PREFACE IN 1887 the Delegates of the University Press offered to entrust to me the preparation of a separate Edition of the Fifth Book of Hooker's Treatise of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. It had been hoped that Dean Church would add to his admirable edition of the First Book, and to his revision of Mr. Keble's great work, this further help in the study of Hooker. It was when he judged it necessary to resign the task that it passed into my hands; and this volume contains such partial fulfilment as I have been able to give to an undertaking formally made in 1888. At that time I was lecturing on Hooker: a few of the pages here printed were written for the lectures: and I thought the work I had undertaken would be finished in two or three years. I should exceed even the licence enjoyed by egotism in a Preface if I tried to tell the hindrances or own the faults which have nearly stretched the two or three years into twelve. I will only say that there have been hindrances as well as faults: and that I think the misfortune of having to lay one's task aside, and let it lie untouched, for weeks and months of business far removed from it, can only be realized through experience. The references that seemed securely luminous, the plans one thought one had thought out, the fragments that had promised to cohere, relapse into obscurity and confusion: time after time one has almost to start afresh, with a dwindling capacity for freshness, and with a growing dread of blunders: since it is hard to make sure of thoroughness and accuracy where work is intermittent and lacks the long spells of thought and study that have the best chance |