Charles Jasper Sisson on Richard Hooker

“In the long crowded roll of great English men of letters there is no figure of greater significance to the instructed mind than Hooker... His own life's work [The Ecclesiastical Polity] is a monument of pure and splendid prose style and lucid philosophical thought, based on unsurpassed scholarship in the vast field of his theme. The book itself is a milestone in the history of a great English institution [the Anglican Church] and of religious thought.”

“Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is more than a magnificent piece of prose writing, more than a full statement of the views of a philosopher defending the position of the church against its Puritan enemies. It is a document of Church history of the first importance, a manifesto to which the Church returns at every crisis to seek justification and vindication.”