I III OTHER DECLARATIONS, OFFICIAL T will be observed that the foregoing evidence has all been gathered from official declarations of the Church of England herself or from acts and utterances officially endorsed by her. We have purposely refrained from quoting any passages of a private nature, even from the works of the very highest authorities in the Church which have not been formally endorsed by the Church herself, acting in her official capacity. If now we should go further and attempt to supplement these with all the private opinions expressed by individual churchmen who lived contemporaneously with these official declarations, we should swell this essay to an inordinate length. Numberless quotations of this kind might be adduced. Practically all the Reformers and nearly all the divines of prominence in the English Church from the days of Cranmer down to within very recent times, who have touched upon the matter at all, have recognized the non-episcopal bodies as true parts of the Catholic Church, and their non-episcopally ordained ministers as having been validly, even if irregularly, ordained. The list of those who have in one way or another expressed these opinions includes such names as Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Hooper, Jewel, Bradford, Whitgift, Philpot, Pilkington, Whittaker, Fulke, Willet, Bilson, Sutcliffe, Calfhill, Hooker, Saravia, Mason, Babington, Bridges, Field, Davenant, Francis White, Thomas White, Bancroft, Cosin, Burnet, Andrews, Rainolds, Bramhall, Usher, Hall, Downham, Stillingfleet, Secker, Wake, Tomline, and numbers of others.1 It is not until the days of the Restoration that there is any apparent change of sentiment on the subject, but even then, it is only an opinion of individuals, and never affects the official attitude of the Church herself, which attitude has continued unchanged from the days of the Reformation downwards. It is quite true that men like Archbishop Laud, in their zeal to rid the Church of that Puritanism that had wellnigh overthrown episcopal authority in England, did many things and said many things which, looked at on the surface, appear to countenance many practices and teachings of our "Catholic" friends to-day. But whatever these men may have wanted to do in the way of altering the official teaching of the Church, we must ever be careful to distinguish between what they tried to accomplish, and what they Those who desire to see some of the evidence submitted by these writers are referred to Goode's work On Orders; The True Historic Episcopate, by Mason Gallagher; and a little work by the Author entitled, Apostolic Succession and the Problem of Unity, University Press, Sewanee, Tenn. actually did accomplish-two wholly different things. That the official attitude of the Church toward these non-episcopal bodies and the validity of their ministries was actually changed at the time of the Restoration is a fiction pure and simple which has not one shred of evidence to support it, as we now propose to show. To begin with, there is no clear evidence that even the High Churchmen of this period (i. e. prior to the year 1661) held, even as individuals, the extreme opinions entertained subsequently by the Tractarians, and by our "Catholic" brethren to-day, on the subject of the Episcopate. Laud is the only one of prominence that appears at times to have favoured these views, but if he is to be judged by his own words, even he did not go to the extent of absolutely "unchurching" the non-episcopal bodies, as the Tractarians did, and as the "Catholic" party now proposes to do. "I have endeavored to unite the Calvinists and Lutherans," says he, "nor have I absolutely unchurched them. I say indeed in my book against Fisher, according to St. Jerome, No Bishop, no Church; and that none but a Bishop can ordain, except in cases of inevitable necessity; and whether that be the case in the foreign Churches, the world may judge." (Reply to Fisher, q. Gallagher, Prim. Eirenicon, p. 188.) Here then is the worst that can be said-here are the words of the most extreme High Churchman of his day-the man who is popularly supposed to have inaugurated a fundamental, doctrinal change in the official view of the Church,-yet even he admits that "in cases of inevitable necessity" non-episcopal ordination is legitimate, and adds that in the case of the nonepiscopal bodies of his day, the world might judge whether such necessity existed or not, but for his own part he did not absolutely unchurch them. If these words mean anything at all then, it will be seen that our "catholic" brethren cannot legitimately claim even Archbishop Laud in support of their extreme attitude toward the non-episcopal bodies, for unlike them, he admitted the possibility of nonepiscopal ordinations as being valid under some circumstances. He said distinctly that he would not assume the responsibility of "unchurching" them, the very thing that our "catholic" friends have not scrupled to do. Whatever else he may have said and done, then, they cannot claim that he excluded these bodies from the Catholic Church. If then such an extreme partisan of Episcopacy as Archbishop Laud could not bring himself to assume such an attitude, and yet if even he could be so harsh in the denunciation of these bodies as to cause himself to be publicly "reproved" by the University of Oxford for his radical utterances, how in the name of reason can it be imagined that the authorities of the Church who thus reproved him, went to such an extreme? The truth is, there is no evidence that even the most extreme churchmen of this period ever went so far as positively to "unchurch" these bodies, as so many of their successors are doing to-day. It is quite certain that the Church as a body, i.e., officially, never presumed to do so. Speaking of individuals' |