Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was an English Anglican theologian and political theorist. He authored the excellent prose classic Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, to which Anglican theology owes its tone and direction.
Born near Exeter, he studied at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he became a Fellow in 1577. He took orders in 1581, and in 1584 became rector of Drayton Beauchamp near Tring.
After a drawn-out debate over his appointment as Master of the Temple in 1585, Hooker resolved to set forth the basis of the Church government, and in 1591 accepted the living of Boscombe near Salisbury. There he began his eight-volume work, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594, 1597, 1648, 1662,) a defense of the Church of England as established during Elizabeth I’s reign.
Still unfinished at the time of his death, Hooker’s work defended the Church of England against both Roman Catholicism and Puritanism. It asserted the Anglican tradition as that of a “threefold cord not quickly broken”—Bible, church, and reason. He argued that in England, there was an essential unity between church and state, which were distinct facets of a single community, both subject to the authority of the monarch.
Hooker’s work much inspired the ideas of later political theorists such as John Locke and Edmund Burke.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Richard Hooker
When the best things are not possible, the best may be made of those that are.
—Richard Hooker
Topics: Best
Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
—Richard Hooker
Topics: Change
To live by one man’s will becomes the cause of all misery.
—Richard Hooker
Topics: Will, Will Power, Willpower
He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.
—Richard Hooker
Topics: Revolutionaries, Revolution, Revolutions
There will come a time when three words, uttered with charity and meekness, shall receive a far more blessed reward than three thousand volumes written with disdainful sharpness of wit.
—Richard Hooker
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