One of the most familiar stereotypes of modern Anglican Christianity is that it combines doctrinal indifferentism with obstinate defensiveness about the externals, ritual, social or legal, of the Church of England and its offshoots – what Donald MacKinnon devastatingly christened ‘ecclesiological fundamentalism’ in his little book, The Stripping of the Altars. Footnote ¹ Sometimes this is seen as foreshadowed in the positions of divines and scholars of the Church of England's first independent century. Donne's phrase in his ‘Satire iii’, ‘Doubt wisely’,Footnote ² might be prayed in aid; and the first book of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici gives some colour to the idea that Anglican identity has more to do with belonging than believing, to use what has become a fashionable contemporary distinction. Over and above what is laid down in the articles of religion, says Browne,

Doubts that arise, he continues, he will either forget or defer considering, on the grounds that reason will with the lapse of time find a ‘reasonable truce’ between warring opinions. And to enter into active controversy may imperil the certainty I have if I do not happen to possess the kind of dialectical nimbleness that can assure victory in argument: ‘A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender.’Footnote ⁴ Later on, he observes in passing that ‘[m]any things are true in Divinity, which are neither inducible by reason, nor confirmable by sense; and many things in Philosophy confirmable by sense yet not inducible by reason.’Footnote ⁵ ‘Reason’ cannot persuade anyone of matters of fact: the phenomena of the world are what they are and can be found out by observation: the point being, apparently, that what we can defensibly assert varies from one area of knowledge to another. If ‘Philosophy’ – that is, in this context, the systematic observation of the natural world – does not depend on what can be predicted on rational principle, we should not be surprised if there are truths which do not depend on either empirical observation or rational generality. As to empirical observation, it is the kind of thing that justifies me in solemnly swearing that such and such is truly the case; but where what I assert goes beyond what I have seen myself by ‘infallible warrant’, I should hold back from swearing. I may be entirely convinced that something is the case, but it would be improper for me to take my oath on it, since that would imply that I could support what I assert by direct testimony. As we might put it, the ‘grammar’ of swearing has to do with direct evidence; and so I cannot take my oath about my spiritual condition any more than about the existence of the city of Constantinople. I am not in doubt, but the fact of my being convinced is not evidence.Footnote ⁶ The implication is that we must be very modest about the capacities of argument to resolve controversy; we may regard some proposition as certain (and we may as a matter of fact be right about that), yet be unable to establish it by public dispute. Whatever resolves doubt is not going to be dialectic. In the case of the existence of Constantinople, we can always go there; in the case of religious doctrine, we have no ideological high court but may decide – for a huge variety of reasons – to be loyal to an institutional system that makes broad sense to us and is consistently supported by the general tenor of our experience.

It is important to be clear what Browne does and does not say in this informal analysis. He is not arguing for a general agnosticism in matters of doctrine: he accepts the Articles of Religion and whatever is implied in the authorized liturgy. He does not deny that we may have certain knowledge on matters outside rational demonstration and empirical proof; but he implies that we may not know the grounds of our certainty. He identifies ‘infallible’ knowing with what we can credibly demonstrate on the basis of first-hand sense experience;Footnote ⁷ but in so defining what we simply cannot be wrong about he does not suggest that this is the sole way of being right. He is not a doctrinal indifferentist, though he is clear that there are ‘matters of indifference’ outside what the Church has decided to pronounce on. In many ways, he echoes themes that had been more fully developed by Richard Hooker (d. 1600); and it may help to look at some of Hooker's key passages to find further illumination on how certainty and uncertainty, personal conviction and public belonging are negotiated in this context. It is in the Fifth Book of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie that we find some of the most notable arguments on the subject, specifically in Hooker's discussion of the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. He distinguishes here between ‘demonstrable conclusions’ and ‘demonstrative principles’: the latter are axioms whose certainty is either self-evident or ‘evident by the light of some higher knowledge’; ‘conclusions’ are what can be deduced from prior agreed points.Footnote ⁸ In Christian teaching, both are present, but what is fundamental is the recognition that the ‘principles’ of this teaching are to be believed with complete adherence on the grounds of what is believed about God. Once we have settled our trust in God, we may take the basic lines of revealed faith for granted; we trust their source. And these ‘basic lines’, Hooker implies, are to do with the conviction, the ‘acknowledgment’, that we are loved by God and invited into the fellowship of his Son, not as a reward for our belief but as the condition for it. Baptism establishes in us the gift of this new life as ‘children of the promise’; the eucharist, as he spells out a few chapters later, is our conscious appropriation of what has been given. ‘We know by grace what the grace is’,Footnote ⁹ and are given the discernment to see something both of our growth in holiness and of the entire dependence of such holiness on the action of Christ upon us through the consuming of his sacramental signs.

Thus in baptism what happens is that we are visibly incorporated into the fellowship of Christ: it is now true to say of us that we are children of the promise, and that truth is certain in itself because God has made it to be the case. Through our participation in the eucharist, we acquire increasing subjective certainty about what has been done. This illustrates the argument advanced by Hooker much earlier in his celebrated sermon Of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect: we must distinguish between ‘certainty of evidence’, where we can appeal to clear proofs of some proposition to establish its truth, and ‘certainty of adherence’, where we have less evidence but stronger affective reason for holding to a belief. We see a putative state of affairs – a claim about God and God's actions, say – ‘not only as true but also as good', and so our will is engaged. Not that we are certain simply because we want to be; but our certainty is a matter of consistently desiring a truth we have glimpsed or sensed which, if it is true, matters more than any truth that can be more evidentially grounded, and it reflects a state of affairs more ‘sure’ in the sense of being more firmly established in actuality, than any empirical matter of fact.Footnote ¹⁰ Hooker, as several scholars have observed, is taking for granted a familiar scholastic distinction between truths that are ‘self-evident’ (per se notum) in themselves, in the sense that if true they are necessarily or ‘definitionally’ true, and truths that are self-evident quoad nos: that is to say, something may be necessarily true in that a subject cannot actually be consistently thought or described in any other way, but we may as a matter of fact be ignorant of that intrinsic quality of the truth in question because we have an imperfect grasp of the subject.Footnote ¹¹ And Nigel Voak, in his admirable and ambitious study of Hooker's relation to Reformed theology, notes the parallels with Aquinas's location of the believer's apprehension of revealed truth as combining elements of firmness and clarity that belong to proper and conclusive knowledge with the lack of ‘clear vision’ that belongs to ‘doubt, suspicion or opinion’.Footnote ¹² We are faced with a somewhat paradoxical situation in which the certainty of adherence, despite its apparent unevenness and fragility, is greater than the certainty of evidence where God is concerned, so that it is perfectly possible that we feel doubt or insecurity while still persisting in faithfulness to what has been given.

Hooker's concern in this remarkable sermon is to challenge the suspicion that ‘[i]f I were faithful it could not be thus’Footnote ¹³ – that is, to persuade those in spiritual doubt and desolation that they are not reprobate. The lack of ‘evidence’ for election is no evidence of reprobation: suffering, inner struggle and outer failure do not matter so long as we still long for what we have sought to adhere to.Footnote ¹⁴ If it is evidence we are looking for, it can be found only in that kind of self-examination that tests whether we truly want the good we have dimly apprehended; which is evidence in a very Pickwickian sense, since it can be submitted to no external tribunal. Yet the discussion in this sermon casts light on what Hooker has to say about the eucharist in the Lawes: our fidelity in receiving the sacrament intensifies our consciousness of the grace received, helps us to see that in spite of what we may feel we are actually growing in faith, and reminds us that any such growth is the direct effect of a steady and invincible divine presence in the soul. Communicating provides a new level of – if not exactly evidence – what we could call ‘evidential reinforcement’. Thus I am not persuaded that (as Voak and others argue) we have to imagine a major theological shift in Hooker's thought between his defence of the possibility of knowing ourselves to be elected in the early sermons and a later repudiation of such knowledge, with the passage on the eucharist thus having to be regarded as an anomaly.Footnote ¹⁵ It is true that Hooker has hard words in his Preface to the Lawes for those who conclude that they are elect (and others are not) on the grounds of ‘the fervent earnestness of their persuasion’ or ‘earnest affection’.Footnote ¹⁶ What he is querying here is the assumption that we can be certain of our election because of the strength of our feelings; but this is clearly something different from the consistency of the (grace-supported) will which is being appealed to in the sermon, a consistency which may be unchanged even when strength of feeling is absent. Hooker's pastoral concern in the sermon is for those who cannot believe they are elect because they do not have the right emotions; his theological critique in the Lawes is directed against those who link their Christian assurance to states of feeling, who want precisely to propose their inner condition as evidence. This challenge to a vulgarized Calvinism (and Hooker is explicit in associating it with a popular distortion of the Calvinist theology, while deliberately leaving us with the general impression that it is a risk which this theology will inevitably run because it gives too much house-room to non-rational and non-ecclesial accounts of how the Holy Spirit works) is not a rejection of the idea that we can know ourselves elect. It is rather to clarify what sort of knowledge this might be; what kind of certainty is involved.

The paradox is, as we have seen, that while certainty of adherence is in one way stronger than certainty of evidence, it is also more vulnerable, since it lacks external confirmation and so is open to internal variation. Hence the need to uncouple it decisively from states of ‘affection’. Certainty of adherence is inevitably something that grows and declines (or appears to decline in intensity). Whereas certainty of evidence has a clear, undisputable and irreversible maximal point – we cannot be more sure than when we have the evidence of our sensesFootnote ¹⁷ – the assurance of faith is not like that, whether in respect of the existence and character of God or with respect to my own spiritual standing. Thus my knowledge of my own spiritual condition – of my election – is a complex affair when analysed. I cannot have evidential certainty about it in the usual sense; and if I look for evidential certainty in the state of my ‘affections’, I shall go astray, imagining that positive feelings about this or any related issue constitute proof comparable to the proof of the sense in a dispute over material states of affairs. What is available as evidence is the fact of not having gone back on the decision to be faithful; and this is both weaker and stronger than ordinary evidential certainty. I know my own mind, to the extent of knowing what I want, and knowing therefore when I am grieved and deprived by its lack at the level of feeling. It is not that I am to be convinced of my condition by an appeal to the subjective strength of my conviction, but that the fact of not having decided against what I have committed myself to, the fact of adherence, becomes not so much a ground for certainty but a proof against my reprobation. At the level of evidence, what I need pastorally, in Hooker's eyes, is clear proof that I am not reprobate; and this is provided by the consistency of my graced will – what I go on saying I most desire, even when I feel no warmth or comfort in faith.

Discussions of Hooker's thought on this will somewhat miss the point if they do not begin from his purpose in the sermon on Certaintie, which is not to give proof positive of election through evidence but to use the certainty of adherence as proof ‘negative’, proof that I have not denied my faith and am therefore sincere in my profession even when I feel like a liar. The entire argument is certainly meant to assure believers of their spiritual security, but to do so by way of minimizing dependence on passing states of mind or heart and emphasizing the fact of a decision to trust the fidelity of God, who keeps promises and does not abandon those whom he has addressed and called.Footnote ¹⁸ What we are given to reason with in respect of our election is what our regular behaviour signals – not the unevenness of our feelings or the chanciness of our external comfort and success, but the steady disposition to persist. Thus we may ‘excavate’ a firm certainty of adherence which remains solid even when it feels frail; and to strengthen it we may adduce the evidence of our persistence in desiring. And this provides a bridge to the discussion in Lawes Book 5 of the eucharist. As we have seen, participation in the eucharist offers the possibility of discernment about one's own progress in grace; and this needs to be read against the background of what Hooker says in the second sermon on Jude about the sacrament.Footnote ¹⁹ It is an opportunity to examine oneself in the hope of becoming clearer about one's failings and to seek remedy; the sweetness of the sacrament, the ‘taste of Christ Jesus in the heart’ which it gives, is connected very clearly to the recognition of absolution and renewed grace. In the light of this, it seems that when in the Lawes Hooker describes the eucharist as allowing us to measure our increase in holiness, this is not so much an appeal to the evidential force of our spiritual achievement but a reference to our sustained willingness to turn to Christ for forgiveness and aid, since the eucharist assures us primarily of the character of God in Christ as faithful to what he has declared (as in the meditation recommended to the communicant which closes chapter 67 of Book 5: ‘why should any cogitation posesse the minde of a faithfull communicant but this, O my God thou art true, O my soule thou art happie?’).Footnote ²⁰

But this point now extends further. In chapter 68 of Book 5, Hooker responds to critics of the current practice of the Church of England, particularly to those who attack the Church's willingness to admit known recusants to holy communion without assurance of their abjuration of popish error and their conversion to ‘gospel-like’ behaviour. Hooker's reply becomes fully intelligible when read in the light of what we have so far discussed about assurance. How do we know if someone is definitively outside the Church of God? Only if they actively and explicitly repudiate Christ. The word ‘Church’, says Hooker, is what distinguishes those who call on Christ as Lord for those who do not: that is the ‘essence’ of its definition, relating to ‘the object or matter whereabout the contemplations and actions of the Church are properly conversant’. If we introduce into the definition any other matters, we reproduce the error of Roman Catholics who will not admit any other body to be the Church that does not accept the specific opinions that distinguish them from other Christians; and because ‘[t]hey define not the Church by that which the Church essentially is but by that wherein they imagine their own more perfect than the rest are’, they confuse what may or may not belong to the Church's well-being with what belongs to its essence. Schisms and heresies, so far as they do not touch the central distinguishing mark of the Church, its adherence to Christ, are deplorable but not fatal, not necessarily grounds for final and irreparable rupture. ‘That which separates therefore utterly, that which cuts off clean from the visible Church of Christ is plain Apostasy, direct denial'. So the puritan critic of admitting recusants to communion is in fact mirroring the Roman error, confusing the essence of ecclesial identity with ‘variable accidents’.Footnote ²¹

What we can be sure of is that the recusant presenting himself or herself for communion in the established Church is to be given every benefit of the doubt; they are giving us ‘the strongest pledge of fidelity that man can demand', given the great sensitivities of conscience that attend the matter of sacramental practice (we should not in conscience be able to attend their mass, as this would implicitly commit us to the specific Roman doctrine of presence and sacrifice and priesthood, which Hooker believes both unnecessary and heretical).Footnote ²² They are in any case ‘capable’ of God's sacramental mysteries ‘for anything we hear to the contrary’ and are in need of nurture.Footnote ²³ Whatever fragile beginnings of real faith are present should not be quenched; and if they approach the sacrament in a hypocritical spirit, that is their problem and they will answer to God for it. ‘For neither does God thus bind us to dive into men's consciences, nor can their fraud and deceit hurt any man but themselves . . . In the eye of God they are against Christ that are not truly and sincerely with him, in our eyes they must be received as with Christ that are not to outward show against him.’Footnote ²⁴ Christ leaves us the sacrament ‘not only for preservation of strength but for relief of weakness’.Footnote ²⁵ So to share the sacrament with those whose subjective state of faith is questionable is a properly compassionate pastoral provision. To wait until they have arrived at standards of ‘gospel-like behaviour’ as laid down by Hooker's puritan critics is to ask more than the law can rightly require (and exactly who is to determine what sort of tests they will need to pass?).

What is interesting here is that Hooker is applying to others – to ‘doubtful' conformists in the Church of England – a variant of the test offered to the believer to apply to himself or herself. What do we know of the spiritual state of the church-papist? Only what the evidence of coming to the sacrament supplies: the decision to be visibly part of the sacramental community. Insofar as that decision rests on a genuine desire to be nourished by Christ's life and strength, it is – for all we know – a sign of authentic evangelical faith which will come to fruition in good time. But we cannot determine, and should not try to determine, the degree of sincere adherence, which is known only to God, and which the individual must test by continuing repentance and self-questioning – just as I myself, as a believer, will not have clear and infallible evidence of my own sincerity and integrity of faith, only the evidence that comes from examining what only I can examine, which is my steady disposition to continue to believe. And the evidence of my adherence to the Church's discipline is relevant to this, even if not decisive in the way that direct sense experience is. ‘Institutional certainty’ is simply the visible evidence of conformity, evidence understood in the context of a set of arguments and assumptions about what gives us grounds for claiming knowledge: we cannot completely and definitively know even our own hearts (in the sense of being wholly truthful about our feelings), let alone those of others, and our self-knowledge as believers is constantly being tested and (we trust) deepened by our tangible practice. Institutional conformity does not guarantee against hypocrisy but that is not its point: it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for claiming a certainty of adherence. And this is why for Hooker the legal enforcement of conformity is a good and proper matter: it gives opportunity to the struggling and unsure, or even the probably heretical, to establish a practice which is likely to offer them some anchorage for their fluctuating convictions and ‘affections’. Building up the community on the basis of members who have appropriate ‘affections’, whose inner states are used to prove points in controversy and to assess the inner states of others, is destructive not only of a viable community life but of the very essence of a faith that must be ‘eccentric’, having its focus not in the intensity of its self-consciousness as faith but in its looking towards a faithful God and its constantly rediscovered grounding in a steady desire. It is not that such faith knows nothing of affective states; what Hooker writes about the eucharist provides an emphatic refutation of any such idea. But – as the second sermon on Jude strongly suggests, as does the beginning of chapter 67 of the Fifth Book of the Lawes – moments of strong affection and spiritual sweetness are given to strengthen the continuing decision to be faithful. They correspond to those fleeting gifts of consolation which the Spanish mystic John of the Cross (d. 1591), for example, sees as a stimulus to continuing fidelity in darkness.

As Voak has persuasively argued, Hooker is reluctant to grant that the Holy Spirit ever acts in us independently of the activity of reason. I have contended here that even what he writes about the eucharist does not necessarily infringe this or suggest that there is simple ‘testimony’ from the Spirit in our experience at the Lord's Table. The question is – as indeed Voak grantsFootnote ²⁶ – about what reason is given to work upon; and I agree that Hooker does not stand so very far from a sophisticated puritan like Perkins in affirming that visible habits of self-denial, penitence and tears may be taken as reliable signs of the Spirit's working.Footnote ²⁷ But what matters is that strong devotional feelings around the eucharist, for example, are treated as illustrating what is presented to our self-awareness (in contrast to what we unknowingly receive at baptism): that is, they are available for reasoning about, and this is what Hooker does with them. They are not direct communications from the Spirit which can establish norms for the Church (and boundaries for the Church). They are modest confirmations of the authenticity of my resolve to continue as part of the visible Church and my loyalty to its disciplines, and apart from this – apart from the kind of self-probing that the Certaintie sermon assists with – they have no real significance.

For Hooker, there is a central area of Christian teaching which has to be regarded as certain: all that has to do with the action of God in Christ and the way in which this comes to govern the life of the community and the individual. We hold this with a certainty of adherence, on the grounds that God has shown himself to us as trustworthy, and we have accordingly chosen to commit our lives to continuing in the fellowship of Jesus. If the Church is the totality of those who call upon the name of the Lord, as he asserts in Lawes 5.68.6, we cannot imagine a Church in which the authority of Christ was not so confessed. Beyond this, there are two main areas in which doubtfulness has to be confronted and thought through. The first has to do with disputed doctrinal questions (notably those to do with the eucharist); we may, as Hooker implies, have good reason to deny certain doctrines, such as transubstantiation, but we cannot treat that denial with the same certainty with which we approach the essential definition of the Church; even when disagreement over these arises, this does not justify impenetrable barriers of separation. A ‘doubtful' doctrine, one which can reasonably be argued about without this affecting the conviction of what makes the Church distinctively what it is, cannot be deployed as a means of exclusion, and, as we have seen, Hooker argues that his opponents are reproducing the mistakes of the very people they want to exclude. We could, in the light of Hooker's overall scheme, say that ‘doubtful' doctrines are those which we may hold or not without affecting our basic adherence to God in Christ. Whether or not I believe in transubstantiation does not materially change what I may be certain of in regard to my election and the unqualified generosity of God in determining this. The second area of doubt is over what it is to be a true member of the Body of Christ, a doubt which may apply both to myself and to others whom I observe. As to my own standing, I may – this is the burden of the Certaintie sermon – treat this as a matter for certainty of adherence in much the same way as with fundamental doctrine: I have good reason for believing because of my conviction about God's saving work, and this is reinforced by inspection of my actions, though this does not turn certainty of adherence into certainty of evidence. As to the standing of any other, I remain uncertain; but what I can be certain of, in a fairly straightforward evidential sense, is that they are to be accounted members of the visible Church on the grounds of their not having repudiated their dependence on Christ, and therefore not being certainly reprobate.

Legally imposed conformity is thus both a pastoral opportunity for the weak or wavering (they are obliged to perform the actions that go with faith, and they may thereby come to a living faith by having available to them the witness of their own ‘growing into’ their practice) and a way of recognizing that, if we do not have a Church polity based on detailed confessionalism and detailed official scrutiny of behaviour, we are bound to have a Church that proposes as certain simply its own right to exist as the community of those in this place who acknowledge dependence on the name of Jesus Christ, with the obvious corollary that this assumes the certainty of the divine authority of Jesus Christ, something clearly per se notum in itself even if not quoad nos. We may be sure that the institution is to be accepted and identified with on this basis; and the nature and consistency of our involvement in its life, especially its sacramental life, assists our positive judgement about our own individual election, while giving no ground for pronouncing about anyone else's.Footnote ²⁸ The appeal to a legally sanctioned conformity is not in Hooker's eyes a way of stepping back from seriousness about the demands of discipleship but an absolutely necessary recognition of the importance of not confusing different kinds of knowledge and certainty. He is not some sort of Wittgensteinian avant la lettre, or a plain religious voluntarist. He is nonetheless clear about the primacy of practice in assessing genuine faith and about the need for a sustained act of will in keeping faith with the gift given. Hooker is not interested in how anyone might ‘come to faith’ in the contemporary sense of deciding to adopt a religious worldview, and so it is anachronistic to project modern debates about ‘fideism’ onto his writing. He undoubtedly believes that faith is a rational stance, an adherence based on the revealed trustworthiness of God in Jesus Christ which we continually ‘acknowledge’ by our continuation in ecclesial fidelity (and which we upset if we are constantly looking for a superior polity that will deliver us from affective uncertainty and the proximity of those of whose election we are doubtful). He definitely does not see faith as an act of ‘raw’ will, of arbitrary self-definition. But, in a very Augustinian style, he refuses to separate the rational compulsion of the true from the affective authority of the good; if affections are an unreliable authority in themselves, they are not for that reason to be set aside as motivations for cleaving to what has been revealed, which, if true, is necessarily also attractive.

‘Doubt wisely’, said Donne; and both Hooker and Browne may be taken as illustrations of what such wise doubt might involve. We are not to doubt that God is good and faithful to those he has called; our emotional chill or confusion is not a reason for doubting this. We are summoned to stake ourselves on this conviction, and this means a continuous refreshing of our will and of our awareness of why this belief answers our most significant desire. The dominical sacraments express in clear material form the fidelity of God to his promises, and thus our own fidelity properly takes the shape of obedient participation in the sacraments; and the eucharist speaks directly to our self-awareness, increasing our consciousness both of sin and of growth in recognition of our need of God and so our growth in the only holiness that matters. None of this provides the sort of evidential certainty that would attach to what our senses directly perceive, but that does not matter: certainty may come in various guises, including some that do not entail constant affective clarity and intensity. What we know is that the revealed character of God and the consequent acknowledgement of God as faithful to his elect are certain in themselves (if true, necessarily or definitionally true); and thus that they may properly be held with certainty of adherence. Doubt in any of these areas would not be ‘wise’. However, we can equally properly doubt the absolute importance of finding the right definition of Christ's presence in the sacramental elements; the God-given character of any specific Church order; and our assumptions about the spiritual state of any other baptized person, orthodox or heretic. But if it is wise to be doubtful about these things, we cannot be doubtful about the Church to which our allegiance is commanded by law: conformity establishes the context within which we can be assured of what we should not doubt and be reminded of what we need not be sure of.

Such an argument for conformity is easily dismissed by some as a rationalization of a particular kind of confessional and political hegemony; we have had a fair number of scholars to remind us in the last few decades that Hooker is no unworldly innocent in these matters. But the psychological complexity of his analysis of faith and uncertainty at the very least makes it plain that he is not seeking a glib ready-made justification for the Elizabethan Settlement. He wants to do justice to the felt, the sensed, unevenness of religious conviction and to guard against a tyranny of individual insight exalted to supreme determinative authority and a confessionalism far more severe and exclusive than any dreamt of by the Elizabethan regime. He is of course an apologist for a policy that no modern democrat would find defensible; but what we may miss is that he clearly saw that policy as the most pastorally and humanly effective way of managing the Church's institutional life in what was still largely a society that did not question the need for a religious basis. Furthermore, he provides a solid case for regarding the Church of England of his day as doing better justice to the fundamental principle of the Reformation than those who urged more radical reform. Browne's phrasing reflects Hooker's thought very accurately when he says:

Our faith deals with matters resolved not by our successful performances in thought, feeling or action, but with the ultimate self-evident certainty of the divine determination, to which we bear constant but uneven witness in our practice; to be doubtful of the validity of the Church by law established is to introduce uncertainty into the heart of the Reformed gospel; hence the triumphant paradox that ‘institutional certainty’ is a better guardian of Reformed principle than the search for indubitable criteria of authentic personal election. If the English puritan Thomas Cartwright (d. 1603) and his allies were as unimpressed as we should expect them to be, that should not stop us from recognizing the theological sophistication of Hooker's proposals for distinguishing wise from unwise doubt.