In our Mother Church of England the Archbishops of
Canterbury have been the chief Consecrators of Bish-
ops for 1300 years. And yet (to make the wildest con-
cession imaginable), suppose that every one of them
— from St. Augustine to the present Archbishop — ^was
an impostor, a mitred layman, the Anglican Succession
would still be unimpaired, and Anglican orders as
valid as before. As a recent writer has said :

The first Canon of the most ancient body of Canons in the
Christian Church — called the Apoatolio Canons' — ^requires that a
Bishop shall be consecrated by two or three Bishops, thus recognizing
the collective idea from the start, and the larger of these numbers,
three, has been the express requirement of all subsequent canonical
legislation on the subject.
