the commissioners are unanimous in considering that the Apostles had Divine authority to ordain, three only going so far as to say that had there been Christian princes at the time, their licence would have been required—a manifest complaisance on their part to Henry's recent legislation. Cranmer in his answers plainly treats ordination as a matter of indifference, as does also Barlow.[1]
The latter also states in a sermon:[2] 'If the King's Grace, being supreme head of the Church of England, did choose denominate and elect any lay man (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.'
2. Edward VI. assumed the power of dispensing with orders at his pleasure. Thus he writes[3] to the Bishop of Exeter in December 1552, that 'the King's pleasure is to dispense with Dr. Haddon for taking of any other orders than he had already. What his orders were does not appear, but they must have been irregular, otherwise dispensation would have been needless.
3, The real difficulty—as far as one exists—in pro^dng the point of the employment of non-episcopally ordained ministers, in the earlier part of the period referred to, arises from the fact that contemporaries do not notice it in individual cases, because there was no real question about it. It is simply inconceivable, from the general history of the times, that all the hot-gospellers and volunteers of the Reformation, and all the foreign allies who came from Germany, Holland, and elsewhere, were in every case either re-ordained by the English bishops, or were prohibited from ministering in the churches, and that in no single case should any record of the fact exist. The cases of Whittingham and Travers have been sufficiently referred to in the text. Travers, I may repeat, expressly states that 'afore Mr. Whittingham's case (i.e., 1578) there was never any question moved to the contrary,' and Whitgift finds no fault with his statement.
As has been frequently pointed out—most recently and very clearly by the Dean of Peterborough[4]—the Church of England, though she requires her own ministers to be episcopally ordained, nowhere asserts that non-episcopal orders are invalid. Indeed, we may go further than this, and say that the requirement is to be
