16. =Whitgift and Hooker.=--The Church of England would certainly not have sustained itself against the Puritans unless it had found a champion of a higher order than Whitgift. Whitgift maintained its organisation, but he did no more. Cranmer, at the beginning of the Reformation, had declared the Bible as interpreted by the writers of the first six centuries to be the test of doctrine, but this assertion had been met during the greater part of Elizabeth's reign, on the one hand by the Catholics, who asserted that the Church of the first six centuries differed much from the Church of England of their day, and on the other hand by the Puritans, who asserted that the testimony of the first six centuries was irrelevant, and that the Bible alone was to be consulted. Whitgift had called both parties to obedience, on the ground that they ought to submit to the queen in indifferent matters. Hooker in the opening of his _Ecclesiastical Polity_ called the Puritans to peace. "This unhappy controversy," he declared, "about the received ceremonies and discipline of the Church of England, which hath so long time withdrawn so many of her ministers from their principal work and employed their studies in contentious oppositions, hath, by the unnatural growth and dangerous fruits thereof, made known to the world that it never received blessing from the Father of peace." Hooker's teaching was distinguished by the importance which he assigned to 'law,' as against the blind acceptance of Papal decisions on the one side and against the Puritan reverence for the letter of the scriptures on the other. The Puritans were wrong, as he taught, not because they disobeyed the queen, but because they did not recognise that God revealed Himself in the natural laws of the world as well as in the letter of Scripture. "Of law," he wrote, "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 as not exempted from her power: both angels and men and creatures of what condition soever--though each in different sort and manner, yet all with universal consent--admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." It was therefore unnecessary, according to Hooker's teaching, to defend certain usages on the ground of their sanction by tradition or by Papal authority, as it was unreasonable to attack them on the ground that they were not mentioned in Scripture. It was sufficient that they were fitting expressions of the feelings of reverence which had been implanted by God in human nature itself. [Illustration: Coaches in the reign of Elizabeth: from _Archæologia_.]