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... there are obvious difficulties in the way of our regarding it as essential. To mention only one: since it cannot be clearly traced to the Apostolic Age and was     certainly not generally established then, one cannot say that it belongs to the _esse_ of the church without placing in jeopardy the existence of the primitive church itself. Besides, even if the institution of episcopacy could be clearly grounded in the usages of the earliest communities, there would still be the question of whether it was an accidental or an essential feature. If by the _esse_ of the church we mean what the church originally was and what it had to be (that is, regardless of the actual historical circumstances in which it arose), then we should have to deny, I think, that episcopacy belongs to the _esse_, any more than do the particular canon we have and the particular creeds we have. All these \[_sc_. episcopacy, canon, creeds\] were gradually developed in response to the actual conditions the church confronted (and these conditions might conceivably have been different). Although all three are in a degree adumbrated in the Apostolic Age (and could not have won later universal acceptance if they had not been), nevertheless none of them, as we have seen, can be thought of as having its origin there. If there is a certain inevitability about these developments, the inevitability exists only in the actual context of history; and if we are trying to define what the church from the very beginning and in the nature of the _case_ had to be, we can hardly include episcopacy \[any more than canon or creeds\] in our definition. Besides \-\- and most decisively \-\- one may point to the indubitable fact that the reality of the church is actually found, and that manifestly authentic and effective ministries are being actually exercised, in nonepiscopal bodies (_The Early Church and the Coming Great Church_: 151).