Excerpt from The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, Containing Eight Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Several Other Treatises Book 4. Of the redrejs of Super/lition in God's Church, and concerning the Quefiion of this Book. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

"Richard Hooker has long been viewed as the first systematic defender of Anglicanism, as a via media between Roman Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism. In the last twenty years this traditional assumption has been increasingly challenged, however, and it has been argued that Hooker was a Reformed figure whose Anglican credentials are the invention of the Oxford Movement. Whilst the theological ambiguity of Hooker remains perplexing, it is clear that the seventeenth century, not the nineteenth, was responsible for the creation of his reputation as a leading Anglican father. Michael Brydon examines how, during a period of both religious and political consolidation, Hooker became both an authoritative figure and an Anglican emblem. He demonstrates how Reformed suspicions of Hooker, combined with a Catholic desire to exploit his perceived sympathies, helped secure his status as a distinctive English writer. This led to his subsequent adoption by the avant-garde churchmen and his enthronement at the Restoration, through Isaac Walton's biography, as the epitome of the Anglican identity. Unsurprisingly, the unfolding of contemporary crises led to some reappraisal of his standing. The Glorious Revolution meant that Hooker's previously unpalatable belief in an original political compact now came to the forefront and his vision of a national Church was replaced with an established one. Nevertheless, whilst the boundaries of Anglican comprehensiveness have expanded and contracted in response to particular situations, the belief that Hooker was the unparalleled guardian of the English Church has remained remarkably constant ever since."--BOOK JACKET.