this: the English Reformers, being themselves bishops, retained epis copacy as an ancient institution of the Church catholic, but fully admitted (with the most learned fathers and schoolmen, sustained by modern commentators and historians) the original identity of the offices of bishop and presbyter; while the German and Swiss Reformers, being only presbyters or laymen, and opposed by their bishops, fell back from necessity rather than choice upon the parity of ministers, without thereby denying the human right and relative importance or expediency of episcopacy as a superintendency over equals in rank. The more rigid among the Puritans departed from both by attaching primary importance to matters of discipline and ritual, and denouncing every form of government and public worship that was not expressly sanctioned in the New Testament.

The most learned English divines before the period of the Restoration, such as Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker, Field, Ussher, Hall, and Stilling fleet, did not hold the theory of an exclusive jure divino episcopacy, and fully recognized the validity of presbyterian ordination. They preferred and defended episcopacy as the most ancient and general form of government, best adapted for the maintenance of order and unity; in one word, as necessary for the well-being, but not for the being of the Church. Cranmer invited the co-operation of Lutherans and Calvinists even in the most important work of framing the Articles of Religion and revising the Liturgy, without questioning their ordination; his own views of episcopacy were so low that he declared 'election or appointment thereto sufficient' without consecration, and he was so thoroughly Erastian that after the death of Henry he and his suf fragans took out fresh commissions from the new king.1 His three successors in the primacy (Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift) did noţ differ from him in principle. Archbishop Grindal,' says Macaulay, 'long hesitated about accepting a mitre, from dislike of what he regarded as the mummery of consecration. Bishop Parkhurst uttered a fervent prayer that the Church of England would propose to herself the Church of Zurich as the absolute pattern of a Christian com

1 In accordance with an act of the thirty-seventh year of Henry VIII., which declares that 'Archbishops and the other ecclesiastical persons had no manner of jurisdiction ecclesiastical but by, under, and from his Royal Majesty; and that his Royal Majesty was the only supreme head of the Church of England and Ireland, to whom, by holy Scripture, all authority and power was wholly given,' etc.

munity. Bishop Ponet was of opinion that the word bishop should be abandoned to the Papists, and that the chief officers of the purified Church should be called superintendents.' The nineteenth of the Elizabethan Articles, which treats of the visible Church, says nothing of episcopacy as a mark of the Church. The statute of the thirteenth year of Elizabeth, cap. 12, permits ministers of the Scotch and other foreign Churches to exercise their ministry in England without re-ordination. After the union with Scotland the English sovereign represented in his official character the national Churches of the two countries, and when in Scotland, Queen Victoria takes the communion from the hands of a Presbyterian parson. Prominent clergymen of the Church of England, such as Travers (Provost of Trinity College, Dublin), Whittingham (Dean of Durham), Cartwright (Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, afterwards Master of Warwick Hospital), and John Morrison (from Scotland), had received only Presbyterian ordination in foreign Churches. Similar instances of Scotch, French, and Dutch Reformed ministers who were received simply on subscribing the Articles occurred down to the civil war. The English delegates to the Synod of Dort, which was presided over by a presbyter, were high dignitaries and doctors of divinity, one of them (Carleton) a bishop, and two others (Davenant and Hall) were afterwards raised to bishoprics. Archbishop Ussher, the greatest English divine of his age, who in eighteen years had mastered the whole mass of patristic literature, defended episcopacy only as a presidency of one presbyter over his peers, and declared that when abroad he would take the holy communion from a Dutch Reformed or French minister as readily as from an Episcopalian clergyman at home.

But the reigns of James and Charles I. form the transition. In the heat of the Puritan controversy both parties took extreme ground, Presbyterians and Independents as well as Episcopalians, and claimed exclusive Scripture authority and divine right for their form of government. Truth and error were mixed on both sides; for the primitive government was neither Episcopalian nor Presbyterian nor Independent, but apostolic; and the Apostles, as inspired and infallible teachers and rulers of the whole Church of all ages, have and can have no successors, as Christ himself can have none.

The doctrine of the divine and exclusive right of episcopacy was

first intimated, in self-defense, by Bishop Bancroft, of London (in a sermon, 1589), then taught and rigidly enforced by Archbishop Laud (1633-1645), the most un-Protestant of English prelates,' and was apparently sanctioned in 1662 by the Act of Uniformity, which forbade any person to hold a benefice or to administer the sacraments before he be ordained a priest by Episcopal ordination. By this cruel Act two thousand ministers, including some of the ablest and most worthy men in England, were expelled from office and driven into ncn-conformity.

Notwithstanding this change, the Church of England has never officially and expressly pronounced on the validity or invalidity of nonepiscopal orders in other Churches; she only maintains that no one shall officiate in her pulpits and at her altars who has not received episcopal ordination according to the direction of the Prayer-book.2

RICHARD HOOKER.

The truest representative of the conservative and comprehensive genius of Anglicanism in doctrine and polity, towards the close of the Elizabethan period, is the 'judicious Hooker' (1553–1600), who to this day retains the respect of all parties. In his great work on the 'Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity' he went to the root of the rising controversy between Episcopacy and Puritanism, by representing the Church as a legislative body which had the power to make and unmake institutions and rites not affecting the doctrines of salvation laid down in the Scriptures and œcumenical creeds.

1 Laud made such a near approach to Rome that he was offered a cardinal's hat (Aug. 1633). When he first maintained, in his exercise for Bachelor of Divinity, in 1604, the doctrine that there could be no true Church without a bishop, he was reproved by the authorities at Oxford, because he 'cast a bone of contention between the Church of England and the Reformed on the Continent.' But when he was in power he spared no effort to force his theory upon reluctant Puritans in England and Presbyterians in Scotland.

The facts above stated are acknowledged by the best authorities of the Church of England of all parties, such as Strype, Burnet, Lathbury, Keble, and by secular historians such as Halam and Macaulay. See a calm and thorough argument of Prof. G. P. Fisher, The Relation of the Church of England to the other Protestant Churches, in the 'New-Englander' for January, 1874, pp. 121-172. This article grew out of a newspaper controversy in the New York Tribune, occasioned by the secession of Bishop Cummins after the General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance at New York, October, 1873. This inter-denominational Conference had the express sanction of the Archbishop of Canterbury in a letter addressed to the Dean of Canterbury, one of the prominent delegates. See Proceedings (published N. Y., 1874), p. 720. Comp. also Dr. Washburn, Relation of the Episcopal Church to other Christian Bodies, N. Y., 1874.

He defends episcopacy, but without invalidating other forms of government, or unchurching other Churches. He highly commends Calvin's Institutes' and 'Commentaries,' and calls him 'incomparably the wisest man that ever the French Church did enjoy.' He generally agrees with his theology, at least as far as it is Augustinian, and he clearly adopts his view of the eucharist—namely, as he expresses it, that 'Christ is personally present, albeit a part of Christ be corporally absent,' and 'that the real presence is not to be sought for in the sacrament (i. e., in the elements), but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament.' But he keeps clear of the logical sharpness and rigor of Calvinism, and subjects it to the higher test of the fathers and the early Church.2

His respect for antiquity and his churchly conservatism gained ground after his death in the conflict with Puritanism; and when the Synod of Dort narrowed the Calvinism of the Reformation to a five-angular scholastic scheme, Arminian doctrines, in connection with High-Church principles, spread rapidly in the Church of England. She became, as a body, more and more exclusive, and broke off the theological interchange and fraternal fellowship with non-episcopal

1 He also says: 'Of what account the Master of Sentences [Peter Lombard] was in the Church of Rome, the same and more amongst the preachers of Reformed Churches Calvin had purchased; so that the perfectest divines were judged they which were skillfulest in Calvin's writings; his books almost the very canon to judge both doctrine and discipline by.' See Hooker's lengthy account of Calvin's life and labors in the Preface to his work on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol. I. pp. 158-174, edition of Dr. John Keble.

* Dr. Keble, who was a High Anglican or Anglo-Catholic of the Oxford school, says in the Preface to his edition (p. xcix.): 'With regard to the points usually called Calvinistic, Hooker undoubtedly favored the tone and language, which has since come to be characteristic of that school, commonly adopted by those theologians to whom his education led him as guides and models on occasions where no part of Calvinism comes expressly into debate. It is possible that this may cause him to appear, to less profound readers, a more decided partisan of Calvin than he really was. At least it is certain that on the following subjects he was himself decidedly in favor of very considerable modifications of the Genevan theology.' Keble then contrasts the strict Calvinism of the Lambeth Articles with the cautious predestinarianism of Hooker as expressed in a fragment which teaches eternal election and the final perseverance of the foreknown elect, without mentioning reprobation, and makes condemnation depend on 'the foresight of sin as the cause.' Judas went to his place, which was 'of his own proper procurement. Devils were not ordained of God for hell-fire, but hell-fire for them; and for men so far as it was foreseen that men would be like them.' There are, however, as Keble himself admits, passages in Hooker which are more strongly Calvinistic, especially on the doctrine of the perseverance of saints, which he considers hardly consistent with his doctrine of universal baptismal grace. But both these doctrines were held by Augustine likewise, from whom Hooker borrowed them.

Churches. But we hope the time is coming when the Christian communion which characterized her formative period will be revived under a higher and more permanent form.

NOTE.-My friend, the Rev. Dr. E. A. WASHBURN, of New York, an Episcopalian divine of rare culture and liberality of spirit, has kindly furnished the following contribution to this chapter, which will give the reader a broad inside view of Anglicanism under the various phases of its historic development:

"The doctrinal system of the English Church, in its relation to other Reformed communions, especially needs a historic treatment; and the want of this has led to grave mistakes, alike by Protestant critics and Anglo-Catholic defenders. It was one in its positive principles, as opposed to the dogmatic falsehoods of Rome, with the great bodies of the Continental Reformation; yet it grew as a national Church, while those were more fully shaped by the theology of their leaders-Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. This fact is the key of its. history. England felt the same influences, religious and social, that awakened Europe, but its ideas were not borrowed from abroad; it only completed the growth begun in the day of Wyclif. Its earliest step was thus a national one. Nor was this, as has been proved by its latest historians from the record, the act of Henry VIII.; for before his quarrel the Parliament annulled forever, by its own decree, the supremacy of Rome. It could not be expected that during his reign the standard of doctrine should be greatly changed; and it should be remembered that Luther himself renounced only by degrees the idea of Papal authority. The "Articles devised to establish Christian Quietness," probably the original of the later Cotton MSS., and the "Institution of a Christian Man" following it in 1537, show that the dogma of the mass, the seven sacraments, intercessory prayers for the dead, and reverence of the Virgin and saints as mediators, remained. It is worth noting, however, that the "Erudition" in 1543 gives signs of change, as the "corporal" presence is there only the "very body," and the idea of special intercession is modified to prayer "for the universal congregation of Christian people, quick and dead." But the next reign proves that the act of national freedom held in solution the whole result. Ultramontanism meant then, as now, not only the feudal headship of Rome, but its scholastic and priestly system. The Reformation, ripened in the minds of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and other devout thinkers, bore its fruit in the revised Liturgy and Articles; nor can any thing be clearer than the doctrinal standard of the Church, if we trace it with just historic criticism to the time when these were fixed.

tone.

"The Articles ask our first study. It is plain that the foundation-truths of the Reformationjustification by faith, the supremacy and sufficiency of written Scripture, the fallibility of even general councils-are its basis. Yet it is just as plain that in regard of the specific points of theology, which were the root of discord in the Continental Churches, as election, predestination, reprobation, perseverance, and the rest, these Articles speak in a much more moderate It is from a narrow study of that age that they have been called articles of compromise between a Calvinistic and Arminian party. There were some of extreme views, as the Lambeth Articles prove, but they did not represent the body. The English Reformers had been bred, like the great Genevan, in the school of the greater Augustine; and his richer, more ethical spirit appears in not only the Articles, but in the writings of well-nigh all from Hooper or Whitgift to Hooker. There was the friendliest intercourse between them and the divines of the Continent. Melanchthon, Calvin, Bucer were consulted in their common work. But the unity of the national Church, not the system of a school, was uppermost; and we may write the character of them all in the words of the biographer of Field, that "in points of extreme difficulty he did not think fit to be so positive in defining as to turn matters of opinion into matters of faith."

'We may thus learn the structure of the liturgical system. The English Reformers aimed not to create a new, but to reform the historic Church; and therefore they kept the ritual with the episcopate, because they were institutions rooted in the soil. They did not unchurch the bodies of the Continent, which grew under quite other conditions. No theory of an exclusive Anglicanism, as based on the episcopate and general councils, was held by them. Such a view is wholly contradictory to their own Articles. But the historic character of the Church gave it a positive relation to the past; and they sought to adhere to primitive usage as the basis of historic unity. In this revision, therefore, they weeded out all Romish errors, the mass, the five added sacraments, the legends of saints, and superstitious rites; but they kept the ancient Apostles' Creed and the Nicene in the forefront of the service, the sacramental offices, the festivals and fasts relating to Christ or Apostles with whatever they thought pure. Such a work could