tinct exposition, and to miss altogether many of the most striking passages, on account of their refusing to come into the general summary of the section under which they are to be found, not being integral parts of the argument. This remark applies with particular force to Hooker, whose most admirable passages are those in which he shakes off the shackles of controversy, and launches forth into disquisitions very remotely connected with the design of his treatise. The fund of historical learning, too, and theological knowledge, which is contained in the Ecclesiastical Polity, no abridgement or analysis can pretend to convey. But above all, that which constitutes the chief excellence of the work, the majesty of the style, the noble sentiments with which it abounds, and the spirit of piety by which the Author is often borne away far above the level of his subject, must be sought for in the pages of the original.

Of the numbers who boast of Hooker as the champion of Episcopacy, a very small proportion have, we apprehend, accomplished the perusal of even the first five books of his great work. To them, the present Analysis will be serviceable, should it induce them to enter upon or to prosecute the task. For our own part, we could not derive greater pleasure from reading him, were we never so firmly attached to the ecclesiastical system which he advocates; and the perusal never fails to call up our regret that it has so rarely fallen to the lot of Dissenters, to meet with an opponent of equal candour and calmness of temper. The study of Hooker by those who ought to consider it as a disgrace not to have studied him, would have a most beneficial effect, should it superinduce upon them any portion of his mildness and suavity, but more especially, should it imbue the reader with his sentiments of elevated piety.

Hooker has not always been fortunate in his encomiasts. It is a little singular to find the Author of the present Analysis quoting the panegyric of Pope Clement VIII, as a recommendation of a Defence of the Church of England to the English clergy. The anecdote is given in Walton's Life of Hooker. Pope Clement VIII. had said, we are told, that he had never met with an English book whose writer deserved the name of an author; a fact which is easily explained by recollecting that our early writers wrote for the most part in Latin, and that his Holiness could not be expected to have an extensive acquaintance with the writings of heretics. When Hooker's four first books appeared, Cardinal Allen and Dr. Stapleton, both Englishmen, mentioned them, therefore, to the Pope, saying, that a poor obscure English priest had writ four such books of Laws and Church Polity, and in a style that expressed so grave and such humble majesty, with clear demonstration of reason, that in all their readings they had not met with any that exceeded him.' The

Pope desired Dr. Stapleton to read to him the first book in Latin, and when it was concluded, he exclaimed: There is no learning that this man hath not searched into, nothing too hard for his understanding. This man indeed deserves the ' name of an author. His books will get reverence by age, for 'there is in them such seeds of eternity that if the rest be like this, they shall last till the last fire shall consume all learning.' The Pope might be a competent judge of the learning displayed in Hooker's work, and learning was at that time the test of competent authorship; otherwise, the papal encomium would be worth little. A more equivocal commendation of his labours, has been subsequently furnished by the pen of Royalty. James II. affirms that his conversion to Popery originated in the perusal of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. It was, we know, the favourite book of his father, who enjoined his son, afterwards Charles II. to study it next to the Bible; and so he did, doubtless, next to the Bible. James I. had also passed upon it a just and discriminate encomium; for James, with all his pedantry, was a learned man. Hooker deserves, however, to be vindicated from the conclusions which might readily be drawn from these royal panegyrics. So far from being the advocate of the political principles upon which the Stuart kings modelled their government, Mr. Hume has remarked, that the precious spark of liberty which was kept alive among the Puritans, glows in his pages with a clearness and fervour that have never been ex'ceeded.' Mr. Collinson remarks, in the preface to his Analysis, that whoever turns to Mr. Locke's Essay on Government, will find that the sentiments of that celebrated writer, are an edifice avowedly built on the foundation which Hooker laid, whose words he continually quotes. Thus,' he adds, the Ecclesiastical Polity is one of the fountain heads of those principles 'which produced our free and happy constitution.' Hooker, it should be recollected, lived a century before Mr. Locke, and under the government of Elizabeth; the boldness of his opinions is therefore the more extraordinary. He constantly inculcates, that power originally rests with the body of the people, and is derived from them to one or more rulers according to their choice; and that there can be no lawful government without consent of the governed, given by themselves or their representatives. He affirms, that the power which is bestowed at men's diseretions,' is likewise' held by Divine right;' by which, he clearly cuts up by the root, the pretence of a claim to power founded distinctively upon Divine right, as opposed to an authority founded upon the consent of the governed, or bestowed at men's discretion. To live by one man's law,' he elsewhere remarks, is the cause ' of all men's misery;' and, Utterly without our consent we are at the command of no man living.' Again: Every

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nation or collective multitude has naturally no superior under 'God.' And, Laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so.' It is difficult to reconcile the reverence which Charles I. expressed for such a writer, with the contrary tenor of his whole public conduct. Is it possible that his recommending Hooker next to the Bible to his son's studious perusal, proceeded from the conviction that he had lost his kingdom by disregarding the principles for which Hooker contends,-by reversing the axiom on which that Writer represents our monarchical government to be founded, Lex facit regem?

It may sound like a paradox to assert that Hooker is not a high-church writer. Such, however, so far as regards his politics, is the fact. It would not be equally easy, to exonerate him from having given occasion for the compliment of the royal convert to Popery. If by Popery, indeed, we understand the supremacy of the Pope, the worship of the Virgin Mary, and the meritorious efficacy of human works, no charge could be more unfounded than that of Hooker's favouring such tenets. Upon all these points, he is a zealous and consistent Protestant. But, regarding the basis-perhaps we may say the essence-of Popery, as the assumption of authority in matters of religion by that which claims the designation of the Church, the tendency of Hooker's reasonings appears to us to be directly favourable to the principles of the Romish religion. The radical fallacy of his reasonings, lies in his cardinal principle, that the Church of Christ is a political society, and that, as members of that society, we become subject to human positive laws; which it is obviously the design of his first book to establish. Pope Clement must have heard announced with no ordinary satisfaction, the admission of a Protestant writer, that Men's private fancies must 'give place to the higher judgement of the Church, which is in authority a mother over them,' and that the orders of the holy 'fathers' claim to be received as the positive laws of the Church of Christ.'* With high approbation he must have listened to the judicious Hooker, when, as an illustration of this principle, he cites the Apostolic decree concerning abstinence from things strangled and from blood, as a precedent for ecclesiastical legislation, more particularly in reference to fastings, one of the grand ordinances of the Romish church; for so,' he contends, the very actions of whole churches, have, in regard of fellowship and commerce with other churches, been subject to 'laws concerning food, the contrary unto which laws had else

In the fifth book occurs a similar assertion. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall publicly think and define to be true and good, must in congruity of reason overrule all inferior judgements whatsoever.

Vol. XIII. N.S.

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been thought more convenient for them to observe.' But bad his Holiness proceeded to the third book, what terms of sufficient praise could he have found for the Author, on meeting with the precious quibble, that those things which men find out by help of that light which God hath given them for that purpose,' are of God, not less than things supernaturally revealed; and therefore, that a form of church polity, though not set down in 'Scripture,' may be considered as having God for its author? According to this position, confessedly human enactments in matters of religion, may claim to be derived from God, though they receive no sanction from his revealed will; and this sentiment, the Rev. Mr. Collinson, in the work before mentioned, particularly recommends to the deliberate consideration of all who are inclined to reject human ordinances in matters of religion.' Surely, no Church could possibly desire a more ample basis for its assumed authority, or a more convenient latitude of discretion,' than is furnished by this sophism. It ' is no more disgrace to the Scriptures,' we are told, to have 'left a number of things free to be ordered at the discretion of the Church, than for Nature to have left it to the wit of man 'to devise his own attire, and not to look for it as the beasts of the field have theirs!! One cannot but smile at the grave admission, that the laws of the Church are ill-made,' when they are not consonant with the general laws of nature, or when they are in direct contradiction to any positive law in Scripture. But this truism is only to clear the ground for the following assertion. Unto laws thus made and received by a whole 6 Church, they which live within the bosom of that Church, must not think it a matter indifferent either to yield, or not to yield • obedience. Is it a small offence to despise the Church of God?"My son, keep thy father's commandment," saith Solomon, "and forget not thy mother's instruction: bind them "both always about thine heart." It doth not stand with the 'duty which we owe to our Heavenly Father, that to the ordi" nances of our Mother the Church, we should shew ourselves disobedient. Let us not say we keep the commandments of the one, when we break the law of the other; for unless we observe, both we obey neither...... Yea, the laws thus made, God doth himself in such sort authorize, as that to despise them is to despise him.' After reprobating the loose and licentious opinion of the Anabaptists,' that the Church of Christ should admit no law-makers but the Evangelists,' Hooker proceeds to the iteration of the sophism above referred to. The author of

proceed from us any thing afterwards corrupt or naught, the mother thereof is our own darkness, neither doth it proceed from any such cause whereof God is the author. He is the author of all we think or do, by virtue of that light which himself hath given. And therefore the very laws which the heathen did gather to direct their actions by, so far forth as they proceed from the light of nature, God himself doth acknowledge to have proceeded even from himself, and that he was the writer of them in the tables of their hearts. How 'much more then is he the author of those laws which have been made by his saints, endued further with the heavenly grace of his spirit, and directed as much as might be with such instructions as his sacred word doth yield. If they have God for their author, contempt which is offered unto them, cannot choose but redound unto him.'

It would be hard to select from any Romish casuist, a specimen of more flimsy and pernicious argumentation than this. Higher pretensions the Church of Rome could not advance, that mother of all mother Churches, than to claim for her ordinances an authority equal to that of the commandments of God; nor could she wish for a better plea than that of having God for the author of human laws. Hooker, whatever our readers may by this time think of his being entitled, the judicious, was too ingenuous, too sincere, and too pious a man, to be capable of wilful sophistry, much less of any grosser species of misrepresentation. But when we call to mind what sort of persons they have been for the most part, who have framed and enacted laws of ecclesiastical polity, and to whom the Church has been indebted for the invention of human ordinances in matters of religion, to hear them characterized as saints endued with the heavenly grace of 'God's spirit, and directed as much as might be by his word,' must excite an emotion of indignation which it requires an effort to repress. Was the Holy Spirit the author of the intolerant canons of the English Church? Were those the decrees of his saints?

Once more, in the conclusion of this same book, which has been pronounced a masterly defence of the province of reason in religion,' Hooker thus maintains the prerogative of the clergy. 'Hereupon we hold, that God's clergy are a state which hath been ' and will be, as long as there is a church upon earth, necessarily by the plain word of God himself; a state whereunto the rest of God's people must be subject, as touching things that appertain to their soul's health. For where polity is, it cannot but appoint some to be leaders of others, and some to be led by others. "If the blind lead the blind, they both perish." It is with the clergy, if their persons be respected, even as it ' is with other men; their quality many times far beneath that