"By a line of perpetual succession": Bramhall on the apostolic succession

Bramhall refers to the episcopate of the ecclesia Anglicana as "us, who maintain a personal and uninterrupted succession from the Apostles". Those who receive the order of the episcopate in this communion have been "solemnly and lawfully, according to the institution of Christ and the pattern of the primitive ordinations, consecrated by those who derived a personal succession from the Apostles".

This, Bramhall shows, is a divine order:

though the authoritative power of mission and vocation be in Christ, yet we ought not (with the Anabaptists or other enthusiasts) to trust to fanatical and succession fantastical revelations, or to think that every private motion is a sufficient mission or calling. Therefore Christ hath committed a ministerial power to His Church, to ordain by imposition of hands fit persons for that holy function, whereby the grace of holy Orders is derived from Him to us by a line of perpetual succession.

From Protestants' Ordinations Defended, IV.9 & 10.

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'Whether the Lutheran Churches have right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops': Jeremy Taylor, 'Episcopacy Asserted', and Lutheran orders

Amidst the bitter controversies over episcopacy in the Three Kingdoms during the early 1640s, controversies which had become war in Scotland in 1637 and then in England in 1642, Jeremy Taylor wrote his Laudian defence of episcopal order, The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy Asserted and Maintained . He proposed in this work that the non-episcopal Reformed churches could have had episcopally-ordered clergy: Those good people might have had order from the bishops of England or the Lutheran churches, if at least they thought our churches catholic and Christian. Leaving aside the reality that, for example, French Protestants would have been placed in an invidious political position if they had done as Taylor proposed, it is the reference to "the Lutheran churches" which is significant. To begin with, a large portion of the Lutheran churches - those in the German lands - were governed by a system of superintendency. It is almost inconceivable that Taylor was not aware of th...

laudable Practice

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