on Fast-Days: Richard Hooker

From Book V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, section 72:

The very purpose of the church of God, both in the number and in the order of her fasts, hath been not only to preserve thereby, throughout all ages, the remembrance of miseries heretofore sustained, and of the causes in ourselves out of which they have risen, that men considering the one might fear the other the more, but farther also to temper the mind, lest contrary affections coming in place, should make it too profuse and dissolute; in which respect it seemeth that fasts have been set as ushers of festival-days, for preventing of those disorders as much as might be; wherein notwithstanding, the world always will deserve, as it hath done, blame; because such evils being not possible to be rooted out, the most we can do, is in keeping them low, and (which is chiefly the fruit we look for) to create in the minds of them a love toward a frugal and severe life, to undermine the palaces of wantonness; to plant parsimony as nature, where riotousness hath been studied; to harden whom pleasure would melt; and to help the tumours which always fulness breedeth; that children as it were in the wool of their infancy, died with hardness, may never afterward change colours; that the poor, whose perpetual fasts are necessity, may with better contentment endure the hunger which virtue causeth others so often to choose; and by advice of religion itself so far to esteem above the contrary, that they which for the most part do lead sensual and easy lives; they which, as the prophet David describeth them, “are not plagued like other men,” may, by the public spectacle of all, be still put in mind what themselves are; finally, that every man may be every man's daily guide and example, as well by fasting to declare humility, as by praise to express joy in the sight of God, although it have herein befallen the church, as sometimes David, so that the speech of the one may be truly the voice of the other, “My soul fasted, and even that was also turned to my reproof.”

It is for the likes of this that Samuel Johnson named Hooker among the authors whose language represented “a well of English undefiled.”

One sentence it is, as it should be, for it is one continuous idea, with not a word of it extraneous. They don't make sentences like that any more. Anyone who would attempt such in this degraded age would be derided, and worse, ignored.

I have spent a lot of time with Hooker over the past few years, first with Books I through IV of the Ecclesiastical Polity, and now this winter with Book V. I will stop after this, for the matters addressed in books VI, VII, and VIII are of less interest to me, but Book V is of very great interest. In it, Hooker defends the liturgy and customs of the Anglican Church, a matter close to my heart.

Some books are read in a day; some in a week; some require much more time, either from their size or their content. Hooker is in the third of these categories. For the most part, I have read him in thirty-minute bites, while riding the transit bus. That is about right; more than that would be more than I could comprehend in one sitting.

It is a delight to befriend someone like Hooker. I will be sorry when the time comes to lay him aside.

But one must not so much admire his style as take to heart the content. The above 352-word sentence could provide substance for much meditation, as well as encouragement in this discipline, and I plan to revisit it as we approach the first of the Church's great fast-days: Ash Wednesday. I have posted it here in part to remind myself of that intention.