ABSTRACT
According to Stubbs’s understanding, it was essential for die well-being of a church to enjoy some good ‘discipline’, a conception which embraced the ordination and regulation of the ministry as well as die correction of faults. It was assumed that in a national church these needs were to be best met through the subordination of many ministers to the government of a few, and therefore by the provision of bishops. Bishops, in Stubbs’s view, were even a necessity, but they were not a separate species of minister, at least not in respect of the essentials of their ministerial office, ‘for therein die poorest pastor or shepherd that is is coequal with them.’ Stubbs was popularizing a view of the ministry and government of Church which was shared by most of the founding-fathers of the English Reformation. The details of the presbyterian system were elaborated only in the course of time and were a matter for controversy throughout the Calvinist world.
