bona fide
determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy, — for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies, — were not the substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament.
It
is my own belief that the Puritans and the Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole errors, were both equally in the wrong; — the Prelatists in contending for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective number
Greek: t_on ekkaloumén_on
see previous image
or
ecclesia
, which only belonged, but which rightfully did belong, to the National Church as a component estate of the realm, the
enclesia
; — the Puritans in requiring of the
enclesia
what was only requisite or possible for the
ecclesia
5
. Archbishop Grindal is an illustrious exception. He saw the whole truth, and that the functions of the enclesiastic and those of the ecclesiastic were not the less distinct, because both were capable of being exercised by the same person; and
vice versa
, not the less compatible in the same subject because distinct in themselves. The Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench is a Fellow of the Royal Society.


It is difficult to say, which most shines through this whole passage, the spirit of wisdom or the spirit of meekness. The fatal error of the Romish Church did not consist in the inappellability of the Councils, or that an acquiescence in their decisions and decree was a duty binding on the conscience of the dissentients, — not I say in contending for a practical infallibility of Council or Pope; but in laying claim to an actual and absolute immunity from error, and consequently for the unrepealability of their decisions by any succeeding Council or Pope. Hence, even wise decisions — wise under the particular circumstances and times — degenerated into mischievous follies, by having the privilege of immortality without any exemption from the dotage of superannuation. Hence errors became like
glaciers
, or ice-bergs in the frozen ocean, unthawed by summer, and growing from the fresh deposits of each returning winter.


Ib.
6. p. 212.
An argument necessary and demonstrative is such, as being proposed unto any man, and understood, the mind cannot choose but inwardly assent. Any one such reason dischargeth, I grant, the conscience, and setteth it at full liberty.
I would not concede even so much as this. It may well chance that even an argument demonstrative, if understood, may be adducible against some one sentence of a whole liturgy; and yet the means of removing it without a palpable overbalance of evil may not exist for a time; and either there is no command against schism, or we are bound in such small matters to offer the sacrifice of willing silence to the public peace of the Church. This would not, however, prevent a minister from pointing out the defect in his character as a doctor or learned theologian.



Ib.
c. viii. 1. p. 2-20.
For adventuring to erect the discipline of Christ without the leave of the Christian magistrate, haply ye may condemn us as fools, in that we hazard thereby our estates and persons further than you which are that way more wise think necessary: but of any offence or sin therein committed against God, with what conscience can you accuse us, when your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the peremptory commandments of God; that no mortal man can dispense with them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining thereunto?
Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro
. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible
phasis
or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual.


The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under the proprieties and necessities of space, is, that it does not, as no concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the individuals, the aggregate of whom constitutes the national church, so that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual, and in every congregation may form an
ecclesia
or Christian community; and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the
enclesia
, and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the
ingens desiderium proborum
.


8th Sept, 1826.



Ib.
c. viii. 7. p. 232.
Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned.
Quære
. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century.



B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249.
That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law.
See
the essays on method, in the
Friend
6
. Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to assert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters; — and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words assert the pre-existence of the thing to all its constituent powers, qualities, and properties.
Now
this is either — first, equivalent to the assertion of a
prima et nuda materia
, so happily ridiculed by the author of
Hudibras
7
, and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives: — or secondly, the words assert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having asserted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen. All laws, indeed, are constitutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that constitutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used
proleptice
in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phænomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature.
The
law is
res noumenon
; the thing is
res phenomenon
8
A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance, —
causa sub-faciens
.


P.S. What a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of space — long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique: — and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: without the lower the higher could not have existed. The infant is a riddle of which the man is the solution; but the man could not exist but with the infant as his antecedent.



Ib.
2. p. 250.
In which essential Unity of God, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit.
If 'conceit' here means conception, the remark is most true; for the Trinity is an idea, and no idea can be rendered by a conception. An idea is essentially inconceivable. But if it be meant that the Trinity is otherwise inconceivable than as the divine eternity and every attribute of God is and must be, then neither the commonness of the language here used, nor the high authority of the user, can deter me from denouncing it as untrue and dangerous. So far is it from being true, that on the contrary, the Trinity is the only form in which an idea of God is possible, unless indeed it be a Spinosistic or World-God.



Ib.
c. iv. 1. p. 264.
But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God, and leaving these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and divine, creatures: touching angels which are spirits immaterial and intellectual, &c.
All this disquisition on the angels confirms my remark that our admirable Hooker was a giant of the race Aristotle
versus
Plato. Hooker was truly judicious, — the consummate
synthesis
of understanding and sense. An ample and most ordonnant conceptionist, to the tranquil empyrean of ideas he had not ascended. Of the passages cited from Scripture how few would bear a strict scrutiny; being either,
  1. divine appearances, Jehovah in human form; or
  2. the imagery of visions and all symbolic; or
  3. names of honor given to prophets, apostles, or bishops; or lastly,
  4. mere accommodations to popular notions!


Ib.
3. p. 267.
Since their fall, their practices have been the clean contrary unto those before mentioned. For being dispersed, some in the air, some on the earth, some in the water, some among the minerals, dens, and caves, that are under the earth; they have, by all means laboured to effect a universal rebellion against the laws, and as far as in them lieth, utter destruction of the works of God.
Childish; but the childishness of the age, without which neither Hooker nor Luther could have acted on their contemporaries with the intense and beneficent energy with which, they (God be praised!) did act.



Ib.
p. 268.
Thus much therefore may suffice for angels, the next unto whom in degree are men.
St. Augustine well remarks that only three distinct
genera
of living beings are conceivable:
  1. the infinite rational:
  2. the finite rational:
  3. the finite irrational:
that is, God, man, brute animal.
Ergo
, angels can only be with wings on their shoulders. Were our bodies transparent to our souls, we should be angels.



Ib.
c. x. 4. p. 303.
It is no improbable opinion therefore which the arch-philosopher was of.
There are, and can be, only two schools of philosophy, differing in kind and in source. Differences in degree and in accident, there may be many; but these constitute schools kept by different teachers with different degrees of genius, talent, and learning; — auditories of philosophizers, not different philosophies. Schools of psilology (the love of empty noise) and misosophy are here out of the question. Schools of real philosophy there are but two, — best named by the arch-philosopher of each, namely, Plato and Aristotle.
Every
man capable of philosophy at all (and there are not many such) is a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian
9
. Hooker, as may be discerned from the epithet of arch-philosopher applied to the Stagyrite,
sensu monarchico
, was of the latter family, — a comprehensive, vigorous, discreet, and discretive conceptualist, — but not an ideist.



Ib.
8. p. 308.
Of this point therefore we are to note, that sith men naturally have no free and perfect power to command whole politic multitudes of men, therefore utterly without our consent, we could in such sort be at no man's commandment living. And to be commanded we do consent, when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement. Wherefore as any man's deed past is good as long as himself continueth; so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent.
No nobler or clearer example than this could be given of what an idea is as contra-distinguished from a conception of the understanding, correspondent to some fact or facts,
quorum notæ communes concapiuntur
, — the common characters of which are taken together under one distinct exponent, hence named a conception; and conceptions are internal subjective words. Reflect on an original social contract, as an event or historical fact; and its gross improbability, not to say impossibility, will stare you in the face.
But
an ever originating social contract as an idea, which exists and works continually and efficaciously in the moral being of every free citizen, though in the greater number unconsciously, or with a dim and confused consciousness, — what a power it is!
10
As the vital power compared with the mechanic; as a father compared with a moulder in wax or clay, such is the power of ideas compared with the influence of conceptions and notions.



Ib.
15. p. 316.
I nothing doubt but that Christian men should much better frame themselves to those heavenly precepts, which our Lord and Saviour with so great instancy gave us concerning peace and unity, if we did all concur in desire to have the use of ancient Councils again renewed, rather than these proceedings continued, which either make all contentions endless, or bring them to one only determination, and that of all other the worst, which is by sword.
This is indeed a subject that deserves a serious consideration: and it may be said in favour of Hooker's proposal, namely, that the use of ancient Councils be renewed, that a deep and universal sense of the abuse of Councils progressively from the Nicene to that of Trent, and our knowledge of the causes, occasions, and mode of such abuse, are so far presumptive for its non-recurrency as to render it less probable that honest men will pervert them from ignorance, and more difficult for unprincipled men to do so designedly. Something too must be allowed for an honourable ambition on the part of the persons so assembled, to disappoint the general expectation, and win for themselves the unique title of the honest Council. But still comes the argument, the blow of which I might more easily blunt than parry, that if Roman Catholic and Protestant, or even Protestant Episcopalian and Protestant Presbyterian divines were generally wise and charitable enough to form a Christian General Council, there would be no need of one.


N.B. The reasoning in this note, as far as it is in discouragement of a recurrence to general Councils, does not,
me saltem judice
, conclude against the suffering our Convocation to meet. The virtual abrogation of this branch of our constitution I have long regarded as one of three or four Whig patriotisms, that have succeeded in de-anglicizing the mind of England.



Ib.
c. xi. 4. p. 323.
So that nature even in this life doth plainly claim and call for a more divine perfection than either of these two that have been mentioned.
Whenever I meet with an ambiguous or multivocal word, without its meaning being shown and fixed, I stand on my guard against a sophism. I dislike this term, 'nature,' in this place. If it mean the
light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world
, it is an inapt term; for reason is supernatural. Now that reason in man must have been first actuated by a direct revelation from God, I have myself proved, and do not therefore deny that faith as the means of salvation was first made known by revelation; but that reason is incapable of seeing into the fitness and superiority of these means, or that it is a mystery in any other sense than as all spiritual truths are mysterious, I do deny and deem it both a false and a dangerous doctrine.


15 Sept. 1826.



Ib.
6. p. 327.
Concerning that faith, hope and charity, without which there can be no salvation; was there ever any mention made saving only in that law which God himself hath from heaven revealed? There is not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three, more than hath, been supernaturally received from the mouth of the eternal God.
That reason could have discovered these divine truths is one thing; that when discovered by revelation, it is capable of apprehending the beauty and excellence of the things revealed is another. I may believe the latter, while I utterly reject the former. That all these cognitions, together with the fealty or faithfulness in the will whereby the mind of the flesh is brought under captivity to the mind of the spirit (the sensous understanding to the reason) are supernatural, I not only freely grant, but fervently contend. But why the very perfection of reason, namely, those ideas or truth-powers, in which both the spiritual light and the spiritual life are co-inherent and one, should be called super-rational, I do not see. For reason is practical as well as theoretical; or even though I should exclude the practical reason, and confine the term reason to the highest intellective power, — still I should think it more correct to describe the mysteries of faith as
plusquam rationalia
than super-rational. But the assertions that provoke the remark arose for the greater part, and still arise, out of the confounding of the reason with the understanding. In Hooker, and the great divines of his age, it was merely an occasional carelessness in the use of the terms that reason is ever put where they meant the understanding; for, from other parts of their writings, it is evident that they knew and asserted the distinction, nay, the diversity of the things themselves; to wit, that there was in man another and higher light than that of the faculty judging according to sense, that is our understandings. But, alas! since the Revolution, it has ceased to be a mere error of language, and in too many it now amounts to a denial of reason!



B. ii. c. v. 3. p. 379.
To urge any thing as part of that supernatural and celestially revealed truth which God hath taught, and not to shew it in Scripture; this did the ancient Fathers evermore think unlawful, impious, execrable.
Even this must be received
cum grano salis.
To be sure, with the licences of interpretation, which the Fathers of the first three or four centuries allowed themselves, and with the
arcana
of evolution by word, letter, allegory, yea, punning, which they applied to detached sentences or single phrases of Holy Writ, it would not be easy to imagine a position which they could not 'shew in Scripture.' Let this be elucidated by the texts even now cited by the Romish priests for the truth of purgatory, indulgence, image-worship, invocation of dead men, and the like. The assertion therefore must be thus qualified. The ancient Fathers anathematized any doctrine not consentaneous with Scripture and deducible from it, either
pari ratione
or by consequence; as when Scripture clearly commands an end, but leaves the means to be determined according to the circumstances, as for example, the frequent assembly of Christians. The appointment of a Sunday or Lord's day is evidently the fittest and most effectual mean to this end; but yet it was not practicable, that is the mean did not exist till the Roman government became Christian. But as soon as this event took place, the duty of keeping the Sunday holy is truly, though implicitly, contained in the Apostolic text.



Ib.
vi. 3. p. 392.
Again, with a negative argument, David is pressed concerning the purpose he had to build a temple unto the Lord: Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not build me a house to dwelt in. Wheresoever I have walked with all Israel, spake I one word to any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people, saying, Why have ye not built me a house?
The wisdom of the divine goodness both in the negative, the not having authorized any of the preceding Judges from Moses downwards to build a temple — and in the positive, in having commanded David to prepare for it, and Solomon to build it — I have not seen put in the full light in which it so well deserves to be. The former or negative, or the evils of a splendid temple-worship and its effects on the character of the priesthood, — evils, when not changed to good by becoming the antidote and preventive of far greater evils, — would require much thought both to set forth and to comprehend. But to give any reflecting reader a sense of the providential foresight evinced in the latter, and this foresight beyond the reach of any but the Omniscient, it will be only necessary to remind him of the separation of the ten tribes and the breaking up of the realm into the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel in the very next reign. Without the continuity of succession provided for by this vast and splendid temple, built and arranged under the divine sanction attested by miracles — what criterion would there have existed for the purity of this law and worship? what security for the preservation and incorruption of the inspired writings?



Ib.
vii. 3. p. 403.
That there is a city of Rome, that Pius Quintus and Gregory the Thirteenth, and others, have been Popes of Rome, I suppose we are certainly enough persuaded. The ground of our persuasion, who never saw the place nor persons before named, can be nothing but man's testimony. Will any man here notwithstanding allege those mentioned human infirmities as reasons why these things should be mistrusted or doubted of? Yea, that which is more, utterly to infringe the force and strength of man's testimony, were to shake the very fortress of God's truth.
In
a note on a passage in Skelton's
Deism Revealed
11
, I have detected the subtle sophism that lurks in this argument, as applied by later divines in vindication of proof by testimony, in relation to the miracles of the Old and New Testament. As thus applied, it is a
Greek: metábasis eis allo génos
though so unobvious, that a very acute and candid reasoner might use the argument without suspecting the paralogism. It is not testimony, as testimony, that necessitates us to conclude that there is such a city as Rome — but a reasoning, that forms a branch of mathematical science. So far is our conviction from being grounded on our confidence in human testimony that it proceeds on our knowledge of its fallible character, and therefore can find no sufficient reason for its coincidence on so vast a scale, but in the real existence of the object. That a thousand lies told by as many several and unconnected individuals should all be one and the same, is a possibility expressible only by a fraction that is already, to all intents and purposes, equal to nought.



B. iii. c. iii. 1. p. 447.
The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.
'The division in thought of those things which in nature are distinct, yet one, that is, distinguished without breach of unity, is the mother,' — so I should have framed the position. Will, reason, life, — ideas in relation to the mind, are instances;
entiæ indivise interdistinctæ;
and the main arguments of the atheists, materialists, deniers of our Lord's divinity and the like, all rest on the asserting of division as a necessary consequence of distinction.



B. v. c. xix. 3. vol. ii. p. 87.
Of both translations the better I willingly acknowledge that which cometh nearer to the very letter of the original verity; yet so that the other may likewise safely enough be read, without any peril at all of gainsaying as much as the least jot or syllable of God's most sacred and precious truth.
Hooker had far better have rested on the impossibility and the uselessness, if possible, of a faultless translation; and admitting certain mistakes, and oversights, have recommended them for notice at the next revision; and then asked, what objection such harmless trifles could be to a Church that never pretended to infallibility! But in fact the age was not ripe enough even for a Hooker to feel, much less with safety to expose, the Protestants' idol, that is, their Bibliolatry.



Ib.
c. xxii. 10. p. 125.
Their only proper and direct proof of the thing in question had been to shew, in what sort and how far man's salvation doth necessarily depend upon the knowledge of the word of God; what conditions, properties, and qualities there are, whereby sermons are distinguished from other kinds of administering the word unto that purpose; and what special property or quality that is, which being no where found but in sermons, maketh them effectual to save souls, and leaveth all other doctrinal means besides destitute of vital efficacy.
Doubtless, Hooker was a theological Talus, with a club of iron against, opponents with pasteboard helmets, and armed only with crabsticks! But yet, I too, too often find occasion to complain of him as abusing his superior strength. For in a good man it is an abuse of his intellectual superiority, not to use a portion of it in stating his Christian opponents' cause, his brethren's (though dissentient, and perhaps erring, yet still brethren's,) side of the question, not as they had stated and argued it, but as he himself with his higher gifts of logic and foresight could have set it forth. But Hooker flies off to the general, in which he is unassailable; and does not, as in candour he should have done, inquire whether the question would not admit of, nay, demand, a different answer, when applied solely or principally to the circumstances, the condition and the needs of the English parishes, and the population at large, at the particular time when the Puritan divines wrote, and he, Hooker, replied to them. Now let the cause be tried in this way, and I should not be afraid to attempt the proof of the paramount efficacy of preaching on the scheme, and in the line of argument laid down by himself in this section. In short, Hooker frequently finds it convenient to forget the homely proverb; 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating.' Whose parishes were the best disciplined, whose flocks the best fed, the soberest livers, and the most awakened and best informed Christians, those of the zealous preaching divines, or those of the prelatic clergy with their readers? In whose churches and parishes were all the other pastoral duties, catechizing, visiting the poor and the like, most strictly practised?



Ib.
11.
The people which have no way to come to the knowledge of God, no prophesying, no teaching, perish. But that they should of necessity perish, where any one way of knowledge lacketh, is more than the words of Solomon import.
But what was the fact? Were those congregations that had those readers of whom the Puritans were speaking — were they, I say, equally well acquainted with, and practically impressed by, the saving truths of the Gospel? Were they not rather perishing for lack of knowledge? To reply, — It was their own fault; they ought to have been more regular in their attendance at church, and more attentive, when there, to what was there read, — is to my mind too shocking, nay, antichristian.



Ib.
16. p.137.
Now all these things being well considered, it shall be no intricate matter for any man to judge with indifferency, on which part the good of the church is most conveniently sought; whether on ours, whose opinion is such as hath been shewed, or else on theirs, who leaving no ordinary way of salvation for them unto whom the word of God is but only read, do seldom name them but with great disdain and contempt, who execute that service in the church of Christ.
If so, they were much to be blamed. But surely this was not the case with the better and wiser part of those who, clinging to the tenets and feelings of the first Reformers, and honouring Archbishop Grindal as much as they dreaded his Arminian successors, were denominated Puritans! They limited their censures to exclusive reading, — to reading as the substitute for, and too often for the purpose of doing away with, preaching.



Ib.
lxv. 8. p. 415.
Thus was the memory of that sign which they had in baptism a kind of bar or prevention to keep them even from apostasy, whereinto the frailty of flesh and blood, overmuch fearing to endure shame, might peradventure the more easily otherwise have drawn them.
I begin to fear that Hooker is not suited to my nature. I cannot bear round-abouts for the purpose of evading the short cut straight before my eyes.