found only in the preface to the Ordinal—where it was apparently in the first edition—and that the language used in this, as in the Articles, seems carefully to avoid deciding the question, when obviously it would have been more natural to have used more definite expressions.
4. Two further points call for remark in this matter, viz., (1) As the Dean further notices, the Church of England has not in practice always insisted upon the above requirement. (2) Has this non-insistance been lawful or otherwise? I will take the latter question first.
The words of the Act of the 13 Eliz. c. 12, s. 6, are given in the note above, p. 219. It is quite clear that those words contemplate that there are or may be persons who ' shall pretend to be priests, &c.,' and shall 'have ecclesiastical living' in some diocese 'by reason of some other form of consecration or ordering' than the one contained in the Book of Common Prayer, and to such persons the Act prescribes, not re-ordaining, but that they shall, in the presence of the ordinary, declare and subscribe their assent to the Articles.
It has been alleged, no doubt, that this Act was intended to take security, so to speak, of the old incumbents who had continued in their livings since Mary's reign, and not to admit irregularly-ordained Protestants. The answer is obvious—viz., that the words, however they might have been intended, did admit both; and, further, that a strong presumption exists that they wei-e intended to do so, from the practice to be shortly referred to, and from the following passage of Bishop Cosin, written in the year 1650.[1] This letter is now well known. He is writing to a person named Cordel, who, while residing in France during the Great Rebellion, scrupled about communicating with the French Protestants. Cosin, who was, or had been, as may be remembered, a Laudian High Churchman, advises him to do so, under protest as to the irregularity of their orders, 'considering that there is no prohibition of our Church against it, as there is against our communicating with Papists, and that well founded upon Scripture and the will of God.' Upon the immediate point before us he says—after objecting to the 'irregularity of the orders of the French Protestants, 'If at any time a minister so ordained (i.e., unepiscopally) in their French churches came to incorporate himself in ours, and to receive a public charge or cure of souls among us in the Church of England (as I have known some of them to have so done of late, and can instance in many
