of most mercifully-tempered severity, they fasten on the head of the
Lord's vicegerents here on earth, whatsoever they any where find
uttered against the cruelty of blood-thirsty men, and to themselves
they draw all the sentences which Scripture hath in favor of innocency
persecuted for the truth.

How great the influence of the age on the strongest minds, when so
eminently wise a man as Richard Hooker could overlook the obvious
impolicy of inflicting punishments which the sufferer himself will
regard as merits, and all who have any need to be deterred will extol as
martyrdom! Even where the necessity could be plausibly pretended, it is
war, not punitive law;--and then Augustine's argument for Sarah!


Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 194.

We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole
earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been
ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the
time that the blessed apostles were here conversant.

Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of
knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not
have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the
thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the
Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily
took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason.
Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under
a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of
the name [Greek: epaskapoi]. He would have had superintendents.