order; yet in a letter to Sir Francis Knollys, which Strype has printed in the Appendix to his Life of Whitgift (bk. iii. No. xlii.), he says: "For if it had pleased Her Majesty, with the wisdom of the realm, to have used no bishops at all, we could not have complained justly of any defect in our Church." And again: "If it had pleased Her Majesty to have assigned the imposition of hands to the deans of every cathedral church, or to some other number of ministers which in no sort were bishops, but as they be pastors, there had been no wrong done to their persons that I can conceive.".

In the weighty and valuable note (note vi. p. 293) on "Orders in the Church of England," which Mr. Child has appended to his work on Church and State under the Tudors, he quotes from a letter addressed by Dr. Hammond to Lord Burleigh, Nov. 4, 1588: "The bishops of our realm do not (so far as I ever yet heard), nor may not, claimı to themselves any other authority than is given them by the statute of the 25th of King Henry the Eighth, recited in the first year of

trary, they regarded the Protestants of the Continent as of the same household of faith with themselves. An English Churchman, nay, even an English prelate, if he went to Holland, conformed, without scruple, to the established religion of Holland. Abroad, the ambassadors of Elizabeth and James went in state to the very worship which Elizabeth and James persecuted at home, and carefully abstained from decorating their private chapels after the Anglican fashion, lest scandal should be given to weaker brethren. An instrument is still extant by which the Primate of England, in the year 1582, authorised a Scotch minister, ordained according to the laudable forms of the Scotch Church by the Synod of East Lothian, to preach and administer the sacraments in any part of the province of Canterbury. . . . In the year 1603 the Convocation solemnly recognised the Church of Scotland, a Church in which episcopal control and episcopal ordination were then unknown, as a branch of the Holy Catholic Church of Christ. It was even held that Presbyterian ministers were entitled to place and voice in Ecumenical Councils. .. Nay, many English benefices were held by divines who had been

Her Majesty's reign, or by other statutes of this land; neither is it reasonable they should make other claims, for if it had pleased Her Majesty, with the wisdom of the realm [the similarity between these and Whitgift's words is not a little striking], to have used no bishops at all, we could not have complained justly of any defect in our Church; or if it had liked them to limit the authority of bishops to shorter terms, they might not have said they had any wrong. But sith it hath pleased Her Majesty to use the ministry of bishops, and to assign them this authority, it must be to me, that am a subject, as God's ordinance, and therefore to be obeyed according to St. Paul's rule."

admitted to the ministry in the Calvinistic form used on the Continent; nor was reordination by a bishop in such cases thought necessary or even lawful." 1

Bishop Cosin says: "We had many ministers from Scotland. . . ordained by presbyters only, and they were initiated into benefices, and were never reordained."

There is no difference in any essential matter betwixt the Church of England and her sisters of the Reformation," is the statement of Bishop Hall; and Bishop Hall wrote Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted, in which, while expressly excluding the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, he manages, by some unaccountable dexterity, to bring the Churches of Geneva and Zurich within the charmed and sacred circle.2

In his Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England, Lord Bacon censures the indiscretion of those persons who called in question the orders of foreign Protestant Churches: "Yea, and some indiscreet persons have been bold in open preaching to use dishonourable and derogative speech and censure of the Churches abroad; and that so far as some of our men (as I have heard), ordained in foreign parts, have been pronounced to be no lawful ministers."

This was fifty years after the separation from the Church of Rome.

Bishop Barlow. The oldest Protestant bishop was Barlow; yet of the fact of his consecration there is no extant evidence. All we know is that he was made

1 Macaulay's History of England, vol. i. pp. 75–7.

2 Hunt's Religious Thought in England, vol. i. pp. 175–6.

The slight importance

Bishop of St. Asaph's in 1535. Barlow was disposed to attach to ordination, episcopal or otherwise, may be gathered from his own words

"If the King's grace, being supreme head of the Church of England, did choose, denominate, and elect any layman (being learned) to be a bishop, that he so chosen (without mention being made of any orders) should be as good a bishop as he is, or the best in England. Wheresoever two or three simple persons, as cobblers or weavers, are in company and elected in the name of God, there is the true Church of God." We may imagine, indeed, Barlow's hearty approval of Lacordaire's great saying: "Where there is the love of God, there is Jesus Christ; and where Jesus Christ is, there is the Church with Him." All probable sources of information as to the consecration of Barlow have been searched, but searched in vain. Now, it was through Barlow, in point of law, that Parker received his consecration, and through him it passed to the succeeding line of bishops in the Church of England. Here, then, is a missing link in the chain of apostolical succession missing, at anyrate, so far as the absence of documentary evidence can show it.

The Queen selected Matthew Parker, who had been her mother's chaplain, to be head of the new Establishment; but as none of the bishops in any of the existing sees would take part in consecrating the new Protestant primate, recourse had to be had to four deprived bishops of Edward VI.'s time, and accordingly Parker was inducted by William Barlow, John Scory, John Hodgkins, and Miles Coverdale, the last of whom had been an elder

in Knox's church in Geneva, and is said to have officiated on this occasion in his Genevan gown.

Elizabeth and the Puritans.—It was about the year 1556 the Puritans1 rose into power and became recognised as a separate party in the State. Long prior to this, the leaven of Puritan influence had been silently working in the heart of the best part of the nation,—conspicuously so since the days of Wyclif, who was himself a Puritan of the Puritans, but as yet it had found no concerted, no organised, expression. It was driven to find this at length by the relentless fury of persecution. Mary was on the throne, and her reign was signalised by that series of unparalleled atrocities, so vividly depicted in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which has loaded her memory with execration, and gained for her the soubriquet of Bloody Mary.

Only by flight could the obnoxious Protestants (and of these the Puritan section was the most obnoxious) escape the violence of the storm which now burst upon them. It is estimated that the refugees numbered about eight hundred. Some found an asylum in France, some in Switzerland, some in Holland, some in Germany. They were most numerous in Frankfort; and here, after con

1 Fuller dates the use of the term Puritan, as a nickname for the English Nonconformists generally, from the year 1564. Mr. Froude, however, does not find any mention of the name before the year 1585. He quotes from a document drawn up by a “distinguished Jesuit" three years before the Armada, as follows:- only party that would fight to death for the Queen, the only real friends she had, were the Puritans (it is the first mention of the name which I have found), the Puritans of London, the Puritans of the sea towns."—English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, p. 6,