Justified True Belief

(●) The country parson who answered a campaign to rebuild the Church of England by writing, first, about what a law is. + The question that made him write is one most churchgoers have heard put across a table. Somebody asks why your church kneels at communion, or keeps a written prayer book, or has bishops at all, and then adds the sharp part: show me the chapter and verse. For thirty years a determined party inside the Elizabethan church had been pressing exactly that question, and they were confident the answer did not exist. What they wanted in its place had a name at the time, the Discipline: the pattern of worship and government that Calvin’s Geneva had adopted, elders and all, which they took to be the one form Scripture lays down for a church. Richard Hooker was the man who took the question seriously enough to go back a very long way before answering it. He was Master of the Temple in London for six years and then a country rector in Wiltshire and Kent, and across the 1590s he wrote Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a work in eight books. It does not open with kneeling, or with bishops, or with the prayer book. It opens with the question of what a law is, and where any law at all gets its force, and it is hundreds of pages before he touches the surplice, the white linen vestment an English minister wore to take a service and one of the sorest items on the list. That is why he sits on a shelf of Christian thinkers rather than in a footnote to English church history. The quarrel that produced the book ended long ago, and nobody now loses sleep over a vestment. What Hooker worked out along the way outlived it: that Scripture is perfect for the work God gave it, and that reason is not a rival to revelation but the instrument by which revelation is read. One fact about him is worth holding on to from the start. Three of his eight books were still unpublished when he died, and scholars have been arguing about their text ever since, which is four centuries and counting.

(●) c. 1554 AD: He was born outside Exeter to a family that could not have paid for his schooling. + Hooker was born at Heavitree, then a village just beyond the walls of Exeter in Devon and now a suburb of it. His father Roger was in service to gentry families and had no money to spare. The date is a reckoning rather than a record. No baptism entry survives; Izaak Walton, writing a life of him sixty-five years after his death, said only that he was born about the year of our redemption 1553; the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography settled on March 1554, and the modern critical edition puts the birth in early April of that year. Careful writers still hedge it as 1553 or 1554, so every statement of how old he was at anything rests on that hedge. What the family did have was a useful relative. His uncle John Hooker was chamberlain of Exeter, an antiquary and a man who knew whom to write to, and he brought the boy to the notice of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, himself a Devon man and the author of the most widely read defence of the English church then in print. Walton tells how Jewel looked the boy over, settled a small annual sum on the parents, and found him a place at Oxford. Without that afternoon there is no book.

(●) 1573 AD: Corpus Christi College elected him a scholar, and Oxford kept him for the better part of twenty years. + He had come up to Corpus Christi College some years earlier, in 1568 or 1569 depending on which account you follow, as a clerk: a poor student who earned his keep by singing in chapel and doing small duties about the college. On 24 December 1573, at nineteen, the college elected him one of the twenty scholars of its foundation, a place the founder’s statutes reserved for men born in Devon or Hampshire, and Devon was where he came from. He took his bachelor’s degree in January 1574 and his master’s in July 1577, and was admitted a fellow of the college that September. His patron had died along the way. Jewel was gone in September 1571, and Edwin Sandys, then Bishop of London and later Archbishop of York, picked up where Jewel left off. In July 1579 Hooker was appointed to read the university’s public Hebrew lecture as deputy to Thomas Kingsmill, the professor, and on 14 August that year John Aylmer, Bishop of London, ordained him deacon. When he was made priest is not on record, which is why the older accounts, following Walton, put his entry into holy orders about 1581. The friendship that mattered most came through the tutorials. Sandys sent his own son Edwin to be Hooker’s pupil, and beside him sat George Cranmer, grandnephew of the archbishop who had written the prayer book Hooker would one day defend. Both young men read his drafts twenty years later, and one of them paid the printer.

(●) 1585 AD: He was made Master of the Temple, and the pulpit turned into a duel. + He had been given a parish of his own first. On 9 December 1584 he was presented to Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire, a country rectory he almost certainly never lived in, since within three months he had a post in London. On 17 March 1585 Hooker was appointed Master of the Temple, the church shared by two of London’s Inns of Court, which were the societies where England’s lawyers trained, ate and lodged. His congregation, in other words, was lawyers, who are a difficult audience by trade and an excellent one for a man whose whole argument would turn on what makes a law binding. The trouble was already in the building. Walter Travers, one of the ablest Presbyterian voices in England, held the afternoon lectureship at the Temple and had expected the mastership himself. Presbyterian meant then roughly what it means now: a church governed not by bishops but by ministers and elders sitting together in assemblies, which was the Discipline the party had been pressing for a generation. So the two of them preached from the same pulpit on the same Sundays to the same people, and disagreed. Thomas Fuller, the church historian of the next generation, put it in one line in his Church History of Britain: “What Mr. Hooker delivered in the forenoon, Mr. Travers confuted in the afternoon.” The break came over a sermon. Hooker said, of the English families who had died in the old religion before the Reformation reached them, that he doubted not but God was merciful to save thousands of our fathers living in popish superstitions, inasmuch as they sinned ignorantly. Travers heard that as giving away the whole Reformation and said so from the pulpit. In March 1586 Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, silenced him, and Travers took his case to the Privy Council, the queen’s own inner council of state, complaining that he had been punished before he was heard. Hooker wrote a reply to that petition, which stayed in manuscript and was not printed until twelve years after his death. Ordinary life was going on beside the quarrel. He had lodged in London with a draper named John Churchman, and in February 1588 he married Churchman’s daughter Joan. Walton’s life is unkind about both the wife and the match; modern scholars read Walton here as a storyteller with a case to make rather than as a witness, and the sourness is his rather than the evidence’s.

(●) 1591 AD: He traded London for a country living so that he could write the answer out in full. + In June 1591 he left the Temple for Boscombe, a small parish on a Wiltshire chalk stream. A parish of that kind was called a living, because its land and its tithes were what the man who held it lived on. With Boscombe came the subdeanery of Salisbury, and with that a prebend: an endowed share of the cathedral’s income, carrying a stall in the cathedral and, more to the point for a man with a book in him, the use of its library. Walton tells the story that Hooker asked Whitgift to be taken out of the fight and put somewhere quiet, and whether or not the request happened in the words Walton gives it, the move had that effect. Whether he ever unpacked at Boscombe is another matter: some modern scholars think he went on living at the Churchmans’ house in London and drew the Wiltshire income at a distance, which was common enough and would explain a good deal about how fast the manuscript grew. Answering Travers from a pulpit, week by week, could only ever produce more sermons, and a sermon is over by Monday. What Hooker had decided to do instead was to go underneath the whole dispute and argue it from the ground up, which is not work anyone does between funerals in London. Edwin Sandys the younger and George Cranmer, his old pupils, read the growing manuscript and sent back notes; a set of Cranmer’s survives.

(●) 1593 AD: The Preface and the first four books appeared, and the quarrel changed shape. + The book was entered at Stationers’ Hall in the opening weeks of 1593, which was how a London publisher registered his right to print a title, and it was printed by John Windet, a kinsman of Hooker’s, with Edwin Sandys the younger paying the bill. It was addressed, in the long title of its Preface, to those who sought, as he carefully put it, the reformation of laws and orders ecclesiastical in the Church of England. What surprised his opponents was the manner. The Preface does not open fire. It tells them, at length and with evident respect, where their Discipline came from and why it persuades ordinary people, and it ends by asking them to consider that they might be mistaken, which he asks in the same breath as admitting that he might be. Then comes Book I on law in general, and Books II, III and IV taking their three main positions in turn: that Scripture is the only rule for everything a man does, that it lays down one form of church government which may never be altered, and that the English ceremonies are Roman leftovers the other reformed churches had rightly thrown out. It did not sell quickly. It was not the kind of book that does.

(●) 1595 AD: The crown gave him Bishopsbourne, and there he wrote the longest book of the eight. + In July 1595 the crown presented him to Bishopsbourne, a better living a few miles from Canterbury, and he spent the rest of his life there. In 1597 Book V appeared, dedicated to Whitgift. It is the one that finally gets to the prayer book, meaning the Book of Common Prayer, the single set order of service that every parish in England was required to use, and it works through that service in order: the reading of Scripture, the preaching, the psalms, the prayers, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the churching of women, the burial of the dead. In the standard Victorian edition of his works, the Preface and the first four books share a single volume between them and Book V has one all to itself. Not everyone was persuaded, and in 1599 someone published A Christian Letter of Certain English Protestants, an anonymous tract, probably by Andrew Willet, a Cambridge divine, which was the period word for a working theologian. It is devoted entirely to the charge that Hooker had drifted from the church’s own doctrine, and in his lifetime nobody else wrote a whole tract against him. Hooker began an answer and never finished it, but his copy of the Letter survives at Corpus Christi, Oxford, with his replies written in the margins in his own hand, which is about as close as a reader ever gets to sitting beside a sixteenth-century theologian while he reads his hate mail.

(●) 1600 AD: He died on 2 November at about forty-six, with three books unpublished. + He died at Bishopsbourne on 2 November 1600 and was buried in the chancel of his own church, survived by Joan and four daughters. He was about forty-six, which means every page he ever published came out in the last seven years of his life. Books VI, VII and VIII existed in manuscript in some state, and what happened to them afterwards is the untidiest part of his story. No more of the Laws was printed for forty-eight years. Books VI and VIII came out together in 1648, and Book VII appeared for the first time in John Gauden’s edition of 1662. The papers had been handled, copied and rearranged by then, and the results show it. John Keble, editing him in the nineteenth century, concluded that the Book VI we have is simply not the book Hooker announced: he had promised an answer about lay elders, and what survives under that number is a long treatise on repentance and confession instead.

What He Taught

(T1) Every law there is, from the one God works by down to a parish rule about kneeling, belongs to a single order. + Think of a household where shoes come off at the front door. A visitor asks where that is written, and of course it is written nowhere. Somebody in the house decided it, for reasons anyone can see once they are pointed out: the carpet, the mud, the children. The rule is not arbitrary just because it was made, and it is not eternal just because it is sensible. Next year, on a different floor, it might go. Book I of the Laws is Hooker sorting out every kind of rule there is so that a reader can tell which sort the surplice belongs to. He walks through them one at a time. There is the eternal law, the rule God has set for himself to work by. There is the law that natural agents keep, which is what we now call the regularities of nature: stones fall, seeds grow. There is the law the angels obey. There is the law of reason, the moral law that a rational creature can work out for itself without being told, so that no society has ever had to be informed that gratitude is owed to parents. There is divine law, what God has revealed in Scripture because reason could never have climbed to it. There is human law, what a society enacts for itself. And there is the law of nations, what peoples observe in dealing with one another. The payoff comes when he asks which shelf a rule about kneeling sits on. It is human law, made by a church for its own good order, and a rule of that kind does not need a proof text to be binding. A proof text is a verse produced to authorize a practice, the chapter and verse the man across the table was asking for, and a rule of good order was never the kind of thing that needed one. What it does need is to be reasonable, to be lawfully made, and not to contradict anything God has commanded. That is the whole answer to the chapter-and-verse question, and everything after Book I is Hooker applying it. He adds one point in passing that would have a life of its own. Human laws bind a people because that people has consented to them, in person or through those who act in their name, and a ruler who imposes law without either God’s express commission or his subjects’ consent is, in Hooker’s flat phrase, no better than a tyrant.

(Q) "Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power." + Source: Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity I.16.8 (Keble’s edition). These are the closing words of Book I, and Hooker means them as a summary rather than a flourish. Having spent the book distinguishing seven kinds of law, he ends by insisting that they are seven kinds of one thing, and that the smallest of them is still a relative of the greatest (T1). The sentence goes on: angels, men, and creatures of every condition admire her, he writes, as the mother of their peace and joy.

(T2) Scripture is perfect for the work God gave it, which is to save, and reason is the instrument by which it is read. + A car manual is a perfect thing of its kind. It will tell you the tyre pressures exactly, and it will not tell you where to drive, and nobody thinks the less of it for that. A man who complained that his manual was defective because it said nothing about his marriage would be told he had misunderstood what it was for. Hooker’s opponents held a rule he stated fairly before answering: that nothing may be done in the church, in worship or government or ordinary life, without express warrant from Scripture. Thomas Cartwright, the most formidable of them, pressed it down to the smallest details of conduct. Hooker made two replies. The first is that the rule cannot survive its own test, because Scripture nowhere lays it down. The second is the serious one: the demand does not honour Scripture, it insults it, because it asks the Bible to be something it never offered to be. Scripture is, in his words, perfect, exact and absolute in respect of the end for which God ordained it, and that end is stated inside it. The main drift of the whole New Testament, he says, is what John gives as the purpose of his own book, that you may believe and in believing have life. So what does reason do? Not fill gaps. Hooker is emphatic that nothing is missing. Reason is the faculty by which a reader takes what is there and uses it, the way a sword needs a hand. And it is reason, working on what God has made and on conscience, that gives every human being some knowledge of God before any Bible is opened, which theologians call general revelation. Hooker ranked the three voices a Christian listens to, and the ranking is not a balance: what Scripture plainly delivers has the first place in both credit and obedience, then whatever a man can necessarily conclude by force of reason, and after these the voice of the church (V.8.2). It made him enemies. A Christian Letter accused him in 1599 of setting up reason as a rival authority to the Word of God. In the margins of his own copy he denied it, and his point stands on its own feet: a man who says a book is perfect and then says you need your wits to read it has not demoted the book.

(Q) "Unto the word of God, being in respect of that end for which God ordained it perfect, exact, and absolute in itself, we do not add reason as a supplement of any maim or defect therein, but as a necessary instrument, without which we could not reap by the Scripture's perfection that fruit and benefit which it yieldeth." + Source: Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity III.8.10 (Keble’s edition). It is the fifth of a run of answers to the charge that he honours reason too highly (T2). The next line is the memorable one. The word of God is a twoedged sword, he grants, quoting Hebrews, but it is a sword in the hands of reasonable men, and reason is like the weapon that slew Goliath, if the men who use it are as David was.

(T3) What Scripture leaves free, the church may settle, and may settle differently later. + A congregation moves its evening service from six o’clock to five. Nobody supposes a doctrine has changed. The hour was never commanded and was never forbidden, and the church that set it at six is the church that may set it at five, and both times were right in their turn. Theologians have a name for matters of that sort: things indifferent, neither required nor ruled out by God, and therefore free. Hooker’s claim is that a great deal of what the Elizabethan quarrel was about belonged in that category, and that the church has real authority to settle such things for the sake of good order, which is itself a scriptural instruction (1 Corinthians 14:40, Romans 14:5). The crucial half of his claim is the second half. Laws about order are changeable by the same power that made them. Articles of doctrine are not, and no church that has taught something as true may later teach the opposite and call that an exercise of authority. He was willing to pay for the distinction where it cost him something. Book VII is a full defence of bishops as the ancient and apostolic government of the church, and in the middle of it Hooker concedes that there may sometimes be very just and sufficient reason to allow ordination made without a bishop (VII.14.11), which would mean a man set apart for the ministry by other ministers and no bishop in the room. The ordinary way is to be kept because it is the ordinary way; in some cases it may be necessary to decline from the ordinary ways. A man defending an establishment does not usually leave that door open unless he means what he has been saying.

(Q) "The Church hath authority to establish that for an order at one time, which at another time it may abolish, and in both do well. But that which in doctrine the Church doth now deliver rightly as a truth, no man will say that it may hereafter recall, and as rightly avouch the contrary." + Source: Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.8.2 (Keble’s edition). He is answering a jeer. Why, his opponents had asked, should we hang our judgment upon the church’s sleeve, and why in matters of order more than in matters of doctrine? Hooker’s reply is that the question answers itself once the two are told apart (T3): order changes, doctrine does not, and the difference is not a convenience but the reason the church’s authority over the one is safe.

(T4) The righteousness that justifies a sinner is Christ’s, and never the sinner’s own. + Suppose a debt you could not pay is paid by somebody else, and the receipt is made out in your name. Nothing about you has improved. What has changed is your standing with the creditor, and it has changed completely. That is the distinction Hooker preached at the Temple, and he was careful with the words. Justification is God declaring a sinner righteous. Sanctification is God making him righteous, slowly, over a life. Both are real, both are God’s work, and Hooker insists they must never be confused, because the second one is unfinished in everybody. The righteousness of sanctification is inherent, which means it is genuinely in us; the righteousness of justification is imputed, which means it is Christ’s and is reckoned to our account. His charge against the Roman doctrine as he understood it was that it made the inherent righteousness the ground of acceptance, and so rested a man’s standing before God on a work that is never done. His text was Paul’s wish to be found in Christ not having a righteousness of his own (Philippians 3:8-9). Then he said the thing that started the fire. In the same series he told his congregation that he did not doubt God had been merciful to save thousands of their fathers who died in the old religion, because they sinned in ignorance. Travers heard that as handing Rome the argument, and the objection was not stupid: if the doctrine overthrows the foundation, how can the people holding it be saved? Hooker’s answer is a distinction worth keeping. What a church officially teaches and what a frightened old woman dying inside it actually rests her hope on are two different things, and the second is between her and God. He was not softening the charge against the doctrine. He was declining to run the judgment seat.

(Q) "Let it be counted folly, or phrensy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom, and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this, That man hath sinned, and God hath suffered; that God hath made himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God." + Source: Richard Hooker, A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and How the Foundation of Faith Is Overthrown, section 6 (Keble’s edition, Sermon II). Preached at the Temple in the first year of his mastership and not printed until 1612, twelve years after his death. “Phrensy” is the old spelling of frenzy. He has just said that a believer found in Christ is accepted as perfectly righteous as if he had kept the whole law, has caught himself wondering whether to say something stronger still, and then decides he will say it anyway (T4).

(T5) Christ’s presence in the sacrament is to be looked for in the person who receives it. + Two people argue about a wedding ring. One says the marriage is in the gold, the other says the gold is only a reminder and the marriage is elsewhere. Both of them have started in the wrong place, because the thing they want to locate is not in the object at all. It is in the two people the ring has joined. The sixteenth century spent an enormous amount of blood and ink on the Lord’s Supper, and the positions were sharply drawn. The bread and the wine on the table have a name in these arguments: the elements. What happens to the elements was the question. Rome taught transubstantiation, that the substance of the bread becomes the body of Christ. Lutherans held that Christ’s body is truly present in and with the bread. Zwingli and those who followed him took the bread as a sign and a remembrance. Calvin taught that the believer is truly fed on Christ by the Spirit while the bread stays bread. Hooker read all of it, and then did something unusual: he declined to referee. His judgment was that the churches agreed on far more than they noticed, that all of them confessed a real participation in Christ, and that they had fallen out over a question about the elements which the words of institution never set out to answer. The words of institution are the sentences Christ spoke when he handed round the bread and the cup, the ones a minister repeats at every communion, and Hooker’s point is that they are not a statement of physics. What Christ said was take and eat, and what he promised was to give himself. Participation, in Hooker’s vocabulary, is the mutual holding of Christ and his people, in which Christ is whole with the whole church and whole with every part of it (V.56.10). So the place to look for the presence is not the plate. It is the communicant, the ordinary person kneeling there with a piece of bread, which is also the only place where any of it does anybody any good.

(Q) "The real presence of Christ's most blessed body and blood is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament." + Source: Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.67.6 (Keble’s edition). He has just argued that the order of Christ’s own words points the same way: first take and eat, and then this is my body (T5). The sentence is the hinge of his treatment of the Supper, and it is the one line of Hooker’s that has travelled furthest outside England.

(Q) "Think ye are men, deem it not impossible for you to err; sift unpartially your own hearts, whether it be force of reason or vehemency of affection, which hath bred and still doth feed these opinions in you." + Source: Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface 9.1 (Keble’s edition). The Preface has spent eight chapters explaining his opponents to themselves, and this is how it turns to ask something of them. He goes on, two sections later, to say what he would rather have than the argument: far more comfort it were for us, he writes, to labour under the same yoke, as men that look for the same eternal reward of their labours, to live as if our persons being many our souls were but one. A man who writes that in the opening pages of a work of controversy is telling the reader what the controversy is for.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The generation after him called him Judicious Hooker, and the name never came off. + In 1635 a neighbour named Sir William Cowper paid for a monument over the grave at Bishopsbourne, with a bust of Hooker on it and some plain English verses underneath. They begin by admitting that nothing can be said worthy of the name, and then say the name: Judicious Hooker. That is the first time anyone is known to have attached the word to him, and it stuck so thoroughly that for more than two centuries the title page of his collected works read The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker. Much of what the seventeenth century knew about the man came from Izaak Walton, better remembered now for The Compleat Angler, whose Life of Mr. Richard Hooker appeared in 1665. Walton reports that King James, arriving in England, asked Whitgift after the author of the books of church polity and was sorry to hear he was dead, and that Charles I never mentioned him but with the same reverence and charged his own son to be studious in Hooker’s books. The stories are worth having and worth labelling: Walton was writing sixty-five years after the fact for a church that had just been restored and needed a founder, and he shaped his man accordingly. The books themselves had a harder time than the reputation. Forty-eight years passed before any more of the Laws was printed, and the last three came out in 1648 and 1662 from manuscripts that had been copied and rearranged by hands other than his. So the man was being quoted as an authority for decades while a third of his work sat in other people’s desks, and what a reader now has of his final argument is partly a reconstruction. Honest editors have said so since Keble.

(†) John Locke built a theory of government out of his account of law and consent. + Open Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Hooker is there in the fifth section, and again in the fifteenth, and again in the sixty-first, always under the same phrase: the judicious Hooker. Locke quotes him on the natural equality of men, on the laws of nature that bind men as men although they have never had any settled fellowship or any solemn agreement among themselves, and on the age at which a person becomes capable of being governed by law. The citations run to Book I of the Laws, and the passage doing the most work is the one where Hooker says that a ruler who makes law for a people without either God’s express commission or their consent is no better than a tyrant (I.10.8). It is worth being exact about what Hooker meant by it. He was arguing that England’s church laws bound English Christians because England had consented to them, through Parliament and through Convocation, which was the clergy’s own assembly, and that the men pressing the Discipline were therefore rejecting laws they had a part in making. He was not laying a foundation for resisting kings. Locke took the sentences, which were sound, and put them to work in an argument Hooker never made, which is a thing that happens to good sentences. The road from an Elizabethan defence of the prayer book to the political theory behind two revolutions runs, improbably, straight through Book I.

(†) Later readers made him the father of a three-legged stool, Scripture, tradition and reason, that he never built. + Almost anyone who has heard of Hooker has heard of the three-legged stool: Scripture, tradition and reason, three equal legs holding up Anglican authority, and Hooker as the carpenter. He never wrote it. He never drew the picture, and the balance it implies is the opposite of what he taught. What he actually wrote is a ranking, and the order is the whole point of it: what Scripture plainly delivers has the first place in credit and obedience, then what reason can necessarily conclude, and after these the voice of the church (T2). A leg you stand on first is not a leg at all. The image seems to have grown out of an honest summary. Francis Paget, introducing Book V in 1899, wrote that Hooker’s appeal in things spiritual is to a threefold fount of guidance and authority, to reason, Scripture and tradition, and the phrase hardened over the next century into furniture. Behind Paget lay John Keble, whose 1836 edition put Hooker back into English hands, and the Oxford Movement, which read him as the father of a middle way between Rome and Geneva and was glad to have him. That reading is now contested, and the argument is a live one rather than settled. Since the Folger Library Edition of his works appeared between 1977 and 1998, a generation of scholars has pressed the case that Hooker is better understood as a Reformed conformist arguing inside the magisterial Reformation. Both labels want unpacking. A Reformed conformist is a man who holds the theology of Geneva and conforms to the English church anyway, on the ground that its ceremonies were never the sort of thing worth leaving over; and the magisterial Reformation is the Reformation of Luther, Calvin and Cranmer, the one that worked with the magistrate, meaning the civil ruler, instead of breaking away from him as the radicals did. Put Hooker there and he is defending a Protestant church against a Protestant faction, not inventing a third way between the confessions. Others hold that a genuinely distinctive path does open in his pages whether or not he set out to cut one. The plainest evidence for the first side is a small one: the word Anglican does not occur in his writings. It came into use a generation after he was dead.

(†) He made the church and the commonwealth one society, which leaves a dissenting Christian nowhere to stand. + Book VIII states it without any hedging. There is not any man of the Church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth, he writes, nor any man a member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England, and he offers a picture to hold it: a triangle, where the same line is a side and a base at once, one line doing two jobs (VIII.1.2). From that identity the rest follows. The prince may make laws for the church, because he is not governing some other corporation. Bishops may sit in the councils of the state, for the same reason. The difficulty is not establishment as such. Christendom has had established churches for most of its history and has some still, and no one settlement of that question can be called the Christian one. The difficulty is the identity. On Hooker’s account a person belongs to the church by being an English subject, which leaves the man who cannot in conscience conform with nowhere to stand: he is not a Christian in the wrong communion, he is a defective member of his own country. Hooker’s pages handle the separatist, the man who walked out of his parish church to worship with a gathered congregation of his own, as a question of public order rather than as a case of conscience, and by the 1590s English law was doing the same thing with considerably less courtesy. Scripture puts the church together the other way round. The people around the throne were bought by blood out of every tribe and language and people and nation (Revelation 5:9), which is a gathering by call rather than by birth inside a border, and they are named a holy nation precisely because they were summoned out of somewhere else (1 Peter 2:9). When a governor asked their King whether he was a king, the answer drew a line no map has ever shown: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Hooker asked his opponents to think it not impossible that they might err. The request was fair, and it is the one his readers have had to make of him in turn.