Hooker, RICHARD, the greatest of English philosophical theologians, was born in or near the city of Exeter about the end of March 1554. At an early age he showed a 'quick apprehension of many perplexit parts of learning,' and through the influence of his uncle, John Hooker, or Vowel (1525-1601), chamberlain of the city, was brought under the notice of Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, and sent, partly at his expense, to his own college, that of Corpus Christi, Oxford, where Walton tells us he was admitted a clerk in 1567. After his patron's death in 1571 he was befriended by Sandys, Bishop of London, who committed his son Edwin to his care. Another pupil was George Cranmer, grand-nephew of the archbishop, and both became famous men, and remained his constant friends in later life. In his nineteenth year Hooker became scholar of his college, graduated M.A. in 1577, and was soon after admitted Fellow. His progress in learning is seen by his intimacy with Henry Saville, and by his being chosen in 1579, in the illness of the Hebrew professor, to read the lecture. Three months later Walton tells us that he was for a short time expelled by the vice-president for some forgotten college quarrel, along with his tutor and friend, Dr John Rainolds, but soon after restored. After about three years' residence he took orders, and ere long was appointed to preach at St Paul's Cross. This necessity appears to have been a severe ordeal to his modest nature, the more so that the weather proved very unfavourable for his journey; but, says Walton, 'a warm bed, and rest, and drink proper for a cold, given him' by Mrs Churchman [the Shunamite at whose house the preachers were lodged], and her diligent attendance added unto it, enabled him to perform the office of the day, which was in or about the year 1581.' But the scheming widow's kindness proved too much for the simple-minded scholar. He was led into a marriage with her daughter Joan, who brought him neither beauty nor portion, was 'clownish and silly' in Wood's phrase, and, what was worse, proved both a shrew and a scold. Every reader knows Walton's account of the visit of Sandys and Cranmer to their old master at his living of Drayton-Beauchamp, in
Buckinghamshire, whither he had retired. They found him tending the sheep, his Horace in his hand, and not long after they reached the house Richard was called from their company to rock the cradle. Soon after this Hooker was transferred, at the recommendation of Archbishop Sandys, and through the influence of Whitgift, to the Mastership of the Temple, against a strong effort made to promote the afternoon reader Travers, a prominent Puritan leader. The union of the colleagues, as might have been expected, was not a happy one. Travers was the more popular preacher, if the less profound thinker, and Fuller tells us that 'the congregation in the Temple ebbed in the forenoon and flowed in the afternoon.' The sermons of Travers soon became attacks upon what he considered the latitudinarianism and errors of Hooker, and, indeed, as Fuller says pointedly elsewhere, 'the pulpit spake pure Canterbury in the morning, and Gencva in the afternoon,' a state of matters that Whitgift soon put an end to by silencing Travers. The fiery Puritan appealed to the Council with a series of set charges against Hooker's doctrine, and Hooker answered him with masterly conclusiveness and temperance. But having been drawn into this personal controversy against his inclination, he felt it to be his duty to set forth the larger question of the real fundamental basis of all church government, and to this end desired Whitgift to remove him to some quiet living, 'where I might behold God's blessing spring out of my mother earth, and eat my own bread without oppositions.' Accordingly, in 1591 he accepted the living of Boscombe, six miles from Salisbury, becoming also sub-dean and prebendary of Sarum; and here he finished four of the proposed eight books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which were, however, not published till 1594 in a small closely-printed folio. The year after he removed to the living of Bishopborne, three miles from Canterbury, where he remained till his death, unconscious of his growing fame, a parish priest of unexampled humility and devotedness. His fifth book appeared in 1597, but the author did not live to complete his work, dying about the end of the year 1600, of a cold caught in a passage by water betwixt London and Gravesend. Almost his last words were upon the 'blessed obedience and order of the angels, without which peace could not be in heaven, and, oh that it might be so on earth!' He was buried in his own church, and left his widow and four daughters behind him. Sir William Cowper, great-grandfather of the first Earl Cowper, built him a monument in Borne church, and in a poetical epitaph of his own composition applies to Hooker the famous term judicious, which will never be dissociated from his name.
At the time of his death the last three books were believed to be nearly complete, but if so, they were soon lost, the blame of which was laid, apparently with some justice, upon Hooker's widow and her Puritan relatives, who were supposed to abhor the theology contained in them. Some months after his death the rough drafts of the completed books that remained were reluctantly given up to the archbishop, and by him entrusted to Hooker's friend, Dr Spenser, to prepare for publication. The latter reprinted the first five books in 1604, but his further labours were interrupted, and after his appointment to be president of Corpus (1607), he entrusted the papers for transcription to a young scholar named Henry Jackson, who issued some of the Sermons (1612-14). But Spenser died in 1614, bequeathing the papers 'as a precious legacy' to Dr King, Bishop of London. Soon after his death in 1621 they were claimed by Abbot for Lambeth Library, where they remained till Land's commitment for high-treason, when the library was handed over first to the custody of Prynne, next of Hugh Peters. Thereafter the fate of the original papers is unknown. In 1648, as Wood tells us, but more likely in 1651, the sixth and eighth books were published at London, described as 'according to the most authentique copies,' and, indeed, we have good grounds for believing that this text is substantially genuine, being to a certain extent guaranteed to us by Bishop Andrewes and Archbishop Ussher. But, unfortunately, as Keble points out, in its present form the sixth book is an entire deviation from its subject, which should have been, according to the plan of the whole treatise, a discussion of the claim of lay elders to a share in church government, whereas about nineteen-twentieths of the whole is taken up with a series of dissertations on Primitive and Romish penance, in their several parts, confession, satisfaction, absolution. Now Hooker's discussion of lay elders would be just the part of his work most displeasing to the Puritans of his time, and the presumption is perfectly reasonable that this part of the original work was destroyed. At the same time, as Keble points out, the sixth book bears every mark of being Hooker's work, though it is not in its place as a part of the Ecclesiastical Polity. The seventh and eighth books, however, bear every mark of being substantially genuine; the former appeared first in 1662, in the new edition of Hooker issued by Gauden, the soi-disant author of the Eikon Basilike, and not entirely a reassuring editor. The famous Life by Walton was written for a second edition, issued in 1666, in order to correct the inaccuracies in the life provided by Gauden. Walton's account of the saintly and simple-minded theologian is one of the finest pictures in the whole range of English biography, but it should be remembered that in this case he was not sketching from life, and Keble pointed out that the super-simplicity and excessive meekness and temperance attributed to him harmonise but indifferently with the masterly intellect, the incisive irony, and keen humour that were in Hooker. All earlier editions of Hooker's works were superseded by that of Keble, published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1836, containing also Walton's Life and an exhaustive preface from his own pen. Of this work the 7th edition, revised by Dean Church and Canon Paget, was issued in three volumes in 1888. Of the first book alone there is an edition, with an admirable introduction and notes, by Dean Church (1868).
Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is the earliest great philosophical work written in the English tongue, and is a noble monument of massive prose no less than of profound thought and masterly logic. The style is neither artificial nor involved, but as well ordered and well sustained throughout as the thinking itself, while it is capable of a grave and modulated rhythm that rises at times into the region of serene yet impassioned eloquence. As a thinker he is Judicious in the highest sense of the word, and his work forms a broad and enduring foundation adequate for the church of a great nation. Its fundamental idea is that of the unity and all-embracing nature of law, considered as the manifestation and development of the divine order of the universe. The paramount law which dominates the universe is itself but the outward expression of the government of God, and is ever identical with calm and temperate reason. Reason is the criterion by which even revelation is to be distinguished as to what is eternal and immutable and what is variable according to the necessities of expediency. There is a broad distinction between natural and supernatural law, but both supplement and complete each other, both have their place in the interpretation of the ways of God to man. Authority must ever be allowed great weight in the government of the world, but it must ever be kept in harmony and conformity with reason. A necessity of polity may be held in all churches and governments without holding any one fixed form to be necessary, for these forms are not natural but positive, and therefore alterable and subject to expediency as interpreted by temperate reason. But the eternal facts of morality are necessary and self-evident postulates of the divine government of the world, and thus rest on verities that cannot be shaken. The whole furnishes a conclusive answer to the Puritan extreme and exaggeration of the central position of Protestantism, the making of Scripture the sole guide of human conduct, which rests and depends rather on the concurrence and co-operation of all the various sources of knowledge that Divine Providence has provided for man. It is not too much to say that it is mainly to Hooker's work that Anglican theology owes the tone and the direction that it has never since entirely lost.
His first book is built on a broad foundation of first principles; his second and third form polemic corollaries to the first; and in the fourth and fifth we have his detailed defence of church discipline and ritual; while the last two contain a defence of its government and its relation to the state. The fifth book is a complete apology for the Anglican Church and its usages, stamped throughout with characteristic breadth and wisdom. Hooker maintains the high religious value of ritual interpreted by the principle of symbolism, and kept in harmony with primitive usage so as to carry with it the weight of undivided authority, yet asserts the right of the living authority within the church itself both to enact and to dispense, in order to avert anarchy and disruption. In his defence of Episcopacy in the seventh book he shelters himself behind no divine right or assumption of formal scriptural authority, but maintains its superiority as a form of church government, both from its undeniable antiquity and its practical utility in actual experience. In his eighth book Hooker discusses the question of the royal supremacy and the mutual relations of church and state. To him, as to Arnold and Stanley, church and state are merely co-extensive terms, and men owe civil duties to the whole community as a state, spiritual duties to it as a church. The royal supremacy is nothing more than the assertion of national unity and independence as against mere sacerdotal pretensions, the whole body politic under its executive head, the crown, being equally concerned in the framing of all laws affecting the church, itself considered but as a part of a greater whole. On this question modern conditions have entirely shifted the bases of discussion, and, whether rightly or wrongly, Hooker's dream of a church and state one and indivisible now seems to Englishmen little more than a devout imagination.