did not readily lend themselves to dramatic treatment. What national changes there had been, had been quietly political, without the accompaniment of stirring circumstance. As yet the details of domestic life were not considered important enough to be a sphere for art. Heywood, the first to treat dramatically the incidents of domestic life, had been followed by no other dramatist. Instead, the novelists stepped in; Richardson was the first to inaugurate this form of art by his Pamela.

The novel is to us what the stage was to the Elizabethan. Modern life finds in it its truest and most artistic rendering. The circumstances and conditions of present social life, its diffusion of interests and feelings, its complexity, necessitate an outward reserve; the most exciting and dramatic part of modern life goes on below the surface. We have still the same nature that the English people possessed in the days of Elizabeth: we are as eager for life and for joy, our loves and our hatreds are as keen, our disappointments as bitter, our sorrows and our joys are as intense, but many causes have concurred to change our manner of expression. The stage still clings to its old ideals, it clings to the play of action and neglects the subtler play of motive and character, whose deepest life and struggles sometimes make only a faint ripple on the surface of things,-whose vibrations are often but " mere whispers in the rush of hurrying existence." It is this comparatively hidden and inward life which makes the drama of our greatest novel-artists, and till dramatists and actors come to recognise that their ideals are those of a society which has passed away, and that they have little connection with the highest aspects of modern life, the novel will remain as the most complete form of English art, and will find no rival in the stage.

CHAPTER XIII.

ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN RELIGION.

HOOKER, Richard, born 1553; went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, about 1567; obtained a Fellowship there in 1577; entered the Church in 1581? accepted the living of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire, 1584; made Master of the Temple, 1585; controversy with Travers, 1585-6; begins Ecclesiastical Polity, 1585-6; retires to living of Boscombe, Wiltshire, 1591; goes to Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, 1595; died 1600.

Ecclesiastical Polity entered at Stationers' Hall, March 1592-3. Books I.IV. published 1594? Book V. published 1597.

HOOKER's work is not only important in the history of the English Church and as marking an epoch in the Puritan controversy; it is important in the highest degree in the history of English thought. Hooker did in the sphere of moral and social knowledge what Bacon did in the sphere of natural science. Bacon gave to the students and observers of nature the idea of law, of law which was not the creation of the intellectual imagination, but whose actual existence was to be discovered by the careful and patient examination of phenomena.

Bacon was the first in the modern world to establish scientifically the idea that there was an invariable sequence in the phenomena of nature; that there was order in the world of nature. Hooker's work first suggested that there was order in the moral world; that man has neither absolute power over his life nor is the servant of an omnipotent and capricious will; but is always unconsciously governed by law. "He laid down," says Mr. Church, "the theory of a rule derived not from one alone, but from all sources of light and truth with which man finds himself encompassed." In his work lay the germs of what has since developed into moral and political science. He was the first to suggest the idea that law was powerful in the moral world, an idea which, as Mr. Church says, has become the inheritance of the English

race. The religious controversy of the time gave to Hooker the occasion of his work. He wished to defend the Church of England against the attacks of the Puritans; and by the broad basis he took for his arguments, he made an epoch in the history of the Church of England as great as that which, by the earnestness, simplicity, and enthusiasm of his style, he made in the history of English prose. But Hooker was no conscious innovator either in matter or style. His purpose, he imagined, was purely conservative; he wished to clear the Church of England from the aspersions which had been cast on it by the Puritans; he wished to show that its first principles were grounded not on convention, not on unmeaning compromise, "but on a conscious intelligent adaptation to the needs of human beings,” who, in their nature complex, must necessarily be obedient to many kinds of different laws. In the course of his work he endeavoured to show that law was powerful, not only in God's dealings with nature—with unconscious agents, but as active also in his dealings with men in the moral sphere. And in the thought which he brought to establish his reasons, in his eagerness to prove his point, in his enthusiasm for his subject, he gave an intellectuality, an earnestness, and a fervent eloquence to his writing, which first revealed what English prose might be.

"This age,” says Hooker, speaking of his own, "is full of tongue and weak of brain." Full of tongue it indeed was, but the controversies to which the settlement of the Reformation gave rise were by no means always conducted with intellectual feebleness. As Hallam says, after the first heat of the Reformation was over, there was a retrocession on the reformed side. The controversy between Catholics and Protestants, instead of being an appeal to authority on one side and an appeal to reason on the other, was conducted with reference to authority on both sides; and as the strength of the Protestant side rests on reason, and receives inadequate support from the "Fathers," Roman Catholicism had frequently the advantage, and many went over to Rome. Andrewes, a bishop of Elizabeth's time, learned in patristic philosophy, carried on the struggle in England, and it was later taken up on the same lines by Archbishop Laud. The Protestant Church in England had also not only to contend with the Catholic, but to defend itself also against equally formidable opponents, viz. the Calvinists, who, holding that all points of Church doctrine as well as of belief are to be found settled for us in the Bible, seemed to be aiming their attacks at the very essence of true Protestantism, viz. at the independence of the

human conscience. They held that the corrupt nature of man makes him incapable of approaching, by his own exertions, towards a state of acceptance with God, or even of willing it with earnest desire; that he is entirely a slave in the hands of a Power outside himself. Hooker found himself called upon to do battle for the Church of England when it was assailed, on one side, by dangerous foes, who would destroy its doctrine and ritual by an appeal to the traditions of the Church of Rome, and protected on the other by these dangerous friends, who appealed to a vague but equally dangerous authority in support of their views. The Church of England seemed at that time to most men merely an institution which had resulted from accidental political circumstances; from the efforts of the Tudors to settle the disputed questions of the Reformation, or rather to still controversy, by upholding a church which, within certain limits, should be very tolerant. This was probably a true view of the nature of its growth, but whatever may have been the reasons of its establishment, Hooker, feeling the advantage and the justice of its wide tolerance both in ritual and doctrine, was enabled, by going deep into the foundations and actions of man's moral nature, to justify its existence on broad and fundamental principles. The Church of England being a successful compromise in practice, Hooker could justify this compromise in theory by reference to the complexity of human nature, and to the wide and true principles on which all true compromise rests. He showed that man was indeed obedient to authority, but not to any one authority; that as his nature was complex, so the authorities he obeyed were complex; that in supernatural matters of belief and of faith he was the creature of God, and taught by revelation; but that in matters of church organisation, matters too small for God to be concerned with, he was to direct himself by the law of nature as it was revealed to him by reason. He showed that this law of nature as revealed to man by reason was what guided the conduct of individuals of societies, and of the relations of societies among themselves. He justified thus the organisation and ritual of the Church of England, and the action of man's reason and will within the sphere of religion and morality.

The immediate cause of his books of the Ecclesiastical Polity, "a treatise in which I intend a justification of the laws of our ecclesiastical polity," was the controversy in which he found himself engaged with Travers, who, with Cartwright, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, represented the Calvinists, and

with whom he came in contact after his appointment to the Mastership of the Temple in 1584-5. Through Jewel, whose influence had enabled him to become a student at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he became known to Sandys, Bishop of London, by whom he was appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross in 1581. This was his first appearance in public, and after it he became gradually drawn into that controversy which made the business of his life. Although Hooker had come under Calvinistic influence in the course of his education, he had always refused to be driven into the narrow Calvinistic creed: his width of mind caused him to revolt against Calvinistic narrowness: and Travers, who preached at the Temple in the afternoon, after Hooker had preached there in the morning, made his sermons an attack on Hooker's latitudinarianism. Whitgift having silenced the public expression of Travers' opinion, it became a personal controversy between Hooker and Travers: and even Hallam, who calls these most important religious controversies, vulgar quarrels, and those engaged in them, "caitiff brawlers," is compelled to admit that this controversy was carried on with the utmost decency and good sense. Hooker is not only like "the knight of romance,' who descends from higher spheres to cope with an adversary of the ordinary world; but Travers, although narrower and in every way inferior to Hooker, shows a keenness and shrewdness of thought which dignified successful opposition to him, and at the same time displayed a self-control and a respect for his adversary, which did equal credit to both sides. The deep thought into which this controversy plunged Hooker led him to ask the bishop of London for a quiet appointment which would allow him to complete it at leisure. “I am weary, my lord, of the noise and opposition of this place; and indeed, God and nature did not intend me for contention, but for study and quietness." In his retirement at Boscombe, near Salisbury, he finished four out of the proposed eight books on the Ecclesiastical Polity; in 1595 he moved to a better living near Canterbury, where he wrote the remainder of his work, and remained till his death in 1600.

The first Book, "On Laws in General," is the most important from the literary point of view, as containing the best specimens of the drift of Hooker's thought and the best specimens of his prose. The second Book refutes the principle that Scripture is the exclusive rule of human conduct. The third Book deals with "The Laws concerning Ecclesiastical Polity, whether the form thereof be in Scripture so set down that no addition or