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Summary Account of former Editions.

PREFACE.

EDITOR'S copies of the fifth. It is remarkable that the titlepage of this edition promises the whole eight books: the remains of the three last being then in Spenser's custody, waiting to be arranged and published in a second volume. The five books were reprinted, as above stated, in 1617; the Preface to which calls it the fourth edition; reckoning probably the two publications in Hooker's lifetime as the first and second. To these in 1622 Henry Jackson added the second volume, comprising Travers's Supplication with Hooker's Answer, the Sermons on Habakkuk, the Funeral Sermon, and those on part of St. Jude. All these he had before edited separately. There was a reprint in 1632, which speaks of itself as the sixth edition that in 1622 having been the fifth. These are all which the Editor has met with of what may be called Dr. Spenser's editions 41: and they appear on the whole more free from gross blunders than most of those which came after. Nothing more need be said here of Gauden's edition of 1662, which added the seventh book, besides a Life of Hooker and a Dedication to King Charles II. (the latter prefixed to most of the following editions.) Gauden's too was the first collection which contained the other two imperfect books. It is unfortunate, considering the little pains taken to correct it, that this edition should have been acquiesced in as a basis, by subsequent publishers, to the end of the 17th century: only with the substitution of Walton's Life, which at once superseded Gauden's on its first appearance. Editions of this description came out, all in folio, in 1666, 1676, 1682. In 1705, Strype revised the Life for the publishers, and made some improvements; but there is no appearance of his having done much to Hooker's works. However, there were several corrections made, and the series of editions which may be called Strype's, of which in the last century there were many, are on the whole greatly superior to Gauden's: i. e. the copies of 1705, 1719 42, 1723, (which is generally pointed out as the best edition of all,) 1739, &c. In 1793, the first 8vo. edition issued from the Clarendon Press, under the superintendence of Bishop Ran

41 He has since been informed of a seventh reprint in 4to, by Bishop, of London, 1639.

42 There was also an edition in large folio printed at Dublin, by subscription,

1721. It does not appear that the publisher was at all aware of the remains of Hooker in Trinity college library. The only addition to Strype's of 1705 is the Preface by Dr. Spenser.

Crisis of the Church in the Time of Hooker.

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PREFACE.

dolph. The only material variation made in it was the inser- EDITOR'S tion of Andrewes's letter to Parry, which the Bishop had found in the Bodleian. Other editions in the same form have appeared since, but there are only two which require particular notice. The one in two volumes, (London 1825,) by the Rev. W. S. Dobson, of St. Peter's College, Cambridge: a great improvement on all that had been done since Gauden, especially in the laborious task of verifying quotations. The present Editor is particularly bound to acknowledge his obligations to this useful but unpretending publication, having taken it as the groundwork on which to introduce the readings from the MSS. or original editions. The only remaining edition which requires to be mentioned was executed in 1831, by Mr. B. Hanbury, with considerable spirit and industry, but in some parts with a degree of haste, and in many with an expression of party feeling, tending to lessen its usefulness greatly. It is corrected from the Editiones Principes, where the Editor had access to them; and, besides many notes, contains an enlarged Index, Hooker's Letter sent to Burghley with a copy of his work, as given by Strype, a Life of Cartwright by the Editor, the whole of the "Christian Letter," distributed in the notes, and the "Just and Temperate "Defence" by Covel, annexed to the fifth book.

Here, it may be, strictly speaking, the task of the present Editor ought to terminate. But there are two large subjects intimately connected with it, to which it appears desirable to invite particular attention. One, the state of the Puritan controversy just at the time when it was taken up by Hooker, and the mode in which it was conducted by him and his contemporaries: the other, his views on certain questions in theology, collateral indeed to that controversy, but at least equally momentous with any thing in it, questions apparently beyond his original anticipation, at which in course of discussion he successively arrived, and kept them in sight afterwards with a religious anxiety proportioned to his deep sense of their vital importance.

In the annals of the Church, with more certainty perhaps than in those of the world, we may from time to time mark out what may be called turning points; points in which every

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Conflicting Principles of Church Government:

EDITOR'S thing seems to depend on some one critical event or coinciPREFACE. dence, at the time, possibly, quite unobserved. It is awful,

yet encouraging, to look back on such times, after the lapse of ages and generations, and to observe the whole course of things tending some one evil way, up to the very instant when it pleased God in His mercy to interfere, and by methods of which we now can see more than contemporaries could, to rescue, it may be, not only that generation, but succeeding times also, and among the rest, ourselves and our children, from some form of apostasy or deadly heresy.

One of these critical periods in our own church history, if the Editor mistake not, is the latter portion of the sixteenth century and the character and views of Hooker mark him (if we may venture to judge of such a thing without irreverence) as one especially raised up to be the chief human instrument in the salutary interference which Divine Providence was then preparing. In order to have a clearer notion of the peril in which he found the truth, and of the process by which he was trained to be its defender, it may be well if we first consider the previous position of the governors of this church, relatively to the Genevan or Puritan party.

Now the nucleus of the whole controversy was undoubtedly the question of church authority: not so much the question as to the reach and limits of that authority, (which subject he fully discusses in the early part of his great work,) as that which takes up the latter part of the treatise, and which he himself denominates the "last and weightiest re"mains of this cause 43" the question, namely, with whom church authority resides. On this point, in Hooker's time, as now, the Christian world in Europe (speaking largely) was divided into three great parties. The first, that of the ultramontane Roman Catholics, who judging that consent of Christian antiquity in any rule was equivalent to an unive sal sanction of authority, only second (if it were second) to express enactment of holy Scripture; and wrongly imagining that they could establish such consent for the paramount authority of their popes and councils; refused the civil government any further prerogative in church matters, (i. e. as they interpreted, in all matters of conscience,) than merely 43 Book vi. near the beginning.

Papal, Erastian, Presbyterian.

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that of executing what the said popes and councils should EDITOR'S decree.

The second party was that of the Ghibellines in the empire, of the prerogative lawyers in the kingdom of France, of Henry the Eighth in England, and generally of all in every country who maintained more or less expressly the claims of the local governments against the papacy: their common principle (with innumerable shades of difference, and some of them very deeply marked) being this; that church laws and constitutions are on the whole left by Providence to the discretion of the civil power. To this latter party, whether on principle or on account of the exigency of their position, most of the early reformers attached themselves. Its theory was implied in the general course of proceeding, both of the Lutherans in Germany, of the Zuinglians in Switzerland, and of Archbishop Cranmer and other chief leaders of the separation between England and Rome: in their general course of conduct, not in all their measures; for in such extensive and complicated movements thorough consistency is out of the question, without some visible authority more entire and permanent than any which existed for the reformers, as a body, to acknowledge.

To these two parties, which had subsisted in much the same form, at least down from the age of Gregory VII, the events of the Genevan Reformation and the character and views of Calvin had added a third, about thirty years after the rise of Luther; a party which agreed with the Roman Catholics in acknowledging a church authority independent of the state, but differed from them as to the persons with whom such authority was intrusted; assigning it, not to the successors of the Apostles as such, but to a mixed council of Presbyters, lay and spiritual, holding their commission, not as an inward grace derived from our Lord by laying on of hands, but as an external prerogative, granted (so they thought) by positive enactment of holy Scripture. The rapid progress of this system, wherever it was introduced at all under favourable circumstances, proves that it touched some chord in human nature which answered to it very readily while the remarkable fact, that not one of the reformers besides ever elicited the same theory for himself, but that it

PREFACE.

liv Progress of Presbyterianism in England: its Causes:

EDITOR'S is in all instances traceable to Calvin and Geneva, would PREFACE. seem to be very nearly decisive against its claim to scriptural

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authority. Its success is in fact neither more nor less than a
signal example of the effect producible in a short time over
the face of a whole church, by the deep, combined, sys-
tematic efforts of a few able and resolute men. For that their
efforts were combined and systematic, not in Geneva and
France only, but as far as ever they could extend the arms of
their discipline, no one can doubt, who is at all acquainted
with the published correspondence of Calvin first, and in
the next generation, of Beza. Two such men following each
other, and reigning each his time without a rival in their own
section of Christendom, went far towards securing to their
party that unity of proceeding, in which, as was just now re-
marked, Protestants generally were in that age very deficient.
This has been remarked by Hooker himself, in the course of
his unpublished memoranda above mentioned, where he pro-
poses a comparison between Calvin and Beza 44. 'Hereby,"
says he,
we see what it is for any one church or place of
government to have two, one succeeding another, and both
"in their ways excellent, although unlike. For Beza was
one whom no man would displease, Calvin one whom no
man durst." He goes on to specify some particulars of
Calvin's influence: "His dependants both abroad and at
"home; his intelligence from foreign churches; his corre-
"spondence every where with the chiefest; his industry
"in pursuing them which did at any time openly either
"withstand his proceedings or gainsay his opinions; his
writing but of three lines in disgrace of any man as forc-
❝ible as any proscription throughout all reformed churches;
"his rescripts and answers of as great authority as decretal
"epistles." Thus far Hooker, speaking of Calvin. And any
one who will consult Strype's Annals will find incidentally
very sufficient proof of the same kind of authoritative inter-
ference in English affairs on the part of Beza, throughout
Queen Elizabeth's reign.

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There were predisposing circumstances, which made England at that time a promising field for the efforts of the foreign presbyterians. Some of these are touched on by 44 See vol. i. p. 134, of this edition.