only to love extremities, but also to fall to them without degrees) were at the highest strain at the first. The other part' (i.e., the Church party), 'which maintaineth the present government of the Church, hath not kept one tenor neither. First those ceremonies which were pretended to be corrupt they maintained to l)e things indifferent, opposed the examples of the good times of the Church to the challenge that was made to them because they were used in the later superstitious times. Then were they also content mildly to acknowledge many imperfections in the Church as tares come up among the corn which yet (according to the wisdom taught by our Saviour) were not with strife to be pulled up lest it might spoil and supplant the good corn, but to grow on together until the harvest. After they grew to a more absolute defence and maintenance of the orders of the Church, and stiffly to hold that nothing was to be innovated partly because it needed not, partly because it would make a breach upon the rest. Thence (exasperate through contentions) they are fallen into a direct condemnation of the contrary part as of a sect. Yea, and some indiscreet persons have been bold in open preaching to use dishonourable and derogative speech and censure of the Churches abroad; and that so far as some of our men (as I have heard) ordained in foreign parts have been pronounced to be 710 lawful ministers. Thus we see the beginnings were modest but the extremes are violent; so as there is almost as great a distance now of either side from itself as was at first from one to the other.'
These remarks seem to be valuable on other grounds besides the main intention of the writer, in showing the progressive character of differences originally small, as proving also—(1) That there was no doubt in the minds of the men of that time as to the trifling character of the original differences between the Church party and the Puritans, nor yet of the important and essential differences between the Roman and English Churches; (2) the respect in which the foreign Protestant Churches were at first held in the English Church, of which there is also ample proof in the other writings and correspondence of the time; (3) that the idea of questioning foreign Protestant orders was looked upon by Bacon (fifty years after the separation from Rome) as not only a novelty, but also an outrageous novelty.
The above extracts are very far from exhausting the subject, but they seem difficult to reconcile with any continuous adhesion to a strict view of the necessity of episcopal ordination, whether in theory or in practice.
