HOOKER'S ECCLESIASTICAL

POLITY (p. 111).

THE advocates of a presbyterian church had always thought it sufficient to prove that it was conformable to the apostolical scheme as deduced merely from the Scriptures. A pious reverence for the sacred writings, which they made almost their exclusive study, had degenerated into very narrow views on the great themes of natural religion and the moral law, as deducible from reason and sentiment. These, as most of the various families of their descendants continue to do, they greatly slighted, or even treated as the mere chimeras of heathen philosophy. If they looked to the Mosaic law as the standard of criminal jurisprudence, if they sought precedents from Scripture for all matters of temporal policy, much more would they deem the practice of the Apostles an unerring and immutable rule for the discipline of the Christian church.

To en

counter these adversaries, Hooker took a far more original course than the ordinary controvertists, who fought their battles with conflicting interpretations of Scriptural texts or passages from the fathers. He inquired into the nature and foundation of law itself, as the rule of operation to all created beings, yielding thereto obedience by unconscious necessity, or sensitive appetite, or reasonable choice; reviewing especially those laws that regulate human agency, as they arise out of moral relations, common to our species, or he institutions of political societies, or the intercommunity of independent nations; and having thoroughly established the fundamental distinction between laws natural and positive, eternal and temporary, immutable and variable, he came with all this strength of moral philosophy to discriminate by the same criterion the various rules and precepts contained in the Scriptures. It was a kind of maxim among the puritans that Scripture was so much the exclusive rule of human actions that whatever,, in matters at least concerning religion, could not be found to have its authority, was unlawful. Hooker devoted the whole second book of

his work to the refutation of this principle. He proceeded afterwards to attack its application more particularly to the episcopal scheme of church government, and to the various ceremonies or usages which those sectaries treated as either absolutely superstitious, or at least as impositions without authority. It was maintained by this great writer, not only that ritual observances are variable according to the discretion of ecclesiastical rulers, but that no certain form of polity is set down in Scripture as generally indispensable for a Christian church. Far, however, from conceding to his antagonists the fact which they assumed, he contended for episcopacy as an apostolical institution, and always preferable, when circumstances would allow its preservation, to the more democratical model of the Calvinistic congregations. "If we did seek," he says, "to maintain that which most advantageth our own cause, the very best way for us and the strongest against them were to hold, even as they do, that in Scripture there must needs be found some particular form of church polity which God hath instituted, and which for that very cause belongeth to all churches at all times. But with any such partial eye to respect ourselves, and by cunning to make those things seem the truest which are the fittest to serve our purpose, is a thing which we neither like nor mean to follow."

The richness of Hooker's eloquence is chiefly displayed in his first book; beyond which, perhaps, few who want a taste for ecclesiastical reading are likely to proceed. The second and third, however, though less brilliant, are not inferior in force and comprehensiveness of reasoning. The eighth and last returns to the subject of civil government, and expands, with remarkable liberality, the principles he had laid down as to its nature in the first book. Those that intervene are mostly confined to a more minute discussion of the questions mooted between the church and puritans; and in these, as far as I have looked into them, though Hooker's argument is always vigorous and logical, and he seems to be exen.pt from that abusive insolence

respect of language, the three posthumous books, partly from having never received the author's last touches, and partly, perhaps, from his weariness of the labour, are beyond comparison less elegantly written than the preceding.

The better parts of the Ecclesiastical Polity bear a resemblance to the philosophical writings of antiquity, in their defects as well as their excellences. Hooker is often too vague in the use of general terms, too inconsiderate in the admission of principles, too apt to acquiesce in the scholastic pseudo-philosophy, and, indeed, in all received tenets; he is comprehensive rather than sagacious, and more fitted to sift the truth from the stores of accumulated learning than to seize it by an original impulse of his own mind; somewhat also impeded, like many other great men of that and the succeening century, by too much acquaintance with books, and too much deference for their authors. It may be justly objected to some passages that they elevate ecclesiastical authority, even in matters of belief, with an exaggeration not easily reconciled to the protestant right of private - judgment, and even of dangerous consequence in those times; as when he inclines to give a decisive voice in theological controversies to general councils; not, indeed, on the principles of the church of Rome, but on such as must end in the same conclusion, the high probability that the aggregate judgment of many grave and learned men should be well founded.* Nor

would it be difficult to point out several other subjects, such as religious toleration, as to which he did not emancipate himself from the trammels of prejudice. But, whatever may be the imperlections of his Ecclesiastical Polity, they are far more than compensated by its eloquence and its reasoning, and above all by that deep pervading sense of the relation between man and his Creator, as the groundwork of all eternal law, which rendered the first book of this work a rampart, on the one hand, against the puritan school who shunned the light of nature as a deceitful meteor; and, on the other, against that immoral philosophy which, displayed in the dark precepts of Machiavel, or lurking in the desultory sallies of Montaigne, and not always rejected by writers of more apparent seriousness, threatened to destroy the sense of intrinsic distinctions in the quality of actions, and to convert the maxims of state-craft and dissembling policy into the rule of life and manners.

Nothing, perhaps, is more striking to a reader of the Ecclesiastical Polity than the constant and even excessive predilection of Hooker for those liberal principles of civil government which are sometimes so just and always so attractive. Upon these subjects his theory absolutely coincides with that of Locke. The origin of government, both in right and in fact, he explicitly derives from a primary contract; "without which consent there were no reason that one should take upon him to be lord or judge over another; because, although there be, according to the opinion of some very great and judicious men, a kind of natural right in the noble, wise, and virtuous, to govern them which are of servile disposition, nevertheless, for mani

festation of this their right, and men's more peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them who are to be governed seemeth necessary." "The lawful power," he observes elsewhere, "of making laws to command whole politic societies of men, belongeth so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince or potentate of what kind soever upon earth to exercise the same of himself, and not either by express commission immediately and personally received from God, or else by authority received at first from their consent upon whose persons they impose laws, it is no better than mere tyranny. Laws they are not, therefore, which public approbation hath not made so. But approbation not only they give, who personally declare their assent by voice, sign, or act; but also when others do it in their names, by right originally, at the least, derived from them. As in parliaments, councils, and the like assemblies, although we be not personally ourselves present, notwithstanding our assent is by reason of other agents there in our behalf. And what we do by others, no reason bu that it should stand as our deed, no less effectually to bind us than if ourselves had done it in person." And in another place still more peremptorily: "Of this thing no man doubteth, namely, that in all societies, companies, and corporations, what severally each shall be bound unio, it must be with all their assents ratified. Against all equity it were that a man should suffer detriment at the hands of men for not observing that which he never did either by himself or others mediately or immediately agree unto."

These notions respecting the basis of political society, so far unlike what prevailed among the next generation of churchmen, are chiefly developed and dwelt upon in Hooker's concluding book, the eighth; and gave rise to a rumour, very sedulously propagated soon after the time of its publication, and still sometimes repeated, that the posthumous portion of his work had been interpolated or altered by the puritans. For this surmise, however, I am persuaded that there is no foundation. The three latter books are doubtless imperfect, and it is possible that verbal changes may have been made by their transcribers or editors; but the testimony that has been brought forward to throw a doubt over their authenticity consists in those vague and self-contradictory stories which gossiping compilers of literary anecdote can easily accumulate; while the intrinsic

evidence arising from the work itself, on which in this branch of criticism I am apt chiefly to rely, seems altogether to repel every suspicion. For not only the principles of civil government, presented in a more expanded form by Hooker in the eighth book, are precisely what he laid down in the first; but there is a peculiar chain of consecutive reasoning running through it, wherein it would be difficult to point out any passages that could be rejected without dismembering the context. It was his business in this part of the Ecclesiastical Polity to vindicate the queen's supremacy over the church; and this he has done by identifying the church with the commonwealth; no one, according to him, being a member of the one who was not also a member of the other. But as the constitution of the Christian church, so far as the laity partook in its government, by choice of pastors or otherwise, was undeniably democratical, he laboured to show, through the medium of the original compact of civil society, that the sovereign had received this, as well as all other powers, at the hands of the people. "Laws being made among us," he affirms, not by any of us so taken or interpreted as if they did receive their force from power which the prince doth communicate unto the parliament, or unto any other court under him, but from power which the whole body of the realm being naturally possessed with hath by free and deliberate assent derived unto him that ruleth over them so far forth as hath been declared; so that our laws made concerning religion do take originally their essence from the power of the whole realm and church of England."

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In this system of Hooker and Locke, for it will be obvious to the reader that their principles were the same, there is much, if I am not mistaken, to disapprove. That no man can be justly bound by laws which his own assent has not ratified appears to me a position incompatible with the existence of society in its literal sense, or illusory in the sophistical interpretations by which it is usual to evade its meaning. It will be more satisfactory and important to remark the views which this great writer entertained of our own constitution, to which he frequently and fearlessly appeals, as the standing illustration of a government restrained by law. "I cannot choose," he says, but commend highly their wisdom, by whom the foundation of the commonwealth hath been laid; wherein,

though no manner of person or cause be unsubject unto the king's power, yet so is the power of the king over all, and in all, limited, that unto all his proceedings the law itself is a rule. The axioms of our regal government are these: 'Lex facit regem'-the king's grant of any favour made contrary to the law is void;- Rex nihil potest nisi quod jure potest '-what power the king hath he hath it by law: the bounds and limits of it are known, the entire community giveth general order by law how all things publicly are to be done; and the king as the head thereof, the highest in authority over all, causeth, according to the same law, every particular to be framed and ordered thereby. The whole body politic maketh laws, which laws give power unto the king; and the king having bound himself to use according to law that power, it so falleth out that the execution of the one is accomplished by the other." These doctrines of limited monarchy recur perpetually in the eighth book; and though Hooker, as may be supposed, does not enter upon the perilous question of resistance, and even intimates that he does not see how the people can limit the extent of power once granted, unless where it escheats to them, yet he positively lays it down that usurpers of power, that is, lawful rulers arrogating more than the law gives to them, cannot in conscience bind any man to obedience.

It would, perhaps, have been a deviation from my subject to enlarge so much on these political principles in a writer of

any later age, when they had been openly sustained in the councils of the nation. But as the reigns of the Tudor family were so inauspicious to liberty that some have been apt to imagine its recollect on to have been almost effaced, it becomes of more importance to show that absolute monarchy was, in the eyes of so eminent an author as Hooker, both pernicious in itself and contrary to the fundamental laws of the English commonwealth. Nor would such sentiments, we may surely presume, have been avowed by a man of singular humility, and whom we might charge with somewhat of an excessive deference to authority, unless they had obtained more currency, both among divines and lawyers, than the complaisance of courtiers in these two professions might lead us to conclude; Hooker being not prone to deal in paradoxes, nor to borrow from his adversaries that sturdy republicanism of the school of Geneva which had been their scandal. I cannot. indeed, but suspect that his whig principler in the last book are announced with a temerity that would have startled his superiors; and that its authenticity, however called in question, has been better preserved by the circumstance of a posthumous publication than if he had lived to give it to the world. Whitgift would probably have induced him to suppress a few passages incompatible with the servile theories already in vogue. It is far more usual that an author's genuine sentiments are perverted by means of his friends and patrons than of his adversaries.