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IN his treatise on civil lordship, written a few years before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Wyclif raises, incidentally, but in a particularly challenging way, the central problem of political philosophy. The problem is to work out a consistent idea of authority and subordination as reciprocal—in the biblically extreme terms of WycliPs formulation, a consistent idea of reciprocal lordship and servitude or mastery and slavery. It is unclear what part, if any, his brief discussion of reciprocity plays in the rest of Wyclif s thought. There are echoes, but nothing like the elaboration the idea might seem to deserve, and authoritative recent studies raise doubts even about the echoes. Still, if we are willing to interpret Wycliffian reciprocity for ourselves, the idea may prove a fruitful one.

The part of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity most attractively relevant to the theme of this conference is Book V, the first spiritually constructive exposition of the religion of the Book of Common Prayer. Hooker’s edifying account of the public duties of religion in the first seventy-five chapters of Book V and of the ordained ministry in the concluding six chapters can readily be appreciated today on its merits, leaving aside the fact that the religion of the Prayer Book was legally prescribed for all English Christians when Hooker wrote. It is on this currently unattractive fact of legal prescription that I want to concentrate, however, for it sets the historical context for the public devotional theology of Book V. To understand Hooker’s justificatory account of this fact is to become clearer about an essential difference between what is going on today when people minister and are ministered to in accordance with Anglican religious forms and what Hooker, at least, held to be going on when these forms were used in the sixteenth century.

No one doubts that the treatise on repentance published in 1648 as the sixth book of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is by Hooker, but there has been considerable doubt that 1648 (as I shall call it) belongs in the Laws. Keble pronounced it ‘an entire deviation from its subject’, which should have been the Disciplinarian proposal that the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction be exercised by congregational lay-elders, while W. Speed Hill concludes his recent detailed discussion of the problems surrounding the posthumous three last books of Hooker's great work by calling on those who would include 1648 in the Laws to argue their case for its inclusion ‘in the face of a substantial body of evidence, internal and external, to the contrary’. The present note is a response on the ‘internal’ side to Professor Hill's call for argument.

Richard Hooker's work seems relevant to two of the major human projects of our time, the search for unity within the Church and the attempt by modern states to establish their rival ideologies in the world. Hooker's fraternal patience with his Puritan opponents has frequently been noted, as well as his courage in daring to suggest publicly in Elizabethan England that even Roman Catholics might be saved. It would seem likely on the face of it that so irenic a figure could contribute much to ecumenical discussion. With regard to the war for the minds and souls of men in which some statesmen regard their countries as now engaged, one would also expect to find material for reflection in Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a work in which ultimate convictions and values are treated in intimate relation to their possible social embodiment and political enforcement.