he still stood out against the "old symbolising popish garments." Persisting in his nolo episcopari, the King and his governing prelates sought to enforce his compliance, "a usage which the doctor," says Neal, "thought very severe. To miss his promotion was no disappointment, but to be persecuted about clothes by men of the same faith as himself, and to lose his liberty because he would not be a bishop-this was possibly more than he well understood." He consulted with the continental Reformers, who urged upon him to comply, but could not succeed in removing his scruples; and being still contumacious, he was committed to the Fleet Prison. At length, yielding to the remonstrance and entreaties of his friends, he consented to wear the vestments at his consecration, on condition that he might dispense with them at other times, and was accordingly made Bishop of Gloucester in March 1551. Here, for four years, preaching sometimes two or three times a day to crowds of people who hungered for the word of Life, he laboured in season and out of season "in the faithful discharge of every branch of his episcopal character, even beyond his strength, and was himself a pattern of what he taught to others."

When the reign of persecution commenced under Queen Mary, Hooper was one of its first victims. He was burnt at Gloucester on 9th February 1555, suffering torture of the most aggravated and horrible description. With the prayer on his lips, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," died the first martyr of the Reformation in England, the forerunner and champion of English Puritanism.

Puritanism and Anglicanism.-But Hooper was by no means singular in his Puritanism. Many of Elizabeth's first bishops were Puritans-Tyndale, Coverdale, Jewel, Barlow, and Grindal; while Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley became more and more Puritan as their Protestant sympathies and convictions became more pronounced. A large number of them would gladly have dispensed with Episcopacy; they disliked exceedingly the ceremonies which were associated with it, and which reminded them only too forcibly of the ceremonies of the Church of Rome. Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, in a letter to Peter Martyr, describes the worship which the Queen was establishing as such as had often moved their ridicule: "The scenic apparatus of divine worship is now under agitation, and those very things which you and I have so often laughed at are now seriously and solemnly entertained by certain persons (for we are not consulted), as if the Christian religion could not exist without something tawdry." The only excuse Jewel can find for it was the extreme ignorance of the clergy, who were "no better than mere logs of wood, without talent, learning, or morality." They were of no use as ministers of a Protestant Church, and to cast them out would have been to convert them into enemies, so they resolved, says Jewel, "to commend them to the people by a comical dress. Since they cannot

obtain influence in a proper way, they seek to occupy the eyes of the multitude with these trifles."

ridiculous

1 Jewel's Letters are well worth reading for their outspokenness, and for the light which they shed upon this period,

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, claim 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.