very convinced, very earnest, and also very good. The _Ecclesiastical Polity_ is not chiefly valuable as a piece of reasoning. It has for one thing not reached us complete. The first four books, which must have been begun while he was at the Temple, were published in 1594. The long fifth book appeared in 1597. The three, which make up the total number of eight, were left unfinished at his death, and passed into careless, if not unfaithful, hands. But the five undoubted books were enough to do Hooker’s work for the Church of England, and they did not do it by presenting his readers with such a closely reasoned and compact system as they might have found in the _Institutions_ of Calvin. Englishmen have never cared much for consistency of system. It was enough for them that Hooker justified usages, ceremonies, and forms of Church government to which they were accustomed, against the “Disciplinarians” who condemned them for wanting the express authority of the New Testament, by proving that they had prevailed among pious men of former times, were in themselves innocent, and could therefore be accepted by sincere Christians as convenient, pious, and of good example, even if they had no “divine right,” when they were imposed by authority. In substance this was no new doctrine. Her Majesty in Council had been saying as much for years, and so had Whitgift and Bridges, and all the defenders of the Establishment. But what they did by dry injunction or laboured scholastic argument, Hooker did by persuasion, by pathos, and by noble rhetoric. The criticism that he sometimes gives eloquence where he ought to give argument, does not go far when the purpose of his book is allowed for. It was not by logic that God elected to save His Church in former centuries, nor yet in the sixteenth. In Hooker’s case, as fully as in the case of any poet, literature vindicated itself. The beauty of the style, always essentially pure English in spite of an occasional Latin turn of the sentence, is the great merit of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_. The famous eloquent passages arise naturally because they always correspond to the greater pathos, or sanctity, or the deeper passion of that part of his subject which he is handling at the moment. The Englishman stood between the Calvinist on the one hand and the Roman Catholic on the other, both appealing to him on religious grounds. There was a real danger that his own Church would find nothing to tell him except that decency was decent, that he had better not trouble himself about debatable matters he would never understand, and that he must obey the Queen. If this was all it could find to say, Englishmen who were concerned about religion--the majority of thinking men, whether ignorant or learned--would assuredly have gone either to Geneva or to Rome, while the unthinking mass alone would have remained to the Church. In that case it would have gone down for ever in the Civil War. From that fate it was saved by Hooker. FOOTNOTES: