etreats the stately fabric of his
"Ecclesiastical Polity." The largeness of temper which marked all the
nobler minds of his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as
clearly in Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur
and stateliness of style which raised him to the highest rank among
English prose-writers. Divine as he was, his spirit and method were
philosophical rather than theological. Against the ecclesiastical
dogmatism of Presbyterian or Catholic he set the authority of reason. He
abandoned the narrow ground of Scriptural argument to base his
conclusions on the general principles of moral and political science, on
the eternal obligations of natural law. The Puritan system rested on the
assumption that an immutable rule for human action in all matters
relating to religion, to worship, and to the discipline and constitution
of the Church, was laid down, and only laid down, in the words of
Scripture. Hooker urged that a divine order exists not in written
revelation only, but in the moral relations, the historical
developement, and the social and political institutions of men. He
claimed for human reason the province of determining the laws of this
order; of distinguishing between what is changeable and unchangeable in
them, between what is eternal and what is temporary in the Bible itself.
It was easy for him to push on to the field of ecclesiastical
controversy where men like Cartwright were fighting the battle of
Presbyterianism, to show that no form of Church government had ever been
of indispensable obligation, and that ritual observances had in all ages
been left to the discretion of churches and determined by the
differences of times.

[Sidenote: His influence on the Church.]

From the moment of its appearance the effect of the "Ecclesiastical
Polity" was felt in the broader and more generous stamp which it
impressed on the temper of the national Church. Hooker had in fact
provided with a theory and placed on grounds of reason that policy of
comprehension which had been forced on the Tudors by the need of holding
England together, and from which the church, as it now existed, had
sprung. But the truth on which Hooker based his argument was of far
higher value than his argument itself. The acknowledgement of a divine
order in human history, of a divine law in human reason, harmonized with
the noblest instincts of the Elizabethan age. Ralegh's efforts to grasp
as a whole the story of man