The sixth book, included in the part which issued from the press in 1651, is, according to the title, a disquisition upon ecclesiastical power and the question of lay eldership; but the reader does not proceed many pages before he finds the disquisition going off in a tangent, from the subject of Church jurisdiction, to pursue inquiries relative to the Popish dogmas of confession and penance. Such a method of composition is so unlike that of “the judicious Hooker,” that there can be no doubt his last accomplished Editor is right in concluding, that we have here some compositions from the author’s pen not intended for insertion in the _Ecclesiastical Polity_. Notes remain showing that he had drawn up a plan for this department of his task, which would have methodically and pertinently disposed of it, but no MS. has been discovered filling up the carefully-digested outline. It has been suspected that the Puritan relatives of the Church champion in Elizabeth’s reign were guilty of foul play in this matter, and that after destroying most of the genuine copy, they vamped up the mutilated remainder with dissertations selected from other papers. Such a thing may be possible, but certainly it is not proved. I can find no satisfactory positive evidence in support of the suspicion,[448] and it is quite unaccountable how, if the Puritan manglers of his MSS. had made away with what related to lay eldership, they should leave in existence a long Essay, containing a lengthened defence of Episcopal order. This defence, which appeared in 1662, under the Editorship of Gauden, who does not say where he obtained it, presents abundant internal proof of its genuineness, showing nevertheless the absence of that careful revision and correction, which the Author would have bestowed, had he lived to complete his own publication. It forms the seventh book. In the fourth and fifth chapters there is a discussion of the main point, “whence it hath grown that the Church is governed by Bishops.” In the fifth, Hooker says:--