University of Cambridge, and escaped punishment only by
expressing his firm belief in the tenets of reprobation and final
perseverance, and his sorrow for the offence which he had given
to pious men by reflecting on the great French reformer. The
school of divinity of which Hooker was the chief occupies a
middle place between the school of Cranmer and the school of
Laud; and Hooker has, in modern times, been claimed by the
Arminians as an ally. Yet Hooker pronounced Calvin to have been a
man superior in wisdom to any other divine that France had
produced, a man to whom thousands were indebted for the knowledge
of divine truth, but who was himself indebted to God alone. When
the Arminian controversy arose in Holland, the English government
and the English Church lent strong support to the Calvinistic
party; nor is the English name altogether free from the stain
which has been left on that party by the imprisonment of Grocius
and the judicial murder of Barneveldt.

But, even before the meeting of the Dutch synod, that part of the
Anglican clergy which was peculiarly hostile to the Calvinistic
Church government and to the Calvinistic worship had begun to
regard with dislike the Calvinistic metaphysics; and this feeling
was very naturally strengthened by the gross injustice,
insolence, and cruelty of the party which was prevalent at Dort.
The Arminian doctrine, a doctrine less austerely logical than
that of the early Reformers, but more agreeable to the popular
notions of the divine justice and benevolence, spread fast and
wide. The infection soon reached the court. Opinions which at the
time of the accession of James, no clergyman could have avowed
without imminent risk of being stripped of his gown, were now the
best title to preferment. A divine of that age, who was asked by