confirmed and consecrated as such in the chapel of the Archiepiscopal Palace at Lambeth, on Sunday, December 17, A. D. 1559, in the presence of a goodly number of the three estates of the Realm, by William Barlow, sometime Bishop of Bath and Wells, now elect of Chichester; John Scory, sometime Bishop of Chichester, now elect of Hereford; Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, and John Hodgkins Suffragan Bishop of Bedford. Two of these Bishops were consecrated in the reign of Henry VIII., and two in the reign of Edward VI.

Thus as there were in Britain British and Scottish Bishops before the arrival of S. Augustine, to which he added Anglo-Saxon Bishops, and as these three successions in the process of time came to be united into one, so every Bishop of the Anglican Church derives his succession from British, Scottish, and Anglo-Saxon Bishops. This succession has never been interrupted.

1 "The fact that Parker was consecrated by four rightly consecrated Bishops, rite et legitime, with imposition of hands and the necessary words, is so well attested that, if one chooses to doubt this fact, one could, with the same right, doubt one hundred thousand facts. The fact is as well established as a fact can be required to be. Bossuet has acknowledged the validity of Parker's consecration, and no critical historian can dispute it." -Dr. Von Döllinger, at Bonn, 1875; vid. Report of Reunion Conference at Bonn, 1875, p. 96, quoted by Littledale in Words for Truth, p. 78.

* So little thought was there of denying this succession that at the Council of Trent, on November 30, 1562, in the discussion on the necessity of papal confirmation to validate the status of Bishops, an Irish Bishop-Bishop O'Harte of Achonry-said that to rule against this necessity would be very dangerous, because in England the sovereign appointed the Bishops, who were conseSo little thought was there of doubting the contauity of the Anglican Church that Popes Paul IV. and Pius IV. offered to confirm what had been accomplished in the way of reconstruction of the offices of the Church and the reformation of doctrine, during the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth, if only she would acknowledge the Pope's supremacy over the Church and Realm. And for more than eleven years of Elizabeth's reign there was no communion distinct from the National Church. All attended her ministrations till Pope Pius V. excommunicated Elizabeth and set up for the first time a Roman Catholic communion in England.

As Bishop Burnett says in his History of the Reformation:" "When, therefore, Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, she found some of the sees of England vacant by death; some occupied by persons who, having been legally deposed in King Edward's reign, had been uncanonically restored; and others by persons whose ordinations had not been recorded, or who, if ordained at all, had been ordained by those who had no authority to confer Episcopal jurisdiction in this country. Unless, therefore, the several occupants of the Episcopal sees were content to conform themselves to those unrepealed decisions of convocation, that had been put forth in the time of former sovereigns, there was no course left for Queen Elizabeth to pursue but to seek out such of the lawful prelacy of England as might happen to have survived banishment and the fires of Smithfield, and to continue through them a legitimate succession of the Episcopacy of the English Church. This was accordingly done; and so little thought was there then of disputing the canonical authority of the Episcopacy thus continued, that nearly all the clergy of the realm readily submitted themselves to the jurisdiction of the Bishops of their several dioceses. In the meanwhile the Romanists at large regularly attended the services and sacraments of the Reformed Church of England, whilst the Bishops who continued their allegiance to Rome neither attempted to perform any Episcopal acts nor to keep up any succession of their order. For more than eleven years, therefore, there was no communion in England distinct from that of the present Reformed Church, but all used our reformed Liturgy, and communicated in our parishes.

"Whether, therefore, the adherents of the Bishop of Rome in this country were justified in what they afterwards did or not, it is a matter of history that in the twelfth year of the reign of Elizabeth, and in obedience to the papal mandate [Elizabeth having refused to recognise the supremacy of the Pope over the realm of England] they voluntarily separated themselves from the communion of the English Church and placed themselves in communion with the Court of Rome. And as if to make the separation more markedly their own voluntary act, those forsakers of our Church, having no Bishops of their own in this country by whom they could be governed, subjected themselves to the superintendence of a foreign and anomalous authority, and were ministered to by priests of foreign ordination. The consequence has been that there is not at this day an ecclesiastic in the whole of the Romish communion existing in this country whose orders are not of foreign origin; and as also the worship and discipline of that communion are equally foreign, no English Romanist can have any connection whatever with the Old Church of England. The ecclesiastical portion of the Romish communion subsisting in these realms is, in fact, exactly parallel to that of the Dutch Anabaptists, of the followers of Henry Nicholas, or of other sectaries who may from time to time have passed over from the Continent to England, and have drawn adherents to their several communions through the agencies of foreign ministrations.1 It is not to be supposed

..

•

The Roman Catholic Church, therefore, in the British Isles, is a foreign and an alien Church, and so are all the Protestant sects, whether they take the form of Presbyterian, Baptist, or Independent, and all their offshoots-they have no connection

that those of the Separatists who had been accustomed to regard a Presbyterian form of Church government as peculiar to the school of Calvin, would be dissatisfied with this direct repudiation of Episcopacy on the part of the Court of Rome, yet for twenty-five years the archpriest policy was maintained in England, in spite of all remonstrances to the contrary "-the Romanists being under an ecclesiastical superior who should bear the novel office of Archpriest; they had no Bishops.

Having now briefly examined the planting of Christianity in the British Isles; the continuity of the Faith thus planted; the organisation and constitution of the Church and its continuity from Apostolic times in the British Isles, we conclude this little Volume by repeating what was said to the Spartan of old: "You belong to Sparta; see that you do her credit "-see that you defend her, love her, and do her honour by your life and by your work.

The Lord defend His Church, govern it with His Holy Spirit, and bless the same with all prosperous felicity.

Amen.