3. Struggles and schisms: the Elizabethan odyssey
Struggles and schisms: the Elizabethan odyssey 1. Education, education One of the demands common to all varieties of Puritanism was that ministers should be biblically well-educated preachers. Of course, others agreed who could not be called Puritan. But certainly any Anglican who looked for further reformation in the Church of England (our definition of a Puritan) would have given a very high priority to training preachers.
Cambridge University fulfilled this aspiration to a significant degree. Some of the individual colleges within the university were marked by Puritan ideals, notably Christ's College, Saint John's College, and Trinity College.
Emmanuel College was founded in 1584 specifically to foster Puritan ideals of ministry. Several generations of Puritan clergy and schoolteachers emerged from these institutions.
A method of biblical education utilized in Cambridge was the "conference". Lecturers would meet with students to study the Bible together; each participant had a different speciality assigned to him—
Hebrew, Greek, history, logic, rhetoric. The idea was that by pooling their talents and insights, their discussions would lead them to a fuller understanding of the sacred text. The Swiss Reformed canton of Zurich under Zwingli and Bullinger had developed this conference method, and it had caught on in the other Reformed Churches of Continental Europe.
2. The courage and fate of Archbishop Grindal These conferences spilled out of Cambridge and became popular among the more Protestant-minded clergy and laity in towns and cities; they were known as "prophesyings". This has nothing to do with gifts of prophecy in a charismatic sense. In Elizabethan language, "prophecy" and "prophesying" referred to preaching and teaching. The clergy would discuss a text or a theological subject; the laity would listen. These conferences were not organized in defiance of Episcopal authority; where they took place—in almost all the southern dioceses, by 1577—they had the bishop's approval.
Sometimes it was the local bishop who started them on his own initiative.
However, it tended to be Puritans who were most active among the clergy and laity who attended.
There was a problem: Queen Elizabeth. She reacted strongly against the prophesyings. To her they smacked too much of democracy and anarchy.
No one in Elizabethan England believed in democracy, least of all the imperious sovereign herself.13 She decided to stamp the prophesyings out; but true to her customary method, she would not do it herself—she would order someone else to do it. The task fell to the luckless Edmund Grindal, who in 1576 had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Grindal was no Puritan. He had experienced some scruples about wearing clerical vestments when Elizabeth made him Bishop of London in 1559, but his mentor, the great Italian Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli (then teaching in Zurich), advised him not to forfeit such an opportunity over something so trivial as a vestment. Once Grindal was installed as bishop, he enforced the clerical garb of the surplice on his London clergy. However, Grindal was thoroughly Protestant—emphatically Reformed in his theology. He believed in the necessity of an educated preaching clergy; he saw the value of the prophesyings as a means to this end. He admitted that Puritans had made use of the conferences to criticize things they did not like in the Church, but his answer was to regulate the conferences better, not to suppress them.
Consequently, when Elizabeth ordered her new archbishop to suppress the prophesyings, Grindal refused. His letter to Elizabeth, dated 20th
December 1576, was unlike anything for boldness that Elizabeth had ever heard from any of her subjects:
…the speeches which it hath pleased you to deliver unto me, when I last attended on your
Highness, concerning abridging the number of preachers, and the utter suppression of all learned
exercises and conferences among the ministers of the church, allowed by their bishops and ordinaries, have exceedingly dismayed and discomforted me…
Public and continual preaching of God's word is the ordinary mean and instrument of the salvation of mankind. St Paul calleth it the ministry of reconciliation of man unto God. By preaching of God's word the glory of God is enlarged, faith is nourished, and charity increased.
By it the ignorant is instructed, the negligent exhorted and incited, the stubborn rebuked, the weak conscience comforted, and to all those that sin of malicious wickedness the wrath of God is threatened. By preaching also due obedience to Christian princes and magistrates is planted in hearts of subjects: for obedience proceedeth of conscience; conscience is grounded upon the word of God; the word of God worketh his effect by preaching. So as generally, where preaching wanteth, obedience faileth… I trust, when your Majesty hath considered and well weighed the premises, you will rest satisfied, and judge that no such inconveniences can grow of these exercises, as you have been informed, but rather the clean contrary. And for my own part, because I am very well assured, both by reasons and arguments taken out of the holy scriptures, and by experience, (the most certain seal of sure knowledge,) that the said exercises, for the interpretation and exposition of the scriptures, and for exhortation and comfort drawn out of the same, are both profitable to increase knowledge among the ministers, and tendeth to the edifying of the hearers,—I am forced, with all humility, and yet plainly, to profess, that I cannot with safe conscience, and without the offence of the majesty of God, give my assent to the suppressing of the said exercises: much less can I send out any injunction for the utter and universal subversion of the same. I say with St Paul, 'I have no power to destroy, but to only edify;' and with the same apostle, 'I can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth'…
Bear with me, I beseech you, Madam, if I choose rather to offend your earthly majesty, than to offend the heavenly majesty of God.
Elizabeth was incensed. She suspended Grindal from his duties and placed him under house arrest. He spent the rest of his life in disgrace, and was only allowed to resume the full functions of archbishop in 1582, when he was almost blind. He died the following year. Meanwhile, the queen directly ordered all the individual bishops to suppress the prophesyings in their own dioceses. They were suppressed throughout the south of England, but continued in parts of the north, where the gravest threat to the Elizabethan Church came not from new-fangled Puritans but old-fashioned
Roman Catholics.
3. Presbyterian subversion: the classis movement John Field, author of the Presbyterian Admonition to Parliament, had not given up his dream of Presbyterianizing Anglicanism. In the mid-1570s, he began organizing a secret Presbyterian structure within the Church: the classis movement. A classis (plural "classes") was another name for a presbytery. In Field's movement, it was a meeting of all the ministers from a particular area (a city, or a country district), who discussed together the situations and needs of their congregations, providing collective oversight.
No elders were involved, as would be normal in Presbyterianism, because the Anglican Church lacked an eldership. It seems that the classis evolved from the conference or prophesying meetings considered above. But when the prophesyings were suppressed, the classes continued. Field acted as a sort of national coordinator for the movement. As his influence grew, the whole movement took on a more decidedly Presbyterian character, which it originally lacked; certainly the rural classes had started out as little more than secret clerical conferences for moderate Puritans. Field, however, operating from London, succeeded in permeating the movement with his own radically Presbyterian ideals. One classis at Dedham in Essex kept a detailed minute-book of its proceedings, covering 81 meetings between 1582 and 1589: an invaluable source of information for the movement.
By the mid-1580s, Field and his Presbyterian colleagues had managed to move beyond classis or presbytery level. They arranged provincial synods: collective meetings of all of the different classes in particular counties.
These provincial synods were well-attended in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. Field's ultimate achievement was to organize several national synods—a sort of Presbyterian general assembly within Anglicanism. One met in London in 1586, another in Cambridge in 1587. This was the zenith of the movement. Walter Travers wrote a Book of Discipline for the classes, provincial synods, and national synod, setting out the rules for church government. Thomas Cartwright, who had been pastoring an English merchants' church in Antwerp, was now back in England again, helping promote the classis movement. The classes even acted as election agents in the general election of 1586, working
(sometimes successfully) to get Puritan MPs elected. The national synod held in London that year was timed to coincide with the opening of
parliament; a number of radical Puritan MPs went back and forth between parliament and synod.
However, the great parliamentary venture fizzled out pathetically. The Presbyterian MP Sir Anthony Cope (c.1548–1614) presented a bill to replace the Anglican Prayer Book with a Continental Reformed liturgy (a version of the one used in Geneva); attached to the Reformed liturgy was a Presbyterian scheme of church government. Cope's bill also proposed to scrap the entire governmental structure of Anglicanism—all its "laws, customs, statutes, ordinances, and constitutions". Cope was not acting alone; there was a small cadre of Presbyterian MPs backing him.14 The bill, however, was rejected overwhelmingly by the House of Commons; most
Puritan MPs voted against it. Queen Elizabeth, once again outraged by the audacity of her less-than-loyal subjects, had Cope and his collaborators thrown into prison. Their weakness had been pitilessly laid bare:
Presbyterianism did not have the blessing of the great bulk of moderate Puritans, could not command support in parliament, and was therefore exposed to the unmitigated force of Elizabeth's hostility.
4. The reign of Archbishop Whitgift Thereafter, the Anglican Presbyterian movement went into rapid decline, and by the early 1590s it had vanished like smoke. Partly this was owing to the death of John Field in 1588; no one was found to replace his sheer organizing genius. Partly it was because radical Puritanism was brought into utter disrepute both with moderate Puritans, and with the Anglican establishment, by the appearance of the notorious Martin Marprelate tracts in 1588–9. These were seven anonymous satires—no one knew who "Martin Marprelate" was—that poured a merry, scornful ridicule on the unreformed Church of England and its bishops. (Marprelate means something like "Bash-a-Bishop" in modern English.) The queen and Episcopal hierarchy were incandescent with anger; it did not help that the Marprelate tracts were quite popular, and often scandalously funny.
Moderate Puritans, however, deeply disapproved. Richard Greenham, one of their most admired figures, preached against the Marprelate tracts in Saint Mary's College, Cambridge University, on the basis that their effect was "to make sin ridiculous, whereas it ought to be made odious". In fact, almost all those on the Presbyterian wing of Puritanism agreed with Greenham's criticism; but the Marprelate tracts threw a suspicion of tasteless extremism on any Puritan who "rocked the boat" of Anglicanism, as the Presbyterians had certainly done. To this day no one is sure who wrote the Marprelate tracts. Some have suggested Presbyterian MP Job
Throckmorton, others the Welsh Presbyterian-turned-Separatist John Penry (see below).
Presbyterianism, and indeed Puritanism in general, had acquired a new and powerful foe in 1583. The disgraced Grindal, who died that year, was replaced by Thomas Cartwright's old enemy, John Whitgift. The Presbyterian effrontery in the 1586 parliament, and the Marprelate tracts, which had often lampooned Whitgift, provoked the archbishop into using repressive legal machinery against Puritans on an unprecedented scale. The chief machine was a special church court known as the court of high commission, which had almost unlimited powers to investigate and punish the enemies of the established Church.
Whitgift now employed the court of high commission to discover and shut down the printing presses responsible for the Marprelate tracts; its agents did this successfully, using torture to extract information. They also
arrested Thomas Cartwright and some 10 other leading Puritans, who were imprisoned for refusing to take the infamous ex officio oath. This was an oath by which a prisoner swore to answer truthfully any and all questions put to him (there was no get-out clause—no right of objecting to questions or claiming confidentiality). Cartwright was kept in prison for some two years altogether, but finally released through the intercession of powerful supporters, including King James VI of Scotland, who saw himself as a marvel of erudition and had a soft spot for scholars. The father of English
Presbyterianism soon departed for Guernsey in the Channel Islands, with its new governor, Lord Zouch; Guernsey was under the authority of the English crown but outside its Church—French Reformed influence had made Guernsey Presbyterian. Cartwright was at home here.
Archbishop Whitgift put an efficient Anglican churchman in charge of the court of high commission—Richard Bancroft (1544–1610), a Cambridge doctor of divinity and Canon of Westminster Abbey. Bancroft proved a formidably skilful opponent of Puritanism. He managed to discredit the Presbyterian wing of the movement by a dexterous ploy, turning Calvin against them in his 1593 treatise, A Survey of the Pretended
Holy Discipline:15
And that you may perceive what great difference there is betwixt our men's spirits and Master
Calvin's; their outrage, and his modesty: their rashness, ignorance and giddiness, and his sobriety, learning and judgment… But it may peradventure be said that, howsoever Calvin did carry himself in this cause, yet Beza is of another opinion. Indeed he is so: but it turneth more and more daily to his own discredit. He succeeded Master Calvin in place; but neither in his learning nor in all his virtues.
Beza took a far stricter view of Presbyterianism as the divinely ordained and exclusively valid form of church government than Calvin had done.
Ironically, Bancroft proved something of a mirror-image of Beza here; he claimed (or seemed to claim) unique divine authority for the Episcopal form of church government. This was an advance on Whitgift, who had defended
Episcopacy as merely lawful. Bancroft could therefore be seen as the originator of a "High Church" type of Anglicanism, which has insisted on Episcopacy as an essential mark of the rightly constituted Church. Not even
Bancroft, however, was prepared to declare invalid the ministers and sacraments of other Churches that lacked Episcopacy.
5. Separatism's second wind The 1580s saw the re-emergence of Separatism in Elizabethan England under new, educated leaders. The most significant was Robert Browne
(1550–1633), a Cambridge graduate who studied under Thomas Cartwright.
Browne began as a Puritan, influenced not only by Cartwright but by Richard Greenham, who in 1578 took Browne under his wing, encouraging him to finish his divinity studies and accept a parish ministry. However, omitting the tangled complexities of Browne's biography, by 1582 he had rejected both the entire established Church, and also the Puritan ideal of reforming it from within. The only way to have a Scriptural church, he concluded, was to leave Anglicanism and start afresh. Having gathered some like-minded believers, Browne sailed for the Dutch Republic; the Separatist congregation found a home in the city of Middelburg. Browne's church, however, imploded through internal quarrels, e.g. the attitude that should be taken toward believers who conformed to Anglicanism. Browne adopted too exclusive and censorious a stance for most of the congregation, and they eventually sacked him. He left for Scotland.
But before being sacked, Browne had written the first and enduring masterpiece of Separatist theology: A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for any (1582). Here Browne argued that reforming a corrupt
Church like the Anglican involved an ungodly tarrying (waiting)—waiting for bishops or MPs to be won over—whereas Scripture required immediate action. Hence true believers had no choice but to secede and form their own congregations, made up not of everyone living in a locality (as in the parish system), but of genuinely faithful souls. These churches were to be run, more or less, according to what a later generation would call
Congregational principles.
After leaving the Dutch Republic, Browne's attempt to propagate Separatism in Scotland failed—he ended up in prison again. After regaining his liberty, this sadly disenchanted Separatist pioneer made his way back into England, where he conformed to the Anglican Church. In 1591 he became minister of the Anglican parish of Achurch-cum-Thorpe in Northamptonshire; he still held this post when he died in 1633. But his name had become attached to the movement he had abandoned—
Separatists and Congregationalists were now routinely called Brownists.
Further, his Treatise of Reformation, and his A Book which Sheweth the Life
and Manner of all True Christians (1582), which also expounded Congregational church government, had both made a big splash in England; they continued to influence many, even after Browne himself no longer believed what he had written. The treatises were condemned by special royal proclamation in 1583, and two men—John Copping and Elias
Thacker—were hanged in Bury Saint Edmunds for distributing the forbidden literature. The blood of martyrdom was beginning to sanctify the Separatist cause in its followers' eyes.
The other great Separatist leaders at this time were John Greenwood, Henry Barrow, and John Penry. The common date of their deaths in 1593 testifies that all three suffered martyrdom for their Separatist faith in a single savage outburst from the English establishment.
John Greenwood (d.1593) was a Cambridge graduate, originally Puritan, deeply influenced by Thomas Cartwright, but he had now withdrawn entirely from the Church of England and become the foremost Separatist leader in London. Arrested in 1586 when agents of Bishop Aylmer of London broke into a meeting where Greenwood was expounding Scripture, he spent the next seven years in and out of prison.
Henry Barrow (c.1550–93) was another Cambridge graduate, an exlawyer who had become consumed by theology after a sudden conversion experience. A friend of Greenwood's, he visited him in prison and was promptly arrested himself. It was during his long imprisonment that Barrow wrote some of the most important treatises of early Separatism, setting forth
Congregational ideals of church life, e.g. A True Description of the Visible Congregation of the Saints (1589), and A Brief Discovery of the False
Church (1590), printed by friends in the Dutch Republic. As a result of these influential writings, Brownists were also sometimes called
Barrowists.
John Penry (1559–93) was not connected with Greenwood or Barrow prior to being imprisoned with them, but they did develop a sense of brotherhood in captivity. Penry was a Welshman from Llangamarch in Breconshire, who studied at both Cambridge and Oxford; he may have been a Roman Catholic by upbringing, but at Cambridge he embraced Calvinism in an ardent Presbyterian form. At Oxford in 1587 Penry published a plea for more effective evangelism in Wales; he was so critical of the Welsh
Anglican establishment, the court of high commission threw him in prison for several days to cool him off. Suspected of authoring the Martin
Marprelate tracts of 1588–9 (he certainly helped print them), Penry was arrested again in March 1593. By now his Presbyterianism had passed into outright Separatism.
Greenwood and Barrow were convicted of publishing material "with malicious intent" and hanged on 6th April 1593. Penry was convicted (on dubious testimony) of inciting rebellion, and hanged on May 9th.
Separatism had three more martyrs. By killing its leaders, however, the Elizabethan authorities had not stamped out the thing itself. They knew this; the Conventicle Act of 1593 assumed the existence of a significant underground movement of Separatists, decreeing banishment as the first penalty, and death if the banished person dared to return.
Most of Greenwood's congregation emigrated to the Dutch Republic, settling in Amsterdam, where in 1597 Francis Johnson (1563–1618) became their pastor. Johnson was an English Presbyterian, a disciple of Thomas Cartwright, who had finally despaired of Anglicanism and embraced Separatism. Unfortunately the Separatist church in Amsterdam was plagued by quarrels and schisms, which at one point involved a solemn examination of a dress worn by Johnson's wife Thomasine, to determine whether it was too flamboyant. Johnson ended up excommunicating as "slanderers" the enemies of the dress, which included his father and his brother. Not surprisingly, further controversies erupted over whether the power of excommunication resided in the eldership or the congregational meeting. Johnson and his followers ultimately withdrew and founded a more Presbyterian-style church in Emden.
6. Questioning Calvinism The Puritan critique of the condition of the Anglican Church was bound to provoke a theological response sooner or later. In the 1590s, the climate was right for such a response. Roman Catholicism was no longer considered so great a danger, after the failure of Philip II of Spain's attempted Catholic invasion of England in 1588; the mighty Spanish fleet
(the "Armada")16 was smashed by a combination of the English navy and a storm. Philip was the great European champion of intolerant CounterReformation Catholicism, and his defeat was a grave blow to Catholic prestige. The Catholic claimant to the English throne, Mary Stuart—"Mary
Queen of Scots"—had also finally been executed the previous year, having been Elizabeth's troublesome prisoner for two decades, and the focus of endless Catholic plots to topple Elizabeth and replace her with Mary.17 With the Catholic threat thus diminished, the Anglican establishment felt no need to soft-pedal its opposition to Puritans, who were strong allies in the struggle against Rome.
One sign of things to come was opposition to the Reformed understanding of salvation that so characterized 16th century Puritans.
Peter Baro (1534–99), a learned Huguenot, had been Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge since 1574. In the 1580s he began to have second thought about the Reformed view of predestination. He did not, however, aggressively challenge the Reformed Orthodoxy that had the upper hand in the Elizabethan theological world (although a university sermon in 1579 upset some people). But in 1595, Baro's student William
Barrett, a fellow of Caius College, did aggressively challenge Reformed Orthodoxy in a sermon preached as part of his Bachelor of Divinity examination. Not only did Barrett openly reject the doctrine of unconditional election and perseverance; he criticized John Calvin, Peter
Martyr Vermigli, and Theodore Beza in a way that many thought irreverent.
The resulting uproar resulted in the intervention of none other than Archbishop Whitgift. His response, however, was not what modern students might have expected. For all his hostility to Puritanism, Whitgift was an uncompromising Calvinist in his theology of grace. The archbishop promulgated a doctrinal statement known as the Lambeth Articles which throttled Barrett's anti-Calvinism. The Articles stated:
1. God from eternity has predestined certain people to life; certain people He has reprobated.
2. The moving or efficient cause of predestination to life is not the foresight of faith, or of perseverance, or of good works, or of any thing that is in the person predestined, but only the good will and pleasure of God.
3. There is predetermined a certain number of the predestined, which can neither be augmented nor diminished.
4. Those who are not predestined to salvation shall be necessarily damned for their sins.
5. A true, living, and justifying faith, and the Spirit of God sanctifying, is not extinguished, does not fall away; it does not vanish away in the elect, either finally or totally.
6. A man truly faithful, that is, such a one who is endued with a justifying faith, is certain, with the full assurance of faith, of the remission of his sins and of his everlasting salvation by Christ.
7. Saving grace is not given, is not granted, is not communicated to all people, by which they may be saved if they will.
8. No one can come to Christ unless it shall be given to him, and unless the Father shall draw him; and all are not drawn by the Father, that they may come to the Son.
9. It is not in the will or power of everyone to be saved.
Barrett eventually fled to France where he became a Roman Catholic. His provocative sermon, however, should probably not be seen as an isolated event. There seems to have been a more widespread questioning of Reformed views of salvation in Cambridge University around this time.
Other critics were Everard Digby (dates unknown), a theologian of Saint John's College, Cambridge, and Lancelot Andrewes (see below), later to be
Bishop of Winchester, but Master of Cambridge's Pembroke College from 1589 to 1605. Digby was expelled (allegedly for unruly behaviour— blowing a trumpet during daylight hours); Andrewes, however, survived to become one of the founders of a new "High Church" tradition in Anglicanism in the reign of King James I. Still, Whitgift had made it crushingly clear with the Lambeth Articles that there could be no successful
challenge to a Reformed doctrine of grace as long as he was archbishop.
The seeds would blossom only after his death.
7. Richard Hooker: Elizabethan philosopher-theologian par excellence The most effective response to Puritanism came not from the critics of Calvinism, but from a man who largely shared Calvinist views of salvation.
However, he set them within a larger philosophy of God's ordering of creation, thereby offering a "sociology of grace" that differed from Puritanism of any type. The man was Richard Hooker (1554–1600). A native of Exeter, Devon, Hooker studied at Oxford under the patronage of the illustrious John Jewel (1524–71). Jewel, a Protestant exile in Mary
Tudor's reign, became Bishop of Salisbury in the Elizabethan Church; his Defence of the Anglican Church (1562) was one of the 16th century's most eloquent and persuasive statements of English Reformation principles against Roman Catholicism.
Hooker was ordained in 1579, and became private tutor to the son of devoutly Protestant Edwin Sandys (1519–88), who was Bishop of London from 1570 to 1577, then Archbishop of York until his death in 1588. At the suggestion of Sandys and Archbishop Whitgift, Queen Elizabeth appointed
Hooker in 1584 as Master or rector of London's Temple Church, which served the legal community. Many of the lawyers would have preferred the Presbyterian leader Walter Travers (see above), and decided to hire him as a lecturer; this was a common device among Puritans to give their preachers employment, since lecturers could be appointed by anyone with enough funds, on a purely voluntary basis. The result was a sort of preaching duel between soft-spoken Hooker (the morning preacher) and fire-breathing
Travers (the afternoon lecturer); as Thomas Fuller the historian put it, "the pulpit spoke pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon".
Hooker was not built for controversy and sank into depression; he appealed to Archbishop Whitgift to relieve him. Whitgift's response was to silence
Travers by a sort of legal injunction served on him while he was in the pulpit. It was probably not what Hooker had in mind, since there was no personal animosity between himself and Travers—they had the highest regard for each other's learning.
Hooker's exposure to Travers' dynamic Presbyterianism inspired him to the true labour of his life, a personal investigation of the deeper issues underlying the debate between Presbyterians and the Elizabethan Church.
This bore fruit in his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, published in five
volumes between 1594 and 1597.18 Hooker's prose is generally recognized as among the noblest in English literature; he holds an exalted place in literary history, whether or not one accepts his beliefs. As for the immediate controversy that provoked the Laws, the Presbyterian leaders—Travers and Cartwright—had argued that the New Testament imposed one single detailed form of church government, binding on all Christians in all places at all times, and that failure to follow this pattern was defiance of God.
Hooker counter-argued that Scripture revealed no such single detailed pattern. Rather it gave principles that had to be embodied in any form of church government. But the specific form of government varied from one time and place to another, according to need and circumstance. Hooker defended Episcopacy, not because it was imposed by Scripture, but because the age-long experience of the Church had proven it to be a useful way of enshrining Scriptural principles of oversight, and because it had been appointed by lawful authority for the Anglican Church of which Travers and Cartwright were members.
Stepping back from the immediate dispute, Hooker critiqued the Presbyterian view of Scripture. Travers and Cartwright had set up a stark antithesis between Scripture (which alone carried God's authority) and everything else (which was of merely human authority, and therefore suspect at best and sinful at worst). Hooker argued that this fierce antithesis was over-simplistic and false. God ruled His creation by law. That law was wider than Scripture. Natural law, encoded in the very nature of humanity, was God's law. Therefore reason and conscience had inalienable rights as aspects of God's inbuilt law of nature, and must not be despised in the name of an exclusive Scripturalism.
This facet of Hooker's argument was aimed, in part, at Cartwright's assertion that even the civil laws of the state had to be derived from Scripture—by which Cartwright meant the law of Moses, with a large extension in English law of crimes that should merit the death penalty. In fact, Cartwright argued that the civil authorities now must be more severe than Moses: God no longer sent miraculous punishments as He often did in Old Testament times, so that the state must punish more strictly to make up for this apparent divine leniency. "If this be bloody and extreme, I am content to be so counted with the Holy Ghost", Cartwright solemnly pronounced. Hooker rejected this view both of the proper function of Moses' law, and of how civil authority enacted God's will. He appealed
again to natural law as God-given. The basic purpose of Scripture was not, as Cartwright seemed to think, to give a detailed blueprint for all of life, without which life was lawless, but to reveal the way of salvation in Christ.
When Christians followed the laws of nature, reason, and conscience, in other areas of life, they were still following Christ, because He as Creator was the source of nature, reason, and conscience.
The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God Himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but His instrument. By her from Him we receive whatsoever in such sort we learn. Infinite duties there are, the goodness whereof is by this rule sufficiently manifested, although we had no other warrant besides to approve them. The Apostle St. Paul having speech concerning the heathen saith of them, "They are a law unto themselves." His meaning is, that by force of the light of Reason, wherewith God illuminateth every one which cometh into the world, men being enabled to know truth from falsehood, and good from evil, do thereby learn in many things what the will of God is; which will Himself not revealing by any extraordinary means unto them, but they by natural discourse attaining the knowledge thereof, seem the makers of those Laws which indeed are His, and they but only the finders of them out.
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, then, left behind the original controversy about church government, and became a much larger exploration and vindication of the nature and role of reason in human life.
Its philosophy of natural law had roots in Thomas Aquinas, and we would not go far wrong if we envisaged Hooker as a synthesis of Thomist and Calvinist. His treatise certainly remains one of the most majestic expositions of reason and natural law in a theistic setting ever written. It was almost immediately regarded as a literary, political, and theological classic, and moderate Anglican opponents of Puritanism found it both a fortress and arsenal for their beliefs.19
Among Hooker's other writings, his Learned Discourse of Justification was one of the most eloquently classic presentations of the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith from the entire 16th century.20