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Home » Publications » Free Presbyterian Magazine » 1959 » January 1959 » An English Bishop and a Presbyterian

An English Bishop and a Presbyterian

A Scottish, presbyterian lady resident in England recently wrote to a Scottish paper relating her experience of bishop and Anglican treatment. Retired with her husband in an English village far from a Presbyterian Church, she attended the Church of England place of worship and also helped with certain congregational activities. Later she asked to partake of the Lord’s Supper. She tells that the poor Vicar had no authority to grant this and had to consult the bishop. The bishop refused, and said that she would need suitable instruction, and to be baptised and then confirmed in the Church of England. She was already baptised and a communicant member of the Church of Scotland. She ends up by saying: “If I had been a Greek-Cypriot I could have had Communion in the Church of England.” This last observation is truly illuminating. The lady refers to this experience as “The despotic power of bishops.” We may add, that there is also behind all this, the superstitious belief in the Apostolic Succession and the supposed Spiritual power conferred on bishops, which in turn by the laying on of their hand (or hands) in confirmation, the person is thus and only thus, fitted for the Lord’s Supper. The above experience, we note in our pages just as an illustration of ecclesiastical procedure under bishops, and in itself as a sufficient warning to Presbyterians in Scotland not to be duped into ecclesiastical bondage.

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