CHAPTER IV.

The Preface to the Treatise, and the First Four Books.

THE first four books were published, with the Preface for the whole work, three or four years before the Fifth Book, from which they differ both in scale and in character. The four together are only about half as long as the fifth, and they are concerned with the main principles of the Puritan position, and with the principles and conceptions which Hooker sets against them; whereas the fifth deals with particular allegations of the Puritans against the existing order and ceremonial of the Church. Thus the earlier books are easily separable from the later; but they are presupposed in it, and cannot be ignored if it is to be rightly studied and appreciated. They have indeed a preeminent importance for a due estimate of Hooker's work, for they show his power in its widest, boldest exercise; they are the achievement in which he rises into highest distinction above the level of controversy in his day. One can imagine a well-meaning Puritan being somewhat puzzled as he turned the pages, feeling that he was less familiar with the debate than he had thought: and the imagination is borne out by some of the criticisms which the work received. It is indeed a wonderful and impressive thing, and it may serve to show the courage that great learning and hard thinking give a man, to see how a quiet, humble student lifted at once into a more generous air the conflict in which he was called to bear his part.

What is now to be attempted is such a presentation of the general course and main points of this first part of the treatise as may help the student of the Fifth Book to realize the conceptions with which Hooker met the Puritan attack, the ground on which he stands, and the characteristic principles of his position.

I.

The vividness and power of certain parts in the long Preface have diverted attention from the purpose of the whole. That purpose is indeed inadequately shown; but with care it can be traced; and it is worth tracing.

Mention has already been made of the note of apprehension and foreboding which sounds in the first sentence of the Preface. The defence of the historic Church is felt to be an arduous enterprise, where much ground has been already lost. The pervading thought of the Preface is in harmony with this beginning. Hooker writes as one who is aware of a wide prejudice against the cause he is maintaining1. In various ways his opponents have secured a presumption in many minds that they must be right, and Hooker is concerned to dispel or attenuate this presumption, by examining the causes which have engendered it, and by showing that they really have no bearing on the question at issue, that however naturally they may have commended the Puritan position they have not done so logically, and that the truth or falsehood of that position ought to be ascertained by an independent and fearless and open-minded inquiry.

Such is the purpose and effort underlying and giving coherence to the whole Preface. Hooker frankly owns that he himself had thought there must be in the Puritan movement more reason than, when he scrutinized it, he was able to discover. The number and earnestness of the Puritans had lodged in his mind an unwarranted presumption that they must be more or less right2; and he knows that a similar presumption has been similarly lodged in the minds of many others. Many were tending to infer the rightfulness of the Holy Discipline from the wide deference, the commanding position which it had attained; and Hooker therefore sets himself to show that that position and deference had been secured by advantages and events which con

1 Hooker must have been thoroughly familiar with the great Preface to Calvin's Institutes, reckoned "as one "of the three most famous Prefaces "which the world has ever seen"; and there is a certain likeness between Calvin's anxiety to get a fair

hearing with Francis I and Hooker's anxiety to clear the ground for the cause which he had to maintain. Cf. Dyer, Life of John Calvin, p. 33. Espin, Critical Essays, p. 182.

2 Preface, ch. 1. § 2.

stituted no evidence of truth or right. In his brilliant sketch of Calvin's work at Geneva', though he touches incidentally many other points of interest, this is his especial aim. He shows how the Discipline met a great need at a momentous crisis; how strong and able and masterly and indefatigable and uncompromising a man its founder was; how the growth of his fame in all parts and the course of events at Geneva tended to enhance his power and consolidate his work; how his commanding influence and his rightful authority as a teacher masked the lack of Scriptural warrant for the system he maintained; and how the range of its acceptance spread with the advance of his prestige. Thus it was that the Discipline had come to hold its impressive dignity and sway among men, and to be so enthroned that there seemed audacity in asking for its credentials. But in truth such asking was reasonable enough; for the causes which had thus exalted the Discipline involved no evidence of its Scriptural authority, its divine origin, its right to supremacy; and high as it stood, it might still be found ill-grounded and indefensible.

The question of its truth, then, should be investigated fearlessly. But here a second source of presumption against his own cause and in favour of the Puritans seems to occur to Hooker's mind. It is characteristic of him to think respectfully of human reason in all its exercises and manifestations; and it is no light matter to him to see that a great multitude of men in England profess themselves convinced that the Puritans are right. The Discipline has not only acquired that strong mastery at Geneva, and that wide influence through Europe of which Hooker has been giving an account; it has also secured the hearty approval of a vast number of English men and women. But two considerations check that approval from having the logical significance which might otherwise be claimed for it. The first is that the matter of the controversy is such as to require special training and knowledge for a right judgement, so that the opinion of the uninformed multitude of men has little weight in it. The second-which is treated more fully-is that the method followed in the convincing of this multitude is not such as to accredit their resulting conviction. Hooker's sketch of this method is singularly shrewd and vivid. It was a method which reversed the proper course of

1 Preface, ch. II.

proof; for by unproved general statements affection was won for the conclusion; and then this affection served to cover the inadequacy of the premisses. The multitude were constantly informed of the faults of those who were set over them (the impression of superior integrity in those who thus informed them naturally rising in their minds); then all these faults were ascribed to the established order of Church government (the impression of wisdom thus enhancing that of integrity); then the Holy Discipline was proposed "as the only sovereign remedy of all evils"; then men's minds were so preoccupied and predisposed that they might read the principles of the Discipline into passages of the Scripture where plain folk saw nothing of the sort, and they were persuaded to regard this their peculiar discernment as a divine illumination, to think of this illumination as sealing and proving them to be God's children, and therefore to cherish, deepen, and display it in all ways, and particularly by the exercise of a generous bounty towards their teachers. The general inducements which have been thus enumerated were brought to bear with especial effect on women, whose manifold aptness to favour and promote such a movement as that of the Puritans is analyzed in a passage of curious penetration—a passage which has been already cited. Women and men alike were settled imperturbably in their allegiance to the cause by a certain invincible satisfaction with their own opinions; and a deeper determination came with the experience of repressive measures, which were regarded as persecution and as conferring the dignity and authority of martyrdom.

Thus it was that the affection of the multitude had been drawn to the Puritans; and such affection hid from untrained, uninformed minds the slightness of the Scriptural or reasonable ground on which the Puritan discipline rested. It should not be forgotten that simple people often had far better causes than any which Hooker here mentions for yielding their affection to Puritanism— causes rising from the indolence and ignorance and inability of their own clergy, the earnestness and sincerity of many among the new teachers, the power of any fragment of truth that is heartily believed and taught. But even these causes do not materially traverse the inference for the sake of which Hooker has dwelt on the inappropriate and illogical methods by which crowds of English people had been got to imagine themselves

convinced that to resist the Holy Discipline was to set aside the will of God and the voice of Scripture. For all that he is here concerned to show is that that conviction had not been logically brought about, and that therefore its wide prevalence yielded no solid presumption of its truth, and no warrant for prejudging the great questions of the controversy.

But Hooker could not fail to see that besides the broad mass of uninstructed and illogical opinion there was a strong force of weightier judgement on the side of the Discipline. His own conflict with Travers, his prolonged difficulty with Travers' adherents in the educated society of the Temple, his knowledge of Cartwright's works, were points at which he had personally come into contact with the Puritanism of learned men; and there could be no doubt that Puritanism had found among the learned many ardent friends-friends whose conspicuous support might create in favour of the cause a more thoughtful presumption than that which rose from its mere popularity. Hooker's plea to bar or suspend this presumption rests on a brief sketch and criticism of the three main groups of arguments,- from Scripture, from antiquity, from contemporary authority,-adduced by educated men in maintenance of the Discipline. His main point against the arguments from Scripture is that if Scripture inculcates the Discipline it is very strange that no one has ever found it out before. The arguments from antiquity are somewhat more fully dealt with. The Puritans cited antiquity; but "for fashion's sake only," with no real reliance on it, with no trust in anything later than

the apostolic age. "Back to the Apostles" was the cry both of lay-reformers, who had reasons of their own for wishing to recall the Church to apostolic poverty, and of clerical reformers, who only wished for apostolic polity. But there was little use or sense in this appeal to the pattern of the apostolic polity, since that polity was imperfectly known, and so far as it was known, might not be perfectly applicable to altered times, and certainly in some important matters showed no affinity with the Puritan scheme; while those who appealed to it had their own reserves and suspicions as to the unsullied purity of the Church even in the apostolic age. Lastly, the appeal was made to the authority of learned writers who had upheld the Discipline. It was, according to Hooker, a somewhat indiscriminate appeal to