Since the above Note was in print I have seen two other papers which require notice. One is a letter addressed by Dr. Hammond to Lord Burleigh, Nov. 4, 1588, on the Divine Authority of Bishops, published in the 'Hatfield Calendar,' Pt. III. No. 754, in which he expressly denies it, and concludes his paper almost in the same words as does Archbishop Whitgift, above (p. 296):—'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 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, 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.'
The other is an answer (?), published in the 'Newbery House Magazine,' by the Rev. J. Hancock, to the Dean of Peterborough's paper quoted above. To this it must be objected—(1) That it quite fails to answer any one of Dean Perowne's facts. It fails to show how men like Bishop Cosin could have either stated what was not true, or failed to know what had happened in their own days and in those of older men, like Bishop Overall, with whom they had been associated. (2) That it falls into the somewhat fashionable error of treating the Reformation as an event of the seventeenth century alone, and almost entirely ignoring the occurrences of the sixteenth. The position which all the advocates on this side of the question fail to touch is, shortly, this—that for almost two generations after the separation from Rome, neither the practice nor the theory of the Church of England even suggested a belief in the modern doctrine of Apostolical succession, while many instances occur, as I have already shown, in which it was both neglected in practice and repudiated in theory.
