book 'Apologia pro ministris &c.,' 2nd edit. p. 18, Eleutheropoli, anno ssrse Bai-tholome?e, as follows: —
'Petiit e Mortono Episcopo Dunelmensi Spalatensis dum apud nos ageret, ut dignaretur quendam in Ecclesiis transmarinis ordinatum denuo ordinare presbyterum, quo liberior esset ei aditus ad beneficia ecclesiastica. Rescripsit Mortonus, non posse illud fieri, sine gravissimo ecclesiarum reformatarum scandalo, cujus ipse autor esse noluit … testem habeo Dominum Calendrinum ecclesiæ Anglo-Belgicæ apud Trinobantes pastorem, in cujus manibus est ipsum autographum literarum Mortoniarum.'
I may add that there is independent evidence that Mr. Calendrin was a friend of Bishop Morton.
Cosins' own view upon the subject, as well as his evidence (or some of it) in regard to the usage of the English Church up to the time of the Commonwealth, has been already given. There is, however, a further letter of his[1] to a Mr. Gunning, wherein he speaks of the re-ordination of Presbyterian ministers as a thing 'which was never yet done in the Church of England' (except in an individual case to which he refers apparently with disapproval); but he says, 'it has rather admitted them and employed them at several times in the public administration of the Sacraments'; and he quotes Bishop Overall to the same effect.
To this series of bishops I am now enabled to add the name[2] of Joseph Hall. He says: ' The sticking at the admission of our brethren returning from the Reformed Churches was not in the case of ordination, but of institution; they had been acknowledged ministers of Christ without any other hands laid upon them. … I know those more than one, who by virtue only of that ordination which they have brought with them from other Reformed Churches have enjoyed spiritual promotion and livings without any exception against the lawfulness of their calling.'
There is also a vast array of individual instances in which men of more or less distinction have been admitted to various offices in the English Church, where no notice can be found of their re-ordination, when they were undoubtedly ordained first in one of the foreign Protestant Churches, and when the presumption is so strong against it, especially when taken in connection with the distinct statements of Overall, Morton, Cosin, and Hall already quoted, that it seems pure quibbling to insist on the probability, or even possibility, of their having been so. The
