Towards
the bishops and their policy, though his language is very respectful,
for the government was implicated, he is very severe. They punish and
restrain, but they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what was
wanting; and theirs are "_injuriae potentiorum_"--"injuries come from
them that have the upperhand." But Hooker himself did not put his finger
more truly and more surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement:
on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party spirit and visible
personal ambition--"these are the true successors of Diotrephes and not
my lord bishops"--on the gradual development of the Puritan theory till
it came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable and intolerant as
that of the Papacy; on the servile affectation of the fashions of Geneva
and Strasburg; on the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan
teaching--its inability to satisfy the great questions which it raised
in the soul, its unworthy dealing with Scripture--"naked examples,
conceited inferences, and forced allusions, which mine into all
certainty of religion"--"the word, the bread of life, they toss up and
down, they break it not;" on their undervaluing of moral worth, if it
did not speak in their phraseology--"as they censure virtuous men by the
names of _civil_ and _moral_, so do they censure men truly and godly
wise, who see into the vanity of their assertions, by the name of
_politiques_, saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring of
man's brain.
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