Christ's Church, but inviolably, and at all times, to keep and observe the same, and redeem the Church of England out of captivity of foreign powers heretofore usurped therein."
Hardwick the historian says: [1]"In this country, as the old episcopal organization was preserved inviolable, the succession of ministers was also uninterrupted and the spirituality continued to form a separate estate."
Even an Unitarian, whose sympathies would certainly be the other way, was willing himself to acknowledge—I mean Dr. Beard in his Hibbert Lecture on the Reformation—that [2]"There is no point at which it can be said, here the old Church ends, here the new begins. Are you inclined to take the act of supremacy as such a point? I have already shown that Henry's assumption of headship was but the last decisive act of a struggle which had been going on for almost five centuries. The retention of the Episcopate by the English reformers at once helped to preserve this continuity, and marked it in the distinctest way. … It is an obvious fact that Parker was the successor of Augustine, just as clearly as Lanfranc and Becket, Warham, Cranmer, Pole, Parker - there is no break in the line, though the first and third are claimed as (Roman) Catholic, the second and fourth as Protestants." Only one more quotation from another writer of authority. It rans: [3]"No historic fact is clearer than that the Church of England retained every essential element of her ancient organization, her apostolic doctrines, and her national character all through the years when the Tudors reigned. She never lost her identity. She
- ↑ p.328, Reformation (1890 edit.)
- ↑ Hibbert Lecture, p.311.
- ↑ pp. 103-4, Lane's Notes on Church History, Vol. II.
