On the decease of Dr. Spenser, the manuscripts of Hooker were left as “a precious legacy” to Dr. King, bishop of London, in 1611. They were resigned with the most painful reluctance by the speculative and ingenious student to whom they had been so long entrusted, that he looked on them with a parental eye, having transcribed them and put many things together according to his idea of the system of Hooker.[3] During the time the manuscripts reposed in the care of the bishop of London, an edition of the five books of the “Ecclesiastical Polity,” with some tractates and sermons, was published in 1617;[4] had Dr. King thought that these manuscripts were in a state fitted for publication, he would have doubtless completed that edition. He died in 1621, and the manuscripts were claimed by Archbishop Abbot for the Lambeth library.
Again, in 1632, the five undoubted genuine books were reprinted. Laud, then archbishop of Canterbury, attracted probably by this edition, examined the papers—he was startled by some antagonist principles, and left the phantom to sleep in its darkness; whether some doctrines which broadly inculcate jure divino were touches from the Lambeth quarter, or whether the interpolating hand of some presbyter had insidiously turned aside the weapon, the conflicting opinions could not be those of the judicious Hooker.
But their fate and their perils had not yet terminated; the episcopalian walls of Lambeth were no longer an asylum, when the manuscripts of Hooker were to be grasped by the searching hands and heads of Prynne and Hugh Peters, by a vote of the Commons! At this critical period the sixth and eighth books were given to the world, announced as “a work long expected, and now published according to the most authentique copies.” We are told of six transcripts with which this edition was collated. It is perplexing to understand when these copies got forth, and how they were all alike deficient in the seventh book, which the setter forth of this edition declares to be irrecoverable. After the Restoration, Dr. Gauden made an edition of Hooker; in the dedication to the king he offers the work as “now augmented and I hope completed, with the three last books, so much desired and so long concealed.” This remarkable expression indicates some doubt whether he possessed the perfect copies, nor does he inform us of the manner in which he had recovered the lost seventh book. The recent able editor of the works of Hooker favours its genuineness by internal evidence, notwithstanding it bears marks of hasty writing; but he irresistibly proves that the sixth book is wholly lost, that which is named the sixth being never designed as a part of the “Ecclesiastical Polity.”
Both the great parties are justly entitled to suspect one another; a helping hand was prompt to twist the nose of wax to their favourite shape; and the transcripts had always omissions, and we may add, commissions. Some copies of the concluding book asserted that “Princes on earth are only accountable to Heaven,” while others read “to the people.” We perceive the facility of such slight emendations, and may be astonished at their consequences; but we need not question the hands which furnished the various readings. When we recollect the magnificent entrance into the work, we must smile at the inconclusive conclusion, the small issue from so vast an edifice. “Too rigorous it were that the breach of human law should be held a deadly sin. A mean there is between extremities, if so be that we can find it out.” Never was the juste milieu suggested with such hopeless diffidence. Such was not the tone, nor could be the words, of our eloquent and impressive Hooker. From the first conception of his system, his comprehensive intellect had surveyed all its parts, and the intellectual architecture was completed before the edifice was constructed. This admirable secret in the labour of a single work, on which many years were to be consumed, our author has himself revealed to us; a secret which may be a lesson. “I have endeavoured that every former part might give strength unto all that follow, and every latter bring some light unto all before; so that if the judgments of men do but hold themselves in suspense, as touching the first more general meditations, till in order they have perused the rest that ensue, what may seem dark at the first will afterwards be found more plain, even as the latter particular decisions will appear, I doubt not, more strong, when the other have been read before.”[5] Here we have an allusion to a noble termination of his system.
This great work of Hooker strictly is theological, but here it is considered simply as a work of literature and philosophy. The first book lays open the foundations of law and order, to escape from “the mother of confusion which breedeth destruction. The lowest must be knit to the highest.” We may read this first book as we read the reflections of Burke on the French revolution; where what is peculiar, or partial, or erroneous in the writer does not interfere with the general principles of the more profound views of human policy. And it is remarkable that during the anarchical misrule of France, when all governments seemed alike unstable, some one who had not wholly lost his senses among those raving politicians, published separately this first book of Ecclesiastical Polity; a timely admonition, however, alas! timeless! I was not surprised to find classed among “Legal Bibliography” the works of Hooker.
The fate of those controversies which in reality admit of no argument, is singularly exemplified in the history of this great work. These are the controversies where the parties apparently going the same course, and intent on the same object, but impelled by opposite principles, can never unite; like two parallel lines, they may run on together, but remain at the same distance, though they should extend themselves to infinity. Opposite propositions are assigned by each party, or from the same premises are educed opposite inferences. In the present case both parties inquired after a model for church-government; there was none! Apostolical Christianity had hardly left the old synagogue. Hooker therefore asserted that the form of church-government was merely a human institution regulated by laws; and that laws were not made for private men to dispute, but to obey. The nonconformist urged the Protestant right of private judgment and a satisfied conscience. Hooker, alarmed at this irruption of schisms, to maintain established authority, or rather supremacy, was driven to take refuge in the very argument which the Romanist used with the Protestant.
The elaborate preface of Hooker is a tract of itself; it is the secret history of nonconformity, and of the fiery Calvin. Yet was it from positions here laid down that James the Second declared that it was one of the two books which sent him back to the fold of Rome. It is not therefore surprising that when a part was eagerly translated by an English Romanist to his Holiness, who had declared that “he had never met with an English book whose writer deserved the name of an author!”—so low then stood our literature in the eyes of the foreigner,—that the Pope perceived nothing anti-papal in the eloquent advocate of established authority, while he was deeply struck at the profundity of the genius of “a poor obscure English priest;” and the bishop of Rome exclaimed, “There is no learning that this man has not searched into; nothing too hard for his understanding, and his books will get reverence by age.” Our James the First, who it must be allowed was no ordinary judge of polemics, on his arrival in England inquired after Hooker, and was informed that his recent death had been deeply lamented by the queen. “And I receive it with no less sorrow,” observed the new English monarch, “for I have received more satisfaction in reading a leaf in Mr. Hooker than I have had in large treatises by many of the learned: many others write well, but yet in the next age they will be forgotten.”
The attestations of his Holiness and our James the First, to some of my readers, may appear very suspicious. They are, however, prophetic; and this is an evidence that the “Ecclesiastical Polity” must contain principles more deeply important than those which might more particularly have been grateful to these regal critics. Our sage, it is true, has not escaped from a severer scrutiny, and has been taxed as “too apt to acquiesce in all ancient tenets.” What was transitory, or what was partial, in this great work, may be subtracted without injury to its excellence or its value. Hooker has written what posterity reads. The spirit of a later age, progressive in ameliorating the imperfect condition of all human institutions, must often return to pause over the first book of “Ecclesiastical Polity,” where the master-genius has laid the foundations and searched into the nature of all laws whatever. Hooker is the first vernacular writer whose classical pen harmonised a numerous prose. While his earnest eloquence, freed from all scholastic pedantry, assumed a style stately in its structure, his gentle spirit sometimes flows into natural humour, lovely in the freshness of its simplicity.
[1] When our literary history was only partially cultivated, the readers of Hooker were often disturbed amidst the profound reasonings of “The Ecclesiastical Polity,” by frequent references to volumes and pages of T. C. The editors of Hooker had thrown no light on these mysterious initials. Contemporaries are not apt to mortify themselves by recollecting that what is familiar to them may be forgotten by the succeeding age. Sir John Hawkins, a literary antiquary, drew up a memoir which explains these initials as those of Thomas Cartwright, and has correctly arranged the numerous tracts of the whole controversy. But Hawkins having consigned this accurate catalogue to “The Antiquarian Repertory,” it could be little known; and Beloe, in his “Anecdotes of Literature,” vol. i., transcribing the entire memoir of Hawkins, verbatim, without the slightest acknowledgment, obtains a credit for original research. Beloe is referred to for this authentic information by Burnet, in his “Specimens of English Prose-Writers.”