and few." If, however, we are to think of God at all, we must represent the Unknowable to ourselves through our highest faculties. We must think of Him, not as an arbitrary tyrant, ruling His creatures by caprice, but as a Will freely accepting reason as its rule; His wisdom has set bounds to the effects of His power. This reason, this wisdom-the rule of God's being-which Hooker terms "the first eternal law "-goes forth from God to become operative upon all His creatures visible and invisible, angels of heaven, moving worlds, stars and sun, wind and rain, the clods of the field and the waves of the sea, the beast of the field, and man as an individual and in societies; constituting thus the "second law eternal." It cannot but be that "Nature hath some director of infinite knowledge to guide her in all her ways." In Him we live, and move, and are.

But what is the special character of this law as impressed upon the spirit of man? Hooker's answer is the same as that uttered with ardour for our own generation in many of Browning's most characteristic poems; the law of man's being is that it shall perpetually aspire to perfection, that it shall constantly tend upwards to God. Man's intellect aspires to knowledge; man's will aspires to goodness. And these two tendencies are intimately connected, for in order that our will should seek after goodness, goodness must first be discerned by the reason. Should our attempt to identify what is best and highest by a study of its inmost nature and its essential causes only lead us into perplexity, we may yet recognise it by signs or tokens, of which the most trustworthy is the common consent of men at all times and under all

conditions of life: "The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God Himself."

Reason is, then, our guide to the discovery of what is good; and we support, supplement, control our private judgment by the collective reason of mankind. Thus may be ascertained those natural laws which should govern man's life as an individual. But merely as an individual no man can attain to the perfection of his nature. He is a sociable being, who stands in need of the aid of his fellows. Hence political cominunities are formed; hence governments are established upon a basis of common consent. The particular form of government, monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, Hooker regards as a matter of political expediency. He had not learnt, like the High Churchmen of the next generation, the doctrine of the Divine rights of kings; rather he insists that under every form of government the consent of those who are governed is essential; otherwise what is called a government becomes in fact a tyranny. In the time. of the Tudors he anticipated the political teaching of Locke.

So far as has been set forth man seeks his perfection by the light of reason. But his desire for good is infinite, a desire which can be completely satisfied by nothing less than the union of his own life with the life of God. We seek a threefold perfection-sensual in the necessaries and the ornaments of our material existence; intellectual in the possession of truth; and last, a spiritual perfection in the attainment of things only to be reached by ways which are above and beyond nature in the ordinary meaning of that word. The

laws which regulate man's supernatural duties are delivered by revealed religion. Reason, however, is not displaced by revelation; it is reason which warrants our admission of the claims of revealed truth; and, indeed, many natural laws are repromulgated by the revealed word, in order that what is obscure may be made clear, and that further sauctions may be added. Every natural law, whether it concerns man as an individual or men in society, is of permanent obligation. Positive laws, although imposed by Divine authority, are not of necessity invariable.

We are at length brought to the point at which the connection of all that had gone before with the Puritan controversy becomes apparent. Positive laws fall into two classes; laws, in the first place, which refer to men as men, without regard to time or circumstances, and these, although positive, having been once promulgated, remain of perpetual and universal authority; laws, in the second place, which refer to temporary conditions, circumstances, or affairs, and such laws, though of Divine imposition, have no more permanence than the matter with which they are concerned.

Thus, while his Puritan adversaries asserted that no law which is not found in Holy Scripture can be of permanent obligation, Hooker maintains that all those natural laws discovered to us by human reason are binding upon man as long as he is man. And again, while his Puritan adversaries asserted that every rule and regulation found in Scripture is therefore a law for all time, Hooker maintains that such regulations may indeed be valid for ever, but may also be temporary and

variable; their abiding validity depends not on the fact that they are declared and delivered by the voice of God, but on the character of the laws themselves; if they deal with things that are unchanging, they are themselves unchanging; if they deal with matter that is transitory, they also are transitory.

To degrade human reason and to set up Scripture as the sole and sufficient rule of life, though it may wear the appearance of humble piety, is in truth a disguised arrogance, which opposes its own wisdom to the Divine wisdom, manifested alike in human reason and in revelation. The sources of truth are many; to discredit any one of these is to wrong our own nature and to wrong the Divine order. It may render hasty and violent revolution easier; it is not the way of prudent and just reform.

IV

Such, in brief, is the substance of the first book of Hooker's great treatise; such is Hooker's temper of liberal-conservatism. What is most remarkable throughout the whole argument is not any incisiveness or any originality of thought. Hooker's originality lies rather in his equable grasp of many truths, and in his power of co-ordinating and harmonising those truths. He does not effect a breach between what is natural and what is supernatural; both proceed from the same source; each is auxiliar to the other. He does not oppose reason to revelation; both are of celestial origin. He does not discover a discordance between the inward spiritual life of man and the outward manifestations of that life; he

rather exhibits their harmonious action. He does not reduce religion to a mere affair of the individual soul; he has a feeling for the corporate life of society; each man as an individual has supernatural duties; but he is also a member of a great community which has supernatural duties. He conceives the whole universe as a vast harmonious system; and human creatures, who, on the one side, are akin to the beasts of the field, to the grass of the earth and to the clay from which it springs, are on the other side only a little lower than the angels, those glorious intelligences who, looking down upon the children of men, in their countenance " behold themselves beneath themselves." This conception of the cosmos, its wonder and its harmony, is at least a majestic vision, a piece of the poetry of theology not unworthy of the period which mirrored the moral world of man in Shakespeare's plays and attempted a method of exploring the laws of the material world in Bacon's "Novum Organum."

These great masters of strategy were also skilled in tactics; Bacon less skilled than either Shakespeare or Hooker, for the tactics of science were slow in their development. From his wide-orbing survey of the whole field, Hooker proceeds to capture the key of the position. The second Book is devoted to a refutation of the Puritan thesis that Scripture is the only rule of all things which in this life may be done by men. Hooker's contention is not against the authority of Scripture; it is against narrowing the bounds of that wisdom which comes to us through many and diverse channels: "Whatsoever either men on earth or the