laudable Practice

In his 1621 account of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth in 1618 , David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38) reminded his opponent - "the Libeller" - that presbyterian government had not been the fixed order in the Church of Scotland since the Reformation.  Particularly addressing the charge that the Perth Assembly was not "free and lawfull" because the ministers in the Assembly had not been chosen by presbyteries, Lindsay points to how episcopacy followed the system of superintendency by which the Church of Scotland had been governed until 1592: The Libeller .... thinks, that because it was the custome while the Presbyteriall gouernment stood in force, that all Commissioners, at least of the Ministrie, should bee chosen by the seuerall Presbyteries, it should now bee so: But he must remember that sort of gouernment is changed, and now they must haue place in Assemblies, that are authorized by their calling...

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...