Outside Anglicanism the standard understanding of the term historic episcopate is that the ministry has descended from the Apostles by a continuous transmission, and that this is the guarantee of grace in the sacraments and the very essence (esse) of the Church. However, the Anglican Communion "has never officially endorsed any one particular theory of the origin of the historic episcopate, its exact relation to the apostolate, and the sense in which it should be thought of as God given, and in fact tolerates a wide variety of views on these points".