Jure Divino Research Articles

Catholic Political Thought and Calvinist Ecclesiology in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644)

AbstractThis article presents a significant reinterpretation of an essential text in Scottish (and British) political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, by analyzing its relationship with Catholic scholasticism. While scholars have observed Rutherford's use of Catholic authors, there has been no sustained analysis of how Rutherford strategically applied this intellectual tradition to the religious and political context of the British civil wars. Ideas about human liberty, the law of nations, and popular sovereignty that were developed by Catholic scholastics in the School of Salamanca allowed Rutherford to defend limited monarchy and fulfill an ecclesiological purpose in seventeenth-century Britain. He, and the majority of his Covenanter contemporaries, believed in jure divino presbyterianism: scripture mandated that elders and synods, not bishops, should rule the church. To ensure a presbyterian settlement, Rutherford needed to disprove royalist absolutists who claimed that presbyterianism threatened absolute monarchy (the divinely ordained form of civil government) by limiting royal supremacy over the church. By building on Catholic scholastic political ideas, Rutherford was able to argue that human beings could change the form of civil government and that absolute monarchy was not required by God. Ironically, to make a civil state safe for presbyterianism, Rutherford resorted to Catholic scholastics rather than those of his own confessional tradition. This analysis urges reconsideration of not only the porosity of traditional confessional boundaries in early modern political thought but the respective positions of both Calvinism and Catholicism in shaping the political ideas underlying the British revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century.

“Treason and Loyalty go Hand in Hand”: Moral Politics and Radical Whiggery in Defoe’s Jure Divino (1706)

Daniel Defoe’s Jure Divino is a generic oddity, a twelve-book poem in heroic couplets devoted to dense political theorizing, labeled by its author a “Satyr.” Accounts of Jure Divino suggest a work of would-be great heroic poetry communicating straightforward mainstream Whig ideology—but we have not fully understood the radical nature of the statement Defoe makes about resistance and the limits of political obligation. Jure Divino amplifies John Locke’s anticlericalism; reflects Defoe’s commitment to advancing Protestant politics and the Reformation project against the dark politics of the high church; represents a reversal of the High Tory argument about the sinfulness of rebellion; and desanctifies claims about divine right government and hereditary succession. The poem represents a reminder that we have not fully understood Defoe’s role in the religiopolitical controversies of late Stuart Britain.

Daniel Defoe and the Whig Tradition in Satire

This essay uncovers the forgotten Whig tradition in satire and reconsiders Daniel Defoe's relationship to that tradition. Recent scholarship on Whig literary culture has ignored or denied the existence of a Whig tradition in satire beyond the Carolean libels of authors such as Andrew Marvell and his followers. This essay traces the reception history of those libels. Defoe rejected libel as an appropriate model for Whig satire and instead imbued his satires with panegyric strains, designed to encourage moral reformation. Defoe's most ambitious verse satire, Jure Divino, was his last attempt to forge this new kind of Whig satire grounded in equal parts praise and blame.

Principios lógicos y principios morales: la identidad de los indiscernibles

<p class='p1'>Partiendo de la definición de la identidad en Principia Mathematica, aquí se discute el estatus lógico del principio de la identidad de los indiscernibles con los criterios y argumentos de Leibniz y Clarke. En la defensa que hace Leibniz de este principio se establece la distinción entre una necesidad lógica y una necesidad moral, relacionada con la existencia y el buen juicio de Dios, que se resume en el principio de razón suficiente; esta posición se puede relacionar con el Tractatus, donde se critica a Russell en términos similares a los que Clarke usó en contra de Leibniz. Wittgenstein, sin embargo, habla de la experiencia necesaria para entender la lógica: la experiencia fundamental de que algo es; así, se puede sugerir un paralelo entre su posición y la distinción de Leibniz, el cual también nos llevaría a replantear y repensar en términos leibnizianos la independencia radical de la lógica.</p>

The Tragicomic Moment: Republicanism in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher inaugurated their collaboration on a series of popular tragicomedies their play, Philaster, Or Love Lies a-Bleeding, a success soon followed by A King and No King. (1) While their tragicomedies were remarkably popular audiences and influential on other playwrights throughout seventeenth century, burgeoning genre of tragicomedy was also maligned as an aesthetically impure form of drama for its mingling of comedy and tragedy, seemingly against decorum of neoclassical poetics. This prejudice against Fletcherian tragicomedy is visible in modern critical history as well, though for different reasons: notion that genre supports politics has been a commonplace at least since Coleridge's lectures and notes on Shakespeare, in which he indicts Beaumont and Fletcher for their presumed ultra-royalism, describing them as the most servile jure divino royalist in their political opinions, and as high-flying, passive-obedience, Tories whose ideology contrasts badly Shakespeare's serene adherence to permanent politics of nature. (2) Coleridge's judgment on Beaumont and Fletcher is characteristic of critical discourse on tragicomedy, and Fletcherian drama in particular, that takes conciliatory endings of genre as support for its claims, since these endings seem to affirm, rather than to trouble, monarchical and absolutist authority. (3) Such critics as Franco Moretti have argued that early modern tragedy tends to subvert absolutist monarchy by staging deaths of kings. (4) But can we find a similarly subversive undercurrent in tragicomedy and in Beaumont and Fletcher? Specifically, can we identify a republican politics in a genre and among authors typically considered antithetical to republican concerns? If we look at theoretical formulations of Giovanni Battista Guarini in his 1601 Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, which Fletcher almost certainly had read and taken as a model for his 1609 preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (itself indebted to Guarini's II Pastor Fido), we can locate surprising political possibilities for tragicomedy. In defending his own dramatic practice against critics who upheld generic purity of tragedy and comedy as defined by Aristotle, Guarini argues for superior modernity of tragicomedy. The norms of classical tragedy could no longer be binding, Guarini claims, for the precepts of our most holy religion, which teaches us word of gospel had rendered horrible and savage spectacles of tragedy superfluous for contemporary Christian audiences; meanwhile, comedy had been rendered tedious by mediocrity of mercenary and sordid persons, requiring tragicomic playwrights, following steps of Menander and Terence, to restore seriousness to comedy by combining with pleasing parts of comedy those parts of tragedy that can suitably accompany comic scenes to such an extent that they strive for purgation of sadness. (5) To show that such a mingling of tragic and comic elements could produce a new form superior to either tragedy or comedy in their pure forms, Guarini cites examples of biological and chemical mixtures in nature and, more importantly, political example of republic in human relations: (6) Does not Aristotle say that tragedy is made up of persons of high rank and comedy of men of people? Let us give an example of men of rank and men of people. The republic is such a thing. I do not say this in respect to its material, for every city is of necessity composed of nobles and those who are not noble, of rich and poor, ... but I speak of forms that spring from diversity of these two, that is, power of few and power of masses. Are not these two Species of government very different among themselves? If we believe Aristotle, or even pure reason, there is no doubt of it; yet Philosopher puts them together and makes of them mixture of republic. …

Defoe’s Birth

In 1937, James Sutherland began his fine biography of the author of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner by describing the “unsettled and eventful world into which Daniel Defoe was born” before going on to point out, perfectly correctly, that: “The exact date of his birth is unknown.” “From various sources, however, one can make a fairly good guess,” Sutherland continued: “it is almost certain that Defoe was born in the autumn of 1660.”1 In fact, the reasons adduced by Sutherland suggest that Defoe was born in the autumn of 1659 rather than in the autumn of 1660. First, Defoe’s age is given as “ab[ou]t 24” in the license dated 28 December 1683 (not 24 December, as Sutherland has it) which authorized his marriage to the twenty-year-old Mary Tuffley on 1 January 1684.2 Second, in the Preface to The Protestant Monastery—included in both Maximillian E. Novak’s list of Defoe’s works in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 2: 1660–1800 (1971) and P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens’s Critical Bibliography (1998)—”Andrew Moreton, Esq;” writes: “Alas I have but small Health and little Leisure to turn Author, being now in my 67th Year, almost worn out with Age and Sickness.” The Protestant Monastery was dated 1727 on the title-page but actually published in November 1726. And a year later, in Augusta Triumphans, Defoe returns to his physical condition when he insists that: “I have but a short Time to live, nor would I waste my remaining Thread of Life in Vain.”3 There is a complicating factor, however: according to the Parish Register of St Giles, Cripplegate, “Elizab’ daugt’ of James Foe tallowchand’ & of Ailce [i.e. Alice?] not Christe[ned]: [was] borne June 19” in 1659.4 If this were the case, then Defoe patently could not have been born to James and Alice Foe in the autumn of 1659, let alone on 30 September—the date on which Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked on his island, and which, according to some commentators, seems to have had some special significance for Defoe. Thus, in his study of Defoe’s Early Life, Frank Bastian acknowledges that, “[w]ith so many improbabilities, it would be rash to be dogmatic,” but nevertheless he goes on to explain that, “for the sake of convenience it will be assumed, when referring to Defoe’s age, that he was born on 30 September 1660.”5 Until recently, therefore, scholars have tended to assume, on the basis of the evidence of the Preface to The Protestant Monastery, that if Defoe had indeed entered his sixty-seventh year by November 1726, that he was probably born in the autumn of 1660. More recently, however, John Martin has asserted that the author, Daniel Defoe, who wrote The True-Born-Englishman, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, and Jure Divino, as well as the series of narratives which we now know as Defoe’s novels, was born not in London in 1660, but in Etton, Northamptonshire, in 1644. The basis of Martin’s assertion is an entry in the Parish Register of the Church of St. Stephen, Etton, which he has posted as a jpeg on the website of the discussion group of the Defoe Society (Defoe@lists). The relevant entry reads: “Daniel the sonne of Daniel Foe & Hellen his wife was baptized 3 December.1644.” What Martin has yet to do, however, is demonstrate that the author of Robinson Crusoe is the subject of this entry in the Parish Register of St. Stephen, Etton. Instead, Martin argues that, in the absence of an entry in the Parish Register of St. Giles Cripplegate of the baptism of a son of James and Ailce Foe called Daniel, anyone who does not accept that the Daniel Foe baptized at Etton in 1644 is the Daniel Defoe known to posterity must demonstrate that the latter was indeed the son of James Foe, tallowchandler. This is a decidedly odd method of proceeding, particularly when the significant number of documentary references to Defoe that appear to indicate he was born around 1660 in London...

The restoration of the episcopate and the English Reformation

While puritan displeasure at bishops as being a so-called ‘Popish Dreg’ is much discussed in modern scholarly writing, attempts by defenders of the office to align this authority with reformed doctrines is an under-examined aspect of English ecclesiastical history. Analysing the period when the suppression of episcopacy under the Commonwealth was coming to an end, this article questions one particular scholarly reading of English episcopal authority, in that the doctrinal and ecclesial positions of the Laudian Church shaped the reconstruction of the episcopal hierarchy up to and beyond 1660, especially the theories of jure divino episcopacy. Detailed analysis of John Gauden's The Loosing of St Peters Bands will demonstrate how the restored episcopate could appeal to its immediate context in order to justify its authority as reformed. Gauden looked to reformed churches in Europe and Scotland to illuminate the reformed features of English episcopacy. Paradoxically, the reformed confessions which had no bishops provided his evidence for how reformers revered episcopacy. His ideas were a reaction to many decades of anti-episcopal Protestant polemic in England. In this context, appeals to reformed authorities were the most compelling way to defend English episcopacy.

“A Living Law to Himself and Others”: Daniel Defoe, Algernon Sidney, and the Politics of Self-Interest in Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures

This article provides a context for the dramatic shift in the political constitution of Crusoe's island that occurs between Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures. Scrutinizing Daniel Defoe's changing views on self-interest from the publication of Jure Divino: A Satyr (1706) to the publication of the Crusoe narratives (1719) provides insight into why a monarchical Crusoe appears confident enough to place the political authority of his island in the hands of the previously recalcitrant mutineers. Defoe's insistence that the ability of the inhabitants to consent to a particular form of government is predicated upon their capacity to provide themselves with appropriate rules of social and political conduct underwrites the central paradox of Crusoe's island republic: how might a self-governing commonwealth be reconciled with the need to defer authority to an external ruler? What additional forms of civic practice might be required for the security of a European colony so far removed from the seat of British monarchical authority?

Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence by Katherine Clark

MLR, 104.1, 2009 175 inthecourseof thepoem,as 'a multitude of thoughts [...] swarm'inhismind, is 'Howbestthe mighty workhemightbegin I Of saviourto mankind'(i.186-87,196 97).The temptation ofthe kingdoms, the most threatening ofall,corresponds tohis own hopes and thatof his disciples, thathe might be called toperform 'heroic acts' and 'rescueIsraelfromthe Romanyoke' (I.216-17). TheconclusionJesus reaches isthat'Allthings arebestfulfilled intheir due time':'Mytime[. . .] isnotyetcome' (III.182,396-97).Addressingtroubled Christians'tried inhumblestate', faced with 'tribulations, injuries, insults', Milton counselsthemthatthey mustenduretheir lot as assignedbyGod, relying on theinnerlight ofconscience:'whobestcan suffer, best can do' (III. 189-90, 194-95). KING'S COLLEGE LONDON WARREN CHERNAIK Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame ofNature, Time and Providence. By KATHERINE CLARK.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. xi+269pp. ?50. ISBN978 0-333-97136-9. This timely reassessment of thereligious basesofDefoe's thought foregrounds his orthodox Trinitarianism, centraltoand inseparable from his social ideasandhis torical vision.It isnot justthat Defoewas not theharbinger of secular modernity thatsomehavedeemedhim,but that hemilitatedagainst opinionsthat seemed,to hisage,tosignalanerosion ofreligiosity: atheism, heterodoxy, andnaturalreligion. His earlyforays intothestanding army andoccasionalconformity controversies are informed by Defoe'sErastianism andadherence to'Old'dissent, championing statist intervention andadvocating eventual comprehension for nonconformists withinthe national Church (p. 116).BuildingonManuel Schonhorn's Defoe'sPolitics(Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press,1991),Katherine Clark countersreadings of Defoe as a 'Lockeian acolyte' (p. 5i)-an advocate of contractual monarchy and rightto resistance-inherchapter on Jure Divino (1706), finding thepurposeof Defoe's verseessaycloser to Milton's ParadiseLost thanLocke's TwoTreatises, though notelaborating precisely how, beyonda sharedfocus on originalsin.In the lastchapter Clark revisits Defoe's take onParadiseLost, morehostile by1726, when he exposed Milton'sArianismin A Political History ofthe Devil. Thisbook's limitations aremost apparentin thechapterthatviewsRobinson Crusoe as an 'orthodox penitent' (p.113)who,particularly inthetwo often-ignored sequels, upholdsTrinitarian doctrines, especially Christ'scoevalplace inthe God head and thewickedness of idols. It isnot thatClark's argument is skewed orwrong, butthatitistooemphatic andhencereductive, dismissing the possibility that Crusoe couldbe aboutstadialdevelopment, nascentcapitalism, andcolonialexpansion, as well as a condemnation of heterodoxy, let alone a formal experiment thatmarks a forward step in the emergence of the English novel (pp. 136-37). Such claims are brushedaside,largely on theevidenceof thosesequels,and itbecomesclearthat Clark's interpretation ofDefoe,howeverinsightful, islargely amatterofemphasis. And thenovelsonwhichDefoe's famerests aredecidedly underemphasized, per haps because they would jeopardizethetenability of thecentralthesis. Afterall, 176 Reviews critics have longrecognized thatthese novelscomplicate certainissuesthat Clark's reading of thenon-fiction makes straightforward: theexactnatureofprovidential orderingin A Journal ofthe PlagueYear;sincerity and repentance in Moll Flanders; andambivalence towards finance andcreditinRoxana. Teachersofundergraduate courses will be sorrytoseevirtually no treatment of thenovels-even theoriginal Crusoegetslittle attention. Defoe scholars, however, will be glad toreadtheexcellent chapters onDefoe's historical visionand on the Anglo-Scottish Union of1707.Pace Pocock,Clarkcredits Defoewith 'being oneof the firstthinkers to articulate theview thathis age was one inwhich commerce was supplanting conquestas a historical force'(p.3), elucidating hisviewsofexchange and plurality, competition and commerce, discovery and improvement, as divine injunctions. Herein,Clark draws linksbetweenDefoe and the ideasof Scottish Enlightenment thinkers halfa century after hisdeath.Forexample, A General His tory ofTrade (1713) 'shows Defoe developing modes ofargument associated with philosophical history andenlightened theories ofprogress'(p.107)-he anticipates AdamFerguson's andDavidHume's beliefinthe maturation ofcivilization through exchange and trade. Pickingup IlseVickers's mantle from Defoeand the New Sci ences(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996),Clark arguesthat Defoe's approbation ofBaconian sciencederivedfrom his sensethat God intended man to populatetheearth, mine itstreasures, improve themthrough industry, and foment trade amongitspeoples.Defoe endorsedcredit where itfacilitated trade,industry, and progress, but tradinginciphers(stock-jobbing) offended his epistemological sensibility, creating a dissonancein meaningthat subverted God's will. The book ends with an invitation for more research on this topic (p. 210). Itwill be interesting toseewhetherthisisaccepted, whether Defoe's orthodoxyis tobe challenged ormerelyde-emphasized, andhow the prosefictions fit intothepicture. UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM NICHOLAS SEAGER Scottish and Irish Romanticism. ByMURRAY PITTOCK.Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. ix+292 pp. E50. ISBN 978-o-19-923279-6. MurrayPittock's Scottish and Irish Romanticism isabookdividedagainstitself. On theonehand,Pittock wants tojoinall those who haveprecededhim inprotesting againstthe manner in which the workofsix male poetshasbeen allowedtohijack a literary period.Like those who haveso successfully reclaimed the womenwriters of theperiod,Pittock discoversinScottish and Irish writersa 'social Romanticism' that countersthe Romanticism of...

Protestant Bishops in Restoration England

The reconstruction of the Church of England's hierarchy after 1660 has attracted extensive scholarly attention. Scholars have evaluated how far the doctrinal and ecclesial positions of the Laudian Church shaped the reconstruction of the episcopal hierarchy up to and beyond 1660, especially the Laudian recourse to theories of Jure divino episcopacy as justifying episcopal status and power. Detailed analysis of two texts, John Gauden's The Looſing of St Peters Bands and Arthur Duck's Life of Henry Chichele (a medieval archbishop of Canterbury) will demonstrate how the restored episcopate was prepared to appeal to its late-medieval past and to its immediate context in order to justify its authority and demonstrate its self-conception as being an agent of reformed authority.

‘Undouted Realities’: Clarendon on Sacrilege

The phrase in the title is Charles I's. Writing from Newcastle to Henry Jermyn, John Culpepper and John Ashburnham in September 1646, he voiced his ‘unexpressable greefe andastonishment’ at the advice on the church which he had received from them during the course of his negotiations with the parliamentary commissioners. For they had assured Charles that, if he was no doubt‘ obliged’ by his conscience ‘to doe all’ that was in his ‘power to support and maintain that function of Bishops’, then he had already discharged that obligation to the full, as ‘all the world can witness’. Conscience, in this sense, had no further claims on him, nor could it be more strictly interpreted:if by conscience is intended to assert that Episcopacy is jure divino exclusive, wherby no Protestant (or rather Christian) Church can be acknowledged for such without a Bishop, we must therin crave leave wholly to differ. And if we be in an errour, we are in good company; ther not being (as we have cause to believe) 6 persons of the Protestant Religion of the other opinion. Thus much we can add, that at the treaty of Uxbridge none of your Divines then present (though much provoked thereunto) would maintain that (we might say uncharitable) opinion, no not privatly amongst your commissioners. Nether doeth it follow that in this, or any the most riged, sence you are obliged to perish in company with Bishops meerly out of pitty (and certainly you have nothing els left to assist them with) or that monarchy ought to fall, because Episcopacy cannot stand.

The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy ‘Jure Divino’, 1603–1640

Laudian divines cried up the king's prerogative. But they also affirmed that episcopacy was by divine, not human right. Was jure divino episcopacy, which many clerics asserted in the decades after Bancroft's famous sermon of 1589, in fact incompatible with the traditional English theory of the Royal Supremacy? Catholics and extreme puritans answered this question in the affirmative, and many recent commentators have accepted their judgement. The purpose of the present study is to question this interpretation, and to suggest that the first two Stuarts endorsed the theory of jure divino episcopacy not because they were misled by the rhetoric of such men as Bancroft, Barlow and Laud, but because they correctly perceived that these divines were vigorous supporters of the king's Supremacy in ecclesiasticals.

Primitive Christianity revived: religious renewal in Augustan England

The restoration of Charles II seemed to the men of the church of England the miraculous inauguration of a golden age—‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy.’ The clerical beneficiaries of the settlement of 1662 had much to rejoice them; the act of uniformity symbolised the secure replanting of the Laudian ideal, an ideal which, as R. S. Bosher has shown, had stiffened and intensified in the years of adversity. The restored church was more certain of itself, more intransigent in its jure divino episcopal claims, than the church of the 1630s. This new assurance was nourished by the flowering of anglican patristic learning which is so striking a feature of the later seventeenth century. The magisterial works of Ussher and Pearson on the Ignatian epistles, of Pearson and Fell on Cyprian, and of Bull on the ante-Nicene fathers, each contributed to a deepening sense of the continuity of the church of England with the catholic church of the first centuries. More and more the appeal to antiquity became the criterion of orthodoxy, and in that antiquity anglicanism found not merely its origins, but, occasionally and increasingly, a mirror image of itself. William Beveridge told his hearers at St Peter’s Cornhill.there are [some] who blame our Reformation as defective, as if the Church were not reformed, not purged enough from the errors it had before contracted; but if such would but lay aside all prejudices and impartially consider the constitution of our church, as it is now reformed, they might clearly see that as there is nothing defective so neither is there anything superflous in it, but that it exactly answers the pattern of the Primitive and Apostolical Church itself, as near as it is possible for a national church to do it.

A Reconsideration of Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9

Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9 owes its fame to the fact that it has traditionally been associated with the first appearance in Anglican theology of the jure divino theory of episcopacy. So far as I have been able to discover, this tradition appears to derive its origin from the account of the Sermon given by John Strype in the eighteenth century, although the germ of the idea is considerably older, since it can be traced back to the attacks made at the time by Bancroft's puritan opponents, most notably Sir Francis Knollys, who accused him, along with archbishop Whitgift and others, of seeking to undermine the Royal Supremacy by preaching that bishops owed their ‘superiority’ over the lower clergy to God rather than to the queen. Until the eighteenth century, however, this interpretation of Bancroft's teaching is only to be found in puritan writers. Seventeenth-century Anglican church historians in general do not appear to have attached any doctrinal significance to the Sermon. Peter Heylyn, for example, in his Aërius Redivivus (1670) refers to it as ‘a most excellent and judicious Sermon’ and proceeds to give a lengthy summary of its contents without at any point suggesting that Bancroft was putting forward a novel theory of episcopacy, while Thomas Fuller makes no reference to it at all either in his Church History of Britain (1655) or in his account of Bancroft in The Worthies of England (1662). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sermon enjoyed a modest vogue among the Non-Jurors, who admired it for its vigorous defence of the Church of England against the attacks of the puritans; but neither Henry Gandy, who reprinted it at the instigation of Dr. George Hickes in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1709), nor Jeremy Collier, who discussed it at considerable length in his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1709-14), drew any explicit connexion between the Sermon and the emergence of the jure divino theory of episcopacy.

Episcopacy and a ‘Godly Discipline’, 1641–6

On 22 April 1646 the House of Commons formally questioned the jure divino claims put forward by the ministers in the Westminster Assembly. Ostensibly this action represents the climax to one of the most puzzling developments in the Civil War: the triumphant assertion of Erastianism by men who had acquiesced in the passing of theocratic measures in the early part of the Civil War. W. A. Shaw's reading of the situation typifies the general attitude of historians of the period: the resolution of the problem by denying that it is one. His main thesis is that English Puritanism in the period 1641–6 was never really divorced from its historic Erastian associations.

The Doctrine of Apostolic Succession in the Church of England

A definition of terms is essential at the outset of this investigation, but I am not aware of a definition of Apostolic Succession that would be accepted as authoritative by those who profess the doctrine, In this paper the term will be held to mean the doctrine that the order of bishops exists in the Church jure divino; that the first bishops were ordained by the Apostles as their successors, and that these orders have been transmitted by an unbroken succession to the present time; and furthermore, that without bishops there can be no valid orders, no valid sacraments, in short, no Church. It is not proposed in this paper to question the truth of this theory—to inquire whether there is adequate evidence in its favor either in the Scriptures of the New Testament, in the early Christian literature, or in the institutions of the Church of the first two centuries. Assuming that the doctrine rests on the sure foundations of Scripture teaching and institutional Christianity—or, at least, allowing that this may be the case—our task is to trace the effects of this doctrine upon the external history and internal life of the Church of England.