properties, and qualities there are, whereby sermons are distinguished
from other kinds of administering the word unto that purpose; and what
special property or quality that is, which being no where found but in
sermons, maketh them effectual to save souls, and leaveth all other
doctrinal means besides destitute of vital efficacy.

Doubtless, Hooker was a theological Talus, with a club of iron against,
opponents with pasteboard helmets, and armed only with crabsticks! But
yet, I too, too often find occasion to complain of him as abusing his
superior strength. For in a good man it is an abuse of his intellectual
superiority, not to use a portion of it in stating his Christian
opponents' cause, his brethren's (though dissentient, and perhaps
erring, yet still brethren's,) side of the question, not as they had
stated and argued it, but as he himself with his higher gifts of logic
and foresight could have set it forth. But Hooker flies off to the
general, in which he is unassailable; and does not, as in candour he
should have done, inquire whether the question would not admit of, nay,
demand, a different answer, when applied solely or principally to the
circumstances, the condition and the needs of the English parishes, and
the population at large, at the particular time when the Puritan divines
wrote, and he, Hooker, replied to them. Now let the cause be tried in
this way, and I should not be afraid to attempt the proof of the
paramount efficacy of preaching on the scheme, and in the line of
argument laid down by himself in this section. In short, Hooker
frequently finds it convenient to forget the homely proverb; 'the proof
of the pudding is in the eating.' Whose parishes were the best
disciplined, whose flocks the best fed, the soberest livers, and the
most awakened and best informed Christians, those of the zealous
preaching divines, or those of the prelatic clergy with their readers?
In whose churches and parishes were all the other pastoral duties,