Episcopacy

Chapter 7 analyses the Reformed Conformist attitude to the Church’s hierarchy. It opens by underlining that the British delegates at Dort had specifically asserted the superiority of the episcopal Church order maintained in the British Isles. It then uses Carleton’s Consensus to establish the high regard in which Reformed Conformists held episcopacy, and reinforces that point through the writings of Ward and Davenant. On that basis, it presents Hall’s notorious work, Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted, as in fundamental continuity with the Reformed Conformist tradition, despite the editorial interventions of William Laud and Matthew Wren. The chapter then establishes, through Downame’s Two Sermons and Prideaux’s 1624 Oratio, that episcopal ordination played a significant role within Reformed Conformist soteriology.