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HOOKER'S ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY'1

IF the value of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity be considered in relation to the age and the state of thought prevalent at the time of its appearance, it will perhaps be considered one of the most remarkable books in English literature. It may, indeed, be said to have contained in itself the germ from which several characteristically English schools of thought ultimately grew.

It may be convenient just to mention that Hooker was born in 1553 at Exeter, and died at his living of Borne, three miles from Canterbury, in the year 1600, and probably in the month of November. His lifetime thus coincided very nearly with the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1556-1603), and with the second great outburst of Protestantism, which began after the Diet of Augsburg in 1555, and was thrown back in the later part of the century, by the efforts of the Jesuits, aided by the great Roman Catholic sovereigns, and especially by Philip II.

1 Eight Books of the Law of Ecclesiastical Polity, by Richard Hooker.

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Hooker's earlier impressions must thus have been those of hope and victory. He belonged to the party of progress in the greatest crisis which the world had seen for many centuries- a greater crisis in some respects than any which has followed it. In his later years, on the other hand, he must to some extent have felt himself more or less upon the defensive, though the firmness with which Protestantism was settled in England, and the slightness of the communication with foreign countries which existed in those days, in comparison with what exists at present, may have prevented him from perceiving the full force of the turn in the tide.

The Ecclesiastical Polity has, so to speak, a triple aspect. It is at once a philosophical, a theological, and a political treatise; and in order to do justice to the importance of this, we ought to remember how vast a change had, at that time, come over the literature of all Europe, and especially over that of England. It was the age of the great revival of letters; and books were just beginning to be published which were constructed on the classical, rather than on the scholastic model. All that we now understand by moral science-metaphysics, logic, theology, law in all its various applications-had for centuries been treated as so many branches of theology, and had been investigated, if at all, by the scholastic methods. Hooker was the first great English writer who broke through these fetters, except for exclusively controversial purposes; and although he had in other parts

of Europe a few predecessorsas, for instance, Machiavel (1469-1527)-and a few contemporaries, as Bodin (1530-96) and Montaigne (1532-92), he is undoubtedly entitled to a leading place in the class of literature to which he belonged.

Nor must it be forgotten that there were peculiarities in his situation as an Englishman, which gave a degree of practical importance to his writings that belonged to those of no other man till we come to Grotius, in the next generation. The Church of England, the theory of which he did so much to form and to enunciate, was an almost unique institution. It was the most important of the Protestant bodies. Its constitution had more comprehensive aims, and was constructed on more statesmanlike principles, than that of any other church, and it was much more closely connected than any other with the active political life of a great nation.

Our own experience has shown us in many different ways how all English speculation is affected by the closeness of its relation to practice. This gives it on the one side great vigour and originality, and, on the other, a fondness for details, and an adaptation to immediate results, which more or less hampers and narrows it. This peculiarity is to be traced more or less in all our great writers, and we know of no one in whom it is more conspicuous than in Hooker. Sometimes we find him discoursing about the essence of law and the broadest principles of morals; and then again, we fall upon endless discussions with Cartwright as to the pettiest of petty

matters the turn of some particular phrase, or the propriety of some small ceremony in the Prayer Book.

Of all the limitations which his character as an Englishman imposed upon him, as on other English theological writers, none probably has detracted more from the permanent value of Hooker's writings, and from those of others like him, than the necessity of writing controversy. Most of our great theological books are more or less controversial, and though this occasionally gives them surprising spirit and precision, it certainly impedes the flow and development of their authors' thoughts, and encumbers their books with a great deal of matter, the interest of which, such as it was, has entirely died away. Most readers of Hooker must have got very much tired of Cartwright and his errors, but it is fair to say that few, if any, controversial books are so little disfigured with the polemical spirit as the Ecclesiastical Polity.

Upon the whole, it may be viewed as the first great effort made in modern times to give the full theory of a great institution, to show the ideal principles upon which it was founded, and to indicate its substantial agreement with that ideal. The number of books even now which can claim such a character is by no means great, and in that day it stood almost alone.

Taking this view in general of the character and position of the Ecclesiastical Polity, we will now attempt to give some sort of sketch of what we have called its triple aspect-its aspect, namely, towards philosophy, towards theology, and towards politics,

and to show how the principles which its author inculcated, have been represented in the subsequent history of the Church and State of England. The work falls naturally into three great divisions. The first contains the first and second books, though perhaps the second book might with more propriety be put in the second division. The second contains the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh books; and the third the eighth. These divisions may not unfairly be taken to represent the three aspects of which we have already spoken-the philosophical, the theological, and the political respectively- though the seventh book is closely connected with the eighth.

The first book of Hooker is well known to every one who has anything like a competent acquaintance with English literature. Perhaps its most remarkable quality is its extraordinary poetical power. The magnificent sentences with which it ends, sum up its doctrine with such an incomparable majesty and nobility of phrase that we shall be pardoned for repeating them, familiar as they are:

'Wherefore that here we may briefly end of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest are not exempted from her power; both angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner,