others before my time), our bishops did not re-ordain him before they admitted him to his charge, as they would have done if his former ordination here in France had been void. Nor did our laws require more of him than to declare his public consent to the religion received among us and to subscribe the Articles established.' This one quotation might suffice for both my present points. No better authority could be imagined than Bishop Cosin. He had been secretary to Bishop Overall, at Norwich, more than thirty years before, and was greatly esteemed as a churchman and a man of learning.[1] Baxter says of him that 'he was excellently well versed in canons, councils, and fathers,' and he was one of the principal speakers at the Savoy Conference.
But the question of the practice of the Church of England needs not to depend on any one authority however eminent. On the contrary, we may trace a perfect 'tradition' in the English Church, to the effect of the validity of non-episcopal orders, through a whole line of bishops, from Jewell in the commencement of Elizabeth's reign, through Whitgift, Bancroft, Andrews, Overall, Morton, and Cosin, who died some twelve years after the passing of the last Act of Uniformity: thus Whitgift—besides the negative evidence given in the text in reference to the Travers case—says plainly, in a letter to Sir Francis Knollys,[2] '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 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.'
Andrews, as is well known, took part in the consecration of three bishops for Scotland who had never been ordained priests, and in so doing was supported by Bancroft. There are two somewhat different accounts of this transaction in which both Andrews and Bancroft are implicated. Thus Canon Perry (vol i. p. 184) says that Bancroft removed Andrews's scruple—viz., that the Presbyterians to be consecrated bishops had not received episcopal ordination—by the argument that episcopal orders might be conferred at once even on a layman, and that it contained in itself the lower functions of deacon and priest, alleging the cases of Ambrose and Nectarius as examples. He
- ↑ Quoted in Hunt's Religious Thought in England, vol. i. p. 298.
- ↑ Strype, Whitgift, vol. iii. pp. 222-3.
