For the ministerial fundamentalist the yardstick is the ministry. … There is no doubt that this is the crucial issue in reunion today. So Canon Fison wrote ten years ago and the same might be written in the same context today.

This yardstick is bound up with validity and so some attempt to consider its meaning may help; but first we shall define the word and then mention some relevant discussions. ‘That is valid which, by virtue of satisfying certain conditions laid down by competent authority, is actually entitled to everything to which it appears or claims to have a title.’ Much argument has centred on the exclusive claims made for episcopacy in The Apostolic Ministry, though, after the introduction, there is only one reference in the index of that work to validity. The late Bishop Rawlinson dealt with ‘validity’ in Problems of Reunion; he used certain arguments Canon Quick had outlined in his contribution to The Ministry and the Sacraments and also in The Christian Sacraments. Historical considerations on the topic have been ably summarised by Professor S. L. Greenslade in his Schism in the Early Church. Useful contributions have been made more recently by Dr A. L. Peck in Anglicanism and Episcopacy. All these writers are Anglicans.