the circle described by the magic wand of high authority, not to endeavour at the outset, before we proceed farther, to derive countenance to this Apology from some powerful name.

A more powerful than that of Hooker can scarcely be required; Hooker, one would almost say, against a World; and Hooker is one of the first extant names in the catalogue of those who are asserted to compromise their conscience by subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles. So early as the year 1599, a tract entitled "a Christian Letter of certaine English Protestants unfained favourers of the present state of religion, authorised and professed in England unto that reverend and learned man Maister R. Hoo. requiring resolution in certayne matters of doctrine, &c."(a)-professing themselves devotedly attached to the external establishment of the Church, charges this unfoiled champion of our Ecclesiastical Polity with inculcating doctrines contrary to all the articles of religion, and especially the seventeenth, concerning Predestination. "All the articles of our Religion," says this tract, "and many parts of our Church Government, checked, blamed and contradicted." "The Church of England believeth, that Predestination unto life is the eternal purpose, &c. but you Mai. Hoo, seem to us to affirme contrarie, when you saye, "if any man "doubt how God should accept such prayers "case they be opposite to his will, or not grant them, if they be according unto that which him"self willeth, our answer is, that such suits God accepteth, in that they are conformable to his general inclination, which is that all men might

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(a) A Christian Letter, &c. 1599, quarto, (London,) it is supposed; the place of publication is not expressed: and Izaak Walton's Life of Hooker, in Wordsworth's collection, London Edit. 1810, Vol. iv. p. 269, Editor's note.

bę saved; yet always he granteth them not, for as much as there is in God sometimes a more "private occasioned will which determineth the "contrarie."(b) Here we begge your ayde to make manifest unto us howe God eternallie predestinateth, by a constant decree, them whom he calleth and saveth, (as our Church professeth,) and yet hath as you say; a general inclination that all men might be saved." This is the erroneous doctrine with which they charge him, and which, as well as the sin of his attachment to "philosophie," makes it their imperative duty to call upon him, "to be careful not to corrupt the English Creede and pure doctrine whereunto he hath subscribed."-Of the doctrine certainly he is guilty; he maintains it in his Ecclesiastical Polity, after having ushered it into the world "with his first public appearance to it from the pulpit of St. Paul's Cross, A. D. 1581, in the presence too of Elmer, Bishop of London," (c) and again in his disputations with Mr. Travers. The sum of them is, " that Predestination is not of the absolute will of God, but conditional; that the doings of the wicked are not of the will of God, but only permissive; that the reprobates are not rejected, but for the evil works which God did foresee they would commit."(d) "That in God there were two wills, an antecedent and a consequent will; his first will, that all mankind should be saved; but his second will, that those only should be saved, that did live answerable to that degree of grace which he had offered or afforded them." Undoubtedly

(6) Ecel. Polity, Book v. § 49.

(c) Walton's Life of Hooker, Wordsworth's Eccl. Biog. Vol. iv. p. 205.

(d) Ibid. p. 255.

if the doctrine, now usually called Arminian, contravene the Article, this contravenes it; yet the learned Elmer, his auditor, did not refuse to be his "advocate when he was afterwards accused for it."(e) And Archbishop Sandys, a reviser of the Liturgy, and one of the Translators of the Bishops' Bible, (f) was not afraid to recommend him to the mastership of the Temple, a patent place, (g) in which Archbishop Whitgift observes, "a man well directed and taught, might do much good, as also much harm,"(h) and which, however, he was instrumental in procuring for him. To find this doctrine delivered from the Pulpit, in about nineteen years after the revision of the Articles, in the presence of one of the most distinguished Bishops of that time, by a man of a meek and quiet spirit, who shunned contention; to learn that it was published in opposition to the current dogmas of the day; to know that it was restated and confirmed in a work, the production of his riper mind, his most balanced judgment, and mature consideration, in defence of the Ecclesiastical Polity of that very Churchin a work that has perpetuated his fame and her glory, and rendered both inseparable; to find, I say, this doctrine of such a man excepted against, not simply for its non-conformity to truth, for which it was attacked by Travers, but for its contrariety to the Articles of that Church, of which he was the champion ;-under such cir

(e) Walton's Life of Hooker, Wordsworth's Eccl. Biog. Vol. iv. p. 255.

(f) Biographia Britannica, Watkin's Biog. Dict.

(g) Izaak Walton's Life of Hooker, Wordsworth's collection, Vol. iv. p. 209.

(h) Ibid. Letter to Queen Elizabeth, p. 212.

cumstances-at so early a period and by some obscure writer-is no small encouragement to lead us to believe, that, let the private opinions of some of the Divines of that day have been what they might, neither Hooker, nor his ecclesiastical superiors, (some of whom, we repeat, were revisers of the Articles and Liturgy,) imagined, that the Church of England had definitively declared her sense of the doctrine of absolute decrees.

Nor is Hooker an isolated instance. Him, his well-known meekness, which would lead us to believe that he would not, and his profound attachment to the Church of England, which would argue that he did not infringe her institutions, intimate the propriety of placing foremost, in vindicating to his brethren of this day that liberty of conscience which he enjoyed, and which, at a period of period of very irritable popular sensibility to the slightest deviation from the dogmas of absolute decrees, he firmly exerted too. But Cheney, Bishop of Gloucester, who held Bristol in commendam, affords an earlier testimony. In the year 1568, he, when avowing his agreement with the opinion of Erasmus concerning Free-will, asserts, "that he dissented not from the Fathers of this realm, in that Article, when it was offered him to be subscribed in Latin."(i) The Bishop of Gloucester then affirms the tenth Article, which involves the interpretation of the seventeenth, not only to coincide with the sentiments of Erasmus, but, what is greatly more important, that in that interpretation he dissents not from the Fathers of this realm and for the truth of the assertion, he

(i) Strype's Ecclesiast. Annals

appeals to "the Lord Bishop of Sarisbury, (Jewel) and others, being great learned men, and well treated in antiquity, who well knew what had been taught of this matter in the Primitive Church with great consent. Their judgment, (he adds,) he could better like, than the impugners of this time." These assertions, if they could be disproved, were peculiarly hazardous. They were made in a letter to Cecil, the Lord Treasurer, and were urged as the Bishop's answer to articles presented by his parishioners of Bristol to the Ecclesiastical Commission, charging him with supporting the opinion of Erasmus concerning Free-will. And what defence does he adopt? The truth of the charge he admits, but its infringement of the Article he denies. Here the true sense of the Article was put to issue; and does any decision, censure, or reprimand, rebuke the Bishop's formal declaration of the sense in which he expressly subscribed the Article? No such thing. It does not appear that any proceedings whatever were taken against him in that jealous Court. No; though he was no favourite with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who shewed his dislike to him, both in opposing his translation to Chichester, and in excommunicating him for his absenting himself from a Convocation after summons.(k) In Cheney, then, himself an exile from the persecution of Queen Mary's inextinguishable rage against the reformed Religion, and one of the most distinguished of these sufferers, we find an unimpeachable witness of a construction of the tenth Article, hostile to

(k) He was afterward absolved, but not till his Chaplain had made oath that he was then so ill as to be confined to his bed.Strype in loco.

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