RICHARD HOOKER I THE Anglican position at the close of Elizabeth's reign is defined in the writings of Hooker; more than this, the best temper of English thought is exemplified in his work. The spirit of the Renaissance is brought into harmony by him with the spirit of the Reformation; he is serious, reverent, devout; with seriousness and reverence he does honour to human reason; a grave feeling for beauty moulds his elaborate periods; he can soar and circle aloft in a wide orbit, yet all the time he remains in living relation with concrete fact and the realities of human life; he is at once humanist and theologian. Through Izaac Walton's delightful biography we are familiar with the man. Walton, with much seeming simplicity or naïveté of style, was an artist in his craft; he had formed a definite conception of what Hooker was, or what he ought to be for the purposes of biography. A great scholar and thinker, his greatness was to be enhanced by something like insignificance in. his outward aspect. Not that he was in any sense really insignificant, but his exceeding meekness and humility, together with a bodily presence which was not impressive, are used by Walton's art to throw out his intellectual and moral greatness. Keble, in his edition of Hooker's works, qualifies Walton's view by adding that meekness and patience were by no means constitutional with Hooker: "Like Moses, to whom Walton compares him, he was by nature extremely sensitive, quick in feeling any sort of unfairness, and thoroughly aware of his own power to chastise it; so that his forbearance . . . must have been the result of strong principle and unwearied self-control. Again, Walton or his informants appear to have considered Hooker as almost childishly ignorant of human nature and of the ordinary business of life: whereas his writings throughout betray uncommon shrewdness and quickness of observation, and a vein of the keenest humour runs through them." We cannot quite be brought even by an editor's enthusiasm to regard the author of "The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity" as an Elizabethan humourist, but he was master, when he pleased, of a certain restrained irony. Let us think of him, among his fellow-divines of the Anglican communion, as the Elizabethan incarnation of that stranger who in the days of the Oxford movement reappeared as Newman's guest and lives for us in Newman's sonnet : Courteous he was and grave-so meek of mien But Hooker's logic is less emotional than the true Saint Paul's, and he never glows with as bright an ardour of charity. Hooker's complexion, says Walton, and we must attend to such hints of a rude physical psychology— was sanguine with a mixture of choler; yet even in youth his speech and movements were grave and deliberate. As a boy he was distinguished by the union of a questioning intellect with habitual modesty and a serene quietness of nature." He was never, Walton declares, known to be angry, or passionate, or extreme in any of his desires; he was never heard to repine or dispute with Providence. No man, he would say, ever repented him upon his death-bed of moderation, charity, humility, obedience to authority, peace to mankind. "There will come a time," wrote Hooker, "when three words uttered with charity and meekness shall receive a far more blessed reward than three thousand volumes written with disdainful sharpness of wit." In reply to the violence of a controversial adversary his word is formidable in its moderation: "Your next argument consists of railing and of reasons; to your railing I say nothing; to your reasons I say what follows." Begging to be removed from the Mastership of the Temple, "My Lord," he wrote to the Archbishop, "when I lost the freedom of my cell, which was my college, yet I found some degree of it in my quiet country parsonage; but I am weary of the noise and oppositions of this place, and indeed God and nature did not intend me for contentions, but for study and quietness." His desire, he says, was to keep himself in peace and privacy, to behold God's blessing spring out of his mother earth, and to eat his own bread without oppositions. To conduct a campaign of controversy in the interests of peace - it is a rare achievement; to possess the magnanimity which does not seek to score points against an antagonist, which does not triumph in putting an opponent to shame-it is a high distinction. The rage of theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries strikes our ear as terribly as that hollow burst of bellowing "like bulls or rather lions" which alarmed Shakespeare's conspirators on the enchanted island. Hooker was deeply concerned on behalf of the cause which he had undertaken to defend; he gave his whole mind to the great debate; his love of peace was not a lethargic complacency or a dull wooing of ease; but he desired to bring his opponents, if possible, to an honourable surrender; he saw the questions in dispute in relation to first principles on which an agreement might be possible, and which made the personal passions of controversy dwindle; possessed by a profound reverence for order, he felt that intemperance or breach of charity would ill become one who attempted to expound the divine idea of order. This magnanimous combatant in his quiet parsonage at Canterbury was already famous. Scholars, as Walton tells us, turned out of their way to see the man whose life and learning were so much admired-no stately personage to look on, but "an obscure, harmless man; a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature, and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul; his body worn out, not with age, but study and holy mortifications." In the pulpit he was never vehement; he used no graceful gestures of the orator; his dim eyes remained, from first to last, fixed upon one spot; "he seemed to study as he spake"; his voice was grave and tranquil; "his style," says Fuller, "was long," that is, involved, "and pithy, drawing on a whole flock of several clauses before he came to the end of a sentence," so that to some hearers he seemed tedious and obscure. To the close of his life Hooker remained the student and the thinker. When during his last illness robbers plundered his house, the sick man's inquiry was, "Are my books and papers safe?" The property inherited by his wife and daughters, to the value of a thousand pounds, was in great part made up by his library. His friend Dr Saravia, standing by the bedside, asked what was now occupying his mind (for Hooker's face wore its contemplative aspect), "to which he replied that he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which peace could not be in heaven; and oh, that it might be so on earth!" In another of Walton's familiar records it is the humanist rather than the theologian who is presented; former pupils of Hooker visiting him found their master tending his small allotment of sheep, with a book-the "Odes of Horace "in his hand. A contemporary of Shakespeare and Spenser and of that choir of singers who made tuneful the closing years of Elizabeth's reign, Hooker was no stranger, we are assured, "to the more light and airy parts of learning as music and poetry." The marriage into which Hooker unwisely allowed himself to be drawn was not fortunate, but Walton, to exalt his meek hero, seems to make the worst of what he had learnt by hearsay. The gravest charges |