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Richard
Hooker by
C Sydney Carter
<<His
ecclesiastical position
In 1595 Hooker accepted the living of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury
and resided there till his death in November, 1600. It was here
that he formed a most intimate friendship with Dr. Adrian Saravia,
then a prebendary of Canterbury and the author of a learned treatise
in support of episcopacy. Saravia was however a non-episcopally
ordained Dutch Reformed Church minister who had been driven by
Romish persecution to the Channel Islands, and after being a
Divinity professor at Leyden, held several English benefices.
Walton describes this fellowship as a “holy friendship,
increasing daily to so high and mutual affections that their
two wills seemed but one and the same.” Saravia assiduously
visited Hooker in his last illness and much capital has been
made by Anglo-Catholics of the fact that Hooker requested this
bosom friend to hear his death-bed confession and give him absolution
in accordance with the special provision in the Visitation of
the Sick. But Hooker expressly states that this permission
is only an allowable exception “for the comfort of such
as are ready to depart this world,” and, as we have seen,
he definitely discourages private or auricular Confession as
a general practice. On the following day - the day of his death
- Saravia found Hooker deep in meditation “of the number
and nature of angels and their blessed obedience and order, without
which peace could not be in heaven.” And he added “Oh,
that it might be so on earth!” He told Saravia that “God
had heard his daily petitions,” for, he said, “I
am at peace with men, and He is at peace with me, and from that
blessed assurance I feel that inward joy which this world can
neither give nor take away, and this witness makes the thought
of death joyful.”
Books
VI-VIII of the Polity - In 1597 Hooker finished his fifth
book of the “Polity,” and in his last three years,
in failing health, he over-taxed his strength in his endeavour
to complete the last three books. He declared just before he
died that he had finished them, but their “history” is
eventful and somewhat obscure. If finished, in rough manuscript,
they were certainly not ready for publication, and it is doubtful
if they were actually completed. Walton’s story that on
Hooker's death his careless and disloyal wife allowed some Puritan
minister to destroy or seriously mutilate them and then later
on confessed this “crime” at a Privy Council inquiry
and died the next day, is, as regards the last statement, certainly
inaccurate, since Mrs. Hooker married again and did not die till
1603! And there is no proof of her impeachment by the Privy
Council or of her want of devotion to her famous husband, who
made her the sole executrix of his will.
Whether Hooker actually completed these last three Books remains
an unsolved problem. His friend Dr. John Spenser's statement
would seem to argue in the affirmative, since he writes of “perfect
copies being conveyed away . . . of malice or covetousness or
wicked blind zeal . . . and nothing but certain old imperfect
and mangled draughts dismembered into pieces and scattered being
left to us.” But this account depends on the report of
his wife, who had no special love for Mrs. Hooker! What actually
has been proved is that at Hooker's death John Churchman, also
a life-long keen Churchman, immediately sent an agent to Bishopsbourne
who brought back all Hooker's incomplete manuscripts and sermons
in a “cloak-bag” to London. Here they were distributed
amongst his close friends, Sir Edwin Sandys, Dr. Parry and Dr.
John Spenser, the president of his old College, to be sorted
out and arranged. Books VI and VII were found to be almost ready
for publication and Dr. Spenser, as a labour of love, edited
what he called “the old imperfect and mangled draughts,” which
he hoped would show “some shadows and resemblances of their
father's face.” But through various causes, one of which
was an alleged difference of opinion between Sandys and Bishop
Andrewes on the tract on “Confession “ (which , is
really Book VI), the three last Books when completed by Dr. Spenser
a few years later, were not published for over fifty years after
Hooker's death. Bishop Andrewes also assisted in this task as
he had been specially anxious that Hooker's great work should
not fall into malicious hands. There is no reason to believe
that Hooker's friends materially altered his last three books
or that they cannot be relied on as expressing his views. They
have been generally accepted as authentic.
>>Hooker's Character
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