kind, Bacon's effort to bring all outer
nature to the test of human intelligence, were but the crowning
manifestations of the two main impulses of their time, its rationalism
and its humanity. Both found expression in the work of Hooker; and
coloured through its results the after history of the English Church.
The historical feeling showed itself in a longing to ally the religion
of the present with the religion of the past, to find a unity of faith
and practice with the Church of the Fathers, to claim part in that great
heritage of Catholic tradition, both in faith and worship, which the
Papacy so jealously claimed as its own. Such a longing seized as much on
tender and poetic tempers like George Herbert's as on positive and
prosaic tempers, such as that of Laud. The one started back from the
bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment for his
devotion in the outer associations which the piety of ages had grouped
around it, in holy places and holy things, in the stillness of church
and altar, in the pathos and exultation of prayer and praise, in the
awful mystery of sacraments. The narrow and external mood of the other,
unable to find standing ground in the purely personal relation between
man and God which formed the basis of Calvinism, fell back on the
consciousness of a living Christendom, preserving through the ages a
definite faith and worship, and which, torn and rent as it seemed, was
soon to resume its ancient unity.

[Sidenote: The Arminians.]

While the historical feeling which breathes in Hooker's work took form
in the new passion for tradition and ceremonialism, the appeal which it
addressed to human reason produced a school of philosophical thinkers
whose timid upgrowth was almost lost in the clash of warring creeds
about them, but who were destined--as the latitudinarians of later
days--to make as deep an impression as their dogmatic rivals on the
religious thought of their countrymen. As yet however this rationalizing
movement hovered on the borders of the system of belief which it was so
keenly to attack; it limited itself rather to the work of moderating and
reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of the points of
difference which parted Christendom and the greatness of its points of
agreement, or to revolting with Arminius from the more extreme tenets of
Calvin and Calvin's followers and pleading like him for some
co-operation on man's part with the work of grace. As