"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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